New People Read online

  Now Khalil and Lisa are changing, turning into something closer to Maria, and she feels like Charon, leading them across the river to the dark side.

  Lisa bought a T-shirt on the street in Harlem a few weeks ago that reads, It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.

  Maria sometimes catches sight of herself walking with them through the city and thinks what an unlikely arbiter of blackness she is. How strange that it should be she to ferry them across.

  Here in the restaurant, the woman examines Maria’s hand, twisting it this way and that, and Maria too peers at her own hand, the ring, as if it belongs to somebody else. The stone glimmers as she tilts it beneath the light at different angles.

  It is a large sapphire surrounded by twelve white diamonds. It belongs—belonged—to Khalil’s grandmother, the one with the camp numbers tattooed on her arm. She lives on the Upper East Side. She has given her blessing.

  Now that Maria is here, the conversation turns to the wedding. It always turns to the wedding.

  She listens to Khalil and Lisa imparting the details as if it’s they who are getting married. It will be at the lighthouse on Martha’s Vineyard. It will be in May. They will break a glass (Jewish) and jump the broom (black).

  Who’s going to be there? the woman wants to know.

  It is Lisa who answers. All the Niggerati.

  That weekend, a filmmaker arrives at their apartment to interview them for a documentary about “new people.” That is actually the working title of her film: New People. Her name is Elsa. She has frizzy blond hair and golden brown skin and green eyes. She stands in the foyer, glittering with snowdrops. In her strong teeth Maria can see the Scandinavian half of her heritage. She introduces the others she has brought with her—an Asian-American cameraman named Ansel with hair down to his waist, and a white woman with a buzz cut named Heidi. They crowd in the hallway, damp and smiling.

  Elsa is older than Maria and Khalil. She is well into her forties. Maria does the math. This means she would have been born in the 1950s, the Era of Mulatto Martyrs—which Maria knows from the history books was a whole other scene. Maria and Khalil were each born in 1970, the beginning of the Common Era.

  Elsa says that when she met Khalil at a party uptown, she knew he was perfect for the film. He wanted Maria to meet Elsa before they committed themselves to it. Khalil and Maria sit on the couch now while Elsa’s crew hovers in the background, filming their conversation. Elsa wants them to talk naturally, to be spontaneous.

  They tell jokes and share stories they have told before, stories that already feel like lore. His parents met at Freedom Summer and Maria’s mother was once a member of SNCC.

  Khalil says: Sometimes she teases me about acting Jewish. You know, like my rabbinical hand gestures. Sometimes I tease her about acting WASPy. The way she says “duvet” instead of comforter. We’re like a Woody Allen movie, with melanin.

  Elsa scribbles notes. After the interview she and her crew film Maria and Khalil walking hand in hand through Prospect Park. It is only late afternoon, the snow has melted, and it is nearly dark. The longer Elsa films, the more Maria and Khalil have to pretend they’re having a conversation. Her mind is elsewhere. She is tired of being on camera already. She wants to be back in the library under the artificial lights with her papers spread out around her, the headphones playing the children’s voices, a mystery about to be solved.

  But back at the apartment, Elsa and her crew stick around. They film Maria and Khalil chopping vegetables in their kitchenette, making a Moroccan tagine while Ornette Coleman plays on the stereo. Afterward, they each sign forms agreeing to be in the movie. Khalil seems happy about it and Elsa, grinning, tells them how thrilled she is to have them on board. She says they are exactly the subjects she has been looking for. Maria goes through the motions, smiles along, but she is aware of a pain in her chest, a tightness to her breathing.

  The apartment feels different after the crew has packed up and gone—more barren than it did before. Maria sits in bed, flipping through the brochure for Jonestown. She can see Khalil through the open door. He is seated in the living room, bare-chested in boxers, staring at something on the computer screen.

  Maria brought the brochure home from the library the other day. The girl on the cover is not somebody Maria recognizes from any of the other pictures she has seen of the collective. The girl is maybe fifteen years old and stands in the jungle, smiling, cradling a tiny sloth in her arms. The creature stares into the camera with sad humanoid eyes. Over the picture are the words A feeling of freedom.

  Inside is a montage of photographs advertising the compound. The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana was only two years old. After the earliest arrivals had spent months clearing the remote jungle outpost with machetes and tractors at Jim Jones’s behest, hundreds of Americans—members of the San Francisco Church—relocated there. They lived together in the simple wooden cottages together, among the macaws, harvesting their own food. They even had a mascot, a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs whose cage was next to Jones’s own cottage.

  Maria has stared at this brochure many times. She knows it was used to recruit new members from up and down the California coast. In the picture she stares at now, an old man stands beside an orange grove over the caption Everything grows well in Jonestown, especially the children. Below him is another image showing a smiling blond boy of ten or eleven holding two plump brown babies on his lap. On the next page, two women in kerchiefs sit on the ground of a nursery, tending to a row of toddlers who lie side by side in cots. The testimonials from those who have arrived sound ecstatic.

  People are so free here and they look so different . . .

  This is a new world—clean, fresh, pure—

  Man, the Fillmore has seen the last of me!

  The brochure goes on for sixteen pages. On the final page is a picture of a young man with his hair in neat cornrows, standing with his arm around a young woman, her hair in a wide Afro. Maria recognizes their faces. She knows they are siblings. She knows their names. Ronnie and Shanda James. She knows the exact brutal details of how their story will end. But in the picture she stares at now, it is still just the beginning.

  It is an active thing, this remembering him. Like rubbing a prayer bead in your pocket. She conjures him up in odd moments and it never fails to bring her a wave of pleasure. The thought of him makes her not so much relax as it seems to transport her, electrified, to a secret, happy place. She doesn’t have much to draw upon—the conversation they had on the street where he repeated her name aloud, and before that, the fleeting moment when he glanced up at her in the club and asked if she was good. The light in the scenes that play in her mind is grainy and muted, like clips from an old movie, one of the films her mother used to love, maybe Klute. She imagines them together inside one of those movies, where the women had real faces and drooping, small breasts and the men were dirty and sly.

  Now, as the subway train rumbles to a stop, she is jarred back to the present. She is in midtown. She pushes her way through the crush of dank, unmoving bodies. They don’t bother to step aside. She barely makes it out before the doors close.

  It is a weekday morning, but she is not headed to the library today. She is taking a day off from her work to go meet Khalil’s grandmother, the one he and Lisa call Oma. Maria is going to try on wedding dresses in front of her and Lisa at the bridal salon on the fourth floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Lisa organized the excursion and made the appointment for them there with a bridal specialist. Lisa has arranged to pick up Oma at her apartment on the Upper East Side and bring her by cab to Bergdorf’s.

  Maria would have preferred to go somewhere cheaper, smaller—a thrift shop, perhaps—for her dress. But Oma wants to see her try on dresses at Bergdorf’s. Oma is the bestower of the ring on Maria’s finger and she cannot shake the sense that the ring will always belong to Khalil’s family.

  Khalil’s paren
ts live in Seattle, where he grew up. His father, Sam, grew up in New York City but went west after college. He is an epidemiologist specializing in global health initiatives. Khalil’s mother, Diane, is a local television producer in Seattle. The Mirskys spent the bulk of Lisa’s and Khalil’s childhood traveling the world. They are as tight-knit a family as Maria has ever known. Their homeland is one another. They seem most happy when they are together, sprawled around their brightly colored living room. They even have their own family whistle—a shrill birdcall they made up long ago to locate one another in foreign crowds when one got separated from the group.

  Whenever Maria and Khalil go to visit them in Seattle, Diane prepares fresh fruit for their breakfast. She cuts it up and leaves it all laid out on a platter for them to start their day. Sam has a subscription to Consumer Reports magazine.

  The Mirskys remind Maria of something her mother, Gloria, once said on the Fourth of July, standing on the balcony of her graduate student housing, her plastic cup of white wine held up to toast the fireworks that exploded over the Charles River. You got a few things right, America, she said. Jews and jazz. Happy birthday.

  Gloria is dead now. She was diagnosed with breast cancer during Maria’s final year of college. She died eight weeks later at a hospice called Transitions. She was forty-nine. She died with no survivors but her adopted daughter, Maria, and fifty thousand dollars in student debt. There was not a single piece of furniture or jewelry worth selling.

  As Maria moves past the shops and peddlers and break-dancers in the station and toward the escalator, she hears somebody calling her name. The voice is warbling, female, unfamiliar. She stops and looks over the heads of strangers until she spots a young woman smiling and waving at her.

  Maria. Maria. Maria.

  She is jogging toward Maria beneath the flickering fluorescent lights of the station. She looks Maria’s age and wears a blue business suit. The jacket has large shoulder pads and looks a decade out of style. Maria watches, puzzled, as the girl comes toward her, laughing, a little out of breath. Her dirty blond hair hangs in thin strands around her face, but her skin is clear and bright, her features fresh, like a girl in an acne cream commercial. She touches Maria’s arm, leans in for a hug. She smells of a cheap floral drugstore perfume. Maria accepts the hug stiffly, struggling to remember where and how they met.

  I saw you all the way downstairs but you didn’t hear me. Wow. Wow. I can’t believe it’s actually you.

  Maria searches the girl’s face. She has slightly buck teeth, pale blue eyes, a smattering of freckles on her nose. She looks a bit like the eldest sister on Eight Is Enough.

  Come on, she says. You remember me, don’t you?

  I’m sorry, Maria says. I’m drawing a total blank.

  Okay. I’ll give you a hint. College? Self-Defense for Women?

  Maria remembers the class. How could she forget? There was a book that came out that year called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Maria has thought in the years since that she should write a book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in College. More specifically, in Self-Defense for Women. That class was where she learned to shout “NO!” from her diaphragm. That was where she learned how to push away a man with a butterfly motion of her arms, how to ram her knee into a man’s balls, how to stomp her heel onto his foot so that the metatarsal bone would break, how to thrust her palm upward into his nose so that his nasal bone would go straight through his brain, how to gouge out his eyes. Scoop into them just right. That was where she learned how to “maximize the damage.”

  She remembers everything about that class—but she doesn’t recognize this girl standing before her.

  We were partners, the girl says, blinking, looking a little hurt. I’m Nora Convey.

  The name. Of course. It sends her back. Nora Convey. Sad-sack Nora Convey. Yes, they were partners all right. But she doesn’t look at all like the same person. Nora Convey. Distantly, she can see the old Nora, can make out the faintest resemblance. But Nora has changed. She used to be extremely overweight with acne. Now she is slim with this clear, bright complexion. And something else is different, something Maria can’t put her finger on.

  Remember? Nora says, grinning, nodding. Her teeth are still slightly yellow. Some things never change.

  Of course I remember you. Of course. I’m so sorry I didn’t see it.

  No worries. You don’t have to pretend. You won’t hurt my feelings. Nobody recognizes me anymore. I don’t blame them. I was . . . Nora crinkles her nose. You know. A different person.

  Maria is unsure how to respond. She feels awkward. She remembers being disappointed whenever she was chosen to be Nora’s partner. Once she’d had to stand inside the circle of other girls wearing a giant helmet and overalls with padding between her legs and attempt a “model mugging” on Nora. She remembers how weak Nora had been, how easy she had been to throw onto the mat. How irritated Maria had been that Nora didn’t even really struggle. She’d had the thought at the time that Nora was a born victim.

  And in a way, it seemed like the truth. Nora told the class one day about being bullied as a child. She described a particularly horrible bus ride home, where she’d sat in a kind of numb trance while the other kids threw candy wrappers and garbage at her.

  The women in the self-defense class assured Nora she was a survivor. And maybe they were right after all, because she stands before Maria looking like an entirely different person.

  The air in the station is sweet and thick; nearby is the grating manic tune of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” A crowd has encircled a dancer just a few feet away. Maria sees it is a child, an androgynous, raceless child moonwalking in the center, his or her hat tilted forward over his or her face, one white-gloved hand limp, snapping a beat as he or she moves backward on an invisible conveyor belt.

  Nora turns to watch the child with Maria for a moment, both of them transfixed.

  You were always so kind to me, Nora says. I mean, when you didn’t have to be, you were kind to me. It’s funny how you don’t forget that sort of thing.

  Maria tries to remember being kind to Nora. She can’t think of one instance. She wasn’t mean to her, but she wasn’t kind either.

  That was the semester she and Claudette had gotten high one night and written the worst protest poem in the history of the world together. Claudette and Maria did everything together that year. Claudette was a self-declared dyke—a black military brat who had come out of the closet upon her arrival at Stanford and shaved off her long “colonized” hair. No more Revlon three-minute relaxers. No more squeezing her bunions into anything but combat boots. No more fucking around.

  Claudette was Maria’s closest friend for a long time, before she wasn’t.

  That night, she and Claudette wrote a parody in Maria’s dorm room of an epic poem called “Her Story.” They scribbled it together, cackling hysterically on Maria’s bed, then typed it up and printed it out and signed it Anonymous and at three in the morning walked through the cool night air to the offices of the school’s feminist magazine. The poem, as she remembers it, involved the liberal use of the terms my cunt-ry and Amerikkka. It was a voice screaming from history’s dustbin. They left it in the submissions box, then forgot about it and drove to San Francisco in Maria’s ancient blue Volkswagen for a night of clubbing.

  A few weeks later Maria was surprised to see their words published on the front cover of the feminist magazine. It had been distributed all across campus.

  Nora is talking fast beside her. She is saying that she wants to find out what Maria has been up to all these years. She wants to tell her about her own amazing journey.

  Maria is curious—as much about how Nora went from sad to happy as she is about what, exactly, Nora remembers of Maria’s kindness. She wants to know the details of it. She glimpses a clock on a distant station wall. She still has twenty minutes before she’s sup
posed to meet Lisa and Oma at the bridal salon. She tells Nora she has a few minutes to spare. She can walk with her at least.

  Outside of the station, the sky is darker than it was when she left Brooklyn. It hovers, low, as if threatening to rain. The city seems all lit up for Christmas already, colors blinking and biting at the pedestrians who rush past.

  Nora talks as they walk—tells Maria how she tried everything for years: pills, diets, therapy, even living on a Native American reservation for a year and taking peyote and enduring sweat lodges. She says she was trying to get free of the self-loathing inside of her.

  People say children are resilient, Nora says, but it’s not true. If kids were so resilient, why would we have a world of broken people out there? Why would we have so many people paying to talk to strangers? Childhood is a series of traumas that build up and make you forget who you really are. You know what I mean, Maria? So you have to find a way—a path—back to the person you were before it got so muddy.

  Maria listens, trying to understand what Nora is saying. She keeps searching her face, trying to see the other girl, the fat girl, but the more she looks at this new face, the more she can’t really remember what the other one, the old Nora, looked like. Not really. Just that she was overweight and felt so soft and clammy and weak in her arms when she model-mugged her in class.

  Nora’s words have an opaque quality to them.

  Maria, she says, you were one of those rare popular girls who was also nice. I remember when you told me I was beautiful, Maria. That comment kept me going for years. Did you know that?

  Maria doesn’t remember being popular. She also doesn’t remember telling Nora Convey she was beautiful. She is pleased by the description of herself nonetheless and feels a sort of swelling pride in her chest. When she catches sight of her own reflection in a store window, she sees she’s smiling and there is a sort of excited gleam in her own eyes.