Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

AT OUR third session, I told Dr. Raeburn I didn’t mind if he smoked. He sat on the sill of his open window, smoking behind a jungle screen of office plants.

We spent the first ten minutes discussing the Iliad, and whether or not the text actually states that Achilles had been dipped in the River Styx. He said it did, and I said it didn’t. After we’d finished with the Iliad, and with my new job in what he called “the scullery,” he asked questions about my parents. I told him nothing. It was none of his business. Instead, I talked about Heidi. I told him about that day in Commons, Heidi’s plan to go on a date with Mr. Dick, and the invitation we’d been given to the gay party.

“You seem preoccupied by this soirée.” He arched his eyebrows at the word “soirée.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Dina,” he said slowly, in a way that made my name seem like a song title, “have you ever had a romantic interest?”

“You want to know if I’ve ever had a boyfriend?” I said. “Just go ahead and ask if I’ve ever fucked anybody.”

This appeared to surprise him. “I think that you are having a crisis of identity,” he said.

“Oh, is that what this is?”

His profession had taught him not to roll his eyes. Instead, his exasperation revealed itself in a tiny pursing of his lips, as though he’d just tasted something awful and was trying very hard not to offend the cook.

“It doesn’t have to be, as you say, someone you’ve fucked, it doesn’t have to be a boyfriend,” he said.

“Well, what are you trying to say? If it’s not a boy, then you’re saying it’s a girl—”

“Calm down. It could be a crush, Dina.” He lit one cigarette off another. “A crush on a male teacher, a crush on a dog, for heaven’s sake. An interest. Not necessarily a relationship.”

It was sacrifice time. If I could spend the next half hour talking about some boy, then I’d have given him what he wanted.

So I told him about the boy with the nice shoes.

I was sixteen and had spent the last few coins in my pocket on bus fare to buy groceries. I didn’t like going to the Super Fresh two blocks away from my house, plunking government food stamps into the hands of the cashiers.

“There she go reading,” one of them once said, even though I was only carrying a book. “Don’t your eyes get tired?”

On Greenmount Avenue you could read schoolbooks — that was understandable. The government and your teachers forced you to read them. But anything else was antisocial. It meant you’d rather submit to the words of some white dude than shoot the breeze with your neighbors.

I hated those cashiers, and I hated them seeing me with food stamps, so I took the bus and shopped elsewhere. That day, I got off the bus at Govans, and though the neighborhood was black like my own — hair salon after hair salon of airbrushed signs promising arabesque hair styles and inch-long fingernails — the houses were neat and orderly, nothing at all like Greenmount, where every other house had at least one shattered window. The store was well swept, and people quietly checked long grocery lists — no screaming kids, no loud cashier-customer altercations. I got the groceries and left the store.

I decided to walk back. It was a fall day, and I walked for blocks. Then I sensed someone following me. I walked more quickly, my arms around the sack, the leafy lettuce tickling my nose. I didn’t want to hold the sack so close that it would break the eggs or squash the hamburger buns, but it was slipping, and as I looked behind me a boy my age, maybe older, rushed toward me.

“Let me help you,” he said.

“That’s all right.” I set the bag on the sidewalk. Maybe I saw his face, maybe it was handsome enough, but what I noticed first, splayed on either side of the bag, were his shoes. They were nice shoes, real leather, a stitched design like a widow’s peak on each one, or like birds’ wings, and for the first time in my life I understood what people meant when they said “wing-tip shoes.”

“I watched you carry them groceries out that store, then you look around, like you’re lost, but like you liked being lost, then you walk down the sidewalk for blocks and blocks. Rearranging that bag, it almost gone to slip, then hefting it back up again.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“And then I passed my own house and was still following you. And then your bag really look like it was gone crash and everything. So I just thought I’d help.” He sucked in his bottom lip, as if to keep it from making a smile. “What’s your name?” When I told him, he said, “Dina, my name is Cecil.” Then he said, “D comes right after C.”

“Yes,” I said, “it does, doesn’t it.”

Then, half question, half statement, he said, “I could carry your groceries for you? And walk you home?”

I stopped the story there. Dr. Raeburn kept looking at me. “Then what happened?”

I couldn’t tell him the rest: that I had not wanted the boy to walk me home, that I didn’t want someone with such nice shoes to see where I lived.

Dr. Raeburn would only have pitied me if I’d told him that I ran down the sidewalk after I told the boy no, that I fell, the bag slipped, and the eggs cracked, their yolks running all over the lettuce. Clear amniotic fluid coated the can of cinnamon rolls. I left the bag there on the sidewalk, the groceries spilled out randomly like cards loosed from a deck. When I returned home, I told my mother that I’d lost the food stamps.

“Lost?” she said. I’d expected her to get angry, I’d wanted her to get angry, but she hadn’t. “Lost?” she repeated. Why had I been so clumsy and nervous around a harmless boy? I could have brought the groceries home and washed off the egg yolk, but instead I’d just left them there. “Come on,” Mama said, snuffing her tears, pulling my arm, trying to get me to join her and start yanking cushions off the couch. “We’ll find enough change here. We got to get something for dinner before your father gets back.”

We’d already searched the couch for money the previous week, and I knew there’d be nothing now, but I began to push my fingers into the couch’s boniest corners, pretending that it was only a matter of time before I’d find some change or a lost watch or an earring. Something pawnable, perhaps.

“What happened next?” Dr. Raeburn asked again. “Did you let the boy walk you home?”

“My house was far, so we went to his house instead.” Though I was sure Dr. Raeburn knew that I was making this part up, I continued. “We made out on his sofa. He kissed me.”

Dr. Raeburn lit his next cigarette like a detective. Cool, suspicious. “How did it feel?”

“You know,” I said. “Like a kiss feels. It felt nice. The kiss felt very, very nice.”

Raeburn smiled gently, though he seemed unconvinced. When he called time on our session, his cigarette had become one long pole of ash. I left his office, walking quickly down the corridor, afraid to look back. It would be like him to trot after me, his navy blazer flapping, just to get the truth out of me. You never kissed anyone . The words slid from my brain, and knotted in my stomach.

When I reached my dorm, I found an old record player blocking my door and a Charles Mingus LP propped beside it. I carried them inside and then, lying on the floor, I played the Mingus over and over again until I fell asleep. I slept feeling as though Dr. Raeburn had attached electrodes to my head, willing into my mind a dream about my mother. I saw the lemon meringue of her skin, the long bone of her arm as she reached down to clip her toenails. I’d come home from a school trip to an aquarium, and I was explaining the differences between baleen and sperm whales according to the size of their heads, the range of their habitats, their feeding patterns.