Symptomatic

by Danzy Senna

  I didn’t comment. I knew they would do no such thing. It was just talk. And besides, the apartment did belong to Vera. I had no claim to it. The fact of the matter was I had nowhere to live. Vera would probably let me stay for tonight, but that would be it. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to stay longer. The apartment wasn’t big enough for a roommate.

  Flo’s apartment was on the fifth floor, just below Vera’s. When we reached her landing, she set down the bags and started looking through her purse. “Now, just hold up a minute. I’m going to need your help bringing these in. My sciatica—” I could hear cats mewling from behind her door.

  After an inordinate amount of time, Flo finally managed to open the door.

  Two cats meandered out of the apartment and whined at the sight of Flo. She baby-talked to them—Pickles and Luigi were their names—while she picked up her few light grocery bags and started inside the apartment. I followed her with the heavy ones.

  The decor was a mismatch of warring styles, but the prevailing two themes were Afrocentric and 1970s arts and crafts. African warrior masks warred with flowery bric-a-brac. A row of porcelain dolls in hoop skirts were lined up on the mantelpiece, beside a Yoruban fertility symbol. On the wall, beside a bright red, gold, and green Kwanzaa poster, hung a huge patchwork quilt. The words “Friendship Lasts Forever” were embroidered on one of the squares.

  Along the wall there were traces of Flo’s earlier life—photographs of a much younger Flo with rather sweet features and her hair in a short natural, seated in a group of long-haired white women. In one, the women sat before a WOMEN’S HEALTH COLLECTIVE banner.

  The cats multiplied before my eyes. I counted fifteen in the living room alone. They were draped over the sofa and the kitchen table and the television set. The place smelled strongly of cat shit.

  As we moved deeper inside, I saw the layout was the same as Vera’s. But while Vera had furnished her place minimally, Flo’s was stuffed with extra furniture—two of everything, it seemed—along with boxes and garbage bags of junk that lined the hallway so that I had to edge through as if in a tunnel. There were two huge sofas, one black leather and modern, the other pale and overstuffed, upholstered with pastel flowers. They faced one another, and between them sat two coffee tables, one glass, the other solid oak. By the window, two kitchen tables were pressed together, surrounded by a bevy of unmatched chairs.

  Flo was busy feeding the cats on the kitchen counter. They prowled around the groceries, sticking their noses in the bags. Flo fed them anchovies by hand, one by one, from an open tin. Oil dripped from her fingers.

  “Why do you have two of everything?” I wondered aloud, my eyes taking inventory of the room. I was loitering, I knew. Avoiding my situation. “Two couches, two tables, two television sets, two stereos …” My voice trailed off.

  Flo glanced up from her task. “Oh, I had a roommate once. Maxine Feldman. She got all spiritual on my ass and moved to Tibet and left all her stuff behind. I decided to just keep it.”

  I jumped as something touched my ankle. More cats had prowled out of the bedroom and they rubbed up against my pant leg.

  Flo purred to the cats on the counter before her. “Marvin, Sula, Assata, Amiri, did you eat your Tender Vittles? Come here, you big fat fish-eyed fools.”

  I set the grocery bags on the kitchen table. “Well, take care,” I said grimly. Because tomorrow I will be gone, was what I thought.

  One cat climbed up Flo’s dreadlocks, as if they were the branches of a tree, while another stood on the counter eating tuna fish right out of a can. “Won’t you stay for dinner, though? I was going to make greens and some black beans and rice, healthy stuff.”

  Disgusting as those cats were, I was almost tempted to eat with her. But upstairs, I heard dull footsteps. I would have to face it sooner or later. “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve got to go deal with Vera.”

  “I don’t envy you,” Flo said. “She’s a mess, that girl. They done tried to evict her three times, for skipping out on the rent, but every time she ends up finding the money at the last minute. And the noise. Jesus! The last months have been a vacation for the building. You were so quiet! Like a little mouse. That’s what Corky called you. ‘The little mouse.’”

  “Thanks.”

  She was chopping up anchovies now. I couldn’t tell if they were for her dinner or for the cats. The creatures prowled in circles around her legs, purring, their tails rigid with excitement as the fishy smell wafted through the air.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I complained to Mr. Hinton, the super, a few times last year, about Vera and her ruckus. But he wouldn’t listen. That old dirty dog is probably fuckin’ the bitch. Probably got some kind of arrangement. That’s how these skanky white girls stay in business, you know.”

  She continued muttering to herself even after I had said good-bye and started down the hall. The last words I caught as I went out the door: “And that trailer-trash music she be playin’ till all hours of the night? Lordy be, I’m gonna have to invest in some earplugs.”

  25

  I PAUSED IN THE HALLWAY, listening to her voice seep out to me from the living room. She was singing along to soul music, this girl whose home I had temporarily called my own. She had a smoker’s voice, husky, androgynous, a bit ragged, like I had imagined it would be. Beneath the Curtis Mayfield, I could hear a faint tearing sound, like newspaper being slowly shredded.

  My old coat—her old coat—was soaked through, and I saw I’d created a puddle of wetness on her hardwood floor. I felt a wave of shame at the sight—as if I were a lost puppy who had wandered in off the streets to urinate indoors. The song came to an end and there was nothing except the tearing sound.

  I knocked my fist against the wall beside me, just to get her attention. But there was no reply. I called out, “Hello! Is somebody there?” But still no reply—just the intermittent sound of tearing. I crossed my arms, shrugged to nobody, and started down the hall to meet her.

  SHE WAS WEARING one of my old oxford shirts from the closet and a pair of running shorts that she must have found in my suitcase.

  She sat beneath the Mahogany poster, her legs stretched out before her.

  The wax strips she had already pulled off lay faceup all around her. They looked like grass beds, holding the prickly black hairs she had just torn from her body.

  A pile of fresh muslin strips were stacked neatly beside her. Her job was only half done. One leg sat finished, a newborn babe, glowing and hairless. The other leg, which she had just started now, was still coated in straight black hair.

  For a while I couldn’t say anything. I just watched while she spread the wax on her leg with a spatula in the direction of the hair growth, then pressed the muslin strip against it and tore in the opposite direction, just like the ladies in the salons. She did it with expert swiftness, as if she had been trained in this art.

  After a moment, she did glance up at me, without much interest, but then concentrated on the task in front of her.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought—”

  “Figure it out. You’re the genius here.” She continued waxing. She had finished only a few strips on the second leg, and the contrast between what had been waxed and what remained in its natural state was dramatic. It looked like a lawn half mowed, each side revealing what the other was not.

  I tried to sound calm, but I heard the tremor under my voice. “So you had a key?”

  “Of course I had a key,” she said. “This is my place.”

  “What about Vera?”

  “What about Vera?” She chuckled for a minute, enjoying, I guess, my surprise. “I was gonna wait a few weeks to come home—but I couldn’t take another minute of that old gimp. Always on my back.”

  There was a fetid smell in the air, like a dying apple. I felt saliva gathering in my mouth. All around me was her mess. My eyes roamed the space. Chinese food containers sat cluttered on the kitchen table. She’d pulled some of my clothes out of the bedroom, a
nd they lay in a tangled heap in the middle of the living room floor.

  “Wait, I’m lost,” I said, with a short strangled laugh. “How can that be?”

  “How can what be?”

  “How can you be—”

  “Vera? Don’t be stupid. There are a million motherfuckers out there with more than one name. Herman Schmidt a.k.a. Niggah with Attitude a.k.a. Jiminy Wendell Harris.” She sighed. “It’s easy. You just gotta have the cojones.”

  “But—” Only one word came to mind. “Why?”

  She sighed. “Because I was just sick of being Vera, okay? Tired of credit card assholes calling my ass day and night. Tired of Mr. Hinton threatening to evict me if I didn’t put out. You’re young. You don’t know this yet. But a name can get pretty fuckin’ worn out in this town. It starts to lose its snap and sheen. People start thinking you owe them something just ‘cause your name is Vera Cross.” She ripped off a new sheet of wax and winced in pain. “Anyway, I needed money. A job. A good job. The temp agencies all had me on some list of people not to hire. So I got a new name and a new résumé. Faked some references. Faked some IDs, and voilà, I was Greta Hicks. It was no big deal. I’d done it before. But this time was different because—” She looked up at me quite suddenly. It was a look so hard and direct I coughed, just to feel something.

  “Because I met you. Two of us! Two of us in that one stinking plantation. What are the odds? It changed everything. I wanted you to have what I had and to know what I knew. I would have given you everything. The coat off my back. I would have shown you the way. It wasn’t a coincidence we met. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  When I didn’t answer, she looked back down at her leg and scratched at a piece of wax that had not come off properly. “Anyway, I hope you appreciated the place. I’ve been staying with my mother the past few months. That old bitch was on my case every minute.” Greta chuckled. “She even called the Elder Abuse Hotline one night. I didn’t even know they had such a thing. Elder abuse. Jeez Louise, after all the dog walking I did for her, too. The nerve.”

  I was aware of being hot. Sweat drenched my underarms. It mixed with the cold wetness from the storm outdoors, making me slightly dizzy.

  She eyed me from my head to my shoes. “So where were you anyway? Fucking King Kong?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m just here to collect my things. Then I’m leaving. This place. You can have it back. Tonight.”

  Of course, it seemed like a crazy thing to say when I looked up at the window, at the snow swirling around out there. It was the same impulse I’d had once in college, when I’d found an impossibly huge insect—a water bug—in my dorm room bed. I’d wanted to evacuate the premises rather than do the sensible thing, which was to kill the creature.

  She didn’t respond. She just continued waxing, spreading a fresh layer of the yellow goo along her thigh.

  “Well, I’m going to pack,” I said, and started down the hall. The sound of wax and hair being ripped away from skin followed me.

  I stopped at the door to the bedroom. It was a disaster. In a short time, she had been able to destroy it. My clothes and her own clothes were strewn together on the floor. The bed had been stripped, and the duvet and pillows were on the floor, in a corner, as if she’d chosen to sleep there, under the window. The Map of the Stars’ Homes lay in the middle of the floor, ripped, beside an overturned cup of coffee. The brown liquid had dried on the rug. The lamp beside the bed had a tear in its paper like an open wound, and she’d ripped some of the pages out of The Dance of Anger, the overdue library book, and pasted them up on the wall over the bed.

  And when I glanced up at the tackboard, I saw that all of her pictures and postcards had been removed. In their place, she had hung up the photo of my family. She must have scavenged through my box of personal belongings. My eyes stung when I saw what she’d done to it. She had put white pushpins in all of our eyes so that we looked like a family of zombies. There was something written on it, too, in black Magic Marker, and when I crossed the room, stepping over the mess, I saw it said “Who killed the Congo?”

  I heard her voice behind me—high and breathless—an imitation of a Southern belle. “Why ah would have tidied up if I knew you were comin’ ovah, Mr. Butlah.”

  I turned around to see her standing at the doorway, hands on hips. She wore a dirty old bathrobe, but it hung open, so I could see both her legs. They were clean now, hairless from top to bottom, and shining with some kind of oil, so they looked like prosthetic limbs.

  “What have you done?” I asked, noticing new vandalism on the opposite wall. Over the dresser, she’d written in giant Magic Marker letters “XANADU.”

  I sank down on the radiator behind me. It was hot. But I stayed there, letting it burn through my pants legs. I touched my forehead. “Why would you do this? I mean, if it was somebody to pay the rent, that’s one thing. But this?” I swallowed. “You’re sick.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t say that. I’m not sick. I’m not. Don’t you know? Without you I’m nothing—” Her voice caught, and she covered her face with her hands and began to cry. She stood there at the doorway, weeping behind her hands. I watched her shoulders shake silently, listened to the gasping noises she made behind her hands, and I felt a small awakening of pity.

  “This is nuts,” I said, rising from the radiator and taking a step forward. “You’ve got to get help. There are people who can help you. That’s their job. But you’ve got to ask for it.”

  She pulled her hands away and I saw that she was not crying at all. She was laughing. Her cheeks were wet, but from tears of hilarity, not sorrow. She wiped at her face with the back of her hand and shook her head silently, drooling a little now as she quaked.

  I backed up. My fingers twitched so that I had to move them. I scratched my thighs. “What are you laughing at?”

  “You. You look funny. Like a monkey in a cage.” She chuckled harder. “Spooked.”

  I reached behind me for the phone, and grasped it without looking.

  “Put down the phone.”

  “I just need to call somebody.” I began punching in random digits. I could not remember anyone’s number. “My parents. They’re expecting—”

  “Put down the fucking phone!”

  It fell to the floor with a clatter. She was moving toward me. I saw her face as ragged, much older, suddenly, than forty-three.

  “Don’t do this. Please, Greta.”

  “That’s not my name. At least get it right.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “‘I want to go home. I want my mommy.’ That honkified whore doesn’t give a rat’s ass where you are. And neither does that fat edumacated Negro daddy of yours, playing in the sandbox with a bunch of towel heads. You think he cares if you live or die? Wipe your fuckin’ eyes. I’m just telling you the truth. And so what. My mama didn’t give a shit about me either. My father was the only one who ever loved me and he ate bullets for breakfast. So don’t even think about trying to leave. Hear me? God, stop crying and answer me. Do you hear me?”

  26

  I SCREAMED as she lunged toward me—not a word, just a wail, warbled and plaintive. Her fist struck me across the face. My neck snapped back. Before I could recover, she had struck me again, this time in the stomach. I bent over, clutching my abdomen. I heard my own small voice say, “Please, please, no.” Then a sob—was it hers or mine?—broken by a fit of coughing. I heard these sounds distantly, as if there were two of me now, one made of skin and bones, bruisable and breakable, the other just a vapor, floating above, watching the scene but unable to help. I watched as Greta dragged me by the wrist and hair into the living room. Watched as she twisted my arms behind my back and tied them with a belt she’d brought with her. Watched as she shoved me down on the sofa and stuffed a red cardigan that lay there into my mouth. Only the sleeve fit. The rest of it hung out down my front. It tasted of wool and perfume. The cloth tickled the back of my throat and my throat convulsed, but I co
uldn’t spit it out.

  “It’s just you never listen,” she said, breathing hard from the exertion. “Now maybe you’ll listen.”

  She fiddled with some buttons at the stereo. The room filled with blaring rock, Steely Dan. “Hey Nineteen.”

  “I love this song,” she said, nodding and snapping her fingers to the music. She glanced over at me. “Don’t you? Don’t you love this song?” She shrugged when I didn’t answer. “Whatever. You were probably in diapers when this shit came out. I bet you and your man like to listen to that rap shit together.”

  Ivers. She was talking about Ivers Greene. It seemed centuries before that I’d waved to him from the airport security checkpoint. The thought of him brought a sob to my throat, but the sweater made it useless. It had nowhere to go.

  In front of me she was affecting a dumb expression, bending her knees and bouncing up and down. “Uh, uh, nigga this, bitch that. Ho. Yo mama. Uh uh uh.” She shook her head. “I hate that shit. Calling itself music.”

  She wandered over to the window and peered out at something on the street, then after a moment turned around to face me. She leaned against the window and crossed her arms. Observed me from across the room. “I know you’re gonna blow this all out of proportion. You’ll somehow make it look like my fault. That would be just typical of you. To flip it on me.”

  She started to walk in my direction, and I braced myself, but then the door buzzer rang. I shut my eyes, and some mixture of hope and terror pulsed through me. Help had come. Ivers’s plane had been canceled because of the snow. He’d come to spend the night. But Greta just sighed as if she was expecting a visitor.

  “About fucking time,” she said, as she started out of the room. “And he best not be empty-handed.”

  JIMINY’S VOICE WAS still familiar to me, though we’d met only that one time.

  “Wassup, V?” I heard him say, high and jive, down the hall. “Amadeus, this be my cuz, Vera.”