by Danzy Senna
“Anyway,” Greta said, stepping closer to me. “What do you say? The colors. This weekend?”
The person was waiting, looking at me now for change. I fumbled in my pocket and tossed some silver into its cup. It wheeled off to the next person.
“Well, it’s kind of out of my price range—”
“Oh, come on. How much is your happiness worth?”
My train rolled into the station just then. “All right, all right, maybe I’ll give it a try.”
“That’s a girl.”
I pushed my way into the subway car with the rest of the passengers and turned back to look at it for one more guess. But it had disappeared.
Greta was still there. She smiled and waved and mouthed: This weekend?
I hesitated, then nodded, because it was silly. I had no other plans. This wasn’t what I’d imagined for my grown-up life in New York—going to color analysis with a woman twice my age. But for now this was all I had—and she was growing on me, in her own funny way.
I WAS a Winter, too.
Greta sat on a stool in a corner of the woman’s apartment, holding her coat on her lap, smiling broadly with vicarious pleasure as the woman draped one polyester cloth after another before my face.
“Oh, yes, you’re a deep Winter,” the woman cooed. “This here? Lobelia? This is your ball-gown color.” She clucked her teeth at me in the mirror. “Gorgeous.”
I stared at my reflection. I looked like somebody’s child with the purple swatch tucked like a bib into my shirt.
The woman—Dorothea was her name—told me she was a Spring. She had ashen blond hair and pinkish skin with, she pointed out, blue undertones. She appeared to be in her mid-fifties. She wore a chartreuse green blouse under a black polyester pants suit, and gold earrings. On her lip was a giant, blooming herpes sore. It glistened with the ointment she’d put on it.
“Now, you should never wear gold,” she said, crinkling her nose as she held a metallic gold cloth up to my face. “See that? Cheap. A Winter always looks more expensive in silver.”
Her apartment was a dark and cluttered fourth-floor walk-up in the Village. It served as both her home and her color studio.
“I live and breathe color,” she’d said when we came inside, pointing to an entire shelf filled with books covering every angle of the subject—from a large, glossy photo book of Tuscan pottery to the bible of her trade, The Elements of Color, by Johannes Itten of the Bauhaus School in Germany, where Dorothea said she had studied.
Signed headshots of actors were plastered along one wall. They’d apparently all come seeking color advice. None was famous, as far as I could tell. One of the faces—a ruddy white man in his fifties who in the photo posed in a construction worker’s uniform—did strike me as familiar, and while Dorothea talked about the perils of greens and yellows on a girl of my complexion, I remembered where I’d seen him before. He was the M&M Man. I’d watched him in commercials as a child. I could still see his big hand opening to reveal the clutter of multicolored candies to the lot of greedy children.
“You’re the only season who can get away with wearing black and white together,” Dorothea said, holding both colors up to my face. “See? Gorgeous,” she said. “Now somebody like me, a Spring, can’t get away with it. The contrast is too harsh.” She scowled at herself in the mirror as she held the black and white swatches side by side up to her own face. “I look cheap,” she said. “Like a caterer.”
Just then, from the abyss of the apartment, a teenage boy wandered into the living room, yawning. He was blond, lanky, with braces and acne, and wore a faded gray T-shirt and boxer shorts. He looked half asleep, but jerked awake at the sound of Dorothea’s voice.
“Goddammit, Ricky!” she shrieked at the sight of him. “Can’t you see? I’m working!” Her cheeks had reddened in embarrassment or maybe rage. I couldn’t tell.
He blinked awake and scratched his hair and muttered, “Sorry, I just wanted some juice,” before turning around and shrinking back down the hall again.
She winced a smile at me. “Excuse me a minute.” Then, in clicking high heels, she followed him into the darkened hallway.
I could hear the sound of her whisper as she scolded the boy. I caught the words “asinine” and “privacy” and “a business, for God’s sake.” Something fell to the floor and smashed.
“Pretty cool stuff, huh?” Greta whispered to me from her perch on the stool.
I thought the whole thing was pretty ridiculous, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to offend Greta. We sat there for what seemed a good while waiting for Dorothea to return. All had gone quiet down the hall. I was hot and bored and still had a puke yellow bib on—something Dorothea had put on me to show me a wrong color. Greta was still watching me. I tried to make a joke and pointed at the gallery of headshots. “Do you think Dorothea autographed them all herself?”
Greta didn’t laugh. Her mouth tightened into a straight line and her eyes drifted behind me. I turned. Dorothea stood in the doorway watching us. She had her hands on her hips. I couldn’t tell if she had heard me. She sniffed and crossed the floor. “I’m sorry about the interruption. It won’t happen again.”
Somewhere, deep down the hall, I heard her son sobbing. Dorothea went and turned on the stereo to classical music and cleared her throat.
“Now, where was I?” she asked, her voice still tense with what had gone on in the other room.
The next twenty minutes were a blur: rules spat at me from thin red lips, swatches flying, wrist flicking makeup onto my face. Then, for forty dollars extra, she offered to do an analysis of my “clothing personality.” I was either dramatic, gamine, romantic, ingénue, or classic—but she wouldn’t tell me which until I gave her the forty dollars. I declined the service but lied and promised to come back soon when I had some extra money.
At the door, she handed me my wallet of color swatches, which she told me I should always carry with me in my purse for reference.
“Eventually, you won’t need it. But for now, the first few years, you really need to refer to it when shopping.”
Greta piped in beside me, “I never leave home without mine.”
Dorothea reached out to shake my hand. “Well, it’s awfully nice to lay eyes on you. Greta told me about you over the summer. She kept saying, ‘Wait’ll you see this friend of mine. She’s just like me.’ She was in such a state about it.”
I looked at Greta. She had her eyes fixed on Dorothea. She wore a stiff smile.
I was silent as we went down the stairs. I could hear voices behind Dorothea’s door—the teenage boy sobbing enraged epithets—bitch, cunt, I hate you—at his mother.
Outside, a soft rain fell. I stood under the awning beside Greta while she fumbled in her purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“That was funny,” I said. “What Dorothea said? This summer? We barely knew each other.”
Greta paused. I saw, under the beige of her skin, that she was blushing. She looked away at the street, then back at me. “I know. But I felt like I knew you. I just, well, I had this feeling we’d be friends.”
She looked so flustered that I had to laugh.
“It’s okay.” I shook my head. “I just got a little confused, that’s all.”
She bit her lip and searched my face. “Are you mad?”
I shook my head. “Oh, please. Not at all.” Because I wasn’t. I touched her arm. “Really. It’s no biggie. Hey, I’m glad we’re friends. I’m glad your prediction came true!”
Greta grinned, visibly relieved. “Now tell me what you thought. She’s a genius, right?”
I started to tell her what I really thought—but changed my mind. I humored her. “Yeah, you were right. It was worth it.”
“And now you’ll see,” Greta said, turning to face the street. “The world is made up of people wearing the wrong colors. Except you and me, of course.”
She linked her arm in mine. “So. Tell me. Do you like hot wings? ‘Cause there’s a
bar near here. Houlihan’s. They have Happy Hour every night from five-thirty to seven-thirty. Two for one on drinks. Even on the weekends. And they serve hot wings half price. Fries too. But I try to resist the fries.” She patted her hip. “Urban sprawl. At my age, you gotta be careful.”
And the next thing I knew the two of us were running through the rain, laughing together under her Chase Manhattan umbrella.
HOULIHAN’S WAS PACKED—a dingy sports bar with Budweiser and Heineken mirrors lining the walls. Guns N’ Roses played from the jukebox. There were a million and one clean and stylish bars in the Village, but Greta had chosen this. Still, I was glad not to be going home just yet to my stinky apartment. While she ran off to get us our drinks, I saved a booth in the back.
A few tables away sat a couple. I watched them while I waited. The girl was thin, her feathered hair tinted a silvery blond. The man wore a suit and glittery cuff links, his light brown hair gelled back. Their skin was an identical bronze—a raceless shade of brown I imagined they’d achieved during a recent vacation to Club Med in Cancún or maybe Aruba.
I thought about Andrew. I tried to imagine him and his friends in a place like this. He preferred down-and-out dives on the Lower East Side, the tempered debauchery of junkies and those who just looked like junkies. He had an aversion to this world of productive, white-collar, Midtown professionals. He was funny that way. He fancied himself a workingman’s writer, but his background flared up in certain moments, making its presence known, like malaria emerging from remission.
I recalled one night, toward the beginning of our relationship, when we lay together in the dark, planning a trip across the country. Some part of me had known even then that we would never take it, but I had indulged the fantasy anyway, suggesting we get a sleeper car on an Amtrak train. But Andrew didn’t like the idea. He wanted to take a Greyhound bus. He said he loathed Amtrak. The people on Amtrak, he’d said, were the bane of American culture. I hadn’t known exactly what he was talking about at the time—which people?—but sitting here, in Houlihan’s, I understood: it was the solid middle class. He, of Bendover, of Old Money, of trust funds, hated their bourgeois pretensions. It was the working class he found romantic—steel mill workers in Pittsburgh, trailer trash in New Hampshire, welfare mothers in Detroit. Drug addicts on the Lower East Side, even. These middling professionals with their forty-hour work weeks, their mundane aspirations, their Banana Republic shirts, their Coach purses, had set his teeth on edge.
That night he’d gone on to say that what he loved about me was that I was neither the sort to take a Greyhound nor the type to take an Amtrak. No, he’d said. I was the kind of girl who’d drive a 1974 powder blue Volvo sports coupe with sheepskin seat covers. The interior would smell of clove cigarettes and dust and car oil, and the floor would be a clutter of rumpled road maps and mix-tapes made by boyfriends gone by. “Yeah,” he’d said, smiling at me through the darkness, his eyes filled with an intensity that made me both nervous and happy. “That’s what you’d drive. Right out of town.”
Of course he was wrong. I’d taken an Amtrak train several times with my family, and the womblike lull of a train in motion was my favorite form of transportation. You saw poor people riding side by side with rich flying-phobics. And everything in the middle. And it seemed on those journeys that the lines broke down. There was camaraderie among the riders, as if for those hours on the train, they were one.
But I hadn’t contradicted Andrew, preferring to indulge his fantasy of me in a powder blue vintage car.
Greta came back carrying our drinks—a whiskey sour for me and a sidecar for herself, and an enormous pile of hot wings, glistening and orange. “I put some songs on the jukebox, too—though it may take a while for them to play.”
I took my drink. “Thanks. How much?”
She shook her head. “It’s on me. You can get the next round.”
She took a hearty gulp of her drink, then started in on a chicken wing dipped in cool ranch sauce. I picked one off the pile and put it on my plate, but I was unable to actually eat it. It reminded me for some reason of the rodent in the glue trap I’d heard scraping around the other night at Vera’s place. The squeaking had eventually stopped, but I’d been afraid to pull back the stove to throw away the remains.
Greta finished off a wing, smacked her lips, and tossed the bone onto her plate, and I only half listened as she began to chatter on about an affront to her that day at work. “So I go into his office and David Shapiro doesn’t even look up at me, he just grunts out his request to me without even looking up from his lousy computer….”
Behind Greta, I could see the Club Med couple engaged in a hot make-out session. I watched their tongues intertwine, wetly rotate around each other. Watched the man’s hand creep up the woman’s rib cage, rest just beneath her ample, Victoria’s Secret–clad breast. I remembered a time not so long ago when Andrew and I had kissed like that at a subway station, late at night, after a movie. Him leaning against the grimy wall, his hands tucked into my back pockets, cupping my ass. That night, I’d closed my eyes and drifted away from the dank station and into our intimacy—until I heard a voice—female, young, brash—say, “Them motherfuckers need to take that shit home!” I’d pulled back from his embrace to see a group of teenage girls dressed in bomber jackets. They stood a few feet away from us. Varying shades of brown. They were eyeing us, laughing. “White ho!” one of them had shouted, then they all bolted down the platform, cackling at their own audacity. Andrew had watched them, too, smirking, unperturbed, and muttered, “Heifers,” before trying to pull me back to his embrace. But I had pulled away, crossed my arms.
He had smiled tenderly at me. “You’re not embarrassed now, are you?”
I’d just shaken my head and stepped away toward the edge of the platform, peered down the dark tunnel. “Come on, fucking train,” I’d said under my breath, feeling desperate all of a sudden to get back to the secrecy of his apartment.
“Listen!” Greta said, jarring me out of my thoughts.
She was grinning, pointing to the air. “The song. It’s one of my selections.”
It was the Rolling Stones. “Wild Horses.”
She closed her eyes and rocked her head and began to sing along.
After a few stanzas, she opened her eyes and smiled lazily. “This is the best line. Listen.”
I listened. Graceless lady, you know who I am.
“What’s so great about that line?”
She looked surprised. “Oh come on, what do you think?” Then she sang her version loudly, imitating Mick Jagger’s slur: Raceless lady, you know who I am.
“Are you sure that’s what he’s saying?”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s what he’s saying. You gotta listen more closely. This is our song, girl.”
I listened. He said it again. Graceless. It was definitely graceless. I said, “You’re wrong. Listen again.”
He said the lyric one last time. Graceless.
She shook her head, and her eyes flashed, and for a minute I thought she was angry. “You’re just not listening,” she said, and closed her eyes and began to sing along loudly to the rest of the song.
I was glad when the music shifted to somebody else’s selections—it was country, twangy. Greta rolled her eyes and grumbled, “Ugh, I hate this shit, don’t you?”
I nodded quickly. “Yeah, I’m not a big country-western fan.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “I didn’t think so.” She lifted her glass to me. “To sisterhood.”
“To sisterhood,” I repeated. We clinked glasses. Afterward, there was an awkward silence, and I tried to think of something funny to say but found myself speechless, as if we were strangers after all. We sat with our drinks and our cold hot wings, looking at everything but each other, and after a while I feigned a yawn and said I was beat and had better get home to bed.
10
T HE SMELL of the apartment did not fade. And I noticed other ones beneath it. Smells of skin and
hair and sweat in her sheets no matter how much I washed them, and the thick fetid odor of menstruation in the bathroom no matter how much I scrubbed the toilet. Smells of takeout meals in the kitchen. Underneath all these was a faint odor of chemicals, a smell that reminded me of my high school biology class when I dissected a frog. It was an experience I have never forgotten. When I sliced into the frog’s belly I found it was pregnant—a clump of tiny eggs had stared up at me. The smell of formaldehyde had stayed with me, and I detected it here in the apartment, ever so faintly.
I got a few more obscene phone calls. One was a message on the machine, like the first one, the same gravelly voice talking in detail about Vera’s genitalia.
Beyond Vera’s suitors, I got calls from creditors wanting Vera to pay them the money she owed.
They always called in the evening, when I was just settling down in front of the news. Family time. Dinnertime. They were voices so nasal I imagined that was all they were: a series of giant noses calling me.
“Hello, is this Vera Cross?”
This one had called before. He was a gay nose, and I imagined him seated on the other end of the line, in a cubicle, surrounded by rows and rows of other noses—WASP noses, African noses, Jewish noses, Chinese noses, Puerto Rican noses—all speaking in one blur of nasal harassment.
He had called yesterday before dawn and demanded I pay the institution to which I owed money. I could not make out the institution’s name. Something like Pippin and Grossberg. He had not believed me when I told him I was not Vera Cross.
“This is not Vera Cross,” I said to him again tonight. “She went away. Try again next year.”
But he didn’t seem to hear me.
“I’m sorry to inform you that there’s a lien on you.”
As he went on naming the large sum of money I owed and what legal action would be taken against me should I fail to pay it, I drew the face with my finger in the fog on the windowpane. The woman I’d never grown tired of drawing.