This Will Be My Undoing Read online

  Later on, after I have left, my mother whispers to him that it is okay to leave, and he does. When I get the news, I’m not sure if I still want to go back to Princeton to see the opening night of my play. I think it is inappropriate to leave, even cruel, but my mother urges me to go. I have been working on it throughout my sophomore year, and fighting with other more popular, white-dominated arts groups to get the performance space that the production deserves. I listen to her and return to campus. The show sells out. People agree to pay half price to sit on the steps to watch. My collaborators and I could only have dreamed of this several months ago. Although my mother cannot make it and my stepfather has already passed, my father, Mathurin, shows up front and center. Growing up, I desired nothing more than to make him proud, and now his eyes are glimmering as my art comes alive in front of his face. His presence reinforces to me how loved I am. I am happy.

  To my surprise, it was my mother who suggested, a few months before my stepfather passed, that I go to therapy. She had been researching for days leading up to one of my breaks from college, and made my first appointment. She told me that I would be fine, and that she would sit alongside me if I authorized it.

  My first thought was: If she thinks it’s okay, then it must be okay. My mother is one of the most religious people I know, and I still look to her for counsel. She told me that I needed to get well, not to be like some other parishioners in our church who suffered from psychological and physical distress yet refused to seek help.

  At first I sat and fidgeted on a comfy sofa while obsessively looking at the clock. But soon, I felt like weights were being taken off my heart. I finally had someone to talk to about my feeling of weakness without the fear of being embarrassed. I realized that it was okay to admit out loud that I’m weak, I’m tired, I’m hurt, and some days, I am not happy. As a black woman studying at an Ivy League university, I felt like I had to put on a facade of perfection all the time, or else I was not meant to be at such a prestigious institution—a space that was never originally meant for people like me. Whenever I went home, my family members reminded me how much of a blessing it was. I wasn’t supposed to be unhappy, and if I was, I should just suck it up.

  I saw the therapist a few times before and after my stepfather’s death. She recognized that I needed to restructure my thought process, and none of her methods deviated from or challenged what I knew to be true within the tenets of my religion. The guilt of being disobedient to God gradually faded. There is a time to pray and there is a time to act. My soul did not have to be at odds with either, and I wish that others like myself would recognize this when they cry for help. I felt peace in my head and in my bones.

  After my stepfather passed, my mother herself hovered on the verge of depression. She would not leave her bed, and all the curtains in the house were closed. Taking care of him had taken a huge toll on her, as it would on anyone. She was exhausted from watching his every move, and infuriated that his colleagues had never called or come around to check up on him. She gained over a hundred pounds from stress. But she never viewed him as a burden. He was her husband. She never complained. She didn’t so much as wince or groan when she had to get up to take him to the bathroom, or bathe him. This is the most extreme example of love that I will probably ever witness in my life.

  I pushed her to go to a support group at a hospital that was just ten minutes away in a neighboring town. She went and returned home a more revitalized woman, and she kept going to the sessions. She lost those hundred pounds, and then some more. And eventually, I did not pace; I did not check, double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check, sextuple-check, septuple-check, octuple-check anything; I did not wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, or fear that a bell was going to fall from the sky and pulverize me. I still experience infrequent waves of apprehension around silverware, not because I want to harm myself but rather because my reflection in the metal utensils reminds me that I am still here. I am living.

  At times I do feel quivers of compulsion. I keep thinking that I’ll forget an alarm, but I never do. I think something will catch on fire, but it never does. I am learning to trust myself more and in turn work less, which is still more than enough. I do not know if OCD will become a constant in my life, if what I went through was just a one-time experience or the first glimpse of a condition that I will have to battle in synchronicity with the ebbs and flows of my life.

  I did not realize at first that psychological healing was in fact what I needed more than anything after my surgery. My mother had reluctantly brought me back to Harlem, but I still could not wipe myself after using the bathroom, only pat. I could not wash my vagina as usual, but rather let the soapsuds slide down my body. I could not laugh as raucously as I used to; laughing required me to hold my stomach up and space out my giggles so that I would not feel pain from the stitches. I had to sit with pillows underneath me. And then the dreams started. I had feverish dreams in which I would be walking down the street when a man would push me up against a wire fence before loosening his belt buckle. I would tell him that I was physically unable to be penetrated, but he would force himself in anyway. My stitches would rip and I would go into shock. When he’d finished, my rapist would kick me there for good measure before disappearing into the night. Every dream I had was about sexual assault, although the focus was less on me being penetrated without my consent and more on my stitches being torn out. I felt less like a woman and more like a rag doll that could come undone at any moment.

  My journal pages filled with my frantic thoughts. I feared that if anyone read it, they would assume that I was having a mental breakdown. When I walked to the train station I had to remind myself to act as I had done prior to my procedure, because every force inside of me wanted me to pull down my pants and yell at everyone to look at what a doctor had done to me. I didn’t care about being catcalled, about a man getting hard, about a mother shielding her child’s eyes. I needed to experience some emotion, some sensation, other than pain. I tried masturbating, but after forty-five minutes I was still hardly wet. Before, I could come in less than fifteen.

  The man who I was dating at the time wanted to see me. When we got back to his place, after a glass and a half of wine, I was taking my top off. We quickly moved from the living room to his bedroom, but I just wanted to be next to another body when I could barely hold on to my own. As he pressed up against me, I hissed and told him to be gentle. I was still in recovery, after all.

  And that’s when he asked, “Can I see it?”

  “See what?”

  His eyes dropped below my waist, and so I showed him. He could have stared at me for three minutes or an hour. I was so focused on how this was one of the most intimate experiences of my life. I didn’t need to be penetrated. I had never been. All I needed was to be reminded that I was still a woman.

  My vagina isn’t and was never a “flower.” My vagina was a labyrinth. I had to strategize and maneuver, pushing excess flesh around, to see all that I contained. I would watch episodes of Baywatch, Sex and the City, Girls, and Degrassi, and wonder why no one ever talked about vaginas unless it was in relation to birth or periods. What about oversized labia? What about their pain? What about our pain? I wrote a much shorter essay about my labiaplasty for Fusion, an assignment that my mother warned me against out of fear that I would turn off potential suitors. I didn’t tell my father until several months after my procedure. I don’t know if he even remembers me telling him. My friends found out about a month post-op; I didn’t tell them beforehand because I was ashamed. I felt like I was breaking some ancient feminist creed that maintains that we have the bodies we have, and if we manipulate them, the patriarchy is destroying us. I didn’t tell them because much of my femininity had been wrapped in secrecy and pain, and the further pain born of secrecy.

  I do not regret my surgery. I do not praise it either. My pain is gone. When I part my legs now, I have to remind myself of what used to unfurl. However, there are some spots that are still sens
itive, spots where I am not entirely certain that the stitches have disintegrated. I do not know if this is a psychosomatic response, some remnants of my feverish dreams perhaps, but I don’t need to know. I am content, and that is all I need.

  7

  Human, Not Black

  There was chaos at home and in my heart as my stepfather’s health declined, but I found solace in the dizzying prose of Dostoyevsky, in the way he made madness seem almost normal, even attractive. I read his novella The Double, in which a man is convinced he has a doppelgänger, then Crime and Punishment, in which a man kills an old pawnbroker and believes himself to be superior to anyone else. I regaled myself with the long, drawn-out psychological conversations in The Brothers Karamazov. In a matter of months I became a fanatic, and I decided to learn the language—I wanted to know what lay beyond the barrier of translation, to discover the untranslatable intricacies of Dostoyevsky’s work. As a comparative literature major, I had to learn at least two foreign languages to graduate. I’d already chosen Japanese, and I’d been flirting with the idea of French because I loved Madame Bovary. But Russian seemed more daring. It turned out to be a much harder conquest than Japanese: the verb conjugations seemed contradictory, the linguistic logic impenetrable, the pronunciation coarse. However, after hard work, I was accepted into an intermediate Russian course at the Nevsky Institute in St. Petersburg held during the summer following my sophomore year.

  After I got in, I was told by both the program’s director and my introductory Russian teacher that there had been a rise in hate crimes there over the past few years, and if I had any reservations about going, they would understand. I wondered if they told this to my peers. I was not the only person of color—there was Jacqueline, a Singaporean woman, and Daniel, a Mexican-American guy—but I was the only black person. Ultimately, I decided to go anyway; immersing myself in the culture, I thought, and hearing the language buzzing in my ears all summer was the only way to truly learn.

  I arrived in St. Petersburg on my twentieth birthday. After I landed, a Nevsky Institute representative took me to my host family’s apartment on Krasnogo Kursanta (“Red Cadet”) Street in the Petrogradskaya District. Their building was next to a courtyard, but on the inside it felt abnormally dark. I would be rooming with Jacqueline, an arrangement I assumed was intentional because we were both women of color. Our host mother was a part-time singer who regularly had international guests, from American to Indonesian, shuffling in and out of her apartment. She had two children, a son and daughter—I believe their names were Misha and Sasha—and I could count on my fingers how many times I actually saw them. I’d hear their voices, but I never bumped into them while passing through the corridor. They could have been apparitions for all I knew. Jacqueline and I would eat together at the dining table—we never shared meals with the family. We would never be integrated into this family because our being there was strictly business.

  I took the room closest to the front door. A portrait of Alexander Pushkin hung on the wall outside my bedroom. Because Russians pride themselves on their literature perhaps more so than any other facet of their culture, Pushkin is held in the same esteem as Americans hold Elvis Presley, or the English the Beatles. You can probably stop a Russian child on the street and ask him or her to perfectly recite one of Pushkin’s poems. I found it interesting that this man, whose African heritage I could detect in his nose and around his jawline, was so revered here and yet black people like myself were not.

  To be fair, my treatment in St. Petersburg was far milder than that experienced by other black people. I’ve heard stories of people having things thrown at them, being harassed on the metro, having children point at them as if they were carnival freak show exhibits. However, the threat of danger was everywhere. In Russia, if you are a foreigner, you will be stared at unblinkingly for close to a minute with an intensity I will never forget. I remember countless moments when I was on the escalator at Chkalovskaya station while a Russian—most times, a man—was unable to take his eyes off of me. In my prior experience, a held gaze meant attraction, but this was different. His entire face would be stoic and his eyes would be unyielding even after he knew that I knew that he was watching me. I would look down at my copy of The Master and Margarita, look up, and he would be staring at me. I would scrape out the dirt from under my fingernails, look up, and he would be staring at me. I would check my cell phone for any messages from my classmates, look up, and he would still be staring at me. I couldn’t tell him how rude it was to stare because my vocabulary was limited. I would stutter, and he would know that he had the upper hand in more ways than one. So I remained dejected and uncomfortable, under surveillance all the time.

  It took about two to three weeks for me to be okay with riding the metro by myself. I expressed my anxiety to grad students who accompanied us on the trip. They were sympathetic, but they didn’t really get it; it wasn’t their experience. Unlike me, they could roam around freely. One time I did take the metro downtown alone, to meet a Russian “friend” assigned by the institute to help me acclimate to St. Petersburg, and a man said hello to me in Russian as I was gathering tokens for the ride. I did not like his tone. His voice was low and his face cold, like the others’, yet he seemed hungry for something. He stood a few steps behind me on the escalator, and I pretended to occupy myself with games on my phone. Once the train arrived, I hopped on and he got into the same car. Something wasn’t right, and I could feel it. A blond-haired man sitting on the opposite side of the car leaned forward and stared at me, and I began to feel like they were in it together, that finally all of this staring would come to a head. Two large men were gathering their suitcases to get off at Admiralteyskaya, my stop, so I slipped in between them. Unfortunately, the man who had been following me did a double take and slipped out before the doors closed. I began to walk briskly. I had to make it to the station entrance, where there would be the safety of hundreds of people around. Then again, how would he lose me? I was black. I couldn’t find a police officer because I didn’t have the vocabulary to properly articulate my concern, and even if I did, would the officer care?

  Students from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland were also studying at the Nevsky Institute that summer. During one of our afternoon breaks, we were given the chance to visit the classroom across the hall and meet them. Daniel and I quickly established a rapport with them. We were drawn to their free-spirited and easygoing personalities. Michael was a gay man who towered over six feet, Catherine was a short blonde, and Emily was a long-haired brunette whose natural drawl signaled to me that she partied hard. We agreed to hang out, along with Daniel’s Russian “friend” Anastasiya, at Mishka Bar, which was not too far from Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare in the city. Underground and badly lit, it was a hipster spot decorated in gray and pink, frequented by plenty of twenty-somethings and expats. When I walked in, I didn’t feel so self-conscious. It was the first moment when I felt like I could relax and pretend that I was not different from anyone else. I ordered a Long Island iced tea to loosen up even more. Who knew when I would return to Russia, a country that’s famously known for its vodka? I might as well go hard, I thought. Because I had never had a Long Island iced tea, I underestimated its power, and by the time I returned to our spot in the back of the bar, the side of my face was already on the table. Catherine and Emily giggled at how drunk I was before talking to some locals, who invited them to come to another bar. We figured that we should all go as a group, and the bar they suggested was not too far from Mishka.

  I don’t remember where we turned; all I knew was that the street was suddenly less populated than the riverside embankment outside Mishka Bar. A group of young Russian men was hanging around on the sidewalk, and one of them pinned me against the wall of a building. He smirked at me, and because his eyes weren’t focusing I knew that he was drunk. I stayed still and said nothing. There wasn’t enough time to be afraid. As soon as I realized that it was probably not wise for me to try to escape fr
om underneath his arms, Michael gently grabbed me and escorted me to the bar, which was a hole-in-the-wall on the second floor of some building.

  The woman at the door checking IDs examined my face more than my driver’s license and asked, “You from America?”

  When I told her yes, she said, “Good luck,” and handed me back my license.

  Believing that she did not know how to say “Have a good time” or “Enjoy” in English, I took her response as a well-wish rather than a warning.

  By this time, I had somehow sobered up, but Daniel was beyond drunk. We had lost Catherine and Emily from the moment we turned the corner onto the street, but given the smallness of this new bar, we felt sure that we would find them inside soon. It was much dirtier and less attended by internationals than Mishka. After about a half hour of circling around, we saw both Catherine and Emily sitting beside some Russian men, dressed in all black, with shaved heads. Michael, who was also very inebriated by this point, decided to approach one of them. I stood farther back, my body disappearing behind his.

  Michael stuck out his hand and one of the men shook it before saying, “Do you know what I am? I’m skinhead.”

  Immediately, I pivoted and grabbed Daniel’s hand. He tried to resist, but I gripped his wrist tighter and we flew down the staircase. In that moment of fight-or-flight, I couldn’t feel my feet hitting the steps or the pavement outside. Once we were out in the open air, Anastasiya joined us, visibly concerned but her mind congealed by alcohol. Daniel drunkenly yelled at me, asking me why we were outside, and I told him that there were neo-Nazis. His face dropped, but he was so drunk I didn’t know if he’d fully understood what I said. I dragged both him and Anastasiya into a nearby Subway sandwich shop, and we sat there until the Edinburgh students joined us. Michael was quiet, but Catherine and Emily were giggling as they recounted the men and their Nazi saluting—they said they had joined in. They said that they’d done it because they were afraid, but their faces suggested otherwise. I began to wonder if this was just another raucous night for them, a crazy story that they could afford because they were white.