by Z. Z. Packer
“I see,” I said. The record she’d given me was playing in my mind, and I kept trying to shut it off. I could also hear my mother saying that this is what happens when you’ve been around white people: things get weird. So weird I could hear the stylus etching its way into the flat vinyl of the record. “Listen,” I said finally, when the bass and saxes started up. I heard Heidi breathe deeply, but she said nothing.
WE SPENT the winter and some of the spring in my room—never hers—missing tests, listening to music, looking out my window to comment on people who wouldn’t have given us a second thought. We read books related to none of our classes. I got riled up by The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Chomsky Reader; Heidi read aloud passages from The Anxiety of Influence. We guiltily read mysteries and Clan of the Cave Bear, then immediately threw them away. Once we looked up from our books at exactly the same moment, as though trapped at a dinner table with nothing to say. A pleasant trap of silence.
THEN ONE weekend I went back to Baltimore and stayed with my father. He asked me how school was going, but besides that, we didn’t talk much. He knew what I thought of him. I stopped by the Enoch Pratt Library, where my favorite librarian, Mrs. Ardelia, cornered me into giving a little talk to the after-school kids, telling them to stay in school. They just looked at me like I was crazy; they were only nine or ten, and it hadn’t even occurred to them to bail.
When I returned to Yale—to a sleepy, tree-scented spring—a group of students were holding what was called “Coming Out Day.” I watched it from my room.
The emcee was the sepia boy who’d given us the invitation months back. His speech was strident but still smooth and peppered with jokes. There was a speech about AIDS, with lots of statistics: nothing that seemed to make “coming out” worth it. Then the women spoke. One girl pronounced herself “out” as casually as if she’d announced the time. Another said nothing at all: she came to the microphone with a woman who began cutting off her waist-length, bleached-blond hair. The woman doing the cutting tossed the shorn hair in every direction as she cut. People were clapping and cheering and catching the locks of hair.
And then there was Heidi. She was proud that she liked girls, she said when she reached the microphone. She loved them, wanted to sleep with them. She was a dyke, she said repeatedly, stabbing her finger to her chest in case anyone was unsure to whom she was referring. She could not have seen me. I was across the street, three stories up. And yet, when everyone clapped for her, she seemed to be looking straight at me.
HEIDI KNOCKED. “Let me in.”
It was like the first time I met her. The tears, the raw pink of her face.
We hadn’t spoken in weeks. Outside, pink-and-white blossoms hung from the Old Campus trees. Students played Hacky Sack in T-shirts and shorts. Though I was the one who’d broken away after she went up to that podium, I still half expected her to poke her head out a window in Linsly-Chit, or tap on my back in Harkness, or even join me in the Commons dining hall, where I’d asked for my dish-room shift to be transferred. She did none of these.
“Well,” I said, “what is it?”
She looked at me. “My mother,” she said.
She continued to cry, but seemed to have grown so silent in my room I wondered if I could hear the numbers change on my digital clock.
“When my parents were getting divorced,” she said, “my mother bought a car. A used one. An El Dorado. It was filthy. It looked like a huge crushed can coming up the street. She kept trying to clean it out. I mean—”
I nodded and tried to think what to say in the pause she left behind. Finally I said, “We had one of those,” though I was sure ours was an Impala.
She looked at me, eyes steely from trying not to cry. “Anyway, she’d drive me around in it and although she didn’t like me to eat in it, I always did. One day I was eating cantaloupe slices, spitting the seeds on the floor. Maybe a month later, I saw this little sprout, growing right up from the car floor. I just started laughing and she kept saying what, what? I was laughing and then I saw she was so—”
She didn’t finish. So what? So sad? So awful? Heidi looked at me with what seemed to be a renewed vigor. “We could have gotten a better car, eh?”
“It’s all right. It’s not a big deal,” I said.
Of course, that was the wrong thing to say. And I really didn’t mean it to sound the way it had come out.
I TOLD Dr. Raeburn about Heidi’s mother having cancer and how I’d said it wasn’t a big deal, though I’d wanted to say the opposite. I told Dr. Raeburn how I meant to tell Heidi that my mother had died, that I knew how one eventually accustoms oneself to the physical world’s lack of sympathy: the buses that are still running late, the kids who still play in the street, the clocks that won’t stop ticking for the person who’s gone.
“You’re pretending,” Dr. Raeburn said, not sage or professional, but a little shocked by the discovery, as if I’d been trying to hide a pack of his cigarettes behind my back.
“I’m pretending?” I shook my head. “All those years of psych grad,” I said. “And to tell me that?”
“What I mean is that you construct stories about yourself and dish them out—one for you, one for you—” Here he reenacted this process, showing me handing out lies as if they were apples.
“Pretending. I believe the professional name for it might be denial,” I said. “Are you calling me gay?”
He pursed his lips noncommittally, then finally said, “No, Dina. I don’t think you’re gay.”
I checked his eyes. I couldn’t read them.
“No. Not at all,” he said, sounding as if he were telling a subtle joke. “But maybe you’ll finally understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Oh, just that constantly saying what one doesn’t mean accustoms the mouth to meaningless phrases.” His eyes narrowed. “Maybe you’ll understand that when you finally need to express something truly significant your mouth will revert to the insignificant nonsense it knows so well.” He looked at me, his hands sputtering in the air in a gesture of defeat. “Who knows?” he asked with a glib, psychiatric smile I’d never seen before. “Maybe it’s your survival mechanism. Black living in a white world.”
I heard him, but only vaguely. I’d hooked on to that one word, pretending. Dr. Raeburn would never realize that “pretending” was what had got me this far. I remembered the morning of my mother’s funeral. I’d been given milk to settle my stomach; I’d pretended it was coffee. I imagined I was drinking coffee elsewhere. Some Arabic-speaking country where the thick coffee served in little cups was so strong it could keep you awake for days.
HEIDI WANTED me to go with her to the funeral. She’d sent this message through the dean. “We’ll pay for your ticket to Vancouver,” the dean said.
These people wanted you to owe them for everything. “What about my return ticket?” I asked the dean. “Maybe the shrink will chip in for that.”
The dean looked at me as though I were an insect she’d like to squash. “We’ll pay for the whole thing. We might even pay for some lessons in manners.”
So I packed my suitcase and walked from my suicide single dorm to Heidi’s room. A thin wispy girl in ragged cutoffs and a shirt that read “LSBN!” answered the door. A group of short-haired girls in thick black leather jackets, bundled up despite the summer heat, encircled Heidi in a protective fairy ring. They looked at me critically, clearly wondering if Heidi was too fragile for my company.
“You’ve got our numbers,” one said, holding on to Heidi’s shoulder. “And Vancouver’s got a great gay community.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “She’s going to a funeral, not a Save the Dykes rally.”
One of the girls stepped in front of me.
“It’s O.K., Cynthia,” Heidi said. Then she ushered me into her bedroom and closed the door. A suitcase was on her bed, half packed.
“I could just uninvite you,” Heidi said. “How about that? You want that?” She folded a polka-dotted
T-shirt that was wrong for any occasion and put it in her suitcase. “Why haven’t you talked to me?” she said, looking at the shirt instead of me. “Why haven’t you talked to me in two months?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know,” she said, each syllable steeped in sarcasm. “You don’t know. Well, I know. You thought I was going to try to sleep with you.”
“Try to? We slept together all winter!”
“If you call smelling your feet sleeping together, you’ve got a lot to learn.” She seemed thinner and meaner; every line of her body held me at bay.
“So tell me,” I said. “What can you show me that I need to learn?” But as soon as I said it I somehow knew she still hadn’t slept with anyone. “Am I supposed to come over there and sweep your enraged self into my arms?” I said. “Like in the movies? Is this the part where we’re both so mad we kiss each other?”
She shook her head and smiled weakly. “You don’t get it,” she said. “My mother is dead.” She closed her suitcase, clicking shut the old-fashioned locks. “My mother is dead,” she said again, this time reminding herself. She set her suitcase upright on the floor and sat on it. She looked like someone waiting for a train.
“Fine,” I said. “And she’s going to be dead for a long time.” Though it sounded stupid, I felt good saying it. As though I had my own locks to click shut.
HEIDI WENT to Vancouver for her mother’s funeral. I didn’t go with her. Instead, I went back to Baltimore and moved in with an aunt I barely knew. Every day was the same: I read and smoked outside my aunt’s apartment, studying the row of hair salons across the street, where girls in denim cutoffs and tank tops would troop in and come out hours later, a flash of neon nails, coifs the color and sheen of patent leather. And every day I imagined Heidi’s house in Vancouver. Her place would not be large, but it would be clean. Flowery shrubs would line the walks. The Canadian wind would whip us about like pennants. I’d be visiting her in some vague time in the future, deliberately vague, for people like me, who realign past events to suit themselves. In that future time, you always have a chance to catch the groceries before they fall; your words can always be rewound and erased, rewritten and revised.
Then I’d imagine Heidi visiting me. There are no psychiatrists or deans, no boys with nice shoes or flip cashiers. Just me in my single room. She knocks on the door and says, “Open up.”
Speaking in Tongues
AFTER SUNDAY SCHOOL, Tia usually went outside, where she’d talk with her best friend Marcelle. They would lean against the white brick of the church, silently hoping that Morning Service would never begin. Tia had only known Marcelle since the summer, when the two had met in band camp, Tia playing the clarinet, Marcelle the trumpet. They were also the only saved students in Rutherford B. Hayes High, roaming the halls together in their ankle-length skirts, their long-sleeved ruffled blouses, while the others watched them: the other black girls who leaned sexily against lockers as though auditioning for parts in a play, the white girls who traded pocket mirrors, lipsticking themselves like four-year-olds determined to crayon one spot to a waxy patch. These were the people Tia and Marcelle gossiped about after Sunday school, but that Sunday Tia knew she was in trouble. Instead of heading outside, she searched the sanctuary, trying to get to her great-aunt Roberta before Sister Gwendolyn did.
The trouble had started in Sunday school. Tia was sitting next to Marcelle, who was reading aloud from the lesson: “God’s Special Message for Teens.”
The other girls in Sunday school had read their passages, but Tia had been gazing at the stained-glass Paul: behind his frozen image of sudden blindness and supplication, shadows passed, turning the picture of Paul dark and opaque. Marcelle had kicked Tia’s shin.
“‘God’s Special Message for Teens,’” Tia began.
“I already read that,” Marcelle whispered, tapping her pencil to a passage ten paragraphs down the page. Next to the passage was a picture of a young Jesus sitting on a grassy hill with a dreamy Nazarene look in his eyes. Marcelle leaned over Tia as if the words in Tia’s book were different and more engrossing than her own. Marcelle began to draw a cartoon bubble above Jesus’ head. Tia read the passage:
“As a teen, you may believe that no one understands your problems. You may say to yourself, ‘I’m all alone.’ But this is NOT TRUE! God understands your problems. Remember, Jesus was a teen, just like you! Modern teens face many challenges, but just think: when Jesus was a teen, he already knew he would have to save the world from SIN. And as though that weren’t enough, the elder rabbis gave him homework, too—just like you!”
All the Sunday school books Tia had read were written this way, but this was the first time they seemed so ridiculous to her. Perhaps, as her aunt Roberta never ceased to remind her, this was Marcelle’s bad influence. Perhaps, as she’d learned in her high school biology class, all bodies’ cells regenerate, and within seven years’ time, all cells have died and been reborn, and you are truly a new person. Tia stopped reading and looked up from the page, glancing at Sister Gwendolyn, who held her book in front of her as if she were about to begin singing carols from it. “Continue,” she said.
Marcelle now had the book in her lap and Tia had to lean over to see the words. Marcelle made an arrow from the word “homework” to the cartoon bubble she’d drawn. In the bubble next to Jesus’ head she’d written out a quadratic equation.
“Tia, Marcelle is busy taking notes and you can’t even concentrate on a simple passage. Read. Please.”
Tia continued, trying to read with a revitalized sense of duty:
“You, being a teenager, may be asked to drink alcohol, smoke drugs and other things, or ‘have a little fun.’ DON’T DO IT! Doing these things may seem ‘far out’ and ‘groovy,’ but they are not only dangerous to your health, they are also dangerous to your life as a Christian. When someone asks you to go to a party, you should ask yourself, ‘Would Jesus go to this party?’ If he wouldn’t, then that’s God’s way of telling you that the party is not for you.”
When Tia finished, Marcelle was putting the final touches on a crude drawing of three guys in bandannas asking the sketch of Jesus to attend their party.
Though Tia did not laugh very loud, or for a long time, the other girls, including Marcelle, looked at her, their eyes blinking the slow and steady concerned flashes of car hazard lights. All these other girls in her Sunday school had begun speaking in tongues, but Tia could not. You couldn’t fake it, though she had tried to at home. The fake tongues sounded like something between Pig Latin and a record played in reverse.
You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at church and she had tried at home, but nothing worked. In her room, she would genuflect, pushing her head against her bed ruffle, reciting scriptures, praying, singing, concluding it all with a deep, waiting silence. But nothing would come out. Her only solace was that Marcelle was three years older and hadn’t spoken in tongues either.
Tia could not afford to laugh, and yet she had done it.
“Sister Tia Townsend. May I remind you that the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”
By the time Tia wove through the clusters of church members, Sister Gwendolyn and Tia’s aunt Roberta were already talking about her. Sister Gwendolyn wore a hat that looked like a strawberry birthday cake. Roberta’s hat was dove-gray, sleek as an airplane. At each angry quake of Sister Gwendolyn’s curls, Tia’s aunt Roberta furrowed her brow deeply, shook her head heartily, held her Bible so tight against her chest one might think it could ward off a heart attack.
Tia watched their hats drift away from each other. She knew what they were thinking: Tia did not Believe, thus Tia Laughed in her Heart, thus Tia was not able to Speak in Tongues. Their thoughts headed toward the same conclusion as tiny ants march toward the same mammoth cr
umb of bread.
TIA FOLLOWED Sister Gwendolyn past the sanctuary, past the pastor’s office. When they reached the hymnbook closet, Sister Gwendolyn took out a ring of keys and unlocked the door. “In here,” she said with a smile that never reached her eyes. She turned on the light, gesturing to the only chair in the closet, one used as a step stool for reaching the top shelves.
Sister Gwendolyn wedged herself in between Tia and the shelf of hymnbooks, wheezing the way big people do in small places. All the smells of the closet were buoyed by its heat: the hymnbooks, musty with years of sweaty palms, the bottles of anointing oil that had seeped through their boxes, marking the cardboard with round, greasy stains. And then there was Sister Gwendolyn’s signature odor: fig-smelling perfume, armpit sweat, cough drops.
By now the congregation would be filing into the sanctuary for Morning Service. Soon someone would begin jangling a tambourine and the choir would sing. Robin-breasted women would swell their bosoms, inhaling God.
“Sister Townsend,” Sister Gwendolyn said, “do you believe that you will ever receive the Holy Ghost?”
She knew the answer to that one. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.
Sister Gwendolyn held her hands behind her back, sharking around Tia as best she could without her haunches threatening to unpry books from the shelves. Sister Gwendolyn raised her palms to either side of Tia’s head, as though Tia’s skull were a fly she was determined to trap with her bare hands. Tia had seen this done before, a more aggressive sort of laying-on-of-hands, usually performed on new members. Or the sick-hearted older ones, Brothers who refused to stay with wives, Sisters who refused to obey their husbands. Sister Gwendolyn began: This child oh Lord is not following in your path oh Lord show her the way oh Lord you died on the Cross at Calvary oh Lord and you came resurrected oh Lord but this child laughs at you oh Lord, spare her oh—