she, trying to follow the logic as she repeated what he’d said to herself:
–I’ll have to think about that.
–Naw, just listen is all. Otherwise, well, never mind the otherwise.
And she thought to herself, “Who the hell is this?” and to disguise the thought, she asked the singer’s name.
–Never mind, that’s part of the otherwise.
As he said this, Shame’s eyes rose up. He’d been staring at the ground. When he looked to the sky his eyes passed over her face. Ndiya felt a strong pull, or was it a push? As their eyes passed each other, she thought she heard a voice in her ear say, “Careful with that.” She must have said it to herself out loud because Shame asked,
–Careful with what?
–Oh, never mind.
–Oh, right, “never mind,” that’s part of the “otherwise.”
But Ndiya thought, just then, that party didn’t count as a meeting or a date. So, she was under no obligation to deal with it.
■
Despite being soaked and conspicuous, Ndiya tried to maintain her equilibrium in this unfamiliar street. She thought, “Weather and the blank blue behind it,” and blurred her ears from the inside. The song was no more and the young man was greeting another young man and a woman who’d each been shifting their weight from one foot to the other at the corner since she’d passed by them on her way. One eyebrow up, she felt her top lip fold inside her mouth, her teeth scraped across it twice before it popped back cool in the air. OK, here goes.
Date number two. Late July? A Friday? The twenty-third? She’d been invited to a birthday party for Maurice from the firm. Maurice Thomas, Esq. Morehouse, Phi Beta Sigma, Northwestern Law, office 2402. She knew him mostly from editing his briefs. Immediately after they’d been introduced, she named him “That Maurice.” She couldn’t have been back in Chicago for more than six weeks. She was new at the job. Afraid to unpack most of the boxes in her provisional, no-lease townhouse sublet. She had regular urges to tape up the few she had opened, call the movers, and spend half her savings on a one-way move to a brand-new nowhere in the big old ABP, her personalized acronym for USA.
Her job was to keep records in the firm, sit in on depositions, prepare forms, motions. The computer did the formatting and the abstract, opaque legalese the lawyers used came naturally to her. “Naturally” meant it was a skill she’d practiced unconsciously in order to survive. She recognized the technique immediately. Just like she did, the legal language surgically and tactically excised its connection with the world outside the precise matter at hand. The point was to create a version of whatever case that guarded against threats. Bring it on. If she could do anything, Ndiya Grayson could do that. In two weeks, she could mouth the words before the lawyers got their sentences out. In three, a few junior associates recognized that she wrote in their world-obliterating tribal language better than they did. Most quickly began to simply list the basic facts of the case and let her do the rest. They’d make a special effort in five-syllable words to say—strictly on procedural grounds, you understand—that they’d need to proof the briefs before they were submitted, but she knew it was all show. They probably didn’t even read them until they were on their way to court, if they ever got that far.
She felt a flash of panic when she saw how plainly some people read things about her that she hadn’t consciously disclosed. She asked Yvette-at-work about her future as a legal ghostwriter. She was told not to sweat it. “If they know you’re smart you’ll either get promoted in a little while or fired right away—how long has it been?” She’d started as a temp and, when the temporarily absent person stayed gone, she’d signed a one-year contract for more money than she’d ever thought she’d make. In truth, she thought to herself, it wasn’t so much a job as an excuse to get out of bed, shop on Oak Street, and live in a part of the city that meant absolutely nothing to her. “What do you expect,” she’d laughed to herself, “going to work in a building that looks like a fifty-story pair of sunglasses?” She imagined that the buppified stretch of townhouses on the near South Side where she sublet her place couldn’t mean anything to anyone. She figured that was the whole point. She was wrong, of course, but that didn’t matter yet. And if you allowed for travel well beyond the speed of light, and back in time, the neighborhood was just a few blocks east from where she’d grown up.
The message about Maurice’s party was the first post she’d received after having been added to the SnapB/l/acklist. This was the secret listserv that trafficked news between the young, gifted, and professional black employees of Gibson, Taylor & Gregory, the corporate law firm where she worked. Somewhere, of course, she knew better than to click to join and RSVP to the list to say nothing of actually showing up to That Maurice’s birthday party. And worse, Yvette-at-work had written back to the list to acknowledge that Ms. Ndiya Grayson, new colleague and the newest member of the list, would be there and everyone should make it a point to introduce themselves.
Nevertheless. “No, forget the n,” she thought. “Make it ‘evertheless.’” At six thirty on that Friday evening, she found herself in front of a mirror, humming along to the sublet TV’s “Soul Salon” and lost in time blending shades of MAC on her eyelids. She checked the rhythm-method calendar of her hair: “It’s Friday, second day out of the braids and on its way back for the weekend. Sunday evening, back to braids.” She made sure the seam in her stockings was straight up the back of her calf. The door of the building said, “Don’t!” when it slammed behind her but she shook it off and went down the steps to take the bus uptown to the Violet Hour. Everyone was meeting there for dinner before they headed off to whatever other closet of uptown nowhere the rest of That Maurice’s party was to take place in.
■
Leaving big-eyed Melvin and his grandmother or whoever she was behind, Ndiya continued walking as the business strip gave way to residential buildings rimmed with lawn and living room furniture and old people to nod and smile at as she passed. In her mind, she continued on with her self-promised reckoning with date number two. The incident. She remembered riding the bus up South Michigan Avenue, awestruck by the unfamiliarity of the city and bothered by a strange feeling that she knew all of the black people she saw personally. Coming back to Chicago felt like returning to a family of two million people who lived in, or near, a city that’d embarked on an aggressive campaign of cosmetic surgery. “Way too aggressive,” she thought, as she wondered if what happened to Michael Jackson’s face could happen to a city. She knew it could. She’d been to Phoenix, an experience—or, more accurately, the utter lack of—which changed USA in her mind to ABP: “Anywhere But Phoenix.”
Still, this was Chicago. She thought, “It is still Chicago, right?” The miles of empty lots, abandoned blocks, and defunct train tracks that she’d known south of Grant Park were one place of massive change. And she knew that what she’d known was itself—for someone else—a bit of blur that wasn’t designed to last either. “Chalk it all up to America’s War on Time,” she thought.
Thoughts like these made Ndiya half regret her youthful, vengeful lack of patience and half wish she could feel it again full force. Then she remembered Art. After college they’d moved back to New York City where he’d grown up. She saw herself smile and wince and shake her head in the window as post-op Chicago wheeled past like it was on a gurney outside the bus. She remembered, though, how her youthful fire had delivered her to dangerous dead ends. “Look at me,” she’d told Art. “I can go anywhere in the world and never be mistaken for anything but exactly what I am, NAF, Negro American Female. All I have to do is open my mouth and say a word or two. A person,
