Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

by Z. Z. Packer

  She had not known where this last bit had come from, and, she could tell, neither had he, but she could hear the other nurses coming down the hall to see who was yelling, and though Cleophus Sanders looked to have more pity on his face than true belief, he had come after her when she turned to leave. She’d heard the clatter of him gathering his crutches, and even when she heard the meaty weight of him slam onto the floor, she did not turn back.

  THEN there it was. Pastor Everett’s silly motion of cupping his hand to his ear, like he was eavesdropping on the choir, his signal that he was waiting for Sister Clareese to sing her solo, waiting to hear the voice that would send the congregation shouting, “Thank you, Jesus, Blessed Savior!”

  How could she do it? She thought of Cleophus on the floor and felt ashamed. She hadn’t seen him since; her yelling had been brought to the attention of the administrators, and although the hospital was understaffed, the administration had suggested that she not return until next week. They handed her the card of the staff psychiatrist. She had not told anyone at church what had happened. Not even her aunt Alma.

  She didn’t want to sing. Didn’t feel like it, but, she thought, I will freely sacrifice myself unto Thee: I will praise Thy name, O Lord, for it is good. Usually thinking of a scripture would give her strength, but this time it just made her realize how much strength she was always needing.

  She didn’t want to, but she’d do it. She’d sing a stupid solo part—the Waterfall, they called it—not even something she’d invented or planned to do who knows how many years ago when she’d had to sneeze her brains out, but oh no, she’d tried holding it in, and when she had to sing her solo, those years ago, her near-sneeze had made the words come out tumbling in a series of staccato notes that were almost fluid, and ever since then, she’d had to sing all solos that way, it was expected of her, everyone loved it, it was her trademark. She sang: “All-hall other-her her grooouund—is sink-king sand!”

  The congregation applauded.

  “SAINTS,” the Pastor said, winding down, “you know this world will soon be over! Jesus will come back to this tired, sorry Earth in a moment and a twinkling of an eye! So you can’t use call-waiting on the Lord! Jeeee-zus, my friends, does not accept conference calls! You are Children of God! You need to PRAY! Put down your phone! Say goodbye to AT&T! You cannot go in God’s direction, without a little—genuflection!”

  The congregation went wild, clapping and banging tambourines, whirling in the aisles. But the choir remained standing in case Pastor Everett wanted another song. For the first time, Clareese found that her monthly troubles had settled down. And now that she had the wherewithal to concentrate, she couldn’t. Her cross-eyes wouldn’t keep steady, they roamed like the wheels of a defective shopping cart, and from one roving eye she saw her aunt Alma, waving her arms as though listening to leftover strains of Clareese’s solo.

  What would she do? She didn’t know if she’d still have her job when she went back on Monday, didn’t know what the staff psychiatrist would try to pry out of her. More important, she didn’t know what her aunt Alma would do without the special medical referrals Clareese could get her. What was a Sister to do?

  Clareese’s gaze must have found him just a moment after everyone else’s had. A stranger at the far end of the aisle, standing directly opposite Pastor Everett as though about to engage him in a duel. There was Cleophus Sanders with his crutches, the right leg of his pinstriped pants hollow, wagging after him. Over his shoulder was a strap, attached to which was his guitar. Even Deacon McCreedy was looking.

  What in heaven’s name was Cleophus doing here? To bring his soul to salvation? To ridicule her? For another argument? Perhaps the doctors had told him he did not need the operation after all, and Cleophus was keeping his end of the deal with God. But he didn’t seem like the type to keep promises. She saw his eyes search the congregation, and when he saw her, they locked eyes as if he had come to claim her. He did not come to get Saved, didn’t care about his soul in that way, all he cared about was—

  Now she knew why he’d come. He’d come for her. He’d come despite what she’d told him, despite his disbelief. Anyhow, she disapproved. It was God he needed, not her. Nevertheless, she remained standing for a few moments, even after the rest of the choir had already seated themselves, waving their cardboard fans to cool their sweaty faces.

  Our Lady of Peace

  THE CHROME - TOPPED vending machine in the Baltimore Travel Plaza flashed Chips! Chips! Chips! but no one could have known it was broken unless they’d been there for a long time, like Lynnea, having just escaped lackluster Kentucky, waiting for a taxi, watching a pale, chain-smoking white girl whose life seemed to be brought to a grinding halt by an inability to obtain Fritos.

  The white girl kicked the vending machine, then cracked her knuckles. After a few spells of kicking and pouting, she found her way to the row of seats where Lynnea was sitting, then plunked down next to her.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” the white girl said.

  Lynnea turned in the girl’s direction, which was invitation enough for the girl to begin rattling off the story of her life: running away, razor blades, ibuprofen; living day to day on cigarettes and Ritz crackers.

  Outside the Travel Plaza, Baltimore stretched black and row-house brown. Traffic signals changed, dusk arrived in inky blue smudges, and slow-moving junkies stuttered their way across the sidewalk as though rethinking decisions they’d already made. This, she thought lamely, had been what was waiting for her in Baltimore.

  But any place was better than Odair County, Kentucky. She’d hated how everyone there oozed out their words, and how humble everyone pretended to be, and how all anyone ever cared about was watching basketball and waiting for the next Kentucky Derby. Her grandparents had been born in Odair and so had their parents. Her family was one of four black families in the county, and if another white person ever told her how “interesting” her hair was, or how good it was that she didn’t have to worry about getting a tan—ha ha—or asked her opinion anytime Jesse Jackson farted, she’d strangle them.

  Nevertheless, she’d gone back to Odair County after college and started working at the Quickie Mart. One night—while in the middle of reminding herself that the job was beneath her, and that once she’d saved up enough, she’d move to a big city—four high school boys wearing masks held up the place with plastic guns, taking all the Miller Light they could fit in their Radio Flyer wagons. She hadn’t been scared, and the manager had said she’d done the right thing. Still, she smoked her first cigarette that night, and spread a map of the country over her mother’s kitchen table.

  When she’d ruled out the first tier of cities—New York (too expensive), L.A. (she had no car), Chicago (she couldn’t think of any reason why not Chicago, but it just seemed wrong)—Lynnea had settled on Baltimore. She took an apartment sight-unseen, her last few hundred dollars devoured by a cashier’s check for a security deposit, signed to a landlady named Venus.

  Now that she had arrived in Baltimore, she’d begun to have doubts. There was no taxi in sight, and the white girl next to her droned on, describing preferable methods of suicide.

  “Tibetan monks light themselves on fire,” the girl said.

  Lynnea held her head in her hands and tried to ignore the girl. She stared at the floor, its checkered tiles marbleized by filth; she looked outside to see if any taxis had arrived. She even cast her eyes about the bus station crowd, but the white girl still would not shut up.

  “Eskimos kill themselves by floating away on icebergs,” the white girl said.

  “If you can find an iceberg any where near Baltimore,” Lynnea finally said, “I’d be glad to strap you to it.”

  HER LANDLADY, Venus, was a tiny sixtyish woman who walked in quiet, jerky steps. Her complexion was the solemn brown of leatherbound books—nearly the same shade as Lynnea’s—but atop her head, where presumably black hair should have been, Venus wore a triumphant blond wig. Lynnea had been living i
n a damp efficiency below Venus for nearly three months when she spotted the woman taking out the garbage, readjusting her wig as though Lynnea were an unexpected guest.

  “Oh my. Shocked me near to death. How’s the moving going?”

  “I moved in three months ago,” Lynnea said. “I’m pretty much finished moving in.”

  “I thought you were moving out.”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  Lynnea always paid her rent late and hadn’t paid last month’s at all. She slurped black bean soup straight from the can, used newsprint for toilet paper, had tried foreign coins and wooden nickels in the quarters-only laundromat. By the end of three months she’d decided freelancing at the weekly paper was not enough; she would need a job that paid for dentist visits, health insurance, toilet paper.

  Then she read about a teaching program that promised to cut the certification time from two years to a single summer. This, she knew, was for her. Inner-city Baltimore students would be nothing like the whiny white girl from the bus station. Lynnea would become an employee of the city, and have—at long last—benefits.

  “We’re going to do a few exercises,” the director said on the first day of the certification program. “What you’re trying to do,” she said widening her eyes, “is disappear.”

  Lynnea waited for her to explain what she meant by “disappear” but the director just smiled as though disappearing were easy and fun. Lynnea looked around the classroom to see if others were as lost as she. A man who had previously introduced himself to Lynnea simply as Robert the Cop stared at Evelyn, then winced as though he’d been asked for a urine sample.

  “Miss Evelyn,” Robert the Cop said, his hands holding a box of imaginary no-nonsense. “I’m a cop. I’m new at this teaching business. You gotta break it down for me. What do you mean by ‘disappear’?”

  “Disappear. You know. To go away, to vanish.”

  Lynnea sighed and looked down, watching a roach scramble across the floor. Then Jake Bonza, the man second-in-charge, a teacher for twenty years, took over. “What Ms. Evelyn Hardy means is this: one a y’all is going to pretend to be the teacher. The rest of y’all are going to abandon your adult selves and act like students. Not the goody-two-shoe students, but the kinda fucked-up students you know y’all were or wanted to be.” He paused, looking at them as if to sear his words into their heads before he continued, “This’ll prepare you for the freaks of nature who’ll throw spit wads at you while you try to take attendance.”

  Bonza browsed the room, flashing an ornery grin. “Yeah.” He nodded. “We’ll see which one a y’alls cracks and bleeds. Which one a y’alls bends over and takes it from behind.”

  DURING THE training sessions, adults playing students took their roles as miscreants to heart: they got out of their seats, wanting to pee and eat and smoke: Robert the Cop stood and lit a Marlboro while some pink farm girl from Vermont went through her lesson on subtraction in tears, her shaky hand gripping the chalk so hard it broke. They’d ask questions like how much wood could a wood-chuck chuck; one teacher felt liberated enough to discharge a sulfurous fart. Lynnea sat with her chin resting on her desk, eyes trained on the chalkboard, refusing to believe her students would act this way, refusing to participate in team-spirit badness.

  But after eight weeks of role-play, Lynnea was in front of a real classroom. Freshman English. After she’d written her name on the chalkboard, a tall boy, the color of a paper bag, hitched up his droopy jeans and exclaimed, “Two G’s, yo!” splaying two fingers like a sign of victory, the other hand in an arthritic semblance of a “G.” The replies were immediate and high-pitched. “Yeaah boyeee!” “What up, yo!” Then a trio found each other from the maze of Lynnea’s carefully organized seats and high-fived elaborately before leisurely sitting back down, happily grabbing their crotches.

  Throughout the first day, she kept hearing this phrase; students in the hallway yelling, “2 G’s! 2 G’s!” She finally pulled two girls aside and asked what it meant. The girls looked at each other, tottering coltishly in their clunky Day-Glo shoes, all enlarged eyes and grins, muffling giggles on each other’s shoulders. Finally one girl composed herself enough to explain, “It mean two grand. Two thousand dollars. Like the Class of 2000. Get it?”

  Lynnea nodded her head quickly, feigning remembrance of something she’d momentarily forgotten. She had wondered what the Class of 2000 would call themselves when she and people she called friends gathered in the Taco Bell parking lot to celebrate their own graduation. “What’re they gonna call themselves? The class of Double Nothing?”

  AT THE end of the first week of teaching, Lynnea found herself having to raise her voice to get their attention—something she wasn’t used to doing. They didn’t quite yell and scream, but their collective whimsical talk was the unsettling buzz of a far-off carnival. When she sent them to the principal’s office, they snickered and bugged out cartoon eyes, heading toward the office for a few paces, then bolting in the opposite direction. She found herself sharking the room, telling duos here and trios there that they should not be talking about their neon fingernail polish or the Mos Def lyrics in front of them, but the novel at hand, Their Eyes Were Watching God. They were quiet for a moment, controlling their grins as if they were hiding something live and wriggling between the covers of their notebooks.

  One day into her second week of school, students had begun slipping to the edges of their seats during the lesson, stunt-falling to the floor whenever an anonymous ringleader gave the signal.

  “STOP IT,” Lynnea said, teeth clenched. As soon as she spoke, a wave of students dropped to the floor, stricken by an invisible three-second plague. She gritted her teeth and tugged at her hair. The students hushed and slid back into their chairs, then sat straight again as if watching to see what gesture of pain she’d make next. She tried counting to ten, but only got to five when she caught the unmistakable scent of marijuana.

  “All right. Who’s been smoking?”

  “Smoking’s bad for you,” someone said.

  First came guarded giggles, then a blossoming of laughter.

  EVERY FRIDAY after school all the teachers in the program met at a bar called The Rendezvous Lounge, ostensibly to swap teaching stories and commiserate before they got drunk. The first time she’d gone to The Rendezvous, she and Robert the Cop had smoked together, making fun of Bonza.

  “Forget that crack-and-bleed song and dance,” Robert the Cop said. “All I want is for the students to do what I tell them. All I want is for my fucking health care to kick in so I can get rid of this rotten molar.”

  Just a week ago, Lynnea would have agreed, but now, at the end of her second week of teaching, she just wanted to be able to teach without having to shout above the students. One of the teachers at her school had said that whenever the students got loud, he whispered, forcing the students to shut up in order to make out what he said. But this little trick didn’t work for Lynnea. Her whispers went as unheeded as her yells.

  She ordered a DeGroen’s and scanned the crowd of teachers, the barroom air smelling of beer and smoke. Then, to Lynnea’s surprised joy, Jake Bonza strode through The Rendezvous in a pantomime of majesty, glancing right and left; surveying the crowd before picking the person he believed would soonest buckle under the pressure of his loud piss stream of talk.

  “How’s it hanging, Davis?” Bonza called out to Lynnea. Bonza took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke from his nostrils like a hero in an old western before aiming the cigarette Lynnea’s way. “You think you gone pull through this, hon?”

  “Of course I’ll pull through,” Lynnea said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  She hadn’t told him anything about the past two weeks, and now felt insulted that he’d assumed—correctly—that something was wrong. Lynnea searched Bonza for an elaboration, but Bonza just winked at Evelyn, then downed half of his beer.

  “I’ve been through some tough times,” Lynnea said, thinking back to her days of working at the Odai
r Quickie Mart. She would have to pull through: she wouldn’t get paid until the end of the month. And she was running out of toilet paper.

  A FEW days later, Lynnea caught two girls nonchalantly plunking packages of fake hair onto their desks. The packages were labeled by color: Burnished Rum, Foxy Black, Champagne Kiss.

  “What do you think you’re going to do with those?” she asked mid-lesson, her shaky finger still pointing to a vocabulary word on the chalkboard: expiate.

  One of the girls, Ebony, looked her up and down, then rested her eyes at a point beyond Lynnea’s glare. “Whatever the hell I want to.” Ebony took out a strip of hair from the long plastic bag, doubled it, and hooked it around a spongy black clump of Kyra’s hair, then proceeded to braid. The room was quiet.

  “Out!” Lynnea said.

  “No,” Ebony said, then sucked her teeth as though annoyed she’d been forced to answer. Ebony kept braiding at a steady pace, as if determined to show the rest of the class she wasn’t paying attention to Lynnea. It was this calm, this nonchalance, that infuriated Lynnea most of all, and she gripped Ebony’s bony shoulder, leaned until her mouth was flush against Ebony’s ear, and blared, “OUT!”

  Ebony whipped up from her seat and backhanded her, strands of Foxy Black slapping across Lynnea’s face. Chairs clattered to floor, students stood, screaming like cheerleaders. “Shit! Did you see that! Ms. Davis got banked!”

  Lynnea felt her face. No blood. Barely a sting. The girl was gone. Lynnea blinked slowly, then walked out of the classroom. Behind her the class had become a noisy party, and ahead of her, a few yards down the hallway, she saw Ebony make the corner—a flash of short skirt, yellow plastic go-go boots, a trail of fake hair. She heard the squeak of sneakers and knew half her class was on its way down two flights of stairs and out the massive doors.