Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2 page)

“Snot, you’re not going to be a bitch and tell Mrs. Margolin, are you?”

I had been called “Snot” ever since first grade, when I’d sneezed in class and two long ropes of mucus had splattered a nearby girl.

“Hey,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t hear them right—I mean—”

“Are you gonna tell on us or not?” was all Arnetta wanted to know, and by the time the question was asked, the rest of our Brownie troop looked at me as though they’d already decided their course of action, me being the only impediment.

C
AMP
C
RESCENDO
used to double as a high-school-band and field hockey camp until an arcing field hockey ball landed on the clasp of a girl’s metal barrette, knifing a skull nerve and paralyzing the right side of her body. The camp closed down for a few years and the girl’s teammates built a memorial, filling the spot on which the girl fell with hockey balls, on which they had painted—all in nail polish—get-well tidings, flowers, and hearts. The balls were still stacked there, like a shrine of ostrich eggs embedded in the ground.

On the second day of camp, Troop 909 was dancing around the mound of hockey balls, their limbs jangling awkwardly, their cries like the constant summer squeal of an amusement park. There was a stream that bordered the field hockey lawn, and the girls from my troop settled next to it, scarfing down the last of lunch: sandwiches
made from salami and slices of tomato that had gotten waterlogged from the melting ice in the cooler. From the stream bank, Arnetta eyed the Troop 909 girls, scrutinizing their movements to glean inspiration for battle.

“Man,” Arnetta said, “we could bumrush them right now if that damn lady would
leave.
”

The 909 troop leader was a white woman with the severe pageboy hairdo of an ancient Egyptian. She lay on a picnic blanket, sphinx-like, eating a banana, sometimes holding it out in front of her like a microphone. Beside her sat a girl slowly flapping one hand like a bird with a broken wing. Occasionally, the leader would call out the names of girls who’d attempted leapfrogs and flips, or of girls who yelled too loudly or strayed far from the circle.

“I’m just glad Big Fat Mama’s not following us here,” Octavia said. “At least we don’t have to worry about her.” Mrs. Margolin, Octavia assured us, was having her Afternoon Devotional, shrouded in mosquito netting, in a clearing she’d found. Mrs. Hedy was cleaning mud from her espadrilles in the cabin.

“I handled them.” Arnetta sucked on her teeth and proudly grinned. “I told her we was going to gather leaves.”

“Gather leaves,” Octavia said, nodding respectfully. “That’s a good one. Especially since they’re so mad-crazy about this camping thing.” She looked from ground to sky, sky to ground. Her hair hung down her back in two braids like a squaw’s. “I mean, I really don’t know why it’s even called
camping
—all we ever do with Nature is find some twigs and say something like, ‘Wow, this fell from a tree.’” She then studied her sandwich. With two disdainful fingers, she picked out a slice of dripping tomato, the sections congealed with red slime. She pitched it into the stream embrowned with dead leaves and the murky effigies of other dead things, but in
the opaque water, a group of small silver-brown fish appeared. They surrounded the tomato and nibbled.

“Look!” Janice cried. “Fishes! Fishes!” As she scrambled to the edge of the stream to watch, a covey of insects threw up tantrums from the wheatgrass and nettle, a throng of tiny electric machines, all going at once. Octavia sneaked up behind Janice as if to push her in. Daphne and I exchanged terrified looks. It seemed as though only we knew that Octavia was close enough—and bold enough—to actually push Janice into the stream. Janice turned around quickly, but Octavia was already staring serenely into the still water as though she was gathering some sort of courage from it. “What’s so funny?” Janice said, eyeing them all suspiciously.

Elise began humming the tune to “Karma Chameleon,” all the girls joining in, their hums light and facile. Janice also began to hum, against everyone else, the high-octane opening chords of “Beat It.”

“I love me some Michael Jackson,” Janice said when she’d finished humming, smacking her lips as though Michael Jackson were a favorite meal. “I
will
marry Michael Jackson.”

Before anyone had a chance to impress upon Janice the impossibility of this, Arnetta suddenly rose, made a sun visor of her hand, and watched Troop 909 leave the field hockey lawn.

“Dammit!” she said. “We’ve got to get them
alone.”

“They won’t ever be alone,” I said. All the rest of the girls looked at me, for I usually kept quiet. If I spoke even a word, I could count on someone calling me Snot. Everyone seemed to think that we could beat up these girls; no one entertained the thought that they might fight
back.
“The only time they’ll be unsupervised is in the bathroom.”

“Oh shut up, Snot,” Octavia said.

But Arnetta slowly nodded her head. “The bathroom,” she said.
“The bathroom,” she said, again and again. “The bathroom! The bathroom!”

A
CCORDING TO
Octavia’s watch, it took us five minutes to hike to the restrooms, which were midway between our cabin and Troop 909’s. Inside, the mirrors above the sinks returned only the vaguest of reflections, as though someone had taken a scouring pad to their surfaces to obscure the shine. Pine needles, leaves, and dirty, flattened wads of chewing gum covered the floor like a mosaic. Webs of hair matted the drain in the middle of the floor. Above the sinks and below the mirrors, stacks of folded white paper towels lay on a long metal counter. Shaggy white balls of paper towels sat on the sinktops in a line like corsages on display. A thread of floss snaked from a wad of tissues dotted with the faint red-pink of blood. One of those white girls, I thought, had just lost a tooth.

Though the restroom looked almost the same as it had the night before, it somehow seemed stranger now. We hadn’t noticed the wooden rafters coming together in great V’s. We were, it seemed, inside a whale, viewing the ribs of the roof of its mouth.

“Wow. It’s a mess,” Elise said.

“You can say that again.”

Arnetta leaned against the doorjamb of a restroom stall. “This is where they’ll be again,” she said. Just seeing the place, just having a plan seemed to satisfy her. “We’ll go in and talk to them. You know, ‘How you doing? How long’ll you be here?’ That sort of thing. Then Octavia and I are gonna tell them what happens when they call any one of us a nigger.”

“I’m going to say something, too,” Janice said.

Arnetta considered this. “Sure,” she said. “Of course. Whatever you want.”

Janice pointed her finger like a gun at Octavia and rehearsed the line she’d thought up, “‘We’re gonna teach you a
lesson
!’ That’s what I’m going to say.” She narrowed her eyes like a TV mobster. “‘We’re gonna teach you little girls a lesson!’”

With the back of her hand, Octavia brushed Janice’s finger away. “You couldn’t teach me to shit in a toilet.”

“But,” I said, “what if they say, ‘We didn’t say that? We didn’t call anyone an N-I-G-G-E-R.’”

“Snot,” Arnetta said, and then sighed. “Don’t think. Just fight. If you even know how.”

Everyone laughed except Daphne. Arnetta gently laid her hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “Daphne. You don’t have to fight. We’re doing this for you.”

Daphne walked to the counter, took a clean paper towel, and carefully unfolded it like a map. With it, she began to pick up the trash all around. Everyone watched.

“C’mon,” Arnetta said to everyone. “Let’s beat it.” We all ambled toward the doorway, where the sunshine made one large white rectangle of light. We were immediately blinded, and we shielded our eyes with our hands and our forearms.

“Daphne?” Arnetta asked. “Are you coming?”

We all looked back at the bending girl, the thin of her back hunched like the back of a custodian sweeping a stage, caught in limelight. Stray strands of her hair were lit near-transparent, thin fiber-optic threads. She did not nod yes to the question, nor did she shake her head no. She abided, bent. Then she began again, picking up leaves, wads of paper, the cotton fluff innards from a torn stuffed
toy. She did it so methodically, so exquisitely, so humbly, she must have been trained. I thought of those dresses she wore, faded and old, yet so pressed and clean. I then saw the poverty in them; I then could imagine her mother, cleaning the houses of others, returning home, weary.

“I guess she’s not coming.”

We left her and headed back to our cabin, over pine needles and leaves, taking the path full of shade.

“What about our secret meeting?” Elise asked.

Arnetta enunciated her words in a way that defied contradiction: “We just had it.”

I
T
WAS
nearing our bedtime, but the sun had not yet set.

“Hey, your mama’s coming,” Arnetta said to Octavia when she saw Mrs. Hedy walk toward the cabin, sniffling. When Octavia’s mother wasn’t giving bored, parochial orders, she sniffled continuously, mourning an imminent divorce from her husband. She might begin a sentence, “I don’t know what Robert will do when Octavia and I are gone. Who’ll buy him cigarettes?” and Octavia would hotly whisper,
“Mama,”
in a way that meant: Please don’t talk about our problems in front of everyone. Please shut up.

But when Mrs. Hedy began talking about her husband, thinking about her husband, seeing clouds shaped like the head of her husband, she couldn’t be quiet, and no one could dislodge her from the comfort of her own woe. Only one thing could perk her up—Brownie songs. If the girls were quiet, and Mrs. Hedy was in her dopey, sorrowful mood, she would say, “Y’all know I like those songs, girls. Why don’t you sing one?” Everyone would groan, except me and Daphne. I, for one, liked some of the songs.

“C’mon, everybody,” Octavia said drearily. “She likes the Brownie song best.”

We sang, loud enough to reach Mrs. Hedy:

The Brownie song was supposed to be sung cheerfully, as though we were elves in a workshop, singing as we merrily cobbled shoes, but everyone except me hated the song so much that they sang it like a maudlin record, played on the most sluggish of rpms.

“That was good,” Mrs. Hedy said, closing the cabin door behind her. “Wasn’t that nice, Linda?”

“Praise God,” Mrs. Margolin answered without raising her head from the chore of counting out Popsicle sticks for the next day’s craft session.

“Sing another one,” Mrs. Hedy said. She said it with a sort of joyful aggression, like a drunk I’d once seen who’d refused to leave a Korean grocery.

“God, Mama, get over it,” Octavia whispered in a voice meant only for Arnetta, but Mrs. Hedy heard it and started to leave the cabin.

“Don’t go,” Arnetta said. She ran after Mrs. Hedy and held her by the arm. “We haven’t finished singing.” She nudged us with a single look. “Let’s sing the ‘Friends Song.’ For Mrs. Hedy.”

Although I liked some of the songs, I hated this one:

If most of the girls in the troop could be any type of metal, they’d be bunched-up wads of tinfoil, maybe, or rusty iron nails you had to get tetanus shots for.

“No, no, no,” Mrs. Margolin said before anyone could start in on the “Friends Song.” “An uplifting song. Something to lift her up and take her mind off all these earthly burdens.”

Arnetta and Octavia rolled their eyes. Everyone knew what song Mrs. Margolin was talking about, and no one, no one, wanted to sing it.

“Please, no,” a voice called out. “Not ‘The Doughnut Song.’”

“Please not ‘The Doughnut Song,’” Octavia pleaded.

“I’ll brush my teeth two times if I don’t have to sing ‘The Doughnut—’”

“Sing!” Mrs. Margolin demanded.

We sang:

There were other verses, involving other pastries, but we stopped after the first one and cast glances toward Mrs. Margolin to see if we
could gain a reprieve. Mrs. Margolin’s eyes fluttered blissfully. She was half asleep.

“Awww,” Mrs. Hedy said, as though giant Mrs. Margolin were a cute baby, “Mrs. Margolin’s had a long day.”

“Yes indeed,” Mrs. Margolin answered. “If you don’t mind, I might just go to the lodge where the beds are. I haven’t been the same since the operation.”

I had not heard of this operation, or when it had occurred, since Mrs. Margolin had never missed the once-a-week Brownie meetings, but I could see from Daphne’s face that she was concerned, and I could see that the other girls had decided that Mrs. Margolin’s operation must have happened long ago in some remote time unconnected to our own. Nevertheless, they put on sad faces. We had all been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealings with whites, sickness and death. I tried to do what the others did. I tried to look silent.

“Go right ahead, Linda,” Mrs. Hedy said. “I’ll watch the girls.” Mrs. Hedy seemed to forget about divorce for a moment; she looked at us with dewy eyes, as if we were mysterious, furry creatures. Meanwhile, Mrs. Margolin walked through the maze of sleeping bags until she found her own. She gathered a neat stack of clothes and pajamas slowly, as though doing so was almost painful. She took her toothbrush, her toothpaste, her pillow. “All right!” Mrs. Margolin said, addressing us all from the threshold of the cabin. “Be in bed by nine.” She said it with a twinkle in her voice, letting us know she was allowing us to be naughty and stay up till nine-fifteen.