at college, as she’d find out later, to her horror, was that they basically treated each other and most of all themselves the same way.
And she suspected the difference between the police and the protesters was a matter of competing dialects in the same language. For the people in the shanties and for Art’s mama, and for his little sister, the police and the protests, finally, meant the same thing. The police were getting paid to do what they got paid to do. They looked the part. Most of the protesters looked like, and even more, sounded like, the whitecaps Ndiya had abstracted into “weather blue” in order to survive college. Most of them had the same ratty T-shirts and jeans on and hadn’t rubbed quite enough grime over their suburban accents to cover up their SAT scores. She used to taunt Art mercilessly about this. He’d take her to some newly opened restaurant full of whitecaps and she’d ask him, “How does it feel to be the grime these people rub on their tongues?” His eyes would do the abandoned-well thing and she’d scrape her lip with her teeth.
Neither one of them knew the half of it then. They didn’t know that these hopelessly clean people under their precisely wrinkled clothes were protesting desperately to save the catastrophe in the park. The park wasn’t the point, much less the people. It was the catastrophe that mattered. It was the catastrophe they thought could bleed for them and help them walk on the water of their wants to the other shore of what they needed. Transcendent catastrophe, the dark matter, as ever, of self-reliance. When flashes of all this dawned upon her, Ndiya felt possessed by a violence at once very far off and as near to her as the metal taste of anger in her mouth; Art would shake his head at the ground: “You’re selling them short, Ndiya.” And she: “Yeah?” Her top lip scraped twice on her teeth and then back in the cool air. “Maybe I am.”
■
Ndiya paused in the street. She also paused recounting date number two with Shame so she could focus on the end of the “maybe I am” days knowing Arturo. Split between the scene in the street and her memory, she felt something, maybe sundown, warming her back. Or maybe it was the memory-sun through the window on the bus up to Maurice’s party? It hadn’t come to her in years, and then, just then, there it was.
One wrong afternoon Arturo had to physically prevent her from attacking a staccato-syllabled, open-faced young white woman on the street. Looking at it now, Ndiya thinks the woman had done her best to impersonate the appearance of the addicted girls she’d seen in the park. Somehow she had stepped out of nowhere, directly in front of Ndiya’s next stride. She pushed a squatter’s rights petition into Ndiya’s face. Maybe it had nothing to do with the park, the catastrophe, or the vacant lots, maybe it was just how the woman ended what she said with her tone of voice pointed up in the air like one person riding a seesaw? Maybe the provocation was simply the collision between the dingy clothes, the militant white-straightness of the girl’s teeth and the fashionable angularity of her eyeglasses? Or maybe it was that voice she’d just bought from the Gap? It didn’t matter.
The slashing phrases that erupted from Ndiya’s mouth echoed in her memory. The scratch-the-surface-and-look-what-you-get look on the struck-open young woman’s suddenly old and closed face scared Ndiya all over again for the fresh waves of hatred it inspired when it came to mind. Ndiya prided herself and depended upon her ability to see these people long before they saw her. She’d missed this one and so Ndiya heard herself saying, “You better get your motherfucking hand out my chest, bit—”
Art grabbed her from behind, pulled her back toward the corner hissing, “Hey, hey, hey now, hey now,” into her ear through the siren pulsing in her head. On the bus, Ndiya absently bit through the skin on her knuckle thinking about it.
When they got to the apartment Ndiya went straight to the bathroom and double-locked the door. She took Art’s mother’s hidden cigarettes out from behind the radiator and smoked one and then another, blowing smoke out the small window that stayed open over the chipped tile in the shower stall. Art, bless him, somehow knew better than to bother her with his sapper’s kit of mitigating questions and accommodating disagreements.
She sat, frozen, timing her pulse against the duet of drips from the shower and sink. Her eyes followed the joints in the wall between the cinder blocks north, south, east, and west. That summer, Art’s little sister, Sonja, had created a mural of lower Manhattan using the tile joints on the bathroom wall as the major streets; she’d begun to color in and label storefronts, vacant lots, schools, and churches. All her friends’ apartments were labeled. Sonja had listed the names of the people in them, who worked, and who did what. Ndiya traced lines between these buildings and a key to the map comprised of hearts and stars and frowning faces. A week ago Sonja had proudly told Ndiya that young Latino brothers from Washington, DC, called it a Youth Map and they paid her a hundred dollars per week to do it. Several of her friends were doing their own Youth Maps as well. At the end of the summer, they’d receive a final payment after submitting their finished maps and a written report describing what they’d learned making them.
“Recon,” Ndiya thought. The little girl was a doubleagent and she didn’t even know it. Who would pay how much for the information these kids come up with? What would it be used to do? Despite all that, the love in Sonja’s mural had calmed Ndiya before. This time, as the pieces fell together, it felt like the eye, the camel, the needle, and the last straw. Then her face folded into itself and splintered when she smashed her hand into the mirror as she spit out, “Squatter’s rights? It doesn’t age well, you know.” Then her body broke into convulsive sobs and a sound filled the room that had no room in it for anyone’s maybes. She pictured the woman with the petition, “I’d pay to see her petition for her own family’s rights to squat in an abandoned building while kids mine the walls for bricks. Her family probably lives in a house, in Connecticut no doubt, made of the damned bricks themselves. Of course they do, it’s perfect. I wonder why she won’t squat in that house?”
An hour later, she came out of the bathroom feeling clean and elegant as brushed steel and sharp and mean as the ivory-handled knife her father had used to cut her slices from his apple. He told her it was a gift from his father. At once, in a clear sweat, Ndiya understood that gift. “Maybe I am” was slashed and lay dead on the tiny, white, nicotine-tinted octagonal tiles of Art’s mama’s bathroom floor. He knew better. But Art asked anyway. And she: “It was about, Arturo, what kind of people could imagine what other kind of people, families, kids, Art, kids, deserve squatter’s rights.” Then she lost it and screamed, “And it’s about having clue-the-fucking-first and, so, not jumping up in my face with no white-ass-uptilted-seesaw voice, period. Ever!” Even then she could feel that this was about much more than that but she defended herself by blaming that feeling on Art.
With her voice echoing in his screamed-at eyes, Art said that she didn’t understand, and she thought to herself, “You’re damned straight I don’t. No maybe about it.” Art held her hand but she could see him try and fail to well his eyes. She asked him, “What if they’re people, real people?” In that moment of intense and reductive focus, she told herself that she could see Art had no idea what she was talking about. And she could see more clearly than ever that he was determined not to know. At that time, she couldn’t admit what all she, too, was determined not to know. As for Art, if he’d known that much, she’d have respected that. He didn’t and she could see then that he wouldn’t. Blind to herself, she could see that Art was determined to be a certain kind of American, the kind that wants to be an American. Ndiya was equally determined to be another kind of American, the kind determined not to be Arturo’s kind of American. As soon as she realized this, of course, she’d need to find another Arturo somewhere, or she’d need to be alone.
She’d heard about medical training and how doctors needed to insulate themselves against all the kinds of caring and feeling that sent them beyond their clinical abilities. This enabled them to perform the technical features of their work. From college English, Ndiya remembered Hemingway’s doctor saying of the American Indian woman, “Her screams aren’t important. I don’t hear them because they’re not important.” She’d been afraid to ask the professor about it in front of all those whitecaps in the class. But she remembered wondering if the doctor would have said that if the woman was white?