by Danzy Senna
One Sunday in late February, Jackie stumbled up Flatbush Avenue after Beulah on their way to the park, their weekend ritual. The sky was a flat slate gray, and the frigid wind burned her cheeks. She hadn’t dressed for the weather, and her gloveless fingers were numb around Beulah’s leash.
A couple in the distance caught her eye. They were unremarkable except that the man was black and the woman was white. The man wore jeans and a red windbreaker, his head shaved neatly to his skull. The woman was tall and blond and wore jeans and motorcycle boots. They spoke to one another conspiratorially, one head tilted toward the other. Jackie stared at them, thinking for a moment of her parents. She wondered if they’d ever been in cahoots that way.
When the couple was a few feet away, the man looked up. Only then did Jackie recognize Kip.
He looked good, better than when they’d been together. She’d always disliked his dreadlocks; they’d made him seem vain and girlish. She’d fantasized about cutting them off. His new short cut made him look more vulnerable, naked, as if all the illusions had been cut away along with the hair. He was laughing at something the white girl had said. Jackie could see the girl better now. She was attractive in a flawed sort of way, with a slightly hawkish nose and a large mouth. She reminded Jackie of all the white girls she’d ever grown to hate—the ones with a casual, moneyed confidence that always made Jackie feel awkward and prudish in their midst.
Beulah, straining at the leash, half dragged Jackie to a little plot of dirt where a tree was planted. She squatted and began to take an immense shit in her humpbacked position.
Kip was upon them now, and as he passed he glanced up casually in Jackie’s direction. She held her breath, waiting for him to smile, or frown, or blush with embarrassment beneath the light brown of his skin. But he only looked past her at the dog, and sneered slightly. Jackie held a plastic bag tightly in her hand, and the sweat made it slippery. Kip’s eyes moved over Jackie again, but showed no recognition.
They moved past her. She watched their backs as they strolled away down the avenue. A block farther on, she saw them disappear into a diner. She recalled going there once or twice with Kip, for a big bacon-and-egg breakfast after a leisurely morning in bed. Jackie leaned against the slender tree, but it bent back with her weight. Had Kip simply not recognized her, or had he just pretended not to notice her? She wasn’t certain. She left Beulah’s mess where it was, just this once, and followed Beulah up the street.
The dog park was more crowded than usual; the atmosphere was raucous. Balloons and a small folding table had been set up in the center of the grass, and music played from a portable tape deck. The dogs and their owners crowded around the table, talking and laughing. Kabuki wore a pointy party hat. Jackie remembered Doreen mentioning something about Kabuki’s birthday party. Nan had whispered afterward that she wouldn’t be caught dead at such a ridiculous event. They’d laughed about it together. Now Jackie could see that some of the dogs were trying to get the party hats off by pawing at their heads, but most of them were gathered in front of the folding table, where the owners were doling out treats, just like at a real toddler birthday party.
Beulah romped off to join the group. Jackie watched as one of the Weather Girls waved to her, then attempted to get a party hat on Beulah’s head. Another one of them spotted Jackie and shouted, “Join the fun!”
Jackie pretended she hadn’t heard and shoved her hands in her pockets, looked at the ground. She couldn’t help thinking about Kip and the girl. She imagined them getting married someday, beginning to look alike over the years, the way couples often did. She imagined they’d have children who looked like her—butterscotch babies. She could rouse no anger. The idea of their union was oddly comforting.
She must have stood thinking a long time, because when she looked up, the park was empty. The party had disappeared. The only evidence that anybody had been there was a lone party hat on the grass, and a bright orange balloon stuck high in a distant tree. The cold had turned Jackie’s face into something foreign and rubbery. She could no longer feel it. She looked at her watch. It was way past nine. Leash laws had gone into effect. She would get a ticket if she didn’t comply.
In the distance she spotted Beulah. The dog darted ecstatically through the trees, hatless now, a lone speck of black and brown, oblivious to the cold and to her master.
Jackie called softly. “Beulah, Beulah, Beulah.”
Then a bit louder—Beulah!—the way they beckoned the maid on the TV show her grandmother liked to watch.
Beulah heard that one. She turned, her ears pricked up. She grinned, wiggling her bottom in excitement, then pranced behind a cluster of trees. She wanted to play tag. She wanted to humiliate Jackie once again.
Jackie felt a dull clicking in her brain, a throbbing in her gums, and swore she’d kick the dog’s ass when she caught her. She’d beat her right here, in the dog park. She didn’t care who saw her. Nan could call the cops for all she cared. There were such things as bad dogs, not just bad owners. It went both ways.
She began to stride across the grass toward Beulah, her hands clenched into fists by her side, but halfway there something went out of her. She felt tired. Her throat hurt and her chest ached, as if she were coming down with something. She watched Beulah in the distance as she ran insane circles around a tree, faster than seemed possible. She ran so fast she blurred, so fast it almost looked like there was more than one of her, like the tigers in Little Black Sambo, who ran so fast they turned into the butter that Sambo, along with his mother and father, Mumbo and Jumbo, slathered onto pancakes for their triumphal meal. Jackie imagined herself chasing Beulah until both she and the dog turned into butter. She too would melt and disappear.
She spoke the dog’s name one more time in the weakest of whispers. Beulah. Then she turned and trudged away, up the slope of mud and grass toward the big road. At the crosswalk, she felt something heavy shift inside of her, a sense of dread stronger than she’d ever felt before, and turned to look behind her—but the dog was not there and the feeling was gone as quickly as it had come over her.
She lay on a table in the back room of a midtown salon. She was on her lunch break from her new temp job at a law firm. A Russian woman stood hunched over her, concentrating on her eyebrows. She was giving Jackie an expression of perpetual surprise. Odd, Jackie thought, that women sought to look shocked. Not coy or delighted, but shocked. It was as if they wanted to look frozen in the moment just before something happens.
The Russian woman was artificially pale, all bleached out. Her dye job seemed to mock her dark, Asiatic complexion. She didn’t talk much, but when she pulled up Jackie’s skirt to start waxing her legs, she whistled through her teeth.
“When the last time you wax?”
Jackie glanced down at her body. Her legs looked strong and useful, unintentionally toned and muscular. It had been months and months since she’d touched them.
The woman shook her head, then took the spatula and stuck it into the pot of warm wax. She stirred it for a minute, then spread the wax along Jackie’s leg, like butter on bread. It felt nice, warm and soft, but quickly hardening. Wax always felt so nice going on, Jackie thought, and so bad coming off. Her eyes began to water in anticipation.
Replacement Theory
The last time I saw Janice she was standing on the lawn in front of the house. The kid, Bryant, was crawling around in the grass, pausing every so often to sit back on his knees and shriek at the moving van. “Twuck! Twuck!” He was eighteen months and still not walking, a source of great worry and embarrassment for Janice. The doctor she’d brought him to didn’t think it was a problem. He assured her that the child would, someday, get off his hands and knees. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal except that Bryant was unusually tall, more the size of an average three-year-old, and so the sight of him moving around on all fours, like a baby, was unsettling.
I was on my way to pick up Oscar from school, and was embarrassed when she spotted me across the s
treet.
Janice was dressed that day the way she always dressed, as if she was about to go on a cruise, in white jeans, a bright gauzy top, low-heeled sandals, her hair a mop of black curls. She had lost a lot of weight and looked better than ever, the way divorcing women so often do—one of life’s tiny justices.
Janice watched the moving men come in and out of the house carrying boxes, and she looked almost amused, as if this was funny, what was happening to her right now—the unraveling of her life. Her husband, Greg, was already living with the new woman and Janice and the kid were moving out of town, starting over on the East Coast. Rodney and I had been looking for a house for over a year, the whole time we were friends with them. We’d turned up our noses at one place after another. When we learned that they were breaking up and putting their house on the market, we both had the same thought: This was the house we’d been waiting for. It seemed almost serendipitous the way the timing worked out.
Still, when she waved, I felt caught somehow, like a vulture circling its prey.
“I’m almost finished here,” she said with a short laugh. “You can get the key from Greg tomorrow.”
“No rush,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t coming to see if you were gone. I was just on my way to get Oscar from school.” I nodded my head up the block. It was the same toddler program Bryant had been scheduled to start in the fall. You practically had to apply at birth to get your child in. When Janice had canceled, a spot had opened up for Oscar. Now Bryant would be going somewhere else, a Montessori in Washington, D.C.
The moving men came past now carrying a giant mirror. It was hidden inside padded blankets, but I could tell what it was from the size and shape. I remembered it had been propped in the entryway to the house. I remembered liking it, the bold narcissism of it sitting there, taking up all that wall space, instead of art. Janice mentioned she might be leaving a few things, belongings too cumbersome to drag across the country, but this apparently wasn’t one of them. I watched, disappointed, as it disappeared inside the truck.
The house was much bigger than the apartment where we’d been living—and the furniture we owned wasn’t as nice as theirs. I was the first to admit it.
Beside me, Janice sighed. “It hit me this weekend,” she said, crossing her arms. “It’s really over.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “About everything.”
She gave me that short laugh again. “Well, at least something good has come out of it. At least you guys are getting a nice house.”
“Yeah, well . . .” I said, but let the words drift off.
“I told Greg last night, ‘You discard people.’ I told him, ‘You treat people like things.’ He agreed. I feel sorry for the new woman. I really do. He’s going to do the same thing to her. Just wait and see.”
“I’m sure you’re right. God, what a jerk,” I said, but my mind was up the street, on Oscar. I couldn’t linger here, chatting, if I was going to be on time. But it seemed rude to breeze off.
The moving men came out carrying pieces of the bed frame. Janice watched them and laughed again, a raspy sound this time. “What was I thinking? That’s what I keep asking myself. Shouldn’t I have sensed he had a problem before I went off and married him? Had a kid with him?”
“No, you couldn’t have known,” I muttered, staring up the block toward the school. It was starting to seem like a long conversation.
“He’s addicted to new relationships. He thrives on that shit, the gifts, the thrilling sex, the six-hour-fucking-getting-to-know-you phone calls. He only likes the beginnings of stories. He likes to be the hero.”
“That’s not good,” I said, though really I was thinking it sounded fun, all that stuff that came with beginnings.
“So stupid of me,” Janice went on. “My mother told me. She said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry a black man.’ ” Janice glanced at me after she said it, I guess checking to see how it might sit with me. “I know, I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t say things like that. It’s not nice. But it’s true. Black men can’t be trusted. That’s just a fact. I never even dated one before Greg.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded. I was really eager to go now.
But she wasn’t finished. She fingered her curls as she spoke about a psychic she’d seen in Venice. “He told me the next man I’m going to meet is going to be a single parent. Somebody blond. Somebody into yoga. He told me to hang around in school yards and yoga studios.”
“That sounds great. Listen, I’d really better get going.”
We stood for a moment, silence filling the air between us. Off to the side, I could see Bryant crawling across the porch, getting under the feet of the moving men.
I hugged Janice stiffly, thanking her for the recent helpful e-mails about the alarm system, the satellite dish, the Internet provider. We promised to keep in touch. She said she would shoot me an e-mail when she got to D.C.
As I started away, I thought about what she’d said about black men. And I thought about how I hadn’t even known Greg was black for the longest time. He was tall, with wavy brown hair and pale skin, sharp features, and he always seemed to be grinning, his large teeth and gums exposed. I thought she was the black one and that they were an interracial couple. After I found out (somehow it came up in casual conversation) I could sort of see it, but it was funny how long I’d gone seeing them as something they weren’t.
Halfway up the block, I turned back once more to wave good-bye, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was holding both of Bryant’s hands and trying to force him to walk, but his legs dangled like wet noodles, and he was laughing with his head tilted up to the sky.
Our moving day came and Janice was gone. Not a sign of her and Greg was left in the house, not a single roll of toilet paper. I stood in the center of the empty living room, thinking how I could have never imagined living in a house like this back when I was poor and single.
I’d lived in squalor for most of my twenties, in apartments with roaches and bad carpeting, sleeping on a mattress on the floor with a milk crate turned upside down as my nightstand. I’d subsisted on Chinese takeout, ramen noodles, black beans and rice. I had not known comfort until I met Rodney.
I was thirty-four at the time and had just ended another two-year relationship. I’d had a whole string of them—they all ended at two years, like an expiration date, a string of willowy boys in grungy jeans who split the bill down the middle at restaurants and went to therapy and had been forbidden to play with guns as children.
Rodney was different. He was older than me by fifteen years, and richer than me—a real adult man with a mortgage and a secretary and cuff links and shiny black shoes. He gave no thought to using valet parking and only flew business class. He was an attorney. A long time ago he’d been a public defender but now he only took on private clients. I’d met him one night at a wine bar where I was out with a girlfriend. I noticed him immediately, sitting alone in his suit, tie pulled loose. He caught me looking and bought me a drink from across the room, just like the men do in television movies. My friend made herself scarce and I joined him at his table. We talked about his work and ultimately about his marriage. The ring was hard not to notice—it was thick platinum and glinted in the candlelight. He told me it was over. They still lived together, still slept in the same bed, but didn’t have sex anymore. He wanted to leave her but he didn’t know how. They’d been trying to have a baby for years and had been unable to. Every time his wife got pregnant—it had happened five times—she miscarried. The last one had been the worst. She’d carried the child for eighteen weeks. They had learned it was a boy already, and had named him Noah. They went on a weekend trip to Santa Barbara to celebrate their first time reaching the second trimester. They were out shopping for clothes at a fancy maternity shop called Due when Rodney heard an animal groan from the dressing room. He knew what it was and put his face in his hands and just sat there waiting for her to emerge.
We began meeting secretly for wine at th
is bar. I learned only his wife’s name—Linda—and that they had gone to law school together. He told me they were miserable together but that it would look bad if he left her now—as if he was leaving her because she had failed to make him a baby.
I told him something I remembered from a meditation class I’d taken years before. What matters is your intention. If your intention is pure, then you can be sure you are doing the right thing. “As long as you’re leaving her in the right spirit,” I told him, “it doesn’t matter what she chooses to think. You can’t control that.”
After he ended things with her, we never heard from Linda again. Turns out that when there are no children, divorces are clean. There is no reason to ever speak again.
Rodney was not a man who liked to be alone. My friend, the one who had been beside me at the bar the night I met him, told me, “Men are like monkeys swinging through a jungle. They don’t let go of the vine until they’ve already gotten a grip on the next one.” I was only thirty-four but I was frightened if I waited too long—if I was too picky—I would wake up one day and discover it was too late. I didn’t yet have a career but I wanted a home more. Overnight I went from living like a squatter to bourgeois comfort. Rodney’s bachelor pad—small but plush, with shining stainless-steel appliances—was the fanciest place I’d ever lived. When he was at work, I would walk around the house stroking things, lying in the giant bed, feeling like an immigrant maid at her first job in America.