Eye to Eye Read online

  Instead, I have worked on my relationship with Southern food, probably the one thing about the South that couldn’t possibly be overrated. On my drive home from the campus, I’ve taken to detouring from my usual route to make a pit stop at the OK Café, home of the best macaroni and cheese I have yet to find in Atlanta. So far as I can tell, the standout thing about Atlanta is the food. Midwesterners, I have now decided, are fat for no good reason whatsoever. Southerners, however, have a point. Between the ten kinds of greens around town, the fried chicken, the red velvet cake, the banana bread pudding, the shrimp and grits, the turkey meat loaf with mushroom gravy, all washed down with the omnipresent calorie bomb, sweet tea, you could pack on ten pounds without batting an eye. And with no one to witness my demise, I’m on my own mini-mission to reach size twelve by the end of fall term.

  At the loft, alone, again, I sit down to watch an exciting evening of reality television, bowl of macaroni in hand, Us Weekly in lap, nice glass of chardonnay at my side. If this is how one slides into defeated middle-age, then let the games begin. Here is the problem with my brain: in terms of word association, middle-age begets old, which begets barren and hagged out, which begets why didn’t Zach love me, which begets no one will ever love me, which begets time to eat a little crap for the team, which begets me reaching for the telephone, telling myself that I don’t really care, that I’m just really bored and dialing Zach’s number in that half-conscious-but-determined state of I-know-I-shouldn’t-do-this crossed with what-the-hell-here-goes-nothing. I’ve successfully ignored his silence, trying to make him believe that I’m out having a grand old time in Atlanta, rather than Hoovering macaroni and developing a semi-intimate relationship with my television and conversational skills with the ghost-parrot through the wall.

  “Doris?” he says, picking up the phone on the seventh ring. Only Zach would resist owning an answering machine well into the twenty-first century. “Lemme turn the music down.” I hear the latest Elvis Costello blaring, then fading, in the background. And then, to my horror, the dull murmur of a woman’s voice growing from faint to audible. “Zach, you want to put these away?” Not a voice that I recognize.

  “Who’s that?” I ask. Drunk and defensive.

  “You remember Samantha? I think I told you about her.”

  No bells are ringing.

  “From my composition class?”

  “You mean your student Samantha?” I ask, properly disdainful.

  “I mean my ex-student Samantha. She gave me a lift to the grocery store.”

  “And now she’s inside helping you unpack your groceries? Cute.” This is definitely the day for hating how I sound, but I can’t stop myself. “What is she? Twelve?”

  “C’mon Doris, she’s only doing me a favor.” Then he remembers something. “It’s not like we’re still dating. I assume you’re not sitting at home pining for me in Atlanta. I took that for granted from the deafening ring of my phone.”

  He’s got to be kidding. Not calling one’s ex is standard operating procedure for those possibly getting back together—dating nymphets barely past Humbert Humbertdom is not.

  “So you are dating her. Pervert. Remember what we said about students? Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  Zach exhales like he’s smoking a cigarette.

  Then he inhales like he’s smoking a cigarette.

  “Are you smoking?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Zach!” He quit two years ago. Secretly though I’m pleased that he must be depressed, doing the male equivalent of macaroni binges and Lifetime movie marathons. Or, I correct myself, trying to look cool for his no-doubt nicotine-addled waif of an ex-student.

  “So is this just some late-night fault-finding mission?”

  My phone beeps. I’m putting together a biting rejoinder, but first I click over to hear Ronnie’s voice. Ronnie, who, after listening to a call-waiting-shortened summary, tells me, “GET OFF THE PHONE WITH HIM NOW BEFORE YOU MAKE A COMPLETE ASS OF YOURSELF.”

  Zach is none too happy to rid himself of my carb-fueled hysteria.

  “Ronnie,” I exclaim, “My friend! My real, nonacquaintance, nonacademic friend. Come to save me from myself.”

  “Don’t drink and dial, Doris. That’s the oldest one in the book.”

  “You think they can teach that to the parrot? So that I can knock on the wall and he can yell back ‘put it down, beeatch.’ You know, train him to fly out of the cage like Batman and knock the phone out of my hand when he catches booze on my breath?”

  Ronnie laughs. “You’d have one knocked up telephone.”

  “Not funny!” I swing my legs over the arm of my chair. “What’s shaking in Hellay? Can I expect to see Earl on the big screen anytime soon?”

  “Nooooo. But you can expect to see me in print.”

  I almost drop my chardonnay.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I hope so,” she says. “I’m still hoping it wasn’t a prank call. Not sure I’ll even believe it until I have a signed contract in front of me, but it looks like my novel is going to come out sometime next spring from Burning Spear Press. I spoke to the editor yesterday, called me out of the blue, and after a whole stack of rejections, there you have it. Out of nowhere.”

  “Next spring! That’s like turbo-publishing! Are you going to be rich? Okay, and forgive me my poet’s ignorance, but what exactly is Burning Spear Press? One of those lefty presses out of Cambridge or San Fran?”

  Ronnie sounds excited, if disbelieving.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been meaning to look it up, just haven’t had the chance.”

  “Don’t remind me about your neo-Ludditism. I know from the weekly posts I receive. It’s like being friends with a missionary.”

  “So I haven’t really been able to check them out properly because my laptop is acting up again, I only know that they’re a black press.”

  Chardonnay glass in one hand, I move to my kitchen counter and sign on to the Internet.

  “Luckily, my friend. I now have wireless. I’ve gone from the Flintstones to the Jetsons in two short months. All the computer techies at Langsdale would be very impressed. And have I said congratulations? CONGRATULATIONS!”

  I know how hard Ronnie has worked for this, how we used to sit around at Langsdale and fantasize about how our first books would look. Probably the same way I imagined other women sat around and fantasized about future children or husbands. I wanted something kitschy but literate, appropriate for the title of my collection, Man Trouble in the Nuclear Age. The cover I got was close, a woman next to an oven, pulling out a tray of cookies, smiling, but in the window behind her you could see a mushroom cloud bellowing. Very literal, my publishers. And Ronnie had always wanted something closer to the old Catcher in the Rye covers, plain with white or black letters, allowing the fiction to speak for itself. And here she was, only months away from seeing that dream come true.

  “Sorry,” I say. “It’s slow connecting.”

  “Admit it,” says Ronnie. “You poured yourself another glass of wine.”

  “You’ll never know and I’ll never tell.”

  I Google Burning Spear Press and click on the first entry.

  “So?” Ronnie asks.

  I take a big sip and try to break the news gently.

  There’s nothing neo-Garvey about Burning Spear, nothing “fight the power.” The only thing vaguely African about the Web site is a red, green and gold cocktail napkin, on which sits a gigantic martini glass with a “spear” of olives resting inside, and “burning” flames around two figures, male and female, framed in the background. At the top of the page the words “Burning Spear Press” appear in scripted lettering, with “Fire for the Rest of Us,” beneath it. To the side of the main image are bullets on recent releases, authors, press, etc. The usual. And when I look more closely at the page, I see that Burning Spear Press, is “the new, hip, ethnic imprint.” Their covers are mainly cartoon figures with hands angled jaun
tily on hips and purses dangling from the crooks of their silhouetted arms. If male writers were subjected to marketing like this, then their books would all have Amstel light bottles and Rogaine in shadow on the covers.

  “Doris?”

  “Good news first?”

  Ronnie groans. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “The circulation is huge. It looks like most of the books are done in print runs of the tens of thousands. Which, might I add, having had a print run of five hundred on my poetry collection, is no small feat.”

  “Quit beating around the bush, Doris.”

  “Wellllllllllll. It’s an African-American imprint.”

  Silence.

  “An African-American imprint? Tell me, I beg you, that they’re branching out into literary fiction.”

  I scroll down the “About Us” page.

  “Kind of. It looks like they’re going to do one literary, or as they’re saying ‘adventurous’ novel every other month. Seems they did one last month. Murder on the South African Express. I think I saw that book. It looked like a real book.”

  I don’t tell Ronnie that by “real book” I simply mean hardback book, that the cover showed a woman in what could only be described as a dashiki minidress boarding a train, leopard-print luggage case in hand.

  “I have to get to the library.”

  “The good news is they’re publishing your book. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  I peruse the other recent offerings. Brown Sugar and Maple Syrup, Grooving with Mr. Thang, and Catcher of the Fly (with a decidedly non-Salinger cover). I have to concede that some of the covers are quite clever, and it looks like Catcher of the Fly was reviewed favorably in both People and Time magazines, and a Barnes & Noble notable book. So regardless of the covers, what’s going on between the pages is evidently interesting. The most important part.

  “Some good reviews on one of these. And don’t forget the zillions of copies. Oh, and look, believe it or not, even though the publisher is in New York, looks like Burning Spear has an office in my fair city. And for the record, presses can mean anything these days. Pam Anderson gets published by the same folks who put out Gish Jen. Burning Spear could be radical chic. Maybe you can get them to fly you out here, make sure your cover is normal and everything.”

  “Do publishers do that?”

  “Big publishers might. For all I know, my poems were published by the Keebler elves, but you know how poetry goes. We practically pay them to put us into the world, and as much money as I’ve spent on contests to get that stupid collection out there, ready for ridicule by Georgia teens, I might as well have self-published. Would have been cheaper. No matter what happens, no matter how you feel when you do find Burning Spear Press, repeat after me: published is better than not published. Big press is better than obscure.”

  “You’ll have to add one more chant to the chain—black Doris is better than white Doris.”

  “Whaddayamean?” I ask. “I already feel my next-door neighbor would prefer a black Doris to a white Doris, so don’t toy with my emotions.”

  Ronnie explains that, demographically speaking, white Doris doesn’t make much sense to potential readers. That editors aren’t even sure that they believe in white Doris.

  “So I’m like the Easter Bunny? Or Santa Claus? Why doesn’t white Doris make any sense? You know that I’m going to have a full-out existential crisis when I get off the phone.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I’m going to have a full-out literary identity crisis when I find the Web page for Burning Spear Press.”

  “Published is better than not published,” I repeat. “Published is better than not published. Black and white Doris agree.”

  I hang up the phone and decide, after closing down my computer, that it’s best that I didn’t get to discuss my Zach interaction with Ronnie. She tends to side with Zach anytime I’m being irrational and prideful. But the mental image of some tattooed, pierced, twenty-two-year-old swooping in on my ambition-free ex-boyfriend? Me no like. I can just imagine them, smoking cigarettes, and her twenty-two-year-old take on his situation: that’s really cool, man, I think it’s cool you want to open your own theater. Why be part of the system? Let’s make love and eat shitty twenty-nine-cent ramen on your decade-old futon. Coooooool. The image is enough to convince me that I’m going to have to venture to the one place I never thought I’d be looking for men: the Internet.

  By the sound of Stevie Wonder through the walls, I know that Toni is home, so I decide to seek out her expert advice on the subject and attempt to further forge a friendship. I take my half-opened bottle of wine, since it’s the only one I have left, and knock on the door like some sad charity case.

  “Doris,” she says excitedly, a half-opened bottle of wine on her own coffee table. “Fellow single woman fighting the good fight. Have I found an activity for the two of us.”

  “Is it low cal?” I ask. “I think I’m taking up obesity as a hobby.”

  Toni has her computer open, and is clearly online and drunk typing.

  “I’m losing it, Doris. I know I’ve been AWOL, but something terrible has happened.” She falls back into the couch cushions and lets out a sigh that lets me know “terrible” is code for “wonderful, but problematic.”

  “First off, no judging,” she says. I like this rule, since it excuses me from all behavior with Zach, so I nod in mock-solemn approval. “Okay, so I went out with this horrible fascist who liked white, thirty-two-year-old Toni. His profile says the only ethnicities that he’ll date are white and Asian, and he’s looking only at women who are at least two years younger and two inches shorter than he is. I mean, his profile is loathsome. I was all fired up to make out with him and then tell him he had biracial cooties and go home and write three paragraphs about it.”

  I know exactly where this is going. “But you liked him,” I interrupt.

  “More than like. I still half hate him, but aside from the profile, he has yet to say anything really fucked up, and I can’t see that he’s racist in daily life, but I know that he is crazy with the race thing because I read his profile and we even talked about it. He said that he ‘just knows what he finds attractive,’ which was clearly me.”

  “So he just doesn’t know what he finds attractive. He needs your help.”

  “I’m the one who needs help. I need an intervention.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tino,” she replied. “Can you even believe that? Big hairy Italian. He’s not my type at all. But when we talk, it’s like we were pods on the same spaceship. We like the same books, same movies, we crack each other up. We even went to the same stupid church camp in New Jersey when we were teenagers, but two years apart. I think my body is against me.”

  I pour the dregs of my wine bottle into the glass.

  “Or it knows more than you do.”

  Toni shakes her head defiantly. “Never. We’ve been on five dates in the past two weeks, so I must take immediate action. You and me, we’re going speed dating. Copelands. Tomorrow. He must be replaced.”

  Like living in Los Angeles and having passionate affairs with pool boys, speed dating is something that I knew about only from my favorite source of trashy information—the television. On television, speed dating looked like a fast, acceptable way to meet a veritable bounty of professional men. The news magazine special that I’d seen on speed dating showed a large room, dimly lit, with white tablecloths checkerboarded in half-empty wineglasses. The clientele were all thirty-and forty-something, laughing urbanely over no-doubt literate conversation.

  Speed dating in Atlanta—the nontelevised version—I was soon to learn, was something altogether different.

  The next night, Toni stopped by my apartment looking equal parts glamorous and jittery. She was nicely put together in the official Atlanta spring/fall uniform of sweater twinset in a bright yellow pastel, dark denim jeans, low sandals with an open toe, übercoiffed hair and manicured nails. Fashion wise, Atlanta is like if you
crossed L.A. with a Lily Pulitzer warehouse. Coiffed, conservative and colorful. Very done and very matching. “I know, I know,” she says, gesturing at the outfit. “But I don’t like to scare the lawyers. Sometimes the loud prints make them skittish, and I wasn’t kidding, I need to find a replacement, fast.”

  I, however, am dressed in my very own version of “Langsdale chic,” a carefully honed homage to years of shopping in the rural Midwest, meaning a mismatch of Target, thrift stores and the occasional online Bluefly purchase. Today it’s an Isaac Mizrahi button-down white shirt, cuffed jeans from the Salvation Army, and my all-time-favorite shoes, Marc Jacobs’s take on ruby slippers, a delicate Mary Jane with an agony-inducing heel, but well worth the punishment. Funky, yet feminine. Furthermore, I worked to get my general appearance city-ready—tweezed my eyebrows; polished and filed my chipped, uneven nails; spent thirty-five minutes with Miss Clairol changing my roots from dull silver to nutmeg; and the evening before I even used whitening strips on my coffee-dyed teeth. If I didn’t feel unstoppably gorgeous, at the very least I felt presentable. In Langsdale this would have been “supermodel”; in Atlanta, it was “average.”

  Toni drove, and I tried hard to pretend that I wasn’t fearful for my life. Unlike Langsdale, where the speed limit rarely tops forty-five, or New York, where public transportation is the de facto mode of travel, residents of Atlanta are drivers. The first time I rode in a car with Antonia, truly, I feared for my life. In Atlanta, a speed limit of fifty-five means seventy for all but the far right lane, and seventy was about as fast as my Toyota could handle. I stayed out of the far left lane unless passing one of those confused and/or passive-aggressive souls who drive the speed limit. Toni’s BMW, however, was made to go eighty, ninety, even ninety-five. These are all speeds at which my Toyota would no doubt begin to shake uncontrollably, lose bolts and hubcaps along the way. But Toni was also a true Atlantan in that driving the actual car was secondary to all the other activities she engaged in behind the wheel. She rarely signaled, fiddled with the CD player, answered the phone, and then cursed the poor souls driving around her for not being able to read her mind when she crossed three lanes in three seconds to make her exit. From what I’ve seen of Atlanta drivers, it’s as though the turn signal were simply a decorative touch or design flaw. Psychic driving, I told Ronnie.