by Z. Z. Packer
“Well, I’m not going to suck his dick, that’s for sure.”
She put her arm around me in mock comfort, but I pushed it off, and ignored her. She touched my shoulder again, and I turned, annoyed, but it wasn’t Heidi after all; a sepia-toned boy dressed in khakis and a crisp plaid shirt was standing behind me. He thrust a hot-pink square of paper toward me without a word, then briskly made his way toward the other end of Commons, where the crowds blossomed. Heidi leaned over and read it: “Wear Black Leather—the Less, the Better.”
“It’s a gay party,” I said, crumpling the card. “He thinks we’re fucking gay.”
HEIDI AND I signed on to work at the Saybrook dining hall as dishwashers. The job consisted of dumping food from plates and trays into a vat of rushing water. It seemed straightforward, but then I learned better. You wouldn’t believe what people could do with food until you worked in a dish room. Lettuce and crackers and soup would be bullied into a pulp in the bowl of some bored anorexic; ziti would be mixed with honey and granola; trays would appear heaped with mashed potato snow women with melted chocolate ice cream for hair. Frat boys arrived at the dish-room window, en masse. They liked to fill glasses with food, then seal them, airtight, onto their trays. If you tried to prize them off, milk, Worcestershire sauce, peas, chunks of bread vomited onto your dish-room uniform.
When this happened one day in the middle of the lunch rush, for what seemed like the hundredth time, I tipped the tray toward one of the frat boys as he turned to walk away, popping the glasses off so that the mess spurted onto his Shetland sweater.
He looked down at his sweater. “Lesbo bitch!”
“No,” I said, “that would be your mother.”
Heidi, next to me, clenched my arm in support, but I remained motionless, waiting to see what the frat boy would do. He glared at me for a minute, then walked away.
“Let’s take a smoke break,” Heidi said.
I didn’t smoke, but Heidi had begun to, because she thought it would help her lose weight. As I hefted a stack of glasses through the steamer, she lit up.
“Soft packs remind me of you,” she said. “Just when you’ve smoked them all and you think there’s none left, there’s always one more, hiding in that little crushed corner.” Before I could respond she said, “Oh, God. Not another mouse. You know whose job that is.”
By the end of the rush, the floor mats got full and slippery with food. This was when mice tended to appear, scurrying over our shoes; more often than not, a mouse got caught in the grating that covered the drains in the floor. Sometimes the mouse was already dead by the time we noticed it. This one was alive.
“No way,” I said. “This time you’re going to help. Get some gloves and a trash bag.”
“That’s all I’m getting. I’m not getting that mouse out of there.”
“Put on the gloves,” I ordered. She winced, but put them on. “Reach down,” I said. “At an angle, so you get at its middle. Otherwise, if you try to get it by its tail, the tail will break off.”
“This is filthy, eh.”
“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “To clean up filth. Eh.”
She reached down, but would not touch the mouse. I put my hand around her arm and pushed it till her hand made contact. The cries from the mouse were soft, songlike. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God, ohmigod.” She wrestled it out of the grating and turned her head away.
“Don’t you let it go,” I said.
“Where’s the food bag? It’ll smother itself if I drop it in the food bag. Quick,” she said, her head still turned away, her eyes closed. “Lead me to it.”
“No. We are not going to smother this mouse. We’ve got to break its neck.”
“You’re one heartless bitch.”
I wondered how to explain that if death is unavoidable it should be quick and painless. My mother had died slowly. At the hospital, they’d said it was kidney failure, but I knew, in the end, it was my father. He made her so scared to live in her own home that she was finally driven away from it in an ambulance.
“Breaking its neck will save it the pain of smothering,” I said. “Breaking its neck is more humane. Take the trash bag and cover it so you won’t get any blood on you, then crush.”
The loud jets of the steamer had shut off automatically and the dish room grew quiet. Heidi breathed in deeply, then crushed the mouse. She shuddered, disgusted. “Now what?”
“What do you mean, ‘now what?’ Throw the little bastard in the trash.”
AT OUR third session, I told Dr. Raeburn I didn’t mind if he smoked. He sat on the sill of his open window, smoking behind a jungle screen of office plants.
We spent the first ten minutes discussing the Iliad, and whether or not the text actually states that Achilles had been dipped in the River Styx. He said it did, and I said it didn’t. After we’d finished with the Iliad, and with my new job in what he called “the scullery,” he asked questions about my parents. I told him nothing. It was none of his business. Instead, I talked about Heidi. I told him about that day in Commons, Heidi’s plan to go on a date with Mr. Dick, and the invitation we’d been given to the gay party.
“You seem preoccupied by this soirée.” He arched his eyebrows at the word “soirée.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Dina,” he said slowly, in a way that made my name seem like a song title, “have you ever had a romantic interest?”
“You want to know if I’ve ever had a boyfriend?” I said. “Just go ahead and ask if I’ve ever fucked anybody.”
This appeared to surprise him. “I think that you are having a crisis of identity,” he said.
“Oh, is that what this is?”
His profession had taught him not to roll his eyes. Instead, his exasperation revealed itself in a tiny pursing of his lips, as though he’d just tasted something awful and was trying very hard not to offend the cook.
“It doesn’t have to be, as you say, someone you’ve fucked, it doesn’t have to be a boyfriend,” he said.
“Well, what are you trying to say? If it’s not a boy, then you’re saying it’s a girl—”
“Calm down. It could be a crush, Dina.” He lit one cigarette off another. “A crush on a male teacher, a crush on a dog, for heaven’s sake. An interest. Not necessarily a relationship.”
It was sacrifice time. If I could spend the next half hour talking about some boy, then I’d have given him what he wanted.
So I told him about the boy with the nice shoes.
I was sixteen and had spent the last few coins in my pocket on bus fare to buy groceries. I didn’t like going to the Super Fresh two blocks away from my house, plunking government food stamps into the hands of the cashiers.
“There she go reading,” one of them once said, even though I was only carrying a book. “Don’t your eyes get tired?”
On Greenmount Avenue you could read schoolbooks—that was understandable. The government and your teachers forced you to read them. But anything else was antisocial. It meant you’d rather submit to the words of some white dude than shoot the breeze with your neighbors.
I hated those cashiers, and I hated them seeing me with food stamps, so I took the bus and shopped elsewhere. That day, I got off the bus at Govans, and though the neighborhood was black like my own—hair salon after hair salon of airbrushed signs promising arabesque hair styles and inch-long fingernails—the houses were neat and orderly, nothing at all like Greenmount, where every other house had at least one shattered window. The store was well swept, and people quietly checked long grocery lists—no screaming kids, no loud cashier-customer altercations. I got the groceries and left the store.
I decided to walk back. It was a fall day, and I walked for blocks. Then I sensed someone following me. I walked more quickly, my arms around the sack, the leafy lettuce tickling my nose. I didn’t want to hold the sack so close that it would break the eggs or squash the hamburger buns, but it was slipping, and as I looked behind me a boy m
y age, maybe older, rushed toward me.
“Let me help you,” he said.
“That’s all right.” I set the bag on the sidewalk. Maybe I saw his face, maybe it was handsome enough, but what I noticed first, splayed on either side of the bag, were his shoes. They were nice shoes, real leather, a stitched design like a widow’s peak on each one, or like birds’ wings, and for the first time in my life I understood what people meant when they said “wing-tip shoes.”
“I watched you carry them groceries out that store, then you look around, like you’re lost, but like you liked being lost, then you walk down the sidewalk for blocks and blocks. Rearranging that bag, it almost gone to slip, then hefting it back up again.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“And then I passed my own house and was still following you. And then your bag really look like it was gone crash and everything. So I just thought I’d help.” He sucked in his bottom lip, as if to keep it from making a smile. “What’s your name?” When I told him, he said, “Dina, my name is Cecil.” Then he said, “D comes right after C.”
“Yes,” I said, “it does, doesn’t it.”
Then, half question, half statement, he said, “I could carry your groceries for you? And walk you home?”
I stopped the story there. Dr. Raeburn kept looking at me. “Then what happened?”
I couldn’t tell him the rest: that I had not wanted the boy to walk me home, that I didn’t want someone with such nice shoes to see where I lived.
Dr. Raeburn would only have pitied me if I’d told him that I ran down the sidewalk after I told the boy no, that I fell, the bag slipped, and the eggs cracked, their yolks running all over the lettuce. Clear amniotic fluid coated the can of cinnamon rolls. I left the bag there on the sidewalk, the groceries spilled out randomly like cards loosed from a deck. When I returned home, I told my mother that I’d lost the food stamps.
“Lost?” she said. I’d expected her to get angry, I’d wanted her to get angry, but she hadn’t. “Lost?” she repeated. Why had I been so clumsy and nervous around a harmless boy? I could have brought the groceries home and washed off the egg yolk, but instead I’d just left them there. “Come on,” Mama said, snuffing her tears, pulling my arm, trying to get me to join her and start yanking cushions off the couch. “We’ll find enough change here. We got to get something for dinner before your father gets back.”
We’d already searched the couch for money the previous week, and I knew there’d be nothing now, but I began to push my fingers into the couch’s boniest corners, pretending that it was only a matter of time before I’d find some change or a lost watch or an earring. Something pawnable, perhaps.
“What happened next?” Dr. Raeburn asked again. “Did you let the boy walk you home?”
“My house was far, so we went to his house instead.” Though I was sure Dr. Raeburn knew that I was making this part up, I continued. “We made out on his sofa. He kissed me.”
Dr. Raeburn lit his next cigarette like a detective. Cool, suspicious. “How did it feel?”
“You know,” I said. “Like a kiss feels. It felt nice. The kiss felt very, very nice.”
Raeburn smiled gently, though he seemed unconvinced. When he called time on our session, his cigarette had become one long pole of ash. I left his office, walking quickly down the corridor, afraid to look back. It would be like him to trot after me, his navy blazer flapping, just to get the truth out of me. You never kissed anyone. The words slid from my brain, and knotted in my stomach.
When I reached my dorm, I found an old record player blocking my door and a Charles Mingus LP propped beside it. I carried them inside and then, lying on the floor, I played the Mingus over and over again until I fell asleep. I slept feeling as though Dr. Raeburn had attached electrodes to my head, willing into my mind a dream about my mother. I saw the lemon meringue of her skin, the long bone of her arm as she reached down to clip her toenails. I’d come home from a school trip to an aquarium, and I was explaining the differences between baleen and sperm whales according to the size of their heads, the range of their habitats, their feeding patterns.
I awoke remembering the expression on her face after I’d finished my dizzying whale lecture. She looked like a tourist who’d asked for directions to a place she thought was simple enough to get to only to hear a series of hypothetical turns, alleys, one-way streets. Her response was to nod politely at the perilous elaborateness of it all; to nod and save herself from the knowledge that she would never be able to get where she wanted to go.
THE DISHWASHERS always closed down the dining hall. One night, after everyone else had punched out, Heidi and I took a break, and though I wasn’t a smoker, we set two milk crates upside down on the floor and smoked cigarettes.
The dishwashing machines were off, but steam still rose from them like a jungle mist. Outside in the winter air, students were singing carols in their groomed and tailored singing-group voices. The Whiffenpoofs were back in New Haven after a tour around the world, and I guess their return was a huge deal. Heidi and I craned our necks to watch the year’s first snow through an open window.
“What are you going to do when you’re finished?” Heidi asked. Sexy question marks of smoke drifted up to the windows before vanishing.
“Take a bath.”
She swatted me with her free hand. “No, silly. Three years from now. When you leave Yale.”
“I don’t know. Open up a library. Somewhere where no one comes in for books. A library in a desert.”
She looked at me as though she’d expected this sort of answer and didn’t know why she’d asked in the first place.
“What are you going to do?” I asked her.
“Open up a psych clinic. In a desert. And my only patient will be some wacko who runs a library.”
“Ha,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t work in a dish room ever again. You’re no good.” I got up from the crate. “C’mon. Let’s hose the place down.”
We put out our cigarettes on the floor, since it was our job to clean it anyway. We held squirt guns in one hand and used the other to douse the floors with the standard-issue, eye-burning cleaning solution. We hosed the dish room, the kitchen, the serving line, sending the water and crud and suds into the drains. Then we hosed them again so the solution wouldn’t eat holes in our shoes as we left. Then I had an idea. I unbuckled my belt.
“What the hell are you doing?” Heidi said.
“Listen, it’s too cold to go outside with our uniforms all wet. We could just take a shower right here. There’s nobody but us.”
“What the fuck, eh?”
I let my pants drop, then took off my shirt and panties. I didn’t wear a bra, since I didn’t have much to fill one. I took off my shoes and hung my clothes on the stepladder.
“You’ve flipped,” Heidi said. “I mean, really, psych-ward flipped.”
I soaped up with the liquid hand soap until I felt as glazed as a ham. “Stand back and spray me.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. I didn’t know whether she was confused or delighted, but she picked up the squirt gun and sprayed me. She was laughing. Then she got too close and the water started to sting.
“God damn it!” I said. “That hurt!”
“I was wondering what it would take to make you say that.”
When all the soap had been rinsed off, I put on my regular clothes and said, “O.K. You’re up next.”
“No way,” she said.
“Yes way.”
She started to take off her uniform shirt, then stopped.
“What?”
“I’m too fat.”
“You goddam right.” She always said she was fat. One time I’d told her that she should shut up about it, that large black women wore their fat like mink coats. “You’re big as a house,” I said now. “Frozen yogurt may be low in calories, but not if you eat five tubs of it. Take your clothes off. I want to get out of here.”
She began taking off her uniform, then stood there
, hands cupped over her breasts, crouching at the pubic bone.
“Open up,” I said, “or we’ll never get done.”
Her hands remained where they were. I threw the bottle of liquid soap at her, and she had to catch it, revealing herself as she did.
I turned on the squirt gun, and she stood there, stiff, arms at her side, eyes closed, as though awaiting mummification. I began with the water on low, and she turned around in a full circle, hesitantly, letting the droplets from the spray fall on her as if she were submitting to a death by stoning.
When I increased the water pressure, she slipped and fell on the sudsy floor. She stood up and then slipped again. This time she laughed and remained on the floor, rolling around on it as I sprayed.
I think I began to love Heidi that night in the dish room, but who is to say that I hadn’t begun to love her the first time I met her? I sprayed her and sprayed her, and she turned over and over like a large beautiful dolphin, lolling about in the sun.
HEIDI STARTED sleeping at my place. Sometimes she slept on the floor; sometimes we slept sardinelike, my feet at her head, until she complained that my feet were “taunting” her. When we finally slept head to head, she said, “Much better.” She was so close I could smell her toothpaste. “I like your hair,” she told me, touching it through the darkness. “You should wear it out more often.”
“White people always say that about black people’s hair. The worse it looks, the more they say they like it.”
I’d expected her to disagree, but she kept touching my hair, her hands passing through it till my scalp tingled. When she began to touch the hair around the edge of my face, I felt myself quake. Her fingertips stopped for a moment, as if checking my pulse, then resumed.
“I like how it feels right here. See, mine just starts with the same old texture as the rest of my hair.” She found my hand under the blanket and brought it to her hairline. “See,” she said.
It was dark. As I touched her hair, it seemed as though I could smell it, too. Not a shampoo smell. Something richer, murkier. A bit dead, but sweet, like the decaying wood of a ship. She guided my hand.
