by Danzy Senna
Khalil falls asleep beside her on the rug, and she lies in the semidarkness, thinking that the poet is probably making love to the other girl in his little apartment right now. The other girl who is probably a fan of his poetry, who probably has memorized his poems. Maria feels numb at the thought of this, actually numb, which seems, surely, like a kind of progress.
Besides. She loves Khalil. She likes him and loves him. He’s the man on her wedding cake. He’s the Jimmy and the Johnny of her girlhood daydreams. They make a fine picture together walking down the street, holding hands.
Once upon a time, Greg, not yet Goya, asked her, wistfully, while tracing a finger along her body, What if the world got so mixed up there was no black and white? Ever think of that?
Don’t be an idiot, she’d said to him. It’s called Brazil. And you want to know something about Brazil? Those motherfuckers coined the phrase “Money whitens.” So don’t talk to me about race mixing. ’Cause it won’t solve shit.
Greg, not yet Goya, also said to her once, I’ve always thought mixed people were the prettiest. I’ve always thought it was, like, God’s way of telling us we should mix.
She just stared at him that time, fighting the urge to hit him over the head with a small African statuette she kept beside her bed.
But maybe he was onto something in his imbecilic we-are-the-world revelations. She’s tired of being smart. Maybe she and Khalil are some kind of solution—the beautiful blend that happens four hundred years after humanity’s collision. What’s black and white and red all over? America. The bloody triumvirate. She and Khalil are what happens when colors mix and then mix again and then again.
Okay, so the sex is not great, but in Maria’s mind she’s already skipped to the part where they don’t have sex anymore. She’s done the math. Apparently they don’t have that many years of good sex left. Once they have kids, it’s all downhill—sex that is at best pathetic, at worst, a chore. And Khalil says he wants to try to get pregnant as soon as they are married. So the years of bad sex that are specific to them are not much longer. Soon it will be generalized, married-with-children bad sex. And everyone else they hang around with will also have kids and also be having bad sex, or no sex at all, so she will end up in the same place as the rest of them, no matter who she marries.
Maria feels grateful to Khalil for showing up when he did. She is acutely aware that there were always other options—other story lines she could have chosen or inherited or stumbled into. Khalil has spared her from all of these other stories. In his arms she is, as Gloria would say, a radical departure from the obvious scripts for a mixed girl born the year she was born.
Scenario One. She ends up with a white boy. Not Greg. An ordinary white boy. A perfectly good white boy. The kind you don’t throw out with the trash. Let’s call this white boy Dave. Let’s say Maria marries Dave. She never feels as black as she does in Dave’s arms. When she clears his dishes, she says she feels like his slave. So Dave clears the dishes. She says she feels like his slave when she mops the floor. So Dave mops the floor. She imagines he is raping her when he makes love to her. Dave is anything but a rapist—but still, it’s there, in the back of her mind when they have sex, that he is a rapist. And she tells him and he hears her and after that he’s very tender during lovemaking and asks her for permission before he does each and every thing.
With Dave, Maria runs the show. She is the beloved, he is the lover. Every couple has one of each. If she and Dave ever broke up, she knows and he knows he will never go back to the other side. He will only ever again be with women as dark or darker than Maria. It’s true what they say: Once you go black, you never go back, even if your black was kind of white. Maria is his island in the sun. She is his Dorothy Dandridge. She is his Gauguin girl in the tropical skirt. She loves and despises Dave in equal measure. It is a happy marriage.
She and Dave accrue the trappings of a middle-class life. Turns out everyone who is somebody loves an interracial couple. She benefits from their association. She learns how to be around white people in a way that works for everyone. She learns to wear the smile, the one she’s seen all her life on the faces of those brown women married to white men. A smile that is tight and lost and a little bewildered. A smile that wonders, Did I win the lottery or lose it? She convinces herself it does not bother her, coming home from a dinner party on the arm of this particular body, walking past the brown boys clustered on the street corner, feeling Dave’s fear as they move past all the dark male bodies she has failed to embrace.
Let’s say this is Maria’s story. She develops a laugh that is light and more impulsive-sounding than it needs to be, the kind of laughter that puts white people at ease in her presence. She is the one they are referring to when they say “some of my best friends are black.” She is the exception to the rule. She is the one they feel safe around. She adds flora and fauna to their dinner parties, but sometimes, still, they “forget” she is black. She has to remind them in small, nonthreatening ways.
She gives birth to children lighter than herself (who knew that was possible!), children who someday grow up to go to the best colleges. On their applications, they put down that they are “everything.” Because it’s true. There is no one-drop rule anymore. And only now that that rule is gone does Maria realize how much she has depended on it for her survival. And only now that her children are grown does she realize that what the lady says in the Tide commercial is true: You actually can wash out a stain. It wasn’t as stubborn as you were led to believe. You really can get those clothes white again. And once the stain is gone it is really gone.
And she thinks perhaps it doesn’t bother her. She is everything she set out to be. She is loved. She is happy.
And then one day she notices a pain in her throat when she swallows. She feels a lump there, on her neck, a firm bulge under her skin. Now what is this? And she wonders if the lump there has to do with all the times she swallowed her words. If it has to do with her practiced easy laugh. If it has to do with all the times she smiled so hard her face hurt.
No, the doctor assures her. This is just the way the cells divide. This is deeper than skin.
Dave makes love to her in the dark that night after her diagnosis. She thinks how in the blue light, hovering above her, he looks almost like a black man—the outline of a man who could be her father.
Scenario Two. The one where Maria stays true to her race. Oh, it’s not pretty either. It ends the same way. She gets cornrows in her hair, but they won’t stay neat. The braids keep coming loose. Her girlfriends think she’s the funniest thing on earth. Dance for me, Maria, dance for me. She does the Smurf for them and they all bust up laughing. She speaks in exaggerated Ebonics. She jerks her neck and snaps her fingers and goes on Stokely Carmichael rants when the occasion calls. Later, after college, she has a string of buppie boyfriends—stiff weirdos in suits. They smell too much like cologne. (All of them tell her, at some point after the first date, that they have a crush on Vanessa Williams. She attracts that type of man. She realizes she looks nothing like Vanessa Williams. She realizes everything is a euphemism.)
The babies come one after another from three different guys, they come like dark waves from her pale body, each one there to make her feel she’s crossed over for good.
Years later, after all the buppies have left her for white women, she turns into a churchgoing middle-aged spinster. She thinks she will find home in Jesus. Maybe He is the man she was looking for all these years. She sits in church weeping, surrounded by brown women and men who think of her as their little mascot. She is adored, she who has never talked back, never strayed. She is Gloria’s daughter. She has become the daughter Gloria wanted, finally.
Then one day, there it is, the pain in her throat when she swallows. She wonders, has to wonder, if it has to do with all the times she pretended to hate white people. All the times she pretended to hate half of herself. If this lump has anything to do w
ith all the times she has painted herself, her history, as blacker than somebody else’s, in an attempt to gain membership. Pick me! Pick me! I’m the soldier you want. Could it have to do with that?
No, the doctor tells her, as they stand together staring at the X-rays on the glass—the shapes of problems growing beneath her skin. This abnormality he is seeing has nothing to do with any of that, the doctor says. It was always going to happen. No matter what.
What she and Khalil have been trying to pull off here—the audacity of it—is not lost on her.
Maria and Khalil wander Crate and Barrel one afternoon in a dream state, making a list of the objects they hope will fill their cabinets someday—fairly useless household items that, according to the saleslady at Crate and Barrel, are necessities of a grown-up, middle-class couple. Objects that nobody, as far as Maria can tell, uses on a daily basis, but they might someday whimsically desire, and should therefore have stored away in their cabinets just in case. A Le Creuset pie pan, fluted around the edges—because someday, once or twice in the next decade, she will want to bake a pie. A six-speed blender that can crush ice and probably fingers too in its silver blades. A Crock-Pot with a ceramic insert that promises to make wholesome dinners while the multitasking career mother is at work. A mortar and pestle made from volcanic rock used to crush spices for the slow-cooker meals she will someday prepare and leave to cook by themselves. A juicer for the fresh orange juice she will once or twice think to serve her tribe of racially nebulous children in the morning before school. A set of cocktail tumblers and a copper ice bucket for the chic parties they will do every weekend or more likely every few years. An ice cream machine, so they can, on a whim, make exotically flavored ice cream one Friday night after baking their own pizza using the portable Pizzeria Pronto oven. And a nonstick muffin tin too, because although she will not be the kind of dreary mother to slave over a hot stove every day, she will be the kind of woman who might decide to bake muffins once in a while just for fun. So she will have a muffin tin available when and if this should ever happen.
They celebrate the completion of their registry checklist by going out to lunch. Over matching Waldorf salads, Khalil says he has a surprise. He says, smiling, that he’s contacted a friend at the New York Times who feels confident he can finagle a featured wedding announcement about them. Khalil says this means they will be the subject of a longer article, rather than just the blurbs with the headshots they give to everyone else.
We’re going to be a fucking feature, he says.
Maria asks him why. He looks disappointed in her reaction.
I mean, she says, are we interesting enough for a feature? We met in college just like ninety-eight percent of the other couples in that section. What’s so great about us?
Khalil leans across the table and whispers to her, We’re mulatto. Everybody loves mulattos. Nobody will grow bored of us, ever.
He begins to laugh. She laughs too because it’s funny. Every sentence is funnier with the word mulatto in it.
After lunch, they look into store windows, holding hands. She glimpses an attractive smiling couple up ahead. It’s them, of course, a reflection in the glass. Maria and Khalil. They look good together. They really do. And she is happy with him. She thinks he’s probably right about the article. They will be promoted to a feature story. They are already the subject of a documentary, after all. So what if the sex is not great. Nobody has to see their wooden lovemaking. That doesn’t have to be in the feature article about them.
They only have to know this vision of them walking down a street laughing together. From far away they look like a couple that would have great sex. It’s not that important—sex. The best sex she ever had was with a white guy she despised and fantasized about bludgeoning to death with an African statuette.
Elsa is going to shoot more footage for the film today. She has narrowed the film’s focus to four New People. Maria and Khalil will be two of the four. The others will be a homeless rights activist in Berkeley who is half white and half black and also, predictably (and mathematically impossibly), part Cherokee. The other is an aspiring singer/actress who lives in Los Angeles and who is Nigerian and Swedish. All of them are around the same age, born in the late sixties and early seventies, the progeny of the Renaissance of Interracial Unions. Elsa says the film will intersperse interviews and footage of all four subjects—moving through their lives. She wants Maria and Khalil’s story to be the narrative arc that holds the whole film together. She will reveal fairly early on that they are a couple but withhold that they are getting married until the very end.
It will, Elsa says, suggest the ending of an era, the beginning of a new one—like the way sometimes those apocalypse movies end with the birth of a baby. That will be implicit, that a new race will be born from these New People.
Maria and Khalil both know it is a big honor to be in the film, and especially to be the bookends for the story. Elsa has told them, in a conspiratorial whisper, that she chose them out of fifty other New People whom she auditioned.
Lisa isn’t officially a subject in the film, but she shows up a lot on set, bringing pastries for the crew and standing with Ansel and Heidi, pointing out possible backdrops, rushing in to adjust Maria’s scarf or arrange Khalil’s dreadlocks. Elsa has promised her a cameo. Over Ethiopian food with them one night, she says, You do realize every mutt in the world is going to hate you guys when they see the movie. They’re going to be, like, Who died and made these guys the Ministers of the Mulatto Nation?
Khalil laughs and assures Maria this isn’t true. Nobody will hate them. Everyone will love them. And he points out the other benefit of being in the movie: They will be getting a professional-level camera crew to film their wedding, rather than having to pay out of pocket for a half-assed videographer. He’s heard through the grapevine that Ansel is highly regarded as a documentary cameraman. Khalil says someday they can share the footage and the movie itself with their sons and their daughters, little Cheo and little Indigo. It will be a record of their life that they will someday cherish.
Maria has come around to seeing his point. But the film is eating up a lot of time. Elsa seems to need an astronomical amount of footage, filler shots of them together. Every weekend she wants to film something. Maria would prefer to be in the library in those moments, because she feels like a horse who smells the stable. Now that she knows she can finish, she wants to gallop toward that ending, rather than cavorting with Khalil in front of Elsa and Ansel in a variety of staged scenes. The long weekends away from her carrel feel disruptive at this late stage in the writing, and it always takes her a couple of days at the start of each week to immerse herself again. The momentum gets lost. But it seems important to Khalil that they fulfill their promise to Elsa. And he is actually enjoying their excursions on camera. So Maria puts her work aside every weekend to do it.
Today Elsa has planned for them to attend a circus that has come to town. Maria and Khalil weren’t planning to go, but it’s right in the neighborhood, so they agree. It is a relatively new all-black circus called the UniverSoul Circus. Maria has seen the posters around town for weeks. She stands in her room getting dressed for it, listening to Elsa and Khalil and Ansel and the new gaffer, Heather, a white woman who seems to have replaced Heidi, with slightly different features but an identical buzz cut.
They are all in the other room, talking while they wait for her.
Heather is talking about how much she’s learned working for Elsa and Ansel. Maria can hear her saying that she never felt that she belonged to an actual race before college, that she thought of herself as “just human,” but now she understands that whiteness is a race. She is white. She understands that this whiteness affords her privilege she didn’t earn. She is calling it her “invisible backpack,” the privilege she carries around on her back every single day.
Maria only half listens to their voices as she opens up a box from the back of her clos
et. Inside are a bunch of old clothes—things she had planned to give to charity months ago. She pulls out a pair of overalls. They are Gloria’s. She used to wear them all the time while she worked, trying to channel the spirit of Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God. Or maybe just Minnie Riperton. Maria puts them to her face and inhales and catches the scent of Dr. Hauschka.
By the time Gloria found out that the school was cutting her funding and that she would have a month to move out of graduate student housing, she’d become a real pack rat. Over spring break, Maria flew home to help her move out. She found Gloria surrounded by Afrocentric tchotchkes, Native American beadwork, bottles upon bottles of Dr. Hauschka beauty products that she would never get around to using, boxes and boxes of rice pilaf and cans and cans of organic soup she would never get around to eating.
Gloria sat at the little table across from Maria sipping a cup of Lipton tea, saying she didn’t know where she would go next. She actually thought maybe she could finish the dissertation in thirty days. The tome sat a foot high in her freezer, so that it wouldn’t burn up in case of fire. Of course she had it on disks and such, but she still wanted a draft in that freezer. Maria stared at it when she went to get ice for her lemonade.
Gloria gazed off into space as she spoke. I should tell you—I’m having a little health hiccup.
What do you mean?
It’s nothing. Just a thing Chuck noticed. A lump. Under my arm. He thinks he can treat it with remedies. We’re going to try that first. My body is trying to tell me something. We’re trying to figure out what it’s trying to say.