Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (22 page)

Ari took out the crackers, the cheese with the hard ends, the paprika, the salt, and the plum.

“I lost my job,” he said.

Quietly, shamefully, they mustered out their
Sorrys
. She’d expected him to lash out, tell all of them to leave, but he didn’t.

“I’ll pay you back,” Dina said, “every penny.”

“You mean yen,” Ari said.

They ate the crackers with sliced plum and cheese on top. Then Petra spoke.

“I do not like cheese,” she said. Everyone looked at her, her pouting lips and unblinking eyes. Zoltan clenched her arm. Petra had taken her slices of cheese off her sandwiches and Zoltan grabbed the slices with one fist and thrust them at her. They fell humbly into the folds of her shirt.

“You don’t have to eat them,” Ari said. But Petra knew she had to eat the cheese, that the cheese mattered. She ate it and looked as if she might cry, but didn’t. They sat for a while. The food melted in Dina’s stomach just as the sunset melted, their synchronized fading seeming to make the whole world go dimmer and volumeless. Then she felt a sharp pain, as though the corners of the crackers had gone down her throat unchewed. None of them spoke, and that seemed to make the pain in her stomach worse. They watched the people and the lake and the sun, now only a thread of light.

“Look,” Sayeed said.

Geese. Stretching their necks, paying no mind to humans. Zoltan bolted upright from where he lay and ran after them. For a few moments, the geese flew hysterically, but then landed yards away from
him, waddling toward escape, all the while snapping up bits of crackers the Japanese had thrown just for them. When Zoltan started the chase anew, Dina realized he was not after the crackers but the geese themselves. She imagined Zoltan grabbing one of the thin, long necks, breaking it with a deft turn of wrist. And what would all the Japanese, quietly sitting in the park, make of it all? She skipped over that scene, speeding ahead to the apartment, everyone happily defeathering the bird, feathers lifting and floating then descending on their futons and blankets, the down like snow, the underfeathers like ash. They’d land on Petra’s trunks, empty now that all her clothes had been sold, and they’d land on the tea table at which they used to eat. They would make a game of adjusting the oven dials, then wait out the hours as the roasted gamy smell of the goose made them stagger and salivate. And there would be a wishbone, but it wouldn’t matter, because they’d all have the same wish.

Zoltan ran as haphazard as a child chasing after them, and when he seemed within grasp of a few tailfeathers, the geese flew off for good. When he returned, he dusted off the blanket before sitting down, as though nothing had happened.

All Japanese eyes were on them, and it was the first time Dina thought she had actually felt embarrassment in the true Japanese sense. Everyone was looking at them, and she’d never felt more foreign, more
gaijin
. Someone laughed. At first she thought it was Sayeed, his high-pitched laughter that made you happy. Then Dina saw that it was one of the Japanese picnickers. Families clapped, one after the other, cautious, tentative, like the first heavy rains on a rooftop, then suddenly everyone was clapping. Applause and even whistles, all for Zoltan, as though he had meant to entertain them. Ari made a motion for them to stop, but they continued for what
seemed like minutes, as if demanding an encore. They did not stop, even when Zoltan nuzzled his head into Petra’s gray corduroy shirt so no one could see him weep.

I
T WAS
a week after they saw the geese that Ari sliced up the grapefruit and banana into six pieces each. Dina watched them eat. Sayeed, his face dim as a brown fist, took his banana slice and put it underneath his tongue. He would transfer the warm disk of banana from side to side in his mouth until, it seemed, it had grown so soft that he swallowed it like liquid. He nibbled away at half a wedge of the grapefruit, tearing the fibers from fruit to skin with his bitten-down lips. He popped what was left of his grapefruit into his mouth like a piece of chewing gum.

Petra let her slices sit for a while and finally chewed the banana, looking off from the side of her eye as if someone had a gun pointed to her head. She wrapped up her grapefruit slice in a bit of leftover Saran Wrap and went to her corner to lie down.

Zoltan rubbed his eyes, put the banana slice on the flat side of the grapefruit and swallowed them both whole, grapefruit peel and all.

Ari ate his slices with delicate motions, and after he’d finished, smiled like a Buddha.

Dina ate her fruit the way she thought any straightforward, normal American would. She bit into it. One more piece sat on the plate.

“Anybody want that?” Dina asked. No one said anything. She looked around to make sure. No one had changed. She ate the last piece, wiped the grapefruit juice from around the corners of her mouth, looked at the semicircle of foreign faces around her, and knew she had done the wrong thing.

She needed to go to Shinjuku. Once again, she claimed the turnstile wouldn’t issue her a ticket, and although the girl at the counter didn’t look convinced, she gave Dina a ticket. When she got to Shinjuku, it was going on noon.
Sararimen
hurled by, smiling with their colleagues, bowing for their bosses to enter doors first. Mothers shopped, factory workers sighed, shopworkers chattered with other shopworkers. The secretaries and receptionists—the “Office Ladies”—all freshened their lipstick and straightened their hair-bows. The women in the miniskirts rushed past as though late.

She stood in the Shinjuku station, though she hadn’t ridden the train to get there. She read an old magazine she’d brought along. Finally, a
sarariman
approached her.

“Verrrry sexy.”

H
E PAID
for the love motel with a wad of yen. “CAN RENT ROOM BY OUR!” screamed a red-lettered sign on the counter. Dina ascended the dark winding staircase, the
sarariman
following. The room had only a bed and a nightstand, though these simple furnishings now seemed like luxuries. He watched her undress and felt her skin only after she’d taken everything off. He rubbed it as if he were trying to find something underneath.

The inside of her closed eyelids were orange from a slit of sunlight that had strayed into the room. The
sarariman
shook her. She opened her eyes. He raised his eyebrows, looking from Dina to the nightstand. The nightstand had a coin-operated machine attached.

“Sex toy?” he asked, in English.

“No,” she said, in Japanese.

The motel room sheets were perfect and crisp, reminding her of sheets from home. She touched the
sarariman
’s freshly cut Asian
hair, each shaft sheathed in a sheer liquid of subway sweat. The ends of the shortest hairs felt like the tips of lit, hissing firecrackers.

He was apologetic about the short length of time. “No problem,” she told him in Japanese.

S
HE LEFT
with a wad of yen. While riding the
tokkyuu
she watched life pass, alert employees returning to work, uniformed school children on a field trip. It all passed by—buildings, signs, throngs of people everywhere. When the train ran alongside a park, yellow ginkgo leaves waved excited farewells as the train blazed past them. Fall had set in, and no one was picnicking, but there were geese. At first they honked and waddled as she’d seen them a week ago when Zoltan had chased them, but then, as the train passed, agitating them, they rose, as though connected to a single string. Soon the geese were flying in formation, like planes she had once seen in a Schoolbook about Japan.

The book told of kamikaze pilots, flying off to their suicide missions. How each scrap-metal plane and each rickety engine could barely stand the pressures of altitude, how each plane was allotted just enough fuel for its one-way trip. The pilots had made a pledge to the emperor, and they’d kept their promises. She remembered how she’d marveled when she’d read it, amazed that anyone would do such a thing; how—in the all-knowing arrogance of youth—she’d been certain that given the same circumstances, she would have done something different.

D
ORIS
Y
ATES STOOD
in the empty sanctuary and wondered if the world would really end in a matter of hours. It was New Year’s Eve, 1961, and beyond the pebbled amber church windows the world seemed normal enough; the bushy teaberry and arum pressed their drupes against the windowpanes as if begging to be let in, the speeding Buicks and Fords on Montgomery Road sounded like an ocean. Farther out in the world other Negro youths sneaked out of their homes and schoolrooms to sit stoically at the Woolworth’s while whites poured catsup on them. King and Kennedy were transmitted onto the television screens of Stutz’s Fine Appliances and Televisions. Whenever she went there, Doris would sit with old Stutz while he smoked and complained: “No news of
Lithuania!” he’d say with a disgust one would have expected to settle into resignation since there never was—and never would be—any news about Lithuania. Just as she thought that the world might end that very night, sunlight illumined the windows, clear as shellac, bright as if trying to wake her. She remembered the bottle of furniture oil at her feet and the rag in her hand and began to polish the pulpit.

Cleaning the church was her mother’s job, but that day, the day the world would end, it was hers. Her mother cleaned house for the Bermans, the one Jewish family in Hurstbourne Estates. Doris’s father picked up her mother just outside the neighborhood because the Bermans’ neighbors had complained that the muffler of Edgar Yates’s old Hupmobile made too much noise. This meant Doris’s mother Bernice had to walk nearly a mile to meet Doris’s father, and was too tired to clean the church besides.

“They sure can cut a penny seventy-two ways,” Doris’s father would say whenever the Bermans were mentioned. It was his belief that all Jews were frugal to a fault, but Doris’s mother would correct him. “It’s not the men that’s like that, it’s the women.” Once, when this exchange was playing out, Doris had said, “Can’t be all that stingy. It was a Jew man who gave Dr. King all that money.” She waited, not knowing whether she would get swatted for talking. Bernice and Edgar Yates were firm believers that their seven children should be seen, not heard. Doris was lucky that time; all her mother did was make a sound not unlike the steamy
psst
of the iron she was wielding and say, “Proves my point. It’s not the men, it’s the women.”

Nevertheless, the furniture polish she stroked onto the pulpit was donated by Mrs. Berman and the rag she held had once been little Danny Berman’s shirt. As Doris wiped down the pulpit, she thought
of the Jewish boys from up North getting on that bus in Anniston, taking a beating with the rest of the Negro students. She’d seen it all with her family on TV, from the store window of Stutz’s. It was important, historic, she felt, but underneath the obvious importance there had been something noble and dangerous about it all. She’d called the NAACP once, to see how old one had to be to join a sit-in, but when she couldn’t get through and the operator asked if she’d like to try again, her suspicions were confirmed that all those Movement organizations were monitored. Once she’d even asked Reverend Sykes if she could go to a march, just one, but the answer had been no, that Saints didn’t go to marches. Then he quoted the scripture that says, “One cannot be of two masters, serving God and mammon both.”

She could hear the main church door open and felt a rush of cold air, the jangle of keys being laid upon wood. The service wouldn’t begin for another two hours or so, and she felt cheated that her quiet time was being disturbed. At first she thought it was her mother, then, for a brief moment, Reverend Sykes. When Sister Bertha Watkins appeared at the far end of the aisle, she tried to hide her disappointment.

Sister Bertha unbuttoned her coat, inhaling grandly, the way she did before she began her long testimonies. “Well, are you ready?”

“Almost, ma’am. I’m doing the dusting and polishing before sweep and mop.”

“No,” Sister Bertha smiled. “Not ‘Are you finished?’
Are you
ready?
For the Rapture?”

A
CCORDING
TO
the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, an organization comprising the Kentucky–Tennessee–Ohio tristate
area, the countdown to the end of the world began in 1948. That year marked the founding of Israel as a nation, and the countdown to the arrival of the Second Coming of Christ. A preacher from Tennessee had put the first Rapture at ’55, seven years after Israeli nationhood, and when the Rapture had not occurred, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World recalculated, slating the Second Coming for the last day of 1961.

On New Year’s Eve, after she’d cleaned the church, Doris took her seat at her usual pew with the other girls her age. Girls who spent much of the service wondering whether Reverend Sykes conked his hair or if it was naturally wavy like that; why he hadn’t found a wife yet and which of them would make likely candidates. They passed around notes that got torn up and stuffed into an innocent Bible; they repressed their laughter so that it would sound like a cough.

The service began like most, with testimonies, though tonight there were more people than usual. Doris listened to Brother Dorchester testify that he’d heard birds chirping about the end of the world. Sister Betty Forrester stood and said, “May the Lord take me tonight, because I
sho
don’t want to go to work tomorrow!”

When Reverend Sykes rose, everyone gave a great shout, but he sent them a serious look, placing his folded hands on the podium.

“Bear with me, Saints. It’s New Year’s Eve, and while the world out there jukes around, I want to talk about another holiday. I want to talk about Thanksgiving. Now, y’all may be thinking, ‘Why is Reverend Franklin Sykes talking about Thanksgiving? Don’t he know he a few months too late? Don’t he know he a little behind? Don’t he know that our Lord and Christ and Savior Jesus is coming tonight? Don’t he know
anything?
’”

“Yes y’ do,” a Sister in the back of the church piped up.

Reverend Sykes smiled. He could look thirty or forty or fifty, depending on how he smiled and for whom. “Like I’ve told y’all before, I’m just a country boy. And in the country when
Daddy
wanted to get some meat on the table by
Christmas
, he knew how to get it. You see, ’fore Thanksgiving came
around
, we’d go out and catch us a turkey. Now you can train a horse to bite on the bit. Train the ox to go the straight
and narrow
way. But Saints! You can
not
train
no
turkeys
! Even the chickens will come when you feed them, and in time, lay their eggs in the nest. All the other birds—the
gooses
and the
sparrows
and the
chickadees
—will go
south
when the winter comes. And the Lord shows them the way to go north in the spring.”

“Amen,” a few women called out. Doris also said, “Amen,” though a bit late, wondering where he was heading with it all.

“When the raaaain comes pouring
down
—they won’t try to run and hide. No, Saints! They don’t heed the Lord’s call like the other animals. All the turkey wants to do is follow all the
other
turkeys! They get so
tangled up
in one another, that they will
push
the weak ones on the bottom, but guess what?
All
the turkeys gonna drown! That’s right. Don’t be a gaggle of turkeys, Saints! Because when the
raaain
comes—!” He walked back to the pulpit and closed his Bible as if that was all he needed to say.

“Preach it, Brother!”

People were up on their feet, shouting, for they now knew the turkeys were all the sinners of the world and the rain was the Rapture that would surely occur that night. They danced and shouted in the aisles like never before. Doris stood as well, looking to see if her mother had arrived, when she spotted a white lady, standing, her hands swaying in time with everyone else’s. She definitely wasn’t one of the white Pentecostal women who occasionally visited colored churches. This lady had auburn hair, in deep waves that grazed
her shoulders like a forties film star’s, whereas saved white women were forbidden to cut their waist-length hair, the straggly ends like dripping seaweed. Those women wore ruffles and brooches from the turn of the century, but this lady was dressed in a smart, expensive-looking suit. Then it hit Doris—the white lady wasn’t a lady at all, but a girl. Olivia Berman, Mrs. Berman’s daughter. Beside Olivia was Doris’s mother, who, despite the commotion, was completely silent. Why was Olivia Berman, a Jewish girl, here?

Everyone else was so caught up that no one noticed that Doris’s mother wasn’t, but Doris could not concentrate. If Jesus had come at that very second she would have been left behind because she wasn’t thinking of Him.

I
T WAS
nearly one o’clock in the morning and 1962 when they quit their shouting and settled into prayer. Jesus hadn’t come, and the children—up past their bedtimes—began to grumble and yawn. When the last hymn had been sung, the last prayer spoken, and the last “Amen” said, Doris found herself outside, buoyed by the night air, scrambling to find the rest of her family. It wasn’t hard with a white girl around. The rest of the congregation swirled around them, looking at them but saying nothing. There was no ignoring Olivia: her whiteness, her strangely erect posture, her red hair, the abrupt way she had of tossing her head like a horse resisting a rein.

Outside, everything was extremely as it had been. Jesus had not arrived, but Doris wished He had, if only to keep everyone speculating why Doris and her mother had brought a white girl to church.

“You remember Olivia,” her mother said after the service. “She’ll be going to Central.” Her voice was changed, all the music gone out
of it and replaced with the strange, overenunciated syllables she used talking to white folks or imitating them. Bernice Yates usually bade each and every Saint a good night, but that night she looked only at Doris and Olivia.

Before Doris could remember to be polite, she said, “Why are you going to public school? What happened?”

Her mother shot her a look. “Nothing
happened
.”

“It’s okay, Bernice,” Olivia said, lightly touching Doris’s mother’s shoulder.

Doris cringed. Not even her father called Doris’s mother by her first name. Only Mrs. Berman—who paid her mother a paycheck—could call her Bernice.

If Olivia caught the ice in Doris’s eyes, she didn’t let on. “You see, Doris, I got kicked out. I’m in need of some saving myself, that’s why I came here tonight.”

Doris’s mother laughed, high and irregular. “Miss Olivia loves to kid around.”

“I changed my name, Bernice. Livia. Not
O
-livia. And I’m not kidding around. I came to find out all about Christian salvation.”

Doris watched as her mother looked at Olivia. It was hard to tell whether Olivia was making fun of them. Though Saints were gladdened when anyone became interested in the Holiness Church, this was too much. Jews were Jews, and that was that.

Doris remembered how she’d always thought of how lucky the Jews were: Reverend Sykes had said that whether or not they believed in Jesus, they wouldn’t go to hell like other nonbelievers, because they were Chosen. That would mean heaven would be stocked with nobody but Pentecostals and Jews. Doris thought how strange it would be, getting whisked away to heaven only to find things much the way they were when she used to help her mother
clean at the Bermans’: Mrs. Berman with her pincurls whorled about her head like frosting on a cake, little Al and Danny Berman playing the violin, eyes rolling to the ceiling at Stravinsky’s beautiful, boring music. She remembered when Al and Danny quit the scherzo they’d been practicing and started up “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” sawing on their expensive violins as if they were country fiddles. Mr. Berman had let out a primitive yell, thudding something to the ground, the only time Doris had seen him mad.

Olivia Berman offered to drive them home. Doris’s mother said that with her daughters Etta Josephine and Doris now there, the car would be too full, and implored Miss Olivia to go ahead home. Doris’s mother insisted that no, it was not too far for them to walk. That they’d been doing it for years.

S
HE WAS
the only Negro student in the class, the only Negro in all her classes. And though Mr. Fott, her Honors History teacher, rarely called on her, she was fine with it. She was relieved that he graded fairly, though sometimes he’d comment on her essays with a dark, runic hand:
Do you mean Leo XIII believed the state must remain subord.
to the interests of the indiv. composing it? Despite his antipathy of
laissez-faire policies?
At least he didn’t speak to her the way Mrs. Prendergast always did, slowly, loudly, as if Doris were deaf.

On the first day Olivia came to Mr. Fott’s class, she wore earrings like tiny chandeliers and a pillbox hat, like Jackie Kennedy, though no one wore hats to school. She entered minutes after the bell had rung, and though Mr. Fott made efforts to flag her down, chide her for tardiness, introduce her to the class, she rushed straight to where Doris was seated and cried, “
Doris!
” Doris made no move to get up, but Olivia descended upon her in an embrace, then turned to the
class in mock sheepishness, as if she could not help her display of emotion. “Doris and I haven’t seen each other in
forever
.”