by Z. Z. Packer
“Shut up!” he yelled.
She saw him cover his ears, but she couldn’t stop, and so he dragged her along the shag of the carpet and sheepskin until her face felt the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor and she saw the endless, reeling flowers of the kitchen wallpaper. She gargled on her own spit, felt blood trill down her nostrils. He slapped her, as though reviving the dead. Her teeth locked, biting nothing, and her screams dead-ended into low grunts.
She could not remember getting up, her hand finding the knife on the counter. The smell of onions on the blade, pungent and insinuating.
There was no drama to his voice, just the word in its nudest form.
“Don’t.”
SHE RAN and no one followed, past the signless signs, past billboards, past the transvestite whores with the balloons for breasts. Then she ran up against a wall of soft purple and cocoa butter. Marie.
Marie adjusted herself from the run-in, eyelashes curtsying apologies to the man with whom she’d been speaking. The man sucked his teeth and ambled down the sidewalk.
Tia told her everything, pausing when any car drove past, thinking it Dezi’s. She apologized to Marie for kissing him, told how she had felt herself, down there. How she believed he’d done something so horrible that she had cut him and slashed him, and how by the time he’d grabbed hold of the knife she had run out the door.
“Good Lord,” Marie said. “You see him come after you?”
“No.”
“Well, he will. If you cut him up, he will come after you.” Marie wiped Tia’s face and rocked her. “Come here,” Marie said, and led her to an abandoned building that had neither doors nor windows.
“All right, Miss Lady,” she said. She waved her cigarette in the air like a wand. “He ain’t got no business with you anyway. You fourteen? Fifteen? That’s statutory rape, right there. That’s what that’s called.” At first she thought Marie was going to hide her there, but Marie knelt at Tia’s feet, the heels of her thigh-high boots scratching on the fallen plaster. “Drop ’em.”
“Drop what?”
“Your drawers, drop your drawers.”
Tia backed away.
“Look girl, I’m just going to check on something, just to make sure. You should go to a clinic anyway for this, but they’ll charge and I’m doing it for free.”
She felt that she might cry, but instead she shimmied her panties down to her knees. Marie left her cigarette to balance on a stray block of wood, blew up a condom, worked her hand into it with difficulty. She peered up Tia’s skirt. Then she prodded. By the streetlight shining through the squares where windows should have been, she looked at what was there, a thin slick of something. Then—Tia couldn’t believe it—Marie tasted it.
“Nope,” she said. “I think your juices just got to flowing. You ain’t never got off on your own before?”
Got off?
Bleak, feeling the full extent of her ignorance pound on her chest like a gavel, Tia said yes. She pulled up her underwear.
Marie sighed then drew a long drag on the cigarette and kept going. “We sending you home. Yes sir. We can’t have people like you running around here.” She grabbed Tia by the arm, fingernails digging into Tia’s flesh as she led her back to the street.
Outside she felt sick and cold despite the early autumn heat. The transvestites were gone, and only three women walked the stretch of sidewalk where Tia had found Marie.
“Lordamercy,” Marie said, “I sho wouldn’t want my baby girl out here in ten years. Look at this mess.” Marie took Tia by the crook of the arm as if they were going on a stroll through the park. “Glad I won’t be out here too much longer. Almost got my wad saved for the condo. Almost. Maybe another year.”
Tia knew the only reason Marie was talking so much was to keep her company, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. When silence grew upon silence, Marie stopped, rubbing Tia all over as if to warm her. “Snap out of it, girl. I’ma give you the name of a place you can go and get yourself checked out for real. I’ll give you the number, but I’d rather get you on a bus back home. You want that, sugar doll? You wanna go home?”
“Yes,” Tia said.
“Well, Marie will deliver.”
Marie whistled, sharp and loud like a man. “Lydia! Lid-dee-ya! Get your ass over here!”
All Tia saw of the woman named Lydia was a metallic slip and red sneakers. Lydia waved her limp hand as if shooing away a fly.
“Ho, you best be moving your fat ass, I’m trying to get this church girl off and back to her peoples!”
Lydia walked with haunchy, bovine steps, taking nearly five minutes to make it down a single block. She looked bored, as though she’d only obeyed Marie out of curiosity.
“This poor child need to get her ass on a bus. She need some benjamins. What you got?”
Lydia made a face as if she’d been asked to hand over her liver. “She got a mouth and a pussy like everyone else on this corner. Make her earn her money.”
“She’s right,” Tia said. “I can’t take other people’s money just because—”
“Give her twenty,” Marie said. She unpried Tia’s hand from her skirt pocket and made her hold it out as if begging for alms.
Lydia said no.
“I’ll pay you back, ho. Now, hand it over.”
While Lydia undid the Oriental topknot where she apparently kept her money, Marie called over two unsuspecting girls from across the street.
“Marie,” Tia said, “I’ve got thirty-two dollars, I don’t need any more.”
But Marie inhaled grandly, and Tia understood that Marie liked doing this: bossing everyone around, demanding money from people unwilling to give it. For a moment, she felt a deep pity for the woman. She would have made a great executive, manager, fundraiser, but here she was, on Northside Drive, walking the streets.
Then it occurred to her that if Marie and Dezi really were a couple, Marie was doing a good job of getting rid of her, making sure she had enough money to get on the bus home and stay there. Then she felt guilty about both thoughts, the former patronizing and the latter just plain catty.
Marie explained things to the two girls from across the street. One introduced herself as Shatrice, the other was Joan.
“We heard about your plight,” Shatrice said, “and we’ll do whatever we can to expedite your journey home.”
“Thank you,” Tia said.
“Je vous en prie,” Shatrice said.
“Uh-oh,” Joan said.
A car screeched, found new direction, and started up again. A tan Celica, barreling down Northside. Finally Dezi careened into the corner and didn’t bother to close the door after him. His cut had been wiped and cleaned, but fresh blood filled the gash, threatening to seep out. He was holding her clarinet case.
The other three girls moved a few paces back, close enough to watch everything, but far enough away to make a run for it.
“C’mon baby,” he said, as if Marie were invisible, “I know you were just freaked out. I just want us to talk.”
Marie stood in front of Tia. “She’s going home.”
“Come on, Tia.”
“What did I tell you?” Marie said, eyes bugging out at him. “I said she’s going H-O-M-E!”
He pointed at her with a bandaged finger. “I’m not talking to you!” He paused, deflating the anger from his voice. “Let’s go,” he said to Tia. “Your bag is back at the place. I got your flute right here.”
“I should apologize to him,” Tia said to Marie. “He didn’t even—”
“Like hell you should!” she said, then yelled, “Cradle-robber!”
Dezi took a step toward them. “Marie, this ain’t none of your business.”
Marie stepped forward, meeting his challenge. “Lay the horn down. Put it on the curb and leave.”
Dezi had to peer around Marie to make eye contact with Tia. “Come on,” he said, beseeching. But when she stepped back, away from him, he bounced like a boxer, impatient and eager to get
into the ring. His voice hit an angry clef. “Come on.”
“Leave, Dezi,” Marie said.
In an instant he lunged for Tia; she felt his hand grazing hers. But she pulled away. Marie swatted at him, then he and Marie actually seemed to be fighting, her limbs askew as he grappled her, her jacket bunching in the middle and her midriff exposed. She was spiking his foot with the heel of her boot and clawing his face. Then the girls were in on the action, their fingernails scratching the nylon of Dezi’s jacket, and once, catching Marie in the eye.
Tia had begun backing away, but she could not stop watching.
“Come on!” Dezi said. Then he fell to the ground, looking as if he were trying to tear out his eyes. Someone had Maced him. Marie sat down on the curb, as though defeated.
The street girls pinned Dezi to the ground with their high heels and platforms, screaming all at once to Tia, “Run! Run! Run!”
People stuck their heads out of their doorways, straining to see what was happening. In the distance, a siren.
Tia grabbed her clarinet. She hugged Marie, who reached in her thigh-high boots and snatched out a thin fold of money. She pressed it all into Tia’s hand. “Run, honey.” Her voice was tired.
“I need your address. To pay you back.”
“Run! You heard me!” Marie pushed her so hard she fell off the curb. “Run, honey. And don’t let nobody lock you in no closet no more.”
Tia stood up and brushed gravel and broken glass from her skirt. And she ran.
Geese
WHEN PEOPLE BACK HOME asked her why she was leaving Baltimore for Tokyo, Dina told them she was going to Japan in the hopes of making a pile of money, socking it away, then living somewhere cheap and tropical for a year. Back home, money was the only excuse for leaving, and it was barely excuse enough to fly thousands of miles to where people spoke no English.
“Japan!” Miss Gloria had said. Miss Gloria was her neighbor; a week before Dina left she sat out on the stoop and shared a pack of cigarettes with Miss Gloria. “Japan,” Miss Gloria repeated, looking off into the distance, as though she might be able to see Honshu if she looked hard enough. Across the street sat the boarded-up row houses the city had promised to renovate. Dina tried to look past them, and habored the vague hope that if she came back to the neighborhood they’d get renovated, as the city had promised. “Well, you go ’head on,” Miss Gloria said, trying to sound encouraging. “You go ’head on and learn that language. Find out what they saying about us over at Chong’s.” Chong’s was the local take-out with the best moo goo gai pan around, but if someone attempted to clarify an order, or changed it, or even hesitated, the Chinese family got all huffed, yelling as fast and violent as kung fu itself.
“Chong’s is Chinese, Miss Gloria.”
“Same difference.”
The plan was not well thought-out, she admitted that much. Or rather, it wasn’t really a plan at all, but a feeling, a nebulous fluffy thing that had started in her chest, spread over her heart like a fog. It was sparked by movies in which she’d seen Japanese people bowing ceremoniously, torsos seesawing; her first Japanese meal, when she’d turned twenty, and how she’d marveled at the sashimi resting on its bed of rice, rice that lay on a lacquered dish the color of green tea. She grew enamored of the pen strokes of kanji, their black sabers clashing and warring with one another, occasionally settling peacefully into what looked like the outlines of a Buddhist temple, the cross sections of a cozy house. She did not want to say it, because it made no practical sense, but in the end she went to Japan for the delicate sake cups, resting in her hand like a blossom; she went to Japan for loveliness.
After searching for weeks for work in Tokyo, she finally landed a job at an amusement park. It was called Summerland, because, in Japan, anything vaguely amusing had an English name. It was in Akigawa, miles away from the real Tokyo, but each of her previous days of job hunting had sent her farther and farther away from the city. “Economic downturn,” one Office Lady told her. The girl, with her exchange-student English and quick appraisal of Dina’s frustration, seemed cut out for something better than a receptionist’s job, but Dina understood that this, too, was part of the culture. A girl—woman—would work in an office as a glorified photocopier, and when she became Christmasu-keeki, meaning twenty-five years old, she was expected to resign quietly and start a family with a husband. With no reference to her race, only to her Americanness in general, the Office Lady had said, sadly, “Downturn means people want to hire Japanese. It’s like, obligation.” So when the people at Summerland offered her a job, she immediately accepted.
Her specific job was operator of the Dizzy Teacups ride, where, nestled in gigantic replicas of Victorian teacups, Japanese kids spun and arced and dipped before they were whisked back to cram school. Summerland, she discovered, was the great gaijin dumping ground, the one place where a non-Japanese foreigner was sure to land a job. It was at Summerland that she met Arillano Justinio Arroyo, with his perfectly round smiley-face head, his luxurious black hair, always parted in the middle, that fell on either side of his temples like an open book. Ari was her co-worker, which meant they would exchange mop duty whenever a kid vomited.
By summer’s end, both she and Ari found themselves unamused and jobless. She decided that what she needed, before resuming her search for another job, was a vacation. At the time, it made a lot of sense. So she sold the return part of her round-trip ticket and spent her days on subways in search of all of Tokyo’s corners: she visited Asakusa and gazed at the lit red lanterns of Sensoji Temple; she ate an outrageously expensive bento lunch under the Asahi brewery’s giant sperm-shaped modernist sculpture. She even visited Akiha-bara, a section of Tokyo where whole blocks of stores sold nothing but electronics she couldn’t afford. She spent an afternoon in the waterfront township of Odaiji, where women sunned themselves in bikinis during the lunch hour. But she loved Shinjuku the most, that garish part of Tokyo where pachinko parlors pushed against ugly gray earthquake-resistant buildings; where friendly, toothless vendors sold roasted unagi, even in rainy weather. Here, the twelve-floor department stores scintillated with slivers of primary colors, all the products shiny as toys. The subcity of Shinjuku always swooned, brighter than Vegas, lurid with sword-clashing kanji in neon. Skinny prostitutes in miniskirts swished by in pairs like schoolgirls, though their pouty red lips and permed hair betrayed them as they darted into doorways without signs and, seemingly, without actual doors.
At the end of each day, she took the subway, reboarding the Hibiya-sen tokkyuu, which would take her back to the gaijin hostel in Roppongi. She rented her room month to month, like the Australians, Germans, and Canadians and the occasional American. The only other blacks who lived in Japan were Africans: the Senegalese, with their blankets laid out in front of Masashi-Itsukaiichi station, selling bootleg Beatles albums and Tupperware; the Kenyans in Harajuku selling fierce tribal masks and tarry perfumed oils alongside Hello Kitty notebooks. The Japanese did not trust these black gaijin, these men who smiled with every tooth in their mouths and wore their cologne turned on high. And though the Japanese women stared at Dina with the same distrust, the business-suited sararimen who passed her in the subway stations would proposition her with English phrases they’d had gaijin teach them—“Verrry sexy,” they’d say, looking around to make sure women and children hadn’t overheard them. And even on the tokkyuu itself, where every passenger took a seat and immediately fell asleep, the emboldened men would raise their eyebrows in brushstrokes of innuendo and loudly whisper, “Verry chah-ming daaark-ku skin.”
Ari found another job. Dina didn’t. Her three-month visa had expired and the Japanese were too timid and suspicious to hire anyone on the sly. There were usually only two lines of work for American gaijin—teaching or modeling. Modeling was out—she was not the right race, much less the right blondness or legginess, and with an expired visa she got turned down for teaching and tutoring jobs. The men conducting the interviews knew her visa had expired, and th
at put a spin on things, the spin being that they expected her to sleep with them.
Dina had called Ari, wanting leads on jobs the English-language newspapers might not advertise. Ari agreed to met her at Swensen’s, where he bought her a scoop of chocolate mint ice cream.
“I got offered a job at a pachinko parlor,” he said. “I can’t do it, but you should. They only offered me the job because they like to see other Asians clean their floors.”
She didn’t tell him that she didn’t want to sweep floors, that too many Japanese had already seen American movies in which blacks were either criminals or custodians. So when they met again at Swensen’s, Dina still had no job and couldn’t make the rent at the foreign hostel. Nevertheless, she bought him a scoop of red bean ice cream with the last of her airplane money. She didn’t have a job and he took pity on her, inviting her to live with him in his one-room flat. So she did.
AND SO did Petra and Zoltan. Petra was five-foot-eleven and had once been a model. That ended when she fell down an escalator, dislocating a shoulder and wrecking her face. She’d had to pay for the reconstructive surgery out of her once sizable bank account and now had no money. And Petra did not want to go back to Moldova, could not go back to Moldova, it seemed, though Ari hadn’t explained any of this when he brought Petra home. He introduced her to Dina as though they were neighbors who hadn’t met, then hauled her belongings up the stairs. While Ari strained and grunted under the weight of her clothes trunks, Petra plopped down in a chair, the only place to sit besides the floor. Dina made tea for her, and though she and Ari had been running low on food, courtesy dictated that she bring out the box of cookies she’d been saving to share with Ari.
“I have threads in my face,” Petra said through crunches of cookie. “Threads from the doctors. One whole year”—she held up a single aggressive finger—“I have threads. I am thinking that when threads bust out, va voom, I am having old face back. These doctors here”—Petra shook her head and narrowed her topaz eyes—“they can build a whole car, but cannot again build face? I go to America next. Say, ‘Fix my face. Fix face for actual.’ And they will fix.” She nodded once, like a genie, as though a single nod were enough to make it so. Afterward she made her way to the bathroom and sobbed.