Heads of the Colored People

by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  NOT TODAY, MARJORIE

  Marjorie was already frazzled when she entered the DMV. She had tried to stick to her acronym all morning:

  Watch your feelings for a moment

  Acknowledge them

  Imagine your options

  Thoughtfully proceed

  Though she had succeeded in avoiding any unseemly confrontations for the past four consecutive days, the ride to the DMV was taxing, the night before tormenting, and she felt her limits approaching. It was one of those afternoons on which, despite her best efforts, she could not see the good, could not practice the options for avoiding conflict that her therapist was making her study, could not replace the word “and” with the word “but,” as she had been instructed to do. On a good day, Marjorie was supposed to say, “I’m angry, and I can still keep my temper in check,” instead of, “I lost my temper, but I couldn’t help it.” Instead of “I hate crowds, but I have to go to the DMV,” on a good day, Marjorie could say, “I hate crowds, and I’m still going to keep my wits about me at the DMV.”

  Today, however, was not a good day. Today Marjorie paused at an Ice Cube song on the radio and felt a shiver of longing for her old lifestyle and her ex-boyfriend Charles. Once she stepped out of her car, she immediately regretted her choice of a black long-sleeved shirt—she always wore long-sleeved shirts—the sun burning straight through the fabric onto her arms. Today Marjorie saw the yellow jackets and the wasps but not the fragrant lavender bushes that lined the front entrance of the DMV. She smelled the icky pollen but did not notice the vibrancy of the goldenrods in the planters. One side of her hair wouldn’t lie flat, and though she had spent hours flat-ironing it, the ends of her hair now looked limp, yet the edges looked beady. Today was all buts.

  Inside the DMV, grimy children ran around or played with cell phones, families spoke languages Marjorie didn’t recognize, squat pregnant women slouched in chairs, their laundry detergent and deodorant pungent. The air conditioner blasted through the space, quickly replacing the heat outside with its own cold oppression. Marjorie had made up her mind to get in and get out with her attitude intact, but already, so many things portended difficulty. You are already stressed and you are not going to get worked up, she told herself. Not today, Marjorie.

  Marjorie’s preferred DMV on Baseline, if one can prefer a DMV rather than simply dread it, was closed for renovation. She scolded herself for waiting until the last minute to renew her license. She scolded herself for taking the advice of her friend Jessica, her only remaining friend, who warned Marjorie to “at least try to renew your license online or go to the Foothill location, since you know you how irritable you can get around crowds. It’s nicer at that one, newer building.”

  Jessica was wrong on three fronts. First, Marjorie could not complete her driver’s license renewal online or by phone or by mail because she had mailed in her previous two renewals, so she must appear in person for this one, subjecting herself to new fingerprints, vision tests, and the long lines. Anyway, she would never apply for renewal online because she didn’t trust the online system not to steal her identity. That had happened to Coryn White’s son Londyn when he renewed his vehicle registration a few months ago.

  Second, Marjorie could be perfectly fine in crowds. She attended a church with over ten thousand members, and she had just organized and volunteered at its back-to-school backpack drive three days before, passing out school supplies and nonperishable food items to nearly two hundred families. She had collected many of the supplies herself, shopping the packed stores for inexpensive bulk erasers and glue sticks. It wasn’t the crowd at the DMV she dreaded so much as the inefficacy of the place and the many variables that could make the experience ugly. There was so much ugliness in the world now, not least of which included the ugliness of this DMV, dark with cement floors and red walls. And that—the alleged niceness of the DMV—was the third thing about which Jessica was wrong.

  Marjorie settled into her chair facing the entrance, avoiding a black blotch that might have been old gum, and adjusted the sleeves of her shirt. She tried to assure herself that it really didn’t matter which DMV she chose, because in some ways they were all the same. She would have had to wait in long lines in Fontana and San Bernardino, and while at one she might have traded filthy upholstery for these hard plastic chairs, the chairs would be equally uncomfortable no matter the location. And these same kinds of people might have very well been at any DMV. She focused on her breathing, counting to three on the inhalation and five on the exhalation. But this was interrupted by the intrusive staring of a little boy who might have been Latino; she couldn’t tell. There were so many immigrants now.

  The boy wore a lightweight blue hoodie with the hood pulled so tightly over his face that it squished it into exaggeration. His sneakers were scuffed at the tips, and his eyes carried the insipidness of someone who could not entertain himself without television. Marjorie averted her eyes; she should have brought a book to read. The boy stared. Marjorie grimaced and stuck out her tongue at him. His eyes widened but still had no sheen, and he turned back to his mother, tugging at her sleeve, but she was engrossed in a driving manual and would not look up at him. Served him right, she thought, though she could already feel a little guilt pressing her insides together.

  Marjorie didn’t have any children of her own, nor did she want any. Her volunteer work stifled any latent biological clock, silenced it outright. The children who came to collect the backpacks and school supplies from the church were like wild animals, even the good ones. They were receiving gifts, curated by caring hands, and yet some of them had the nerve to complain, “I don’t want a red one.” “I want a different backpack, not that one.” Marjorie had smiled graciously and fought back her urges to say, “Beggars can’t be choosers, now, can they?”

  “You should see how some of the mothers dressed them,” she had told Jessica after the backpack drive. “Completely inappropriate outfits. One little girl had on a spaghetti-strapped top and shorts and ankle boots with a little heel. I’m talking about a seven-year-old with a little heel.”

  “The top doesn’t sound that inappropriate,” Jessica said. “It is summer. Not everyone keeps their arms covered like you.”

  Jessica knew good and well why Marjorie kept her arms covered—something Marjorie hadn’t even told her own therapist, Alex, about yet—so that was a low blow. For a counselor, Jessica could sometimes be insensitive. Not today, Jessica, Marjorie thought.

  “And the way they talk,” Marjorie had continued. “Some of them sound straight-up illiterate. Don’t get me wrong, we had our slang growing up, our Ebonics and what have you, but all this ‘I be wanting this,’ and ‘she be needing that.’ The educational system and these parents are failing our black children.”

  The phone line went silent, and Marjorie was just about to ask Jessica if she was still there when Jessica said, “Yes, you’ve said that before. How is the therapy going for you?”

  Marjorie sniffed, drawing out the sound, and said, “It’s going. Not sure how long I’ll stick with it. And I thought you weren’t going to ask me questions about it, confidentiality and all.”

  Jessica made some excuse to get off the phone shortly after that.

  Jessica attended Marjorie’s church, and they had become fast friends about seven months earlier when Jessica joined one of Marjorie’s volunteer committees. But she was starting to pull away from Marjorie like a lot of people had recently. Marjorie noticed but did not let on how much this distance concerned her. Pastor Bevis said two Sundays ago, “Sometimes when God lets people leave your circle, it’s because they weren’t meant to be there. If He shrinks your crowd, it’s because not everybody can go where He’s taking you.” Marjorie had said a very loud “amen” to that and looked at Coryn White, who had formerly been in Marjorie’s circle but who must not be going where God was taking her now. Coryn couldn’t even compliment her on the success of the backpack drive, she was so bitter. She smiled weakly and wouldn’t make
eye contact with Marjorie the whole day.

  After the phone conversation with Jessica, Marjorie had made a mental note to be more positive. If Jessica stopped talking to her, too, Marjorie would really look like she had no one, and Coryn would win all over again.

  The little boy in the hoodie kept glancing at Marjorie cautiously, but he wasn’t staring anymore. Marjorie heard that Pastor Bevis was going to use footage of the backpack drive in the announcements that played over the jumbo screens in the church this coming Sunday and personally congratulate her for her hard work. Then Coryn would really have something to feel bitter about. Marjorie giggled a little in anticipation of Coryn’s face, then feeling self-conscious, she almost stopped herself. But she remembered, in keeping with her new therapist’s advice, she was supposed to feel her feelings, not suppress them, and she kept laughing, right in the DMV.

  • • •

  LIKE THE DMV on Foothill, the therapy was Jessica’s idea, and Marjorie had started it, reluctantly, only a month ago with one of Jessica’s colleagues, a therapist named Alexandria, Alex for short.

  “It might help with some of your trauma—and this whole ongoing issue with Coryn, and your volatility,” Jessica had said over the phone; they rarely met for dinner anymore. “Not that I’m judging you—it’s just that you have some areas you might want to work on now, while you can. And it’s all confidential. I certainly wouldn’t talk to your therapist about you.”

  It was true that Marjorie had been reprimanded a few times at her current job and had left her previous one after a blowup with her manager. In addition to Jessica, more than a few former friends had called her volatile. She was tired of that word. She was not a beaker full of combustible chemicals or a volcano looking for an opportunity to expel pent-up heat, leaving ash and damage in her wake. She was a person, just as much as they were, perhaps more complicated, but certainly normal, just as normal as they were.

  Marjorie described herself this way to Alex, during their first meeting and on the intake sheet: “pretty normal, generous with a bit of a temper.”

  Alex, a petite, brown-skinned black woman, wore her hair pulled tightly in a bun at the top of her head, her glasses olive green and square. She scribbled notes on a pad that she kept next to her on the smaller of two couches, and she never broke eye contact with Marjorie while she wrote.

  “That’s what I want to work on, the temper, and people say I’m very negative and that I only see the worst.” Marjorie was specific in stating her goal, her short-term focus; she did not need to dig up her past or heal from trauma to improve her current behavior, as Jessica had so boldly suggested. She did not want to be one of those people who went to therapy for the rest of their lives, blathering on about what “my therapist said” or “what we uncovered in therapy.” It struck Marjorie that those people never got any better; they just used longer and more complicated phrases to say things. Marjorie was tired and spread too thin—that was all—at work, with her volunteering and church duties, with the many dramas of her social life, Coryn. She said as much to Alex, who smiled an ambiguous healthcare professional smile and wrote something down.

  “Do you have any examples of what you mean by your temper or your negativity?” Alex asked. When she was not writing, she rubbed her fingers together briskly, in the manner of someone hungry.

  Marjorie omitted a few recent incidents with her neighbors and the recent blowup with Coryn and chose her example carefully.

  “Last week,” Marjorie said, after a pause, “I flung an entire tub of yogurt across my living room. It was raspberry flavored, and the little seeds still had some pulp on them and left marks all over the wall, and every time I see the traces of the stain, I feel mad at myself all over again.” She fiddled with the sleeves of her shirt and adjusted each so that it covered her wrists.

  “What made you want to throw the yogurt?” Alex asked.

  “A lot of things,” Marjorie started. Some of the things she didn’t want to tell Alex. “I’d had a bad day at work, then I ran into my foster sister Coryn at Ralphs, my grocery store—I don’t want to talk about her, but we go to the same church—and then Ralphs didn’t have any more of the kind of pickles I like, and when I got home, the yogurt was raspberry instead of strawberry, and somehow I’d picked the wrong kind.” Marjorie felt slightly embarrassed, anticipating a scolding. “It wasn’t very sanctified of me,” she said.

  Alex’s face didn’t show any judgment, but she scribbled on her notepad before she said, “It sounds like it was a hard day. Sometimes it feels good to throw something, maybe not so fun to clean it up.”

  Marjorie nodded. “There’s still this slight yogurt smell in the carpet.”

  “It seems like the anger didn’t just come out of nowhere but had been bubbling for a while. What happened at work before that?”

  “I got mad at a customer,” Marjorie hesitated. She did not say that earlier in the day she had scrolled through pictures of herself with Charles and felt a suffocating sadness or that when such feelings came up, she often punished herself by pinching at her own arms and legs, digging her nails into old scar tissue until it hurt again. “I’m an account clerk in the bursar’s office at a university. I didn’t say it loud, but I whispered, ‘Go to hell,’ just as my manager was walking by, and I already have two strikes, spread out over six months. He gave me a warning look but no incident report. It wasn’t nice to say, not a good witness to my church either.”

  Alex scribbled again. “Had the customer done something wrong?”

  “They’ve always done something wrong.” Marjorie could feel her blood pressure rising. “I don’t just get mad for no reason. This girl had come in there, and first of all, I saw her cut in line to take a pen from one of the other tellers, and then she was still filling out her slip when she walked up to my counter, and she had made a mistake on her form and tried to argue with me about it. I tried the de-escalation techniques we’re supposed to follow, but those kind of customers take a toll on your day.”

  Alex nodded and wrote; she must have used some kind of shorthand. “It seems like you feel a lot of guilt about your anger. Do you think you might also feel any anger about your guilt?” Alex said, and the subtle profundity of this chiasmus annoyed Marjorie. It was precisely the kind of psychobabble she wanted to avoid and that she sometimes pointed out in Jessica, who would sigh and apologize.

  “The Bible says, ‘Be angry, and do not sin,’ ” Marjorie said, ready to pack her purse and go, “so if I have guilt, it’s over what I said, which was a sin, not over being angry.”

  “Listen to that statement,” Alex said. “You’re allowed to be angry and still not sin. Do you give yourself a chance to feel the anger?”

  “What do you mean, ‘feel the anger’? I told you I threw a tub of yogurt and whispered ‘Go to hell.’ ” Marjorie was beginning to think Alex was a little slow.

  “But did you try to suppress those negative feelings, or did you pause to accept that you were angry?” Alex said. Her fingers moved rapidly; there was something squirrelly about her. Marjorie made up her mind that she wasn’t coming back. But Alex stood and, after fiddling in her desk, handed Marjorie a worksheet and sat back down on the couch.

  “I’d like to work with you if you want to keep coming,” she said. “Do you know what a dialectic is? That two or more things can be true at once? So you can feel how you feel—and you can observe that emotional side of your mind and really feel it—and you can still make a choice not to follow it.” She pointed to her head, fingers still moving. “We can recognize our emotions without either negating them or letting them dictate our response, as in ‘I feel like I could eat every cookie in sight, but I know I shouldn’t.’ Instead of invalidating your feelings, you would say, ‘I want to eat everything in sight, and I’m still going to have only one chocolate chip cookie and really take my time eating it.’ ” Alex leaned back and stopped moving her hands at this.

  “So I would say, ‘I hate my job and many of the custom
ers who come in—even though as a Christian I’m not supposed to hate—but I’m still going to have a good attitude,’ ” Marjorie said.

  ‘ “And,’ not ‘but’ or ‘though,’ or ‘yet,’ which are fake ‘buts,’ ” Alex said. “You’d say, ‘I feel some hatred toward some of the customers at my job, and I’m a Christian, and I’m still going to have a good attitude.’ ”

  Marjorie didn’t see how these subtle semantic shifts would make any difference, in her behavior or her feelings. She could already picture herself becoming one of those people who always talked about what their therapists said, or at least becoming a person who made fun of what her therapist said. But—and—she committed to completing the homework assignment over the next week.

  • • •

  THEY WERE TAKING forever to call her number, another reason to regret this DMV. At the one on Baseline, she bet, you could simply stand in line with your check already made out and get your license much more quickly. Here, you had to grab a number and wait. Take a letter and wait. Fill out paperwork and wait. Get fingerprinted and wait. Have your picture—which always comes out looking deranged—taken and wait for the little machine to print out a new license. The entire setup at this DMV was inefficient—even with the new technology and all the blue monitors—routing people through various lines as though they were at Disneyland, where the lines only appeared to shrink because of the ways they wrapped around the dividers. When she was thirty-three Marjorie had won a lawsuit against Disneyland. While there with her boyfriend Charles Stampton, she had slipped in a puddle near Splash Mountain and sprained her ankle. She’d won similar lawsuits from a Denny’s restaurant and a ninety-nine cent store in San Bernardino. If these businesses were more efficient, she wouldn’t have needed to sue. If Marjorie were running this DMV, there would be two sections with three lines each, one for driving tests and one for plates and registrations and renewals. One could deposit the paperwork and get fingerprinted, have one’s vision tested, and take the photograph in a single interaction with a single teller, no numbers, no letters, no sitting, queuing, sitting, lining up again, and waiting over and over.