Flyover States, page 7
“Excellent. Go on.”
“Uh, that’s it.”
Professor Lind stares at me and waits and waits. But I’m not so afraid of her that I’m going to look like an idiot. I’ve always played it close to the vest in class. When the only black person—in anything—screws up, you never live it down. Lucky the first black guy who shined shoes didn’t fuck that up. I guarantee all these years only white folks would have been “qualified” to shine shoes.
She sighs and gives me a look as if to say, I’m going to let your ass off the hook for now, but just wait until next time. “What John and Ronnie are getting at is good. We’re talking about the question of, ‘You’re telling me something, but what do you want with what you’re telling me? What is your aim?’ We’re talking about speech acts theory here. For example, I said that John’s statement was ‘Che vuoi?’ because he made a statement but in fact expressed another desire with that statement, the desire to appear intelligent.” She says this matter-of-factly while everyone looks around, glad she’s not serving us our asses on a platter. She doesn’t seem phased. She points at John. “Look. I’m not trying to pick on you all. I’m trying to make Žižek as plain and ordinary as I can. This ‘Che vuoi?’, this gap between what’s articulated, and what’s actually desired, is as real and common as any crap that’s on MTV. And don’t mistake it for hypocrisy. It’s something else. Think of Hamlet and how this applies for next time.” She stands up and looks at us, waiting and waiting. She reaches into her black jacket, pulls out a stick of gum, unwraps it, shoves it in her mouth and chews while she stares at us for a lifetime. Then she gathers her books and is out the door.
The rest of us, there are only nine, are slow to get up. Iris, who’s, of course, in the class because that’s my funky karma, walks out with John. I hear her say how “inappropriate” Professor Lind’s “attack” on him was. But to me, this class was the most appropriate thing I’ve come across in a long time; how, exactly, I don’t know, but something feels like the truth.
“This is all happening to me because of my feng shui,” Doris says, pacing around her apartment, ripping things off the walls. P.J. Harvey’s singing about how some dude is not rid of her. See this angel, and the little cherub? The little bastard, he’s coming down. I read in this book that you can totally fuck up your love life if you have too many girlie things in one place, facing the wrong directions, and this is why, now, after that psycho message, I have to look out the peephole every time I hear a knock on the door. We’re in the Midwest! Who needs to look through a peephole in the Midwest?”
I shrug and look around Doris’s apartment, which is sort of girlie, lots of nail polishes and shoes lined up on shelves as decor, but since when is this a bad thing? And the unnecessary peephole: this is a new philosophy for both of us since, being women born and raised in big cities, we were practically born with eyes in the back of our heads and gaits that say, “I will cut off your balls if you even.” But two years here, and I’ve stopped worrying about getting robbed or mugged. It’s creepy stuff like squirrels and deer you have to watch out for. “Luis’s ‘cousin’ isn’t so crazy that he’d come to your house and try to off you or something, would he?”
“Cousin. Isn’t that rich. Who knows? I mean, never mind that he’s a pansexual, pathological liar, he’s totally jeopardized my health. Mental and physical. Just listen to this thing. Listen to it.” Doris dumps a mermaid sculpture into the box of bad girlie things and disappears into her bedroom, which you can see from the living room, to play her answering machine. “Are you listening? I’m playing it right now.”
I listen to the message. Doris stops the machine and then comes back into the living room. She holds her hands out, palms up, and looks at me with her eyebrows raised.
“Scary,” I say. “He’s definitely scary,” I repeat, nodding.
“Oh, God, no! I needed you to say it wasn’t that bad!”
“Well, for what it’s worth, he sounds pissed off but not violent.”
“Great. That’s the bright side.”
“Have a drink,” I say, refilling her glass.
She sighs and drops down beside me on her couch. “I wonder what Luis told him. I can’t get Luis on the phone to save my life. Probably thinks that I’m some stalker. Or his other cousin. He’s a sick man. This is sick, sick, sick.”
“Luis’s probably got somebody else besides who probably tipped the cuz off to throw him off his trail.”
“Not. Funny.”
“It kinda is.” P. J. Harvey is screaming now, and Doris gets up to change the CD. “This is so not the kind of music to be listening to when being stalked. I’m going to put on some Johnny Cash, some old-fashioned matter-of-fact badass to toughen me up.”
“Sounds good.”
See, I knew this would happen with Way Gay. From the moment I met him, he was slick and phony and just plain “performative,” to use grad-school language. Being a poet, and male, and therefore thinking you’re God’s gift is strike one, but he was always milking the Chilean thing a bit too much and then giving me knowing looks like, Hey, we two minorities, we know the score around here. I know there’s no getting around the whole double-consciousness thing, especially in academia. It ain’t no joke. But I think even Du Bois would say, Dang, tone that shit down unless you’re planning on joining the Screen Actors Guild.
I try to make Doris laugh. “Now you won’t ever be able to outfit your baby in little revolutionary outfits, with little matching berets for the three of you.”
“You’re totally demented,” she says, singing along with Johnny Cash.
“Oh, wait. I forgot about the double consciousness, so some days would be beret days, and other days would be… Wait, what are considered white hats?”
“You mean hats that only white people wear?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, you’re officially out of your mind. But thanks for making me more concerned for you than I am for myself right now.” Doris gives me a side glance. “What’s not funny is that I could be fooling around with somebody who has four, count ’em four, consciousnesses.” She holds up four fingers.
I wrinkle my nose. “Wha?”
“Chilean conscious, Anglo conscious, straight conscious, gay conscious. That’s four. No, five. He has jackass consciousness, special bonus and fully utilized.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s a whole lot of stuff going on.”
Doris slaps her hand to her forehead and keeps it there. “This is the opposite of normal.”
And this could be one of those nights where I get way too deep into the bottle, but it’s only six, and I have to work tonight. I can’t afford to be here, and I think of Mona with her two jobs and something like four hours of sleep. “D.,” I say, “I have to go try to take a nap before work. But call me if you need anything.”
“It sucks that you have to.”
“Yep,” I say. But it’s an old conversation at this point.
I’m having time-management issues. I’m trying to socialize in between the factory and the classroom. Something’s got to give, but I don’t know what. I certainly can’t fake it in Professor Lind’s class, and when I’m at Valtek, I’m at Valtek. Ain’t no goofing around at the watercooler and taking a stroll around the block when I get bored, like at my old copyediting job. Punching the time clock is like bars slamming closed once you enter the cell. It’s final and ongoing until you punch out. Giving up the Office Saloon is out of the question, too, because it’s the only place I tend to see what I’ve taken to calling “normal” people—folks who aren’t university related. Some do sneak in from time to time, but I can’t get too snobby and purist about it. After all, Doris, Paolo, Chris and I are university related.
I’m on my last break before I clock out for the day. It’s 5:13 a.m. and I can see the sun coming up through the lounge window. The sky’s a pretty lavender-and-wine color, and the sun brightens the room and takes the edge off the fluorescent lights. I started my shift at eleven, after taking a two-hour nap and after having too much at happy hour the evening before. I’m paying the piper, and no amount of Mountain Dew can help me out right now.
I put my head down on the desk, after checking the clock on the wall. I have seven minutes to rest, so I listen to the hum of the vending machines, which lull me into a half nap. I can’t take a real nap because I’ll fall into a deep sleep. I’ve slept through two earthquakes in my life and the last thing I need is Ray coming up here looking for me. Five minutes. I hear the door open so I lift my head up. It’s Mona. She’s not what I’d call a talker, but since my two weeks here I’ve found out that sometimes when you’ve only got a half hour or ten minutes of peace before you go back downstairs, you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to do anything. The first few nights I’d bring my schoolbooks in, like I was going to read something, but since then I’ve finally understood the concept of leisure. If you read at work at all, you read something that goes down easy, something you don’t have to think about. You read for pleasure, and if you read, you read because there’s nothing else more important, like massaging the pain out of your legs, or trying to keep your eyes open in the middle of the night so stacks of plastic speakers don’t bunch up and go crashing to the floor.
Mona sits down across from me and flips her long black hair behind her shoulders. She picks through a newspaper that somebody left and concentrates on the coupon sections. She’s got sharp green eyes that would be pretty if she didn’t always look so tired.
“I’m a have to get down to Winn-Dixie when I get off work. They got chuck roast, two pounds a buck fifty.” She’s holding the paper up in front of her, so it looks like she’s talking to it.
“Wow,” I try, not knowing what else to say. I’m still not used to people speaking to me, and when they do, I don’t know how to act. Much like at the university, I’ve not seen any other black people on my shift, so I used to think that they were just being chilly to the black girl. But, not much like at the university, I know it has nothing to do with race or being “awkward.” Folks are just too damn tired to walk around all chipper and conversational and tap-dancing and shit.
Mona puts the paper back on the table and looks at me. “My kids eat so much. My boy, all he likes is meat. I try to give him a vegetable and he can barely get it down.” She smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile. “He’s only eight and as big as a fifteen-year-old.”
“Hmm,” I manage. I’m trying to think of something to say, and I can’t. Am I “awkward”?
Mona rests her forehead on her hand that’s propped up on the table. She rubs her temples and sighs. “How old are your kids?”
“Me?”
She gives me the look Ray’s always giving me, the look that establishes me as simple.
“Yeah. How old are they?”
For some reason I feel like I’ve been caught. I’m startled that she assumes I have kids, and startled, all of sudden, that I don’t have any. “Oh, I don’t have any kids,” I reply. It sounds like an apology.
“And you’re how old?” She squints at me and looks my face up and down.
“Twenty-nine.”
She’s still peering at me, like she’s looking for something she recognizes. “Well, you’re smart, I guess,” she says, and she stretches her legs and arms, and yawns. “When I get off at seven, I got to go wake up my boy and my girl, get ’em washed up and dressed for school, and then I got to walk them over to the bus stop. Then I go to my second job over to Winslow gas station.”
“Well,” I manage. “We’ve only got about an hour and a half to go.” But what I’m really thinking is, When does she sleep? No wonder she always looks tired. I’m just about to ask her how she does it when she’s already getting up and leaving. I’m right behind her though, because my ten minutes is up.
It’s the factory bell ringing and ringing and ringing. Why won’t it stop? I keep wondering why it won’t stop when I realize I’m dreaming and it’s my phone. I keep it right by my bed, an old habit from my L.A. days, in case anyone comes into my apartment and tries to ax me while I’m sleeping. I fumble a bit before I find the thing.
“Hello?” I sound extra alert and awake, like I’ve been up for hours, but I have no idea what I’m saying.
“I saw him,” Doris says on the other end. “He walked up to me.”
“No. Way.” I sit up in bed and turn on my lamp so I can wake up proper.
“I was in Winn-Dixie, and this skinny man in ill-fitting soccer-wear tapped me on the shoulder.”
I’m quiet until I figure out Doris isn’t going to speak. “Well, what the hell happened?”
“It was a complete Days of Our Lives, daytime-television moment. God, I’m not even sure what he said, it was this angry, angry Spanglish hybrid-talk, but no one missed the ‘Dor-ees. Prostituta.’ And lots of hand-waving. I believe I might have been pushed.”
“Damn.”
“You said he wouldn’t make a scene,” Doris says. Her voice is shaking. “That was definitely a scene.”
“God, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“And then he just gives me this cold-ass stare with these crazy eyes and says, real low, ‘Stop it,’ before he turns and walks away from me.”
“Man. That’s some crazy Clint Eastwood shit right there.”
“Exactly.”
“See, I hate this, I’m willing to go with his whole calling-you-a-whore thing—”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, but seriously, women always go after other women when they need to start knocking heads at home, and now gay men are doing it, too?” I look at my clock: 10:30 a.m.
Doris sighs. “I didn’t sign on for a head-knocking. Why isn’t Luis’s head the one getting knocked? He’s so phony. He’d probably just go and write a poem about it.”
“Cain’t do wrong and get by with it.”
“In theory,” Doris says. “In theory.”
Doris
Teaching, Weeks Two and Three: Accept Defeat.
“Accepting Defeat” seems more of a cosmic thing these days than a strictly teaching thing. Getting attacked at Winn-Dixie: deeply not my fantasy. It sucked. And you know if there’d have been a $3.99 can of dumb-ass in aisle ten, I would have handed it over and said, “Okay, go ’head.” But whoop-ass? That’s what the “cousin” was laying on, and that I refuse to accept. Unfortunately, the only Spanish I could think of in the moment was “me llamo Doris,” which he obviously already knew, and “Luis is a LIAR,” which didn’t seem to be translating. I knew better than to listen to Luis. He told me, when he first started with, “Doris, you know how people in this department love to label things, make drama where there isn’t any. What you’ve heard, forget it. My feelings for you are strong, real, physical. I think sexuality is more like a river, you let it wash over you and take you where it may.” River? More like a cesspool. New dating math for Doris: sexual fluidity=confused-ass bullshit. I almost felt sorry for the “cousin.” His eyes looked weepy, and his voice kept cracking. Dor-eeees. The “whore” thing was way too much since there ain’t a local in Langsdale who can’t translate prostituta.
“I loathe him,” I said to Ronnie on the phone. “And to think, I was so blinded by the fact that he liked my poetry, like he helped me rediscover my voice, like he’s the original Jesus Christ of iambic pentameter, and I’m just some dumb-ass waiting at the bus stop for any asshole to pick me up, show me the way, fly me to Jonestown and pass me the Kool-Aid.”
“He’s one prize ass,” Ronnie said, “But do not self-flagellate over that man. Do not do it.”
“He’s a liar and a coward. And he doesn’t even have the balls, yeah, the one tiny ball it would take to pick up the phone when I call to ask what on God’s green and beautiful earth might have been going through his mind.”
“But you knew that about him,” Ronnie points out. “I’m not excusing him, no way, but you shoulda known that ‘way gay’ mighta had a little glimmer of truth to it. You don’t see us nicknaming Earl ‘way gay,’ do ya?”
“I thought he was a sensitive man,” I said. “A tender human being. A human being who believed in beauty and poetry.”
It’s probably a blessing I haven’t seen Luis. Someone said that he packed up and left town. This morning, though, before I have to teach TROOPS (and might I say, that was my worst nightmare, standing in Winn-Dixie, accepting Biblical retribution for a nonexistent wrongdoing, the idea that one of my students might have been in aisle eleven, listening close and buying construction paper to handcraft my very own scarlet “A”), I check my e-mail and—like chickenshit clockwork—Luis has written. He has the nerve to send me an e-mail. Not even call like a half-decent half-gay Chilean jackassito.
Doris, I am so sorry that Armando found you like that. Please know that I never meant to hurt you or him. I’m trying to know where I stand myself these days, what I want and how to get it, how to live. I am trying to be true to who I am, true to Armando, and true to you. Sometimes life gets in the way of who we want to be. Believe that your beautiful voice has meant the world to me. Please keep a door open for us until things settle down.
I’m so angry I can barely see straight, and I have to teach in twenty minutes. No time to respond properly, but I feel the need to respond promptly, so I type: All doors closed. Have been called a “whore” in front of respectable shoppers. Over it. Locked door and threw away key. Please. Go. Away.
I was trying to think of something more clever, or mean, but at a certain point the only thing left to be said is, “No. No. Thanks, but No.” Oprahism: “No is a complete answer.” Move on to nonmarried Chris, teach the kids how to write, don’t ruin self over incredible, nigh-on-unbelievable lack of judgment, don’t overdo the shopping therapy. Don’t keep door open for Way Gay Faux Che.
“You okay?” I hear from over my shoulder, so I send the e-mail without rereading it, and close out the window as quickly as possible. Chris pulls up a chair beside me and looks at me like I’m some charity case. “You don’t look so hot.”
