New People Page 5

  The apartment is too hot. It’s one of those buildings where they crank the heat up too high in the winter. Maria makes out the sound of a radiator hissing nearby as she stands in the middle of the room. She wants to tell the woman she’s not Consuela. But now seems like the wrong moment to interrupt, given the intensity of the phone call. The woman is pacing, shaking her head, while the baby screams unattended in the other room. Maria looks around, wondering if the poet’s apartment is the same size, the same layout. This one is decorated like so many others she has seen: a framed photograph of Billie Holiday looking anguished and on the verge of death; a forties poster of a worker woman flexing her muscle under the words We Can Do It. A Native American dream catcher. A kilim rug. A midcentury couch. She thinks she could walk into any apartment on this hall and find these same standard-fare objects. She wonders if the poet has any of them. She doubts it. She tries to imagine how he has decorated his place but can’t imagine, and it seems poignant to her suddenly, the idea of him living all alone with actual furniture and objects he’s purchased.

  The baby is really screaming his or her head off in the other room.

  Plastic toys lie scattered on the rug, a bouncy chair sits on a kitchen table. A half-full bottle of milk on the coffee table beside a plastic bowl with some congealed gray mush inside. The woman paces, shaking her head at what the person on the other end of the call is saying. She has cropped blond hair. Her body is still youthful, bony, boyish. She does not look like she was recently pregnant.

  Maria can’t take it anymore. She goes into the bedroom. The air is thick with the smell of urine, baby shit. The room has yellow walls decorated with stickers of farm animals, alphabet letters, and numbers. There is a white crib in the far corner from which the baby’s screams come forth, loud, insistent. Maria goes to the crib and looks in and is surprised to see that the baby is Asian. She’s dressed in a pink onesie.

  Maria picks the baby up. Her diaper is full, bulging. She continues to scream, hysterical, as Maria takes her to the changing table and lays her down. She unsnaps her onesie and takes apart her diaper and sees that it is only pee but she has a bad diaper rash underneath. Her skin is red and chafing. It looks painful. Maria doesn’t know babies, has never been a babysitter, but she picks up a tube of rash cream from the table and smears it around on the child’s bottom and crotch. The baby stops crying and stares at Maria. She’s a pretty baby now that she’s not screaming. She has perfect baby features, bow lips, a set of shiny dark eyes. Maria hands her a rubber giraffe and she sticks it in her mouth, bites at it with her small nubs of teeth just forming.

  Maria wonders if the poet is home. If he is, they might be only feet from each other. She is overjoyed at the thought that he is so close, that they are in the same space, breathing the same air of the same building.

  When she has cleared up the mistake, given the baby back to her mother, she will go to his door and knock. She will be bold. She will say, I was just in the neighborhood, thought I’d say hi. People used to do that, once upon a time—pop in on neighbors, unannounced. Of course she isn’t really a neighbor, and it might seem strange that she’s already in the building, but she is a friend. Sort of. A casual acquaintance. Not a total stranger. She tries to imagine the look on his face when he sees her. Will he be confused or amused, happy or irritated? She imagines he will look at her with wary amusement. She feels pretty certain he won’t be surprised. It seems impossible that he has not felt it too—the pulse that beats between them. Seems impossible that he does not have the same notion that they are linked, through time and space.

  The baby is calm now. Maria can no longer hear the woman’s voice. She must have gotten off the phone. She’s probably cleaning herself up, getting ready to go out. She picks up the baby and sniffs the top of her head and it smells sweet and pure, the universal baby head smell.

  She carries the baby to the living room and says, aloud, Listen, there’s been a mistake.

  The living room is empty. The kitchen is empty. The apartment is empty. Maria’s throat goes dry. Still holding the baby, she rushes to the window and looks out in time to see the woman walking down on the street. She’s wearing a long gray down parka and high heels and holding her arm up to hail a taxi. Maria scrambles to open the window but it is painted shut and it doesn’t matter anyway, because the woman has hailed a taxi. She slides inside and is gone.

  Maria does this thing with her eyes, something she’s been doing her whole life, where she makes them go blurry, then clear, blurry then clear. As she adjusts her eyes, she is half expecting the woman to reappear in the spot where she was standing, laughing and waving, because of course this was all some practical joke. But the woman is really gone and Maria is alone with the baby, who feels almost weightless in her arms.

  The baby tugs at Maria’s hair, makes cooing sounds.

  Maria asks: What’s your name? Where do you come from?

  Her voice sounds strange to her, the bright false cheer of a missionary.

  The baby stares back with solemn disdain.

  Maria walks around the apartment with the baby on her hip, feeling bored already of being a nanny, though her shift has just begun. She notices with irritation that the woman left her with a mess in the kitchen. She wonders if this was in the job description or if it is just one of those things people do—hire a laborer to do one job, then hope they will do all this other extra stuff if you leave it around, undone. A pot sits on the stove with ramen noodles in it. There is a bowl holding rotten fruit—an orange with a fuzz of white mold on one side and a starkly black banana. A faint net of fruit flies hover above. Maria holds the baby with one arm while she throws the fruit and the ramen into a trash can and runs hot water in the sink, squeezes in some soap.

  She sighs as she does so, mutters, Typical white woman shit—just leave it to the Latina.

  The baby seems unhappy too and begins to squirm and whimper in her arms.

  Maria abandons the kitchen cleanup and puts the baby down on the rug, gets down on her knees beside her, and dangles a toy—a small fuzzy white spider—in front of her face. The baby twists her body, grabbing for the toy. Once she has it in her hands, she loses interest and throws it down, begins to fuss, sucking on a fist, whimpering.

  Maria picks up the baby, glimpses a bottle of milk on the coffee table, half-empty. She hands it to the baby and she sucks at it greedily, staring up at Maria with wary eyes.

  After a while, her eyes flutter closed, the whites rolling up just before her lips relax and detach from the artificial nipple.

  Maria carries the baby to the nursery-cum-bedroom and sets her down in the crib. The room still smells of baby shit, and maybe extramarital sex too. The shades are drawn and the bed is unmade, a rumple of dingy sheets. Maria goes to the far wall—the one the room shares with the poet—and places her palms flat against it, moving them around like a mime in an invisible box. She rests her ear against the cool whiteness and thinks she hears muted explosions on the other side—a television show. She stands closer, so that her whole body is pressed flat against the wall, her eyes squeezed shut. She knocks. Nothing happens. Knocks again. The television volume goes low and is followed by the sound of heavy male footsteps, a clearing throat. He heard her knock and thinks somebody is at his door. She hears him open his front door and she imagines him standing staring into the hallway. She laughs to herself at his confusion. It’s like Ding Dong Ditch. She is tempted to go out there and surprise him, but doesn’t. She hears his door shut. More footsteps. A moment later the sound of the television explosions returns.

  When she thinks of the poet, she doesn’t imagine their future—a relationship, a home, a union, a child. She only imagines the beginning, the moment before they are about to touch for the first time.

  The poet is not a New Person. He could not be a subject in Elsa’s documentary. He doesn’t have mud-toned dreadlocks or octoroon-gray eyes or butterscotch skin. The p
oet is old-school—a brown-skinned black boy with a shaved head, a scar in his eyebrow. He has the body, the skin, the face that cabdrivers pretend not to see, that jewelers in midtown refuse to buzz inside. His body is the very reason they got those buzzers installed in the first place.

  She wonders what kind of body the poet desires, what kind of skin and hair and face catch his eye in the street. Is it a black girl or a white girl? Is he a tit-man or an ass-man? Is he into boys or girls, or girls with appendages? Anything is possible. She knows nothing about him except her own desire.

  Before Khalil, Maria had a type—a kind of body she desired. He looked nothing like Khalil or the poet. It’s weird how sometimes she forgets that she was once, like Lisa, into white boys. What was it she overheard Gloria saying on the phone to a friend once when she was in high school? Maria loves her some white boys.

  Not just any white boy. They always had the same look: olive skin, brown hair, sharp features, dark eyes. Israeli-ish, even if they weren’t Israeli (though sometimes they were).

  She remembers the last white boy. How could she forget? The last white boy in more ways than one. He died. He killed himself. Not literally, because some version of him still walks and talks on earth, but the white boy she knew is long gone.

  Greg Winnicott. A long lean white boy from Darien, Connecticut. Tall—freakishly tall, like six foot four. He had the kind of male form Gloria liked to call a tall glass of water. Greg Winnicott. Bright-eyed. Articulate. Average intelligence. Firm handshake. Moderate Democrat. A perfectly good white boy. Maria knew him in college her freshman year, but in the years since they were together he has literally become somebody else.

  Today, as far as she knows, he still goes by his new name. Goya, like the artist—like the beans. Every category about him has changed.

  Once a few years back when she was bored, she scribbled a list on a pad of paper to work it all out in her head.

  Greg Winnicott Goya Alvarez

  White Chicano

  Straight Queer

  Catholic Buddhist

  Premed Visual arts

  Thin Fat

  Anti–affirmative action Pro-reparations

  Moderate Democrat Green Party

  How such a thing happens—you have to go back to Stanford University, circa 1989. The era of the T-shirt revolutionary. The era of the anthology. The era of the individually designed major. The same year the school officially changed the term freshman to frosh so as not to alienate “half the sky.” 1989. Both the beginning and the end, in other words, of everything.

  She met Greg in her frosh dormitory. He lived on the second floor, she lived on the first. She desired him in the way she had always desired that type—she couldn’t figure out where the hatred left off and the desire began.

  There was a racial incident on campus that fall. Two drunk white students—responding to a widely publicized campus talk by a historian about Beethoven’s black heritage—had defaced a poster of Beethoven to make him appear stereotypically Negroid and hung it up in the black-theme dorm. Giant Afro, big lips—the whole racist kit and caboodle.

  In the midst of it, she found herself being professionally black—arguing with a bunch of white students in the hallway of her frosh dorm about why such crude racist imagery was offensive and why the school needed to take action. They seemed not to understand, which was astounding to her.

  Maria called Gloria, ranting about the incident, expecting sympathy and encouragement. But Gloria sounded distracted. She was chewing on something, opening and closing a refrigerator door, running a bath. She kept bringing the conversation back to her homeopath, a guy named Chuck Whittle who had an office in his home in Somerville and who had helped her with her sinuses.

  Maria received a letter from Gloria later that same week, written in longhand, purple script, offering her advice:

  My dear Maria,

  Don’t hate white people. They can’t help it. They have a learning disability. They need your compassion. They need accommodations. They are like preschoolers—their understanding of race is so basic. They can’t be faulted for being uncomfortable with somebody who has what amounts to a graduate degree in race—that is, us. It’s not fair for preschoolers to be placed in the same classroom with graduate students and be forced to compete. Pity them, Maria. Take their hands and explain very slowly and very carefully to them the truth of what you know, but with kindness in your heart. Have compassion for them, because not everybody starts on an equal playing field.

  Love, Gloria

  P.S. I am so eager for you to meet Chuck. He can really help you. He’s got a remedy for everything!!!

  Now Greg stood with a cluster of other white kids in a circle around her, trying to argue that the Beethoven poster was just a practical joke—insensitive, maybe, stupid, maybe, but not worthy of expelling the boys.

  Greg said, People need to lighten up.

  She exploded. She called him clueless—part of the motherfucking problem. Four-hundred-year-old rage surged through her.

  He listened with shimmering doe eyes to her rant.

  When she was done, she immediately wanted to have sex with him. So she did.

  She began to date Greg, but with an appropriate sense of self-loathing. He accused her of being the queen of ambivalence. She couldn’t deny it. She hated the way they looked together. She would sometimes glimpse herself with him in a reflection—holding his hand while they walked through Palo Alto, or kissing him outside a party, or sitting on his lap—and feel a literal surge of bile rising to her throat. They looked cute together. They looked like a cute white couple. She looked like she belonged on his lap.

  She told Greg not to get too attached: told him she just wanted to sleep with him, not settle down with him or anything—which, it turns out, was the key phrase to winning any man’s heart.

  Greg mentioned from time to time that he had a Chilean grandmother. Maria was not impressed. Did you even know her? she asked. He shook his head. So then what does that mean to you? He didn’t have an answer.

  When they watched a movie together in bed where the black characters were doing some Stepin Fetchit routine, she watched his face to see if he would laugh. When he did laugh, she pressed pause and asked him why he was laughing. She policed his chuckles.

  Around campus that same year, Maria noticed a boy out of the corner of her eye—a miscellaneous black kid surrounded by white kids. She saw him playing Hacky Sack, his Basquiat dreadlocks flopping around on his head. He looked familiar to her, uncannily so. She couldn’t remember how or why, but she knew that boy from somewhere.

  Meanwhile, Greg was getting clingy. She asked him not to hold her hand when they walked around campus together. She said she didn’t like PDA, but they both knew that was not the real issue. She told him not to get too comfortable. She said she could never have children with a guy like him; she’d feel trapped. He mentioned his Chilean grandmother, and she sighed. You’re just not getting it, are you?

  One night, after too much to drink, she paced around his dorm room, naked, his cum still inside of her, ranting like Huey P. Newton about the trouble with white people. He listened, lying long and lean and golden tan before her.

  Do you even love me? he asked when she was done with her speech.

  As much as I can.

  He stared at her, lips parted, as if something was dawning on him.

  She said she had to go. She needed to attend a BSU meeting in the lobby of Ujamaa. It was an important meeting—they were voting on something essential, she couldn’t remember what.

  He asked if he could join her.

  She said, You have to identify as a person of color to even attend the meetings.

  He put his face in his hands. She felt a wave of pity move through her.

  Um, are you okay? she asked.

  He glanced up wearing a pained smile. I was just thinking abo
ut something my dad once told me. He was coaching my football team and he said to me, Son, when you can’t decide, you end up with nothing.

  That’s sweet, Maria said. I can just picture it. Father-son bonding at a football game. How despicably American.

  She began to put on her clothes. Listen, she said, I realize you think that I, quote unquote, can’t decide, that I’m some tragic mulatta, betwixt and between. The queen of ambivalence. And maybe that idea is a big turn-on for you. I don’t really know. But the truth is, Greg, I can decide and, actually, I have decided. I could never settle into this. She waved her arm around at his dorm room. I could never really feel, I don’t know, at home with you. Don’t take it personally.

  Greg spoke. His voice was calm.

  Last night, he said, while you were out with Claudette, I went to a party at the Phi Delt house. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would freak out, call me a frat boy or something. I just had to get out of this room. Anyway, Sally Eubanks tried to kiss me at a party. When I told her I had a girlfriend, she said, You mean Sacagawea? I told her your name was Maria. She said that she and other girls in our dorm have nicknamed you Sacagawea.

  Maria was dressed now, brushing her hair in the mirror, a smile on her face she couldn’t explain.

  Sacagawea, she said. That’s some fucked-up bullshit. I should report that to the administration.

  Oh Jesus, Maria. Cut it out. That was just her jealousy talking. I know it’s hard for you to imagine but she wanted me. Anyway, I’m talking about you and me now. Us. Anyway, she asked me why I was so hung up on you. She said, Why is a guy like you chasing after such an odd, twisted girl? That’s what she called you. “An odd, twisted girl.” I tried to defend you, Maria, but I couldn’t really give her a good answer.

  So don’t defend me, Maria said, turning to look at him. Anyway, there is no us. There never was.