by Danzy Senna
I turned away quickly so he wouldn’t see the surprise on my face. I took a gulp of my wine. “No,” I said. “That’s not the word I’d use to describe myself.” I looked back at him. “I’m half. And anyway, that word just seems pretty archaic.”
His mouth curled into a slight smile. “Oh. You don’t like that kind of language. It’s impolite. You must be one of those ‘new people’ I keep reading about in the papers.”
“I guess so,” I said.
He began to laugh then. It was a tinkle at first. But it grew into a full belly laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
He sighed happily at the joke he refused to share. “Lemme ask you another question.”
I waved the reporter’s notebook at him. “Later. See, I’ve got a lot more questions for you—”
“But—well—I’m so curious. I’ve just got to know.”
“Okay. What?”
He leaned in, and once again spoke in a whisper. “Do you say ‘motherfucker’?” He said the word all stiff and nasal. “Or do you say ‘muthafucka’?” This time he said this word in a high, exaggerated slang.
I fixed my gaze on the ice cubes floating in the wineglass.
Ivers repeated the question. “Do you say ‘motherfucker,’ or do you say ‘muthafucka’? ‘Cause you could really go either way with somebody like you.”
I took a sip of my drink.
“I asked you a question,” he persisted. “Do you say ‘motherfucker’? Or ‘muthafucka’? Which one?”
I stood up and grabbed my coat and bag, threw a twenty on the counter.
“Hey,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “I say, ‘Fuck you,’ ” and stormed out of Roylstons.
It was night. Dirty cars like tin cans moved past slowly in traffic, a stream of exhaust and beeping. The sky was invisible, a clutter of billboards for liquor and cigarettes and cars and insurance. Lots of insurance. Empty-eyed models grinned ecstatically down at the pedestrians trudging home slowly as if their bunions were aching.
I headed around a corner, into an alley, where I paused to put on my coat. When I had it on I peeked back around in the direction I’d come from.
Sure enough, Ivers had followed me outside. He stood there, in the middle of the block in front of Roylstons, no coat on, looking plaintively to his left and right.
After a while, he turned and made his way back inside. Only then did I emerge from my hiding place and jog toward the subway station a few blocks away.
ON THE TRAIN headed downtown, I stood squeezed in between a decrepit old man and a pregnant young woman clutching a metal pole. Nobody had offered them a seat. Instead, the seats were filled with the young and able, who sat with their legs sticking out where somebody could trip over them.
As I stood there, I found myself thinking not about what had just occurred but about something from my past—somebody I’d dated in college. Claude. In general I tried not to think about him. My only recourse had been to ban him from my memory. But sometimes, like now, he drifted back into my thoughts whether I liked it or not.
We’d met during the fall of my junior year. He was a teaching assistant in my class “Images of Blacks in Film.” It was a popular course, and I’d taken it because it was known to be easy. There was only one book you had to read, called Toms, Coons, Mammies, Mulattos, and Bucks. The professor was a kindly old man who wanted to retire and until that day would only teach courses where he could sit in the dark and watch movies.
Claude was ten years older than me. Dreadlocks. Pale yellow skin. Angular features. A Ph.D. student in African American studies. He and a smattering of other teaching assistants did all the grading and met with us one-on-one throughout the semester.
One day he invited me to coffee to discuss topics for my final paper. I’d never talked to him alone before. We sat in a booth at the back of the Coffee House, “Sweet Home Alabama” blaring over the speakers. He told me that I had beautiful hands and feet, long, delicate “whispers of Africa,” as he put it.
Later that semester, lying beside me on the futon bed in his graduate student housing suite, he preferred to call them my “permanent reminders.” Just like the rest of my body. He said it was a “permanent reminder” of what I still held within me.
One night, when things were beginning to erode between me and Claude, he predicted my future. It was late. We were in a bar off campus. He had just put back three pints of Guinness draft on an empty stomach.
“Oh, I see it all,” he’d said. “You’ll end up on a farm someday in Vermont, with a husband named Ben and a kid named Chloe or Zoë or Max. And you’ll remember all this as just a phase you were going through. And when the day comes when your marriage starts to go a little stale, because they all do, you will tell your husband about your dark past. You’ll tell him about the black boys you loved or didn’t love and the protests you attended or didn’t attend, and when you’re done talking he will fuck you in the dark, and the sex will have never been better. And you will be thankful for this past. And thankful that it is over.”
Six months later we had sex for the last time in my dorm room. It was midafternoon. My mind wasn’t really on his touches, and my eyes kept drifting out the window to the palm trees. They looked to me like a row of lean brown boys with dreadlocks sprouting out from their heads. The sky over them was a dusky orange. Down Lomita Drive, I could see a cluster of students walking in and out of the Student Health Center.
When it was over, I lay with my back to him, feeling his cold sticky residue seep out onto my thighs and the camel-colored sheets, and listening as he told me it was over.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said, stroking my back with his fingers. “It’s just that, well, I don’t feel at home with you. At the end of the day, I don’t feel comforted when I see your face. And when you get to my age, that’s what you’re looking for. Comfort.”
For some reason I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. The television was on, though the sound was off. The show that played was an old episode of Three’s Company. Mr. Roper was at the door, holding a plunger and a bucket. Jack was trying to get rid of him. Inside the apartment, behind the front door, you could see that Jack was hiding a half-dressed blonde.
“It’s like, I know you’ve got it in you, somewhere, ‘cause I’ve seen your family photo. And,” Claude said with a chuckle, “I’ve seen this.” He patted my derriere. “But when I look at your face, I see something else. And it’s unsettling. You know? The dissonance.”
Mr. Roper was inside the apartment now, whistling as he sauntered past the half-dressed blonde, oblivious to her quivering form. As soon as Mr. Roper was in the bathroom, Jack hustled the bimbo out the door, but at the same moment, Mrs. Roper, in a muumuu, walked in the door. Hand on hip, she eyed the woman. I could read her lips. What is this we have here?
“Are you even listening to me?”
His dreadlocks were tickling my arm like a tentacle reaching out to me.
“Yeah, you’re leaving me. I’ve fallen short.”
I rolled over to look at him—but at the sight of his face I lost control. I buried my face in the pillow and began to laugh. It was the kind of laughter that always overtook me at funerals—overwhelming and completely bewildering to me and everyone around me. My face was hidden, and Claude assumed I was crying and patted my shoulder, clucking his teeth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. We can still be friends.”
He kissed my shoulder, and pulled me over to face him.
He saw that I was laughing. First he looked stricken, then angry. “What the fuck?”
I wiped my tears with the back of my hand. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”
He pulled his hand away from my shoulder as if I were contagious. He tried to laugh, too, to regain some control of the situation maybe. But the laughter died as soon as it had risen to his lips, and he muttered, “Guess it’s true what they say.”
That was the last thing he said to me. Guess it
’s true what they say.
I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t bother asking. I just watched, holding my stomach, still laughing, as he got up and walked naked across my room, past the sliding glass doors, his bare bottom and dangling penis exposed to the whole campus. He dressed quickly, threw me a final angry look, picked up his shoulder bag and the book he’d be teaching a gaggle of undergraduates that afternoon—Mules and Men—and walked out my door forever.
Only after he was gone did it stop being funny. And I spent the rest of the afternoon lying in bed watching situation comedy after situation comedy in sober silence.
SOMEBODY WAS WATCHING ME. I was sure of it. I looked up into the faces on the subway car around me. A white girl. The only one here tonight. I stared back at her, irritated by the expression on her face, a slight, searching smile, as if she thought we were comrades among all these dark bodies. That happened to me a lot. The one white person on board smiled at me as if to say, Thank God you’re here. We can help each other in case there is a riot.
This girl was neither beautiful nor ugly, but she stood out on that subway car like a firefly in the country night. She had medium-length brown hair, a pointy face. Fullish lips for a white girl. Brown eyes. She was dressed kind of like me: a tan corduroy jacket that wasn’t warm enough for the weather, an Irish fisherman’s sweater underneath, and black slacks. And she was staring at me. I was sure of it. Staring at me and copying everything I did. When I blinked, she blinked. When I scratched my head, she scratched her head. Now she was even aping my own slumped posture and bereft expression. I felt an irrational rage well up inside of me—an urge to go over and slap her until she stopped looking at me. What? What? You see something funny? I restrained myself. I rode with her mimicking me the whole way. She didn’t get off the subway until my stop in Brooklyn. She started toward the door at the same moment that I did, glancing over at me nervously as if to make sure I was still there. I wanted to follow her—to ask what it was she saw that made her gape—but as soon as we were off the train, she vanished.
GRETA CALLED ME THAT NIGHT as I was drifting off to sleep.
“Uh-oh,” she said when she heard my voice. “Did I wake you up?”
She was at a pay phone. I could hear cars whooshing past behind her.
“No,” I lied, propping myself up on an elbow. “I was still awake. What’s up?”
She took a sharp inhalation from a cigarette, then said, “Just wanted to know how the interview went. You know. With Elton.”
The clock across the room read twelve-thirty. I rubbed my eyes. “Terrible,” I said. “As bad as an interview could possibly go.” Then I told her what had happened, what he’d said to me. Motherfucker or muthafucka. “Over and over again. He just wouldn’t stop. So I told him to fuck off and walked out.”
I waited for her laugh, because it sounded almost funny, but she was angry. “Typical prick,” she said. “God! You did the right thing. Assholes like that, they’re out for only one thing: to humiliate us. Mark my words. He should be taken out and shot—”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I mean, I’m fine. Anyway, I’ve got to worry about what to tell Rula tomorrow. The article’s a wash. She’s gonna have my scalp.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Greta said. “I’ll figure something out. Just give me a night to sleep on it.”
“What do you mean?”
I heard a wild screeching and a crash in the background, somewhere behind Greta, then a man shouting, “What are you, blind?”
“Jesus, what an asshole,” Greta said, momentarily distracted. “Anyway, now go back to sleep. Don’t worry about a thing. I’m gonna go put on my thinking cap, and in the morning, we’ll sort this whole thing out. Night-night.”
AFTERWARD, I couldn’t get comfortable. First I was too cold, then too hot. Shivering, I pulled the comforter over me, then, a few minutes later, sweaty and breathless, I pushed it off onto the floor. I felt a bug crawling up my leg. But when I searched for it, I found nothing. The sheets smelled like somebody else’s skin. And when I shut my eyes, I heard noises everywhere: a faucet dripping, a distant car alarm, the ticking of my own watch. It was almost morning when I finally fell into a tangled, uneasy sleep.
15
T ELL RULA he tried to rape you,” Greta said. “Tell her he pinned you to a table and you had to fight like hell to escape unviolated. That should appeal to her feminist sensibilities.”
We were sitting across from each other in a dingy Chinese food restaurant near the office.
I laughed, lightly, nervously, but she didn’t crack a smile.
“Come on, that’s insane. I’m not going to say that.”
“Why not? It’d get you off the hook. She wouldn’t dare send you back into his clutches.”
“I think I’ll just tell her the truth.”
Greta scoffed. “Right. Like that cracker bitch is gonna understand anything.” She sighed heavily and pushed her tray away. “But suit yourself.”
She was in a bad mood. I had not yet seen her in such a mood.
I watched her face as she stared at the people moving along 53rd Street. She looked like she was coming down with something. Dark circles under her eyes. Cracked lips. Today she was wearing the wrong color—a sweater in mustard yellow. It made her look sick.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you feeling okay? You seem—”
She looked back at me. “I hate to be the one to break the news to you, kid, but life sucks. You’ll learn. Someday. You think it’s all hunky-dory.” She made her voice high to imitate me. “That you can get out of a muddle by telling the truth.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
“I do appreciate your advice.”
Singsong repetition. “‘I do appreciate your advice.’” She pressed her fingers to her temple and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. Don’t mind me. It just gets hard sometimes. You try to keep going, but for what?”
“You’ve got a lot going for you,” I said, but the words sounded weak.
“Yeah,” Greta said, with a slight twist of a smile. “A dead-end job. A crappy roach-infested apartment, a whole freezer full of Lean Cuisines. Mmmmm good.”
“That makes two of us,” I said, trying to lighten the conversation. “I’m so sick of Ho Ho’s takeout I could puke.”
“Two of us? Honey, you’re the Riggs Fellow. And you’re, like, thirteen years old. We are not in the same boat. Trust me.”
I coughed, then said, “You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman.” Like a sentence you’d learn in a Berlitz course. When she didn’t reply, just scowled, I said, “Maybe you should try to meet somebody. As in, start dating.”
She made a sound in her throat—it wasn’t quite a laugh—and turned to look at me. “Date?” she said, as if the word were Mandarin. “Who would I date?”
Her lips curled into a small, sardonic smile. “Middle-aged cow with bunions on her toes and a bad case of secretarial spread. In search of—” She picked up her napkin and draped it over her food like a sheet across a corpse. “You fill in the rest, kid, ‘cause I’ve tried every variation in the book and let me tell you, girls like us, we don’t mix well. The black guys just want to put us down, drag us through the dirt, work out their fucking insecurity complexes on us. And the white ones. Well, sister, I don’t have to tell you about the white ones, do I?”
I noticed as she spoke that her eyes fixed just slightly—almost imperceptibly—to the left of my face. It gave me the odd sensation that there was somebody hovering behind me. I wondered if it was an optical defect, something I’d never noticed before. I moved my face slightly to enter her line of vision, but she moved her eyes, too, as if following this shadow person, not me.
“Well,” I said. “What about a mixed guy? Have you ever tried that?”
“A mixed guy? That would be a bit redundant, don’t you think?”
I didn’t answer. She was looking away, toward the waiter, the corners of her mouth turned down like a comic-book frown. I w
atched her profile, wondering if bitterness could be contagious.
We left the restaurant in silence. It was snowing—big flakes drifting like pale ashes from a distant fire.
As we made our way back to the office, Greta’s mood seemed to lift slightly. She chattered about a facialist named Helga she wanted to take me to. Helga was an expert at skin like ours, she said, the sole reason Greta looked so much younger than she was. Helga would do beautiful things to my eyebrows.
About a block from the office, I stopped in my tracks. For a moment, I thought I was mistaken—an optical illusion created by a trick of light. I squinted through the snow. It was no mistake. It was him. Ivers Greene. Standing in front of our office building, playing with a yo-yo.
Greta turned around to see why I’d stopped.
“That’s him, the artist. The one I was telling you about.”
“That skinny black guy?”
The sight of him standing there made me laugh into my mitten. “Oh my God. How funny is that?”
Greta put a hand on her hip. “I don’t think it’s funny at all. I think it’s creepy. You aren’t actually going to speak to him after yesterday, are you?”
“I’ll see what he wants.”
We started to walk. Greta spoke with her face tilted down, eyes peeking up at Ivers in the distance. “I’ll tell you what he wants. He wants to get in your underpants.”
He stood slouched against the building, one foot resting against the wall behind him. The yo-yo was one of those glow-in-the-dark ones from a dime store. He was giving it his full concentration, brow furrowed, biting his bottom lip, but he was doing a lousy job. Every time it went down, it stayed down, and he had to wind it up again manually.
Greta was still talking. “Listen, I think you should think twice about going back there. A guy like that only wants—”
I turned to her. “Hey, don’t worry about me, okay? I’m just gonna have a few words with him, maybe finish this interview after all.” I tried to joke. “Maybe he’s ready for his close-up.”
But she didn’t laugh. Her face was drawn with fear, and I felt sorry for her. I shouldn’t have confided in her. She was making way too big a deal out of this—out of everything—but I didn’t know how to explain that to her.