New People Page 3
My mother always used to say that character is character, Nora says. Maria, you were always a good person. I always felt that about you, from the moment we met.
Nora stops walking and turns to face her. Maria wonders briefly if Nora is making a mistake, confusing her with somebody else. She says it aloud. Are you sure you’re thinking of me? I’m not a bad person, Maria says, but I’m—
Of course I’m not confusing you with somebody else! Nora clucks her teeth. There’s only one Maria Pierce. Gosh, Maria. Who would I be confusing you with?
Maria laughs a little, relieved. She stares at her reflection in the dark window behind Nora. Wait, was it after class? How did I say it exactly? Like, “You’re beautiful.” Just like that?
Hail begins to fall in pellets all around them. A sound of drumbeat on the glass. Nora squeals, laughing, and grabs Maria’s arm. She pulls Maria inside the doorway of the building beside them. Maria shakes the ice off her jacket and looks around to see they are standing inside what looks like a hotel conference room.
There are people milling around, smiling, busy. She is surprised to see some of them smiling in their direction, waving, and then it dawns on her that they already know Nora. That this is where Nora was leading her.
Wait, she says. What is this place?
I’m about to show you.
There is a large sculptural display of books on a table nearby. All the books have similar covers. She squints and sees that they are all written by L. Ron Hubbard.
Nora is still talking. This is the place that saved my life. Do you know that I would have died had I not met my teacher one day just walking down the street? Truly. I would have died had she not led me through these doors, the way I’ve just led you.
An Indian-looking man and a black woman are waving at them from behind the stack of books. Maria offers a limp wave back. She sees Asian people, white people, Latino people, and black people moving around, working together in clusters, heading off together arm in arm to other parts of the building. When she was just a kid, Gloria told her never to trust a group of happy, smiling multiracial people. Never trust races when they get along, she said. If you see different races of people just standing around, smiling at one another, run for the hills, kid. Take cover. They’ll break your heart.
Nora is standing too close to Maria.
Listen, I sense you’re going through some difficult times, Maria. I can feel it coming off you. I’d like to administer a simple test that I think will help you. No strings attached. I just want to help you the way you once helped me.
Maria stares at her. Some small part of her thinks maybe the girl Nora is describing from college was a real person. She follows Nora into another room, still trying to remember telling Nora she was beautiful.
Nora invites her to take a seat at a table. There is a contraption on the table. She hands Maria a set of metal cylinders and then begins to fiddle with the machine. Maria dimly thinks of the poet, wonders what he’s doing at the moment, if he’s writing a poem alone in his apartment. She tries to imagine his apartment, what it smells like. It’s automatic: She feels the rush of pleasure that his image conjures inside of her, doesn’t even care that much that Nora is strapping something onto her arm. Thinking about him, she doesn’t even care if she was ever kind or popular or if she ever really did tell Nora she was beautiful.
Nora fiddles with some dials until lights go on, then she begins to ask Maria questions.
Maria tries to answer as truthfully as she can.
What would you do if you saw a woman beating a child by the side of the road?
I don’t know. What did the kid do?
Would you ever lie to save a friend’s life?
Of course.
What would you do if you saw a dollar lying on the subway platform?
Pick it up. Put it in my pocket.
Have you ever felt yourself to be a figment of your own imagination?
Yes.
The questions come at Maria, one after another, until Nora just stops on one question and keeps repeating it over and over again, no matter how many times Maria answers, as if it holds some key.
Can you remember a time when you were really real?
There was a time when Maria could honestly say she hated white people. She felt she was allergic to them. She looked a lot like one of them, which made her understand how much they were getting away with every day of their lives. She flinched in white poeple’s presence. She once overheard her mother saying to a friend, with a smirk of pride, that Maria had “that particular rage of the light-skinned individual.” Probably the reason was that Maria was privy to what Gloria liked to call whiteyisms—those comments white people made about black people when they thought they were alone.
She lived that year in one of her college’s ethnic-theme dorms. The black-theme house, Ujamaa. Every Thursday night was Cosby night. She and her friends hovered around the television as if they were watching a church sermon, hungrily taking in every detail of the most boring black family in America. Afterward they’d watch A Different World, laughing at the corny, hackneyed plots. It was such a sad relief to see these images, in such sharp contrast to the insidious television Negroes of their youth: the lanky and jive-talking (JJ), the fat and comforting (Florida, Nell), the stunted and orphaned (Webster, Arnold), or the benign tokens, roller-skates welded to their feet (Tootie). So night after night, in the lounge of Ujamaa, they hungrily ate up the sight of black people being rich, black people being normal, so normal they made Maria secretly want to vomit. It all felt a little pathetic to her, even then. It all suggested only that someday they would be as boring and vapid as white people. Someday Barbie and Ken would come in all the colors of the rainbow.
Can you remember a time when you were really real?
She carried a notebook with her everywhere that year, a notebook with a postcard of a gloomy-eyed James Baldwin taped to the cover. She permed her hair in the curly direction so that she looked more biracial. She’d have preferred to look like Whitney Houston, but she hadn’t the moderate amount of melanin nor the doe eyes and button nose to pull it off, so she compromised at Jennifer Beals. The curls did soften her features, which she had always felt were unpleasantly angular. She put a sticker that said OPP on the door to her dormitory room and danced in a line to Digital Underground in the weekly “chill-outs” hosted by the Black Students Union.
Can you remember a time when you were really real?
The first time she had sex was in high school. She lost it, so to speak, to an Argentinian Jew in his twenties. Was it rape? He was ten years older. She said, maybe, maybe, and he said, yes, yes, and fucked her. She watched his face over hers, his contorting expressions of pleasure, conscious that she was living inside an important scene in the movie of her life. Later, there was blood, and he looked nervous, stroked her arm. She wanted to get far away from him and his bodily fluids, the sticky innocence of them. Later, in college, she wondered if it was rape. It fit the definition of the women in her self-defense class. She’d said maybe and he’d done it to her anyway. But she didn’t really feel it was rape. It was more like inserting a tampon. She hadn’t liked it, and she’d been glad when it was over. Just like she was glad when her period was over. It was gross, in the same way. But she’d also known, even on the T ride home that night, that she wasn’t any different than she’d been before he put it inside her, thrust around. And she knew too that whatever had happened then was not the cause of the crookedness inside of her.
Can you remember a time when you were really real?
Once, years ago, she’d read one of Gloria’s old diaries. In an entry from the year Maria was born, her mother wrote: Maria is a strange baby. I don’t think she loves anybody in particular. Or maybe she loves everyone equally. She squirms away from my embrace. She’s perfectly cheerful, but I sense coldness.
Can you remember a time when
you were really real?
Maria didn’t know many other adopted children growing up. Gloria avoided the adoption community. There was a boy named Cedric in Maria’s second-grade class who had been adopted from an Eritrean orphanage. His white parents never cut his hair. It was all locked up with plant matter stuck in it and Maria started at some point calling him Thidwick, after the warmhearted moose in the Dr. Seuss story who lets all the creatures of the forest make a home on his antlers. Gloria made Maria watch Roots that same year beside her on the couch. She talked the whole way through. She kept saying that it was a work of speculative fiction. I love Alex Haley as much as the next Negro, she said, I’m glad the brother’s getting rich, but come on. There’s no tracing our shit back. Once the boat leaves the port, don’t bother. Just make friends with your shackle-mate and try to stay alive.
Nora turns off the machine. Thank you, Maria—thank you for those memories. I’ll be back in a few minutes with your test results. This should be—she pauses—very illuminating.
She strides across the room. Maria is alone in the Church of Scientology banquet hall. It is bare but for the framed posters hanging on the walls around her. One of them shows a family of three—mother, father, child—squatting with their arms around one another, grinning, superimposed beneath a blue sky and a silver skyscraper. The words above the family’s head, italicized like scripture, read: On the day we can fully trust one another, there will be peace on earth.
The organization’s gold emblem—half cross, half corporate logo—hovers in the air beside them. Another poster shows the profile of a woman in a military getup. Only Clears and OTs will survive this planet, and we’re the only ones who can make them!
Nora is back, holding a stack of white pages. Her face is unreadable, impassive. She looks like she knows something. Maria squirms, uncomfortable now. Nora sits down across from her, the evidence in her hands. She lays out the pages. They are computer-generated charts and numbers, incomprehensible to the untrained eye. If nothing else, they look seriously damning.
Nora squints at Maria for a moment. She taps one of the pages.
This is blowing my mind, she says.
What is?
Your results. I mean, I actually can’t believe it. These are your results. The machine doesn’t lie.
Maria chews her lip. What’s it say?
Nora leans forward so that Maria can’t avoid meeting her gaze.
Listen closely to what I’m about to tell you. I need to tell you a secret. Are you listening?
Maria nods.
Nora cups her hands around her mouth and whispers: You can be anything you want to be.
Maria glances down at the pages. That’s it? That’s what it says?
And I mean anything. You could be running a Fortune 500 company. You could be a movie star. A banker. A doctor. A schoolteacher. You have that special something that makes people succeed in life. I don’t know where it comes from, but some people—some small percentage of people on this planet—they have it. You have it, Maria.
Nora sits back in her chair, crosses her arms. Her blue eyes stare at Maria for a moment, sparkling.
I’ll be honest. I’m a little jealous of you, Maria.
Thank you, Maria says. I mean, I’m sure you can be anything too.
But here’s the thing, Nora says. She stares down at the indecipherable results printed out in front of her. I’m going to be truthful with you. There are these two areas on your chart that concern me. Frighten me, really. Look here. You are doing great in all these areas, and then suddenly the line dips—here and here.
Maria sees the sharp dips on the chart.
This here, Nora says, is deception. You’re a deceptive person, Maria. Am I right?
I don’t know. Not really.
And this here is belligerence. You are belligerent. Am I right? Are you belligerent?
That depends what you mean. What do you mean?
These two small things could destroy you. I don’t say that lightly. When I said I was blown away, it was by your potential. But I can see here, right here, and here, and here too, why you haven’t reached that potential. You haven’t reached it, have you?
Maria shakes her head.
When I met you in college, I said, that’s a girl who is going places. But you’re not there, are you?
Maria says a soft no.
That’s because you need to do the work to clear yourself. Do you know what it means to be clear?
Not really.
That’s all it takes. Nora is off and running—talking, talking, talking. Maria listens to the jumble of words. At least they sound like words. She pretends to listen just to be polite, her leg jiggling. She might be more interested in Nora if she dressed better. Everyone in this place is dressed terribly. She doesn’t know why they all stopped evolving, stylistically, after the eighties. Her eyes drift to Nora’s wrist. She sees that her watch is a cheap Timex from 1989. Everything she’s wearing is cheap from 1989, the year that invented cheap, the year they were in Self-Defense for Women together. It is as if time stopped there, on that mat, Maria pushing Nora down to the ground. She stares at the watch. Sees that it says noon. Nora is still talking about how to get clear. Maria stares at the watch for a long blank moment before it dawns on her that she was on her way somewhere. That she’s late. She has completely forgotten her appointment. Oma and Lisa are waiting for her in Bergdorf’s bridal salon.
Oh my God, she says, and jumps up from her seat. She runs out of the Church of Scientology, passing all the smiling people. They call out to her, Are you okay? Can we help you with something?
She half expects them to tackle her but she gets out alive.
Outside, the hail has stopped but there is still a web of drizzle. She pushes through the swarm of midtown bodies as she runs, her purse slamming against her side, in the direction of Fifth Avenue. She does the math. It’s four long avenues west and then two blocks north and then she will be there, but she will be terribly, horribly late.
When she finally arrives, out of breath, she is too afraid to check the time. She pushes inside through the gold revolving doors and stands for one bewildered moment staring at the makeup and perfume section, as bright and white as a hospital ward. She asks a security man in a suit for directions to the bridal salon. He points toward the elevators. She takes it to the fourth floor and steps off into a land of gilded mirrors and creamy white softness. The air is warm and too sweet, as if perfume is being pumped out of the vents. There are framed photographs hanging here too, but these ones are black-and-white portraits of brides smiling shyly over bouquets. No grooms. Just brides.
She sees a door marked Bridal Salon and opens it a crack to see Lisa and her grandmother sitting on a sofa on the far side of the room. They are holding cups of tea. They are tilted toward each other, whispering.
She steps inside and they both look up at her. Lisa wears a burgundy dress and her hair pinned up like a forties movie star. She looks elegant, old-fashioned, like Dorothy Dandridge.
Oma, tiny and delicate, is all dressed up too, in a blue polka-dot dress and black leather buckle shoes.
You’re so late, Lisa says, a hard look in her eye. Lisa stares at her, studies her.
The subway, Maria says. It broke down.
Lisa is silent, frowning.
I am so sorry. Her voice is only a rasp.
Lisa is silent, her eyes cold, suspicious.
Oma is squinting at her, quizzically, as she holds Lisa’s arm and teeters forward. She stands before her and points at her chest. What is this you wear?
Maria looks down to see she’s wearing a sticker. Nora put it there. It says, Welcome to the Church of Scientology. Below that is her name scribbled in a Sharpie. Maria pulls it off and crumples it into a ball. She puts it in her pocket. Listen, she says. I can explain.
Lisa crosses her arms and sighs,
rolls her eyes, looks into the distance.
No, Oma says, squeezing her arm. You explain nothing. You are here now and that’s what matters. Look, we have work to do.
Maria turns to see what she had not noticed before. Five gowns displayed on mannequin bodies on the opposite side of the room. They stand in a row, headless, waiting for her to fill them.
The poet has an ordinary name—the most ordinary of names. Still, Maria knows how to find him. She knows what to look for. She remembers that he mentioned the street he lived on to Lisa and Khalil after the reading, while she was standing nearby. He also mentioned a Jewish deli downstairs where he ate most of his meals. When she looks it up in the white pages, there is only one person with his name living on East 10th Street above a Jewish deli. She is surprised at how easy it is to find him. Though she knows it’s not true, she has come to think of him as a celebrity, somebody sought out by strangers.
It is late morning when she gets ready to leave. Khalil is on the phone with his business partner, Ethan, making plans to meet him in the city. The company they are launching together is beginning to take shape; it is all Khalil seems to talk about these days and it seems to Maria that he’s always on the phone with Ethan or with him in person.
Maria clears her throat. Khalil turns around to face her, the phone held in the crook of his neck. She tells him she’s going to work on her dissertation. He blows her a kiss, then turns back to his computer screen.
Maria stands for a moment, watching the back of his head, his Muppet-like silhouette against the glow of the monitor. She feels a heavy weight in her chest, a nameless dread. She wants to call to him, but she doesn’t. Instead she turns and heads out into the cold, bright morning, leaving her bag of Jonestown materials behind.
She gets on a Manhattan-bound train, but instead of taking it all the way uptown, she gets off at West 4th Street. She walks to the used record shop where she saw the poet the week before. It’s late morning. There are people in the record shop, not many, just a few. They are all of a certain type—grimy, with piercings and spiked hair. They stand around flipping through albums. She feels out of place in her black low-heeled boots, her plum lipstick, her diamond and sapphire engagement ring. She looks bourgeois—like an extra from A Different World—and the truth is, she doesn’t belong to this grungy place, this punk music. She grew up listening to Whitney Houston, and she has never liked or known music outside of the mainstream. Being black and looking white was enough of a freak show.