by Danzy Senna
But instead of going up to the front door, I scooted beside the building. I moved along the thin strip between houses, just below the first-floor windows.
When I got to the third window in, I heard the muted sound of television just above my head. I heard voices—but the words were garbled. All I knew was that one of them belonged to Greta. I stood on my tiptoes, but the window was too high. So I scavenged in the alley and found a milk crate, just like the ones the men in front of the bodega were sitting on. They grew these things in Brooklyn.
An old white lady with Greta’s face sat in a wheelchair, barking in German at Greta, who lay on the sofa in her sweatpants, holding a bag of Cheetos and switching stations with the remote control. Her parka lay like a fallen beast on the floor nearby. She was ignoring the old woman, who, I assumed, was her mother.
The living room was drab fifties décor. A plaid wool couch decorated with tiny lace pillows.
Greta shoved Cheetos into her mouth as she changed the channels. Her expression, which was as sullen as an irate fifteen-year-old’s, settled into a satisfied smile when she saw something she liked. She dropped the remote control to the floor and nestled into her pillows. The old lady in the wheelchair was not finished, though, and kept speaking at her in fast, guttural German. Greta ignored her.
The dog wandered in just then, his leash still dragging behind him, and began to nibble at the neon orange crumbs Greta had dropped on the floor.
When Greta noticed what it was doing, she stuck a leg out and kicked the beast so that it screeched in pain and walked away. This enraged the old woman further, and she began to roll around in her wheelchair, still yapping at Greta, working herself up into a frenzy. I thought she’d pop an artery. Instead, she rolled herself in front of the television screen and sat there, blocking the show, still speaking and waving her arms.
Greta lay for a while, staring at her mother with unfettered hatred. When she broke her gaze, it was to lean down and pick up the remote control, point it at her mother’s face, and click a button.
The sound did go off—on her mother and on the television set behind her. The old woman stared, silently, unblinking, at Greta, her face rigid with fear or hatred, I couldn’t tell which.
Just then, a phone rang in another room. The old lady started to roll herself toward the door, but Greta was too fast. She jumped to her feet and shoved the old lady’s wheelchair out of her way, racing past her into the darkened hallway. She caught it on the first ring.
The dog, who had been lying in a corner since Greta had kicked him, dared to get up now, and he went to the old lady, wagging his tail. She leaned forward and let him lick her face, which I couldn’t see but imagined to be tear-stained.
Only then did I step down and creep away.
When I got home, I took a long hot shower and stood under its stream with my eyes closed.
STORIES DRIFTED MY WAY.
One afternoon, Rula had gone down to the fact-checking corral to ask Greta a question, and was leaving a Post-it note when she glimpsed a pair of sneakered feet sticking out from under the desk like those of the Wicked Witch of the West. Rula panicked, thinking Greta had fainted or collapsed or died, until she heard the snoring. She woke Greta up with a gentle kick of her stiletto heel and led her to her office and spoke to her behind her closed door. Fifteen minutes later Rula opened the door, looking pinched and flushed with embarrassment or maybe rage, and Greta lumbered out, a sheepish smile on her face.
I heard it from the reporters at my table. We were having lunch in the cafeteria, and they whispered about the incident in tones of jovial titillation.
“Her days are numbered.”
“Maisie Roosevelt said she spends her days getting her nails done, or sitting at her desk reading poetry books from the library.”
“Katie Mondello heard her throwing up in the bathroom. Right after lunch.”
“Laurel Davies said she saw her feeding the pigeons in Washington Square Park last weekend. She was dressed like a bag lady and she was listening to a transistor radio and eating a Middle Eastern wrap that was dribbling all over her shirt.”
I picked at my salad and stared across the room at her, where she sat alone, by the window, eating a piece of chicken with her hands. She wore a faint smile, and raised and lowered her eyebrows as if in polite conversation with an invisible friend.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY, Carlos the mailman left propped up on my desk a letter postmarked from Hawaii. On the back was my brother’s familiar, loopy script. It was peppered with words I could not understand. Phat barrels off of Kona … totally stoked … catching burly waves … the shit was rickt … kelp monster … Spyder caught da kine wave, brah! … nip factor high … macking … Quasimoto … I kicked that dude Vincent Cho’s ass. You shoulda seen his faucet nose gush.
23
I VERS AND I WENT OUT to shop for records in the Village one day. We went to a little hole-in-the-wall that on one side sold comic books and on the other vinyl. There we stood for hours, flipping through old album covers—Rick James, Teena Marie, Patty and Tuck, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam—artifacts of the eighties culture we had grown up on.
Afterward we walked down Lafayette toward the Lower East Side. He’d bought a Luther Vandross album. I’d bought the Dazz Band. It was four o’clock, and at the edge of the sky I could see it was getting dark. I kept my arm linked in Ivers’s and babbled about something I’d seen on television the night before—a new sports show that pitted beast against man. I had watched as they’d shown a giraffe racing a human being. The human being had won without much effort.
Ivers interrupted me at some point with a whisper. “Check it out! WASPs!” He said it as if he were a bird-watcher and had just spotted a flock of rare egrets.
It was a band of white people, our age, their arms linked, singing Jane’s Addiction together into the evening air. “She gets mad, she starts to cry. She takes a swing but she can’t hit.” These were not just white people. They were a particular breed of WASP that was maybe dying off. They were handsome and rich and timeless—they moved as if they owned the city. I squinted. They were familiar. Sophie and Tommy and Chloe and some kid I didn’t recognize. And yes, there at the end was Andrew. He looked somehow scrawnier than I’d remembered him. They moved forward laughing and singing, passing a small silver flask between them, the Rat Pack minus Sammy.
I stopped. Ivers looked back and forth between me and this pack, waiting for an explanation. They were upon us now, about to move past. I waited for each moment to play itself out: for Andrew to recognize me. For him to step forward and say a painful hello. And indeed, he did glance my way now, still singing into the frigid evening air. Jane says, She’s never been in love, no. She don’t know what it is. She only knows if someone wants her! His eyes glided across my face, over to Ivers’s, and I waited, breathless, to see how he would greet me. But there was no flicker of recognition. And then they were all past us, leaving a faint smell of gin behind.
IN LATE FEBRUARY she was turning in fact-checked articles, signed off, but she had not in fact done any checking—not a word.
She had fudged some important facts on her résumé, too. Rula and Ward were investigating further.
Her hair was falling out. In chunks. I glimpsed a faint balding at the back of her head when we passed one day in the hall.
She was spotted walking down the hall carrying a giant maxipad in her hand. She’d not bothered with discretion.
For breakfast, she ate Pop Rocks and Coke at her desk, the sizzling sound audible all over the Pit.
ONE DAY in early March I bought a new coat on my lunch hour. I was tired of wearing Vera’s old ugly one that made me look like an armadillo. The one I bought was expensive, wool, a bright blue that reminded me of the sky back home. I stuffed Vera’s old one into the shopping bag and wore the new one back to the office.
I sensed something was off before I even stepped inside the lobby. It was the way everybody was turned in one direction.
I
went inside. A commotion. The sounds came from the farthest end of the lobby. Two security guards were struggling to drag her out of an elevator.
“Don’t you touch me. Don’t fuckin’ touch me or I’ll make you sorry your black ass was ever born.”
Everybody—the shoeshine man, the newspaper kiosk owner, people on their way in and out of the lobby—had stopped what they were doing to stare. The guards finally managed to carry her out. They held her between them by her elbows.
“You see this shit? See how they treat me? Sic a couple of bona fide Negroes on me. Throw me out on the sidewalk without batting a motherfucking eyelash. This is what they call progress—”
She thrashed from side to side, bucked her whole body forward and back, but the guards held on tight. On her feet she wore her old filthy sneakers. Her skirt was ripped. Her hair was tangled and her pink lipstick smeared.
I hid beside a magazine rack, fixed my eyes on a tabloid cover. Liza Minnelli was a hermaphrodite. A piece of Michael Jackson’s nose had fallen off during a concert. I tried to focus. But it was no good. She glimpsed me when she moved past and said my name.
I peeked up, my cheeks burning.
“Listen. Please. You gotta help me.” Her voice was ragged, wheezing. “Just meet me outside, I need to talk—”
I couldn’t hear the rest when the door closed behind them. My heart was still slamming around inside of me. I stared at the magazines on the rack, but no longer saw the words.
THAT NIGHT Ivers and I had sex at my place. His skin smelled of something chemical, sharp but not unpleasant. He’d been working all day on a mural on a wall on the Lower East Side. There were flecks of silver spray paint on his hands and cheek, like something stripped of its artifice. His breath smelled of coffee. I tried to concentrate on the act itself, but my eyes kept opening to peer around the bedroom behind his head. The Map to the Stars’ Homes and the Estée Lauder gift certificate. The dead orchid. The postcard with the six puppy dogs peeking out of the pickup truck. I closed my eyes as he moved inside me, imagining Vera in this very bed, beneath one of her boyfriends. I wondered if she was loving anybody tonight in London. And was he loving her back?
When it was over, Ivers rolled off me and saw my face. “What is it? What’s the matter? What did I do?”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing. I’m just in a weird mood today, I don’t know why.”
“You look—I don’t know, odd. Pale. Come on. Spit it out. What happened?”
I was quiet for a while, staring at the postcard of the puppy dogs on the corkboard, trying to think of an answer.
“I want to move,” I finally said. “I think this apartment is making me sick. Is that possible?”
He was silent, and when I turned to face him, I saw he’d already fallen asleep.
24
H E HEADED OFF to Rotterdam in the second week of March. Two of his pieces had been selected for a show there. It was a big deal, and he knew it, and he was tense, distracted, at Kennedy Airport that Sunday. He looked handsome in his battered black jacket and red scarf. He held my hand, but his mind, I could see, was already six hours ahead, in The Hague.
We kissed good-bye, then waved at each other as he walked through the metal detectors. I watched his bobbing brown head till it was out of sight, then went and found the airport bar and sat there for a while, nursing a Bloody Mary and feeling generally sorry for myself to be left alone in the gloom of March. I imagined Ivers meeting a willowy blonde and never coming back.
I went to a movie at an art house in Park Slope. It told the story of an English family living in the countryside, who one rainy night hear a knock at the door. They open it to find a very pregnant blond waif standing in the cold. She is lost, her car has broken down, and she wants to know if she can spend the night. The couple, who have four children, agree to let her, but when they wake in the morning the woman is gone—having given birth in the night and having left behind her newly born baby. The couple decides to keep the baby and raise it as their own. But the adopted child is possessed, and over the next ten years she grows into a little blond angel who murders, one by one, her siblings. The film was terrifying the way only movies made in the seventies on a low budget in the English countryside can be. Everybody had bad teeth and there were odd stretches of silence when the trembling camera would zoom in on the lovely blond girl sitting in the meadow, smiling.
It was already dark when I stepped out of the theater, and in those few hours it had begun to snow. People rushed past, bundled up. The temperature had dropped. I looked for a gypsy cab, but there were none. I was wearing Vera’s coat again. The new one—the fancy one—had turned out to be more for style than function. It was too cold to wear anything but the armadillo. I zipped it up and started down the hill.
I felt mild dread as I walked, but put it down to the lingering effects of the movie—and the knowledge that I was once again alone in the world. I didn’t want to go back to the apartment. The space depressed me. Every month I sent a check to Jiminy. But I never heard anything from him, and the bills for his cousin were mountainous. With Ivers around I could avoid going there most nights. I hadn’t been back all weekend. I kept a toothbrush in his loft.
I passed a storefront church and paused to glance inside. It was just a fluorescent-lit room, bare bones, the ugliest church you ever saw, but the people were beautiful. Old ladies in all white. Matronly women in plumed hats. Little boys in three-piece suits. They were all crowded in there, on folding chairs, backs to me, before a makeshift pulpit. On it, an old man ranted and raved. He had a salt-white Afro, a craggy face, and wore a brown suit and horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a ghost from another era. I stood fogging up the glass, listening to his muted sermon float out, punctuated by Amens from the congregation. Now Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children, and so he done gone and made Joseph a coat of many colors. (Amen.) And when his brothers saw that coat, Lord, they was jealous and hated their brother. And one night, Joseph dreamed a dream, that he was the ruler of them all, and he told it to his brothers—and my people, don’t you know? They hated him all the more. They hated him for his dream and for his words and for the very fact of his being. (Tell it!)
My father had attended a church like this as a child, deep in the bayou of Louisiana. Now he was halfway across the globe, in Mecca, searching through the sands for another god who would take him home. He had never told me about the terrible power of these services or the contemporary stories they spun from ancient texts. Both he and my mother had wanted a clean break from the past when they moved to California. They both believed in ruptures and amnesia and had tried to instill in my brother and me a sense of freedom from all tradition.
The old man’s voice seemed to shake the glass. And one day Joseph’s own brothers threw Joseph into the pit, yes they did. (Lord no!) They threw him into a pit with no water and they took his multicolored coat and they dipped it in goat’s blood and brought this coat to their father and told him his youngest son was dead. (Make it clear!)
I wanted to hear the end of the story and dawdled outside the church for a few more minutes, but the weather was getting worse all around me. I took one last look, then continued on my way.
I FOUND FLO loitering by the mailboxes again. She was flipping through bills, and smiled up at me through her huge bifocal glasses. A huddle of plastic grocery bags brimming with food sat on the floor around her feet, along with a puddle of water from the melted snow.
She was blocking Vera’s mailbox. I waited, shivering and wet, hoping she’d get the hint and move. I hadn’t been home in days, and I knew it would be crammed with the usual demands for payment.
Flo stood where she was and started talking about people I didn’t know. “I was supposed to go to New Jersey tonight, to go see Harold and Neecie? But it’s just too wild out there.” She nodded toward the outside world, the icy bluster. “It’s supposed to go on all night. Maybe longer. But I’ve bought enough food for a week. And candles. Just to be on
the safe side. You never know.”
She squatted beside me and began to shove her mail into one of her grocery bags.
I stepped over her, but when I unlocked Vera’s box, I found it empty. I felt a small foolish relief, as if it were I who was out of debt.
Behind me, I heard Flo’s voice. “So I see your girl came home.”
“What?”
“Vera,” she said. “She’s back.”
Vera. Back. I was glad Flo couldn’t see my face.
She carried on behind me, a casual banter. “I saw her in the hall a few hours ago, putting out some trash. Guess it didn’t work out so well overseas.” She chuckled. “From the looks of things, none of that European sophistication rubbed off on her. She looks like the same old greasy ho bag to me.”
I shut my eyes. Swallowed. So Vera had come home the way I had always suspected she would—one night, without warning, the failure of her experiment in international living behind her. For some reason—pride, I guess—I didn’t want Flo to know that this was a shock to me. I didn’t want her to know I was homeless.
I gathered my wits and let out a small laugh as I turned to her. “Yeah, can you believe that? She came home early. I’ve gotta start looking for a new place to live.”
Flo stood up and massaged her lower back. “Say, hon? Can you give me a hand with these grocery bags? My sciatica’s acting up. ‘Preciate it.” She didn’t wait for my answer and handed me the two heavier bags.
It was just as well. I needed a few minutes before I went back to the apartment for the inevitably awkward encounter. An excruciating thought crossed my mind: Had Jiminy even told Vera she had a tenant living there?
As we went up the stairs together, Flo chattered, throwing glances at me over her shoulder. “I wish you didn’t have to move out. You just seem like the nicest girl. Wish we could all find a way to get rid of that Vera. Maybe I’ll start a petition or something. Yeah, maybe me and Corky and Mr. Douglass—’cause he been complaining about Vera for years. Maybe we’ll start us a petition and get her ass evicted.”