Love Like a Rusty Blade

by Camille Wanliss

2020 Essay Contest Honorable Mention

They say it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but in your case, it was an electric toothbrush. Just before Thanksgiving 2014, your husband opens the CVS bag you’ve dropped on the kitchen counter and suddenly, a tectonic shift. He reminds you that the last time he bought toothbrushes there were his-and-her versions. But now, you’ve only purchased one for yourself. He uses the moment as an allegory for your selfishness. Declares you never put him first. You’re the mother of a three-year-old. You don’t even put yourself first.

The constant nagging has worn you down. The dishes are in the sink too long. You don’t cook or clean enough; not even your scrambled eggs are made properly anymore. No matter what you remedy, he still doesn’t think you do enough.

He doesn’t know this, but at the bottom of your handbag is a small notebook where you scribble dialogue and plotlines for stories long discarded—stories he’s never even bothered to read. You think of the sacrifices you’ve made, of the dreams deferred so he could forge his own. “Art Widow,” they call you. Elsewhere in the book you’ve written the total cost of monthly expenses to live as a single mother. Even with the rent-stabilized apartment, it’s too much.

You met the summer after sophomore year at the art school where he worked. He was older and more mature than any of the dudes you dated. You fell for him—not because he was an artist (though that sealed the deal), but because he was one of the first guys you’d been left alone with that didn’t try to sexually harass you. He made you feel safe, secure. You were by each other’s side through thick and thin—art shows, graduation, trips to Miami and Hawaii, George W. Bush’s second term. Four years into the relationship, a loose thread unraveled. Whenever the topic of marriage came up, he pointed out the flaws he saw in you. He even questioned the kind of mother you’d be.

You parted ways, but it wasn’t long before you reconciled. A year later, you were married and a year after that, you gave birth to a baby boy. That’s when things really changed. The Great Recession gifted your household with alternating layoffs, and somewhere between the lack of sleep, the lack of money, and the lack of sex, more loose threads appeared. Nothing you said to each other made sense anymore. It’s like he spoke Vulcan when all you knew was Klingon. Tensions grew and by the time your kid was taking his first steps, you were in marriage counseling. Therapy didn’t fit the pieces back together, but it tempered hostility into nonchalance. You became two people living separate lives together.

Weeks after the Battle of the Toothbrush you ask, “Do you even love me?” in the same manner one would ask for the time. If his pause were any more pregnant, its water would break.

 “I care for you . . .”

“That is not what I asked. Do you love me?”

“No,” he confesses.

Eleven years vanish in a matter of seconds.

Your mother says it’s a generational curse. She and your father have been separated for a decade by the time your divorce is finalized. Your siblings each have a failed marriage under their belt, and neither set of grandparents were ever married to each other.

You meet your father at a hotel in Jamaica. He travels from Kingston to St. Elizabeth, the parish of his birth, to escort you around while you do research for your novel. Maybe it’s all the knowledge you’re gathering or the fact that you’re in the country where your parents met and married, but at some point you ask, “What made you fall in love with Mommy?”

It’s a question that’s been nagging you since the divorce. It’s occurred to you that you have no clue what love is. You’ve never seen it. Not in your marriage. Certainly not in theirs. They treated affection like some sort of infection. An affliction. The first and only time you witnessed them embrace was in the hallway of your Brooklyn home. You were five years old, and it was so shocking you gasped.

“There was a sparkle in your mom’s eye that made my heart skip a beat,” he says without hesitation now.

You’re taken aback by his candidness. It’s a rare moment of tenderness from a man who eschews any sort of vulnerability. He seems different now from the man you grew up with. The factory worker with the quick temper and sharp tongue. A theologian and rude bwoy. He wielded the bible with the same fervor as his belt or cutlass. One of your earliest memories is of him holding a machete to your neighbor’s eye. You can still see the look on the man’s face after your father threatened to remove it. Can feel his fear trailing behind him when he escaped down the block. Love thy neighbor, this was not.

The thing that strikes you the most after the divorce is how much you crave being touched. A palm pressed into yours, digits entwined. An entire arm draped around the nape of your neck. A hand braced against your lower back.

The last man to break you does so with such ease you question what you’re made of. It begins with a text from your girl about a friend who’s requested to meet you. Like you, he’s Jamerican, a creative, and trying to figure out how to get back in the game after a recent divorce. When she tells you his name, you’re shocked at how eerily similar it is to your ex-husband’s. It’s a sign you shouldn’t have ignored.

You meet at Zinc Bar in the Village, where he’s playing a gig. He’s got the face of ’90s D’Angelo and the humor of Dave Chappelle. You bond over Coltrane and Black liberation and it’s not long before you’re spending entire weekends at his place. When he’s not on tour, you spend nights by his side, your days watching movies or grocery shopping or cooking together. You even walk his dog when he’s working. Phone calls last for hours. 

Seven months in, he receives an invitation to his friend’s Labor Day barbeque. He tells you about it and then . . . just . . . stares at you. You can’t tell if he wants you to join or not. You’d be meeting his circle of friends for the first time and maybe he’s hesitant because that would mean something. You’ve been careful not to rush him into anything, but now you’ve got to know what this is.

He says he doesn’t want to label what you two have. “I can’t claim you,” he adds, like you’re lost luggage at JFK. 

Weeks after he tells you he doesn’t want to be in a committed relationship, he enters a committed relationship. You think back to that time you wanted to post a photo from one of your dates on Facebook and he requested you didn’t because he was a “public figure.” Now you know it wasn’t his personal life he wanted to keep private. Just you. Now, it feels like someone has lassoed you on the inside and is pulling you through the floor below. You break his album. You pray his dog mauls him. You even dream of murdering him. Twice. Then one day, the void that opened up pulls you violently inward, swallowing you whole.

Now you’re the fuckboy. Fuckgirl? You do everything you’re supposed to. Relegate your new lover to Wednesday dick. Abscond in the middle of the night. Treat him like an afterthought. And yet, his love is patient. His love is kind. He goes above and beyond for you. He encourages you. Affirms you. Tells you he loves you unprompted. He’s the first man you’ve met who’s emotionally invested and available. But this is the antithesis of who you are now. You are not patient. You are not kind. When he offers monogamy, you agree and then immediately go fuck someone else. You make it painfully clear you don’t love or want him. You’re brutal in your honesty, but at least you’re giving him what you never received. At least that’s what you tell yourself.

You know this rollercoaster of breaking up and getting back together again must end, but no matter how many times or ways you tell him it’s not meant to be, he keeps coming back. 

Then one night, your lover arrives at your door drunk. He sits on the floor in your living room and reads you for filth. He says you contributed nothing to the relationship. You can’t get a word in. You don’t even try to. You just listen to the litany of ways you’ve broken this man. It’s a day when the tables turn.

Your father calls. Due to a slew of health issues, you’re overseeing his medical care and finances from New York. Forty years of factory work has left him hard of hearing, but he’s still spry and his memory is as sharp as a tack. These days he likes to reminisce about you as a little girl.

Of his three children, you were the one who had it easy. Maybe it’s because you were your mother’s “wash-belly,” the last. Maybe it’s because you were prone to sickness and accidents. Your early years read like a series of unfortunate events: chicken pox at three weeks old, surgery at two, pneumonia at seven. He likes to tell you about the metal window that slammed down on your tiny hands in that old apartment on Hawthorne Street or the flight of stairs you fell down as a toddler, the heavy padding of your winter coat saving you from serious bodily injury. You had so many issues the family took to calling you Dead-and-Wake.

Your father says he loves you. He’s been saying this a lot lately. Words you never heard growing up. Words you sought from other men. He says you’re a good daughter and that he doesn’t know what he’d do without you. But the same can be said for him. Before he moved back to Jamaica, your father lived with you for two years. He’ll never know what a gift it was having him there while you navigated single motherhood. He wants you to know what a good job you’re doing raising your son.

Something remarkable happened when he became a grandparent. All that love he couldn’t muster up as a young man, an immigrant in a new land, suddenly awakens for this new generation.

Your father is almost eighty. You hope it doesn’t take you that long.

You and your sister talk about how soft the old man’s gotten, how you wish he had told you these things long ago.

“He did in his own way,” she says and brings up that incident with the neighbor who had been caught leering at you from the other side of the fence. “Daddy almost took his eye to protect you.”

Your lover loves you like goddamn. On a rainy night in April, he navigates the COVID-stricken streets of Harlem to drop off provisions. Fertilizer for the house plants. A pack of lightbulbs. Two ceramic wig heads and a paperback copy of Crazy Rich Asians. Before he leaves, your lover hands over a single stem of cotton, its fibers a brilliant shade of teeth and bone.

For weeks, he has talked about reclaiming the plant as a symbol of resilience, excellence, or as Kiese Laymon calls it, that “Black Abundance.” He wants to offer it—in lieu of flowers—to loved ones on birthdays, for graduations and promotions, and other special occasions. On this night, he gifts you the cotton bouquet for stepping outside of your comfort zone and reading one of your fiction pieces during an Instagram Live event.

“I’m so proud of you,” he says, planting kisses in quick succession from his masked lips to yours. Later, he confesses the way he feels about you scares him. “I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.”

You want to tell him you’re scared too. And not just about your inability to reciprocate. What you’re most frightened of is your inability to care at all. But he already knows this. For four years, he’s tried to cut through the scar tissue surrounding your heart. 

You still don’t know what love is, but you know this much is true. Sometimes it’s not found in three simple words, or a single stem of cotton, but in the promise of a rusty machete blade.

Published February 21st, 2021