WIFE OF BROOKLYN / Beauty Reals

WIFE OF BROOKLYN

My English class had just completed Chaucer’s Wife of Bath Prologue when my college professor exclaimed, “Marriage is the stickpin in the balloon of pomposity.” 

What she meant was that to have a successful marriage, you must abandon your individuality and conform to what society sees as the perfect wife. I vehemently disagreed with her far-flung synopsis. It appeared a blatant disregard for individualism, not to mention, an attack on femininity. I further contested her declaration, saying, “Conforming to an ego-less persona is ridiculous.  The mere thought contradicts what feminists have worked decades to dispel!”

I beat that dead horse to the ground and declared Chaucer’s Wife of Bath a fictional pioneer having been bold enough to redefine an old definition of marriage.  I concluded my argument by saying, “At least she had the wherewithal to enter marriage demanding her due.”

And with the slightest adjustment to her plastic frames, my professor dismissed me as if to say, "You just wait."

To say I had it coming is an understatement. That same year, on a college campus overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, I met the man who’d become my husband. He was from a traditional West Indian home in Brooklyn, New York. Whereas, I hailed from a suburb of New York City, reared by a single mother whose I could do bad all by myself temperament had shaped who I would become. It was plain we had vastly different beginnings, but it was impossible to predict the challenges that lay ahead. 

Student elections were happening, and I was running for Ms. Freshman-the equivalent of class president. I assumed my running would be a natural progression given my history as a student leader. But on the day of the actual election, I'd just returned from a short weekend off campus, utilizing a quick ten-minute taxi ride from the train station to school to craft the speech I would recite in front of the entire freshman class. I'd chosen to write a poem describing life as a strong African American woman, which went something like this:

…I am her internally and externally for she is the quintessential link to my ancestry. I derive my strengths and accountability from the sparks of her experiences instilled within me…

Granted, it was not a typical speech, but then again, I was not the typical candidate. I arrived at the auditorium and rushed to take my seat on stage when Monica, an ornery, student advisor scolded me in front of the entire freshman class,

“You’re late! That’s grounds for disqualification-I shouldn’t let you present!”

Suffice it to say, I was last to present while Carol-a rather uninteresting opponent-went first. She'd recited an original, Acrostic poem entitled CAROL.

“C is for Confidant, A is for Able, R is for Righteous…”

Snoopy-like boos reverberated the building while a multitude of Carolesque copycats followed. But there was one opponent whose shrewd platform had me doubting my taxicab draft: Laurie. Imagine Olympian Gabby Douglass battling it out for the Gold but instead of remaining silent through her floor show, delivers screaming chants of self-promotion after sticking every landing. Laurie sported a two-piece beige pantsuit while she backflipped, double jumped and split her way to victory while belting out her lengthy attributes in alphabetical order. By the time I presented, Laurie had already reduced my self-prophesying prose into a eulogy. Anyway, I lost.

As I stood outside the auditorium nursing my wounds, I relished my future husband walking toward me. I delighted in all six feet, one inch of his chiseled frame as time brushed passed me, disabling my ability to think and move. At that moment, it seemed time, and I stood still. I was in a daze when he'd asked,

“Do you mind reading your speech?” 

Despite being enamored, I replied, “Where were you the first time I read it?”

He told me he’d slipped out for pizza and missed my speech.  Right then I knew he was greedy or impatient. Either way, I was enchanted by his model good looks and so, read my manifesto aloud. Afterward, I waited for a comment or a clap or anything to suggest he was listening. But instead, he'd chosen to comment on the strange cartwheels and annoying chants he saw earlier, adding,  

“I worry about the political future of our freshman class now in the hands of a corporate gymnast.” And we laughed hard. I mean sidesplitting laughter. Although he hadn't yet shared his thoughts on my poem, which ultimately happened months later, his sarcasm was refreshing. Our first moments together, laughing in the open air, respecting each other’s politics, was a thing of unspeakable beauty.  In the hours that followed, we sat together in the lobby of my dorm, discussing my unfulfilled presidency, my childhood in suburbia, and his undying devotion to Brooklyn. Yet unbeknownst to both of us, we’d unearthed a recipe for falling in love: 

• Cozy up in a dimly lit hallway. 
• Spew humdrum stories from childhood that no one else cares to hear. 
• Share unsavory secrets you’ve locked away until now. 
• Stir the pot. 
• Let time pass: seconds, minutes, hours (weeks, months, years, if necessary) 
• Gaze into the eyes of the only person that matters beyond this point. 
• Put the lid on.
• And simmer.

To be clear, I was young and free and had no interest in love or recipes.  Besides, I'd shared a dorm with commitment-obsessed coeds who'd spent countless hours vetting potential husbands while earmarking wedding editorials in the Bridal magazines. Girls, who after first dates rushed back to the dorm to regurgitate fantasies of becoming the wife of some guy they'd just met. And since I'd had no interest in becoming anyone’s wife, the sport of catching a man was so far beyond making any sense to me.

That said, for the next four years, I'd accidentally slipped into a quasi-monogamous bubble. Our desperate attempts to preserve the relationship seemed to collide with the many desirable dating options college life offered us. Yet somehow, amidst relationship mass destruction, the wish to be each other’s only developed. And upon graduation, I'd made the uncharacteristic decision to move to his beloved Brooklyn and begin our young adult lives together.

***

New York proved a fresh-start for us. I worked as a model, while he started his lifelong career in education. We were gaining ground as a ‘real’ couple when given our living arrangement with his parents, questions surfaced of our intentions toward one another.
Notwithstanding my expressed commitment to move to Brooklyn and live together, I had to choose between moving out and avoiding a barrage of further questioning, or face the inevitable conversation of engagement then marriage. During that time, my English professor’s words reverberated in my head, making the idea of marriage feel more like an end to something natural than a natural next step. Yet the purgatorial position of boyfriend and girlfriend had grown stale. It came time to move on by myself or move forward as a couple.

At the time, he'd still owned a townhouse in Virginia and asked if I'd go with him to check on it. I'd reluctantly agreed, having at that time decided to move on. We'd arrived in Virginia, and he'd taken a detour to our college campus. We got out of the car and began walking when he took my hand in his. His palm was moist and warm, which was always the case. But for the first time, I couldn’t tell where he began, and I ended. It felt incredible. Soon, we were standing on the exact spot we’d met eight years prior when suddenly, he went down on one knee and pulled a ring from his pocket, and said,

“I love you.  Will you spend the rest of your life with me?”  

His tear-filled eyes and nervous hands excited the deepest part of me. It was then I'd forgotten all the reasons for wanting to move on alone, and said, “Yes!”

And just like that, wedding plans encroached.  Our happy weekends turned into a year of sorting out details for a three hundred person wedding when the truth is, we should have been sorting out the realities of a happily ever after. 

We were married on an unusually warm Saturday in November 1999.

It was a fairy tale and the reception, a grand, expensive show. And after returning from our unconventional honeymoon in Jamaica, we'd converged on our plush, sofa-a wedding gift to ourselves- when my husband said,

“I plan to watch football on Sundays. Every Sunday. And I expect you to leave me alone like my mother does for my father.”

Almost immediately, fear and regret flooded my body. While my husband's chauvinistic utterance had exposed my deepest fears of marriage: submission and loss of identity. His words opened the door to years of contentious debates, which had me wondering where I'd gone wrong.  At our lowest point, we were at odds on everything from gender roles to how to discipline our children. And as he sunk deeper into the sofa every Sunday, and I fled our home for yoga, flea markets and time alone, our marriage suffered. Our inability to agree on anything affected everything. Until one night, my husband proposed having a weekly date where we’d sit and talk like we'd done that first night in the lobby of my dorm. 

Our weekly dates started off rough and abrasive. Sometimes resulting in not speaking for days or weeks. We'd had so much troubled history to contend with and opposing upbringings to decipher, the road to 'happily ever after' seemed impossible. And yet we'd relished the memory of the night we'd fallen in love. The first time we kissed; the first time we made love; the first time we hated being away from one another, and that warm day in November when we'd promised to shut the rest of the world out and become one. The problem was, we had no idea how to do that, so we had to learn by doing. And though it had taken a while, I'd once again, recognize the guy who'd stolen my heart; the only person I ever cared to share my entire self; the one with whom conversations felt natural and fluid. Only now, he's the husband with whom I share an entire life.

As much as it pains me to say this, my English professor was right: marriage will take the stubborn ego you claim as individuality and rip it to shreds. But if you’re lucky, you’ll emerge a better you with the bonus of having someone who loves you at your side forever. Yet and still, this many years later, neither one of us has forged the perfect road to 'happily ever after,' and perhaps we never will. But our saving grace is, when our dispositions work to divide us, it's love that draws us closer.

After rereading the Wife of Bath prologue as a wife, I'm baffled by Chaucer’s decision to write 'the wife' as such an uncompromising, contradictory figure. Perhaps his goal was to demonize women and show how a ‘proper wife’ should behave by establishing nonconformity and promiscuity as sins when men throughout history do the same without the worry of judgment. Whatever the case, the presence of the wife's unapologetic voice in proto-feminist literature remains the pinnacle of feminism in my book.