Chapter 6 #2
Three issues after I was promoted, I was finally able to publish a piece I was proud of: I had researched the growing fashion scene in Africa and found several wealthy, fashion-forward African women to profile.
It ended up being a groundbreaking special on the continent’s most influential women, photographed in looks from emerging diasporic designers shot in Cape Town, Lagos, and Accra.
The media coverage was enough to land Lucinda on the Today show (an appearance for which she wore a cringey kente cloth dress).
It also produced a spike in sales so decisive that Mary-Kate brought me a thank-you gift from Lucinda: a large square box containing a new Celine bag.
When I showed the bag to Teresa, she just shook her head. “Doesn’t that cost, like, two thousand dollars?” she asked me, even though she was the biggest label hound in the world and knew, to a decimal point, the retail price.
“This bag could pay my rent, home skillet.” I laughed and handed her a glass of Chardonnay.
We were having a rare girls’ night at my Brooklyn apartment.
Lately, I’d been craving more time in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood that always reminded me of the Harlem of my youth.
I welcomed the familiar mix of older Black folks dragging red carts filled with groceries, buppies in shoulder pads rushing to the subway with The New York Times folded under their arms, intrepid gentrifiers carrying Starbucks cups and pushing fat-tired strollers, teens in puffy jackets with elaborate hairstyles, and dudes in basketball jerseys trying to sell me some dirt weed. It felt like home.
Joseph was working on a major deal and had been pulling late nights for the past couple weeks, so Teresa and I decided to do a classic sleepover, complete with wine, movies, homemade facials, comfy sweatpants, and scrunchies.
I popped a Bobbie Washington CD into my stereo.
Her debut was an up-tempo hit with multiple chart-topping singles and a couple club bangers, unusual for a neo soul artist. But that night, I was in the mood for Bobbie’s sophomore album, a poignant tour de force written like a series of diary entries.
After Bobbie visited Howard during my junior year to give an acoustic concert and talk to the class about pursuing our passions, I’d been inspired to create a club for aspiring journalists.
By my senior year, our club had launched a widely read zine that grew to campus fame for our no-holds-barred op-eds decrying various social injustices.
Founding the journalism club had been the first time I’d acknowledged how much I loved to write, but it was producing the zine that changed me.
My essays were generating ripples of reaction and impact, and I wanted more: a bigger platform, a larger audience, the ability to deep dive on all the topics I cared about.
I started thinking about becoming an editor in chief.
Bobbie’s sophomore album came out around then, which is why its lyrics about finding your voice and being true to yourself felt as if they had been written just for me.
“Oooh, crank that,” Teresa said when she heard the first few chords of the lead track, about Black women loving the skin they’re in.
She sang along for a few lines then stopped to survey me.
“Speaking of … are we staying straight?” Teresa motioned with her chin toward my head, her own tight curls pulled into a messy topknot.
“Ouch, heffa. Why I gotta be self-hating because I have a blowout? Although, I do confess to a love-hate relationship with this hair,” I replied with a smile that I hoped was convincing enough for her to drop it. But Teresa knew me too well.
I was now scheduling weekly blowouts, and the heavy mop that slipped into my eyes all day was as annoying as the rabid interest it generated from men (including Joseph), who suddenly found me and my flowing locks irresistible.
It made me realize that perhaps the blue-eyed girl in my Jack and Jill chapter had not wanted all that attention; maybe she’d felt bad sitting in the chair that her admirer had prevented me from occupying; perhaps she often wore sunglasses so people wouldn’t continually comment on a physical feature that others valued more than she did.
“I don’t know, boo. Thinking you’ve really gone to the dark side.
” She dipped a finger in the mud-colored DIY pore-tightening mask we were mixing in my tiny kitchen, smelled it, and recoiled dramatically.
“You know I got you no matter what,” she continued.
“Like I said when we were hanging in your office, if you’re happy, I’m happy. If not, we ride at dawn.”
I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about my hair.
I carefully measured out some more oatmeal to buy myself time.
“Everything is going my way right now, you know? Lucinda just gave me the nod, and Joseph has been all over me lately. I’m on a roll, so let me get these silk presses in peace. ” I laughed unconvincingly.
Teresa frowned at the lumpy substance in the bowl. “Yo, why does this mask look like dog food?”
This time my laughter was sincere. “No idea! But I’m not convinced about putting Purina on my face.”
“I’m following your lead. You’re the StyleList HNIC.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about this little experiment. I vote for more booze, less beautifying.”
“Hear, hear,” Teresa agreed. She flopped onto my fraying sofa and tucked her legs under what she considered to be her best feature. “Did I tell you about the cute guy I met on the subway?”
“You mean the Asian dude in the basketball jersey who was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude or the Black guy in the suit doing the Times crossword puzzle?” With her curves, brains, and easy confidence, Teresa always had men trying to drink her bathwater.
An equal-opportunity dater with indiscriminate taste, her only rule was no lawyers.
As a public defender, Teresa had to be flinty and focused all day; she needed the release that partying and dating gave her.
“Nah, this guy’s Panamanian. Real sexy, runs a music promotion street team for Jive Records. The pro-slash-con is that he’s Afro Latino. He gets me and he even speaks Spanish, but he looks like my Flatbush cousins, so I dunno…”
“Yikes, no bueno!” I grimaced.
“I know, right? But he’s so fine. I’ll let him buy me dinner before I decide.” Teresa shrugged. “So, what are you gonna do about Joseph? That nice, fine, rich, boring man wants to marry you sooo bad.”
“Ha-ha.” I brought the wine bottle over to the sofa, sat down, and topped us off. “All I know is the more people act like marrying Joseph is a foregone conclusion, the less I’m into the idea.”
“You love him?”
“Yes,” I replied slowly. “We have a million single friends who’d cut off a pinky to be with a guy like him…” I finished half my glass in one gulp. “It’s just weird that the less I recognize myself, the more he adores me.”
Teresa put down her glass and touched my knee. “Hey, Nik, I didn’t know you were feeling this way. Other than having to deal with that big stick up his ass, I thought you were doing okay with ole Joe.”
I’d always felt that Teresa’s lukewarm attitude toward Joseph stemmed, in part, from the fact that I’d met him through Marie, to whom she’d often referred with the faintest hint of jealousy as my work wife. But despite her snarky words, there was nothing in her expression but concern.
“I really don’t know,” I muttered, staring into my glass. “I should be so happy right now…”
“Are you having an issue at StyleList? I know you’re dealing with snobby low-key racists all day, but I thought you were doing okay in that nest of vipers too.”
“Now that I’m achieving all these goals at work, I don’t know why I’m not more fulfilled. And I can’t complain to anyone because I sound like a bougie ingrate.” I looked down at my hands, taking in ragged cuticles that I’d been nervously gnawing for weeks.
“Ingrate, no. Bougie, uh … yeah!” Teresa smiled.
“But seriously, have you considered that maybe you just don’t want any of it?
Remember when I was on the partner track at that corporate law firm, and I was fucking miserable?
Everyone thought I’d lost my whole mind when I quit.
And now I love being a public defender. Well, most days.
” She took a long drink of her wine. “Sure, I’ll be paying off my law school loans until I’m arguing cases in court wearing an adult diaper and using a walker, but I’m helping people. ”
I had to smile at the image. The reality was that Teresa was whip-smart, with a fearsome ability to think on her feet and a preternatural talent for slicing up opposing lawyers’ arguments with Ginsu-like precision.
DAs and judges were always underestimating my girl, which was just fine by her, because she had the trial record of a legal prizefighter.
“You were working hundred-hour weeks and your hoo-hah was covered in cobwebs! No way that was going to work for your, ahem, lifestyle,” I chortled.
“Hey, I’m a work hard, play hard girl!” Teresa winked, then turned sober.
“But that was what I was supposed to want, chica. And it was not easy to give up. Even though I got a scholarship, Columbia wasn’t free, and it was hard on my family when I went there for seven years straight.
Then I give up a fancy job at a fancy firm to help the people my parents were trying to keep me away from?
” She exhaled slowly and shook her head.
“I never thought of it that way, Tee. That job just never seemed like you, so I wasn’t surprised when you left.”
“Well, everyone else was. Which made it even harder for me because I wasn’t entirely sure. All I knew was that the longer I stayed, the more I could feel my soul getting hoovered right out of my body.”