Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“I can’t,” she said, trying to sit up, but he was heavy and pressing.

His tongue flicked and circled against her neck. He said something, but she could not hear it. She squeezed her thighs together, but his hand found its way between them. She bolted upright, against his weight, covering herself in the blanket she’d folded just hours before. He stood up and sighed. Completely naked, his muscles looked embedded, sleek and round as cobblestones. His gold tooth glinted in the darkness.

“Shit!” he yelled. He stared down at his erection, holding it in disgust, and when it finally shrank, he whirled around and punched the framed skyline on the wall. The frame clattered against the top of the stereo, the glass shattering onto the sheepskin rug.

“It’s Marie,” she said. “I know about you two.”

“Marie!” He thrust his head back, throat exposed like a sacrifice. He paced the living room before sitting on the couch beside her. He took one loud, impatient breath. “All right. What’d she tell you?”

ΤIA WOKE that evening and could not remember how she’d fallen asleep. Though the children no longer yelled and played outside, she thought she could hear echoes of them. Then, as the world began to come into focus, she heard the awkward dicing of Dezi making something in the kitchen. Liver and onions.

The smell of it filled her with homesickness. For one year that was her favorite meal, and whenever the topic of food came up her aunt Roberta didn’t miss an opportunity to tell church members that most children hated liver, but it was Tia’s favorite, and this was good because liver was cheap. The living room light had not been turned on, and in the evening darkness Tia could feel that she was still in her underwear, covered by the blanket. She touched the inside of her panties, which were sticky and wet.

She had felt this way before — listening to her aunt Roberta’s snores, moving her hand between her thighs. It had been a mystery to her when she felt electric waves of peace and fear flow through her, the weightless moment before an elevator descends, when it feels like the bottom has dropped. When she drew back her hand it had always felt and smelled slick and wet, like the skim of water atop fresh potter’s clay. But those nights in her bed seemed long ago. This was now, and she kept thinking “semen.”

When she screamed, she could hear nothing else. Dezi came out of the kitchen and tried to put his hand over her mouth, but her cries ran over his fingers. She grabbed her clothes, swinging them at him.

“Tia!” He pinned her down.

“You did it to me!”

Her legs kicked, but she sank into the soft, endless maw of the couch as he held her down. She wrestled away from him, only for him to pin her down again, but she kicked and flailed the whole time, and finally her knee punched his groin. Dezi rolled off her and onto the floor with a low moan.

“No,” he said, quietly, calmly. “No, I didn’t do anything. Trust me. I didn’t.”

She put on her skirt and her blouse, her clothes straying at haphazard angles. She swung the door open and fell; Dezi had her by the foot and yanked her into the apartment, Tia’s chin dragging the doormat along with her.

“I want you to repeat after me—”

“I’m wet!” she sobbed, until she screeched at a new, high pitch, “YOU!”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“I’m wet!”

“Tia, baby, I did not do anything inside you. You fell asleep and I was hungry. I made me some—”

But she shrieked, a woman in labor, then scalded with water. She screamed until she went hoarse and had to gulp air before she could scream again.

“Shut up!” he yelled.

She saw him cover his ears, but she couldn’t stop, and so he dragged her along the shag of the carpet and sheepskin until her face felt the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor and she saw the endless, reeling flowers of the kitchen wallpaper. She gargled on her own spit, felt blood trill down her nostrils. He slapped her, as though reviving the dead. Her teeth locked, biting nothing, and her screams dead-ended into low grunts.

She could not remember getting up, her hand finding the knife on the counter. The smell of onions on the blade, pungent and insinuating.

There was no drama to his voice, just the word in its nudest form.

“Don’t.”

SHE RAN and no one followed, past the signless signs, past billboards, past the transvestite whores with the balloons for breasts. Then she ran up against a wall of soft purple and cocoa butter. Marie.

Marie adjusted herself from the run-in, eyelashes curtsying apologies to the man with whom she’d been speaking. The man sucked his teeth and ambled down the sidewalk.

Tia told her everything, pausing when any car drove past, thinking it Dezi’s. She apologized to Marie for kissing him, told how she had felt herself, down there. How she believed he’d done something so horrible that she had cut him and slashed him, and how by the time he’d grabbed hold of the knife she had run out the door.

“Good Lord,” Marie said. “You see him come after you?”

“No.”

“Well, he will. If you cut him up, he will come after you.” Marie wiped Tia’s face and rocked her. “Come here,” Marie said, and led her to an abandoned building that had neither doors nor windows.

“All right, Miss Lady,” she said. She waved her cigarette in the air like a wand. “He ain’t got no business with you anyway. You fourteen? Fifteen? That’s statutory rape, right there. That’s what that’s called.” At first she thought Marie was going to hide her there, but Marie knelt at Tia’s feet, the heels of her thigh-high boots scratching on the fallen plaster. “Drop ’em.”

“Drop what?”

“Your drawers, drop your drawers.”

Tia backed away.

“Look girl, I’m just going to check on something, just to make sure. You should go to a clinic anyway for this, but they’ll charge and I’m doing it for free.”

She felt that she might cry, but instead she shimmied her panties down to her knees. Marie left her cigarette to balance on a stray block of wood, blew up a condom, worked her hand into it with difficulty. She peered up Tia’s skirt. Then she prodded. By the streetlight shining through the squares where windows should have been, she looked at what was there, a thin slick of something. Then — Tia couldn’t believe it — Marie tasted it.

“Nope,” she said. “I think your juices just got to flowing. You ain’t never got off on your own before?”

Got off?

Bleak, feeling the full extent of her ignorance pound on her chest like a gavel, Tia said yes. She pulled up her underwear.

Marie sighed then drew a long drag on the cigarette and kept going. “We sending you home. Yes sir. We can’t have people like you running around here.” She grabbed Tia by the arm, fingernails digging into Tia’s flesh as she led her back to the street.

Outside she felt sick and cold despite the early autumn heat. The transvestites were gone, and only three women walked the stretch of sidewalk where Tia had found Marie.

“Lordamercy,” Marie said, “I sho wouldn’t want my baby girl out here in ten years. Look at this mess.” Marie took Tia by the crook of the arm as if they were going on a stroll through the park. “Glad I won’t be out here too much longer. Almost got my wad saved for the condo. Almost. Maybe another year.”

Tia knew the only reason Marie was talking so much was to keep her company, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. When silence grew upon silence, Marie stopped, rubbing Tia all over as if to warm her. “Snap out of it, girl. I’ma give you the name of a place you can go and get yourself checked out for real. I’ll give you the number, but I’d rather get you on a bus back home. You want that, sugar doll? You wanna go home?”