Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“Miss …” Fott glanced down at his roll book. “… Berman, is it?”

“Why, yes. It is.”

“Miss Berman, please be seated. For the record, miss, this class starts on time.”

“WHO DOES that Mr. Fott think he is, Doris? I mean, what’s his problem?”

Outside school only a few of the yellow buses had pulled into the lot. Doris had been waiting for hers when Olivia — Livia — had spotted her. Livia stared, mutely insistent that Doris answer.

“He thinks he’s the teacher, Livia,” Doris finally said, “a man to be respected.” She hugged her coat tight around her, praying for her bus to pull into its space and save her. She wished her old friend Helen was around so that she wouldn’t be such a target for Livia, but now that Helen was in all-colored classes and Doris was in white ones, she rarely saw Helen. “All those white folks make me nervous,” Helen had once said when she’d walked Doris to English. It hadn’t occurred to Doris to be nervous, but now she was more annoyed than nervous; annoyed that this girl would use her mother’s first name, annoyed that this girl would come to her church, her school. “Your mother never talks about you,” Doris said, suddenly angry. “And where’ve you been all these years? Where’d you come from anyway?”

Livia took a cigarette from a silver case that looked as thin as a card, then lit it. She inhaled, nostrils dilating, eyes rolling in ecstasy. “I came from walking to and fro upon the earth. And up and down on it.” She looked askance at Doris, as if to see whether Doris recognized that she was quoting from the Book of Job: Satan’s answer to God’s question, Whence comest thou?

“Don’t use Bible verses that way,” Doris said, then added, “and don’t talk to me in class.” She immediately regretted the words: her mother would slap her if she found out Doris had insulted the daughter of her only employer.

Livia looked at her, surprised. “Don’t talk to you? I was doing you a favor. I mean, who does talk to you, Doris? Who? Name one person.”

“I don’t need anyone to talk to. Especially not white people. I talk to my family. I talk to the pastor.”

“Reverend Sykes,” Livia said thoughtfully, as though it were the title of a poem. She exhaled, and the smoke mazed ghostly around her face, then lifted like a veil above her pillbox hat. “Yes, Reverend Sykes. I don’t think Reverend Sykes lets you do the things you want.”

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” Doris said. But the retort sounded hollow: she could not help but remember how Reverend Sykes had disapproved of her going to sit-ins, and wondered what Livia knew about Reverend Sykes besides what she’d seen that night at church. And why had Livia come to church at all? Doris decided that she said things purely to shock, said things so that people like Doris’s mother could say nothing in return while Livia sat back in smug satisfaction, observing what she’d wrought.

Doris’s bus had arrived, and though she tried to think of the worst thing she could say to Livia before parting, all she could manage was, “And I hate your hat.”

WHEN SHE got home it was dark. The boys were running about the house and Etta Josephine had not come back from her job shucking walnuts. But she knew her father must be home; she could hear him hammering away. Her father was trying to build a third bedroom where their back porch had been, but the partition made from blankets never kept out the draft. She turned on the kitchen stove to warm the house and start dinner, wondering why her father had picked winter, of all times, to tear down two major walls of the house. The pock, pock sound of nails being hammered into place had somehow grown spooky, as though some force were chipping its way into the house and would eventually take them all whether they invited it in or not.

She dialed the living room radio to its highest volume so she could hear it in the kitchen, over her father’s pounding and sawing. She’d finished mixing the meal and egg yolk for the cornbread and had begun frying chicken when the white radio announcer delivered news about the Albany Movement in Georgia; how the colored leaders of that area had petitioned for sewage, paved roads, and a moratorium on the stoning of Negro ministers’ houses. It was suspected that the colored citizens of Albany would protest once again if their grievances weren’t met, the announcer said. Then the announcer finished on a note of his own that made Doris so mad she forgot to pay attention to what she was doing and burned her hand on the skillet. When , he implored, will the tumult end?

DORIS HAD excused herself after dinner, saying she needed to gather leaves for her biology-class leaf collection. And though she knew she was headed to Stutz’s, she hadn’t exactly told a lie. She did need to collect leaves for Mrs. Prendergast’s class, though they weren’t due until the end of spring.

“Dorrie!” Mr. Stutz said when she entered his store that night. “It’s Dori-ka!” He took a break from smoking hi cigarette to cough, loud and insistent.

She’d supposed that Dori-ka was some Lithuanian diminutive, but she’d never asked him. She liked that she had another name, in some other language, and didn’t want to ruin the mystery of it by finding out what it meant.

“Hello, Mr. Stutz. How’s your wife and family?”

Stutz made a face and waved his hand. “Want, want, want. They all want. I tell them, in Lithuania, you are freezing. Here, in America, your brain is frying!”

He laughed at his own joke, though Doris didn’t know what was so funny. She didn’t always understand him, but she liked his accent. And he seemed lonely. Sometimes, when he stood among his televisions and appliances, he looked like the only person in a graveyard, so she tried to laugh when he laughed.

“Game show is not on, Dorrie. But come. Take chair.”

She sat on the stool next to him, and for a while they did not speak. They watched Marshal Dillon , Stutz smoking his cigarette peacefully. Then they sat through The Lloyd Bridges Show , and when it was over, Stutz said, “Ah. He should not try that show. He was better in Sea Hunt .”

Doris had not been able to enjoy either of the programs: she could not forget the radio broadcast she’d heard earlier, how the announcer seemed to loathe the colored people of Albany when all they’d wanted was to march for decent sewage disposal without being stoned for it. She thought of what Livia had said about Reverend Sykes not letting her do what she wanted, then looked at Mr. Stutz and announced, “I’m going to go to a sit-in.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “Oho! First I am thinking, She is already sitting , she is already in store.” He shook his head then raised a single finger. “You mean like TV.”

“Yes,” she said. “But they’re not just on TV. They do it for real.”

“I know that they are real ,” he said, as if she’d insulted his intelligence. “But I think: Good maybe for others. Not so good for Dorrie.”

She leapt from the stool on which she’d been sitting. “What do you mean ’not so good’? You think I should just walk around and not care that I have to use a separate everything! That my father shouldn’t be able to vote!”

“Dorrie not yell at Stutz! ”

She sighed her apology, and after a few deep breaths, he seemed to accept it.

“I not say it baaad ,” he said, trying to reconcile. “But Dori-ka is nice girl —”

How could Stutz not understand? She was about to object, but he placed a stern hand on her arm to keep her from interrupting him.