by Danzy Senna
She left to go to her meeting. As she walked across campus, she tried to feel sad, or happy, or anything, but she felt numb. She sat in the back of the BSU meeting, silent, listening to students ranting about the lack of diversity in some required frosh survey course. She listened but didn’t really hear the words people spoke. She raised her hand when they had a vote, something about bell hooks, then left in a daze.
She woke that same night alone in her single bed in her own single room in Otero. She felt the presence of something in the room. Somebody. She’d felt this presence before. It was back. A rhythmic beating, like a heart that was not her own. She sat up and turned on the light. She could hear sighing in her room. It was lurking in the corner. It was a gray shape, a creature—an ever-restless pet. It had entered the space while she was sleeping and was waiting for her. It shifted positions as it watched her, breathing. She was afraid to look at it directly. She said aloud, her eyes fixed on her desk, Go away. Then she turned off the light and lay alert as a soldier until morning.
She didn’t see Greg for a long time—weeks—after their breakup. She did notice somebody else, the strangely familiar boy she’d seen before. The boy with the Basquiat hair. Mr. Miscellaneous. He was never alone. He moved with an entourage of straggly-haired, alterna-white people—the ones who lived at the edge of campus in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest. The ones who were rumored to Dumpster dive behind restaurants for their dinners so as not to waste the earth’s resources.
Mr. Miscellaneous didn’t look like them, really. He looked like he bathed, for one thing. Plus, he was more stylish, in horn-rimmed nerd glasses and a Bad Brains T-shirt. But he seemed necessary to them somehow, a necessary part of their flora and fauna. It became a game for Maria, to spot Mr. Miscellaneous around campus. There he was, playing Hacky Sack in the Quad. There he was, standing on top of a picnic table outside of the Coffee House, tapping a glass with a spoon as if about to make an important speech to a bunch of laughing friends. There he was, flirting—repulsively—with a barefoot and braless blonde in a peasant skirt, a ring in her nose.
He lived in Roble, the biggest frosh dorm on campus, which was fine and well. But the important thing was this: After freshman year, you got to declare your identity, your allegiance, based on where you applied to live. Some went to live in theme dorms, where they immersed themselves in blackness or Chicano-ness or Asian-ness or queerness. Others went to live in fraternity houses, or in the co-op houses that lined the campus, and these too, Maria knew, were ethnic-theme houses. White ethnic-theme houses.
Maria saw Mr. Miscellaneous going down a bad path. He needed somebody to stop him before it was too late.
She longed to talk to him, but it wasn’t like the longing she’d felt toward other boys. Was it romantic, or something else? She couldn’t say—only that she wanted him to know she existed.
Thanksgiving break she could not afford to fly east. Gloria had no money, was living hand to mouth until her dissertation was finished.
Maria’s dormitory mostly emptied out except for a few international students. She ate her holiday dinner in the dining hall with an Uzbeki boy and a Malaysian girl who played footsie and made eyes at each other over the prepackaged turkey dinner and ignored her. She excused herself before dessert and went back to her room. She lay down on her bed, but the moment she hit the mattress she heard it—a sigh. She swallowed. Hello? There was silence. Still, she felt it. A trembling. A breathing, almost imperceptible, in the room with her. She was too scared to move. She sensed somebody was under the bed. She could just make out a second heartbeat. She lay very still. Her eyes welled with tears. It had come for her, whatever it was. She heard it shift. She leaped up and raced out of her room, slamming the door behind her.
It was early evening. She ran for a long time across the deserted campus, her huarache sandals slapping the pavement, her heart pumping. She could feel it—a shadow, a throbbing presence—right behind her. It was chasing her. Finally, she could run no more. She looked back, panting, and saw there was nothing there.
She caught her breath and sat on a bench. The Mission buildings were bathed in a fading peach and orange sunset. The campus was devoid of students. She had never seen anything quite so beautiful or quite so empty.
But then she heard it, a strange and distant sound: a skidding, rolling, scraping.
She stood up. There was something there. She followed the sound through the fading evening light. It grew louder and louder until she found herself at the edge of the Quad.
There, alone, in front of Mem Chu, was Mr. Miscellaneous. The whitest black man in the world. The blackest white man in the world. The sound was his skateboard. She watched him from the shadows of the poli-sci building as he did slow rolls back and forth across the empty space. His arm was in a sling.
Maria felt something fluttering to life in her chest—a widening, a clarifying, an openness. She saw a future she’d never before been able to imagine—her and him, seated on a wide porch together, glamorous into old age, like Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis—which was another way of saying that anything and everything seemed possible.
He didn’t see her yet. He attempted a fancy move and flew off the skateboard, caught his fall, stumbled, and righted himself. Maria stepped out of the shadows into the Quad. He looked up and laughed.
I thought I was alone.
Me too.
He shrugged. It’s just the internationals and us.
She eyed him, saw that up close his features were quite striking. He looked both entirely black and entirely white. While she had melted into a Mexican, in him both parts were held together in a kind of balance.
She coughed into her hand, tried to look casual—asked him how he’d injured his arm.
Mosh pit.
Mosh what?
You’re kidding, right? He squinted at her. Pogoing? Punk?
Wait, she said. Does this involve white music? I don’t listen to white music.
He looked taken aback. What’s white music?
Same thing as black music, only white.
Oh.
He was studying her face. Who are you?
I’m Maria, she said. I feel like we’ve met before.
I’m Khalil, he said, squinting now, as if he thought he remembered her too.
And then, before she knew it, they were one. Attached at the hip. Maria and Khalil: King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom. They held hands everywhere. She led him to the places he needed to go, places he’d never gone before: the lounge in Ujamaa, with its weekly conversations about everything from interracial dating to whether rap music was misogynist. She brought him to his first BSU meeting. She brought him to Cosby night. She brought him to a performance of the Kuumba dancers, the quasi-African student dance troupe. He learned about apostrophes in newfangled, old-fangled places and double vowels and the wit and wisdom of Ron Karenga. He attended with Maria his first step show, where with saucer eyes he watched five clean-cut pledges stomp around in purple and gold—chanting over and over again the words of the age-old Negro spiritual: Proud to be an Omega, Proud to be an Omega. She brought him to his first late-night chicken and waffles in an Oakland juke joint. She taught him at what point at a party he needed to start chanting, The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.
At times Maria felt like Vanna White sweeping her hand across the brand-new kitchen set, saying, All this could be yours. Khalil had seen the dark and he wasn’t going back. He cut the barefoot hippie girl loose, along with the gang from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest.
Sophomore year Khalil and Maria moved together into Ujamaa; they each scored a single, hers on the girls’ floor, his on the boys’.
In bed at night, Khalil wanted to know about Maria’s past. He fell asleep easily beside her, listening to her tales. She thought maybe he had narcolepsy. She learned to talk anyway, whether his eyes were open or closed. She told him everything, inclu
ding that she’d had a fling with a white boy in her frosh dorm. When she said it like that, it seemed true—that it was just a fling with a white boy.
And anyway, it didn’t matter how she described it. Because soon enough Greg was no longer a white boy. He was no longer Greg.
He was Goya.
The light in the room has shifted toward darkness. The baby is still asleep. Maria thinks she should call Khalil, tell him that she has been held up, that she will be home late. But she cannot explain what has happened. It won’t make sense.
In the half light, Maria examines her hand, the diamond and sapphire ring. It looks like somebody else’s hand, a woman she would like to become someday. A fiancée. The hand of a special somebody. The hand of an emergency contact on an official form. The ring is evidence that she is part of this tribe—herself, Khalil, Lisa, their friends—a tangle of mud-colored New People who have come to carry the nation—blood-soaked, guilty of everything of which it has been accused—into the future.
Panic tightens in Maria’s chest. She regrets every choice she made today. She misses Khalil. She wants to return to their apartment. She feels trapped in this apartment. She feels trapped because she is, quite literally, trapped. She doesn’t want to be Consuela. Doesn’t want to be in this other woman’s dingy space taking care of the baby. Babies, she realizes now, are a kind of hell. Cute for five minutes. Cute when they are asleep with their butts in the air. But the rest of the time? Hell. The worst is the idea of paying money to get one from overseas. She can’t imagine paying for this kind of indentured servitude. Paying good money to be a beast of burden. Babies should be foisted on you by forces out of your control. If there was any sense in the universe, babies should always be an accident, a mistake, a lusty night involving alcohol and drugs and a broken condom.
The baby of course will wake up. She dreads it. She wants to go home before this happens, to her small, culturally elite apartment in Brooklyn, to eat Moroccan tagine with Khalil in front of a movie, maybe Chameleon Street for the umpteenth time. The movie is misogynist—Khalil always makes sure to mention this detail—but even so, he can’t deny its genius.
She won’t go, though. She knows she cannot abandon the baby. Nora Convey and the machine may have been right about her flaws—it may have been true that she wasn’t yet living up to her potential—Gloria may have been right that she was “into white boys” and Sally Eubanks may have been right that she was an “odd, twisted girl.” She may be a lot of things, but she is not the kind of girl to walk away from a helpless baby.
The window. She goes and stares longingly down onto the street. It is Saturday night and the East Village is abuzz with activity. She feels a bitter jealousy toward the people on the other side of the glass, with their whole nights ahead of them, babyless. There is a fire escape just beyond the glass. She tries the window and finds this one isn’t painted shut. It slides up easily. She leans her head out and inhales. It is really winter. She catches that in the air. It is December and the Thanksgiving hysteria has already given way to the Christmas hysteria. She hears a Salvation Army bell ringing, drearily, into the sea of atheists. She closes her eyes and listens and it is as if she were in another time, any time, the sound of that bell ringing, the voice begging for charity, is so timeless. When she opens her eyes, a new calm has come over her. She leans out to look at the apartment next door. A light glows softly from the poet’s window. She is so close. She hesitates only for a moment before climbing out onto the metal landing. The air is crisp and stings her skin, reviving her, washing away the warm funk of baby-minding. She thinks she will just take a look inside. What the hell, she’s come this far and gotten this close. She begins to edge along the fire escape until she is right outside his apartment. She will just peek inside. She will just get a sense of how he lives and then she will go back to the baby, to her duties as Consuela.
His window is half open. Inside, it is the exact same layout as the apartment next door. It is sparsely furnished: a lumpy blue couch, makeshift bookshelves, a little wooden table with one chair for eating. How poignant, she thinks, to imagine him eating alone at that little table. The poet in his lair. She feels oddly peaceful sitting there, looking in, when the door to the bathroom swings open and the poet steps out, zipping up his pants. She sits back against the brick wall, her heart slamming into her chest. She can hear the sound of a toilet running behind him. She hears his footsteps. A moment later, she hears his voice.
He’s not far from the window. She glances in, hoping the darkness will conceal her. His back is turned away from the window, but he’s only a few feet away. He’s talking on the phone to someone.
Where do you want to meet?
—
Uh-huh. I know the place.
—
Ten minutes.
—
He laughs. Okay. I’ll be sure to bring it.
He hangs up and stands still for a moment. She wonders if he can feel her eyes on his back, if he senses that someone is watching him. Then he walks away, puts the phone back in its cradle by the television, grabs a jacket off the sofa, and puts it on. He takes a brush and weirdly runs it over his bald head. Pulls a stick of lip balm out of his jeans pocket and rubs it on.
It is the Chapstick that does it. It gives her a very bad feeling. A sick feeling, really, that he is going out on a date. Going to meet a woman. She watches him check for his keys and wallet, then switch off the light and head out the door. She sits there, hugging her knees, staring down at the street below. A few minutes later she sees him emerge on the sidewalk and walk with his head tilted down toward Third Avenue, then disappear around the corner.
He forgot to close his window. Not a wise move. She thinks about how people get robbed all the time in this city. They leave their window open a crack, and next thing they know, their entire life is being hawked from a blanket on Second Avenue.
She sits for a while, thinking. And when she moves forward, she is intending to close his window, but instead she opens it wider.
She doesn’t turn on the light. She can see well enough in the dark. It smells better than it does next door. It smells of soap and coffee. There isn’t much food in his cupboards. Or the refrigerator. A Dannon yogurt, a carton of coffee creamer, a box of Stoned Wheat Thins, a bag of cashews, a few bottles of fancy beer. All a poet needs to live and breathe. She removes a beer, twists it open, and takes a long chug. It’s delicious, high quality—India pale ale. She strides around holding it in her hand, feeling somehow not like herself. For a moment she feels that she is the poet himself.
His apartment is neat. She remembers how clean the poet looks. He always looks freshly showered. She imagines his neck smells good. She sips the India pale ale as she moves around, picking up objects, turning them over. A clay child-sized handprint signed Derrick, maybe a friend’s child or a nephew. She hopes he doesn’t have a child. She doubts it. A snow globe with Paris inside. She shakes it, smiles as she watches the flakes fall around the Eiffel Tower. She runs his brush through her hair, pleased by the sight of the strands she leaves behind, not removing them. She goes to the bathroom, sits down and pees in the darkness, decides not to flush. She brushes her teeth with his toothbrush, minus the paste, then rinses it off and puts it back in its holder.
She enters the bedroom. A computer monitor glows in the darkness. She expects to see lines of half-finished verse on the screen, but the screen holds a frozen image from a video game. He has paused mid-game. He has 256 points.
His bed is queen-sized, with a flowered comforter he’s partway pulled up in a halfhearted attempt at making it, which seems touching to her somehow. She puts the beer down on his nightstand and climbs onto his bed and hugs the pillow, inhales his boyish scent. Desire courses through her.
She liked to have sex with Greg. That was all they shared, really. Other than that, she despised him.
But in all the years they’ve been together, she ha
s never really enjoyed sex with Khalil. In bed, they’re like cousins. It has always been that way.
The first time she and Khalil kissed, she had the thought: One of us is gay. Either he’s gay or I’m gay. Because it felt strange like that. And it made her think of something her friend Claudette once said. Claudette described what it was like to be a dyke and to kiss a boy. Claudette said it felt like kissing her brother or cousin, somebody you would feel no erotic tension toward. She said every time she’d tried kissing a boy she always thought: There is a tongue moving inside my mouth. Like, there is a bug crawling on my leg. It wasn’t quite that lifeless with Khalil, but she has felt none of the warm rush of desire she felt toward Greg.
Though they’ve never touched, she feels pretty certain she would enjoy sex with the poet. The attraction feels real. She kisses his pillow now, strokes it, and imagines it’s his face. She can almost get turned on. She can almost imagine that she is part of the scene in her head, not just watching. She lies there for a while, just holding the pillow in her arms, feeling almost satisfied with just this, his smell, his sheets. It’s almost enough. Distantly, she is aware of a familiar sound. It is like a buzzing, but not. An irritating, grating sound. She tries to ignore it but it persists. The worst sound she’s ever heard. Like a car alarm going off in the street, only worse.
She puts her hands over her face. Of course. It is the baby, alone in the dark fetid bedroom, crying, a small gray shape.
Sighing, Maria rises and heads back through the dark apartment to the window. She climbs out onto the fire escape and closes the window behind her. She starts to crawl across the metal to the other apartment, but glimpses a bearded young white man standing on the fire escape directly across the street. He wears only boxer shorts and a large blanket draped over his shoulders. He is smoking a cigarette and watching her. She fixes a silly grin on her face and raises a hand, as if to say, it’s okay, I’m crawling out of one dark window and into another, but I’m not an intruder. She knows that if she looked anything like the poet this man would call the police right now. The cops would come and blow her away with no questions asked. But she doesn’t look like the poet, so the bearded guy just smiles and waves back, as if what she’s doing is normal—or a joke they are both in on. She lowers herself back inside the woman’s apartment and goes to the baby, who is shrieking, hysterical now. Maria leans over the crib and says, I’m here. At the sight of Maria’s face, the baby screams harder, her eyes alarmed. Maria reaches down to pick her up and holds her, jiggles her, says in what she hopes sounds like a faint Spanish accent, It’s okay, Consuela’s here. No cry, baby, no cry. Consuela is here.