Loading summary
Transcript80 lines
- [00:01]
Debra Treisman
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting to get your money back, which turned into worrying about getting your money back. Now taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes today and help you get up to a $4,000 refund advance loan fast. Get an expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service refund has $0 loan fees and 0% APR refund. Advanced loans may be issued by a 1st Century Bank NA or we term supply is subject to credit approval this is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Debra Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, which appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2000.
- [01:00]
Alexander Hemon
When it was my turn, I said my name is Deena, and if I had to be any object, I guess I'd be a revolver. The sunlight dulled as if on cue.
- [01:10]
Debra Treisman
The story was chosen by Alexander Heman, who is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collection Love and Obstacles and the novels the Lazarus Project, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the World and All It Holds, which came out last year. Hi, Sasha.
- [01:26]
Alexander Hemon
Hello.
- [01:27]
Debra Treisman
So what made you choose Drinking coffee elsewhere to read and talk about today?
- [01:31]
Alexander Hemon
Well, I love the story, as I love the book and I often teach it to my students, particularly for the past few years I've been teaching mainly undergrads at Princeton, and the way they respond to it and the way they understand the university politics or the university dorm politics and such things, it's always refreshing. And so bringing it back to them brings up new things in the story every time.
- [01:56]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, you know, it was written 24 years ago, but I'm not sure if we know exactly when it set, but probably a few years before that. Does everything that happens in this story feel relevant for your students now?
- [02:07]
Alexander Hemon
I mean, I remember when the story was published, and I remember it was published in the early 2000s, but when I was looking at the manuscript now, I kind of forgot that it's 25 years old. That is, most of the students who I made read the story had not been born when it was published. Yeah. And yet it pertains in ways that I I don't have an experience of starting school at an American college, so I learned a lot from ZZ Packer about that, particularly a person of color and the way they enter this, you know, rarefied Ivy League context. But as students understand things, often that are not so much invisible to me, but not personal to me, and that revives it in ways that are glorious.
- [02:55]
Debra Treisman
Do you remember when you first read it, what your reaction was?
- [03:00]
Alexander Hemon
I remember that I read it in New Yorker 25 years ago. It is one of those instances that in the first paragraph or so you see, this is a major writer.
- [03:12]
Debra Treisman
Mm. Well, when the story came out, I think packer was about 27, and it was only the second or third story she'd published. She was very obviously very early in her life as a writer. And I guess it's quite common for people who are starting out writing in their twenties to write about recent experiences, these sort of coming of age stories, college stories and so on. But what. What is it that for you sets this story apart from that genre?
- [03:43]
Alexander Hemon
I think the way that the character of Dina, the narrator, is constructed, the way she narrates herself while also narrating her doubts and obfuscations, because it's a feature of the character, not to say what she thinks, which is a complicated situation if that character is also a narrator. So it has this incredibly well constructed ambiguity about everything she says, that she's avoiding saying certain things, avoiding saying to herself and us as readers about her feelings for Heidi, at the same time narrating the story in which she meets Heidi, who is clearly an important person in her life at that moment. It is an extremely complicated narrative operation. It is in some ways the opposite of confessional, because it's exactly what she's avoiding in the story as a character. Avoiding confession, avoiding opening to others, and being confident or comfortable telling others about her life, her experience, her emotions, her thoughts. And yet she narrates it with incredible clarity and humor and power.
- [04:53]
Debra Treisman
Well, with that introduction, I think we should listen to the story now. So here's Alexander Hemon reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer.
- [05:04]
Alexander Hemon
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Orientation games began the day I arrived at Yale from Baltimore. In my group, we played heady, frustrating games for smart people. One game appeared to be charades, reinterpreted by existentialists. Another involved listening to rocks. Then a freshman counselor made everyone play trust. The idea was that if you had the faith to fall backward and wait for four scrawny former high school geniuses to catch you just before your head cracked on the slate sidewalk, then you might learn to trust your fellow students. Russian roulette sounded like a better game. No way, I said. The white boys were waiting for me to fall, holding their arms out for me. Sincerely, gallantly, no fucking way. It's all cool, it's all cool, the counselor said. Her hair was a shade of blonde I'd seen only on Playboy covers, and she raised her hands as though backing away from a growling dog. Sister, she said in an I am down with a struggle voice, you don't have to play this game as a person of color. You shouldn't have to fit into any white patriarchal system, I said. It's a bit too late for that. In the next game, all I had to do was wait in a circle until it was my turn to say what inanimate object I wanted to be. One guy said he'd like to be a gadfly like Socrates. Stop me if I wax platonic, he said. The girl next to him was eating a rice cake. She wanted to be the Earth, she said. Earth with a capital E. There was one other black person in the circle. He wore an Exeter T shirt, and his overly elastic expressions resembled a series of facial exercises. At the end of each person's turn, he smiled and bobbed his head with unfettered enthusiasm. Oh, that was good, he said, as if the game were an experiment he'd set up and the results were turning out better than he'd expected. Good, good, good. When it was my turn, I said, my name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I'd be a revolver. The sunlight dulled as if on cue. Clouds passed rapidly overhead, presaging rain. I don't know why I said it. Until that moment I'd been good in all the ways that were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student, though I'd learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly I was heart bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats, the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with mace. A revolver, a counselor said, stroking his chin as if it had grown a rabbinical beard. Could you please elaborate? The black guy cocked his head and frowned as if the beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks of his experiment had grown legs and scurried off. You were just kidding, the dean said. About wiping out all of mankind. That, I suppose, was a joke. She squinted at me. One of her hands curved atop the other to form a pink freckled molehill on her desk. Well, I said. Maybe I meant it. At the time, I quickly saw that that was not the answer she wanted. I don't know, I think it's the architecture. Through the dimming light of the dean's office window, I could see the fortress of the old campus. On my ride from the bus station to the campus, I'd barely glimpsed New Haven. A flash of crumpled building here, a trio of straggly kids there. A lot like Baltimore. But everything had changed when we reached those streets, hooded by the Gothic buildings. I imagine how the college must have looked when it was founded, when most of the students owned slaves. I pictured men wearing tights and knickers, smoking pipes. The architecture, the dean repeated. She bit her lip and seemed to be making a calculation of some sort. I noticed that she blinked less often than most people. I sat there waiting to see how long it would be before she blinked again. My revolver comment won me a year's worth of psychiatric counseling, weekly meetings with Dean Guest, and, since the parents of the roommate I'd never met weren't too hip on the idea of their Amy sharing a bunk bed with a budding homicidal loony. My very own room. Shortly after getting my first D, I also received the first knock on my door. The female counselors never knocked. The dean had spoken to them I was a priority. Every other day, right before dinner time, they'd look in on me unannounced. Just checking up, a counselor would say. He was the voice of a suburban mother in training. By the second week, I had made a point of sitting in a chair in front of the door just when I expected a counselor to pop her head around. 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. Let me in. The person looked like a boy but sounded like a girl. Let me in, the voice repeated. Not a chance, I said. 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 rebuffed that person with haughty silence. I don't have anyone to talk to, the person on the other side of the door cried. That is correct. When I was a child, the person said, I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard, all alone 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. I opened the door. It was a she. Plagiarist. I yelled. She had just recited a Frank O'Heyer 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 collar of raw chicken. She blew her nose into the waist end of her T shirt, revealing a pale belly. How do you know that poem? She sniffed. I'm in your contemporary poetry class. She was Canadian and her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. That's a guy's name, I said. What do you want, 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. Why'd you suck his dick? Aren't you a lesbian? She fit the bill. Short hair, hard road 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. Do you have a cat? I asked. Her eyes turned glossy with new tears. No, she said, her voice wavering. And I'm not a lesbian. Are you? Do I look like one? I said. She didn't answer. Okay, I said. I could suck a guy's dick too if I wanted, but I don't. The human penis is one of the most germ ridden objects there is. Heidi looked at me, unconvinced. What I meant to say, I began again, is that I don't like anybody, period. Guys or girls. I'm a misanthrope. I am too. No, I said, guiding her back through my door and out into the hallway. You're not. Have you had dinner? She asked. Let's go to Commons. I pointed to a pyramid of ramen noodle packages on my windowsill. See that? That means I never have to go to Commons. Aside from class, I have contact with no one. I hid it here, too, she said. I should have gone to Magille. The way to feel better, I said, is to get some ramen and lock yourself in your room. 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, I'll hide behind a tree. A revolver, Dr. Rayburn said, flipping through manila folder. He looked up at me as if to ask another question, but he didn't. Dr. Rayburn 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. Tell me about your parents. I wondered what he already had on file. The folder was thick, though I hadn't said a thing of significance since day one. My father was a dick, and my mother seemed to like him. He patted his pockets for his cigarettes. That's some heavy stuff, he said. How do you feel about dad? The man couldn't say the word father. Is dad someone you see often? I hate my father almost as much as I hate the word dad. He started tapping his cigarette. You can't smoke in here. That's right, he said, and slipped the cigarette back into the packet. He smiled, widening his eyes brightly. Don't ever start. I thought that that first encounter would be the last of Heidi, but then her head appeared in a window of Linsley 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. Rayburn. She was waiting for me outside Health Services, legs crossed, cleaning her fingernails. You know, she said as we walked through Old Campus, you've got to stop eating ramen. Not only does it lack a single nutrient, but it's full of msg. I like eating chemicals, I said. It keeps the skin radiant. There's also hepatitis. She already knew how to get my attention. Mention a disease, you get hepatitis from unwashed lettuce, I said. If there's anything safe from the perils of the food chain, it's ramen. But you refrigerate what you don't eat. 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. With this she put a jovial arm around my neck. I continued walking, a little stunned. Then, just as quickly, she dropped her arm and stopped walking. I stopped too. Did you notice that I put my arm around you? Yes, I said. Next time I'll have to chop it off. I don't want you to get sick, she said. Let's eat at Commons. In the cold air, her arm had felt good. 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 18 year olds at heavy wooden tables chatting over veal patties and jello. We got our food tacos stuffed with meat substitutes 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. How you doing, sister? A guy asked, his voice full of accusation, eyeballing me as though I were clad in a clansman's sheath and hood. I guess we won't see you till graduation if I said you graduate. 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 thought you didn't believe in God, I said. Not in the God depicted in the Judeo Christian Bible. But I do believe that nature's essence is a spirit. That all right, I said. I had begun to eat, and cubes of diced tomato fell from my mouth when I spoke. Stop right there. Tacos and spirits don't mix. You've always got to be so flip, she said. I'm going to apply for another friend. There's always Mr. Dick, I said. Slurp, slurp. You are so lame. So unbelievably lame. I'm going out with Mr. Dick 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. You're insane. What are you going to do this time? I asked. Sleep with him? Then, when he makes fun of you? What? Compound your head on my door reciting the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath? He's going to apologize for before. And don't call me insane. You're the one going to the psychiatrist. Well, I'm not going to suck his dick, that's for sure. 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 leaned over and read it. Wear black leather, the less the better. It's a gay party, I said, crumpling the card. He thinks we're fucking gay. 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 prise 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. He looked down at his sweater. Lesbo bitch. No, I said. That would be your mother. 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. Let's take a smoke break, heidi said. 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. Soft packs remind me of you, she said. Just when you've smoked them all and you think there's none left, there's always one more hiding in that little crust corner. Before I could respond, she said, oh, God, not another mouse. You know whose job that is. By the end of the rush, the floor mat 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. No way, I said. This time you're going to help. Get some gloves and a trash bag. That's all I'm getting. I'm not getting that mouse out of there. Put on the gloves, I ordered. She winced. But put them on. Reach down, I said. At an angle so you get at its middle. Otherwise, if you try to get it by its tail, the tail will break off. This is filthy, eh? That's why we're here, I said. To clean up filth, eh? 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 song like. Oh my God, she said. Oh my God, oh my God. She wrestled it out of the grating and turned her head away. Don't you let it go, I said. Where's the food bag? It'll smother itself if I drop it in the food bag. Quick, she said, her head still turned away, her eyes closed. Lead me to it. No, we're not going to smother this mouse. We've got to break its neck. You're one heartless bitch. 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. Breaking its neck will save it the pain of smothering, I said. Breaking its neck is more humane. 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. Now what? What do you mean, now what? Throw the little bastard in the trash. At our third session, I told Dr. Rayburn 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 10 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. It was none of his business. Instead, I talked about Heidi. I told him about that day in Commons, Heidi's plan to go on a date with Mr. Dick, and the invitation we'd been given to the gay party. You seem preoccupied by the soiree. He arched his eyebrows at the word soiree. Wouldn't you be, Dina? He said slowly, in a way that made my name seem like a song title. Have you ever had a romantic interest? You want to know if I've ever had a boyfriend? I said. Just go ahead and ask if I've ever fucked anybody. This appeared to surprise him. I think that you are having a crisis of identity, he said. Oh, is that what this is? His profession had taught him not to roll his eyes. Instead, his exasperation revealed itself with a tiny pursing of his lips, as though he'd just tasted something awful and were trying not to offend a cook. It doesn't have to be, as you say, someone you've fucked. It doesn't have to be a boyfriend, he said. Well, what are you trying to say? If it's not a boy, then you're saying it's a girl. Calm down. It could be a crush, Dina. He lit one cigarette off another. A crush on a male teacher. A crush on a dog, for heaven's sake. An interest, not necessarily a relationship. It was sacrifice time. If I could spend the next half hour talking about some boy, then I'd have given him what he wanted. So I told him about the boy with the nice shoes. I was 16 and had spent the last few coins in my pocket on bus fare to buy groceries. I didn't like going to the Super Fresh two blocks away from my house, plunking government food stamps into the hands of the cashiers. There she go reading, one of them once said, even though I was only carrying a book. Don't your eyes get tired? On Greenmount Avenue you could read schoolbooks. That was understandable. The government and your teachers forced you to read them, but anything else was antisocial. It meant you'd rather submit to the words of some white dude than shoe the breeze with your neighbors. I hated those cashiers and I hated them seeing me with food stamps. So I took the bus and shopped elsewhere. That day I got off the bus at Goban's, and though the neighborhood was black like my own hair salon after hair salon of airbrushed signs promising arabesque hairstyles and inch long fingernails, the houses were neat and orderly, nothing at all like Greenmount, where every other house had at least one shattered window. The store was well swept and people quietly checked long grocery lists. No screaming kids, no loud cashier customer altercations. I got the groceries and left the store. I decided to walk back. It was a full day and I walked for blocks. Then I sensed someone following me. I walked more quickly, my arms around the sack, the leafy letters tickling my nose. I didn't want to hold the sack so close that it would break the eggs or squash the hamburger buns, but it was slipping, and as I looked behind, a boy my age, maybe older, rushed toward me. Let me help you, he said. That's all right. I set the bag on the sidewalk. Maybe I saw his face. Maybe it was handsome enough. But what I noticed first, splayed on either side of the bag, were his shoes. They were nice shoes, real leather, a stitched design like a widow's peak on each one, or like bird's wings, and for the first time in my life I understood what people meant when they said wingtip shoes. I watched you carry them groceries out that store. Then you look around like you're lost, but like you liked being lost. Then you walked down the sidewalk for blocks and blocks, rearranging that bag, it almost gone to slip, then hefting it back up again. Uh huh, I said. And then I passed my own house and was still following you. And then your bag really looked like it was gone, crash and everything, so I just thought I'd help. He sucked in his bottom lip as if to keep it from making a smile. What's your name? When I told him, he said, Dina. My name is Cecil. Then he said, d comes right after C. Yes, I said. It does, doesn't it? Then half question, half statement, he said I could carry your groceries for you and walk you home. I stopped the story there. Dr. Rayburn kept looking at me. Then what happened? I couldn't tell him the rest, that I had not wanted the boy to walk me home, that I didn't want someone with such nice shoes to see where I lived. Dr. Rayburn would only have pitied me if I told him that I ran down the sidewalk after I told the boy no, that I fell. The bag slipped and the eggs cracked, the yolks running all over the lettuce. Clear amniotic fluid coated the can of cinnamon rolls. I left the bag there on the sidewalk. The groceries spilled out randomly, like cards loosed from a deck. When I returned home, I told my mother that I'd lost the food stamps. Lost, she said. I'd expected her to get angry. I'd wanted her to get angry, but she hadn't. Lost, she repeated. Why had I been so clumsy and nervous around the harmless boy? I could have brought the groceries home and washed off the egg yolk, but instead I just left them there. Come on, mama said, snuffing her tears, pulling my arm, trying to get me to join her and start yanking cushions off the couch. We'll find enough change here. We got to get something for dinner before your father gets back. We'd already searched the couch for money the previous week, and I knew there'd be nothing now. But I began to push my fingers into the couch's boniest corners, pretending that it was only a matter of time before I'd find some change or lost watch when earring. Something pawnable, perhaps. What happened next? Dr. Rayburn asked again. Did you let the boy walk you home? My house was far, so we went to his house instead, though I was sure Dr. Rayburn knew that I was making this part up, I continued. We made out on his sofa. He kissed me. Dr. Rayburn lit his next cigarette like a detective. Cool, suspicious. How did it feel? You know, I said. Like a kiss feels. It felt nice. The kiss felt very, very nice. Rayburn smiled gently, though he seemed unconvinced. When he called time on our session, his cigarette had become one long pall of ash. I left his office, walking quickly down the corridor, afraid to look back. It would be like him to trot after me, his navy blazer flapping, just to eke the truth out of me. You never kissed anyone? The words slid from my brain and nodded in my stomach. When I reached my dorm, I found an old record player blocking my door and a Charles Mingus LP propped beside it. I carried them inside and then, lying on the floor, I played the Mingus over and over again until I fell asleep. I slept, feeling as though Dr. Rayburn had attached electrodes to my head, wheeling into my mind a dream about my mother. I saw the lemon meringue of her skin, the long bone of her arm as she reached down to clip her toenails. I had come home from a school trip to an aquarium, and I was explaining the differences between baleen and sperm whales according to the size of their heads, the range of their habitats, their feeding patterns. I awoke remembering the expression on her face after I finished my dizzying whale lecture. She looked like a tourist who'd asked for directions to a place she thought was simple enough to get to only to hear a series of hypothetical turns. Alleys, one way streets. Her response was to nod politely at the perilous elaborateness of it all, to nod in the knowledge that she would never be able to get where she wanted to go. The dishwashers always closed down the dining hall. One night, after everyone else had punched out, Heidi and I took a break, and though I wasn't a smoker, we set two milk crates upside down on the floor and smoked cigarettes. The dishwashing machines were off, but steam still rose from them like a jungle mist. Outside in the winter air, students were singing carols in their groomed and tailored singing group voices. The Whiffenpoofs were back in New Haven after a tour around the world, and I guess their return was a huge deal. Heidi and I craned our necks to watch the year's first snow through an open window. What are you going to do when you're finished? Heidi asked. Sexy question. Marks of smoke drifted up to the windows before vanishing. Take a bath? She swatted me with her free hand. No, silly. Three years from now when you leave Yale? I don't know. Open up a library somewhere where no one comes in for books. A library in a desert? She looked at me as though she'd expected this sort of answer and didn't know why she'd asked in the first place. What are you going to do? I asked her. Open up a psych clinic in a desert and my only patient will be some wacko who runs the library, I said. Whatever you do, don't work in a dish room ever again. You're no good. I got up from the crate. Come on, let's hose the place down. We put out our cigarettes on the floor since it was our job to clean it anyway. We held squirt guns in one hand and used the other to douse the floors with the standard issue eye burning cleaning solution. We hosed the dish room, the kitchen, the serving line, sending the water and crud and suds into the drains. Then we hosed them again so the solution would need holes in our shoes as we left. Then I had an idea. I unbuckled my belt. What the hell are you doing? Heidi said. Listen, it's too cold to go outside with our uniforms all wet. We could just take a shower right here. There's nobody but us. What the fuck, eh? I let my pants drop, then took off my shirt and panties. I didn't wear a bra since I didn't have much to fill one. I took off my shoes and hung my clothes on the step ladder. You flipped, heidi said. I mean, really. Psych ward flipped. I soaped up with the liquid hand soap until I felt as glazed as a ham. Stand back and spray me. Oh my God, she said. I didn't know whether she was confused or delighted, but she picked up the squirt gun and sprayed me. She was laughing. Then she got too close and the water started to stink. God damn it, I said. That hurt. I was wondering what it would take to make you say that. When all the soap had been rinsed off, I put on my regular clothes and said, okay, you're up next. No way, she said. Yes way. She started to take off her uniform shirt, then stopped. What? I'm too fat? You got him, right? She always said she was fat. One time I told her that she should shut up about it, that large black women wore their fat like mink coats. You're big as a house, I said. Now frozen yogurt may be low in calories, but not if you eat five tubs of it. Take your clothes off. I want to get out of here. She began taking off her uniform, then stood there, hands cupped over her breasts, crouching at the pubic bone. Open up, I said, or we'll never get done. Her hands remained where they were. I threw the bottle of liquid soap at her and she had to catch it, revealing herself as she did. I turned on the squirt gun and she stood there, stiff arms at her sides, eyes closed, as though awaiting mummification. I began with the water on low and she turned around in a full circle, hesitantly, letting the droplets from the spray fall on her as if she were submitting to death by stoning. When I increased the water pressure, she slipped and fell on the sudse floor. She stood up and then slipped again. This time she laughed and remained on the floor, rolling around on it as I sprayed. I think I began to love Heidi that night in the dish room, but who is to say that I hadn't begun to love her the first time I met her? I sprayed her and sprayed her, and she turned over and over like a large, beautiful dolphin lolling about in the sun. Heidi started sleeping at my place. Sometimes she slept on the floor Sometimes we slept sardine like, my feet at her head until she complained that my feet were taunting her. When we finally slept head to head, she said, much better. She was so close I could smell her toothpaste. I like your hair, she told me, touching it through the darkness. You should wear it out more often. White people always say that about black people's hair. The worse it looks, the more they say they like it. I'd expected her to disagree, but she kept touching my hair, her hands passing through it till my scalp tingled. When she began to touch the hair around the edge of my face, I felt myself quake. Her fingertips stopped for a moment as if checking my pulse, then resumed. I like how it feels right here. See? Mine just starts with the same old texture as the rest of my hair. She found my hand under the blanket and brought it to her hairline. See? She said. He was dark. As I touched her hair, it seemed as though I could smell it too. Not a shampoo smell. Something richer, murkier, a bit dead, but sweet, like the decaying wood of a ship. She guided my hand. I see, I said. The record she'd given me was playing in my mind and I kept trying to shut it off. I could also hear my mother saying that this is what happens when you've been around white people. Things get weird. So weird I could hear the stylus etching its way into the flat vinyl of the record. Listen, I said finally. When the bass and saxes started up, I heard Heidi breathe deeply, but she said nothing. We spent the winter and some of the spring in my room, never hers, missing tests, listening to music, looking out my window to comment on people who wouldn't have given us a second thought. We read books related to none of our classes. I got riled up by the Autobiography of Malcolm X and the Chomsky Reader. Heidi read aloud passages from the Anxiety of Influence. We guiltily read Mysteries and Clan of the Cave Bear, then immediately threw them away. Once we looked up from our books at exactly the same moment, as though trapped at a dinner table with nothing to say, a pleasant trap of silence. Then one weekend I went back to Baltimore. When I returned to a sleepy tree scented spring, a group of students were holding what was called Coming Out Day. I watched it from my room. The MC was the sepia boy who'd invited us to that party months back. His speech was strident but still smooth and peppered with jokes. There was a speech about aids, with lots of statistics, nothing that seemed to make Coming out worth it. Then the women spoke One girl pronounced herself out as casually as if she'd announced the time. Another said nothing at all. She appeared at the microphone, accompanied by a woman who began cutting off her waist length, bleached blond hair. The woman doing the cutting tossed the shorn hair in every direction as she cut. People were clapping and cheering and catching the locks of hair. And then there was Heidi. She was proud that she liked girls, she said when she reached the microphone. She loved them, wanted to sleep with them. She was a dyke, she said, repeatedly stabbing her finger to her chest in case anyone was unsure to whom she was referring. She could not have seen me. I was across the street, three stories up, and yet when everyone clapped for her, she seemed to be looking straight at me. Heidi knocked, let me in. It was like the first time I met her, the tears, the raw pink of her face. We hadn't spoken in weeks. Outside, pink and white blossoms hung from the old campus trees. Students played hacky sack in T shirts and shorts. Though I was the one who'd broken away after she went up to that podium, I still half expected her to poke her head out a window in Linsley Chit, or tap on my back in Harkness, or even join me in the commons dining hall where I'd asked for my dish room shift to be transferred. She did none of these. Well, I said, what is it? She looked at me. My mother, she said. She continued to cry, but it seemed to have grown so silent in my room I wondered if I could hear the numbers change on my digital clock. When my parents were getting divorced, she said, my mother bought a car, a used one, an Eldorado. It was filthy. It looked like a huge crushed can coming up the street. She kept trying to clean it out, I mean. I nodded and tried to think what to say in the pause she left behind. Finally I said, we had one of those, though I was sure ours was an Impala. She looked at me, eyes steely from trying not to cry. Anyway, she dried me around in it, and although she didn't like me to eat in it, I always did. One day I was eating cantaloupe slices, spitting the seeds on the floor. Maybe a month later I saw this little sprout growing right up from the car floor. I just started laughing and she kept saying, what? What? I was laughing. And then I saw she was so she didn't finish. So what? So sad. So awful. Heidi looked at me with what seemed to be a renewed vigor. We could have gotten a better car, eh? It's all right. It's not a big deal, I said. Of course that was the wrong thing to say, and I really didn't mean it to sound the way it had come out. I told Dr. Rayburn about Heidi's mother having cancer and how I'd said it wasn't a big deal, though I'd wanted to say exactly the opposite. I meant that I knew what it was like to have a parent die. My mother had died. I knew how eventually one accustoms oneself to the physical world's lack of sympathy. The buses that still run on time, the kids who still play in the street, the clocks that won't stop ticking for the person who's gone. You're pretending, Dr. Rayburn said, not sage or professional, but a little shocked by the discovery, as if I'd been trying to hide a pack of his cigarettes behind my back. I'm pretending. I shook my head. All those years of psych grad, I said. And to tell me that you construct stories about yourself and dish them out. One for you, one for you. Here he reenacted the process, showing me handing out lies as if they were apples. Pretending. I believe the professional name for it might be denial, I said. Are you calling me gay? He pursed his lips, non committally. No, Dina, I don't think you're gay. I checked his eyes. I couldn't read them. No, not at all, he said, sounding as if he were telling a subtle joke. But maybe you'll finally understand. Understand what? That constantly saying what one doesn't mean accustoms the mouth to meaningless phrases. His eyes narrowed. Maybe you'll understand that when you need to express something truly significant, your mouth will revert to the insignificant nonsense it knows so well. He looked at me, his hands sputtering in the air in a gesture of defeat. Who knows? He asked with a glib psychiatric smile I'd never seen before. Maybe it's your survival mechanism. Black living in a white world. I heard him, but only vaguely. I'd hooked on that one word, pretending. What Dr. Rayburn would never understand was that pretending was what had got me this far. I remember the morning of my mother's funeral. I'd been given milk to settle my stomach. I'd pretended it was coffee. I imagined I was drinking coffee elsewhere. Some Arabic speaking country where the thick coffee served in little cups was so strong it would keep you awake for days. Some Arabic country where I'd sit in a tented cafe and be more than happy to don a veil. Heidi wanted me to go with her to the funeral. She'd sent this message to the dean. We'll pay for your ticket to Vancouver, the dean said. What about my ticket back? I asked. Maybe the shrink will pay for that. The dean looked at me as though I were an insect she'd like to squash. We'll pay for the whole thing. We might even pay for some lessons in manners. So I packed my suitcase and walked from my suicide single dorm to Heidi's room. A thin, wispy girl in ragged cutoffs and a shirt that read LSBN answered the door. A group of short haired girls in thick black leather jackets, bundled up despite the summer heat, encircled Heidi in a protective fairy ring. They looked at me critically, clearly wondering if Heidi was too fragile for my company. You've got our numbers, one said, holding onto Heidi's shoulder. And Vancouver's got a great gay community. Oh God, I said. She's going to a funeral, not a Save the Dykes rally. One of the girls stepped in front of me. It's okay, Cynthia, heidi said. Then she ushered me into her bedroom and closed the door. A suitcase was on her bed, half packed. She folded a polka dotted T shirt that was wrong for any occasion. Why haven't you talked to me? She said. Why haven't you talked to me in two months? I don't know, I said. You don't know? She said, each syllable seeped in sarcasm. You don't know? Well, I know you thought I was going to try to sleep with you. Try to? We slept together all winter. Smelling your feet is not sleeping together. You've got a lot to learn. She seemed thinner and meaner. So tell me, I said. What can you show me that I need to learn? But as soon as I said it, I somehow knew that she still hadn't slept with anyone. Am I supposed to come over there and sweep your enraged self into my arms? I said. Like in the movies. Is this the part where we're both so mad we kiss each other? She shook her head and smiled weakly. You don't get it, she said. My mother is dead. She closed her suitcase, clicking shut the old fashioned locks. My mother is dead, she said again, this time reminding herself. She set the suitcase upright on the floor and sat on it. She looked like someone waiting for a train. Fine, I said. And she's going to be dead for a long time. Though it sounded stupid, I felt good saying it, as though I had my own locks to click shut. Heidi went to Vancouver for her mother's funeral. I didn't go. Instead I went back to Baltimore and moved in with an aunt I barely knew. Every day was the same. I read and smoked outside my aunt's apartment, studying the row of hair salons across the street where girls in denim cutoffs and tank tops would troop in and come out hours later. A flash of neon nails coifs the color and sheen of patent leather. And every day I imagined visiting Heidi in Vancouver. Her house would not be large, but it would be clean. Flowery shrubs would line the walks. The Canadian wind would whip us about like pennants. I'd be visiting her at some vague time in the future, deliberately vague for people like me who realigned past events to soothe themselves in that future time. You always have a chance to catch the groceries before they fall. Your words can always be rewound and erased, rewritten and revised. But once I imagined Heidi visiting me, there would be no psychiatrists or deans, no boys with nice shoes or flip cashiers. Just me in my single room. She would knock on the door and say, open up.
- [50:36]
Debra Treisman
That was Alexander Hemon reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer. The story appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2000 and was included in Packer's debut story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which was published by Riverhead in 2003. I'm Nomi Frye.
- [50:55]
Alexander Hemon
I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [50:56]
Debra Treisman
I'm Alex Schwartz and we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week?
- [51:03]
Alexander Hemon
We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.
- [51:06]
Debra Treisman
That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
- [51:21]
Alexander Hemon
We talked about the midlife crisis, starting with a new book by Miranda July, but then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno.
- [51:27]
Debra Treisman
You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so called disappearance, and from that we moved into right wing conspiracy theories.
- [51:35]
Alexander Hemon
Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles.
- [51:39]
Debra Treisman
You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere. Advice columns, advice giving. And we kind of want to look at why. Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. So Sasha, let's start at the beginning of the story, this very first scene, which you said grabbed you so much on first reading. Dina has arrived at Yale and she's in an orientation where she's Supposed to play these games of trust with her fellow students. And, you know, she, of all people, has no reason to trust them, I suppose, and doesn't want to do it. So there's that resistance, and then they go on to this other game. What do you think makes her, in that moment, come out with the word revolver? Because that's what sets the whole story in motion.
- [52:33]
Alexander Hemon
Well, in the first paragraph, she mentions Russian roulette. That sounded like a better game than, you know, trust. And so the revolver has a logical, associative connection with Russian roulette. And what is great in that scene, it is that she is, at the same time terrified and really brave. She's entering this context that already has its rules and games and where, you know, the hierarchies are seemingly reproduced in that the white boys have to catch her from falling. But also, she confronts all that by saying a revolver, and does not back down. Stay quiet, silent. And this is the great thing about Dina as a character, is that she is both confrontational and incredibly fragile. She wants to appear tough, but behind that toughness is this loneliness and fragility that is touching and poignant. And at no point the character does acknowledge that. That she. This is what she needs. There's indications later, after she has spent some time with Heidi and the closeness of them being together, sleeping together like sardines, or not like sardines, but she is projecting this tough girl thing. She knows how to kill mice. She knows about death, she knows about dying parents. While inside that shell, there's this throbbing heart of a child who's alone and scared and needs love. Yeah, maybe not a child. A young person.
- [54:15]
Debra Treisman
A young person. They're all children to us now, Right?
- [54:18]
Alexander Hemon
Yeah, of course. Everyone under 50 is a child to me.
- [54:24]
Debra Treisman
I mean, the irony of it is, as she says, she's worked so hard to get to this day. Right. She's an honor roll student. She's done everything she was supposed to do to get there. She's chosen to go to Yale. And then at this crucial moment, she self sabotages, I think.
- [54:43]
Alexander Hemon
I don't know. It's difficult to change context for anyone. I understand it as a form of displacement that there was a context where she knew the rules, but she was not comfortable there. Her family life was not good. She was ashamed of having to use food stamps and all this. And it would seem to someone that, you know, a ticket to ill is a ticket out of that. But that's not how it works, evidently. Certainly not in this story, that some of that Trauma, her family, her mother's death and her father's implicit abuse. She carries that like, you know, a snail carries a little house on her back. And it's not a question of gains and trust. It's so much more. It needs so much more work. It needs so much more engagement and love and trust and a game in an afternoon. The orientation day does nothing to someone whose life is so complex and whose ambition is not simply defined as succeeding in a white patriarchal system.
- [55:58]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. In return for this, she gets a single room and she gets mandated visits to a therapist. Do you think that those responses are actually designed to help her? Do you think that you could see them as useful?
- [56:15]
Alexander Hemon
Well, I mean, clearly they do not help her.
- [56:19]
Debra Treisman
Well, I mean, we can talk about that because, you know, it's pretty easy to see Dr. Rayburn as a fool or a buffoon. He does say some things.
- [56:30]
Alexander Hemon
No, I don't think that Dr. Rayburn is a fool or a buffoon. I think the way that she is focused on by the system, that now she potentially disruptive element and now there's a whole machinery paying attention to her in various ways. And the might of the university system is now working presumably for her benefit. And Dr. Rayburn is part of it. But also Dr. Rayburn is old fashioned and not only because he looks like a Civil War general, but also because he smokes and he belongs to some other time in some ways, right? Yeah, but I don't know what time that is. It is also that, you know, even with Dr. Rayburn, even if he's not a fool, it's still a game of trust for someone like Dina, whose emotional life is complex, who feels isolated and Yale to simply come into an office of a therapist who looks like a Civil War general and deliver confession and some form of self understanding and self fashioning in confession, that's. I mean, that's not easy.
- [57:38]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [57:39]
Alexander Hemon
The thing about Dina, she's terribly lonely, except for that brief period with Heidi. And even then that does not end well.
- [57:49]
Debra Treisman
Well, let's talk about what happens with Heidi. First of all, it's interesting to me. I'm not quite sure why Heidi chooses her, except perhaps a sense of similar loneliness. But why does Dina break down and allow this girl to enter her life?
- [58:10]
Alexander Hemon
I guess she's lonely and there was someone kind and someone who delivers a Frank O'Heir poem, which is a great touch, which is also about feeling like an orphan, which Dina is at the moment and which Heidi will become. So it is sort of a magical connectivity of poetry. That they recognize in each other. This is how I understood it, that Heidi recognizes in Dina, because evidently they both love that poem. We don't know what happened in the contemporary poetry class, but it seems that there was some matching of frequencies in the class between Dina and Heidi. And it's such a key for the lock, for Dina's lock, that Heidi gets in. So at least one aspect of it is really love for poetry. Poetry, as is common among young people at university, as a medium of formulating emotions that are hard to formulate.
- [59:08]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. And then once she's in, Dina basically counsels her to get out and be alone and live the way she does. And Heidi refuses and keeps turning up and keeps throwing her arms around Dina. You know, it's interesting to me what makes Heidi persist and what makes all the barriers break down for Dina.
- [59:32]
Alexander Hemon
There's a marvelous scene in the cafeteria. First killing the mouse and then the washing.
- [59:40]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [59:41]
Alexander Hemon
The purification. And after that point, their relationship, relatively speaking, is pure. They know that they like each other. They can sleep in bed together. There's no sex, but it doesn't seem too far. They're touching each other's hair. An extremely intimate and embodied connection. After they wash themselves in the filthiest part of the university, complete with dead mice. And that is such a spectacular scene and such a warm scene and such a vulnerable scene. And that turns a lot around. We both see Heidi's vulnerability, but also Dina's. She finally opens it has to be with a squirt gun. I mean, the jewel of them bonding is a squirt gun.
- [60:26]
Debra Treisman
A painful one.
- [60:28]
Alexander Hemon
Right. And it's a reference to a revolver. It's the anti revolver, so to speak. She got her revolver and it's a squirt gun.
- [60:35]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. I mean, that scene is. It may be the only one between the two of them that's driven by Dina, in which the kind of self opening is driven by Dina. And she insists she reveals herself. She does not let Heidi not do the same. But it is their nakedness, which she insists on is not really. At least for Dina in that scene. I don't believe there's any sexuality to it. I think it's about self exposure.
- [61:04]
Alexander Hemon
I think so. I mean, it depends how we define where sexuality begins. And so the bonding is in the nakedness of their bodies. Right. They do not enjoy those bodies as they would if they had sex. But the bodies are present and the bodies are fully exposed to each other. And it is after that that the bodies could be next to each other in bed. And you know, that's not sex, but it's clearly sexual in that it's intimate. It's intimate. It is what connects them. And they touch each other. Given Dina's character in the story, that's a huge step for her to let someone touch her and touch her hair without stiffening. Without stiffening. And, of course, you know, white people have a great interest in African American hair. Every African American person can tell you that at some point or another, some white person felt invited to touch their hair. And so to let Heidi do that and not seeing it as an interest, although it plays a role as sort of an exotic interest, indifference, it is a moment of very strong intimacy.
- [62:10]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, I feel just throbbing through the story, the issue of shame. I think you mentioned it before that Dina has shame. She has shame with the boy with the wingtip shoes. She doesn't want him to see where she comes from. She retreats out of a feeling, maybe of inadequacy, maybe of just feeling. No one will understand, but I feel there is a lot of shame at play. And then in that scene of getting naked, it's a refusal of shame. And also, she insists that Heidi has to not be ashamed. She should wear her fat like. Like a mink. You know, it's the one moment where she tells someone else, like, shame isn't helping you.
- [62:52]
Alexander Hemon
She confronts the shame. And it is interesting that, yeah, she. It's a kind of a. You know, it's a job that she has. It is not a prime and elite job at Yale University, right? She's cleaning up after frat boys, right? And they're cleaning up after a population of relatively speaking, privileged kids have enjoyed their meal. So it reappropriates that space, right? It's the space on the fringes of privilege and the space that presumably could be shameful, right? As it is, because Fred Poe is sabotage and want to show you that you know who you are by sabotaging their trace. And it's in this space, in this moment, that Dina trusts Heidi and wants to accept Heidi as she is, so to speak. This is as close as she can get to it, but it's on the fringes of that landscape, the architecture, as she says. And this is where Gina deploys her squirt gun, cleans things up, establishes connection and intimacy with Heidi. Again, it's an extremely vulnerable scene. And her toughness is both protection, but it's also courage in some ways. She confronts the situation, and at that.
- [64:08]
Debra Treisman
Moment, she says she loves Heidi, and.
- [64:10]
Alexander Hemon
That'S as honest as she gets with her emotions in the story that she acknowledges that that says I love Heidi. It's one moment of not obfuscating. And she tells it to us, not Dr. Rayburn or anyone.
- [64:25]
Debra Treisman
So stepping back a little, there's that moment in the cafeteria where someone comes along and hands Dina an invitation to a gay party. And she's horrified and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. And then we have what feels, I think, to her like a moment of betrayal where she witnesses Heidi coming out and joining a group of out gay women. I wonder what you think is happening in her mind at that moment. Why is she, A, horrified at the idea of someone thinking her gay and B, so angered by Heidi?
- [65:05]
Alexander Hemon
I don't know. It's a very interesting question. I think what happens when young people come to university? They enter a kind of a laboratory of public life. Identities that might be affirmed or discovered in university. They always, by necessity, public. And this is generally how identities work. Right. Which is why you come out if you're a queer person. Right. Out. Where's the out? The out is public life. Right. And so it's very difficult for Dina to get out of her room, let alone into the public life.
- [65:36]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [65:37]
Alexander Hemon
And it would coax her out of her room. Was Heidi not an identity of hers or Heidi's? It could be that she is gay or maybe not. But in the conversation with Dr. Rayburn, that's not what he's telling her. That's not that she's gay or not. But I think it's that Heidi was a personal, private thing. I think in this particular moment in the story, it is that Heidi entered her world and then by coming out, she left that world. And the world was small and a room with ramen noodles, the cafeteria and the memories of Baltimore. Right. She doesn't go anywhere else. It's a big step for Dina to go to the commons to begin with. And so by coming out, Heidi acquires a public identity. So it's not about the relationship, or so Dina thinks about the relation between the two of them, but about practicing an identity.
- [66:30]
Debra Treisman
And Dina gets left behind. Yes, because she doesn't claim any part of her identity. You know, she rebuffs the black students as well. Doesn't feel one of them. She doesn't feel one of any group.
- [66:43]
Alexander Hemon
I think that the opening with orientation games. Right. The word games is extremely interesting, but it's also clearly performative. Right. The trust thing, it's not unlike dance. And so she is wary of that performativity of identity. Because she, for one thing, she doesn't know how to do it in Baltimore. A different kind of performance takes place there. And even that, she's worried about it or afraid of it. The incident or this thing with the boy with fancy shoes. Right. She wanted to perform, as it were, her family having more money. But that didn't work out well. And it is a difficulty for a lot of students. I mean, my particular point of view of teaching at universities for many years, that sometimes it's hard to be in the public arena of a university. Particularly kids who, I don't know, they might be a little more sensitive, spend time reading books in relative isolation. Suddenly everything's happening at the same time. It's a very sensitive time.
- [67:44]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. And Dina's been kind of made to feel ashamed of reading. She has to go to a different grocery store because the tellers at the first one make fun of her for carrying a book. Yeah, it's putting on airs, I suppose.
- [67:56]
Alexander Hemon
The qualities that exposed her as out of place in her previous life are now supposed to be the qualities that are cherished and rewarded at Yale. But it doesn't quite work out for her. She doesn't feel a sense of solidarity or connectedness with an Exeter student who's enthusiastic and keeps saying, good, good, good. That's not Dina's experience. And she would have to enter that kind of performative situation. And she's just so disoriented with all that. I mean, that's what I like about the story. How the story and the narrator and Dina and Z.Z. packer at the top of it all owns this confusion. The younger students, or maybe all kinds of readers, they often worry about the character being right or wrong morally or whether you would like that person if they were a friend. But Dina is so marvelously complicated. Is she right? Is she wrong? Is this a way out? Is this the right thing to do? You don't know. You just see this consciousness operating in a very complicated situation, trying to figure out how to be in the world. And the best outcome is it'll take a while to be comfortable in this wide patriarchal system and possibly never.
- [69:20]
Debra Treisman
Do you think that her kind of betrayal of Heidi, in a sense, her refusal to be around Heidi after the coming out moment, is in her mind, a response to Heidi's betrayal of something they had? Or is it fear of being seen as gay herself or of being misread or misunderstood in that way?
- [69:42]
Alexander Hemon
I think yes. And yes. I think that she is not capable of being out in a sense of being public with her feelings and emotions, at least to some extent, because she has a hard time formulating them herself. So she's, you know, obviously was affected by her mother's death, but. But she mentions her father and his abuse, presumably, but never quite talks about all that. And so her proclivity not to confront her emotions is not substantially changed by the end of the story. Right. There was a crisis related to Heidi, and then she backed away from that. And so in some ways, and this is what Dr. Rayburn suggests, she will have to find a way to name her feelings and emotions in relation to Heidi, in relation to her father, in relation to Baltimore and her, you know, class shame, as it were. But she is not capable of naming that right now because she has created a system of misnaming the emotions or an obfuscating system, and it's very hard for her. And, you know, one could imagine. I could imagine that sometime down the road, as people do, once Dina gets out of the crisis, she might understand what happened, but for that, she has to leave Yale and live with her aunt and read books and go back, as it were, to the basics of the game. Not the orientation games, but just the game of life.
- [71:14]
Debra Treisman
Yeah. How do you read the ending? You know, has she gone from Yale for good? Is she taking a break, trying to come to terms? You know, it's a retreat, but is it a retreat to get stronger or just a permanent retreat? She's tried something. It didn't work.
- [71:31]
Alexander Hemon
I think she has this fantasy of Heidi visiting her, but clearly not at Yale. And also stripped of all the other things that are distressing to her, there would be no psychiatrists or deans, no boys with nice shoes and flip cashiers, just a single room. So what Deena's utopian outcome is, or utopian project is to have this sovereign space of her own personhood that does not have to comply with the requirements of public identities or, you know, competitive environments like Yale, where success is presumably one of the bonding horizons toward which everyone is supposed to be moving. And just to get to a point where someone like Heidi asks her to open up, and in some imaginary context, she might be able to open up, but right now she's not. Nevertheless, she can imagine opening up. And, you know, as an old man, I have faith in youth because youth has more time to figure things out.
- [72:36]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, yeah. It's as though she's dreaming of a retake. Right. She wants to go back to the moment when Heidi knocked on her door and do it better.
- [72:45]
Alexander Hemon
Yeah. And maybe not at Yale.
- [72:48]
Debra Treisman
Yeah, yeah. And maybe that'll happen, right? Maybe that's happened for Dina in some other universe.
- [72:56]
Alexander Hemon
Maybe. Yes. I hope so.
- [72:58]
Debra Treisman
You think Heidi's probably not going to entirely give up on her forever?
- [73:03]
Alexander Hemon
It's hard to tell. I think Heidi will stay at Yale.
- [73:08]
Debra Treisman
Yeah.
- [73:08]
Alexander Hemon
And so I don't know about Dina.
- [73:12]
Debra Treisman
You know, I was thinking about why you personally chose this story and thinking about, you know, quite a few of your early stories were about a Bosnian who gets kind of trapped in the US during the war and the siege of Sarajevo, and who has to sort of figure out the language and figure out how he can fit in to this community he's now in which he doesn't really understand. And I could see those sort of parallels. You know, the place that that character is in is somewhere he's would be considered lucky to be in. He's not in Sarajevo under siege. And Dina would be considered lucky to be at Yale and not at home in Baltimore with food stamps. But the environment doesn't feel lucky. You know, the environment doesn't understand them.
- [74:03]
Alexander Hemon
I think that aspect of human dignity is that to own your life up to a point of evaluation in new context. Right. And so for someone like Dina, and I don't want to stretch the comparison. Well, one of the things that my characters find, the situations my characters find themselves in and I have found myself in is having to explain and therefore kind of justify the way that my life, life of people like me had unfolded. And it was really hard to explain. And so I read some books in which the character explained it or something was laid down. But I also reached a point where it was so tiresome to constantly be explaining yourself to others. Right. And so again, not to stress the comparison, but one of the things that Dina refuses to do is explain herself and including by claiming an identity. But it's presumably self evident and she refuses to explain herself. For one thing, she can't quite explain it to herself. She doesn't have words and names for things. But also it's far too complex. And everything ideal seems so remote from that that it's really hard to explain and that she retreats into her little hole where she can manage, as it were, the meaning of her life. And so to me, that looks like displacement. Right? It's voluntary. It's presumably a ticket out of a bad situation. But it's also fundamentally displacement, a sense that one is not in the place where one should be or wants to be, even, but there's no other place to be, where else. And so the break for Dina is when she goes to her aunt in Baltimore, not home, her father, where he's presumably abusive. So it's further displacement, not a solution, not finding home, but moving down the road to the next place. That is something that I think I can recognize. The book Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, there's another great story. There's more than one great story, Speaking in Tongues, where A young girl, 14, leaves Montgomery, Alabama, and then goes to Atlanta to look for her mother and then ends up nearly abused by, you know, a very shady character and so on. But the whole story is also about displacement. She leaves a home looking for her mother and finds herself in a new set of circumstances and she has to learn to survive them. So not that I, you know, I don't think I'll be writing an essay on ZZ Packer, but I could imagine writing an essay, but yeah, I do. And I talk about this, how their stories have often the inciting event is displacement. Right.
- [76:57]
Debra Treisman
Well, one feels for her characters.
- [77:00]
Alexander Hemon
Yeah. As one should. She's a great writer. The character is amazing.
- [77:04]
Debra Treisman
Well, thank you so much, Sasha.
- [77:06]
Alexander Hemon
Thank you. My pleasure.
- [77:13]
Debra Treisman
CC Packer's story collection, Drinking Coffee, Coffee Elsewhere, was published in 2003. A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award and a Whiting Writers Award, she was included in the New Yorker's 20 under 40 issue in 2010. You can hear Packer read and discuss stories by Stuart Diebeck and Leslie Ineka Arima in earlier episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Alexander Heman, a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Penn W.G. sebald Award, among others, is the author of eight books, including the novels the Lazarus Project and the World and All It Holds, the story collection Love and Obstacles and two non fiction works, the Book of My Lives and My An Introduction. He's been publishing fiction and nonfiction in the New Yorker since 1999. You can download more than 200 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including episodes in which Alexander Heman reads and discusses stories by Bernard Malamud and Vladimir Nabokov, or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by Chloe Prasinos. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is David Remnick and I'm.
- [78:48]
Alexander Hemon
Pleased to share the news that I'm Not a Robot. A live action short film from the.
- [78:53]
Debra Treisman
New Yorker's Screening Room series has been.
- [78:55]
Alexander Hemon
Shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This thought provoking film grapples with questions.
- [79:00]
Debra Treisman
That we can all relate to and about identity and technology and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot along with our full slate.
- [79:11]
Alexander Hemon
Of documentary and narrative films@newyorker.com video from PRX.