by Danzy Senna
From the back of the house, Cassie could hear the glass door sliding open, Duncan coming inside, whistling. She couldn’t let him find her here, couldn’t let him see how far it had gone.
“We don’t want you,” she whispered into the night. “The answer is no.” She hesitated, then hissed into the lashing rain: “Go away.”
She could hear Penny’s bewildered shout, “Lots of people would give their eyeteeth—” before it was cut short by the sound of the closing door.
The Land of Beulah
The bitch was a mystery. She didn’t look mixed, more like some breed that hadn’t yet been discovered. Strangers on the street were forever trying to guess her background. They studied her appearance and behavior for clues, but with each guess her identity seemed to shift. In the face of such uncertainty, people saw what they wanted to see. Black folks thought she was mostly rottweiler. White people swore she was a Gordon setter. Puerto Ricans usually guessed an unlikely blend, such as German shepherd and miniature poodle, while the Arab guys at the bodega predicted she would grow into a wolf. The Korean grocer kept his distance, swearing she was the same kind of rare, vicious foxhound that had bitten him as a child.
Jackie wasn’t sure who to believe, or whether she cared. Mixing, she understood, was a game of risk; a mutt could turn out pretty, or pretty damn ugly. The bitch had won at least that round of Russian roulette. She was lovely: shiny black fur, long satiny ears, and little brown dots above her eyes that gave her a perpetual look of fierce concentration.
Jackie had stumbled upon the dog quite by accident, one autumn afternoon while she was out jogging. Brooklyn was almost beautiful that day, a frenzy of disparate colors along brownstone-lined streets. But Flatbush Avenue was as ugly as ever. Seasonless, it stretched out before her, a clutter of extinguished signs and dented vehicles. Jackie moved fast, trying not to notice the men who beckoned to her, gesturing to their loins as if offering fruit for sale. She kept her eyes fixed instead on a giant billboard ahead. It was an advertisement for Newport cigarettes, but there were no cigarettes in the picture. Instead, it showed an ecstatic black woman holding a pin to the gigantic pink bubble emerging from her boyfriend’s mouth. His eyes were wide open in mock fright. The words across the bottom of the billboard read: “Alive with Pleasure!” Jackie found the image disturbing and looked away. That’s when she glimpsed the puppy.
It stood out, incongruous, a spot of life amid the urban squalor. It was tied to a metal pole by an extension cord, so tightly that it couldn’t properly sit or stand. Yet it grinned and squirmed excitedly at the sight of Jackie approaching.
Attached to the dog’s collar was a piece of torn cardboard with a message crudely scrawled in orange marker: TAKE ME HOME, it said.
Jackie felt a surge of pity for the creature that took her by surprise. She reminded herself that the problem wasn’t hers to solve. After all, there were stray mongrels all over Brooklyn, scrawny, mangy creatures who wandered through traffic, wearing brindled coats and crazed, terrified grins, searching for some pack that had long since disbanded. She’d heard on the news that the problem was worst in autumn. When the weather began to change, people grew tired of the puppies they had enjoyed all summer and set them loose on the city. Jackie had noticed them everywhere—in parks, under bridges, in doorways of abandoned buildings. She’d also noticed the women who saved them. Stray women. Jackie had glimpsed them around her neighborhood, wandering through traffic, wearing sensible shoes and foundationless faces, tugged along by a pack of dirty mongrels. Jackie wasn’t one of them.
Yet as she stared down at the creature wearing the pitiful sign, she had to wonder if it had been placed in her path for a reason. She was recently single, unhappy, homesick for some land she couldn’t quite remember. One year into her job search she was still temping. She lived alone. She exercised alone. She ate her dinner alone at night in front of rented movies. She occasionally went to parties alone and left alone, nobody with whom to talk over the evening. Sunday mornings were the worst. She awoke awash with grief, imagining a city full of couples frolicking playfully under puffy duvets, surrounded by newspapers and pastel mugs containing pale, sweet coffee.
Jackie leaned down and began to struggle with the extension cord, attempting to free the puppy. She heard somebody yell, “Suckah!” and whipped her head around to see who had spoken. A grown man on a child-size bicycle cruised down the sidewalk in her direction. He leaned forward with his elbows raised to his sides like chicken wings, his knees pumping up to his shoulders. He didn’t meet her gaze and she wondered if she was imagining things. But when she turned back to the puppy, she heard it again. “Suckah!” She looked over her shoulder, but the man had already whizzed past and was cruising down the hill, out of sight.
A few minutes later, Jackie stumbled up Fulton Avenue toward her building, carrying the trembling animal. She felt flushed with Good Samaritan pride and couldn’t help grinning goofily at strangers. They didn’t smile back. A teenage boy loitering in front of Kansas Fried Chicken shouted out, “Don’t your dog know how to walk?” Farther up the road, two old Caribbean women shuffled past her and one of them muttered, “Now that’s what I call devotion.” Jackie sensed sarcasm in her tone, but she smiled anyway, as if the woman had meant it.
It had been two and a half months since she’d been dumped. Kyle was his name, but everyone called him Kip. He was tall, light-skinned, and dreadlocked, with a mole the shape of Italy on the small of his back. He had gone to prep school all his life, and had only late in college discovered his negritude. Now he was a stockbroker. He claimed he wasn’t really working for the Man: He was just making money so that later, when he joined the revolution, he’d have something to offer.
When Kip told her it was over, Jackie had been taken by surprise, but as she thought it over she saw that there had been warning signs. Every time he saw her he’d found fault with something about her: her feet were callused when he touched them, her breath smelled of garlic, she had a pimple on her chin. He had refused to hold her hand when they walked through black neighborhoods, explaining that while he knew she was black, strangers might think otherwise.
Jackie was the product of a black saxophone-playing father and a white soul-singer mother. She’d come out looking like the missing link between Sicily and Libya. Cabdrivers liked to claim her as part of their race just before they asked her if she was married. In the summertime, she was the color of well-steeped tea. In the winter, she was paler, as if a dollop of milk had been added, although her hair, a tangled mass of wiry curls, always gave her away. Kip had liked her to wear it out around her face, so that people would know.
Kip didn’t believe in race mixing. He thought brothers who dated white girls should be called out in the street.
“But what if they really love each other?” Jackie had replied weakly, thinking of her own white mother and black father, who’d hated one another for as long as she could remember. “I mean, live and let live, right?”
He laughed at her and patted the top of her head gingerly. “There are casualties in every revolution.”
He’d broken up with her at a soul-food restaurant in Brooklyn, over a shared dinner of ribs, greens, and macaroni and cheese. “You can walk away from this anytime,” he said out of the blue, sweeping his arm around the restaurant, although she knew it was blackness he was referring to. “For me, there’s no way out.”
She rested her gaze on the baby-back ribs in front of her. They looked gruesome to her all of a sudden, evidence of a crime.
After Kip told her it was over, he walked her to the subway, chivalrous till the bitter end. It was cold outside, and an old man dressed in a three-piece suit stood on the corner nearby, waving a Bible and raving about homosexuality. Kip had buttoned up Jackie’s coat in an oddly paternal gesture, then punched her lightly on the chin and said, “Don’t worry, Jack, I’m doing you a favor.”
She sucked her teeth and looked away. “What’s that supposed to mean?” She longed for the
comfort of her bed. She would cry later, under her duvet, out of his sight. For the moment, at least, she had to be hard.
Kip shrugged and stared at the ground, as if reading her future in the patchwork of chicken bones and candy wrappers. “Just wait and see,” he said. “You’ll end up with a white boy named Jake, an architect or maybe a painter. You’ll move to Nyack together and live in a big farmhouse. You’ll remember me as a phase you were going through. Just wait and see. Girls like you never stick.”
Jackie wanted to remind him that it was he who was leaving her. But instead she simply listened and wondered if what he said was true. Would she end up with a white boy named Jake, in a farmhouse in Nyack? It didn’t sound so bad, especially the part about the farmhouse, but she had tried to look disgusted by the life he’d described.
Hidden underneath the sign, hanging from the dog’s collar, was a silver tag engraved with the name “Beulah.” Strangely, the tag listed no contact number, as if the dog’s former owners had wanted to ensure her identity, but not her safe return. Jackie vaguely remembered a television show her grandmother used to watch that starred a black maid named Beulah. The name seemed demeaning somehow, like Aunt Jemima. But it was the only name the puppy had. Jackie felt obliged to keep it.
She called all her girlfriends to tell them what she’d found. That was a mistake.
“I give it a week,” said one.
“A dog in the city?” shrieked another. “Yuck, picking up shit ain’t for me.”
Another one warned, “Watch out. You know what happens when a woman gets a dog.”
“What?” Jackie asked, with a stab of fear.
“She stops being lonely. And you know what happens when she stops being lonely?”
“What?”
“She stops looking for a man.”
Jackie shook her head and told them all they were wrong.
But when she looked around her apartment, she felt a shiver of horror. A soiled maxipad had been shredded across the kitchen floor. Black paw prints were smeared along the white wall of the hallway. A shoe—a silver open-toed pump Jackie had worn at last year’s birthday party—was now a mangled allusion to its former self. She tried to remain good-natured about it. She’d just saved a creature’s life, after all. But she couldn’t help feeling she was losing her grip on something she hadn’t even known she was clutching until now.
That first evening, Jackie walked into her bedroom to find Beulah peeing on her bed, a yellow puddle spread across the snowy white duvet. The dog smiled up at Jackie with evident relief. Jackie felt something—a clicking in her brain—she’d never felt before. In one swift motion, she picked Beulah up by the scruff of her neck and flung her to the floor. The puppy fell with a thud, then rose, whimpering, to her feet. Jackie kicked her sharply in the ribs, so that she fell again with a yelp. Jackie hungered to do more, but Beulah ran out of the room, tail between her legs.
Later, when Jackie had cooled down, she found Beulah hiding under the kitchen table. She reached an arm out to pet her, but Beulah shrank out of her reach. Jackie spent the rest of the evening showering the puppy with affection—kisses, tickles, a bouncing ball—feeling that she’d never loved anyone more, and possibly never would.
She promised herself it wouldn’t happen again. She had never thought of herself as ill-tempered, and she knew you weren’t supposed to hit animals. She tried to be content with hissing obscenities at Beulah, but several times that weekend she lost control. She slapped the puppy on its butt when it tore her fancy sheets, and jerked its leash too hard when they went walking down the street, so that the puppy’s body lunged from side to side. Jackie found that small acts of violence—harmless ones, really—helped to quell her rage.
Monday morning, Jackie dawdled around the house. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Beulah alone. But if she didn’t get to the temp agency by eight, all the good assignments would be taken. As she put on her panty hose, cheap pin-striped business suit, heels and lipstick, Beulah watched from a corner. Under the dog’s scrutiny, Jackie’s outfit suddenly seemed tartish to her, a whore’s uniform. She left the dog food and water and toys, and whispered, “I’m sorry” as she went out the door.
At the temp office, black and Latino women of all hues were lined up in seats against the wall, filling out applications and sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. Television sets blared from high in the corners, each displaying a different morning news personality. All the other temps were dressed to the hilt in four-inch heels and impeccable hairstyles. Jackie felt dowdy in her ill-fitting suit and scraggly hair. The temp agency had put out several boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts, but only jelly-filled doughnut holes remained. Jackie shoved one in her mouth and chewed unhappily as she waited for Vanessa, her agent, to find her work.
Fifteen minutes later, Vanessa—a whirling dervish of bottle-blond hair and orange polyester—came flying out of the office holding a clipboard. She scanned the row of female bodies, tapping her foot and snapping her gum in time. Jackie wondered, not for the first time, if she was coked up. Her eyes fixed on Jackie.
“Jackie!” she shrieked, as if they were old college buddies.
Jackie slumped low into her chair, embarrassed. She was always one of the first to get hired, no matter how late she arrived. She’d divined the pecking order immediately: lightest and whitest first. Dark-skinned girls were always the last to go, no matter how fast their typing speed. She kept her eyes to the floor as she followed Vanessa into the back office, not wanting to see the other women cut their eyes at her.
Vanessa sent her to a Swiss bank on Park Avenue, where she was tucked in a corner with a stack of loan applications to enter into the computer. Her trainer was a small beige man named Chuck. Most permanent employees treated temps with contempt, but Chuck was friendly—too friendly. He was giddy, like somebody who has been deprived of air and sunlight and has sat for too long in the same position. That morning he spent over an hour showing Jackie how to enter the loan figures into the computer, a task so simple it needed no explanation. He sat too close, his knee pressed against hers, and kept resting his clammy hand on her exposed elbow when he wanted to underscore a point. He smelled of printer ink. When he could find nothing more to tell her about the data, he shuffled back to his own cubicle, giggling—about what, she couldn’t imagine.
If Vanessa had taught Jackie anything over the past year, it was to work at a turtle’s pace. The longer you took with your tasks, the longer the job would last. You couldn’t be too slow, or they would notice. Jackie had worked out a perfect pace—the pace of somebody competent but not particularly bright—but today she worked more slowly than usual, distracted by thoughts of the puppy. She wondered what Beulah was doing. She imagined her dressed up in Jackie’s workout clothes, slumped human-style on the couch in front of a talk show, eating a bag of potato chips. She smiled to herself at the thought. She began to doodle a picture of Beulah in exactly that scene, but felt someone watching her.
She looked up. Chuck was smirking at her from his cubicle. His feet were propped on his desk, and he leaned back in his chair. He held a sweating can of Fresca at his waist, just above his crotch, and she glimpsed a distinct bulge beneath his khaki pants. When he spoke, his voice came out croaky, like an adolescent boy’s.
“Did you get laid last night?”
She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
“You have that post-fuck glow,” he hissed.
The bulge in his pants seemed to move slightly. His own face glowed, like that of a wax figurine. She wondered what would happen if she held a match up to his skin, whether it would melt or burn.
He tilted his chair back at a more precarious angle. She watched him, willing him to fall and bite off his tongue. After a moment he seemed to see something on her face that made his smile disappear and the bulge in his pants withdraw from sight, like a gopher disappearing into a hole. He turned, quite abruptly, back to his computer, and Jackie could see that the tips of his ears were red. She too
turned back to her screen, only to see her own reflection—pale, tense, her eyes dark hollows—staring out of its glassy surface. She whispered: “You’ve all been a terrible disappointment.” She didn’t know who the words were aimed at or what they meant.
On the way home from work that evening she stopped at a pet shop in the Fulton Mall. The mall was really just a street in downtown Brooklyn made up mostly of sneaker shops, sportswear stores, and fast-food restaurants. Jackie generally tried to avoid it. She called the mall Child Abuse Row, for its ever-present stream of teenaged mothers slapping their dazed children while Jackie looked on in horror. But Jackie remembered that there was a small, anemic pet shop at the far end of the mall, and she wanted to buy Beulah a gift to make up for leaving her alone all day.
The store was devoid of customers and smelled like a hamster cage, warm and dank and fertile. In the back sat a row of puppies—purebreds. They looked perfect, too cute, like the puppies of calendars and greeting cards. Jackie noticed how much calmer than Beulah they all were, almost languid as they stared at her from behind their plastic walls. She peered in at a beautiful golden retriever. It lay on its side, eyelids drooping. She tapped on the glass but it just blinked at her, unmoving.
Jackie wandered the chewies aisle, searching for gifts. There were piggy snozzles, along with pig’s ears and hooves—a use for every part of an animal’s body. She resisted the bully sticks—dried bull’s penises—but left the store with a Nylabone, a piggy snozzle, and a little squeaking mouse doll in her purse.
She limped toward home, her toes crushed together in the tips of her work shoes, and wished she’d changed into sneakers at the office. All around her, women moved wearily toward their homes, and she felt herself to be part of a long and sad parade. It wasn’t quite dark yet, the sky a swirl of light and dark purples. It looked heavy to Jackie, like a fruit swollen past edibility, on the verge of bursting. As she turned onto her block, it slipped into black. She breathed relief, released from some nameless dread.