How Stella Got Her Groove Back Read online

  Nobody has rocked my world, as the saying goes. Nobody has made my heart flutter like it did when I first met Walter, or even when I fell in love with Chad, and I don’t dare go all the way back to high school or college when the world stopped spinning when Nathaniel kissed me. All Dennis did was smile at me and I was like Elvis: all shook up. I didn’t know the power of love was so powerful. But I liked it. Liked feeling like I was full of clouds. Like I could probably run a marathon without ever training for it. Like I was “on” something that was causing me to have a continuous flow of energy, making me feel excited about and see beauty in just about everything. I could walk down the street and feel myself grinning and people would look at me and simply grin too. This is when I thought I understood what God intended for us to feel.

  But then the bullshit always had to enter the picture and contaminate everything that had been so beautiful. Like where were you and why do you have to do that all the time and how come and when are you and I don’t really give a flying fuck if you do but because I felt like it and if you can’t handle it tough shit but as much as I wish I could I can’t even begin to imagine but just the thought of you don’t no not anymore but we could if you weren’t so damn stubborn because hell I can’t help it if I was and yes you are trying to change me into something that I’m not and want to see how long I can resist this shit want to watch me repel and don’t remind me how much we used to have that’s the past and it’s gone baby live in the here and now and check it out this is getting too thick for me and I’m like sinking somewhere low and my heart weighs a ton here lately and as a matter of fact the mere sight of you being in your presence for any length of time depresses the hell out of me and I don’t need this shit who needs this shit so I’m like out of here.

  All I know is that I was sort of already using my reserve tank when he left and afterwards being alone took some getting used to. A person can get on your last nerve, drive you to drink, but you still kind of miss their sorry ass after they’re gone is what I found out. That empty space he left sort of turned into an ache for a minute, or I should say a few months, maybe even a year. It was like this secret longing I felt to replace the void he left with something or someone else. Only I didn’t have the energy. Quincy took up a different kind of space, required a different kind of love. It wasn’t until a year and a half ago that I realized I had not felt the warmth of a man’s body next to mine, that my lips hadn’t trembled, that my breasts hadn’t throbbed or between my legs hadn’t been wet from anybody’s hands except my own, and it made me sad, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I was waiting for him to knock on the front door, I guess, and just say, Here I am. Your worries are over, baby. I’m here. But there has been no knock. I haven’t even bumped into him. Haven’t seen him. Haven’t walked past him in an airport and felt any current radiate from his body to mine. Not at all. Not anything close.

  But it’s okay. Because all I know is that marriage wears you out and I’m not sure if I have the energy left for it. All my married friends are mostly miserable. They’re just in it because. They started it. Those kids. The money would be all fucked up. Lifestyles would change. Alimony. Child support. And that fucking mortgage and all those cars and visitation and fuck it, let’s just stick it out. Some of them don’t even sleep together. Some of the men—a lot of the men—are into serious affairs but unfortunately the chicks on the side don’t have a clue that most of them have no intention of leaving. The men just need a reprieve. Want to break up the monotony. Smell somebody new. In some cases it’s the only way their dicks can get hard and blast off anymore and hell to them it’s worth it.

  Which is why I have pretty much come to the conclusion that marriage itself is a dead-end institution. I’m not doing it again. All I want is a little companionship. No ring. No “I do till death do us part,” because I said that once and we’re both still very much alive. Folks expect too much from one another and when you don’t won’t or can’t deliver you fall short and eventually begin to piss the other person off and years go by and the two of you simply tolerate each other. I wasn’t born to live like this, and especially with a man. I know God didn’t have some master plan where we were supposed to fall in love and then work our asses off to make it work and then it doesn’t and then we end up feeling worse longer than we felt good. There’s something inherently wrong with this whole notion. It seems like everybody is striving for perfection. The perfect fucking spouse who will make you feel perfect. But I know for a fact that no such person exists. I know for a fact that I am far from perfect, but there have been many instances where I didn’t believe that. I fought hard for the right to be right. All I was doing was trying to preserve my right to my own self-image, but I’m here to be whoever I am and if I happen to be a little fucked up then accept me fucked up as I am or leave me the fuck alone. Because if there’s ever going to be a change in my behavior or my personality I will do it myself and I don’t need you nagging me telling me how fucked up I am because you know what? you’re pretty fucked up too.

  I don’t know how long it’s going to take for me not only to fill back up again but to get my engine started. I’ve been divorced now for almost three years and haven’t been on a legitimate date in almost a year even though I have a number to call when I just have to have some even though it’s not passionate but purely maintenance-oriented sex and I thank God he’s married because I wouldn’t want him any other way and these last few months have been tough because he’s turned into such a lazy fuck and he’s pissed at me for not returning his calls and hiding from him really but I’m tired of having sex with him for the sake of getting off because I have to work too hard and he’s started banging me the way he probably bangs his wife, like he’s a slug, and I don’t like kissing him one bit and I’m at the point now where I just can’t do it anymore. Sex should not be cumbersome. And I don’t like the idea of searching for love or trying to conjure up passion. Which is probably one reason why it feels like I’ve lost a lot over these last few years. I know things can never be the way they were (and I wouldn’t dare want it back) but there are a few relatively simple things I’ve stopped doing that I want to put back in my life.

  I wish I could call Delilah. But I can’t. She’d only been my best friend since college and we only talked on the phone every other day and she was the most brilliant person I ever met and we could talk about anything and she lived all the way in Philly and then last year she decides to surprise me and die suddenly from some stupid liver cancer that she didn’t even tell me she had until she was in the fucking hospital and then she was gone the next week and there was a lot of shit we still needed to talk about. A whole lot of stuff. Years and years’ worth of stuff. She knew I was going to miss her ass and I do miss her black ass and the only way I can make the hurt go away is to do one of two things: pretend that she’s still alive and that we’re just not on speaking terms, which we went through from time to time, or pretend that she never existed. Trying to do both has required a great deal of effort and imagination and whenever I’m not looking my heart plummets down real low and I can hardly tolerate the longing.

  So over these next two weeks I want to try to do some make-Stella-feel-good stuff. Which is why I’m planning to do some things I’ve been meaning to do but haven’t for one reason or another. Mostly because I’m always too busy. Always doing something. Work alone has been kicking my ass. It’s been said before, but I’m here to give new meaning to the phrase “I hate my job.”

  I might actually call up a few old friends and sit in a chair and not roam around the house while I talk but give them my undivided attention, listen to what they have to say, what they’ve been going through, how they’ve been feeling. These are people I do care about but now they’re just on the B list. My life has gotten too busy. And it’s time for me to slow it down.

  I will also cook. I used to cook all kinds of interesting and exotic meals, but after Walter left, if Quincy couldn’t identify it he didn’t even want to try it.
A double Big Mac and supersize fries and a nine-piece Chicken McNugget with a medium Sprite and apple pie is his meal of choice. I miss cooking. I miss smelling new smells and stirring new sauces and being surprised by the taste of something different. I will cook. I will make it a habit. I will even make some of those low-fat meals from a few of the fifty or sixty cookbooks I’ve purchased over the years and have yet to ever open.

  For the last two or three years I’ve been meaning to make a computerized printout of all my relatives’ and friends’ birthdays and even their kids’ and have it printed on a specially made calendar so that each day when I walk into my office all I have to do is look up and see whose birthday is coming up, and their card and maybe even a gift depending on their age and who they were would be a surprise and on time.

  I’ll also plant some flowers in the front and back yards since I’ve been reading about the Zen of gardening and how gratifying it can be, and since it’s been awhile since I’ve had sex I’ll take whatever form pleasure comes in. At any rate, I’ve heard that this gardening stuff can relax you and even give you some of those endorphins like people get when they exercise.

  This too is something I’d like to improve upon while my son is off to the Rockies with his how-did-I-ever-love-his-lifeless daddy. As it stands now, I am almost ashamed to tell people that I hired a personal trainer who comes to my house three days a week to make me pump and grind and sweat because the bottom line is that I’m lazy and have no willpower and have woken up too many mornings from dreams in which I worked out so strenuously and was truly too beautiful for a woman who’d just turned forty and I put stars like Cher and Tina Turner and Diana Ross to shame but it wasn’t until a year later after having a series of such dreams that I realized I had never broken a sweat let alone panted. It has taken me another year to get into the rhythm of working out and there are many mornings when I’d just as soon call in sick, but as a result of my desire to improve my health with the real motive being pure vanity I now am almost in shape although I still have my unfair share of cellulite, but it’s not as much as I used to have thank the Lord and I actually do have a number of muscles and my butt is higher and firmer than I ever recall it being but since I’d been paying the health club $105 a month for two years and had actually only been inside to give tours to visiting friends and relatives and inform them that whenever I had the time this is where I usually worked out though the truth was I’d only gone in there to sit in the steam room but since I now have two steam rooms—here and in my cabin at Lake Tahoe—there was really no need to waste my gas driving there so why bother, so last year I admitted to myself that I was bullshitting myself and since I have had a difficult time visualizing myself fat and slovenly and just plain old I decided—like they do in any twelve-step program—to turn myself over to a higher power. Her name is Krystal and she makes Cindy Crawford look like a zero and she only charges fifty dollars an hour. I used to use drugs that cost me more per minute. Which is one reason I could never run for public office. If anyone ever did a background check on me they’d be in for a big shock. But then again, they are always shocked at everybody else’s background when they’re running for public office, aren’t they? No one who has really lived should have a sterling background, in my opinion. My sister Angela is the only baby boomer I know who’s never tried any drugs at all. She’s missed out on a lot of good shit if you ask me.

  But those were the good old days. Times have changed. Twenty years have passed. I am a grown-up. In every sense of the word. I have responsibilities. I am responsible. I am a good mother. I am raising a black male child by myself and trying to be a mother and father and do my very best so that he’ll grow up to be a strong proud and confident black man who knows his own worth and value and is not afraid to love and show his feelings and yet he’ll be strong as steel on the outside and as soft and sensuous as a cashmere sweater inside. I spend a lot of time being a mother.

  I am also a fancy-schmancy analyst for one of the world’s largest investment banking institutions and I make a shitload of money and my family is proud of me because I’m the only one who has actually made it to the top but all I know is that it is lonely as hell up here and I don’t particularly like it. At this point in my life, I’d settle for being in the middle. My job is dull and boring. I just always assumed that a person could have more than one talent, more than one skill, and you could display as many of them as you had available, but I’ve learned that this is not necessarily true. It is difficult to be taken seriously if you are an artist, but playing with numbers gets quite a bit of attention. I’ve also come to realize that the price I’m paying to get paid a lot is a little on the high side. It seems to me that once you get past the two-hundred-thousand-a-year mark you are constantly being appraised and as a result always trying to prove your worth. It wears you out and at the same time no matter what you do or how good you think you are at it, as long as someone ranks higher on that hierarchy than you it makes you expendable. It’s too hectic up here and the race is always on. It’s always rush hour but I haven’t figured out when to put on my blinker because it’s safe to change lanes and I’m also not sure which exit I should take to get off this track altogether.

  I know there’s still room in my life for steel and suede for copper and leather for brass and wood for marble slate glass and material in general, but I just don’t know how when or where to put it back in. Mostly because I’m scared. I’ve always been good at making things that serve a purpose, that perform, that function, but art is so iffy and then there’s the mortgage and I’m not sure if I could recapture regain or pick up where I left off, if I’ll ever have the guts the chutzpah hell the balls to leave my job.

  My divorce and starting all over has taken most of the bite out of me for right now and I don’t know exactly how long it’s going to take me to get my groove back on as the young kids say. All I know is this: Loss is hard. Starting over is hard. Which is why I’m just trying to get from one day to the next, why I’m on the straight and narrow, and it’s probably the reason why most of the time my life is not fun.

  Right now I’m tired of thinking about how uneventful my life has been lately and I wish I knew what I could do to put the fizz back into it. How to resurrect myself. How to shoot some vitality into my heart, my mind, this house of soul I live in. I haven’t always been dead. I used to live a somewhat exciting life. I used to take chances. I used to do some crazy shit and didn’t give a damn because I wasn’t hurting anybody. Fifteen years ago my life was interesting because I didn’t know where I was going I just knew I was going somewhere. It was exciting because I hadn’t arrived anywhere yet. And the journey itself was exhilarating. The detours. The uncertainty. I used to change my mind about things right in the middle of doing the shit. Made mistakes and was woman enough to admit I made them but didn’t slay myself for it. It was usually some bullshit that was reversible anyway. Back then I did whatever I felt like doing that gave me pleasure. When did I stop? And why? After or during marriage? Motherhood? My so-called career?

  I walk outside for a minute to think about this and when the dog runs up to me with his wet dog-smelling self I pat him on the head and go back into the house. My latte is cold and I step inside my office to pick out a book but out of the thousand or so I have it doesn’t seem as if any of them suit my mood. I don’t want to read anything too lighthearted or too deep either. I close the door and head back toward the family room because I’m not so sure that I really want to escape my own world. That I want to be engaged.

  Part of my problem is that I’m always doing something and if I’m not then I’m looking for something to do. I decide to lie down and take a nap. To simply stop moving. For a change. So I sink into the thick cushions on the red love seat and I close my eyes but the leather is cold against my skin and I’m not exactly exhausted because I haven’t exactly exerted any real energy today except what it took to decide on what I was and wasn’t going to do.

  Without even trying I find myself s
pringing up and decide that I’ll watch a little television, something mindless, and it’s the one thing I rarely do except maybe by accident like the accident I’m causing right now. I don’t even know if I have HBO or Showtime and I’m hoping I do and even though my watch says it’s now twenty to one in the afternoon I don’t care if I tune in to the middle of a movie because I’m like an intelligent enough woman who should be able to figure out how something started but I guess all I really want is to hear some noise since Quincy’s not here making any or maybe I’m just so used to being distracted I need something to stop me from thinking so hard about my own mundane redundant predictable but good little life.

  I try three remotes before one works. And as soon as the TV comes on of course there’s a commercial and without looking up I hear this melodic baritone voice almost singing “Come to Jamaica” and I swear it seems as if he’s talking to me and when I look at the fifty-five-inch screen it is filled with turquoise water and hot white sand and a blazing yellow sun and then a bronzed white man in a flapping white cotton shirt and baggy white linen trousers strolls along the shore and a tanned white woman in a straw hat and sunglasses is stretched out on a chaise longue with a book resting across her chest and they are both holding tall frothy glasses filled with something melon-colored and I think I can smell the papaya juice the pineapple juice and coconut oil and that tropical breeze is whispering in my ear and when I look closer that white woman’s legs begin to turn brown and she is wearing my chartreuse bathing suit and my good straw hat and that’s my Swatch watch on her wrist and my Revo sunglasses and when I look closer at this woman who now looks like she could be my twin sister I realize it is me lying on that chaise on that beach and when that lilting voice once again says “Come to Jamaica,” I sit up then stand up and I say to that man, “Why the fuck not?”