New People

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New People Page 11

by Danzy Senna


  Maria says, I haven’t decided.

  She hears a kind of Kitty Genovese scream out in the night. Waits for more but it is followed by silence.

  Khalil stares at her for a moment, tight-lipped. Did you ever call back the woman at the Beach Plum Inn? She left another message.

  I’m going to call her tomorrow.

  Khalil walks with his head down to the bathroom and shuts the door hard behind him.

  She looks at Ethan and says, Sheesh, what’s gotten into him? Khalil never takes a second cup of coffee at home.

  Ethan doesn’t laugh at her joke. They stare at each other in thick silence before Maria heads to the kitchen to fix herself a drink.

  Ethan follows her and stands at the doorway, his arms folded, watching her.

  Did I see you a week ago pushing a baby stroller in the Village?

  No.

  I could have sworn I saw you there—

  It wasn’t me.

  Maria takes a gulp of wine. It is old and tastes like vinegar. She spits it into the sink, and begins to search around the refrigerator for a new bottle. She finds one and sets to opening it at the counter, her eyes fixed on the bottle, not Ethan.

  Maria, don’t lie to me.

  I’m not lying.

  Ethan is a tall man with a wide strapping chest. He’s grown a beard and it makes him appear like a lumberjack. His form seems to take up the whole kitchenette. He seems bigger and wider than she remembered him.

  During their fight about Woody Allen so many years ago she had the feeling he was struggling not to punch her in the face. His face got very red as he belted out the names of Woody Allen movies, rapid-fire, asking her one after another if she really didn’t think they were funny. Annie Hall. Manhattan. Zelig. He tilted his body toward her, his fists balled up at his sides. At some point, mid-fight, she remembered that she did in fact find Woody Allen movies funny—all of the ones she’d ever seen—but it was too late to back down and it wasn’t the point. She wanted to have the right not to find them funny.

  She told Khalil later that she’d felt physically threatened by Ethan.

  Khalil said she was being paranoid. He said Ethan was a feminist and would never hit a woman.

  When she insisted he was violent, Khalil said, He’s the child of classics professors, for God’s sake.

  Now he is hovering beside her in the kitchenette, taking up a lot of room. He’s making her uncomfortable.

  Make yourself at home, she says to him, nodding toward the living room. Remote control’s in there.

  He doesn’t move.

  He speaks beside her in a low, tight voice: Here’s the thing, Maria. I know I saw you with a stroller. I was standing across the street and it was dark, but I saw you. I called your name but you didn’t hear me. You looked like you were in a real hurry. I am absolutely sure it was you. I asked Khalil about it and he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  It was just somebody who looked like me.

  No, it was definitely you. You without this—Afro.

  Maria jerks around to stare at him.

  Here’s the other thing, Maria. I love Khalil like a brother. Okay? So if you hurt him, you are going to have to contend with me.

  You’re joking, right? I mean this whole mafia don shtick.

  Did you just say “shtick”?

  She turns away and begins to wash a bowl from the ramen she ate earlier. There are noodles trapped in the drain. They look like bits of brain. She hears Khalil coming out of the bathroom, the toilet flushing behind him. Hears his bright jostling white-boy voice. What are you two kittens conspiring about?

  Nothing, man. Just shooting the shit.

  Turn on the game, get a brewski. Come on, dude. It’s the playoffs.

  She can hear the boy Khalil once was, a long time ago, before her. Before he began to drop his g’s and pepper his sentences with that eternally rhetorical question: Know what I’m sayin’? She can hear the only black guy at the frat party—the Hootie in his Blowfish—that still lives inside of him.

  Ethan leaves the kitchen and she can hear them joking around, settling into their seats side by side.

  She is trembling. She really thinks Ethan is dangerous. Violent. Or at least potentially so. He only gets away with it because he’s a big white man with a fancy pedigree. Later she will say these words to Khalil.

  For now, she goes to the bedroom and shuts the door.

  She takes some deep breaths. Tries to calm down. She has work to do. Tomorrow she will see the poet. The thought of it makes Ethan and the whole world feel very far away. She begins to rifle through her closet until she finds her favorite dress. It is shaped like a child’s old-fashioned pinafore, black and woolen and hitting just above her knees. She will wear it when she meets the poet. She will pair it with bright pink stockings and low-heeled boots. She lays all the pieces out on the bed like a paper doll outfit, the waist of the tights hidden beneath the skirt of the dress and the legs stretching down beneath the boots. It almost looks like a real person lying there.

  Rendezvous. That’s the word she keeps thinking of. Rendezvous. Today is the day of their rendezvous. She rides the subway all dressed up in her outfit, her vagina bald and her head hair curly. She sees herself in the subway glass and thinks how she looks like a different Maria.

  She arrives at the bar ten minutes early. She had hoped to arrive ten minutes late, breathless and windswept, but her timing was off. The poet has not yet arrived. She takes a seat at the bar. The bartender asks her what she wants. She says, Scotch and milk. The bartender stares at her for a moment as if he thinks she’s joking. She repeats the order. She has never ordered a Scotch and milk in her life but she has always wondered. The bartender places the cloudy liquid before her. She takes a gulp and it is sharp tasting, bitter. She’d hoped it would be milkier. It will not soothe the roiling in her stomach.

  The bar is not crowded. It is only late afternoon and outside the rain is falling in steady gray sheets over the West Village. A few people sit on low couches near the window, looking out onto the street.

  She checks her watch. The poet is officially seven minutes late. She thinks he is probably trying to stage a windswept entrance. He’s actually going to pull it off.

  She could have a good life if the poet never shows up. A Brooklyn brownstone, a tribe of butterscotch dream children, a fancy tenure-track job based on her book on the ethnomusicology of the Peoples Temple, so what if nobody except the faculty on her graduate committee ever reads it, summers spent in Martha’s Vineyard, chatting with megastar intellectuals on private sand. She thinks about how she could enter the world that eluded Gloria.

  Gloria. The French have an expression for when somebody suddenly ages. They call it “the blow of age.” Le coup de vieux. Poverty, Maria knows, can show up on you quite suddenly too.

  Around Gloria’s eighth year in the PhD program, living off student loans, trying to feed Maria and finish her dissertation and teach adjunct courses, she woke up one day and looked poor. It wasn’t about money. It was a particular kind of bag-lady aura that infects PhD students who are overdue on student loans. Her Afro had gone untended for too long. It was past the point of looking political. Her tortoiseshell glasses, once stylish, were taped together at one temple, and the lenses were scratched and filmy. She had begun to wear the same uniform every day, a uniform for working on a computer and schlepping back and forth to the library, sweatpants and an oversized cardigan that had pilled up into a million balls of acrylic fiber. A uniform for going to work on something you know, in your heart of hearts, is not moving forward. Her left front tooth was beginning to rot and she didn’t have the dental insurance plan to deal with it.

  Maria looked poor too. She was only seven at the time, but in photos she had the look of one of the Roma you see on the streets of Paris. Her hair was always tangled, her pants too short, a perp
etual stain of dirt and lollipop juice around the rim of her mouth. Harvard notwithstanding, she lived like any other poor child on a steady diet of hot dogs and ramen noodles. She lived in a cement tower that looked—if you blurred your eyes just right—like any other housing project.

  One day, Gloria was standing with Maria outside Café Algiers in Harvard Square. She was holding her coffee cup with no lid—trying to let the scalding liquid cool off before she took the first sip—when a couple approached them. They were a white man and a white woman and they were deep in conversation. The woman was blond, wearing a long wool coat. Maria noticed the woman looking at Gloria as they approached. She didn’t seem to notice Maria, so fixed was her gaze on Gloria. As she and the man walked past, the woman held out her hand and dumped a handful of change into Gloria’s coffee. The scalding liquid splashed out, burning Gloria’s hand. The couple kept walking, not even noticing the mistake.

  Gloria stared into the cup, where the change the woman had thrown in had sunk to the bottom.

  Did that actually just happen? she finally managed to say.

  Maria nodded. Motherfuckers.

  Gloria glanced at Maria, about to chastise her for her language, then thought better of it. She threw her cup down and started to walk in a swift rage after the couple. Maria followed at Gloria’s heels. She was half excited, half dreading the fight that was about to occur. Gloria got right up behind them, almost upon them, but then stopped, stepped back, a startled look on her face.

  They’re getting away, Maria said, pointing at the couple, who were moving into the throngs of revelers in the Friday night Square. You’re gonna lose them.

  Gloria looked tired. I’m never going to finish this book, am I? I’m never going to get out of this program alive.

  Her mother looked so frail standing there. Maria could see the lanky young woman she’d once been, the one she’d only seen in photographs, her eyes twinkling with irony, her mouth twisted into a smirk.

  Gloria used to drag Maria everywhere. From the special collections stacks to conference halls, from seminar tables to department mixers, Maria went with her mother to everything. Gloria would set her up with a book and a pad of paper in the corner of some non-child-friendly space. She used to try to make it a game for Maria. She’d whisper to her, They all think you’re a child prodigy. Nobody knows you’re my daughter. Maria got into the act. She would affect what she imagined was the expression of a child genius, precocious and slightly tragic, as she trailed after her mother, trying to catch the eyes of passing students, to imagine herself through their eyes.

  It is clear to Maria now, sipping the Scotch and milk at the bar, why Gloria never finished her dissertation. Because she had a child. She had Maria. The child was a weight on her mother’s ankle. No words on a page can compete for attention with a demanding child. She once overheard Gloria saying to her best friend at the kitchen table, See, when you adopt a baby you’re their first wound. Don’t buy this bullshit about it being a blessing. You’re not their mother. You don’t smell like home. You don’t smell like the body. So you have to lay it on thick. Be right up beside them until they forget that other body. Until they are so smothered by your love they don’t even fucking remember her.

  Maria feels a gray figure hovering beside her. It’s here. It’s in the bar. She feels its warmth and weight. But when she looks up at the door she sees it is not the gray thing that has entered the room. It is him. The poet. He walks inside the bar and stands looking around for her. He has no hair so he isn’t exactly windswept, but the effect is the same.

  She waits for him to see her, her whole body pulsing. She thinks about the time she saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh at a Barneys perfume counter. This is so much more than that. Like she is witnessing something from a dream or a movie become reality. Something impossible becoming possible. He is wearing an army-green parka. His head is hatless. He glimpses her and seems not to recognize her for a moment. He looks away, scans the room, then back at her, frowing. She lifts a hand.

  He nods, starts across the room in her direction.

  You look different, he says, eyeing her with mild suspicion.

  She touches her hair. I’m not—different.

  Did you always have curls?

  She looks away. I usually wear it straight.

  She wonders if by her answer—I usually wear it straight—he will think she usually straightens her hair and that these curls are her hair’s natural state. She is pleased at the thought of this confusion, and glancing at her reflection behind the bar, almost believes it—that this curly-haired girl is her “going natural.”

  He sits down. So, do you have my hat?

  She hesitates, waiting for him to laugh. It’s got to be a joke that he is already asking for the hat. But he just watches her, unsmiling. Her eyes stinging, she opens her purse and pulls out the hat. She stares at it for a brief moment before handing it over to him, feeling a sinking unhappiness as the transfer is made.

  Thanks, he says, shoving it into his jacket pocket. She is afraid he’s going to get up and go now, but when the bartender comes over and asks him what he wants, he asks the bartender what kind of beer they serve. She feels all her muscles relax. He is staying. He was just getting their business out of the way. It was a pretense, enacted for both their sakes.

  She listens as he and the bartender proceed to have a very lengthy conversation. He asks the bartender specific questions about each kind of beer on the menu, and the bartender answers him with utmost seriousness, as if he has been waiting his whole life to have this conversation with somebody. Finally the poet decides on a pale ale from Belgium and the bartender assures him he’s made a great choice.

  They drink. They don’t talk about personal matters. They talk about movies and books, people and places, their preferences and hatreds. She longs to ask him more personal questions, but doesn’t. And anyway, from this conversation she gleans everything she needs to know. They are meant for each other. They have strange, unlikely things in common. They both like the music of Steely Dan and Roberta Flack and DJ Quik and Del the Funky Homosapien. They both think that song by Shuggie Otis, “Strawberry Letter 23,” contains the best first few minutes to any song, ever. They both enjoy reading books by Evelyn Waugh and Chester Himes and graphic novels by Kyle Baker and they both love the movies of Roman Polanski. They both listen to Joni Mitchell, and secretly, they both sometimes listen to James Taylor, though not without a certain feeling of humiliation. And she wants the poet to know that since he mentioned it to her that day in front of the record shop, she has decided that she too dislikes Brooklyn. She tells him she thinks it has “bad vibes”—and that maybe underneath, it’s a Native American sacred burial ground.

  Like, it’s somewhere we shouldn’t be living at all, she says.

  He nods, agrees. He has had this exact thought too.

  Strangest, most telling of all, they both harbor the same exact fantasy about moving out of the city to the Hudson River Valley, settling down in the same exact town called Snedens Landing, where neither of them has ever been but have seen on maps.

  Maria’s face hurts from smiling. She thinks of a line from a Dr. Seuss book she used to love as a child. We are here, we are here, we are here.

  The poet nods toward a sofa in front of the fireplace and asks if she wants to sit over there. Yes, she says, adding, like they do in movies: Let’s get more comfortable. They carry their things across the bar, which has grown more crowded. She realizes, walking behind him, that she is a little drunk and happier than she has been in many months, maybe years. They sit side by side on the velvet sofa. He holds a fresh pint of the Belgian pale ale in his hand.

  They have not discussed or even mentioned Khalil the whole time they’ve been talking. But once they are seated by the fire, something changes. The poet looks at her and says: So, are you and Khalil going to have those little figurines on top of your wedding cak
e? Do they even make them with dreadlocks?

  She stares into her glass. I don’t know, she says in a quiet, serious voice. She understands what he is doing. He is trying to make light of a painful situation. She turns to look out at the gray evening light. There are ancient dirty snow piles in the tree beds outside. In the distance, a tiny dog is taking a shit. The world beyond the window looks like a hard, cold place. She wants to stay inside this bar forever, the fire warming her skin, the poet beside her. But she thinks with a kind of weary resolve how many steps she has to take—how much unraveling she needs to do before she can get to the other side.

  She feels his hand touch her shoulder. He gives her a gentle push.

  Hey, he says. Come on. Tell me about the wedding. Are you gonna wear one of those froufrou white dresses? Write your own vows? Are you gonna hold your glass of champagne and interlink arms with him and do that thing where they take a sip all tangled up like that?

  He is wearing a teasing, big brotherly smile, and she thinks he is making fun of her.

  Come on, he says. Spill the beans. Are you gonna go on a honeymoon to Paree?

  Don’t do this, she says. Please.

  Do what? He takes a gulp of beer. Hey, have I mentioned how much I hate Paris? I went last year. Nothing new is ever going to happen in that city. It’s over.

  I hate it too, she says. Though she has never been, she imagines she will hate it too.

  The music playing from the loudspeakers is a Hall and Oates song she hasn’t heard in a long time. “Sara Smile.” Maria says, I love this song. Don’t you?

  He shrugs. I don’t know about love. It’s not bad. It’s true they don’t make white boys like that anymore.

  Are they white? I thought one of them was black.

  He makes air quotes with his fingers and says, Sicilian.

  His hand lies on the sofa only inches from her own. His knuckles are knobby and his fingers ringless. She has already decided that if he invites her back to his apartment she will go. The chances of her bumping into Susan are slim, and even if she does, she suspects Susan won’t recognize her with her curly hair. And even if she does recognize her, Maria will deny everything. Nobody will believe Susan’s story, because it doesn’t make sense.

 

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