by Danzy Senna
Back at my boyfriend’s apartment, I brush my teeth and get undressed and slip into his bed. I lie there with all the lights on, waiting for him as he does his nightly ritual.
Every night it’s the same. He checks his e-mail, takes off his white shirt and khaki slacks, does a series of yoga sun salutations, brushes and flosses his teeth, fills up a water bottle, places it on his nightstand, then sets the alarm so that it will play NPR at 6:30 in the morning.
Even his weekends are ritualized. Tomorrow is Saturday and I know exactly what will happen. We will go to the farmers market at ten a.m. to shop for his week’s groceries, and then to a noon movie at the big theater in Union Square, where we will sneak into one more movie than we paid for, and then go back to his apartment, where we will cook an early dinner. Afterward he will leave me at his place while he goes to the gym, where he will do something on a machine while he reads the newspaper or a magazine. After he finishes on the machine, he will come home and go through his night ritual. Maybe we will have sex. Maybe we won’t. That’s the wild card.
The first time I ever slept at his place, I woke in the morning to the smell of something cooking. I could hear something bubbling on the stove. I saw through the door to the kitchen that he was standing shirtless at the stove, holding a wooden spoon over a big steaming pot.
“What are you making?” I called out to him from the bed.
“Porridge,” he called back, without looking up.
Porridge. The word reminded me of a German fairy tale.
He brought it to me in bed, on a tray, in a big steaming bowl. He said it was a family recipe, a Canadian breakfast of champions, and that if I ate it every day I would live a long life. It was gray, like oatmeal, but it was heartier, with beans and seeds and an assortment of grains mixed in. I wasn’t sure I liked the taste, but I liked being served it in bed, the steam-fogged windowpane across the room, the blurred and distant world beyond. As I ate the porridge, I understood it was a better breakfast for me than black coffee and macaroni and cheese, and I had the sense that I was finally doing something good and right by being here with him, and that my life was turning a corner.
Now, as he makes tooth-brushing noises in the bathroom, I stare into the brightly lit bedroom. I don’t have my glasses on and the room looks grainy and oddly still, like an old color photograph.
I make a list in my head about him. Details I might remember about him someday when he is gone. His skin—the translucent paleness of it. How the first time I lay naked beside him in bed I thought I finally looked dark-skinned next to somebody. How skilled he is at Sunday crossword puzzles, how fast he can finish them, how confused and angry they make me when I try to do them. I think of other things about him too, but in the past tense now: how he never got cold like a normal person—how he could wear T-shirts outside in the winter because, he told me, he had Canadian blood. The time he insisted on playing an old, crackling cassette tape of the “I Have a Dream” speech on Martin Luther King’s birthday. How I sat listening beside him on the couch, like a kid in too-tight Sunday school shoes, knees pressed together, hands folded in lap, cheeks burning. And I remember too the time six months ago when we borrowed that little boy, the son of a friend of his, and went for a walk with him in the park. How acutely aware I was that everybody we passed thought the kid was ours. How my boyfriend kept pointing out how cute the kid was, and how I nodded and smiled but secretly didn’t think the kid was cute. Sometimes kids aren’t cute. Later that day, on the subway ride home, holding hands, he said to me that he liked the names Tristan for a boy and Madeline for a girl. And how it took me a minute to realize he was talking about a baby we might have together. And how surprisd I was to realize he felt our afternoon with the kid had been a success. He thought it brought us closer together, closer to completion. Realizing, not for the first time, that my face didn’t actually show what I was thinking.
I suddenly feel sad, like I’ve already lost something, and when he walks into the room I say out loud, “I’m scared.”
“Scared of what?” he says, sliding into bed beside me.
I turn to him and whisper through the darkness, “I don’t know. Everything seems so temporary.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and I think he’s going to say something about what happened this morning, about the man who jumped, but he just kisses me on the forehead and says, “Shush. Let’s get some sleep.”
Moments later, his eyes are closed and he’s snoring.
I lie awake for a long time in the darkness looking at his face as if trying to commit it to memory. In his sleep, his chin goes slack and his face looks irritated, or maybe just bored.
I think about the man who jumped. Did he drink coffee this morning? Did he check his e-mail? Who was on the elevator with him when he went up to the top? Did they chat? Did anybody in the building glance out the window at the exact moment he flew past? When he landed, was there garbage all around him? Were there pigeons? Was there blood, or did he just shatter inside, invisibly?
The Care of the Self
Livy paced the lobby of the hotel, eyeing the Indian artifacts encased in glass—kachina dolls and squat brown vases, dream catchers and beaded drums. A local pueblo owned the hotel. Engraved in stone above the main entrance were the tribe’s words for welcome: Mah-Waan, Mah-Waan. Christopher had pointed at the inscription when they came in and said, “My wine, my wine,” and now Livy could read it no other way.
From out on the patio she could hear Christopher’s voice.
“Where’s Dessa?” he kept calling through the air, over and over again. “Has anybody seen Dessa?” Then the inevitable, “There’s Dessa! You scared me!” followed by the child’s irrepressible laughter.
Peekaboo. It never failed to amuse the child. At ten months, she still believed that what she could see could not see her. She could not yet walk, but she could hold on to furniture and edge her chubby limbs along with quiet determination. Livy had read all the baby books and learned that Dessa was neither precocious nor delayed. She was in all respects an average ten-month-old, a fact that Livy found oddly comforting.
She checked her watch. Ramona was due to arrive on the airport shuttle any minute. Livy hadn’t seen her friend since they both lived in New York. It had only been three years, but in that short interval of time, everything had changed for both of them.
In New York, Ramona had been married to Julian, a music journalist with butterscotch skin and dreadlocks. And Livy had been single, the sidekick girlfriend they had invited over to their Brooklyn apartment for dinner on weekends. Livy would sit in a leather armchair entertaining them with tales of her disastrous dates, and Ramona and Julian would hold hands on their velvet couch and cluck their tongues and laugh at appropriate moments, telling her not to worry, she’d meet somebody, she just had to be patient and focus on making herself whole, because a good relationship was made of two wholes, not two halves.
Livy always left those dinners with Ramona and Julian more distressed than when she’d arrived, nearly bludgeoned by the happiness of their union. She even wondered some nights if the real reason they invited her over was to remind themselves that it was better to be married than to be alone like sad little Livy Thurman.
At the end of the night, Julian would insist on walking her out to her car, because as Ramona reminded her, a single woman on the street alone was vulnerable. Livy and Julian made awkward small talk once they were alone, and he always insisted on waiting on the curb, shivering in his shirtsleeves, until she’d started the engine and pulled away. She would drive home feeling worse than ever, imagining Julian going back up to the warmth of their apartment, joining his wife on the couch, the two of them drinking red wine and clucking their tongues in pity over her for a while before they retired to their bedroom to make love. She imagined that the specter of her own pathetic figure acted as a kind of aphrodisiac for them. After sex, they would spoon together under the duvet, and invisibly, silently, Julian’s sperm would swim at record s
peed toward Ramona’s ripe ovum, colliding to create a golden love child. Ramona had a black father and a Korean-white mother and Julian had a white father and a black mother. This cultural chaos made their union somehow more perfect in Livy’s eyes, more natural, more enviable.
Rarely in life could you locate the exact moment when everything changed—when the first domino tipped over—but in this case, it had been sharply, violently marked.
One February night Livy got a call from a weeping, nearly incoherent Ramona. She was in the emergency room, she told Livy through her tears. She had been walking home after work—three blocks from home—when something hard whacked her in the face. She had been confused, dizzy for a moment, and it took her a beat before she realized she was being attacked. Three girls—black girls no older than fifteen, with baby faces and slicked-back ponytails—descended on her with geriatric canes. They went at it, beating her for several minutes, shouting “fucking Rican” and “Dominican whore” and “white bitch”—a confused stream of racial epithets—before an old Jamaican man ran out of a store to stop it. The girls dispersed, whooping and laughing, in all directions. It was, the police told her, a gang initiation. They said somebody was probably videotaping the attack. Ramona had to have sixteen stitches in her forehead. She asked Livy to pick her up because she couldn’t reach Julian on his cell phone.
Livy rushed to the hospital and brought the shaking, battered Ramona back to her apartment. She tucked her into bed and sat on the couch waiting for Julian to come home. At some point Livy fell asleep, and when she woke it was morning and Ramona was sitting on the edge of the velvet sofa beside her, weeping. She looked worse than she had in the hospital. Her head had swollen and her face was twisted in anguish. Ramona told Livy this was the third time Julian had disappeared all night. He was with somebody. He had called to tell her he was with a man, someone named Cleavon whom he had met at a bar.
He hadn’t heard Ramona’s voice mail message and had blurted out his confession before she could tell him what had happened to her.
After the divorce, Ramona threw herself into her work with newfound ambition. She got a job at a law firm in midtown and worked late most nights. On the nights she wasn’t working, she was out with other lawyers, drinking in dark glittery bars or eating sushi in restaurants that Livy could not afford.
And Livy? Sad little Livy Thurman flew to Santa Fe one day in February to meet with a gallery owner who was interested in including her work in a group show. She recalled the drive from the airport in Albuquerque, how the dark clouds moving across the sky seemed to ride alongside her rental car like a herd of wild horses. In New York, weather just happened. Here, it announced itself from miles away. As she pulled into Santa Fe, she could see the storm cloud hovering over the distant mountains, could hear rolling thunder. But it had not rained until the afternoon—just in time for her meeting at the gallery. It rained so hard it made the town look blurred at the edges. She sat with the gallery owner, Christopher, in the bright white room looking over her slides, the smell of warmth and damp between them, the steady gray blur of rain outside that made them talk in hushed voices, near whispers, though they were alone.
When all the business talk was done and the rain had ceased, he suggested they go someplace for dinner. Outside, the streets felt empty, as if the crowds of tourists, along with the dust, had been washed away in the downpour. He led her on foot down winding side roads out of town, telling her of his childhood on an Arapaho reservation, of his German-Arapaho mother and his Scottish-Arapaho father, and of his hatred of Santa Fe for its wealth and its white people and its rows of Indian trinket sellers who were, he realized one day, like trinkets themselves. He hated yuppie centers like this, he said, and yet, he admitted, he was unsuited and unwilling to live anywhere else. Years before, he had been plucked from the rez for a scholarship to a prestigious university, and now he was a vegetarian who did yoga. He owned an art gallery. He’d gone all paleface, he said, to the point that he’d never be able to or want to go back to the rez.
He touched the small of her back when they crossed the street.
Now she was living with him under this mood ring of a sky and they had a baby and were thinking of trying for another just as soon as Dessa was weaned and sleeping through the night.
Somewhere in the hotel lobby, Christopher’s voice rang out. “Where’s Dessa? Has anybody seen Dessa?” And the child’s delighted laughter at having eluded him yet again.
The shuttle van arrived. Livy glanced at herself in the large mirror by the revolving doors, trying to see herself through Ramona’s eyes, anticipating what she would think of the new Livy. She weighed the same as she had before the baby, but she knew she did not look the same. The pounds had redistributed themselves—smaller ass, bigger belly, full breasts where there once had been none. She had looked like such a New Yorker before, thin, sardonic, with twenty variations of black in her wardrobe. When she dared wear color, it was subtle—or with a hint of irony. She wore high heels a lot back then, black high-heeled boots that left her feet aching. Now she stood in a yellow sundress and comfortable sandals, her once sleek and straightened hair gone back to its ringlet curls and pulled into a messy ponytail that Dessa couldn’t yank.
She looked tired. Exhaustion ringed her eyes. Christopher said he found her more beautiful than when he’d first met her that rainy day, but she felt—watching the van pull up to the curb outside—suddenly embarrassed by her lack of style. She wished she’d worn something more sophisticated, something to show Ramona that she had not ceased to care.
And there was Ramona now, getting help from the driver with one hand as she stepped out of the van in low-heeled sandals. With the other hand she held a cell phone, her eyes on the screen. She wore tight blue jeans, a black silky top, her dark curly hair now straight and cut in jagged layers around her face. She looked refreshed for somebody who had just gotten off an airplane.
She came toward Livy smiling, dragging a rolling suitcase behind her.
“Liv, oh my God, what a trip,” she said, putting the cell phone in her pocket. “Airplanes are like giant toilets in the sky, don’t you think?”
Livy laughed and held out her arms for a hug as it all came back to her, what they’d shared, what they’d liked about each other, who they’d been, how close they’d indeed been, almost like sisters. It was strange. Her new life was so different from the old life that she sometimes felt like a one-woman witness protection program: new man, new baby, new geography, new friends. And she had half convinced herself that the old friendships had not been so deep. But now, at the sight of Ramona’s face, she felt relief. Ramona was still the old Ramona, a little harder around the jaw, a little sadder around the eyes, but the same woman she’d loved. And this meant that Livy was still the same Livy, underneath the bright sundress and the western sky.
Christopher dragged Ramona’s giant suitcase across the gravel to the house while Livy unlatched Dessa from the car seat.
Ramona stood beside her, taking deep hungry breaths of the thin air.
“It’s so fucking sweet, Liv, really, to see you happy. And this baby!” She pinched Dessa’s cheek and made a loud, harsh kissing sound at the baby’s startled face. “Such a chunky monkey. How can you stand it? Don’t you just want to eat her up?”
Dessa hid her face in the crook of Livy’s neck.
They moved toward the house together, but before they started up the steps, Ramona leaned in to whisper to Livy. “Listen,” she said, hanging back. “Is there a health food store anywhere near here?”
Livy laughed. “Are you kidding? This place is lousy with health food.”
“Good.” Ramona looked over her shoulder to the open door of the house. Christopher had disappeared inside. “Because the thing is, I haven’t gone, you know, Number Two, in days. I mean days. It’s horrible.” She placed a hand on her belly. “I need some help, and naturopaths are great at this kind of thing. This is where they really shine. Can you take me there? I’m despera
te.”
Dessa squirmed and whined in Livy’s arms, tossing her head back like a broken puppet. “Sorry, but I have to put Dessa down for her nap,” Livy said. “She has to stay on her schedule.”
“Oh, right,” Ramona said, glancing at the baby. “Well, just tell me where the Whole Foods is. I’ll find it. I’m a New Yorker. I can find my way around anywhere.”
Livy gave her directions and the car keys and a moment later stood in a cloud of dust watching Ramona drive off in her car.
Christopher came out into the driveway. “She’s intense,” he said.
“Good intense or bad intense?”
“Just intense.”
On that first meeting, Christopher had looked Puerto Rican to her. Livy had never, as far as she knew, met a real Indian before, had only seen them in television commercials, old men in pigtails, crying. She’d found Christopher immediately, oddly attractive, even if he couldn’t dress. He wore an olive-green polo shirt with the collar turned up and stonewashed jeans that had long since gone out of style. He wore his black hair in what was too close to a mullet for comfort.
She had convinced herself when she went to bed with him that she was just doing it to have one more experience in the world, because that was what she was used to, experiences that led nowhere. Her therapist encouraged such acts, as long as they were safe. She told Livy she was in the information-gathering stage of her life, and that all these short-lived relationships with men were part of her education.
Two Livys fell into Christopher’s bed that night—the Watcher and the Doer. The Doer, tipsy and exhilarated with his kisses and the New Mexico sky, could hear the Watcher criticizing Christopher, picking apart his clothes and hair and apartment, his lack of New York edge. She could hear the voice explaining to her that he wasn’t good enough for a variety of reasons, but she went through with it anyway and after they’d had sex she fell into a comalike sleep. She woke once in the middle of the night and looked around his room while he slept soundly beside her and felt she was having an affair on herself, could see all of her girlfriends laughing at her, laughing at him, telling her to stop pretending to enjoy herself and get on the plane home. Brooklyn—the only world that mattered—awaited her.