What We Lose. Zinzi Clemmons

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СКАЧАТЬ She wore horn-rimmed glasses, starched men’s shirts, and designer loafers. She was sharp.

      On the first day of our first-year orientation, the administration crammed our entire class into an auditorium, and when they asked if we had any questions, Devonne stood and recited a spoken-word poem, which she would later tell me she revised from one she had performed at slams in high school.

       You don’t see me when you pass me in the hallways,

       Not the real me,

       I’m just a black girl to you, with

       Tough nails and

       Tough voice.

       I’m here.

      There was a stunned silence, and then enthusiastic applause. My stomach lurched when she strode into my Africana Studies class the following Monday. I hung around after class, waiting for her to finish her conversation with the professor about Marcus Garvey. (He was a world-class bigot. I won’t celebrate him, she said as our professor beamed at her.)

      “I think you’re right about Garvey,” I said as she walked toward me. She smiled.

      “Oh yeah?” she said. “Walk with me.”

      I told her that where I’d come from, my views and my skin made me a lonely little island. I told her I felt so happy to meet someone like her.

      She just nodded along. “You know how many people told me that this week?” We stopped at a forked path on the college green. “I’m headed to the library. I’ll catch you later.”

      I was sure that was the last conversation I would have with her, but the next day, I heard someone call my name from across the cafeteria. Devonne came bounding toward me, her dreads bouncing in the air, feet slightly splayed in her loafers.

      She dropped a small paperback of C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley on my tray.

      “I brought this for you.” She smiled, out of breath. “Where are you sitting?”

      Our friendship burned fast and bright from there. Each day we would find each other in the library and spend hours in the stacks reading side by side. We took cigarette breaks together and marveled at the broody boys who kept us company outside, speculating on the love lives of the ones who offered us their lighters.

      “I bet he’s great in bed,” Devonne would say, or, “SDS: Small Dick Syndrome. Did you see the way he fixed his hair constantly? Insecure.”

      “You’re terrible,” I’d reply, snickering.

      At some point she noticed that they showed me more attention. One offered me a cigarette and not her; another spoke to us both, but kept his eyes on me.

      “I didn’t think you were interested,” I’d say.

      “Of course I’m not interested,” she’d say.

      Our friendship ended in the same place it started: in Africana Studies class. We all did oral presentations: Devonne spoke on Marcus Garvey, advancing her thesis that he should be treated in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini. It was bold but with noticeable gaps in thinking. I did a short presentation on Toni Cade Bambara, including an analysis of her role as the editor of notable anthologies of women’s writing. After class, the professor approached me.

      “Nice work,” he said.

      I looked around for Devonne, but she had already left. She wasn’t in the hallway, or outside in the parking lot, where we normally had a cigarette after class. She wasn’t in the library that day either.

      When I saw her the next week, she told me that she’d slept with one of the boys we’d met outside the library who had looked at me. Though she’d feigned disinterest at first, she’d actually slept with him several times. She said she was in love.

      “What a jerk,” I exclaimed.

      Devonne stared at me, as if she was trying to decode something inside me.

      “Yeah,” she said slowly. She flicked her cigarette and turned briskly without her normal air kiss or sarcastic comment, and, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.

      My first love was Dean, a philosophy student who played guitar with a band from the local art school on the weekends. He was half Spanish, with pouty pink lips and freckles, impossibly. We met at a concert downtown, and at the end of the night he stroked my face and asked me out for coffee the next week. We went, and halfway into my coffee, I felt myself sinking into the vinyl booth. I knew that whatever happened after this point would be irrevocably different. Before long I was spending whole weekends at his apartment downtown, mornings fucking on his dirty red sheets, afternoons sleepily plodding through our reading assignments. He gave me Sartre and Proust and the Velvet Underground and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He taught me how to blow smoke rings from his Marlboro Reds.

      Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

      I grew restless. I could barely focus in class, so I spent most of the day catching up on lessons, and then I stayed up through the night completing my assignments. I saw Dean at the library, smoking his Marlboros on the steps. At first he nodded hello to me with a manner that could be mistaken as warm, but the enthusiasm of those acknowledgments waned as the months went by, and eventually he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He just let his eyes flit over me like I was a piece of stone in the library wall or some other student he hadn’t known, like he hadn’t once breathed, I could love you, you know, on my neck.

      Then one day there was a girl—a thin girl whom I’d seen studying in the visual arts library. She had papery skin and a severe brown bob that framed cheekbones like snow-capped hills. She wore vintage dresses that I never could have squeezed into and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked designed to attract men like Dean, and it sunk in when I saw them together on the steps of the library that this was who he should be with, not me. It was never me.

      I had no reference point for heartbreak. My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep. At first I couldn’t work—couldn’t even focus enough to read a chapter without dissolving into tears. Later, work was all I could do to keep the swirling thoughts from coming in, the images of her in my spot on his bed, her eating oatmeal across from him at his kitchen table.

      My parents grew into a very comfortable life in their middle age. After I left for college, they sold their house in the suburbs and bought a two-bedroom apartment in an upscale Philadelphia apartment complex designed by I. M. Pei in the 1960s. The three apartment towers overlook the Delaware River and decaying, bullet-ridden Camden, an aging beacon of the city’s relative wealth.

      They used the rest of the money from the sale to buy a vacation home outside Johannesburg and a VW Jetta that they kept in the garage. At least once a year, we flew to Johannesburg, and for at least two weeks, we stayed in the house, a modern stucco home with terra cotta tile on the roof. My father employed domestic workers to clean the windows and sweep the driveway while we were away, and to wash our laundry and mop the floors while we were there.

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