Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

by Z. Z. Packer

  Doris watched as her mother looked at Olivia. It was hard to tell whether Olivia was making fun of them. Though Saints were gladdened when anyone became interested in the Holiness Church, this was too much. Jews were Jews, and that was that.

  Doris remembered how she’d always thought of how lucky the Jews were: Reverend Sykes had said that whether or not they believed in Jesus, they wouldn’t go to hell like other nonbelievers, because they were Chosen. That would mean heaven would be stocked with nobody but Pentecostals and Jews. Doris thought how strange it would be, getting whisked away to heaven only to find things much the way they were when she used to help her mother clean at the Bermans’: Mrs. Berman with her pincurls whorled about her head like frosting on a cake, little Al and Danny Berman playing the violin, eyes rolling to the ceiling at Stravinsky’s beautiful, boring music. She remembered when Al and Danny quit the scherzo they’d been practicing and started up “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” sawing on their expensive violins as if they were country fiddles. Mr. Berman had let out a primitive yell, thudding something to the ground, the only time Doris had seen him mad.

  Olivia Berman offered to drive them home. Doris’s mother said that with her daughters Etta Josephine and Doris now there, the car would be too full, and implored Miss Olivia to go ahead home. Doris’s mother insisted that no, it was not too far for them to walk. That they’d been doing it for years.

  SHE WAS the only Negro student in the class, the only Negro in all her classes. And though Mr. Fott, her Honors History teacher, rarely called on her, she was fine with it. She was relieved that he graded fairly, though sometimes he’d comment on her essays with a dark, runic hand: Do you mean Leo XIII believed the state must remain subord. to the interests of the indiv. composing it? Despite his antipathy of laissez-faire policies? At least he didn’t speak to her the way Mrs. Prendergast always did, slowly, loudly, as if Doris were deaf.

  On the first day Olivia came to Mr. Fott’s class, she wore earrings like tiny chandeliers and a pillbox hat, like Jackie Kennedy, though no one wore hats to school. She entered minutes after the bell had rung, and though Mr. Fott made efforts to flag her down, chide her for tardiness, introduce her to the class, she rushed straight to where Doris was seated and cried, “Doris!” Doris made no move to get up, but Olivia descended upon her in an embrace, then turned to the class in mock sheepishness, as if she could not help her display of emotion. “Doris and I haven’t seen each other in forever.”

  That, of course, was a lie; they’d just seen each other three days ago. But before that night at church, Doris hadn’t seen Olivia in years. For the longest time Doris could have sworn she’d heard her mother saying something about Olivia going to a girls’ boarding school. But that turned out not to be true: two or three years ago, at supper, when Etta Josephine had asked about her, Doris’s mother had said, “You know what? I don’t know where they keep that girl? But you know how white folks is. Got family living on the other side of the planet. Hop on one a them airplanes like they going to the corner store.” Then she lowered her voice to a gossipy whisper. “But you know what? Now that you mention it, I do believe she’s in the sanatorium.” Doris hadn’t believed it at the time, and had gradually forgotten about her.

  “Miss …” Fott glanced down at his roll book. “… Berman, is it?”

  “Why, yes. It is.”

  “Miss Berman, please be seated. For the record, miss, this class starts on time.”

  “WHO DOES that Mr. Fott think he is, Doris? I mean, what’s his problem?”

  Outside school only a few of the yellow buses had pulled into the lot. Doris had been waiting for hers when Olivia—Livia—had spotted her. Livia stared, mutely insistent that Doris answer.

  “He thinks he’s the teacher, Livia,” Doris finally said, “a man to be respected.” She hugged her coat tight around her, praying for her bus to pull into its space and save her. She wished her old friend Helen was around so that she wouldn’t be such a target for Livia, but now that Helen was in all-colored classes and Doris was in white ones, she rarely saw Helen. “All those white folks make me nervous,” Helen had once said when she’d walked Doris to English. It hadn’t occurred to Doris to be nervous, but now she was more annoyed than nervous; annoyed that this girl would use her mother’s first name, annoyed that this girl would come to her church, her school. “Your mother never talks about you,” Doris said, suddenly angry. “And where’ve you been all these years? Where’d you come from anyway?”

  Livia took a cigarette from a silver case that looked as thin as a card, then lit it. She inhaled, nostrils dilating, eyes rolling in ecstasy. “I came from walking to and fro upon the earth. And up and down on it.” She looked askance at Doris, as if to see whether Doris recognized that she was quoting from the Book of Job: Satan’s answer to God’s question, Whence comest thou?

  “Don’t use Bible verses that way,” Doris said, then added, “and don’t talk to me in class.” She immediately regretted the words: her mother would slap her if she found out Doris had insulted the daughter of her only employer.

  Livia looked at her, surprised. “Don’t talk to you? I was doing you a favor. I mean, who does talk to you, Doris? Who? Name one person.”

  “I don’t need anyone to talk to. Especially not white people. I talk to my family. I talk to the pastor.”

  “Reverend Sykes,” Livia said thoughtfully, as though it were the title of a poem. She exhaled, and the smoke mazed ghostly around her face, then lifted like a veil above her pillbox hat. “Yes, Reverend Sykes. I don’t think Reverend Sykes lets you do the things you want.”

  “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” Doris said. But the retort sounded hollow: she could not help but remember how Reverend Sykes had disapproved of her going to sit-ins, and wondered what Livia knew about Reverend Sykes besides what she’d seen that night at church. And why had Livia come to church at all? Doris decided that she said things purely to shock, said things so that people like Doris’s mother could say nothing in return while Livia sat back in smug satisfaction, observing what she’d wrought.

  Doris’s bus had arrived, and though she tried to think of the worst thing she could say to Livia before parting, all she could manage was, “And I hate your hat.”

  WHEN SHE got home it was dark. The boys were running about the house and Etta Josephine had not come back from her job shucking walnuts. But she knew her father must be home; she could hear him hammering away. Her father was trying to build a third bedroom where their back porch had been, but the partition made from blankets never kept out the draft. She turned on the kitchen stove to warm the house and start dinner, wondering why her father had picked winter, of all times, to tear down two major walls of the house. The pock, pock sound of nails being hammered into place had somehow grown spooky, as though some force were chipping its way into the house and would eventually take them all whether they invited it in or not.

  She dialed the living room radio to its highest volume so she could hear it in the kitchen, over her father’s pounding and sawing. She’d finished mixing the meal and egg yolk for the cornbread and had begun frying chicken when the white radio announcer delivered news about the Albany Movement in Georgia; how the colored leaders of that area had petitioned for sewage, paved roads, and a moratorium on the stoning of Negro ministers’ houses. It was suspected that the colored citizens of Albany would protest once again if their grievances weren’t met, the announcer said. Then the announcer finished on a note of his own that made Doris so mad she forgot to pay attention to what she was doing and burned her hand on the skillet. When, he implored, will the tumult end?

  DORIS HAD excused herself after dinner, saying she needed to gather leaves for her biology-class leaf collection. And though she knew she was headed to Stutz’s, she hadn’t exactly told a lie. She did need to collect leaves for Mrs. Prendergast’s class, though they weren’t due until the end of spring.

  “Dorrie!” Mr. Stutz said when she enter
ed his store that night. “It’s Dori-ka!” He took a break from smoking hi cigarette to cough, loud and insistent.

  She’d supposed that Dori-ka was some Lithuanian diminutive, but she’d never asked him. She liked that she had another name, in some other language, and didn’t want to ruin the mystery of it by finding out what it meant.

  “Hello, Mr. Stutz. How’s your wife and family?”

  Stutz made a face and waved his hand. “Want, want, want. They all want. I tell them, in Lithuania, you are freezing. Here, in America, your brain is frying!”

  He laughed at his own joke, though Doris didn’t know what was so funny. She didn’t always understand him, but she liked his accent. And he seemed lonely. Sometimes, when he stood among his televisions and appliances, he looked like the only person in a graveyard, so she tried to laugh when he laughed.

  “Game show is not on, Dorrie. But come. Take chair.”

  She sat on the stool next to him, and for a while they did not speak. They watched Marshal Dillon, Stutz smoking his cigarette peacefully. Then they sat through The Lloyd Bridges Show, and when it was over, Stutz said, “Ah. He should not try that show. He was better in Sea Hunt.”

  Doris had not been able to enjoy either of the programs: she could not forget the radio broadcast she’d heard earlier, how the announcer seemed to loathe the colored people of Albany when all they’d wanted was to march for decent sewage disposal without being stoned for it. She thought of what Livia had said about Reverend Sykes not letting her do what she wanted, then looked at Mr. Stutz and announced, “I’m going to go to a sit-in.”

  He looked at her, puzzled. “Oho! First I am thinking, She is already sitting, she is already in store.” He shook his head then raised a single finger. “You mean like TV.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But they’re not just on TV. They do it for real.”

  “I know that they are real,” he said, as if she’d insulted his intelligence. “But I think: Good maybe for others. Not so good for Dorrie.”

  She leapt from the stool on which she’d been sitting. “What do you mean ’not so good’? You think I should just walk around and not care that I have to use a separate everything! That my father shouldn’t be able to vote!”

  “Dorrie not yell at Stutz!”

  She sighed her apology, and after a few deep breaths, he seemed to accept it.

  “I not say it baaad,” he said, trying to reconcile. “But Dori-ka is nice girl—”

  How could Stutz not understand? She was about to object, but he placed a stern hand on her arm to keep her from interrupting him.

  “Nice girl. I like Dori-ka. I don’t want people to put Senf and catsup all over Dori-ka like they do on TV.”

  Whenever he and Doris had watched news footage of the sit-ins in Greensboro, they’d seen whites as young as the Negro students squirting mustard and catsup all over the protesters. It had amazed her that the students could sit so still, taking it, occasionally wiping themselves off, but never shouting or hitting.

  “And Dori-ka,” he said, “I am businessman. I think of things from business perspective. If you do what they say called ‘integrate,’ what will everyone here do?” He waved his hand beyond the window, to where Amos Henry cut meat in his butcher shop, where Mozelle Gordon ran the little store that sold sundries. And there, also in his gesture, was Thomasina Edison, who did everyone’s hair, her hot comb heating in its little pod, waiting to do its Saturday-night miracles. “All these business,” Stutz said, “all of them Negroid. All,” he said, placing his hand on his heart, “but Stutz.”

  “Now, when someone need hairs cut, they go over there. When they need meat cut in half, they go over there.” He pointed out the window as though outside lay the seven wonders of the world. “When you ‘integrate,’ I predict, everyone will go to white, none to black. Why? Because white America will build big palace. They will say, ‘Why go to Negroid store? Little-bitty tchotchke store? We have everything here!’” Then, with a flourish of his hand, he said, “No more Negroid store. Poof. All gone.”

  She didn’t think that would happen. Couldn’t imagine anything like it. But even though Stutz didn’t really understand, she felt something like affection for him. When the Red Skelton Show theme music began playing, she knew it was time to leave. She stood in front of him, and though both made as if to hug each other, they didn’t.

  A WEEK later, after Wednesday-night Bible study, Doris decided to ask for a meeting with Reverend Sykes. Her mother would take at least half an hour to make her rounds, hugging and God-blessing everyone in sight, and her brothers could spend all night outside playing stickball in their winter coats.

  “Of course, Doris,” Reverend Sykes said when she asked to speak with him. “It’s been a while since we had one of our talks.” He gathered his Bible notes from the pulpit and led her to his office: a hymnbook closet that had been only half cleared of books. He gestured for her to take the seat opposite his and made a little laugh. “Remember when you read some book about digestion, then asked why stomach acid didn’t kill Jonah when he was in the belly of the whale?” He smiled, remembering.

  It was true. Doris used to want to know why it was fair for David to have Bathsheba’s husband killed, just because he wanted to marry her himself; why Jacob got to have Esau’s birthright, when Esau’s only fault—as far as Doris could see—was that he was hairy.

  “This isn’t a question,” Doris said, “though it involves a Bible story. It’s more of a theory.”

  Reverend Sykes made a mock-impressed face at the word “theory.”

  “Well, I was thinking about how Jesus turned two fish and five loaves of bread into enough to feed five thousand people, showing how when you feed a physical hunger, folks are more receptive to hearing a message that’ll then feed their spiritual hunger.”

  “Amen,” Reverend Sykes said, nodding. “Couldn’t a said it better myself. A spiritual hunger that needs to be fed by the Word of God.”

  “But Reverend Sykes,” Doris said, “what if a thousand had to eat their bread and fish in the valley, while the rest got to eat theirs up on the hill? That’s what’s happening now. We colored have to eat our fish and bread in the valley. The white folks get to eat theirs up on the hill.”

  He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “Well, it seems like you’ve got a decision to make, Doris. Do you wanna starve, but keep your house with a hilltop view? Or do you wanna live in the valley with a full belly? Hmm? And what’s so wrong with the valley, Doris? The Lord says, ’Consider the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin…’”

  “But Reverend Sykes,” she said, voice quavering, “what if the valley is flooded? And why should you have to choose?” She was already near tears, and if she continued in this vein, whatever she said would surely start her crying.

  “Doris,” he said. He reached across the desk and placed her hands in his, holding them solemnly. “This is about those marches and sit-ins, isn’t it? Now I know there’s Dr. King out there,” he said, making the name sound like a fad, “calling himself preaching. But do you want to be with all those girls and boys who’d go to jail in a second? Not even caring how much their mamas and daddies have to pay to get ’em out. Do you want that?”

  The answer seemed to be no, but it got caught in her throat, like a hummingbird. She finally said, “They’re only asking to be treated equal with white folks. Like how God would treat them. That’s why the other churches support the sit-ins.”

  Reverend Sykes let go of her hands and kicked his feet up on the desk. “And these other churches. I suppose they’re Baptist and A.M.E.? Now, them folks think you can sin on Saturday night and sing hungover with the choir Sunday morning. Did you see that mother of that unsaved family that came in on New Year’s? That woman! Coming to church in a red dress, of all things.”

  Doris hadn’t noticed any such woman, she’d been so surprised to see Olivia in the pews. But she looked hard at the Reverend and said, “Yes. I remember. The night t
he Lord was supposed to come.”

  “TODAY,” Livia said, “you’ll be sick.” This was the Tuesday after Doris had spoken with Reverend Sykes. After Mr. Fott’s class, Livia took Doris by the crook of her elbow, steering her away from third-period French.

  Livia played hooky all the time, and though Doris knew this was what Livia had in mind, knew it was wrong, there was something thrilling about riding in a car with someone besides her parents, going someplace she knew would not be church.

  “I can’t,” Doris said, though she knew she would.

  “Alice is already waiting in the car.” Alice, another girl in History class, spoke to Livia because speaking to Livia always got you noticed. Alice had begun to dress like Livia, one time even wearing a pillbox hat to class.

  Livia drove a turquoise-and-white Mercury Park Lane, a far cry from Doris’s father’s Hupmobile. They saw Splendor in the Grass at the Vogue, Livia sitting in the colored balcony with Doris. Finally Alice came up, too. It was the second movie Doris had seen since her family had joined the church. The first had been a French movie she saw for extra credit, the one time she’d gone against the church’s teachings without confessing what she’d done.

  They drove from St. Matthews to Germantown, covering the city. When they got to Newburg, Alice let out a long sigh. “I bought my dress for the Winter Dance,” she said, turning to Livia. “It’s a long satin sheath with roses on either side of the straps. The straps are that minty green color everyone’s wearing, but the rest is one long flesh-colored sheath. Mama would die if she saw it, but what’s bought is bought.”

  “Flesh colored?” Doris said.

  “I know! Scandalous!”

  “You mean, the color of your flesh?” Doris said.

  “Well, who else’s would it be?” Alice looked to Livia as if searching for a sane opinion.