by Danzy Senna
“I grew up on army bases all over the world,” she was saying. “Seoul. Bombay. Frankfurt. San Diego. And Kenya. I’m a regular United Nations. I always tell people I’m from Nowhere, Everywhere. It’s the only honest answer. You know?”
I nodded, though I didn’t know.
“And what about you?” She was watching me, smiling, waiting for me to reciprocate. I wondered if she already knew my story. I doubted it. Nobody ever knew before I told them. Except Lola. She’d known from the first time she saw me at the Black Student Union meeting our freshman year. I’d stood awkwardly in the back, hands shoved in my pockets, pretending not to notice the whispers and stares. Lola walked across the room, stood in front of me, arms akimbo. I thought she was going to ask me to leave, but then she smiled slowly and said, “Hey, are you nusu-nusu?” For a moment I thought she was mistaking me for somebody else, a girl named Nusu-Nusu. But she went on to explain. She was studying Swahili. It was the word for girls like me. Literal translation: partly-partly.
I told Greta now. The words felt slightly stale. I’d had to say them so many times.
“So you see,” I said when I finished. “We have something in common.”
She laughed, shaking her head, “Yes, we do!”
I still couldn’t tell whether my story had come as a surprise to her or not. Did it matter? According to my parents, none of this was supposed to matter, these quirks of DNA. They were not supposed to change anything. But they did. As soon as Greta had told me, I’d felt an invisible wall fall away between us.
We ordered dessert, flourless chocolate cake for me, crème brûlée for her. I suggested we get brandies as well.
“So what happened with that boy of yours?” she asked me. “Why’d you move out in such a rush?”
I paused, then told her the whole story, my eyes turned down. “I suppose I should have been more—forthright, but—”
“But you wanted to just be yourself. Without all that other stuff mucking it up.”
Had that been it? I nodded, trying to decide.
“Well, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” she said. “He would have just hidden his true colors, played Mr. Sensitive for a while, Mr. Curious, Mr. Enlightened, and then one night, when you were in real deep, he’d let his real self slip out.” A hint of anger had crept into her voice. “At least this way everything came out at the start.”
I nodded. It made sense what she was saying.
“I say hurrah to you for walking away.” Greta lifted her glass of brandy and swished the brown liqueur from side to side. “Learn your lessons early and you’ll save yourself a lot of bullshit down the line.”
We clinked glasses and she leaned forward then, a mischievous smile playing on her lips. “You know what? I think we should start our own nation. If only we had some loot. We could buy an island—one of those little Tahitian joints that Marlon Brando got himself. And we could fill it with people just like us. And never have to deal with the bullshit again.”
I laughed. “Now there’s an idea.”
“I’ll be the minister of defense.”
“And I’ll be the minister of information. We can wear suits and bow ties like those Fruit of Islam men. And sell bean pies to passing sailors.”
“It’ll be splendid!” She closed her eyes and began to recite, haltingly: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea. …”
I watched her face as she went on with the poem. She had a lot of potential, underneath the gaudy makeup and the extra ten pounds. But there was something dusty about her looks, tarnished, like something that’s been put to use one too many times. She seemed lonely to me. She wore no wedding ring, and I wondered if she had given up on love, or if she had someone at home, a warm body in the dark.
“So twice five miles of fertile ground, With walls and towers were girdled round …”
She opened her eyes and broke into a bashful smile. “Like that. It’ll be like that.”
OUTSIDE, the temperature had dropped. It hurt to breathe in too deeply. I waited while Greta hailed herself a cab, and felt a slight dread at the thought of Vera’s cold white bedroom awaiting me at the other end of my trip.
Greta spoke with her back to me, her arm held up toward traffic. “Thank you for the dinner. The whole evening, really. You didn’t have to.”
“But I wanted to. It was the least I could do. You got me out of a real bind.”
A cab with its vacant lights on pulled up in front of her. She stepped off the curb. “So we’ll do it again?”
“Yes, I’d like that,” I said, realizing only as I said it that it was true.
She opended the door, but paused, and turned to smile at me through a web of rain. “You know, you’re never really alone. Not really.”
I looked down and kicked the pavement. I hadn’t known I was that obvious. “I’m fine—” I began, but when I looked up she had already slipped inside the cab.
WHEN I GOT BACK to the apartment that night, I was overwhelmed by the smell. A perfume so strong it had outlasted the girl herself. I cracked open the living room window, but other smells wafted inside: marinated chicken wings and marijuana. I left it open anyway and went to the kitchen and began making some tea, but when I stopped moving for a moment, I heard from behind the stove a distinct scratching sound and a slight squeaking. I recalled the glue traps Andrew had used in his apartment. Recalled him pulling out the remains of one mouse that had gotten stuck—a tiny dust-colored creature with its buckteeth glued to the trap. I listened now, terrified, to the scratching noise, imagining every time it moved it only becoming more enmeshed in the stickiness.
When I went to the bedroom, I saw there was a message blinking on the answering machine. I felt a lurch of hope, despite myself, that it was Andrew. But he didn’t have my number. And when I pressed play, an older man’s voice—he said his name was Tony, he had a thick Brooklyn accent—began speaking to Vera. A stream of obscenities.
“Yo, Vera, how’s that juicy pussy of yours doin’? I’ve been thinkin’ about it. Been thinkin’ about fuckin’ you every night. You and your big bouncing titties.”
The talk went on for a minute and I listened, cheeks flaming, until his voice—jerky, aroused—was finally cut off by the tape. I pressed erase and stood over the machine, breathing tightly for a moment.
I looked around the room. I felt all of a sudden homesick. I lay on the bed, staring at the sole photograph I’d brought with me from California. It was an old snapshot with white scalloped edges. I couldn’t tell the date or how old I’d been when it was taken, but my father wore an Afro, and the lapels on his shirt suggested the seventies. In the picture, my brother and I were dressed alike: blue bell-bottoms and rainbow-striped polyester shirts. I hadn’t noticed it before now, but my brother looked a little cross-eyed in the picture, as if he were trying to see in two directions at once. And my left hand was twisted in my lap in such a way that it appeared deformed.
I tossed the picture onto my night table. The last time I’d seen them all in person was June, my graduation. Class of 1992. After the ceremonies we’d gone out to celebrate at El Torito, a Mexican restaurant in the center of Palo Alto. My father wore a white smock and shoveled corn chips into his mouth as if he were afraid they’d be snatched away. My mother, blond and thin and dressed in a Maoist peasant jacket, sent the waiter back with her food twice to remove first the cheese, then the tortilla itself from her burrito, explaining she was allergic to wheat and dairy. My brother and his girlfriend wore matching sun-baked dreadlocks. They squirmed and tore at their clothes like a couple of mermaids who could not breathe outside water. They didn’t stop their wiggling until they excused themselves to take some hits from a joint. They came back fifteen minutes later, red-eyed and smirking. As usual, I played the stiff, making apologetic faces at the waiters and throwing nervous glances at the bourgeois families celebrating their own children’s graduatio
ns around us.
At some point I passed around a copy of the magazine where I would be working. My parents were politely silent, but my brother flipped through it for a few minutes, looked up, and said, “Do people still read this shit?”
Then they all laughed, a little too hard, as if this was the funniest thing in the world.
These days they were all unreachable. My father was on sabbatical, traveling around the Middle East for six months, part of his requisite pilgrimage to Mecca. I had received a few postcards from him along the way—from the Gulf of Oman and Egypt—saying “As-salaam alaikum” and telling me how beautiful the people in this or that region were. My mother was on a prolonged silent meditation at a Zen retreat in Northern California. And my brother was a champion surfer who was at this very moment chasing waves around the world with his girl. He had sent me one postcard from Haleiwa, written in incomprehensible surfspeak.
It felt to me that they were always laughing at me across a dinner table. My parents had divorced long ago, but it had been an almost imperceptible rupture. To this day they remained living in the same house, my father on one floor, my mother on the other. They often ate dinner together in front of the news, barking out enraged commentary on the latest government corruption. They shared the same politics and the same sense of humor, and very occasionally one of them would go out on a date with somebody else, only to come home early, rolling their eyes, making wisecracks to the other about the poor sod or broad with whom they’d spent the miserable evening. They liked to say they had never broken up; they had simply evolved to a higher plane of friendship.
My father had left me with no way to reach him in Mecca, but my mother had given me the number of the Zen center where she was staying. “In case of emergency,” she’d said, slipping the paper into my hand at the airport, smiling as if she knew there would be no such thing. I called it now.
An irritated man answered on the fifth ring.
I asked for her by name.
“And who’s calling?”
“Her daughter.”
“Is this an emergency?”
I hesitated. I could not honestly say it was an emergency. “No. I just, well, I just wanted to talk to her.” I laughed. Buddhists made me nervous. “I guess I’m just a little homesick.”
His tone shifted then. He sighed, and through the phone wires I could almost feel him trying to control his temper. His voice, when he spoke, was clipped, nasal, irate. “I’m not sure if your mother explained to you what goes on here, but she’s on a silent retreat. Three months of no talking. So unless it’s urgent, I’m going to have to take a message for her on paper, which I will put in her cubbyhole tomorrow.”
“Okay—”
“But I’ll be honest with you. Any kind of invasion from the outside can be disruptive to the process. So unless it’s absolutely necessary—”
“Can’t she talk to me for five minutes? What harm could that really do? Then I won’t call again. I promise. Not until she’s finished.”
“Finished? What exactly do you mean, finished? This is a process that doesn’t end.”
I swallowed. I could hear the man’s breathing. Smooth, calm, metered.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a tiny voice. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
I FELL ASLEEP that night with my clothes on.
In the dream Vera had returned home from her travels to find me asleep in her bed. She crawled in beside me. A big-boned white girl with blind, baby eyes and a scratchy Janis Joplin voice, she held one hand loosely around my neck while the other circled my areola. She whispered that she was going to kill me, but first she had to make me come. I wanted to stop her, but I was paralyzed. Leaden. Only my eyes were working as she slithered down under the sheets and I felt her tongue working between my legs. I came without wanting to, without moving, invisible shudders. When I woke up, there was a stickiness in the space between. The room was shrouded in a thick blue light. The smell was everywhere. In the sheets. The pillows. The surface of my skin.
8
L UCKY GIRL!” said Donna, the secretary, when she passed me in the hall the next morning.
I was on my way back from an ideas meeting on the fourteenth floor.
“Lucky how?” I said, but she just winked and kept walking.
I hesitated when I got to the door of my office. On my desk sat a huge bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses. I approached them warily. My throat closed. I picked up the attached note and opened it.
The card said simply, “Without you I am nothing.”
I stared at the words. God, Andrew, I thought, get a grip. But my body reacted with a mind of its own—a heave in my chest, like an aborted sob, and then slight dizziness.
When I found my balance, I crumpled the card and tossed it in the trash. I started to throw out the roses, too, but stopped. They were too beautiful to discard. It seemed criminal. I marched down the hall with the bouquet. I passed Donna along the way. Heard her call out, “So who’s Romeo?” But I didn’t answer. I just kept walking toward the red glowing sign marked EXIT. I ran down the stairwell two flights and came out the metal door onto the business floor.
I found Greta sitting in a wide-open corral with the other fact-checkers. She was pouring a packet of Equal into a McDonald’s cup and flipping through a magazine. Her cubicle, I saw, was a mess. Papers stacked in tilting sculptures. Books pilfered from the review-copy room in a heap at her feet. She had Cathy cartoons stuck in the corkboard over her desk, along with a postcard of an orangutan dressed in a hard hat and overalls.
I stopped a few feet away from her desk, and just observed her for a moment, not speaking. A feeling rose up in me, both sick and sad. The office air, the fluorescent lights—I wanted to be outside, far away.
She looked up and blinked, surprised, I guess, to see me there.
“Hey—”
I dropped the bouquet onto her desk. “I just got these from my ex-boyfriend. I thought you might want them. I just can’t have them around.”
She touched her chest. “God, they’re stunning. Are you sure?”
I nodded.
She picked them up slowly. “These must have cost a fortune.” She frowned at me, deep furrows between her eyebrows. “This seems wrong. Me taking them. Can’t we at least split them?”
“No. I really don’t want them anywhere near me.”
She saw something on my face. “Oh, geez, hon. It kills me to see you hurting this way. I wish there was something I could do.”
I managed a smile. “You’ve already helped,” I said. “Enjoy the flowers.”
I DID NOT HEAR from Andrew after that. The phone in the apartment rang sometimes late at night, but nobody had my number there, so it was never for me.
“Hey, sugar, what you wearin’?”
The voice was baritone. An older black man. The clock read 2:38 a.m. In the invisible background, I could hear Luther Vandross singing “Creeping.”
I told the man, groggily, that I wasn’t Vera, that I was a subletter.
“Yeah, right. And I’m Harry Belafonte.” He paused, inhaled something. Spoke in a high, tight voice. “You wearing a thong?”
I insisted that I was somebody else.
“Come on, sugar. Talk to me like you did last time. Get on your hands and knees and—”
“I’m not Vera.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
“Where the hell is she?”
“London.”
“Shit. Tell her Sammy called,” he said, and hung up.
9
Y OU’VE GOT A LOT of potential,” Greta said. “But your colors, they’re all wrong.”
We were underground, at Rockefeller Center station. It was evening. I’d spent all day trekking around Central Park, trying to interview mothers about new high-tech playground designs. But all the women were brown, and the children were white, and none of them were related. I’d interviewed the women anyway, but when I handed the piece in, my editor, Rula Maven
, said it wouldn’t work. We couldn’t quote the nannies.
Greta’s uptown train was on the other platform, but she had insisted on coming with me to mine so she could finish convincing me that I needed this service. Color analysis. Something I recalled vaguely from the 1980s—a fad that had come and gone with the mullet.
“See, everybody has a season,” Greta was saying beside me. “Autumn, Winter, Spring, or, blech, Summer. I’m a Winter. Deep Winter. And just knowing that has changed my life. I kid you not.”
Near us, a person in a wheelchair was begging for change. At first I’d thought it was a runaway teenaged boy, all croaky voice and motherless smile. But now, on second glance, it looked more like an old woman, her wiry body wasted by drugs and alcohol and maybe disease. I couldn’t say for sure. It was dressed in layers: a grimy green parka over an “I Love New York” sweatshirt. Its face was hidden behind the bill of a Redskins baseball cap.
“I know just the woman to take you to,” Greta was saying. “For fifty bucks, she does an analysis. Want to try it? We could go some afternoon.”
The person in the wheelchair was raising its eyes to grin at us. The person’s skin looked strange, as if it was stretched too tightly, like it might rip if he or she smiled any harder.
I looked back at Greta. “Fifty bucks. That’s a little steep. And anyway, wouldn’t I be the same as you? I mean, color-wise?”
“Not necessarily. It’s a science. You have to get a degree to diagnose people. That’s why I want to take you to this woman. She’s studied in Europe. She’s a genius. I’m telling you.”
The person was moving toward us, Big Gulp cup outstretched. I stared hard into its face, trying to decide once and for all. Boy, girl, old man, or old woman. No clue. Even the voice was unclear. A raspy wail as it sang out its plea. Wheelchair basketball, wheelchair basketball. Wouldn’t you like to give to wheelchair basketball?
I could hear a rumble in the distance, the train approaching. Greta frowned at the wheelchair person for the first time, just noticing it, and turned away from its outstretched cup to face me.