Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (14 page)

“Try to? We slept together all winter!”

“If you call smelling your feet sleeping together, you’ve got a lot to learn.” She seemed thinner and meaner; every line of her body held me at bay.

“So tell me,” I said. “What can you show me that I need to learn?” But as soon as I said it I somehow knew she still hadn’t slept with anyone. “Am I supposed to come over there and sweep your enraged self into my arms?” I said. “Like in the movies? Is this the part where we’re both so mad we kiss each other?”

She shook her head and smiled weakly. “You don’t get it,” she said. “My mother is dead.” She closed her suitcase, clicking shut the old-fashioned locks. “My mother is dead,” she said again, this time reminding herself. She set her suitcase upright on the floor and sat on it. She looked like someone waiting for a train.

“Fine,” I said. “And she’s going to be dead for a long time.” Though it sounded stupid, I felt good saying it. As though I had my own locks to click shut.

H
EIDI WENT
to Vancouver for her mother’s funeral. I didn’t go with her. Instead, I went back to Baltimore and moved in with an aunt I barely knew. Every day was the same: I read and smoked outside my aunt’s apartment, studying the row of hair salons across the street, where girls in denim cutoffs and tank tops would troop in and come out hours later, a flash of neon nails, coifs the color and sheen of patent leather. And every day I imagined Heidi’s house in
Vancouver. Her place would not be large, but it would be clean. Flowery shrubs would line the walks. The Canadian wind would whip us about like pennants. I’d be visiting her in some vague time in the future, deliberately vague, for people like me, who realign past events to suit themselves. In that future time, you always have a chance to catch the groceries before they fall; your words can always be rewound and erased, rewritten and revised.

Then I’d imagine Heidi visiting me. There are no psychiatrists or deans, no boys with nice shoes or flip cashiers. Just me in my single room. She knocks on the door and says, “Open up.”

A
FTER
S
UNDAY SCHOOL
, Tia usually went outside, where she’d talk with her best friend Marcelle. They would lean against the white brick of the church, silently hoping that Morning Service would never begin. Tia had only known Marcelle since the summer, when the two had met in band camp, Tia playing the clarinet, Marcelle the trumpet. They were also the only saved students in Rutherford B. Hayes High, roaming the halls together in their ankle-length skirts, their long-sleeved ruffled blouses, while the others watched them: the other black girls who leaned sexily against lockers as though auditioning for parts in a play, the white girls who traded pocket mirrors, lipsticking themselves like four-year-olds determined to crayon one spot to a waxy patch. These were the people Tia and Marcelle gossiped about after Sunday
school, but that Sunday Tia knew she was in trouble. Instead of heading outside, she searched the sanctuary, trying to get to her great-aunt Roberta before Sister Gwendolyn did.

The trouble had started in Sunday school. Tia was sitting next to Marcelle, who was reading aloud from the lesson: “God’s Special Message for Teens.”

The other girls in Sunday school had read their passages, but Tia had been gazing at the stained-glass Paul: behind his frozen image of sudden blindness and supplication, shadows passed, turning the picture of Paul dark and opaque. Marcelle had kicked Tia’s shin.

“‘God’s Special Message for Teens,’” Tia began.

“I already read that,” Marcelle whispered, tapping her pencil to a passage ten paragraphs down the page. Next to the passage was a picture of a young Jesus sitting on a grassy hill with a dreamy Nazarene look in his eyes. Marcelle leaned over Tia as if the words in Tia’s book were different and more engrossing than her own. Marcelle began to draw a cartoon bubble above Jesus’ head. Tia read the passage: 

All the Sunday school books Tia had read were written this way, but this was the first time they seemed so ridiculous to her. Perhaps,
as her aunt Roberta never ceased to remind her, this was Marcelle’s bad influence. Perhaps, as she’d learned in her high school biology class, all bodies’ cells regenerate, and within seven years’ time, all cells have died and been reborn, and you are truly a new person. Tia stopped reading and looked up from the page, glancing at Sister Gwendolyn, who held her book in front of her as if she were about to begin singing carols from it. “Continue,” she said.

Marcelle now had the book in her lap and Tia had to lean over to see the words. Marcelle made an arrow from the word “homework” to the cartoon bubble she’d drawn. In the bubble next to Jesus’ head she’d written out a quadratic equation.

“Tia, Marcelle is busy taking notes and you can’t even concentrate on a simple passage.
Read
. Please.”

Tia continued, trying to read with a revitalized sense of duty: 

When Tia finished, Marcelle was putting the final touches on a crude drawing of three guys in bandannas asking the sketch of Jesus to attend their party.

Though Tia did not laugh very loud, or for a long time, the other girls, including Marcelle, looked at her, their eyes blinking the slow and steady concerned flashes of car hazard lights. All these other
girls in her Sunday school had begun speaking in tongues, but Tia could not. You couldn’t fake it, though she had tried to at home. The fake tongues sounded like something between Pig Latin and a record played in reverse.

You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at church and she had tried at home, but nothing worked. In her room, she would genuflect, pushing her head against her bed ruffle, reciting scriptures, praying, singing, concluding it all with a deep, waiting silence. But nothing would come out. Her only solace was that Marcelle was three years older and hadn’t spoken in tongues either.

Tia could not afford to laugh, and yet she had done it.

“Sister Tia Townsend. May I remind you that the fool hath said in his heart,
there is no God
.”

By the time Tia wove through the clusters of church members, Sister Gwendolyn and Tia’s aunt Roberta were already talking about her. Sister Gwendolyn wore a hat that looked like a strawberry birthday cake. Roberta’s hat was dove-gray, sleek as an airplane. At each angry quake of Sister Gwendolyn’s curls, Tia’s aunt Roberta furrowed her brow deeply, shook her head heartily, held her Bible so tight against her chest one might think it could ward off a heart attack.

Tia watched their hats drift away from each other. She knew what they were thinking: Tia did not Believe, thus Tia Laughed in her Heart, thus Tia was not able to Speak in Tongues. Their thoughts headed toward the same conclusion as tiny ants march toward the same mammoth crumb of bread.

T
IA FOLLOWED
Sister Gwendolyn past the sanctuary, past the pastor’s office. When they reached the hymnbook closet, Sister Gwendolyn took out a ring of keys and unlocked the door. “In here,” she said with a smile that never reached her eyes. She turned on the light, gesturing to the only chair in the closet, one used as a step stool for reaching the top shelves.

Sister Gwendolyn wedged herself in between Tia and the shelf of hymnbooks, wheezing the way big people do in small places. All the smells of the closet were buoyed by its heat: the hymnbooks, musty with years of sweaty palms, the bottles of anointing oil that had seeped through their boxes, marking the cardboard with round, greasy stains. And then there was Sister Gwendolyn’s signature odor: fig-smelling perfume, armpit sweat, cough drops.

By now the congregation would be filing into the sanctuary for Morning Service. Soon someone would begin jangling a tambourine and the choir would sing. Robin-breasted women would swell their bosoms, inhaling God.

“Sister Townsend,” Sister Gwendolyn said, “do you believe that you will ever receive the Holy Ghost?”

She knew the answer to that one. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

Sister Gwendolyn held her hands behind her back, sharking around Tia as best she could without her haunches threatening to unpry books from the shelves. Sister Gwendolyn raised her palms to either side of Tia’s head, as though Tia’s skull were a fly she was determined to trap with her bare hands. Tia had seen this done before, a more aggressive sort of laying-on-of-hands, usually performed on new members. Or the sick-hearted older ones, Brothers who refused
to stay with wives, Sisters who refused to obey their husbands. Sister Gwendolyn began:
This child oh Lord is not following in your path oh
Lord show her the way oh Lord you died on the Cross at Calvary oh Lord
and you came resurrected oh Lord but this child laughs at you oh Lord,
spare her oh
—

“I wasn’t laughing
at
Him,” Tia said.

Sister Gwendolyn started once more, clamping the heels of her hands onto Tia’s temples, harder now:
Oh Lord she has laughed oh
Lord at your loving kindness oh Lord
…

“I WASN’T LAUGHING
AT
HIM.”

Sister Gwendolyn stopped. Tia shook off Sister Gwendolyn’s hands. Sister Gwendolyn relaxed. “No?” Sister Gwendolyn said, her wreath of beauty-parlor curls quivering. She reached for a hymnbook and opened it to a random page as if to suggest that, with reading material, she could wait forever. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you weren’t laughing
at
him, you were laughing
with
Him.”

“Something like that,” Tia said.

Sister Gwendolyn threw the hymnbook on the floor, where it slapped the concrete. Once it was thrown, she refused to look at it. “I want you to say the Lord’s Prayer for me, Tia Townsend.” She said it with a quiet steadiness that did not dam the anger behind it. “I want you to say the Lord’s Prayer. I want you to cry tears for Jesus.”

Tia said the Lord’s Prayer. Then the scripture about God giving his only begotten Son. Then the one from Revelation that foretold of rivers flowing blood and seven angels opening seven seals that would end the world.

After a time, no tears in sight, she was allowed to leave.

Τ
IA AND
her aunt Roberta walked home from church on the old rural road. Oaks spread their huge, trophy-shaped crowns, branches of bayberry looking like fans. Beyond this was bottlebrush weed, and beyond the weed, the endless green nap of the cemetery. It was a beautiful day outside; the sky was a color Marcelle called Aqua Velva blue. It seemed a colossal injustice that her internal weather never matched the one outside.

As they walked, Tia briskly and impatiently ahead, her great-aunt unhurried and elephantine behind, Roberta hummed an old tune, a spiritual so mournful people sang it only at wakes, and the only word Tia could make out was “Nebuchadnezzar.” Roberta did not mention her conversation with Sister Gwendolyn; Tia did not mention the closet.

“I want,” Tia said, “to live with my mother.”

She had been working up to these words for a long time. Her mother, as far as she knew, lived in Atlanta, but Tia had only seen her once since Roberta had become her legal guardian. Tia had been seven then, though she hadn’t remembered that last visit as well as she would have liked; she had expected that more visits would follow. But she remembered her mother in a hazy soft-focus way. How her mother would absently stroke her hair, wherever she happened to be, like a starlet. How she would hold Tia’s face with both hands, as if it were a big blossom. Once, Tia recalled to Roberta her mother’s game of making Tia recite the days of the week and months of the year at random. Roberta snapped, “She was trying to make sure you weren’t high on her stuff. She kept it laying around so much it’s a wonder you didn’t get high from the dust bunnies.”
After that, Tia kept her questions about her mother to the essential few, and after a while, living with Roberta seemed less like an arrangement and more like the way things simply had to be.

Tia felt emboldened from her time in the closet with Sister Gwendolyn, and repeated, slowly, forcefully, as if accommodating a lip reader. “I want. To live. With my mother.”

The insolence of her tone was enough to merit a single sharp slap on the face, though Roberta had hit her only twice before. But Roberta did not stop humming, nor did she signal in any way that she’d heard Tia, and when they’d reached home, Roberta took the thawed-out chicken from the Frigidaire and served it baked with green beans as planned.