Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“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.

SHE 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.

DORIS YATES 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?”

ACCORDING 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? ’”