by Danzy Senna
She starts to inch her hand slowly across the velvet toward his, but he lifts his hand abruptly and checks his watch.
Shit, he says. It’s getting late.
She tries to sound casual. Should we find something to eat? She says it but she knows she won’t be able to eat. She doesn’t want to be with him for the first time on a full stomach.
I can’t tonight, he says. He looks at his watch again and chugs downs the rest of his beer.
She swallows. A hard ball has formed in her throat. Wait, she croaks. You have plans?
He is wearing a distant smile. You could say that. I’m meeting someone for dinner.
She scratches her arm. A girl?
Yeah, a girl, he says, looking down at the floor, bashful now. It’s all really early. We’ll see. He sighs. We’re just hanging out. I’m not all grown up like you, with your wedding planner and your big fancy ring.
She realizes, with a mounting bitter clarity, that he is confiding in her. He thinks she is his confidant—the equivalent of the fat girl sidekick or the gay best friend in a movie.
The fire is crackling, the flames gone suddenly high. Her eyes sting as she stares into its burning glow. She rubs at her eyes with her fists. She hears his voice, as if from a great distance, asking if she’s okay. She says there is an ash in her eye and excuses herself. Inside the restroom she pees. Her genitals look so strange and ridiculous with no hair. When she pulls up her tights she sees that they have a giant run in the back leading up and under her skirt. She paces the ladies’ room trying to control her breathing. She doesn’t know where to go. She is drunk but not drunk enough. She needs more Scotch and milk. She looks at herself in the mirror. Her curls are no longer tight neat coils. A top layer of frizz has formed around her head like a haze of gnats. Laverne never told her it would do that. Maria makes herself grin at her reflection, then frowns. She says aloud, I hate you.
The poet is standing by the exit when she comes out. He’s wearing his parka and the Pittsburgh Steelers cap.
So he did want the hat back, she thinks. It wasn’t just trash after all.
He is holding her coat and purse like a gentleman. I already settled up, he says. You can get me next time.
Out on the street, it is warmer than she expected. There is a sound of running water and she realizes the snow piles are melting.
Man, he says, it’s gonna be spring before we know it. He nudges her and says in a wispy girl voice, Wedding season.
She hails a cab. One immediately screeches to a stop for her and the poet says, drolly, Look at that—the privilege of membership.
He smiles at her when he says it, as if they will laugh together, but she can’t muster even a smile. Her throat feels raw as if she has been in a primal scream workshop. The poet leans in to hug her goodnight. He smells of laundry detergent.
When he steps away, he says, You look like somebody—I can’t think who it is.
She fixes her face into what she hopes is a blank expression. She can’t remember how to speak.
He reaches forward and ruffles her curls. Laughs a little as if he thinks her hair is somehow funny. You okay?
She manages a twist of her lips she hopes looks like a smile. She makes a gorilla-like sound. Uh. Uh.
He gives her one last perplexed look, then waves and walks away with the hat on his head toward his true destination. She watches his retreating form, the stark shame of what has occurred washing over her. He has been only half present with her all evening. While she sat in a kind of heady bliss, mooning over their every similarity, he was only half there, his mind on this other person he has gone off to share a meal with, or worse. It was a hat drop-off. Nothing more. She wonders if the other girl shares his feelings about Steely Dan and Evelyn Waugh and Snedens Landing. It seems impossible. And yet he is heading off to her, this other girl with whom he shares nothing. He has missed everything. She has failed to make him see.
The cab beside her beeps. The driver is waiting. She slips inside and slams the door.
Brooklyn, she says.
The driver groans. You gotta be fucking kidding me.
I’m not fucking kidding, she says, and slumps down low in the seat. She can smell her own funk wafting up from inside her jacket. The cab lurches forward. Voices speak from the radio in a language she does not understand.
Khalil is asleep in the bedroom. It is still dark outside. She sits curled in a blanket in the living room. The voices on the radio beside her are talking about a rapper who died tonight. Four bullet wounds to his neck and chest. They are playing his music on continuous loop. Maria listens for a while before she shuts it off.
Her whole body aches. It is still so early. She should go back to bed, but she knows she will not be able to sleep.
Instead she puts on the video of the last night at Jonestown and sits watching it in the gray dusk light. She has seen it so many times before. The footage is grainy. The people in it stand around the pavilion. They are waiting for Congressman Ryan, who is visiting tonight. They are waiting to show him they are happy there. They want to show him their experiment was a success. They want him to know they did it—they created Another America. The place they’d advertised in the pamphlet years before had become a reality.
She watches the footage from the sofa. A woman stands onstage singing a strained warbling version of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “That’s the Way of the World” while the crowd dances and claps. The singer has a beautiful voice.
Her name is Deanna Wilkinson. Maria knows her story. Knows she was born in 1950, the daughter of a white woman and a black man. When she was very small her parents fought and one of them threw a pan of burning oil at the other, but it splashed the girl instead. Deanna’s face was badly burned. She was removed from her parents’ custody. Deanna was one of the Eternally Wounded. She’d been born even before Elsa. Even before the Era of Mulatto Martyrs. She had been born in the Dark Ages of Mestizo Abandonment. While one side of her face was scarred from the burn, the other side remained smooth and untouched. She roamed from one temporary shelter to another until she found Jim Jones. He saved her life. He told her to get on the Greyhound bus and go with him to California. She followed him there and she followed him to Guyana. She never gave up on Jim Jones and she never stopped being ashamed of the scars on one side of her face.
On that final night at Jonestown, while the old people smiled their stiff smiles and danced their stiff dances, Deanna sang Earth, Wind and Fire.
In the video, Congressman Ryan at one point gets onstage. He looks exactly like an actor Maria has seen in made-for-television movies. His wording is careful, awkward. He says into the microphone that the few people he has spoken to that evening have expressed to him that this place is the best thing that had ever happened to them. Before he can say more, the crowd drowns him out with wild, unending applause. He tries to continue with his speech, but the crowd is manic—the applause has the sound of a kind of silencing mob drown-out more than approval.
There is a tarnished, macabre quality to the footage. If you look past the smiles, the dancing, the laughter, the people in the crowd look tired and dirty and thin and coated in a layer of jungle sweat. They are malnourished. Their joy and applause feel manic and desperate. Jim Jones has been coaching them for weeks, teaching them how to make a work camp look like a socialist utopia. He has fed them well for the first time in a year. He has told them to pick something nice to wear from the pile of communal clothing. They have done a good job of pretending, but it is there, if you look closely. It is there in certain shots, when Maria freezes the footage.
Outside, the light in the sky is brightening, edging toward morning. Jim Jones is speaking on camera, his eyes hidden behind his signature sunglasses. He is speaking directly to the cameraman, the one he will murder at the airstrip later.
People play games, friend, he is saying. They lie. They lie. What can I do about
liars? Anybody wants to get out of here can get out of here. They have no problem about getting out of here. They come and go all the time.
Maria does not see the poet again. She does not try to see him. She has moved forward and thrown herself full-body into the future she has chosen with Khalil. She finally returns that call to the woman at the Beach Plum Inn. She discusses the floral arrangements with a woman in Boston. She hires a deejay for the after-party they are throwing at the converted hangar at the Martha’s Vineyard airport. She peruses the caterer’s menu of nouveau soul food and checks off her selections for the rehearsal dinner.
And though that day at Bergdorf’s she did not settle on a wedding dress, she finds the perfect dress by accident one afternoon. She’s on her way to the public library, where she is going to make copies of the FBI transcripts from Jonestown. She is on 31st Street, in the Garment District, when she glances up and does a double take. Inside the window, a dark-haired mannequin stands somewhat jauntily, with her hands on her hips, beneath an awning that reads Jaymi Bride. Maria stands outside just looking at her for a while before going inside.
All the salesladies are Korean and don’t speak much English. One steps forward and introduces herself as Emily. She asks what she can do for Maria.
Maria points to the mannequin in the window. I try that? She catches herself. It is one of Khalil’s pet peeves about her—the way she always speaks in broken English when addressing people with strong accents. She speaks to them as if she too can’t form proper sentences. She corrects herself now. I’d like to try on that dress, she says to Emily. That one right there.
Muzak plays over the speakers. Emily is dressed in a pencil skirt and panty hose, low heels, like a shopgirl from the 1950s. What was it Gloria used to say? Nobody does Americana like new immigrants.
Emily helps her get the dress. She and another saleswoman have to drag the mannequin onto her side to get her out of the window. Maria stands off to the side, a little tense as she watches them unscrewing the arms and hoisting the dress off of the figure.
It is not the dress Maria expected to want. The dresses she saw at Bergdorf’s were more what she would have imagined herself wearing. Those were classy numbers. This dress is something else. It is full-skirted, ivory, with a jewel-encrusted V-necked bodice. It is dreamy—a confection made in Seoul. The shopgirls help her get it on in the softly lit dressing room area.
Afterward, Maria turns in slow circles in front of the mirror, admiring herself, wondering what Gloria would think if she could see her now.
She brings Lisa back to the store a few days later to see the dress. Maria makes sure to invite Oma on today’s outing, since she’s paying for the dress, but Oma says over the phone that she is too old and tired to drag her aching bones across town again. She says, Pick the dress that makes you happy, Maria. Just have them call me when it’s time to pay.
Maria meets Lisa outside the subway station at 34th and Broadway. They have made up since their nefarious meeting in the ladies’ room. Lisa has received her real present, the Lisa Doll by Ceres, and loved it as much as Khalil had imagined she would. The doll really does look like Lisa. It even wears a miniature indigo head wrap. She keeps it propped in her dining room, its arm around a bottle of gin. Nobody has ever mentioned Stacy Lattisaw again.
Lisa comes out of the station looking tired, in faded jeans, an army jacket, a red kerchief on her head. She says she’s just finished an eight-hour shift at the bakery. She says she’s ready for art school. I’m done with the pastry chef shit, she says, wearily. Now let me see what you’ve got.
When they arrive at the shop, Lisa says, Seriously?
Maria ignores the question and leads her inside, where Emily is waiting, her hair in a flawless flip. She has been expecting Maria. She helps Maria change into the dress again. Lisa, slumped in a velour armchair, doesn’t say anything when Maria steps out from behind the curtain. She just stares at her, a tight smile on her face.
Emily stands behind Lisa and holds up a finger, swirls it in circles to suggest that Maria should also turn in circles. So she does, her arms sticking straight out by her sides. Afterward Emily squats on her hands and knees beside Maria, her brow furrowed, sticking pins into the gown’s hem.
Too over-the-top? Maria says to Lisa, who has still not spoken.
Well. Lisa crosses her arms. Well. Um. Wow.
Well, um, wow, what?
Okay. You do realize nobody wears that style anymore, right? She glances around the store, laughs a little. I mean, it’s all about clean lines—the simple satin sheath. Not—that.
Oh. Maria swallows, embarrassed now.
But, Lisa says. She rises from the chair and goes to stand before Maria. You know what else?
What?
I fucking love it, she says. I think it’s genius.
Really?
Really. I love how over-the-top, princess fantasy it is. Like you’re channeling your inner six-year-old girl. It’s—it’s so bad it’s good.
Maria turns to look at her reflection. She hadn’t meant it as an ironic gesture.
Lisa nods. I think we should do it. Let’s do it.
Afterward, they go out to dinner together at a nearby restaurant. Over bowls of steaming bibimbap, Lisa describes the cake she is designing for the bakery in Martha’s Vineyard. It’s going to be over-the-top like Maria’s dress, she says—four-tiered, mint hand-piped royal icing, details of shimmery gold luster dust.
Maria is relieved to have the dress search over. There are six weeks till the wedding—and less than four weeks till her dissertation is due. Though she knows dissertation deadlines are meant to be missed (oh boy, does she know) she wants it to be over before the wedding. She wants to float down the aisle in her Korean confection, free from Jonestown. She doesn’t feel so much done with Jonestown as she feels ready to be done with Jonestown. It isn’t that she has said all that she needs to say about the music of the Peoples Temple. It is, rather, that she is finally accepting that there will never be enough to say about it.
She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn’t finish a paper in college? Be a completionist, not a perfectionist. Gloria was a perfectionist. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the stamina to finish her dissertation on Zora Neale Hurston and the triple consciousness of black women protagonists; it was that she could not tear herself away from the material. She couldn’t bear to leave Janie behind. Because Gloria understood that to finish something—to make something right and final—is to kill it.
The longer Maria looks at the people of Jonestown, listens to their voices, and stares at the pictures of their smiling hopeful faces, the more she can see that there is no way to say enough about them. Maria can see now that it is arbitrary, in a way—when you decide to stop looking at a thing, to put down your pen and walk away. The meanings will continue to form inside you, but you can make the choice to turn your gaze elsewhere.
Her mentor was encouraging in their last correspondence. He wrote to her from Berkeley, where he’d gone for his sabbatical. He said he’d read her most recent pages and that he thought she was making progress—he believed that her work was almost done.
Maria is clearer about a lot of things these days. She knows now that the poet—everything that has gone on between them—happened entirely in her own head. She has the sense of having gotten away with something—of some danger narrowly averted. And she wonders if she is getting religious because these days, whenever she sees the crazy Creole woman who wanders their block, dressed all in white, raving, she thinks of the phrase “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Still. She must be careful. Abstinence is the best policy. Lisa calls one evening and invites her and Khalil to a night of poetry and music with her in the city. Khalil, holding the phone to his ear,
asks Maria if she wants to go. It’s at the Fez. She hesitates. Khalil says, with a shrug, that the poet will be reading.
He says it as if it is just a simple detail about somebody they vaguely know, as if this detail will help her make her mind up—because he likes the poet, he enjoys his poetry. He says it as if this might be a fun thing for them to do together. Watch the poet read his poems.
There but for the grace of God go I.
Maria says that she feels like staying home tonight. Would that be okay? If we just stay home?
Khalil says, That’s fine, babe, and tells Lisa that they are staying home. He hangs up and throws some nuts in his mouth and says, Lisa says we’re already acting like an old married couple. Then he sits down and turns up the volume on the TV. It’s Seinfeld. George Costanza is screaming. His face has turned blue. She’s seen this one before. And for a moment, watching it, seated beside Khalil, she is in the danger zone again. She feels a tightness in her breath. She rises and walks down the hall and locks herself inside the bathroom and strips off her clothes and climbs into the empty bathtub naked. She sits inside the empty porcelain bowl hugging her knees and rocking back and forth.
The other girl will likely be at the reading tonight—the girl he went off to meet, despite the obvious and uncanny connection between him and Maria. He will read aloud his poems and the other girl will sit under the dim light of the Fez wearing a private smile.
Maria is shivering now.
Khalil knocks.
Should we scare up some dinner, babe?
Yes. Yes. I’m coming right out.
They cook. They actually cook. Not like an old married couple but like a newly married couple that will never become dreary or old. They make risotto with white wine and asparagus. It is delicious. They eat it in front of My Beautiful Laundrette and afterward they have sex on the living room shag rug. It is the first time they’ve done it on this rug. She reminds herself as he hovers over her that it’s not so bad. It’s just a penis inside a vagina, an ancient and wholesome pairing, like cookies and milk. It makes babies. It isn’t that deep. She will make it to the other side.