Symptomatic Read online

  EXTRAORDINARY PRAISE FOR DANZY SENNA AND HER NOVELS

  Symptomatic

  “Suspenseful, and the anguish her vividly realized mixed-race characters feel when confronted with hostility from both ends of the racial spectrum is, sadly, all too authentic.”

  —Booklist

  “Thoughtful and exciting. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  Caucasia

  Winner of the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction

  Winner of the American Library Associations’s Alex Award

  A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

  “Lucid and magnificent.”

  —James McBride, author of Miracle at St. Anna and The Color of Water

  “[An] absorbing debut novel … Senna superbly illustrates the emotional toll that politics and race take on one especially young girl’s development as she makes her way through the parallel limbos between black and white and between girl and young woman … Senna gives new meaning to the twin universal desires for a lost childhood and a new adult self by recounting Birdie’s struggle to become someone when she can look and act like anyone.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The visual conundrums woven through Danzy Senna’s remarkable first novel [will] cling to your memory. There’s Birdie, who takes after her mother’s white, New England side of the family—light skin, straight hair. There’s her big sister, Cole, who takes after her father, a radical black intellectual. It’s the early seventies, and black-power politics divide their parents, who divide the sisters: Cole disappears with their father, and Birdie goes underground with their mother … [Senna] tells this coming-of-age tale with impressive beauty and power.”

  —Newsweek

  “Extraordinary … A cross between Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here and James McBride’s The Color of Water, this story of a young girl’s struggle—to find her family, her roots, her identity—transcends race even while examining it. A compelling look at being black and being white, Caucasia deserves to be read all over.”

  —Glamour

  “Senna brings an accomplished voice to this vivid coming-of-age tale, offering images sweet and sorrowful of a child caught on the fault line between races.”

  —USA Today

  “A well-crafted coming-of-age story that escapes the confines of race, all the while digging to its complex core … A stunning debut from one of the most promising writers Boston has produced this decade.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Senna’s debut novel is as thematically and dramatically rich as fiction can be, infused, as it is, with emotional truth. Like her strong-minded young narrator, Birdie, Senna is the daughter of a black father and a white mother, and the lighter-skinned of two sisters, and she writes about race, identity, heritage, and loyalty with wrenching poignancy … As Senna charts Birdie’s odyssey and rekindles the fires of the 1960s, she poses tough questions about integration, intermarriage, and the status of mixed-race children. This courageous and necessary tale about the color of skin and the variations of love is full of sorrow, both personal and societal, and much magic and humor.”

  —Booklist

  “An ambitious debut novel that powerfully, if schematically, addresses the conditions of those living in the great racial no-man’s-land—that is to say, the children of mixed marriage—who belong to both races but are often also rejected by both … An accomplished novel of issues that doesn’t offer any easy solutions but does poignantly evoke the pain and paradox of those caught in the racial crossfire.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  A NOVEL

  SYMPTOMATIC

  Danzy Senna

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For support during the writing of this book, the author wishes to thank the MacDowell Colony, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the College of the Holy Cross.

  Copyright © 2004 by Danzy Senna

  Cover design © 2004 Scott Idleman/Blink

  Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  First Riverhead hardcover edition: May 2004

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: February 2005

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:

  Senna, Danzy.

  Symptomatic / Danzy Senna.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65131-5

  1. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.E618S96 2004 2003066888

  813’.54—dc22

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Symptomatic

  1

  T HIS WAS THE MOMENT I savored every night, when I could see him but he could not see me. I watched through the crack in the door as he moved around the kitchen, fixing us dinner. He was singing along to country music, this boy whose home I was temporarily calling my own. Strange, lovely boy. Sleepy blue eyes. Full pink lips. Tousled blond hair. Skin pale and milky. It irritated him, this skin. An unpleasant side effect of the medication. He’d grown used to the sensation, the permanent discomfort, he’d told me. It was just something he had learned to live with. But still. It looked uncomfortable.

  I went inside. Shut the door softly behind me.

  “Is that the one I love?”

  “I don’t know, is it?”

  I presse
d my body against his back and kissed the indentation at the back of his neck.

  He turned around to look at me, examining my face with mock suspicion, as if I were a twin of myself. Then he smiled, touched my hair, tucked it behind my ear. “Hmmm, she looks like her. Does she taste like her?”

  “Find out.”

  I closed my eyes and parted my lips and let his tongue move inside. Red wine. It didn’t take long before we were both entwined.

  “I keep thinking you’re going to disappear,” he said, nuzzling his face against my neck, sniffing my skin like a dog. “Maybe I was dreaming when I met you and just haven’t woken up. Because it doesn’t seem real sometimes. You know? That you’re here, living with me.”

  We met on the subway, me chewing my gum, trying to disappear behind a book. Him glancing at me every two minutes, blushing whenever our eyes met. A voice in my head had told me to stop glancing back. To stay away from that boy. You know where that’ll get you. But I didn’t listen.

  Have you ever seen the end of a story before it even begins? Not like a psychic. But like somebody who keeps making the same mistake, because it feels good for a while, and even when it starts to feel bad it’s a familiar kind of bad. A problem you can call your own.

  Andrew was his name, but before I knew that I knew only what I saw: sympathy and seduction, old jeans and older money. Sensitive skin. When he found the courage to cross the car and asked me if I spoke Spanish, I’d smiled and said, What makes you say that? Answered a question with a question. The danger arises in that space. You know that as well as I do. The voice scolded me all the way home. Now why’d you go and answer a question with a question? It’s either yes or no. You either speak Spanish or you don’t.

  I’d moved in with him one September night when the place I’d been living had become unbearable: a mold-infested women’s boardinghouse in the mid-Thirties, where I’d fought chronic athlete’s foot and mild bronchitis. It was 1992 and there weren’t any institutions like it left in the city. All the others had been shut down years before, converted into health spas or luxury hotels. I imagined this one, too, wasn’t long for the world. My room smelled vaguely of egg-salad sandwiches, and each night I lay awake listening to the sounds of communal living: coughs, vomiting from the resident bulimic, flushing toilets, sobbing from the girl next door, whom I wasn’t sure I’d ever even laid eyes on. The place was all rules: a compulsory meal plan; a curfew; a “beau room” beneath the staircase, with a deck of cards and an incomplete Monopoly game, where you were supposed to entertain suitors. The official logo of the place hung in the lobby—a framed sketch of an older woman giving a younger woman a piggyback ride. The older woman, all bent over from the weight, wears a strained grin and is dressed like a schoolmarm—bun, clogs, floor-length dress buttoned to the collar; the younger woman is slender, swan-necked, and wears a flowered sundress and braids. She holds her arms loosely around the older woman’s neck. Beneath them are the words “She ain’t heavy … she’s my sister.” Everything about the place was designed to make you feel part of a community, but at night, in my twin bed, I felt a loneliness so complete it made my teeth hurt. A loneliness like grief, as if I were missing somebody who had died and would never come back.

  One night Andrew walked me home from a movie. I was rushing to get back before curfew but paused on the stairs before I went inside.

  “Please don’t make me go back in there.”

  It was a joke, but he didn’t take it as one.

  “Okay,” he’d said, not smiling. “I’ll wait right here. Pack your bags.”

  He kept the cab waiting while I went upstairs and threw my belongings into my Samsonite suitcase, stuffed my bedding into a garbage bag, and wrote the housemistress a note. I flew down the hall past bewildered housemates, shouting good-bye over my shoulder, then disappeared into the mild autumn air in a shining yellow cab.

  The décor of his place was collegiate, preppy, hard angles and minimal furniture and stacks of books like leaning towers in every corner. A framed portrait of President Lincoln, something he’d picked up at a flea market, hung over his bed. On his bookshelf was a stack of vinyl records—Miles Davis stared down pensively, a witness to our coupling.

  “Am I dreaming?” he asked. “I need to know.”

  “You’re not dreaming. I’m really here.”

  “Prove it,” he whispered.

  LATER, I lay beside him, hands behind my head, telling him about my day at work.

  “The usual shit,” I said. “Just more contributions to the downfall of Western civilization.”

  It was my first job out of college. My title, at least, was special. The Carlton A. Riggs Fellowship for “young journalists of exceptional promise.” Earlier that day I had stood on the subway platform at Rockefeller Center stopping businessmen wearing flowery ties. Was it a gift from a girlfriend or mother, or had they picked it out themselves? Did it mean they were comfortable with their masculinity? One tightly wound stockbroker thought I was calling him a faggot.

  I told Andrew about the assignment. “Not quite Watergate.”

  “I’m sure that’ll come.”

  He ran a finger down my stomach. “So tomorrow,” he said, “my friend Sophie is having a birthday dinner at her place uptown. I want you to come. Will you do that?”

  He had asked me to join him at similar events a few times before, but I always found excuses not to go. Every day in this new city I was trying to live in the purity of the present, free from context. Contexts, I knew, were dangerous: Once you put them in the picture, they took over.

  Andrew believed it was unhealthy to keep things so separate. He had told me that if we continued to stay so isolated, removed from everything that had come before, the milk of our affection would start to curdle. It wasn’t so much a warning as a plea.

  He saw me hesitate now, and touched my chin. “Come on, I want you to meet my friends. I want them to meet you. It’ll be good for us. You’ll see. Like coloring in a picture.” He paused. “Sometimes we feel like a sketch of something that’s not filled in.”

  I looked at him. “Everything’s so perfect right now. Maybe we should leave it this way.” I smiled slightly. “A beautiful sketch.”

  He stroked my hair. “I know it seems perfect. And it is. To me too. But it can only get better.” He sighed. “These friends, they’re the closest thing I have to family. I mean, boarding school does that to you. And I guess I just want you to know them. And I want them to know you.” He shrugged. “Is it wrong to want to show you off?”

  “No.” I touched his face. “I’m just being silly. Of course I’ll go with you.”

  BEFORE I MOVED to this city, my mother and I had a conversation. She twisted herself into yoga contortions on a floor mat while I stood at the doorway, arms crossed, half turned away. She wanted to know why I would want to move here, the East Coast. Source of power. Why I would want to be a journalist at all. My mother doesn’t believe in nonfiction. She doesn’t believe there is such a thing as no agenda. Magazines, like the one I was heading off to work for, were, she said, bad for your health. They sustain the status quo in subtle, insidious ways. They keep us separated from each other, all the while homogenizing us into oblivion. I tried to explain to her what I loved about my work: The sense I got of disappearing into somebody else’s story. Of watching and not being seen. Then and only then do the secrets reveal themselves to you. Silly girl, she said, as if that’s possible—then shifted into a new asana.

  2

  S OPHIE OPENED THE DOOR wearing a silver Burger King tiara on her head. She kissed Andrew on the lips. “Welcome back to the land of the living!” She peeked behind him at me. “Well, let’s have a look.”

  I stepped forward. Took her hand. Her eyes darted up and down me, taking in each detail of my clothes and hair. I couldn’t read her verdict until she smiled. “Everybody’s so curious to meet you. We knew Andrew was hiding something down there in the Village, but it was all so covert. We were beginning to suspect i
t was a man.”

  “No, not a man,” I said, with a laugh.

  “Well I can see that!” She took me by the arm and led me into the living room, casting a mischievous smile back at Andrew as she whispered to me, “Remind me to tell you about the time Andrew fell out of his dorm window, wearing a dress.”

  “What are you telling her?” Andrew wanted to know, his cheeks growing pink.

  We both shook our heads, already in cahoots. “Nothing!”

  There were five of them in the living room, lounging on the furniture, nursing their drinks. I stood before them, unsure what to do with my hands, while Sophie introduced me. Tommy, a pudgy fellow on the couch, held up his drink in my direction and sang, “Welcome to the Hotel Sophie. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

  “Don’t scare her, Tommy. She hasn’t even had a glass of wine.”

  Tommy ignored her and began to sing the Eagles now in drunken earnest.

  “Her mind is Tiffany twisted, she’s got the Mercedes bends, she’s got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends—”

  A blond girl beside him, Chloe, hit him on the head with a pillow, then tackled him, holding her hand over his mouth so that the rest of the lyrics came out muffled, incoherent.

  Andrew went around the room hugging the girls, doing elaborate handshakes with the boys. Everybody seemed happy to see him. They ruffled his hair. Slapped his butt. Made fun of his shoes. I watched him for a moment from where I stood near the door, actually glad now that I’d come. I liked seeing him in his natural habitat. He looked happy, but kept glancing back at me even as he worked the room.

  Sophie grabbed my elbow and led me into the kitchen. I leaned against the counter, admiring the posh accoutrements, while she busied herself laying slices of smelly cheese on a platter. Over the stove hung a collection of expensive steel pots and pans on a metal rack. The refrigerator was made of brushed steel. The white counter behind me held a sleek, black espresso machine, an antique blender. The stove was German.