by Danzy Senna
By the time Maria brought Khalil home to meet Gloria—over spring break of senior year—the furor about the racist answering machine message had quelled on campus. The protesters had gone back to their schoolwork, realized they were paying a whole lot of tuition and would need to get jobs someday soon. Khalil was left with a box of surplus Audre Lorde T-shirts. He brought one for Gloria as a gift. She was impressed and immediately put it on.
She was already thin by then. The T-shirt hung from her skeletal frame like a dress.
She laid out the containers of Chinese takeout she’d ordered while Khalil told her about his globe-trotting upbringing. They were still in the middle of the conversation, and of dinner, when Khalil fell asleep. He just nodded off while sitting in front of his half-eaten food. He sat like a puppet at the table, his head lolling forward slightly, his smile still frozen on his lips so that he looked not so much asleep as like a drunken blind man.
I think he has narcolepsy, Maria said to Gloria as she chewed a piece of fried tofu.
Oh well, Gloria said. Nobody’s perfect. You should still marry him. Like, tomorrow.
Maria stood up to clear the dishes. I don’t know, Gloria. I mean, we’re so young. We’re only in college.
So what? College, schmollege. Don’t be an idiot. All your life you’ve wanted to know if you could be everything at once. You’ve wanted to have it all. You were always such a having girl. Well, here’s your chance, kid. Somebody heard your prayers. Because narcolepsy or not, he’s all that you ever wanted and more than you’ll need. Trust me on this one.
You don’t think we’re too young to decide on a mate?
Gloria sighed. The biggest, stupidest cultural shift to ever happen in my lifetime was when people stopped marrying their college boyfriend or girlfriend. When they decided they had to fuck and “try out” a whole panoply of bodies after college. That they had to do all these fake marriages before the real one. I mean, Jesus, I should have married Frank Delroy, trust me on this one. I shouldn’t have waited until I was stuck with H and all his phallocentric bullshit.
But you always say you were on a journey, Gloria.
Fuck that. You go on a journey whether you’re married or not. I mean, you think meeting “the one” gets easier as you get older and more bitter with each passing year? It isn’t easier. You just get more fucking rigid and one day you wake up and you’re forty-five and perimenopausal and going on a cruise to Alaska with your best girlfriend. You don’t get that many chances to be happy. And any stretch of happiness, by the way, only ever lasts two weeks. That’s another rule you learn the hard way.
Maria hovered over the dinner table beside Gloria, her arms folded, watching Khalil’s sleeping face.
I don’t know. Sometimes it feels too easy.
Easy? Oh Jesus. Listen to me. I’m your mother, or at least acting like I’m your mother. They aren’t going to let me stay in this graduate student housing much longer. They have a twenty-year limit on that shit or something. Anyway, you’re going to need a home of your own. Gloria shook her head. You would be a stone-cold idiot not to marry this guy. Shit. I didn’t even know they made this model of guy. Look at this T-shirt he brought me.
She pulled her shirt taut and stared at the master’s house quote upside down. A man who loves Audre Lorde. If that’s not enough to wet your panties—
That was my idea, Maria said. I told him to make the T-shirts after the, you know, racial incident. I introduced him to Audre Lorde.
So what? He agreed to it. He signed his name to it. He sent the template to the T-shirt factory, didn’t he?
Gloria picked up Khalil’s wineglass across the table and swallowed what was left in it. She gave Maria a sidelong glance. Listen, the point is, you should marry him. Right quick. I mean, if this cat got any more perfect for you, he’d be—you.
Maria began to gather their plates, loudly, trying to wake Khalil up. He didn’t flinch. He sat there, head lolling forward, the smile still on his lips, like a beautiful, golden, life-sized man doll.
Gloria watched him. I think the narcolepsy is adorable. Someday you’ll be happy for these little lulls. Who the fuck wants a man to be awake all the time?
Maria brings Susan her glass of vermouth. Susan takes the glass but glimpses Maria’s hand before she can pull it away.
Wait a minute, Susan says, grabbing Maria’s hand and turning it this way and that, examining the stones on her ring.
Did Ricky finally propose?
Yes.
Oh, Consuela. That’s fabulous. And this looks almost real. God. They’ve gotten so good. It’s fabulous.
Maria tries to pull her hand away but Susan holds tight, her eyes fixed on the ring.
Where’d he get this, anyway? Susan says.
He wouldn’t tell me.
Susan squints at it. Well, it looks real. Make sure nobody chops your finger off for it. She releases Maria’s hand and takes a gulp from the glass, smacks her lips. Good for Ricky. Two kids later, he finally got it together.
I have to go home now, Miss Susan.
I know. I know you have to go home. The money is all there. Including last week’s. You can count it. Susan nods toward a wad of cash on the table.
Thank you, Miss Susan. She eyes the money, but doesn’t take it. She knows it makes no sense, but she has the feeling that if she takes the money, she will be acknowledging that she’s been here. If she leaves it there, on the table, it will all have been a dream.
What time can I expect you on Monday?
Monday. Monday. Distantly, Maria remembers the other world. On Monday Maria is supposed to be a highly educated quadroon named Maria set to be married to a highly educated mulatto named Khalil. Monday she is supposed to go to the library to work on her dissertation about Jonestown. Monday, no more Consuela.
She goes to stand by the window. She presses her forehead against the cold glass. It is snowing outside now. Large, cartoon-like flakes drift down before the window and Maria thinks about the snow globe in the poet’s apartment. She imagines she is tiny and has ended up inside that snow globe. She turns her head so that her cheek rests flat on the glass. She’s trying to see his window from here, but from this angle she can’t quite make it out.
It is clearly time to tell Susan the truth. As soon as she tells her, it will be over. She will not be buzzed inside the building again. She may never get this close to the poet’s apartment again. She may never again have the chance to lie in his bed and hold his pillow to her face and breathe in his wholesome scent.
Gloria. Gloria. Gloria. If she were alive today, what would she tell her to do? Gloria had a dozen bumper stickers on her car. Feminism is to womanism as lavender is to purple. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Well-behaved women seldom make history. Sisterhood is powerful! Her car was like an anthology on wheels. This Bridge Called My Car. She made Maria watch Roots every year it came on and bought her a subscription to Essence when she turned fourteen. She always wanted her to become the daughter she’d been dreaming about, the sweetest of dark berries. And she never did.
Gloria always told Maria to tell the truth. She said, The consequences of the truth are never as bad as the lie. But would Gloria love her now, if she knew all her secrets?
Something comes back to Maria now. It flickers before her eyes like a crackling old film reel. The time she went to a roller disco with Gloria. She must have been eight. The disco was called Spin Off—a converted loft in a building in Back Bay. You had to climb three flights of spiral stairs to get there.
Maria whizzed in circles to Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” while Gloria sat somewhere on the sidelines reading Dust Tracks on a Road for the umpteenth time, highlighter pen perched over the text.
Later, while Gloria went downstairs to get the car to pull it around, Maria sat upstairs in the fourth-floor lobby just a few feet away from the s
piral staircase, changing out of her roller skates and into her sneakers. When she looked up from her sneakers she saw that one of her roller skates was rolling away, all by itself, to the edge of the landing. Maria was mesmerized by the sight of her roller skate moving alone, away from its pair, as if pushed by an invisible hand. She sat, frozen, as it rolled to the edge of the landing and then disappeared over the edge. A second of horrible silence, then a thud and shout. Shrieks. She rose and walked to the bannister. Her skate had landed three flights below on a girl’s head. She could see the girl lying on the floor, her hair spread around her face. She was either knocked out or dead, Maria couldn’t say which.
Maria’s other roller skate sat behind her by the bench, as if it had wickedly pushed its twin toward the edge. Her heart wild with fear, she picked it up and held it as she headed down the stairs to meet her fate.
She could hear someone—maybe the girl’s mother—shouting and crying, I’ll kill the motherfucker that did this to my baby.
Maria’s eyes stung as she imagined her funeral. She got to the bottom of the stairs and there, a small huddle of people stood over the girl, who was not in fact dead, but was just sitting up, rubbing her head and moaning. Several employees of the roller disco were racing around trying to assuage the family and looking out the door to see if the ambulance had arrived.
Maria glimpsed, at the edge of the crowd, her other roller skate lying on its side, the twin of the one she held in her hand. It was so obvious that she was the culprit, to anybody who decided to look. A nervous, shifty-eyed girl clutching one roller skate—with a pink pom-pom on the back just like the one that had fallen. If that wasn’t a smoking gun. She picked up the errant skate, then turned to face the group, ready to accept the blame. The eyes of the girl’s mother rolled over Maria, then slid past her, searching for somebody, it seemed, behind her.
I swear, the mother kept saying, I’ll kill the motherfucker.
There was a familiar beeping outside. Maria stood there, waiting for another beat, waiting to be seen, but people looked through her, past her, searching for the someone who had done it.
Maria put the pair of skates in her bag, zipped it shut, and walked slowly outside, where Gloria’s Pacer was idling at the curb.
Gloria sat in the front seat smoking, listening to music with the window open.
What happened in there? Gloria said, staring out at the ambulance that had just pulled up. Two EMTs rushed out and into the building.
A girl got hurt, Maria said, staring out the window at the neon sign, Spin Off. The first three letters were burned out so that it read, simply, N OFF.
The snow is falling more heavily now. Maria catches her reflection in the glass. Somehow, her nose looks pointier than she remembers it, her features more elfin.
Susan, she says, I’m not the person you think I am. I’m not—well, I’m not Consuela. I didn’t mean to mislead you. I would have told you but you were on the phone. You were upset. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to tell you the truth, but you were already gone when I came out. It wasn’t my fault—it just kind of happened.
There. She has said it. She has told the truth. It feels good, just like Gloria always said it would.
I am sorry, Maria says, her chin tilted up at what she thinks is a dignified angle. I didn’t mean any harm.
She waits for Susan’s response—rage or pity, anything, she’s ready—but it doesn’t come. There is only silence.
When she turns around, she sees Susan is asleep. Her mouth hangs open. The glass of vermouth rests on her chest, her hand loosely wrapped around it. On the screen, the movie is over. Some pop rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” plays over the credits.
They are all there, seated together at the back of the restaurant, beneath a million blinking chili-pepper lights.
Lisa is wearing a plum-colored head wrap. She sits at the end of the table, looking regal, luminous, her eyebrows perfectly coy arches. The head wrap is working for her tonight, Maria thinks. It no longer looks like she’s hiding something. It no longer looks kitchen-worker chic. Context is everything. It’s true she is still a pastry chef in training at that Soho bakery, learning to make increasingly intricate French pastries, but she is considering applying to art school. She is considering a career as a painter. She talked about it the last time they were together. She’d taken some quiz in a career counselor’s office that showed she was a visual-spatial learner. Maria feels now an almost big-sisterly pride as she stands on the other side of the glass, watching Lisa hold court.
Maria can see Khalil too, his dreadlocks piled in an enormous bun on top of his head, sitting hunched over a plate of Bangladeshi food, eating with his fingers.
Gloria used to say to her: You can’t have it all. If you’re a black woman in America, you have to choose which thing you will get. For a long time Maria took everything Gloria said to be God-given fact, but now she thinks Gloria was wrong.
The last time she’d gone with Khalil to visit his parents in Seattle, his father, Sam, set up a projector in the living room. After dinner they all sat down to watch a slide show of photographs from the Mirskys’ travels. Maria sat between Khalil and Lisa on the couch, watching the images move past. She had seen some of their pictures before, and they’d always filled her with suspicion. She had never been able to see them without imagining Gloria there too, seated in the corner on an African Senufo stool, watching them all in uneasy silence.
But on that last visit, she’d felt herself relax into the Mirskys’ story—to become part of it for the very first time. She laughed at their stories as if they were her stories too. There was Lisa, small and sun-burnished, standing in a dusty Senegalese village; there was Sam, frolicking, shirtless, in Costa Rican waves; there was Diane, weaving baskets with Bushwomen in Zimbabwe; and Khalil, at thirteen, playing chess with local teenagers in a village square in Mumbai.
Maria stares at them now through the restaurant glass. If she blurs her eyes just right, the scene looks magical, like another America she has been traveling toward all her life. Her breath makes fog on the glass as she peers inside.
Then, by and by, a revelation prickles to life inside of her. There is a figure at the end of the table she did not notice before. She wipes at the glass with her mittened hand, trying to see beyond the fog circles she’s made. Her eyes sting and water. It is a figure she didn’t notice at first. A one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. A figure she recognizes.
She heads through the jingling door and stands inside the warmth of the restaurant, not breathing. She is filled with mirth. She almost laughs aloud. It is him. It is the poet. Alive and well. He has somehow, without her noticing, moved from the periphery, a casual acquaintance whose readings they have attended, whose work they have admired, to the inner circle. He is one of the eight people who have come to celebrate Lisa’s twenty-fifth birthday. Everything seems to go silent around her as she stands there thawing, the snow turning into wetness on her shoulders, her skin tingling to life.
Ma’am? Ma’am?
The restaurant host—a haughty man in a blue blazer—is speaking to her.
Ma’am? he says. You’re dripping all over the floor.
She looks at her feet and sees the puddle forming. I’m melting, she says, with a laugh.
The host doesn’t smile. The bathrooms are for customers only, he says.
I am a customer. I’m with that table over there. She points behind him at the table—at the poet, yes, the poet.
That’s my party, she says. Just over there.
When she gets to the table, Lisa rises to give her a hug.
Maria takes a furtive glance at the poet over Lisa’s shoulder. He is not looking in her direction, but it’s him. He is really here.
They pull apart and Lisa spots the bag twisted around Maria’s hand. She smiles, touches her chest. For li’l old me?
Maria r
emembers that she was supposed to bring Lisa a birthday present. Something special from her and Khalil. She hands Lisa the plastic record shop bag and says, Happy birthday.
Lisa, grinning, pulls out the old Stacy Lattisaw album. She stares at the sleeve with a confused smile. Oh. What’s this?
An album. You remember that song, “Love on a Two-Way Street.”
As soon as she says it, she realizes Lisa would not remember this song. Maria has nearly forgotten that Lisa was not always a Negro. While Maria was listening to Patrice Rushen and Stacy Lattisaw alone in her pantry-sized bedroom, Lisa was living somewhere off the grid, in Mumbai or Calcutta. And later, when she got back to the United States, she did not become the kind of girl to listen to Stacy Lattisaw. Maria has been inside Lisa’s teenaged bedroom in Seattle, has seen the yellowing concert flyer for the Violent Femmes on her corkboard.
Lisa holds the Stacy Lattisaw album as if it is a bag of flaming dung Maria has handed her. Her eyes flash with anger. This is the big surprise? she says to Khalil. Then, in a mocking tone, You guys shouldn’t have.
Khalil leans over to Maria. I thought you were picking up the doll, he whispers.
She stares at him blankly for a moment. The doll. Then it comes back to her. She isn’t sure how she could have forgotten. It is a doll they ordered months ago for this very occasion—made by a woman in Harlem, a modern-day folk artist who goes by the name Ceres Dalton. Dolls for adults, by Ceres.
It goes like this: You give Ceres a photograph of a person you want made into a doll, and in a few months, voilà, she makes it. She sculpts the faces out of resin. The bodies are made of cloth stuffed with cotton batting, soft but with just enough weight in the bottom that you can prop them up on a piano or a bookshelf and they will sit there, watching you. Khalil saw her work listed in a magazine—a Doll by Ceres is one of the top ten gifts to give this year.