Letters to a Mistress

C.R.A.Z.Y.

“Cancer.” She said to me “The anger becomes a cancer. Something you can’t stop and you can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try. You work and work for so long to forget about it all. The pain, the betrayal, the lack of respect, all the things that you understood were things you could easily get over. And then, just when you thought everything was OK and you can move on, you get angry all over again. Angry because you can’t sleep at night. Angry because you can’t get up in the morning. Angry because your stomach hurts from drinking too much. Angry because you cried at a stupid movie. You start not to be able to fight the pain, and you just get so mad that your blood is hot all the time. Day and night. The heat in your skin makes you irritated. You itch and you sweat. Like a crackhead. That, that is when you finally do something stupid. Something so dumb even you could think of reasons not to. And you do think of them. You pray and pray and pray, but the anger takes over your whole soul. And then you do it. You do the one thing you never wanted to do. The thing you wanted to be better than. Better than them. You make a fool out of yourself in anger. I did it. I did it to your father.”

And then she told me. She told me of the time right before my father was leaving us. When things were really bad that they were always fighting. I barely remembered going to visit him and that woman. I barely remembered her name. But when my mother began to tell the story. The night that it all happened started to come back to me like it was yesterday.

The night of my 12th birthday, it was raining really hard and I remembered my mother slammed down the phone, grabbed me and my sister and put us in the car. She was driving really fast, I thought then, but now I could clearly see that it was the rain that was making the windows so messy. Making everything go by so quickly. We drove for like what seemed for hours, my sister singing songs, me just looking out the window, and then we turned down a narrow road, with trees that covered the lights. My mother stopped the car at the end and got out of the front seat. She opened the trunk of the Volvo and whispered to the both of us, “ You stay here until I come back, and don’t get out of this car!” My sister started to whine about my mother leaving us there all alone, but before she could even say anything, my mother had shut the door and walked away. She was gone for what seemed like hours and I had to go to the bathroom. When I couldn’t wait anymore I opened the door and stepped outside the car. Frightened that I just committed the mortal sin of not staying in the car, I took one good look at my sister and said “I’m just gonna go pee OK?” “No! Don’t leave me!” she whined. And jumped out of the car behind me.

The rain had finally stopped when I found a small patch of bushes to squat over. Trying really hard not to make any noise, I bent over and began my stream. “DiDi Look!” my little sister said. “What! I’m tryin to go!” I sneered back. “Look over there! What’s mama painting on that house over there!” As I looked up through the trees I saw her. She was on a ladder with a huge paint brush painting on the house what looked like the words; HOME WRECKER, in big red letters. Just then lights came on from inside the house and I saw my father. He opened the back door and saw me squatting, my sister next to me with her mouth wide open, and my mother, soaked from the rain with a paintbrush in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. I closed my eyes when I saw her lunge for him with the knife. I did not see my mother again until I was 16 and my sister was 12.

“I was hurt and angry, and that snide little bitch he was with just kept acting like she did nothing wrong. But it was her. It was all her. Now I am not saying you are the same person Di, but I tell you, even if it were not her fault, I would have still blamed her because just like I said before, that anger is like a cancer, and you will find every other reason but you for why it all happened. You will use every little thing to blame except for you.”

She continued on to tell me what she felt and started to console me. “You see, every breath you take as the other woman is a breath that needs to be stopped. And all you think about, all you talk about with your friends, as the wife is a way to kill the bitch that wrecked your family. You may be in the right, she may be crazy, and she definitely is doing these things to you. I know its true Diana, I saw them. I was there when she was calling you and leaving dead dogs on your front porch. But honey, I tell you right now, if you want to win this war, you’ve got to think like she does. She’s got the upper hand on you now; she’s got his ear, and all this time and all this way away is not going to make him see what she is doing to you. You can send as many pieces of proof to him as you want to, but all it will ever be is a stack of paper. So you have to choose. If you love him, and lord knows I don’t know why, but if you love him, you need to make a choice. Either walk away from it all or just play the game the way it needs to be played. The way I taught you. Now, I can help you. I can keep you from doing stupidness, but you have to be willing to suffer the consequences.”

And after all that, all that she told me, there was nothing more I could say. I didn’t know how to answer. My own mother telling me stories about my father and what she did to bring her relationship back from the dead. I don’t know if they are really happy, and I dare not ask him, for the woman she showed me today, was a woman I had never seen before. Willing to tell me her secrets just so that she could help me survive. I would have chosen not to do anything. I would have chosen to walk away. But the thought of letting someone treat me this way without showing the world what she had done was enough to take my mother’s had and say to her, “OK mama. Tell me what to do.”

That night we laid out a plan that would bring Naima to her demise. She would never know what was coming and she would never know how it happened. Until it was too late. My mother explained to me that she was so mentally and emotionally unstable that it would be easy to get her to nibble at the bait. “Like a rabid dog” mama said, “Hungry and crazy not knowing whether to bite the hand that’s giving them the food or to just eat the food. She will go for everything you give to her. And when she finally takes the big piece of cake it will be poison.” We talked for hours and drank until our stomachs were swollen. And when the night was at an end, we had every single step of the plan in place. Starting with the first piece of bait that we knew Naima would go for. She was so ravenous for me, that all she ever wanted was a confrontation. So I would give her one. The next time she called, I would answer.