by Danzy Senna
Khalil and Maria went up to the woman’s studio one afternoon a few months ago with a photograph of Lisa laughing in a head wrap. They paid the deposit. Maria thought it was all a scam, just like the woman herself was a scam.
While they were there, Maria pointed out to Khalil that the sample dolls Ceres showed them all had the same face, the same puckish features, only the skin tones and outfits were different. They all looked like the doll-maker, Ceres, who looked like she was made out of resin herself, her skin flawless, her curls crisp and unmoving.
The doll had been scheduled to be picked up this week. Khalil has planned it all so meticulously to make his sister’s birthday feel special. The studio isn’t far from the university library where Maria works each day. It was all to be so easy—an easy task she has failed to do. And scam or no scam, what a great feat that would have been, to pass the doll dressed as Lisa around at this dinner table to oohs and aahs. Lisa would be smiling at her and Khalil lovingly, rather than wearing a disappointed grimace as she tries to find a place to hide the old Stacy Lattisaw record on the floor behind her chair.
The poet. He is here. It is almost too much that he is here, so close to her, after all that has happened today. She sits straight-backed in her chair for a count of twenty before she allows herself to turn and look at him. He’s eating his Bangladeshi food with a fork. He catches her eye and lifts his glass of beer.
Stacy Lattisaw, he says. Nice one.
Electricity moves through her. She smiles, blushes, nods, tries to think of something clever to say back, but can’t. She is without words. He likes the music she picked out. He alone understands the true genius of the gift she gave Lisa. Of course. If they were alone they would listen to the album together. And she knows that she has to get the album back from Lisa somehow. She will tell Lisa it was a joke. That she was only kidding when she gave her the worst birthday present in the world. She will explain later that there is a real gift, because there is a real gift, the doll that looks exactly like her—in a generic, all-mulattos-look-alike way. And Lisa will gladly give the album back to her, laughing, all forgiven.
She thinks of something to say to the poet. She will ask him if he’s ever been to Paris. She will feel the frisson of knowing she has stood in his apartment shaking the snow globe with the Eiffel Tower inside.
But before she can say it, he’s already turned his attention away. He’s talking to somebody else—a girl at his side. Maria feels a prickle of discomfort. The girl has red hair and freckles and a big silly smile. Her strange pointy breasts jut out under a tight green sweater, torpedo tits out of an old Gidget movie. In college, Claudette used to call boobs like that “sweater meat.”
Could this bizarre creature be his date—the one he talked to on the phone before leaving his apartment? Could this possibly be his type?
The girl leans in and says something to him. Her mouth is a little too close to his ear. They laugh and nod together. Maria feels sick. She thinks she might actually get sick. She picks up a piece of naan from the center of the table and takes several bites, filling her mouth completely with the bread, realizing only now that she is starving. She has not eaten since the hot dog in the park. The naan has an odd smell. Dirty. She puts the bread down and touches her lips and realizes the smell is coming from her own fingers. She didn’t wash her hands after giving Susan the foot massage. She stands and heads to the restroom, face blazing. There she washes her hands furiously with soap and hot water. She stares at herself in the mirror.
The Chinese baby—June—had looked so alarmed when she leaned over her crib. She had looked at Maria with such suspicion, almost hatred, until the very end.
Maria hears a sigh from the toilets behind her. She thought she was alone in here, but she is not. She turns to look at the closed stall door. She is about to crouch down to see what kind of shoes they are wearing when the restroom door swings open and Lisa steps inside.
She stands beside Maria at the sink, teasing her hair, reapplying her lipstick. She’s oddly quiet.
You okay? Maria asks.
Lisa doesn’t answer.
You look pretty tonight, Maria says.
Lisa glances at her, then away, as if bored by the banal compliment. She hands Maria a tube of lipstick. Here, she says, you need some color.
Maria takes the lipstick, but can’t help being distracted by the person in the stall. Why aren’t there sounds of defecation? Urination? What are they doing? What is taking them so long? She applies the lipstick and sees it does make her look better. She thinks about the poet and dabs some of the lipstick on her cheeks, rubs it in like rouge. That red-haired girl can’t be his type.
She knows this much: She needs to find out. She tries to sound casual.
So, she says to Lisa: Who invited Raggedy Anne?
Excuse me?
Maria shrugs. You know, the girl with the freckle face.
You mean Shura?
If you must. Shura. Okay. Shura. Maria laughs.
Lisa doesn’t laugh. She just shakes her head. Unbelievable, she says.
What’s unbelievable?
You are.
How’s that?
Lisa’s lips are thin. Well, for starters, you show up nearly an hour late for Oma at the bridal salon wearing that sticker. I mean, she’s eighty-two years old. Was that really necessary? Then you show up late for my birthday, dressed like, like, I don’t know what. Like you forgot. And, I’m sorry—that gift? You’re about to become my sister. And you didn’t even spend any time trying to get me a gift that has any meaning. I felt like you just grabbed any old thing off the street.
I can explain that, Maria says. There’s a story behind that gift. And, I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but there’s another gift coming, and you will not be—
Lisa cuts her off. And now you decide to insult my friend. I grew up with Shura. Did you know that? We went to the same Montessori. And you know what else? She just recovered from a serious bacterial illness. She could have died. I invited her because she’s one of my oldest and dearest friends and she wanted to come out tonight to enjoy herself after everything she’s been through.
She almost died? She doesn’t look like it.
What is that supposed to mean?
Nothing. I just. Maria hangs her head. She shrugs. I’m sorry about everything.
Is everything a joke to you, Maria? Lisa shakes her head and starts to talk about how she already considers Maria family and how it’s a big deal that Maria is about to become one of the Mirskys—and how much they all love her and care about her and that’s what this is all about, really—wanting to be sure she understands that.
There is something going on inside the stall behind them. Somebody is shifting positions, sighing in there. Maria bends down to peek under the stall but she can’t see any shoes at all. Which means that the person either has no feet or that they are crouching on the toilet seat, eavesdropping.
Are you even listening to me? Lisa says.
Of course I am.
Because you seem like your mind is elsewhere.
Maria turns back to Lisa. No, no. I’m here.
Are you? I don’t know what the hell is going on with you, Maria, but pull it together. Pull it to-fucking-gether.
Maria has more to say—she wants to explain about the gift that is coming—she is prepared to ruin the surprise and say it: a Lisa Doll by Ceres Dalton. But she doesn’t get to say it, because Lisa is gone, sweeping out of the bathroom, leaving Maria in the stillness.
It is very quiet now. Maria turns back to look at the stall door. She clears her throat.
Who’s in there? she says.
Nobody answers.
Why are you just—hanging out in there?
There is no answer.
Who are you?
Silence.
She steps forward, adrenaline pumping, to
uches the door lightly, and it swings open. The stall is empty.
They are already singing “Happy Birthday” when she gets back to the table. The cake is a work of high art—a sublime golden confection, created especially for Lisa by her friends at the bakery. Maria slides in beside Khalil, mouthing the words, her eyes now fixed on the redhead, Shura, who sings hardest and loudest of all. Maria feels a little better now that she knows the girl came alone. And if she really did just make it through a medical calamity, this means that she was probably not fooling around with boys. Still, she is sitting too close to the poet and keeps flashing goofy smiles at him while she sings along.
Khalil puts a hand on Maria’s knee. Everything all right?
She picks up a wineglass and gulps what’s left in it. I think your sister hates me.
She doesn’t hate you.
I’m sorry about the doll.
Hey. Look at me.
What?
It’s okay. I forgive you. And you know what else?
What’s that?
I love you.
He tugs her chin toward him. He begins to kiss her soft and slow on the lips. She can feel Lisa’s eyes on them, and she returns the kiss as best she can, thinking, Either I’m wooden or he’s wooden—one of us is wooden.
She hears Lisa say, You two are killing me. Go get a room.
Maria kisses him back, but her mind is on the poet, and the horrifying possibility that he is watching them go at it. She pulls abruptly away, wipes her lips, and looks over at him.
To her relief, he hasn’t seen a thing. He’s too busy eating his slice of birthday cake with full concentration. He savors small bites like a child. She thinks it is perhaps the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, the poet enjoying his slice of cake. And as if he can hear her thoughts, he glances up from his work of eating and catches her eye. She doesn’t smile and he doesn’t either. They watch each other across the table beneath the chili-pepper lights and she thinks he looks a little unsettled by what is passing between them. He frowns and looks down at his cake, then up at her again, chewing what is left in his mouth slowly before swallowing.
It is almost midnight when they all stand up to leave.
The poet and Khalil and Lisa and the rest of them grab coats and mittens and with drunken laughter extract themselves from the table, head toward the door. Maria lingers at the table, fiddling with her bag. She has spotted something on the seat where the poet was sitting. She needs to investigate. When the others are outside, she picks it up with trembling hands. It is a hat. A knit cap. It is his cap. It has to be his, a man’s knit Pittsburgh Steelers cap. The blood rushes into her ears. She shoves the cap into her purse and zips it shut.
Outside, a waiter is standing, coatless, shivering, waiting for them to assemble so he can take their photograph.
Hurry up, slowpoke! Lisa shouts.
Another voice—a slim mulatto girl she has never seen before tonight—says, Homegirl’s slowing around! Maria smirks at the poet, wondering if he too can see how forced it all is—this group and the pantomime of their newly discovered blackness. It’s catching. The craze. We once were lost, but now we’re black. It’s so old-school it’s new-school. They have taken on their duties as Negroes with aplomb, she’s gotta give them that. They are born-again black people. They weeble and wobble on their new roller skates and almost fall, but she has to give them an A for effort.
Maria joins the group. On one side of her stands Khalil, on the other is Shura, who puts her arm around Maria and pulls her in close as if they are old friends. The waiter steps back with the camera and says, Ready?
Khalil shouts, Everyone repeat after me: Bada bye bye.
He says the words in a Jamaican accent like they do in the reggae songs. And everybody repeats after Khalil. Bada bye bye! they cry, just as the light flashes, blinding them momentarily.
Maria and Khalil have sex that night on the floor of their apartment. Maria makes soft moaning sounds and moves her hips around, but she can’t lose herself. When she closes her eyes, she envisions two chairs slamming together, wood cracking, finally breaking apart until they are a pile of parts on the floor. He is still inside her. She tries to imagine a basic image: two white people fucking. The woman has big tits and a tiny waist; a man has a dully handsome Ken doll face and a flat stomach. This isn’t the first time she’s seen them. As an adolescent, she used to sketch this pair in her diary, this crude sketch of naked Caucasoid people fucking, like the first cave-drawing porn. She would stare at the sketch while she listened to Michael Jackson’s “She’s Out of My Life.” She doesn’t know who the people in the image are—she has never met anyone like them in real life. She herself is nowhere to be found in the image she conjures. She just imagines the white couple in different positions and eventually grows aroused. She comes in a mechanical way and Khalil comes a few moments later, then collapses on top of her. She wonders but doesn’t ask what kind of bodies he has imagined behind his eyes.
Greg came by her dorm room unannounced one afternoon a month after their breakup. He said he was there to retrieve his father’s old Connecticut College sweatshirt. As she fished it out of her closet, he said to her: I see you have a new boyfriend.
At the time, she knew whom he was talking about. Greg must have spotted her somewhere on campus, holding hands with the new guy. He wasn’t exactly a boyfriend. His name was Trent Cook and he was a proud member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and a stiff closet case. She had never so much as kissed Trent. He came from a political family in Washington, DC, and wanted to run for mayor someday. He had told her when they first met that she looked like Effi Barry. She didn’t know how to take it, but everybody in Ujamaa said they were a cute couple and she felt a frisson of pleasure at the sight of their reflection walking together, hand in hand, across campus. She looked like a different person beside him—a well-heeled girl who had grown up in DC and attended Jack and Jill and was now thinking of pledging AKA.
Even her features looked different beside Trent, less random, more Talented Tenth. Strangers all her life thought Maria was from somewhere else—Iraq, Israel, Mexico—but beside him, she looked as American as Ida B. Wells. She admired the way she looked on Trent’s arm. It was too bad for her that Trent was, as Gloria would say, gay as the day is long.
So is it serious? Greg said to her now. He was pretending not to care.
Not really, she said, thinking of how Trent always held his hips and butt a mile away when they hugged, as if her vagina might bite him if he got too close. He’d told her the night before last that her nose was awfully large; he asked her if she’d ever considered rhinoplasty, then quickly said he was only kidding.
Maria placed the sweatshirt on her bed. Greg stared at it but didn’t move to pick it up.
Tell me something, Maria, he said. Where did you learn to be so cold?
I learned from my masters, she said back in her best impression of Olivia de Havilland. She smiled, trying to keep things light. Did you ever see that movie? What was it called?
I’m serious, Greg said, wearing a pained expression. How did you get to be like this? I’m curious.
Like what?
You’re a monster, Greg said, flatly.
Maria went and stood by the window. The campus was coated in the too pretty light of late afternoon. A pack of pin-thin, ponytailed girls jogged past her dormitory. In the distant field she could see a boy had attached a thick rope between two trees and was practicing tightrope-walking across it. He kept falling off midway across and then climbing back on to try again.
She once thought there was nothing more beautiful than that campus. The first time she visited, she had thought, I could die here. But standing there just then, she actually felt dead inside, which was a different thing altogether. She missed the steel gray light of the other coast, the winter-hardened faces of her neighbors, the cramped graduate student housing she called
home. She missed her mother fiercely, the mother who had gone half-mad trying to finish the longest dissertation in the history of the world. She thought about how everybody misses their mother when they are dying—even the most hardened soldiers on the battlefield called out for mama just before they took their last breath. When she was a child, she’d had severe separation anxiety. Whenever Gloria would drop her off at school, she’d cling to her leg, drag along the ground after her, screaming: Don’t go. It lasted all the way through second grade. When her mother brought her to a child psychologist, the therapist said it wasn’t separation anxiety—it was attachment anxiety. It meant Maria wasn’t properly attached. That was why Maria couldn’t stand to be apart from her mother. She was not confident in their attachment.
The therapist said it was typical of adopted children. The therapist had no good ideas of how to fix it—just the right words to make her mother feel exactly worthless.
Gloria left the meeting distraught. Attachment anxiety? Are we not attached? she kept saying on the car ride home.
But Maria thought the therapist had been wrong. There was no difference between separation anxiety and attachment anxiety—they were the very same thing.
She could feel Greg’s eyes boring into her back. The sweatshirt he’d come to retrieve lay on the bed, waiting to be claimed. It was possible she was his first truly bad experience.
She heard his voice behind her. Were you molested as a child, Maria?
She turned to look at him. Seriously?
Yeah. Seriously. I’ve wondered it before about you. I’m taking a psych class. You fit the description.
She felt a ticking in her brain.
Wait a minute, she said. Let me get this straight. I have to be damaged goods—molested—not to want to be with a white man.
That’s not what I said. You’re twisting my words again. Forget it.