by Danzy Senna
But she was just getting started.
So it’s unfathomable to you, she said pacing the small room now, that a person would choose to be black if given the option. You have this narrative implanted in your brain and you don’t even know it. Progress equals whiteness. The closer we get to worshipping whiteness, fellating the giant white penis, the closer we are to sanity.
Jesus. Here we go again.
Was I molested? No, I wasn’t fucking molested. I mean, no more than the average female born circa 1970. There was a plumber who watched me shower that one time when I was eleven. There was the homeless guy who jacked off in the movie theater while me and my best friend watched Watership Down. And there was the girl who pulled me into a closet that time and felt me up while bullying me. But none of it was worth mentioning ever because all of it was so banal and run of the mill. I mean, who hasn’t been molested? That’s the unusual thing. People who have never been molested.
I was just asking.
And no, just because I don’t want to be with you doesn’t mean I’m a psycho case. I find whiteness tiresome. Not even upsetting, really. Just boring—like a lecture you wish would end but keeps droning on and on and on for eternity.
Will you cut it out? he said. This isn’t a tribunal. I’m not an Afrikaaner. I didn’t enslave you or your people.
Oh yes you are, and yes you did.
She wasn’t sure what she meant exactly by this part, but she let the words hang there, above them, glittery with rage.
I forgot how predictable you are, Maria. Thanks for reminding me.
No, you’re predictable. I’ve seen this movie before. I remember how it ends. The white guy saves the world from imminent destruction. But not before his black best friend, the funny, dickless one, dies in a hail of gunfire. And not before the mulatto chick throws herself off a bridge. Yadda yadda yadda.
Just forget it. Just forget I ever gave a shit about you. You win. I’m a racist and an idiot and I’m sorry I ever burdened you with my existence. Excuse me. I’m going to kill myself now.
With that, he slammed out the door and was gone. He left his Connecticut College sweatshirt lying on her bed.
She didn’t see Greg again for the rest of the year. He vanished. She worried about him and even thought to ask a boy from his dorm if he was still alive. The boy said he was. He said Greg was lying low, spending a lot of time off campus, doing volunteer tutoring in East Palo Alto.
Summer came and she went back east and got a job working as an assistant to an acupuncturist in Newton. Gloria hooked her up with the job. Doctor Wang was a friend of Gloria’s—they’d met at a yoga retreat in the Berkshires. Since that weekend, Gloria had officially quit all Western medicine. She only saw Doctor Wang and the homeopath, Chuck Whittle.
Doctor Wang hired Maria as her assistant that summer. She needed someone to help around her office, filing and tidying up; she told Maria she might even get to pull some needles out of patients if she was lucky.
Doctor Wang spoke only broken English. From the first day she gave Maria a white coat to wear, just like her own. That same day—after only the most rudimentary, ten-minute, mostly mimed training session—Doctor Wang allowed Maria to perform moxibustion, a procedure where she held a burning stick to a patient’s skin. Closer, closer, Doctor Wang said—until the patient’s flesh turned red and blistered. As the summer went on, she gave Maria more and more responsibilities. She gave her a list of patients with a time scrawled next to their names. Maria had to go in at that time and pull the needles out of their bodies. They were usually naked. She was nervous at first. In her youth she found the signs of decay, fat, wrinkles, and scars on the bodies of older adults disturbing. Her hands often trembled as she moved to pull the needles out. But over the summer she grew more adept. The bodies became just bodies. She pulled the longest needles she’d ever seen out of a woman’s enormous pale ass. She pulled the most needles she’d ever seen at once out of a man’s genital area, where they’d been arranged in his strawberry blond pubic hair in a kind of crop circle around his penis. Though Maria herself felt fine, Doctor Wang would ask her to stick out her tongue, and would feel her pulse and often sent her home with needles behind her ears or in her scalp, saying she thought Maria’s energy was off. She was trying to balance Maria’s energy.
When Maria returned to campus in the fall she saw what Greg had meant by “I’m going to kill myself now.”
Because Greg Winnicott was dead, in a way.
She almost didn’t recognize who he had become. His skin was darker—a strange shiny reddish brown, as if coated in a layer of shellac. He wore a thin ponytail down his neck that seemed too long to have grown in after only a few months. He was wearing short-shorts that seemed too tight for his now thick thighs, and a tight blue tank top with an iron-on image of a rainbow across his chest.
Maria stood watching him from the shadows of an oak tree, wanting to look away but somehow unable. He was shouting orders to the group of Latino high school kids who wore bright prison-orange T-shirts with the name of an after-school mentorship club across the back. He spoke in a Latino inflection, peppering his sentence with Spanish words as if he were searching but failing to find the English equivalent.
The painting they were doing was only half finished but she got the idea: Aztec faces turned up to the sky, fists raised, an Indio mother, squat and sturdy with cherubic baby strapped to her back. When it was finished a few weeks later, they’d given text to the image. It said, Monocultures Die Out.
It has been six days since Maria last saw the poet. She still has his hat in her possession. She wears it sometimes, just locally, to go to the store to buy milk, or in the privacy of her apartment, reading over the files at her desk.
At first she was trying to put it on only when Khalil was out, but a few days ago he came home early and found her wearing it while she fixed them dinner.
Where’d you get that hat? Have you been robbing homeless people again?
I bought it off the street, she said, touching it gently.
Let me try it on. He pulled it off her head. It’s weirdly cool.
Maria snatched it from him and said, with a harshness that surprised her, It’s mine, don’t touch it. She tugged it back on her head and said in a calmer voice, It won’t fit over your dreadlocks anyway.
The hat is nothing special. Just an ordinary knit cap. Eighty-five percent acrylic, fifteen percent wool. Machine wash cold, line dry. The Pittsburgh Steelers insignia has been ironed on. The poet comes from Pittsburgh. She somehow knows this detail about him. She smells the hat, fondles it, handles it often just to think of him. For the first few days after the party, there was a clear smell of his hair caught in the fibers—sweetness, strawberry and vanilla, undercut by something sharper and more male. Now, six days into this, the scent is almost gone. She has to press the fabric with increasing force against her nose, to inhale more deeply, just to get the slightest hint of what was so easily gotten before. And she knows that every day she holds it, wears it, rubs it on her skin, more of him is lost.
Today is the day she will call him. She promised herself she would give it a week. It has been six days—good enough. If she lets too much time pass, the energy that has passed between them over dinner will disappear. She has memorized his phone number. She has been waiting for this moment and preparing, walking around reciting the seven digits in her head as if they are a poem. She hears in their numerical pattern a kind of music. She has already dialed the number before, twice, in the evening. Each time his machine picked up. Each time she found the act of calling and not speaking to him satisfying in its own right. Each time she enjoyed the way his voice sounded on the answering machine, rushed and irritable and curious all at once. Each time she was almost relieved not to get him on the phone, because it prolonged the period when she had his hat in her possession.
She isn’t sure he will answer this time, but she
is ready to speak if he does. She is ready to use the only excuse she may ever have again to see him alone. I have your hat. I’ve been meaning to call. Let me know when we can meet up so I can give it back to you.
It is the perfect excuse, banal and unimpeachable. The luck of her being able to take the hat so easily that night, to shove it into her bag, seems like a miracle. She allows herself at times to wonder if he left it there for her on purpose, lying there on the seat, a beckoning of sorts, the way a girl in a cartoon drops a handkerchief.
Khalil has already gone to work. He left early to meet with Ethan and some investors in midtown about the start-up. It is mid-morning, the writing hour, when the poet will likely be at home. She puts on the hat so that it covers her eyes and stands in the middle of the living room holding the phone. She dials.
Jubilation. He answers on the second ring. Something springs open within her at the sound of his real voice. Hello? His voice sounds creaky, almost prepubescent. She can hear the television in the background—a newscaster’s flat accentless voice announcing that a tornado is about to hit the Midwest.
It is the moment, she realizes, when everything is about to change. The utterance of her name. She grips the phone tightly in her hand as she says, It’s Maria. Maria Pierce.
He pauses. Oh, right. Maria. Hey, how are you?
She tells him she’s fine. He says he’s fine too. He asks her what she’s up to. She says, Just chilling. She winces after she says it. She asks him what he’s doing. He says he’s writing, though she can still hear the television in the background.
Listen, she says, tugging the hat lower over her eyes. There’s a reason I’m calling you.
She lets the words rest there. She wants his suspense to build.
Oh yeah?
I have something of yours. Something I know you’ll want back.
What’s that?
Your hat.
She has imagined this conversation in her head so many times and she expects him to say, Oh man, are you serious? Wow. I’ve been wondering about that hat. When can I get it back?
Instead, he says, What hat?
Your Pittsburgh Steelers hat.
Wait, did I leave it at Lisa’s party?
Yeah. I grabbed it but didn’t get a chance to give it to you then. I—meant to, but forgot.
Oh. Thanks.
I’d like to find a way to get it back to you. Is there somewhere we can meet? Maybe for a drink? I know the temperature is dropping this week. I’d hate to think of your head getting cold.
He is silent.
So just tell me where I can meet you and I’ll bring it to you, okay?
Um, you don’t have to go through the trouble. Honestly. I have other hats.
She pulls the hat so that it covers not only her eyes but also her nose and lips. She tries to control the feeling of panic that has washed over her.
No, she says, No. It’s no trouble at all. I want to give it back to you. It’s a great hat. And, see, I have this weird thing where I think it’s important, always, to return things to their rightful owners. It’s, like, an energetic thing. I can’t explain it. So let’s meet and I’ll return it to you. Okay? Let’s just meet for a drink and I’ll give you the cap and you will have it back and you can do with it what you want.
She is pacing as she speaks, the wool over her mouth growing moist where her breath comes out.
Okay, he says. If it’s like that, we can meet.
She feels the air in the room shift directions. He wants to meet. She pulls the hat off her head. The air of the room feels cold against her face. She feels naked without the hat over her eyes and mouth. In the mirror over the mantel, she can see her hair is wild with static, her skin mottled from the heat.
He says he can meet her in two days at a bar in the Village. He’s going to be in that area around four. Can she meet him at four at this bar on West Fourth?
She can. Oh yes she can.
After they hang up, she stands, a little shocked, in the aftermath. Everything around her looks different. The scattered evidence of her life with Khalil already looks like vestiges: the Peter Tosh album propped up by the stereo, the Moosewood cookbook beside the stove, the Hanif Kureishi novel dog-eared on the sofa, the jar of coconut-scented dreadlock balm on the counter. There is the bulletin board over her desk across the room where so many months ago, on the advice of a magazine article, she tried to start a dream board—magazine tear-outs of glowing, caramel-skinned models getting married. In one image a couple is running, barefoot, teeth bared in ecstasy, on a white sand beach. In another, an equally caramel-skinned, equally ecstatic bride and groom are hand-feeding each other slices of wedding cake. Maria feels a tug of sadness—horror—at what she is about to do, but it passes. She has no time for regrets. There are only two days before she sees the poet. She has work to do. She has only two days to improve everything about herself.
The next evening she stands in front of the full-length mirror, teasing her hair, trying to decide if it is good different or bad different. She has spent the bulk of the afternoon—what felt like a lifetime—in a beauty shop being groomed and coiffed, peeled and scrubbed. She hears Khalil opening the door to the apartment, his keys jingling, his voice calling, Maria! Then she hears the sound of a second voice. He is not alone. He has brought Ethan with him. She is surprised. Khalil rarely brings Ethan to their house. He usually goes to Ethan’s apartment so as to avoid having to deal with the tension between him and Maria.
It’s been this way between Maria and Ethan for a while. Since college, really. When Khalil discovered he was black, he dumped all his white friends from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Ethan is the only white friend who remains from those pre-Maria days—and now that he and Khalil are starting a business together, Maria knows Ethan is here to stay.
He makes her uncomfortable. It isn’t just the way Khalil teases her in Ethan’s presence—the incessant jokes about her being old-school, a Luddite, an Amish girl, or the way Ethan laughs a little too long at those jokes. The source of their tension goes back years, to when she and Ethan had a fight—a strangely vicious fight that seemed to come out of nowhere. They were both a little drunk. She said she didn’t like Woody Allen movies and Ethan accused her of being anti-Semitic. She accused him of being racist. They ended up screaming accusations at each other on an East Village street while Khalil tried to calm them both down. They apologized to each other at a brunch Khalil organized for this purpose a few weeks later, but it was the kind of outburst you don’t forget.
She comes to greet them in the dark hallway, where they stand removing hats and coats and boots. She switches on the light and Khalil does a double take at the sight of her new hair.
Wow, he says. Wow.
The salon she went to today was nothing fancy—a Jamaican storefront salon a few blocks away. She got there late in the afternoon, as a woman stood inside sweeping up chunks of fallen hair. Maria asked her if she could help her out. The woman, whose name was Laverne, asked her if she needed a weave.
Maria considered this option, then said no.
Laverne looked relieved and said okay, she could help her out, as long as it didn’t involve a weave. She could do a perm. That was easy.
A whole lot of formaldehyde later, Maria looked different. The curls came out a little tighter than she’d hoped, more “On the Good Ship Lollipop” than “Oh What a Feeling.” And Laverne insisted on giving her gold highlights at the tips.
Maria doesn’t hate the highlights. She thinks they soften her features. She and Laverne agreed that the little bit of gold made her skin appear less sallow than it did before, a euphemism if Maria had ever heard one.
And the curls, Laverne assured her, would relax after she washed them.
It turned into a longer afternoon at the salon than she’d planned. As Laverne stood teasing her curls, Maria made the mistake of telling h
er that she was getting her hair done in preparation for a big first date.
Oh, Laverne said, smiling saucily as she sprayed something on Maria’s curls. In that case, we better get you cleaned up. Mikki!
Maria had thought they were alone, but then a fat white woman emerged from behind a curtain. Laverne ordered Mikki to wax Maria’s brows into high arches, get rid of her mustache and her leg hair and most of her genital hair.
Mikki, smirking, led Maria to the back room and ordered her to strip.
Mikki did this little thing where she smacked Maria’s skin hard in one spot before she pulled the wax off another spot. She said it was a trick she’d learned in beauty school—to create a distraction on one part of the body so the pain of the waxing would be lessened. It sort of worked, but Maria now had red slap marks all over her body.
She isn’t displeased with what Laverne and Mikki did to her. Her body feels more human—less simian—beneath her clothes. And the curls make her look more biracial than she did before. They do soften her features. They do indeed make her look less sallow. She wishes Gloria could see her with the curls. She looks a crumb closer to her mother. They could actually be mother and daughter, biologically, with the curls. She could almost—if she was a little bit younger—be a girl in a music video with these curls. The girls in the videos always have these curls.
But in the light of the hallway, Khalil’s expression is one of alarm.
What did you do to your hair?
She touches her hair. I got a perm.
Ethan, Khalil says, turning to his friend. Meet my poodle—I mean my fiancée.
He always talks like this around Ethan—sarcastic and corny jokes fly between them.
Maria shrugs. They’ll relax after I wash them.
I should hope so, he says, patting her hair gingerly.
His lips are curled into a mocking smile for Ethan’s sake, but his eyes, she can see, are shining and scared.
Are they going to last until the wedding? he asks.