Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Then she remembered the bus station lockers. She found out how to take the MARTA from Stanford Gardens to the bus station, and there they were in front of her, a row of lockers with combinations. She put her change into an empty locker and was about to lift her case when she saw the photocopied flyer on the next locker. “Missing,” it read, and below the large lettering, despite the poor copy job, she could make out her own face, a picture of her from junior high, her smile forced from the school photographer.

“Tia!” a voice called.

Tia looked around the bus station, expecting to find her aunt Roberta, the pastor, and church members, standing in unison like a choir. And there would be Marcelle, feigning surprise as if she hadn’t seen Tia since Sunday school.

But it was Dezi, leaning against the doorjamb of the video arcade, wearing a black nylon jogging suit, his gold cross on display. He ran toward her, out of breath, holding roses. “Hey,” he panted. “Got your note but didn’t think I’d find you.”

She hadn’t thought she’d ever see him again, and though she had felt nothing but anger for him that morning, now she felt the relief of seeing someone familiar.

Tia remembered when Marcelle and her mother had first come to Hope and Grace. Marcelle had sat next to Tia on her pew, as if to say, We will be friends . Back then, Tia wanted to be mad, to send a look that said, What makes you think I don’t already have friends, but Tia already knew what her own face was saying: Yes, we will be friends. Yes .

Tia scanned the bus station. Everyone, it seemed, was too busy trying to catch their buses, trying to find the restrooms and pay phones and food, to notice the flyers with her face on it. She stared at Dezi blankly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m on my way home. Like you suggested.” She hoped he wouldn’t notice the open locker door, but then again, he might just think she was retrieving something. He didn’t seem to notice the lockers, but he gestured toward her with the roses, and when she didn’t move, threw his arms up in the air, a salesman hating to see goods go to waste. The roses jostled in their translucent plastic. They were typical roses, scattered with sprays of baby’s breath, the roses themselves bright red, petal edges slightly wilted and wine-colored. He walked toward the door where taxis snailed up to the curb and waited. She wanted to tell Marcelle everything that had happened in the last few days, wanted to see Marcelle strain to hide her shock.

No one had ever given her flowers. At first, Tia walked slowly. Then, when the roses in Dezi’s hand seemed within reach, she ran toward them.

ON THE car ride back to his place, she made Dezi pull over twice within the space of half an hour. Only when they neared his neighborhood did she tell him about meeting Marie.

“Me? A pimp?” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “No. I mean. It’s complicated with Marie, but I’m not pimping her.”

“Why are you lying to me?” she asked. “You don’t even know me and you’re lying.”

“Look. All I sell is some good herb and a maybe a little dope on the first of the month. But I don’t sell pussy.”

“O.K. So Marie is just there .”

“I told you. It’s complicated with her.”

She was now entangled in something larger than herself. When she’d watched horror movies, it seemed easy enough to know when the victim should leave, run, hide. There were always shrieking violins and threatening, sawing cellos to alert you to danger. But here there were none, and she banged her head against the dash, as if trying to beat sense into it.

“Stop that,” Dezi said. When she didn’t, he put out a hand to cushion her forehead. “Stop it!” he said. “You got Tourette’s or something?”

When they entered the Stanford Gardens lot, Dezi’s car screeched into a parking space, the brakes slamming.

“Look,” he said when they’d returned to his apartment. He turned off his pager. “I’ma only have time for you from now on.”

Though he’d kissed her on the cheek the previous day, this time his lips pressed against hers and it took her a while to understand that she had to open her mouth to receive his tongue. His mouth smelled of smoke and Tic Tacs. He pushed his tongue over hers, and it seemed to be searching out the cavities of her teeth. The vinyl slick of his jogging suit rubbed against her blouse, and his hands shoved the cotton fabric up past her bra. Suddenly she remembered the bra she had on, an old one with tiny, inelegant sprouts of elastic popping from the straps.

She stopped him, pulling her blouse down, him pulling it up again. Against her skirt she felt what she knew was his erection, and the way the knowledge of this came at her was so undiluted that she wanted to yield to it. This, she thought, was why everyone talked about sex, why widows in church seemed to spin and whirl when given the chance, unraveling their skeins of frustrations and woes. Dezi’s erection was as insistent as his tongue, and as they swam over one another on the couch, she knew that this was her chance, like birth, to be part of someone. Then it hit her with a sadness: if sex and birth meant being part of someone, then death meant you belonged to nobody at all.

She pulled down her blouse, but her skirt was bunched up around her waist. She smoothed it down and it fell with accordion-like wrinkles. Though she felt she had to worry about pregnancy, she remembered that her panties had never come off.

Dezi didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, it seemed, until she had gathered her backpack and clarinet case.

“Where you going?”

“To see Marie.”

IT WAS after five o’clock when she gave up searching for Marie. She walked Dezi’s neighborhood in widening circles. Though people knew of her, no one knew where she lived, or which places she frequented.

Tia ate a sit-down dinner at a real restaurant in an area called Little Five Points, and with tip paid fifteen dollars, leaving her with twelve. When she returned to Dezi’s neighborhood, it was nearly night. The only prostitutes who were out were the transvestites, a different crop and greatly diminished from the beautiful ones she’d seen the night before. These prostitutes made only the vaguest gesture in the direction of femininity — a dress on one, some lipstick on another. Several of them still had mustaches, or, doubling as breasts, two blown-up balloons, their green, red, and blue cleavage blooming from low-cut tops. It was one of these balloon-bosomed prostitutes who told her that Marie sometimes went to a bar called The Palisades.

She’d never been inside a bar before, and this one looked like an alley that someone had, over the course of years, walled and roofed with stray bits of wood and plaster. Everyone stared at her as she stood in the doorway. Marie turned around.

“Look what the cat drug in.”

She didn’t know what you were supposed to do in a bar, so she stood in the doorway, unable to move for fear she’d do something laughable. Marie got up from her stool with exaggerated peevishness and pulled Tia to the bar counter. “Give my girl a drink.” Then Marie cut her eyes at Tia. “You probably never even had a drink. Give homegirl here a lemonade.”

“No,” Tia said, “I want a drink drink.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows, impressed. The men at the bar raised their glasses. One of them said, “I’ll buy the little lady a drink.”

Marie held a single palm. “Don’t even try it. I’m the one doing the buying if any buying’s to be done.”

“That’d be a first.”

“Shady, give her one of your Bloody Marys. That’ll put her off drinking till kingdom come.” The bartender — Shady — disobeyed, making Tia something so fruity she thought he’d skipped the alcohol.