Flyover States, page 11
“Those almost seem like a fire hazard,” Iris says, pointing again at my shoes.
“No more than those,” I say, pointing at La Varian’s pants. This time he actually smiles.
“We’re talking about the studio system,” Iris interrupts. “How in Hollywood, they kept blackface going for years after blackface proper, with Imitation of Life, or even West Side Story. ‘Brownface,’ technically.”
“I hate that movie,” La Varian says. “Hate that string bean of a Natalie Wood doing her white-girl shuffle.”
“As though there weren’t qualified Latina actresses,” Iris continues. “Or Puerto Ricans.” She pronounces Puerto Rican as if she’s from the island, and I wonder a little about how much La Varian really hates Iris, since they’re having a grand old time with Natalie Wood, who may have been a string bean but seems like a pretty easy target.
“Always taking the little white girls and giving them the leads,” he says, looking not at Iris, but at me.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s so nice to meet you. But I’m freezing, I think I’m gonna head back inside.”
On my way to the indoor party, I’m thinking that I actually like La Varian, in a weird way, because even if he’s half insulting me, it seems like he’s half sticking up for Ronnie. Which makes him a good boyfriend and not a bad one. In the fifties version of Hollywood aka Langsdale, I am the Natalie Wood and Ronnie is the qualified Latina actress, turned down for the role written for a Latina. La Varian would be a little out of his mind to hear Ronnie talk about the factory, then see me “not thinking” in my purple heels, without getting hot under the collar. It’s just that I sort of see it from Natalie Wood’s point of view. She’s probably thinking that she’s acting Puerto Rican, not passing. It’s a movie, after all, and she’s an actress, auditioning and getting a part, and somewhere in Hollywood there’s a J. J. Jones, and why not go after the “her”—not the “me.” Or, to put it simply, I just wish it seemed like La Varian liked me a little more, on the human-specimen level.
Inside, Zach and Mandy are at opposite ends of J.J.’s living room. Zach’s sitting alone on a bench with a plate of cheese cubes beside him, and Mandy (who now has two flowers in her hair) is talking up a storm with J.J.
“How’s outside?” Zach asks.
“Cold,” I say. “I dressed wrong.”
Zach doesn’t even bite.
“What’s up with you and Mandy?” I ask. “If you don’t mind. I’m not trying to be nosy.”
Zach scrunches his mouth a bit and pops a cheese cube into his mouth, chews it, then answers.
“You know how sometimes people convince themselves that sexuality is all in their heads. Well, sometimes it’s not. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry?”
“Nobody’s fault,” he says. “We’re working on it. It may work out. Mind over matter. What the hell is wrong with your leg?”
I have my leg crossed, and the side of my left thigh is completely exposed. It’s a patchwork of unshaven white skin and tanned patches.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I say.
“You have that Michael Jackson disease?” he asks, “but reversed?”
“Not even. My sister’s husband-to-be, they’re getting married in a couple of weeks, sent me a box of self-tanners with a swath of this beige color, and he wants me to be that beige color for the weekend of the wedding, so that I look right in the dress, which is champagne. So I sectioned off a few pieces of my leg to see which tanner matched the swath best.”
“And I thought it was just shoes that the bridesmaids had to dye.”
“Ironically,” I say, “the shoes are the one thing we’re allowed to pick ourselves. I hate the way I look tan. See that, if I want to look like some pink ghoul in a champagne dress, shouldn’t that be my choice?”
“Indeed,” Zach says.
“I’m not doing it,” I say. “Screw Marvin.”
Mandy comes up to say that she’s catching a ride with a friend. She kisses Zach goodbye on the mouth, but the way I imagine she’d kiss a brother. Zach pats her on the shoulder. They look like a pair of sad little chimps.
“Ready to go?” Zach asks. “I’m just not in the mood.”
It’s the best piece of conversation I’ve heard all night.
Ronnie
“Jimmy D. has done messed around and got himself fired,” Mona says. It’s ten minutes before starting time, and we’re sitting at a picnic table just outside the entrance to Valtek. Mona’s smoking her generic cigarettes and tapping the ashes into a paper coffee cup.
“What? When did this happen?” I frown because I’ve never seen Jimmy D. do anything that would get him the ax. He’d been a temp for a long time, a lot longer than me. He was also a definite Billy Ray, handsome and sinewy. Wore lots of T-shirts with American flags and eagles on them. He wasn’t especially nice, but he wasn’t mean, either. He was just a good worker who’d ask you, “What’s life doin’ to you?” whenever he’d pass by. I liked that about Jimmy D. Sometimes he’d come around and relieve me so I could take my break, and let me take just that extra minute or two to get back to work. Mona started calling him my boyfriend because I always had an extra pep in my step whenever Jimmy D. came around. What can I say? He was handsome in spite of the mullet.
Mona points her cigarette at my can of Mountain Dew. “I believe you gone turn into a can of pop the way you drink ’em one after the other.”
“Who fired him? What’d he do?”
Mona stubs out her cigarette, checks her watch, and then lights another one. Five minutes,” she says. She sighs. “I’m so tired tonight. Seem like I ain’t never rested up.”
“He steal something? What?”
Mona tightens her lips and tilts her head toward me. “Now, you know Jimmy D. ain’t gone steal nothing. He’d be the last one to do something like that.” She takes one more long drag on her cigarette, drops it, pinches the end of it with the toe of her sneaker, picks it up and puts it in her front pocket. “He just got to talking, making noise, asking why we don’t have no more than a half hour and three tens and more pay.”
I nod. “Shoot. That sounds good to me.”
“To a lot of folks. But the head supervisor didn’t want no trouble and told Ray to cut him loose.” Mona takes a rubber band off her wrist and gathers up all her long black hair. “And he been working here for two months already, trying to get permanent.”
“Man,” I say, looking at my watch. It was time. “We need those breaks, for real.”
Mona smiles at me. “Darlin’, we need a lot more’n breaks around here.” Why was everyone around here always calling me “sweetheart” and “darling”? “But you temp and don’t got to be near as careful as a lot of other folks.” She glances toward the door. “Here come Ray.”
The man himself cracks the glass door open and sticks his head out. “College,” he says to me. “Station eight and nine are singing you a love song, calling out your name. Better shake that leg, sweetheart.” He winks at Mona. What is it about winks? I’m a sucker for winks. They even make Ray look like something when he does it. Reminds me of somebody, too, but I can’t put my finger on it.
“He ought not to call you ‘College’ like that,” Mona says, laughing. She heads toward the door.
I tried telling Ray once that I wasn’t in college, that I was in grad school, totally different.
“Don’t matter to me,” Ray said. “Either one of ’em.”
Three hours later I’m standing outside with another Mountain Dew in my hand. It’s taken me a month to figure out that most folks don’t leave their stations just to go upstairs to sit in that depressing break room unless you’re just about drop-dead tired. It’s nicer to hang around outside and talk shit, or talk about the weather, always the weather. It’s two-fifteen in the morning, and so hot I think about heading back inside. Even if it’s depressing and loud, it’s cooler. You have to pick your comforts. But I like being outside better, even if it is sticky and the mosquitoes are sucking on me like I’m a chocolate shake. Vampiric, I think. I like thinking about the fact that it’s two in the morning, and while most other folks are sleeping, I’m working hard. There’s a factory full of workers, all day, every day, except for Sundays, of course. Nothing but worship going on in the Midwest on Sundays.
I stand around with two other guys I don’t know, one smoking and the other with a big chunk of tobacco in his mouth. I grew up with my grandmother, who was born and raised in the South, dipping snuff—discreetly. So, even if I do think it’s a little 1950s Mississippi to see a white man chewing tobacco, I try not to let it scare me and try to just hang out casually and blend. I try.
One man glances my way. He’s short and older, around fifty, I’d guess. He has what my mother would call salt-and-pepper hair. “Hot, ain’t it? And it ain’t even July yet. We gone be in for it, I tell you what.”
“I know it,” I say.
“They say it’s gone get up to 88 tomorrow night.”
“And that humidity will get to a person,” I say.
The other man looks at me as if he’s sizing me up. He’s younger, around my age, with a crew cut. I get a little nervous and wonder if this might be one of those Mississippi Burning moments. Even though it’s rare, I’ve had them in Langsdale, and you just never know where it’s going to come from, and in what form. I look at him and offer him a weak smile before taking a drink of my Mountain Dew.
“Dad, ’member that time it broke 90 in the shade and on through sundown? That was a mess, what, back in ’92?”
“Sure was,” the man says. “Sure was.” I look at them both like I haven’t before and realize they must be father and son. The younger one walks toward me and I can’t figure out why he’s walking toward me until he veers off to the picnic table and sits himself down. I let out the breath I was holding.
“This yours?” he asks, lifting a section of the newspaper off the table and holding it out to me.
“No, it was just there.”
“Hmm,” he says, pulling open the paper. “I’ve been looking for a car. I keep checking the ads to see what all’s for sale around here.”
I say nothing. I hate when I can’t think of anything to say back to something so simple. It’s like trying to figure out the language first, and then translating the proper response, and then saying it in the right way. Before I do all that damn conversion, the moment’s over. I watch the younger man skim one page then the next and wonder if you get any kind of a deal for working at the car-parts factory, and then I have to wonder what cars the speakers I package are supposed to fit. I never thought about what the car was going to be down the line, because all I cared about was my paycheck and not being tired.
I try to ask both questions without getting the look that Ray gives me when I have to ask him something. “You could probably find a cheap car, like the ones we make stuff for here.”
The son looks at the father, and then the father looks at me. It’s Ray’s look. “Ooh-wee. These cars ain’t cheap—not cheap enough for us, bless your heart.”
The “bless your heart” is worse than “sweetheart, darlin’” and Ray’s simple look that tells me I’m simple all rolled into one.
“I tell you what,” the father says. “It’s hotter’n hellfire out here. I’m gone have to get back inside. Break’s up anyhow.”
His son stands, finishes up his cigarette, and flicks it into the gravel. He looks at me and gives me a nod before he follows his father inside.
“We’re wrapping up Hamlet this week,” Professor Lind says. “And then we’ll start Othello in a few days. We’ll spend three weeks on Othello, and your final papers will be due after that. You’ll remember that you have one week off before the last paper is due. My conference in London?”
We all nod.
“Some of your last papers needed a lot of work. Those of you who didn’t stop by my office hours last time should see me this time.” Professor Lind looks at me and crosses her arms. “There is no reason not to see me for these last papers, unless you think you’ve got it all covered,” she notes finally. Her eyes skim over John briefly before she leans against her desk and picks up her copy of Hamlet.
I know she wasn’t talking to me, because I had gotten a B plus on my last paper, which is an F, by inflated grad-school standards. I wrote an okay paper on Shakespeare’s Henriad and quoted the shit out of Žižek and Peter Sloterdijk’s The Critique of Cynical Reason. The Sloterdijk knocked me out because it was so damn relevant and written in something that more closely resembled English. He seemed to say much better everything I wanted and needed to say about Bolingbroke, Prince Henry and that poor bastard Hotspur. What he was saying to me actually made sense in terms of the world, and for a change I didn’t think reading all this theory was one big mind fuck. Masturbatory. I was actually interested in all the connections I could make between the theoretical criticism and the “primary texts,” as they call books around here. I just didn’t think I sounded smart enough in my own words. I’m still in the process of learning the lingua franca, which is twice removed from regular old white people’s “standard” English. It took me years to break myself from saying shit like, “I seen her the other day.” Now I have to learn words like narratology and dialectical materialism.
Professor Lind wrote in her curvy elegant handwriting “B+”, and then wrote “A-(-)” next to the “B+.” I went to her office to see what the hell that meant, and she sat me down and gave me a good long look before she started. Her looks didn’t make me feel like Ray’s looks—stupid—but they did make me feel like I was coming up short. I used to hate going to my professors’ office hours when I was an undergrad because they were always asking me to, which made me feel as if they were trying to save the poor black kid. On the flip side, I had the teachers who just dismissed me outright—until I turned in a paper and then they realized I was “bright and articulate,” and not coasting on “affirmative action.” Never mind that half the white kids were affirmative action, what with their great-grandfathers—or whoever—who were “legacy,” and had attended the university since the goddamn Mayflower. I didn’t like being singled out, I didn’t like being patronized, but I didn’t like being ignored, either. It was just like in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when he was in school. I didn’t want to be oohed and aahed over like a pink poodle, but I didn’t want to be told that I should be a carpenter when I wanted to be a writer. But now that I teach and beg my undergrads to come see me about their papers, because they’ll actually learn something if they do, I don’t hesitate to park myself in a professor’s office—even if it’s as scary as Professor Lind’s.
When I’d gone to see her, she didn’t ask me why I was there. She told me, “Sit down.” She gestured toward The Chair. It’s huge and overstuffed and makes you feel like a kindergartner sitting in a grown-up’s chair. “You want to know what I meant by “‘A minus, minus.’”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes. I guess there’s a lot of room between a B plus and an A minus, minus, and I’m guessing…well…yes, what did you mean?” I sounded feebleminded.
Professor Lind was wearing a dress with gold strappy sandals with a heel that I had to notice were very sexy. She got away with looking like an actual girl because she never apologized for it, no matter how politicized and policed something like toe cleavage could be in academia. She took off her glasses and twirled them around by one of the stems.
“You wrote something that was fine. It was capable. It was okay.”
I started feeling lilliputian, which I learned the other day means small as shit. I sank down in The Chair.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. She paused and waited for me to say something. I didn’t. “You seem to be struggling between what you think is academic language, and a language that is actually much more engaging. I gave you the B plus for your execution, and the A minus, minus for your ideas and connections. You made very interesting moves in that paper. It was just a bit clunky.”
I nodded and rubbed my hands along the arms of the chair. “Well,” I said finally. “I guess I feel caught. We’re MFAs in an English department, taking classes with Ph.D.s, and I feel like I have to write a certain way in lit classes—or at least, try to.”
Professor Lind tucked some hair behind her ear. “You do,” she said with finality. “I’m not encouraging you to turn in crap.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I’m encouraging you to write well. I see that your syntax and grammar is flawless, when a lot of people in class are writing nonsense, bullshit, gibberish with twenty-five-cent words because they think it’s good academic writing.”
Dang. But I liked that someone was finally saying what I’d been thinking for a long time.
“Ronnie,” Professor Lind said. “Let me see your paper.”
I’d brought it along with me so she could show me how hopeless I was. She took it from me and started reading then, flipping through the pages. “Yes,” she said, what seemed like to herself. “Listen, this is an interesting point,” she says. She started to read from my paper:
“Because Hotspur was unwilling to make such sacrifices, he could only be unsuccessful in his attempt at kingship. Hotspur also makes the mistake of believing that he sees things as they ‘really are,’ and therefore strategy in attaining the crown is simple, in his estimation. One sees it, and one takes it through hard, honest, masculine work [emphasis added]. What he fails to realize, however, is what Slavoj Žižek refers to as ‘the paradox of being’ in The Sublime Object of Ideology.”
Professor Lind stopped reading. “And then you interrupt something really interesting by dumping in this Žižek quote from out of nowhere. It’s a good connection to make, that’s why this is a decent paper, but I want more of your thoughts and observations before you give me the quote.” She shoved the paper at me and I looked down at the page.
