You Are Free: Stories

by Danzy Senna

  I looked at the faces around the table—Dave’s big television smile and Helga’s square face, which looked sad just then as she moved her stew around in the bowl without eating it.

  Hewitt was smirking, enjoying himself—was he tipsy? He was playing a game and I knew he’d been playing it all evening. These people didn’t know us. They only knew what they saw. I kicked what I hoped was Hewitt’s shin under the table. “Yes,” I said, “Hewitt tries to explain to me. I think I get it now. I think I’m finally beginning to understand what you all go through.”

  At the door, saying good-bye, I heard Dave saying to Hewitt, “It’s so cool you guys are our neighbors. This building is full of us. Have you noticed? It’s awesome.”

  I heard Hewitt give a strangled little laugh and say, “Yeah, we’ve noticed.”

  As soon as we were safely inside our apartment, I turned to Hewitt. “You dirty bastard, I saw what you did.”

  “You’re pretty cute for a white girl,” he said, heading down the hall with the car seat and George.

  I followed him. “Now we have to tell them the truth somehow. I mean, we’re going to see more of them.”

  “No we aren’t. I can’t hang out with that airhead. Did you hear him? ‘Coat of many colors.’ ‘We are the world.’ Ugh. TV. I hate TV people. Mediocre minds.” He sat down on the couch and turned on the TV. The honorable doctor, Heathcliff Huxtable, was just stepping across the kitchen in another wacky sweater of bright geometric shapes.

  George woke and began to whimper and flail his arms. I took him out of the car seat and put him on my lap and helped him latch onto my nipple. I realized only then that I’d been uncomfortable all night, a tension like a live wire running through my body. I felt better as soon as the baby made contact. I stared down at him, and I must have been a little drunk—or maybe it was the hormones—but my tears began to flow. They dropped onto the baby, who didn’t notice. His eyes were closed as he suckled.

  Hewitt beside me was fumbling for the remote control and talking to himself. “I hate this episode. Rudy breaks Cliff’s new juicer with her fat white friend what’s-his-name, Piggy or Peter or something. I hate it when it’s all about kiddie stuff. Pudding commercial bullshit.”

  He switched channels then and suddenly we were watching Good Times. JJ gyrated across the screen to the wild hoots of the studio audience.

  Hewitt chuckled. “Can you believe somebody as stone-cold ugly as JJ got all the girls? That was some old white man’s practical joke.” He began to rattle off trivia about the show. “And another thing, did you know that the actress playing the mother was seventeen years older than the dude playing the dad? That’s some sick shit.”

  I was weeping beside him, silently, but he didn’t notice. The baby was letting out little satisfied sighs and gulps at my breast. On-screen, Florida Evans had her hands on her hips and was saying something dignified and articulate to her brood of children.

  On our next walk, Helga told me about her background. She came from poverty—a factory-worker father, a government-clerk mother. They’d lived in East Germany, where Helga pursued her ambition to be an Olympic gymnast. She trained night and day under the abusive regime of an ambition-crazed coach. After a slip off the balance beam, she gave up her athletic career and went to university in Berlin. It was during a semester abroad in New York City that she’d met Dave.

  “I never expected to stay in this country,” Helga said, pausing on the sidewalk to pull a blanket over Gia. “I was only supposed to stay here a few years.”

  We were standing in front of a small stucco house that was being gutted. On the side where we stood, only the frame was left, so that we could look right inside to the dirt- and rubble-filled rooms. Mexican workmen moved in and out, carrying planks.

  “Everything is temporary here,” Helga said. “Everything is casual.”

  “Do you talk to your family much?”

  “Every day,” she said, starting to walk ahead.

  “Do you get to visit them often?” I said, trailing behind her.

  “No. I did when we lived on the East Coast. But L.A. is so much farther away. Everything is far away from here.” Her voice had gone all thick, tremulous, and for a moment I thought she would cry. But when she looked back at me, her mouth was a straight line and her voice was clear again, her tone businesslike. “Listen, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you want to share our nanny? We can share her.”

  “Share her?”

  “A nanny share. Teresa needs extra hours,” Helga said. “So I was thinking you could use her some of the week. I know you said you weren’t sure you were going to get one—” She paused, laughed slightly. “But come on now. It’s a necessity.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to talk to Hewitt.”

  The fact was, I was tempted. I had no time for myself—to think, to walk, and yes, to exercise or get my nails done. I was exhausted and sometimes I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and was startled. In my twenties, when I was single, I had vowed never to become weary and dumpy like the mothers I saw slumping around the city. I’d vowed never to give up on myself. But maybe I had. Even now, six weeks after the birth, I looked vaguely pregnant. My eyes were ringed with dark circles. My feet were thick and hard as horse’s hooves—it had been so long since I’d had a pedicure. And my legs were hairy. Hewitt had run his hand along my leg in bed the other night and muttered, “It’s Chewbacca, with a weave.” Hewitt and I had not yet taken the leap to intercourse, and I felt anything but sexy.

  “She’s gonna loan you her mammy?” Hewitt said, when I told him about Helga’s proposition. “How generous of Miz Scarlett.”

  I explained to him how tired I was. I repeated a phrase Helga had said to me, word for word. “I need some time for myself. I’ll be a better mother if I can have some time to take care of myself.” I ran my hand along my leg. “Don’t you want to see your wife again?”

  Hewitt looked at my legs. “Hey, Star Wars was my favorite movie.” He sighed. “Okay. Whatever you want, babe. Let’s get the mammy. What the hell.”

  Teresa was in her forties, with two children of her own, a broad smile, and a placid, matronly manner.

  The first day she came, she took George for a walk while I wept on the bed and watched the clock. I went rushing to the door the minute I heard it open.

  The next day I told Hewitt I feared George would grow to love Teresa more than me, she was so relaxed and bosomy and calm with him.

  Hewitt shrugged. “So what? If that happens, we’ll just fire her.”

  “But he’ll miss her. We’ll break his heart.”

  “Don’t sweat it. By the time he’s three he won’t even remember her. He’ll just have a vague sense of melancholia but he won’t know what it’s about.”

  “Thanks. I feel so much better.”

  On the third day I ventured out. I went to a salon down the street and got a haircut and an agonizing Brazilian bikini wax and a pedicure, and when I got home George was cooing on Teresa’s broad lap, and I felt a whole lot better than I had in ages.

  The day after that I went down to the gym and worked out for half an hour.

  By the end of the week I felt one baby step closer to my old self.

  That Saturday night, Hewitt and I had sex for the first time since I’d given birth. It was uncomfortable and strange, but not as painful as I’d feared. We took it slow, and afterward held each other in the dark and I felt I’d survived a car accident of epic proportions and was learning to walk again.

  A few weeks later, as I was taking a walk with George one afternoon, a woman, small and blond, came rushing up to me, smiling.

  “Helga,” she said in a slight accent.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, you’re mistaking me—”

  She put a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. From a distance you looked so like her. I’m sorry.” She glanced in at George in the pram, shook her head at her mistake, then slunk away.

  It happened again a few days l
ater.

  A tan young man with blazing, professionally whitened teeth waved at me from the far end of the hallway in the Chandler.

  I walked toward him, hesitantly smiling back, but as I got closer, his smile faltered and his teeth went away.

  “Oops, from far away I thought you were that German girl,” he said. “The light was behind you.”

  Hewitt, when I told him about the incidents, said it was ridiculous.

  “You look nothing alike,” he said, chuckling.

  But then it happened again a week later.

  It was the same small blond woman who’d mistaken me for Helga once before, but she was jogging and wearing a tracksuit and headphones. She ran past me in the parking lot of the Chandler, where Hewitt and I were loading the baby into the car, and she said something fast, in German. She was rushing and out of breath, and this time she didn’t realize her mistake even when she got close enough to see my face. She just said something else in German, laughing, and then jogged past me out onto the street.

  I got into the passenger seat beside Hewitt.

  “Do you think it’s because of the baby?” I said. “Do you think they see me with a black baby and assume I’m her?”

  Hewitt shook his head. “Hon, hate to tell you this, but George doesn’t exactly scream ‘Africa.’ He’s like you, honey. And Gia’s like me. Sometimes that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

  I looked back at him, a vague panic I couldn’t explain building in my chest. “Well then, why? Why does it keep happening?”

  Hewitt turned and looked at me, studied my face for a moment, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “I don’t know.”

  The next time I took a walk with Helga, I looked at the babies side by side in their prams and saw Hewitt was right. They looked nothing alike. Mine looked like a Gerber baby, with golden-brown hair that twisted into a Tintin curl on the top of his head. His cheeks were huge and his skin was pale, and he was fat, with sausage-link arms and accordion legs. He had huge brown eyes and wore an expression of bewilderment. Helga’s baby was brown-skinned and thin, with curly black hair and rather lanky limbs, a shrewd expression in her small dark eyes.

  I eyed Helga’s profile as we walked. She was much thinner than me, with a body that looked more suited for the runway than for childbirth. Her head was quite large and her features were angular, a series of straight lines and arrows. Helga wasn’t pretty but she wasn’t ugly either. My mother once told me men like women with big teeth. Helga’s teeth were big. She looked around as we walked, with a mixture of boredom and hunger I’d seen on the faces of other Europeans.

  I didn’t think I looked like her, but suddenly I wasn’t sure what I looked like. In a slight panic, I searched for a storefront, a car window, a reflective surface of any kind, but we were on a tree-lined street and all the cars were parked on the other side.

  Beside me, Helga was telling me that Gia had recently said her first word. “She said ‘Tata.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “The nanny? Teresa? She calls Teresa ‘Tata.’ ” She smiled. “Teresa was worried I’d be upset. She thought I’d be mad that she didn’t say ‘Mama’ first.”

  “Were you?” I said, a pain spreading through my chest.

  She scoffed. “God, no. It doesn’t matter. I’d just die without Teresa. I wish I could keep her forever. Don’t you just love her?”

  “She’s great,” I said, though really I wasn’t sure I liked the woman. Two days earlier I’d walked into the nursery and found her sitting in the rocking chair with George pressed against her bosom, snuggled there like it was home. She was trying to put him to sleep, just as she was supposed to do, but at the sight of them together, my stomach clenched up. I said George seemed hungry, though he didn’t, and took him into the other room, where I nursed him to sleep.

  From the pram, George began to whimper, and I was glad for the excuse to go home. “Well, I better get back and nurse him.”

  “You’re still nursing him?” Helga said. “Let me give you some advice. Stop. I stopped after two months. They get all the benefits by then. It will really free you up.”

  “But I enjoy it. I mean, I like that I can do something special for him.”

  “You should see what it does to your breasts when you’re done. Then you’ll be sorry you didn’t stop earlier.”

  Helga invited me for walks a few more times, but I found ways to get out of it. I was tired. George was sick. I had work to do.

  A few weeks went past without contact, and then one Sunday we saw Helga at the farmers’ market.

  I was wearing a polka-dotted sundress that hid my still-protruding belly. Hewitt was carrying George in the carrier on his chest, facing outward so that George could grin and wave and shout “Hi!” at all the people, as if he were a tiny mayor of the village.

  “Hey, it’s Eva Braun,” Hewitt said, nodding in Helga’s direction.

  She was standing on the other side of the market next to her pram, chatting with the Frenchman who sold cheeses from around the world. She was wearing a shearling jacket, though the weather was balmy.

  The market was packed with couples with young babies, each with a fancier stroller than the last. An African man with strange masklike features and a mop of mangled dreadlocks sat banging on a drum before an audience of sullen white toddlers. He wore a kente-cloth smock and cowrie beads and added an aura of hippie mayhem to the upscale faux-bohemian affair.

  Hewitt pointed at him and whispered, “Check it out. That man’s not really black. That’s a dreadlock wig. And you can see the line of makeup on his neck.”

  Shocked, I squinted at the man. I edged a little closer, but I couldn’t see what Hewitt was talking about. By the time I turned back to ask him, he had disappeared into the crowd of shoppers with George.

  I forgot about the African man and settled into shopping, picking up berries, vegetables, olive bread, heirloom tomatoes, and a big bouquet of orange tulips.

  I didn’t see Hewitt again until I was almost at the other end of the horseshoe of produce vendors. He stood beside the Mango Man, his favorite vendor. He was talking to Helga. For a moment, I paused and watched them. She had taken off her shearling jacket in the heat and had hung it over the pram handle. Gia sat stone-faced and baking in a mini shearling coat that matched her mother’s, surrounded by bags of fruit and vegetables. She was sucking furiously on her pacifier. Helga was wearing a sleeveless shirt and her bony shoulders looked almost translucent in the sunlight. She was laughing at something Hewitt was saying and throwing her head back so that the long expanse of her neck was exposed. I swallowed the sudden dryness in my throat. I edged closer. Hewitt was grinning and I heard him say, “So how did a beautiful woman like you get such an ugly name? Helga. Jeepers.”

  I couldn’t believe the rudeness of the comment, but Helga was laughing as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  I cleared my throat and stepped forward. They both turned to look at me.

  Helga eyed my dress with a slight twist of her mouth so that I knew it had been a mistake, that it made my belly look bigger, not smaller.

  “Hello, Rachel,” she said. “I didn’t know you were here too.”

  “Where’s Dave?” I asked, looking around for him.

  “He’s in San Francisco on work. Covering gas prices.”

  Hewitt was making George dance in the baby carrier for the benefit of passersby. He was holding George’s arms out and making them move from side to side in an imitation of an Egyptian.

  Helga leaned in and squeezed George’s cheek and said, “Such a blondie!” Then, “Hewitt, you look good at putting things together. Are you handy?”

  Hewitt shrugged. “I’m handy enough.”

  “I just bought this high chair from Sweden, and I can’t figure out how to put the damn thing together. Dave’s not coming back until later in the week and I wanted to feed Gia at the table like a big girl.” She leaned into the pram and fingered Gia’s curls. Gia made a d
eep growling sound in her throat but did not let the pacifier out of her mouth.

  “Sure, I can come over later today. We don’t have plans, do we, Rachel?”

  I shook my head. “No plans.”

  “Great,” Helga said. “Just come over sometime later today. Two-ish?”

  “Two-ish,” Hewitt said.

  Helga waved good-bye and headed out of the market with Gia in tow. I watched her cross the street. She had parked her car in a handicap spot. There was a ticket on her windshield but she barely glanced at it as she went through the process of putting Gia and the vegetables into the back of the car. She drove off, with the parking ticket fluttering like a flag on her windshield.

  We headed out of the market too, passing the African man, who was still drumming and wailing off tune. The crowd of toddlers had grown and they swarmed around him, picking up objects he had spread on a blanket before him—drums and bells and tambourines, along with a stack of CDs of his music. I slowed as we passed, trying to see if there was any truth to what Hewitt had said, but he was wearing a hat and his head was turned away, so it was impossible to tell.

  Back at the Chandler, Hewitt and I played with George for a while before putting him down for a nap. Hewitt made us goat-cheese-and-asparagus omelets that we ate in front of Soul Train reruns. After a while George woke up from his nap and I went to get him. When I returned to the living room, baby on my hip, Hewitt was in the bathroom. I sat on the sofa with George, waiting for Hewitt to come out of the bathroom. He wasn’t making any noise in there and he didn’t flush the toilet, but after a while he came out looking somehow refreshed. His features looked sharper, clearer, as if he’d wiped away a dirty film. He took George from me and held him in the air above his face and said, “I better go help Helga with that chair.”

  After he left, I sat watching the dance line on Soul Train while George lay on a blanket on the floor, shaking a rattle. He started to cry. I picked him up and put his face to my breast but he didn’t seem hungry. I put him in his stroller and put on my sunglasses and jean jacket and headed out of the apartment for a walk. When I passed Helga’s apartment, I slowed down. The door was shut. I paused. I could hear the muted bass of techno music, but when I stepped closer I wasn’t sure it was coming from her place or from the apartment next door. I stood there, my ear to the door, until George squawked in the stroller and I pushed him fast toward the elevators.