The narrative boils down to an unconventional courtship between contemplation and confusion as Dina battles with herself and her new home in New Haven. Coming from a troubled home situation, poverty, and sexual and racial differences, Dina fights to maintain and erase dimensions of her identity which she has internalized for so long.
The writing is intensely real, simple, and yet still evocative. Rather, it seeps into everyday experiences and thematic concerns which many individuals — minority or otherwise — can relate to. I met characters who complained and cried, listened to them deconstruct their lives, and challenged the assumption that race is alway the strongest factor influencing a given situation.
Packer wields language as a means to dazzle, but not in the traditional sense. Her words are candid, honest, and unsentimental. She pushes words so that they collide — in the most natural manner — with authentic voices. Additionally, the complete collections of stories can be found here. This piece is part of Anti-Racist Reading Reviews , an ongoing series in which The Prospect features reviews of and reflections on anti-racist texts and media, as well as works by Black writers.
ZZ Packer started writing at the age of 19, and was well-accepted. She studied at Yale University and successfully finished at another university. Obviously, the theme of the story touches the real life. Social inequality based on racial factor exists even nowadays. So that another theme of a person who has to be strong in society adds to the first one. And in this way the author call us for better relation toward others.
An editor will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. The Question and Answer section for Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Heidi makes another visit to Dina. This was intended to startle them. I also made a point of being naked. The unannounced visits ended. The knocking persisted. Through the peephole I saw a white face, distorted and balloonish.
Then the person began to sob, and I heard a back slump against the door. If I hadn't known the person was white from the peephole, I'd have known it from a display like this. Black people didn't knock on strangers' doors, crying. Not that I understood the black people at Yale. There was something pitiful in how cool they were. Occasionally one would reach out to me with missionary zeal, but I'd rebuff that person with haughty silence. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away.
If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out 'I am an orphan—' ". She had just recited a Frank O'Hara poem as though she'd thought it up herself. I knew the poem because it was one of the few things I'd been forced to read that I wished I'd written myself. The girl turned to face me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph were not in getting me to open the door but in the fact that she was able to smile at all when she was so accustomed to crying.
She was large but not obese, and crying had turned her face the color of raw chicken. She blew her nose into the waist end of her T-shirt, revealing a pale belly. She was Canadian and her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. A sex change? She looked at me with so little surprise that I suspected she hadn't discounted this as an option. Then her story came out in teary, hiccup-like bursts.
She had sucked some "cute guy's dick" and he'd told everybody and now people thought she was "a slut. She fit the bill. Short hair, hard, roach-stomping shoes. Dressed like an aspiring plumber. The lesbians I'd seen on TV were wiry, thin strips of muscle, but Heidi was round and soft and had a moonlike face. Drab mud-colored hair. And lesbians had cats. Her eyes turned glossy with new tears.
Are you? But I don't. The human penis is one of the most germ-ridden objects there is. Guys or girls. I'm a misanthrope. I pointed to a pyramid of ramen-noodle packages on my windowsill. That means I never have to go to Commons.
Aside from class, I have contact with no one. Everyone will forget about you and that guy's dick and you won't have to see anyone ever again. If anyone looks for you—". Raeburn said, flipping through a manila folder. He looked up at me as if to ask another question, but he didn't. Raeburn was the psychiatrist.
He had the gray hair and whiskers of a Civil War general. He was also a chain smoker with beige teeth and a navy wool jacket smeared with ash. He asked about the revolver at the beginning of my first visit. When I was unable to explain myself he smiled, as if this were perfectly respectable. I wondered what he already had on file. The folder was thick, though I hadn't said a thing of significance since Day One. He patted his pockets for his cigarettes.
He smiled, widening his eyes brightly. I thought that that first encounter would be the last of Heidi, but then her head appeared in a window of Linsly-Chit during my Chaucer class.
Next, she swooped down a flight of stairs in Harkness. She hailed me from across Elm Street and found me in the Sterling Library stacks. After one of my meetings with Dr. Raeburn, she was waiting for me outside Health Services, legs crossed, cleaning her fingernails. Not only does it lack a single nutrient but it's full of MSG.
Each time you reheat it, you're killing good bacteria, which then can't keep the bad bacteria in check. A guy got sick from reheating Chinese noodles, and his son died from it. I read it in the Times.
I continued walking, a little stunned. Then, just as quickly, she dropped her arm and stopped walking. I stopped, too. The problem with Commons was that it was too big; its ceiling was as high as a cathedral's, but below it there were no awestruck worshippers, only eighteen-year-olds at heavy wooden tables, chatting over veal patties and Jell-O. We got our food, tacos stuffed with meat substitute, and made our way through the maze of tables.
The Koreans had a table. Each singing group had a table. The crew team sat at a long table of its own. We passed the black table. The sheer quantity of Heidi's flesh accentuated just how white she was. The remark was not well received. As I walked past, I heard protests, angry and loud, as if they'd discovered a cheat at their poker game. Heidi and I found an unoccupied table along the periphery, which was isolated and dark.
We sat down. Heidi prayed over her tacos. I had begun to eat, and cubes of diced tomato fell from my mouth when I spoke. Tacos and spirits don't mix.
So unbelievably lame. I'm going out with Mr. Thursday night at Atticus. His name is Keith. Heidi hadn't mentioned Mr. Dick since the day I'd met her. That was more than a month ago and we'd spent a lot of that time together. I checked for signs that she was lying; her habit of smiling too much, her eyes bright and cheeks full, so that she looked like a chipmunk.
But she looked normal. Pleased, even, to see me so flustered. What are you going to do this time? Then when he makes fun of you, what? Come pound your head on my door reciting the 'Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath'? And don't call me insane. You're the one going to the psychiatrist. She put her arm around me in mock comfort, but I pushed it off, and ignored her. She touched my shoulder again, and I turned, annoyed, but it wasn't Heidi after all; a sepia-toned boy dressed in khakis and a crisp plaid shirt was standing behind me.
He handed me a hot-pink square of paper without a word, then briskly made his way toward the other end of Commons, where the crowds blossomed.
Heidi and I signed on to work at the Saybrook Dining Hall as dishwashers. The job consisted of dumping food from plates and trays into a vat of rushing water.
It seemed straightforward, but then I learned better. You wouldn't believe what people could do with food until you worked in a dish room. Lettuce and crackers and soup would be bullied into a pulp in the bowl of some bored anorexic; ziti would be mixed with honey and granola; trays would appear heaped with mashed-potato snow women with melted chocolate ice cream for hair.
Frat boys arrived at the dish-room window, en masse. They liked to fill glasses with food, then seal them, airtight, onto their trays. If you tried to prize them off, milk, Worcestershire sauce, peas, chunks of bread vomited onto your dish-room uniform. When this happened one day in the middle of the lunch rush, for what seemed like the hundredth time, I tipped the tray toward one of the frat boys, popping the glasses off so that the mess spurted onto his Shetland sweater.
Heidi, next to me, clenched my arm in support, but I remained motionless, waiting to see what the frat boy would do. He glared at me for a minute, then walked away. I didn't smoke, but Heidi had begun to, because she thought it would help her lose weight. As I hefted a stack of glasses through the steamer, she lit up.
Not another mouse. You know whose job that is. By the end of the rush, the floor mats got full and slippery with food. This was when mice tended to appear, scurrying over our shoes; more often than not, a mouse got caught in the grating that covered the drains in the floor. Sometimes the mouse was already dead by the time we noticed it.
This one was alive. Get some gloves and a trash bag. I'm not getting that mouse out of there. She winced, but put them on. Otherwise, if you try to get it by its tail, the tail will break off. She reached down, but would not touch the mouse. I put my hand around her arm and pushed it till her hand made contact. The cries from the mouse were soft, songlike. It'll smother itself if I drop it in the food bag.
Quick," she said, her head still turned away, her eyes closed. We are not going to smother this mouse. We've got to break its neck. I wondered how to explain that if death is unavoidable it should be quick and painless.
My mother had died slowly. At the hospital, they'd said it was kidney failure, but I knew that, in the end, it was my father. He made her scared to live in her own home, until she was finally driven away from it in an ambulance. Take the trash bag and cover it so you won't get any blood on you, then crush.
The loud jets of the steamer had shut off automatically and the dish room grew quiet. Heidi breathed in deeply, then crushed the mouse. She shuddered, disgusted. At our third session, I told Dr. Raeburn I didn't mind if he smoked. He sat on the sill of his open window, smoking behind a jungle screen of office plants. We spent the first ten minutes discussing the Iliad, and whether or not the text actually states that Achilles had been dipped in the River Styx. He said it did, and I said it didn't.
After we'd finished with the Iliad, and with my new job in what he called "the scullery," he asked more questions about my parents. I told him nothing.
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