“She’s not a white girl. She’s black. You’ve got a duty. To let her know who she really is, who we are. What blackness means, not the pathology you see on TV. What it is to be an African American woman in this world. That’s deep.” Tosha shakes her head at it, or me.
The fact that I wasted a decade of my life being in love with Tosha doesn’t seem to get in the way of our friendship now. This is largely because it’s also been more than a decade since we’ve actually seen each other, as well as our mutual understanding that I never really had a chance with her anyway. There is a story of our never becoming lovers, a mythology that I have for us that is boring and false, filled with details that I use to try and convince myself otherwise. I met her the same time George did, at the Greek Picnic, the summer of my freshman year. I had seen her on occasion before this, biking around the neighborhood, once on the R8 train, once at the Value Village shopping for jeans; she was too beautiful to approach or forget. But that summer began our friendship, which over the following summers and Christmas breaks grew from casual to intimate, though all the while George’s shadow hovered, as “I have a boyfriend at college” kept our relationship platonic. But because so many beautiful young women in my orbit had some placeholder boyfriend somewhere in the ether, Tosha’s relationship wasn’t something I took too seriously either. It was supposed to run its course, as was the norm.
After graduation, there was no formal announcement of their impending engagement. It was never mentioned to me, despite near daily interaction. It wasn’t said until Tosha nervously invited me to be a groomsman, a role I was unable to fulfill, as I decided soon after the invitation to leave the country instead.
Tosha married George because she loved him more, or despite our connection she loved me only as a friend. It was either or both reasons, or one or the other. That is the story I eventually accepted.
But I have another scenario, still in my head. That scenario says that Tosha went with George because I am a pale fail of a Negro who would never be enough for a “Nubian Princess,” a title which one of Tosha’s T-shirts declared. This is a product of my paranoia and profound insecurity but also of that time a cousin of George’s saw us at the movies and called him to warn that his girlfriend was “seeing some white boy,” a moment laughed off when it was revealed it was just her castrato, high-yellow nerd. And from the time we left a club on South Street and she was called a “cracker lover” for walking next to me, and from the look of shame that stayed on her face as we continued to the car. And of all her light-skinned jokes, though not numerous, and usually focused at women “damn near white,” and laughed off each time by me as I mentally catalogued. It was a product of the time I sprawled next to her on a park bench at Rittenhouse Square, studying our bare legs stretched out into the heat of July, noticing how pasty and inadequate my epidermis was lined up against her rich mahogany norm. I have never felt whiter than when next to her. I don’t like feeling white. It makes me feel robbed. Of my heritage. Of my true self. Of my mother. So when I found out that Tosha was lost to me, I regrouped by enrolling in an illustration program in Swansea, Wales, where dear Lord I have never felt blacker.
Back, I’m glad I didn’t try to stay and keep waiting for her, because Tosha still loves George. I like George enough, he’s okay, and if I had to pick between the two of us, then or now, I would have picked him over me without hesitation. I see him in his white undershirt, serving scrambled eggs and cheese to their three kids, making them laugh, and yes, I would rather be him than me. He’s a cop, detective grade, with a mortgage, and he knows where he belongs. I am a boy, still in my father’s house. He puts cheese in the eggs. He puts sharp cheddar cheese in the eggs, and soy bacon bits, stirs it all together and calls it “Daddy Eggs.” His kids, they love saying, “Daddy Eggs.” They ask for more, comment on how much they’ve eaten, and who’s all done, and they throw in that “Daddy Eggs” descriptor every time and it doesn’t seem to be getting old for anyone.
“Why don’t you just work on being a dad first, and then build up the expectations from there?” George offers, already on the dirty dishes. He’s washing the damn dishes. He’s not letting them sit in the sink till it overflows with shame.
All this sensationalistic talk about the long-lost mystery daughter, it’s wonderful. I dreaded coming here to these two people and having to say that my marriage failed, that my life has failed, that I wasn’t strong enough to do a basic thing like properly fulfill the one person on earth I was legally bound to love. I never gave Becks her family, and that’s why I have none. Tosha and George are of my generation, my tract in life: their familial growth, in such contrast to the wilted state of my own, is a direct reminder of all my shortcomings. Not that they would ever gloat over this fact, to my face or elsewhere. It would be worse than that. There would be pity there. Someone would say something like, “You’ll get it together,” and I would smile and shrug and know that I wouldn’t. I thought of not coming by at all — I hadn’t seen either since before their wedding. But being in Germantown and not stopping by would be an insult. And now, who cares about something so mundane as another marriage turned to disaster when there is tabloid-level fodder like this being served for consumption? In comparison, talk of the ex-wife is mere canapé. I have a synopsis for that too now, a convenient story that offers everything but detail. It goes like this:
“It turns out when someone is brilliant and driven and hardworking, good things happen to them. Even in Britain. So Becks, she’s got her practice going now, consulting, all that. She fronted me the money for the comic-book shop and I think she thought, I mean maybe I did too, that it would be a hit, that it would grow to a chain, maybe into an online juggernaut. But I’m not a businessman. I wasn’t really driven, like she is. And also, you know, I’m a flake.”
“You’re an artist,” Tosha offers generously.
“And Becks started to hate me for that. I think. Not for not being a success like her, but for not moving on. Having kids. She was getting older, the window was closing, she really wanted them. I just wasn’t ready, you know? To double down on more responsibility. So I kinda pulled away. Then she tugged me back, couples therapy, all that. And then I got pissed and pulled away harder. Then she stopped tugging, and it was too late.”
“That’s horrible,” she says to me, but she’s looking at George, who must be listening but is pretending to keep on with his endless kitchen tasks. Tosha is more jarred by my divorce than I am. For me it’s been happening for over a year, after four other years of misery.
“Becks is really very happy now. She’s replaced me with another black American. A proper dark-skinned one with dreadlocks and everything.”
This is true. Becks is ecstatic. Becks is a new life. Becks is a great weight has been lifted. Becks is so overjoyed, on her Facebook page she’s become a Welsh greeting-card machine. If there is a greeting-card company in Wales, and they just need someone to write platitudes for a line of divorce congratulations, Becks has a good decade’s worth of phrases for them. She now produces the happiest posts I have ever read in my life. The messages I get from her solicitor, those are straight venom and threats of financial apocalypse if I don’t get her the money back, but on Facebook she still comes with lots of exclamation points. All that’s missing is Wish you were here!