by Danzy Senna
He was chewing gum, swiftly and loudly. “Have you received our letters?”
“I’m sure I did. But I didn’t open them. I put them in the closet, with the rest of Vera’s mail. See, it’s illegal to open mail that is not your own. And I’m not Vera. I don’t know where she is or who she is.”
He made a sound that made me understand the word snicker. “Okay, whatever you say. Have a great day, Vera.”
I hung up the phone. The funny thing was, I didn’t mind the calls. Or the mail, for that matter. They were reminders to me that my own life was not so bad after all. Or at least that it could get a whole lot worse.
AT HOULIHAN’S a few nights later I discussed Vera’s money problems with Greta.
“See,” I said, “I’m worried that she’s gonna keep my deposit. Anybody this irresponsible with her finances—”
“Oh, I doubt that. And if Jiminy tries to stiff you, I will personally give you back every dime you lose. I would feel so responsible.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You did me a favor, Greta. That doesn’t mean you’re responsible for what happens to me after that. God, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up when you did. I’m the one who owes you.”
She looked pleased. “Well I’m just happy we’re friends now. That’s payment enough for me.”
I smiled at her, but a fleeting, jagged thought—crazy and no doubt unfair—crossed my mind: That I was, indeed, spending all this time around Greta out of gratitude. That this was all a kind of prolonged thank-you dinner.
ONE EVENING as I came inside the foyer on my way home from work, I met a woman who lived in my building. She was tall, brown-skinned, and looked to be in her forties. She wore a colorful African dress and head wrap, and tennis shoes on her feet. In her arms, under plastic wrap, was a Bundt cake. She watched silently as I opened Vera’s mailbox and pulled out a handful of bills.
“Howdy, you new in the building? I don’t remember seeing you before—”
I paused. Jiminy had not told me whether I could be open about the living arrangement. I tried to keep it vague. “Um, I’m just house-sitting for a friend.”
“Oh yeah? Which friend?”
She wore glasses—huge, plastic pink frames with thick bifocal lenses that made her eyes look like fish floating in a tank. They were focused on the letters I held in my hand, addressed to Vera Cross.
A sneer, barely perceptible, flickered across her face. “Oh, are you a friend of Vera’s?”
I hesitated, then shook my head. Decided to just tell the truth. “A friend of a friend of a friend. That sort of thing. She’s traveling and, well, I’m taking care of her place. I’ve never even met her.”
She put a hand on her hip. “Good,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as if to make sure we were alone. “Keep it that way, honey. That bitch was nothing but trouble for the building. I was just saying to Corky the other day—you know Corky? Anyway, I was just saying to her, ‘Ain’t seen Vera around lately. Maybe somebody finally took out the trash.’”
She laughed after she said it, a mean, throaty chuckle—the kind women have been making about other women since the dawn of ages. I felt oddly protective of Vera.
She held out her hand. “I’m Flo,” she said. Her hands were slippery and soft, and smelled of cocoa butter. “Now, if you ever need anything, just come knockin’! Apartment 3C. I’m sort of the unofficial super around here.”
There was beeping on the street outside, and I looked to see a battered Toyota double-parked in front of the building. I couldn’t see the driver’s face, just a hand waving. “There’s my ride.” And she headed with her Bundt cake into the night.
I SNOOPED THAT NIGHT, feeling a little foolish as I moved around Vera’s apartment like a sleuth, turning over objects, opening drawers. I just skimmed the surface, nothing truly invasive, trying to guess what she looked like based on what she’d left behind. I found a red cardigan folded in a drawer. It smelled strongly of the perfume that lingered in the rest of the apartment. I found a big yellow button that said in red letters “Ask me how I lost fifty pounds,” in a box in the closet, on top of a stack of flyers advertising a diet pill. A New Year’s resolution list from a year before scrawled on a Hello Kitty notepad. “Get to the gym at least three X a week. Quit my fucking job. Take cooking classes. Meditate. Go back to school. Stop calling R.D.” She had left no photos behind except for a bleary Polaroid of an older black man lying in her bed, stark naked, arms behind his head, penis flaccid, grinning up at the camera.
As I sat down to television with my dinner of spaghetti with Ragú sauce, toasted wheat bread on the side, I envisioned Vera as a female version of Jiminy. A pudgy blond girl—a sort of burned-out Teena Marie. Somebody who had long ago left her race—finding momentary liberation in the arms of black men. Yes. I could see it. Something about the way Flo had said, Maybe somebody finally took out the trash.
After dinner, I pulled out of my wallet a slip of paper with Greta’s phone number on it. Just a few days before, she’d given it to me and told me to call her at home sometime. I hadn’t done it yet.
I didn’t want to bother her. Simply because I didn’t know anybody in the city didn’t mean she didn’t either.
But she had said it as if she meant it, so I did now, tentatively.
She picked up on the first ring, but sounded out of breath. In a high voice, she asked if she could call back in a few.
I hung up and wondered if I’d caught her in the middle of sex. Of course I had. But with whom? I still hadn’t been able to figure her out—what kind of man she liked, even if she liked men at all. We saw each other every day, but that was the thing about work colleagues. You knew them only in the sexless fluorescent light of the office.
I didn’t expect her to really call back in a few, but she did.
“Hey, babe,” she said, smacking on gum. “What’s shakin’?”
“It wasn’t important. If this is a bad time—”
“No, no. I was just—well.” She giggled. “This guy—we were canoodling when you called.”
“Oh, well, please don’t let me interrupt.”
“You aren’t. He’s gone. Really. It was enough for one date.”
“Are you sure? Because we can talk tomorrow—”
“Silly, don’t worry. I wouldn’t have picked up if I didn’t want to talk. Now forget about my horn-dog neighbor. His breath smelled like a gerbil’s cage. Honest to God. What’s up with you?”
I laughed. “Well, it was just that I got to snooping and I wanted to tell you what I found.”
I told her about the various objects I’d uncovered.
Greta chuckled. “She sounds like a character. Tell me more.”
I began to move around the apartment with the cordless phone tucked in the crook of my neck, lifting objects and books and describing them to Greta. Together, we fantasized about Vera. I stuck to my theory that she looked like Teena Marie. But Greta got stuck on the idea that she looked like Vanity, the sloe-eyed lead singer from the eighties pop band Vanity Six. We were both cracking up by the time we said good night.
THE NEXT MORNING, I felt it in my throat. A raw pain when I tried to swallow. My joints felt like an old woman’s, arthritic. Outside, the sky was bone white. A cold draft seeped in through the window by the bed.
I showered, dressed in layers, then trudged down the hall to the closet and opened the door. Just above the Macy’s bag overflowing with Vera’s bills hung my jacket. Thin, corduroy. Beside it hung a coat—something Vera had left behind. It was a big down thing, swollen and bulky. Once it had been black, but from wear or washing it had turned the color of pencil smudge. It was ugly, but it looked warm. Warmer than my corduroy jacket. I pulled it out. Tried it on. It fit. I wore it to work. No harm done, though it made me look like an armadillo.
When I got there, Greta was standing in the lobby, perusing the magazine rack. We took the elevator up together. She said I looked ashen, as if I were coming down with someth
ing. “But,” she added, eyeing me up and down, “I’m glad to see you wearing a sensible winter coat. In a Winter color, I might add.”
I almost told her it was Vera’s, but hesitated. She might think I was a thief. “I picked it up secondhand. Pretty ugly, huh?”
“No, not at all,” she said. “It makes you look tough, like a real New Yorker.”
We were at her floor now. The doors slid open. “Now, I want you to go on up to your desk and have a seat and get settled and I’ll be up in a few with some cold remedies.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Shush. It’s no problem. I’m the nurse on duty here. I’ve got a whole pharmacy in my desk drawer.” She winked at me. “Now just do what I say, okay?”
I did, and indeed, five minutes later, she entered my office carrying a handful of vitamins and a steaming cup of orange-hibiscus tea.
11
V ERA’S ORCHID DIED. I woke up one morning, and it was gone—a shriveled brown nub at the top of the green stalk. And outside it was winter. When had that happened? Christmas lights were strung up like a whore’s undergarments along Flatbush Avenue. There was no snow yet, but the muted sunlight was metallic, dreary. I could not remember the last clear day.
Over the weeks that followed, my body continued to send me signals that I was coming down with something, a full-fledged winter flu. Achy bones. A mildly sore throat. Vague symptoms of a problem, but not enough to see a doctor. I continued to wear Vera’s coat everywhere, though I was rarely outdoors for more than a few minutes. I lived either belowground or high above. I spent my time scurrying between extremes: from the damp, cavelike darkness of a train station to the artificial light of my office twelve stories above ground. The earth itself was temporary—something to rush over in hard-soled shoes on your way to the next level.
I didn’t spend much time at home either. I treated Vera’s apartment as a trucker’s rest stop: somewhere to shower, brush my teeth, change clothes. My sleep there felt like an eight-hour nap. There was nothing wrong with the place per se. Everything worked fine. There had been no trouble from Jiminy. But when I was there, I felt ill. My symptoms were mild and vague. They roamed my body, like tinkers searching for new temporary homes where they could not be caught. Nausea one day, a dull ache behind my eyes the next. A rash on my neck like something crawling just beneath my skin.
The creditors continued their phone-harassment campaign, undeterred, but Vera’s boyfriends stopped calling.
At the office, I worked hard, on articles of negligible importance. One week I wrote about the plight of big dogs living in cramped city apartments. It was apparently all the rage that year in New York to own a big dog in a tiny apartment—a Weimaraner if you were wealthy, a Rottweiler if you weren’t. Rula Maven loathed pets ever since she’d stepped in a pile of fresh Great Dane feces on Park Avenue, wearing three-inch stilettos. She wanted me to show how the trend was cruel to animals.
But the dog psychologist I interviewed—a big-boned WASP with invisible lips and silver hair—said that despite what humans might think, dogs, big and small, actually prefer confinement to open spaces. “It’s called the denning instinct,” the woman told me flatly, staring into her own dog’s kennel, where it lay sleeping so peacefully it looked dead to me. “They prefer rules and order over chaos,” the psychologist insisted.
“It’s a mistake to think the happiest dogs are country dogs, roaming the woods all day,” she said. “The happiest dogs live in cages for most of their lives and are allowed outside only at regular intervals, to pee and defecate and exercise in fenced-in spaces.”
I made a few halfhearted efforts to befriend my work peers. I went out for coffee with a wan brunette named Laurel who worked on the local desk. She told me within minutes of sitting down that she was having an affair with a married man. She spent our whole hour together shredding napkins with trembling fingers and spewing vitriol about his wife, whose fault it was that they couldn’t see each other more often. “The marriage was already shit when I met him,” she explained. “Their sex life was nonexistent. She was always depressed, suspicious. He’s just being nice, sticking with it for the kids.” I nodded and went home early.
Another night I went out for a drink after work with a reporter named Ross, who’d come from Mississippi and had started working at the magazine the same time as me. He amused me for a while with stories about his Baptist pediatrician father, but at some point switched to the subject of quotas. He said that if only he had been born in a different skin, he might be editor in chief of the magazine by now. And you, he said, if you were born black, who knows where you’d be? I was quiet while he ranted, and stared at my own face in the mirror behind the bar. My skin looked sallow, my eyes ringed by dark circles. Beside me, he was talking about how he wished he had come of age in the 1950s. Didn’t I wish that, too? Because that was the golden age for people like us. I didn’t answer, just kept staring at myself. This is what they see when they look at you. My eyes looked slightly stricken, and there was an ironic twist to my smile that seemed new to me—an expression I had acquired since graduation.
I didn’t go out with Ross again after that. I didn’t go out with Laurel, either. Both extended invitations, but I declined. I preferred Greta’s company, even though she was twice my age and not on the same track as I was at work. Our friendship was—I’d decided—more than a thank-you dinner. She was the only work colleague I could stand to be around on a social basis. She was always available when I wanted to tie one on, and she was always sympathetic—no, empathetic—to my every grumble and complaint. She agreed with everything I said, and we spent many hours comparing our experiences of being “optical illusions,” as she called us. When I wasn’t working, I was with her, at Houlihan’s, gnawing on chicken wings, putting back tumblers of scotch, and listening to her talk trash about our coworkers. She played “Wild Horses” every time. I’d stopped arguing with her about the lyrics. They were whatever she wanted them to be.
Sometimes it felt as if we’d known each other a lot longer than we had—as if she had in fact always been there, in my life, hovering beside me, a dotty spinster aunt. But other times it felt like no time at all—I knew so little about her life outside of work. Our friendship reminded me a little of a relationship I’d had with an older woman I’d worked with when I was in high school. Divina. She was a cashier at Ralph’s supermarket on Shattuck. I was a bagger that summer, trying to save enough money for a senior trip to Catalina Island. Divina and I spent our breaks together every afternoon, seated in the park across from the store, me drinking a smoothie while Divina chain-smoked and complained to me about her life. She was slightly overweight, coiffed and perfumed. Pedicured and exfoliated. All breasts and ass. Her shoes always matched her belt, and she smoked cigarettes from a long brown filter. We had nothing in common except the place we worked, but we came to know each other in that oddly intimate way of coworkers. The fact that she was so much older than me, but not quite my parents’ generation, made her feel like a safe respite from the brutal social politics of high school. Our time together felt slightly unreal, without consequence, and therefore peaceful. I relaxed in her presence. After high school graduation I quit my job and never saw her again.
I wondered if my friendship with Greta would last when the fellowship was over. How deep was it? I couldn’t say. Only that she was always there for me, steady and comforting, wondering about my health, my welfare, my colors. On those nights when we didn’t go to Houlihan’s, she would call before bed to make sure I’d gotten home okay. And if she didn’t, I would call her, just to speak to somebody. And she was always there to pick up on the first ring.
12
L OLA DID NOT write again. But one evening while I was working late at the office, I picked up the phone to hear a crackling international connection.
“Hey, baby.”
I closed my eyes, surprised at how relieved I was to hear the sound of my father’s soft Southern drawl.
He’d been to Mecca. Now he was staying in Cairo with friends—a couple named Zaid and Aisha. He was going to spend the next month or two sleeping in their guest room and working on an essay. He’d been having a wonderful experience on his sabbatical.
“And,” he said, “I’ve gotten to know Zaid’s son. A very handsome young man. Mustaffa. He’s seen your picture.” Behind him I heard a voice, thick and male and foreign. My father giggled like a schoolgirl. “He thinks you look Egyptian. He wants to know when you’re coming to visit.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s nice.”
“He’s about six-foot-one, broad shoulders, twenty-eight, a graduate student in engineering—”
“What is this? Some kind of marriage service? Don’t you want to know how I’m doing?”
He sounded hurt. “Of course, baby, I was just trying to—How are you doing?”
I told him about my job. I made it sound more interesting than it really was.
“Are you happy?” He said it soberly, like a therapist.
“Sure, I’m having a blast.” I looked out the window behind me at a gridlock of taxicabs on the street below.
“You sound funny. Are you sure you’re okay?”
After he said it, I did feel funny—as if somebody were watching me—and turned in my chair to see Greta standing in the doorway of my office.
I had no idea how long she’d been there.
I pointed at the receiver and mouthed the word, “My father.”
I expected her to go away, but instead she shuffled in and took a seat across from my desk. She picked up a newspaper and began rifling through it noisily.
My father’s voice: “Have you at least made new friends?”
I cleared my throat. “Actually, one of my friends just walked in. Greta. Greta Hicks. She works with me.”
Greta perked up at the mention of her name.
“Greta? What is she? A Swede?” To my father, everybody was a social science experiment. He wanted to know where each person he encountered fit into the historical paradigm.