Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (16 page)

“Rough day?”

Tia nodded.

“Well, keep your pretty self smiling.” He got up and tossed his cup in the trash. He spoke a few words to the bored cashier, then swished out the door.

When Tia finally summoned the energy to order and pay for her food, the cashier waved her hand.

“It’s free,” the cashier said.

“Thank you,” Tia said. “Thank you so much.”

“I ain’t do nothing. He paid for it.” The cashier girl pushed the tray of food toward Tia as though the meal had offended her in some way.

At first Tia thought “He” meant God. For people at church, “He” always meant God.
He touched me, He spoke to me, He healed me
. But people in the World, Tia knew, never used “He” to refer to God.

“‘He’ who?”

The girl waved a lazy hand toward the door. “Him who just left. Dezi. It’s on him.”

The man who’d spoken to her, who’d said she was pretty. The last time anyone had called her pretty was when she was five years old. Her mother lay next to her on a stained, sheetless mattress and said, “You so pretty.” Her eyes were glazed, their whites not white at all but the color of old piano keys. “You so pretty,” she’d said, patting Tia’s face harder than she must have intended.

T
AVERNS AND
bars lined Virginia Avenue, their interiors leaking a dim tungsten glow. Tia passed restaurants where waiters and waitresses zipped around the linened tables like dragonflies through a maze of lily pads. An Oriental grocery advertised itself in both
English and Chinese, and Tia stood transfixed at the complex darning of saber-shaped strokes. The large window displayed an oversized bird of some sort, hanging by its feet, its corpse glossed molasses-black down to its headless neck. Tia walked down the sidewalk, against the northward flow of pedestrian traffic. She found a pay phone and dialed the R. Dunlovey that had previously been busy. A young boy answered the phone.

“Hello!” the voice shouted, loud and confident, as if this were one of the few words he knew.

“Hello,” Tia said. “May I speak to your mother?”

After almost a full minute, she heard a sibling argument over a Popsicle ensue in the distance, and just as she was about to hang up, a woman’s amber-toned voice answered. Tia recognized it, but tried to control herself.

“Ma’am. Do you know a Tia Townsend?”

The woman was silent, and as the silence grew Tia envisioned their reunion, hugs, smiles, shopping sprees so that Tia could get normal clothes, a little adorable brother whom Tia would teach to play the clarinet.

“Atiya, Atiya …” the woman said, “I don’t think so.”

Tia turned onto another street, then another, and another, but she did not cry, not even when she saw a squirrel on the sidewalk, dead, clutching the branch that had failed it. She kept walking until she entered a residential section where it looked like bills were paid on time. Then she saw the quiet streets as Marcelle would have, and suddenly she knew what to do. She checked to see which cars were locked. After the first car alarm, she panicked, her clarinet case banging against her side for the four whole blocks she ran.

She began to look for cars with clubs on their steering wheels.
These, she figured, would not be locked as often as the ones without, and when she brushed past them, no alarms sounded. The one she opened had plush-looking seats, but it turned out the seats did not matter. If she didn’t want anyone noticing her, she’d have to lie on the floor and cover herself. The floor was matted with what seemed like a week’s worth of old newspapers, and she arranged these over herself in a thin tissuey blanket.

It was Monday, so Tia’s aunt Roberta would be home from church and would have made pork chops. When they asked about her, Marcelle would have played it cool,
She talked about going to At
lanta but I never thought she’d do it
. At church, Aunt Roberta would have prayed with the Saints for Tia to come home, for Tia to be safe, for God to guide her. They loved her and she loved them, but it was a smothering sort of love: love because you had to, never getting the chance to find out whether you wanted to or not.

Through a rip in the newspaper, she could see out the window. The sky remained a muddy, light-polluted purple-brown, refusing to turn black and starry the way it did in Alabama. The lights from downtown winked at her, the crescent moon like a castaway cuticle, discarded by God.

T
IA WAS
certain the morning sun would wake her before the owner got into the car to go to work. Instead, the car door slammed, the engine turned over, and the sun streamed through the newsprint as it would stained glass.

The car began moving. Tia wished whoever was driving would hum or turn on the radio so she could stretch without the paper making noise. She felt paralyzed, a vague tingle in her leg. If she
could not get her circulation going soon, she feared it would stay limp and immobile forever. Then the person—a white woman—began singing to herself.

Tia recognized it as part of a song the Rasta-hatted boys sang. She stretched and scratched. She could hear the newspaper crinkle and tear, but she didn’t think the woman would be able to hear it over her singing. Tia stopped scratching, a moment after the woman stopped singing. The silence in the car seemed to double. The car swerved and came to a halt.

The front door opened but did not slam shut. The back door opened, and Tia could feel a draft of air rush up her skirt. She sat up. The woman screamed and ran down the sidewalk. She wanted to tell the woman that she was Tia, that she wasn’t going to steal or molest the woman, but all this was not possible. At some point, Tia got out of the car and began running in the opposite direction, tugging her backpack behind her like a child who couldn’t keep up. The woman had fallen onto the concrete, and amid her screams, Tia realized she’d left her clarinet in the car. By the time she recovered it, the woman’s hyperventilating and repeated pointing had sent two men running after her.

She ran, her skirt chopping off her natural stride. Then she hiked it up, nearly dropping everything in the process. Suddenly she remembered what Marcelle had said at the bus station,
We all look the
same to them anyway
. She had an idea. She stopped running, and the white men, perplexed, stopped shy of her.

“Why’s she screaming at
me
?”

“You were trying to steal her car.”

She was out of breath but did her best to look aghast, wronged, mortified. “You must think we
all
look alike!”

Then it was their turn to look aghast, wronged, mortified. Then one snapped out of it and started the chase anew.

She had not realized she could run so fast in her skirt once it was hiked past her thighs, and cursed herself for all the times in gym when she’d fallen, unable to wear shorts like everyone else. She ran and she beat them. Ha! she wanted to say to the two men who couldn’t keep up. When she felt a safe distance away, she slumped next to a dumpster, sitting amid pizza crusts, half-eaten sausages, and scampering cockroaches.

She took stock of herself; her sleeve was dotted with blood the whole length of her forearm. She cleaned up in a park restroom, raking her hair as well as she could with her fingers. In the park, she stopped to listen to a man playing a saxophone. His case was open, and as people passed by, they dropped money inside. Tia headed toward an unshaded spot in a park where the sky was the color of a suburban swimming pool. Tia opened her clarinet case and began to play. For the first hour, no one put money in her case, so instead of trying to play through the whole
Marriage of Figaro
—most of which consisted of uneventful passages for clarinets—she waited until she saw people approaching before she began to play, concentrating on the dramatic swells and crests. Occasionally, someone would drop a quarter, but more often than not, they dropped wholly unhelpful items, as though her case were an opportunity for them to clean their pockets: a stick of chewing gum from an elderly man, the business card of a personal-injuries lawyer, a single earring with the glued-in rhinestone missing, and several times, lint. But a few times someone dropped—she was overjoyed—a dollar.

S
HE’D MADE
over ten dollars, and to celebrate, she wanted to buy something. Certain she could make another ten before nightfall, she considered buying a pair of jeans she’d seen in a store called Herbie’s. Unlike the other thrift shops on Virginia Avenue, Herbie’s was inexpensive. She still hadn’t found a very cheap store like a Kmart, and figured she’d have to go to the outer reaches of the city, and that she could not do.

Reason took hold of her, and the power of food was more immediate than the intense desire for her first pair of jeans. She walked back to the same McDonald’s at which she’d eaten the day before, the streets now feeling homey and welcoming. She was on her second Big Mac—relishing how two mass-produced patties could bring such joy—when the man from yesterday tapped on the window, mouthing overzealous surprise. He—Dezi—looked younger than she’d remembered. His head, shaved to a bullet-like smoothness, gave his skull the raw beauty of a lynx or a panther. Before, she had put him at thirty; today she thought mid-twenties. He came inside and sat across from her, then boomed his order in the general direction of the cashier. One of the managers brought it over in seconds. She wanted to ask what made him so special, but he spoke first.

“Looking more upbeat, girlfriend.”

“Yeah,” she said, surprised and a little worried that he was being so familiar with her, but she felt obligated to return the casual tone, “Thanks, man, for yesterday.”

While she silently mocked herself—she’d never called anyone “man”—Dezi looked as though he was trying to remember what he’d done that was so remarkable. “Oh.
That
. Sweetheart. Don’t
even sweat it. I take care of people I like.” Dezi sucked on his Coke, but he looked at Tia as though making sure she wouldn’t suddenly leave.

It was strange to have a man across from her. But then again, there was something in the way Dezi sucked his Coke—head bent, yet his eyes on her—that reminded her of Richie Cunningham sitting with his dates on
Happy Days
. This wasn’t a date, but it felt like how she thought one would feel. She grew flushed, suddenly feeling cumbersome in her long, ankle-grazing skirt, her ruffled blouse. She cursed herself for not stopping in that store to buy jeans instead of food.

“Well. I’m thanking you anyway,” she said. “You didn’t have to pay for my food. I have my own money.”

“I know you do, girl. You a modern woman. Inde
pen
dent.”

“True,” she said.

“An independent woman,” he said. “But a church girl, too.” He nodded knowingly, and his lips slowly parted to reveal beautiful white teeth, one capped with gold.

“No. I’m not,” she said, lying before she’d even realized it. It was the first lie she’d ever told, and it slipped from her mouth easily, as though it had been waiting to get out all along.

He affected a British gentleman’s disbelief, a single dainty hand on his neck as if tugging an ascot.

“No,” she said, more forcefully. Not exactly a second lie, she thought, more like one and a half. She’d heard that adding something true to a lie would make it more believable, so she said, “Actually, when the cashier yesterday said, ‘He paid for it,’ ‘he’ meaning you, I thought she meant—” Tia pointed to the ceiling and rolled her eyes, mocking her stupidity.

“God?”

“Dumb. I know.”

“Well, you know what Brother Farrakhan say: the black man
is
God.” Before she could ask whether he was Muslim or not, Dezi fingered his thin gold chain, plucking the cross attached to it from under his shirt. “See. I’m real tight with God,
you know
?” He held up two joined fingers to signify their close relationship.

He talked a little like Marcelle, one idea after another, like facts in an almanac. She was wondering whether she should call Marcelle when he interrupted her thoughts.

“Why’d I say that?” He smiled. “I shouldn’t have even mentioned church. You just look—I don’t know. Special. You look real special.”

“Special
retarded
special?”

He laughed. “Special
pretty
special,” he said, “pretty special, in an
especially
pretty way.”

He liked her.

And she liked the way he talked to her, easy and slow, like how she’d seen guys talking to girls at their lockers. The thought of this made her feel muggy: the clothes themselves weren’t making her hot, but the thought of them was. She broke off his intense love-stare and looked out the window, hoping his eyes would follow suit and that any attention to her clothes would be, for the moment, deflected. When the window trick didn’t work, she picked up her burger with an expression of renewed interest, but he kept staring, and the more he stared at her, the more troubled his face became.

“Your arm,” he said. “What happened?” His voice had suddenly gone gruff, as if he were prepared to pummel the sidewalk that had done this to her.