Being Zarathustra
by Rosemary Banks
While at the park, a funnel of sunlight streamed through parting clouds, and seemed to stalk her like a follow spot in the theater. She power-walked, pumping to combine the movements of flexion and extension of her forearm between the ulna and humerus of the hinge joint, until sweat arrived on her forehead and dived between her breasts.
She unlocked the door. Her right hand pulled the key out and turned the tarnished doorknob. She pushed the metal door open until the bicycle in the hallway blocked its further movement forward, and entered the small apartment, her left hand turning the lever up and the safety chain across the bar to lock. The leftover morning was waiting with odorous remains of toast, oatmeal and the bowel movement she had managed before leaving for her early walk.
Zara bowed her head forward, tumbling spirals of orange wavy hair over her face past her chin, and pulled the tight green cotton Tee off, dropping it where she stood. It lay like steamed cabbage in a damp tiny pile on the floor. She stepped on it, barefoot, walking into the bathroom to turn on the shower. A swarm of freckles covered all but her nipples on breasts that did not jiggle, even as she squirmed out of spandex shorts. Jutting from between her thighs was a bramble burst of soft curly sprouts the color of her hair above. She swung a lean tight figure into warm wet spray, eyes shut and mouth open. Carroty lashes fluttered open, and she pulled the stiff curtain shut.
She hummed no tune, stepped out of the shower, reached for the same thick blue towel she had used the same time yesterday. She held the towel beside her face, her light brown eyes staring at nothing.
Blue, wet, and pale, she tiptoed onto the bedroom rug and from a pile of books beside the bed, grabbed a novel with a picture of a woman’s brown naked figure silhouetted under faint violet mountain slopes, and a waning crescent moon. She flipped it open to one of the numerous pink rub-on markers she had inserted, smiled and read aloud to herself, deriving great pleasure from each word.
The first night that the group visited that greenhouse of illusions the splendid and taciturn old woman who guarded the entrance in a wicker rocking chair felt that time was turning back to its earliest origins when among the five who were arriving she saw a bony, jaundiced man with Tartar cheekbones, marked forever and from the beginning of the world with the pox of solitude. She replaced the book on top the pile.
She yawned wide as a cat, dropped the towel, climbed beneath the checkered covers, and began reading the book she had left next to her pillow, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She completed the few pages she had left of the novel and let it tumble back with her like a lover, on the pungent, stained pillow, plunging instantly into the first of four stages of non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) and one rapid eye movement sleep (REM) repeating in a ninety-minute cycle two times, past the morning and into late afternoon. During REM, while brain wave activity accelerated and dreams occurred, she saw an enormous aves-like figure descending from above, with yellow scaly claws spread for landing. It flopped loud with a terrifying thud on top of her and she could feel its flank and belly pressing against her. It squatted over her body in the bedroom, blocking out the glimmer of light through the blinds. It drew back and briefly flapped cobalt wings with mounds of thick leaden feathers, and a gleaming hooked beak peaked out of a pink blood-engorged baldhead with no eyes, a thin wrinkled sheath of blue-veined skin where they should have been. Her mind told her body to move, but it would not. In the dream, she was open, wet, limp, a captive in recline.
The raptor moved its head back as though retreating, but instead only gathered momentum to peck forward fierce, and when it drew back again, it had ripped the nipple from her left breast. It held the small pink and white flesh in its beak with strands of blood, and fatty tissue hanging. The bird tilted its head up and in one gulp swallowed it completely. Sans eyes, there was no expression of pleasure or disgruntlement.
Her nipple in its throat, the tormentor spread its wings as wide as the walls of her bedroom would accommodate, and levitated straight up above her. She looked up at its huge body, its toes, claws and tarsus dangling in the air, and as it reached the ceiling, it burst, like a fourth of July firework, into soft white plumage that filled the room with the floating, meandering feathers of a thousand pillows. Her breast gaped open like an erupted volcano, spurting spiraling ribbons of blood into the fuzzy air.
Zara sprung upright in bed, saliva seeping from the sides of her open mouth, her eyes half-closed in a part-slumber terror. Sight of the patchwork quilt brought her back to the reality of her bedroom and she grabbed both nipples, for reassurance of their existence. She seized McCarthy’s book, unable to stop her tremors, and flung it across the room. It flopped against the wall and to the floor, next to the sweaty Tee. The book did not look dejected, she stared after it thinking, but its spine perched upward expectant, like an audacious cat, waiting for her to take it back into her arms. Today, she would wear a bra.
She had chosen her wardrobe weeks ago when she learned from her novel seminar syllabus that Toni Morrison would be the guest lecturer for a discussion of her non-fiction essays, following a class critique of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. That’s right, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and yes, Pulitzer Prize winner, she had bragged to friends and co-workers. It was part of the publicity campaign launched at Rosa Parks College, to feature guest lecturers in the Creative Writing department. Zara had been accepted into the MFA program after her Baby Boomer, ex-hippie mom pushed her to apply. If she really wanted to be a writer, her mother had insisted, earn the MFA and maybe get the chance to teach writing, while writing, instead of working the graveyard shift at some funky Jersey diner.
She was hesitant because Rosa Parks College was only five years old, and practically had an all black student body. I raised you to get along with all people, her mother spoke slow and raspy, you don’t have to love them, she coughed, hate most people myself, white, black or green. They’re like cats, pernickety fuckers. Don’t read half enough.
The school had been a private catholic college for two hundred years, but with an undisclosed endowment from Bill Cosby, it had transformed into a liberal arts institution, named after the Civil Rights icon. Likewise, the administration and the student body had changed its complexion like chocolate syrup poured into milk. Friends had warned about potential feelings of racial isolation, but once accepted, Zara could not refuse the opportunity to earn a Creative Writing MFA. Most of the professors were excellent scholars, which convinced her that the administrators, who were mostly black, were smart, although probably biased, she believed, because ninety-five percent of the student body were African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans, in that order.
She was the solitary white face in tonight’s class of fifteen students. She did not perceive herself a racist but felt many of her classmates definitely were at least prejudiced. It had been rough during her three semesters. She had not felt such stressful isolation since she vacationed in Japan with her mother, and beige-yellow faces stared up at her as though she were an iguanodon from the Middle Jurassic period one hundred and sixty-five million years ago.
Last semester, in her Poetry workshop, taught by Sapphire, who wrote the New York Times bestseller, PUSH (Zara liked to brag about these things when she told others what college she was attending), she had one white classmate, but he was a gay man who loved the company of the prettiest black women in the class. He even read his poetry, which was sexually risqué, yet eloquent, in the tone and meter of black poet, Sonya Sanchez. He never even noticed her, except during one class when he turned to her and commented, Girl you’re so pale… Everyone laughed and she curved her lips up, not to show disapproval, unable to hide the blood rushing to her face. They would have blushed as well if she had said, you’re so gay… or you’re so dark…, but she did not. She did not have to respond, because Sapphire leaned between them as she entered the room and interjected, pale fire baby!
Sapphire was an outrageous professor and brought Zara further along in her search for truth in her poetry, in four months, than the journey she had been on since fifth grade. With an amethyst stone in her nose, and numerous silver rings in the lobule and helix of her ears, she was a petite warrior poet. During workshop critiques, she did not allow comments preceded by excuses or conditions. Say what you need to say, because it is your truth. You do not need to apologize for it. Just remember, it is not everyone’s truth, was Sapphire’s proclamation, commencing the Semester.
Gasconading was pervasive in Zara’s friendship with two writers in Columbia’s MFA program, Kelly and Angelica, with whom she had attended high school, the first four years of college, and flirted with boys on the mezzanine. They had been a popular trio at Penn State, until Zara received the rejection letter from Columbia. Kelly and Angelica considered her MFA program at Rosa Parks College a joke, but both began calling her often to find out the latest development in the campaign to build the school’s credibility. She was happy to report that Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, would be teaching at Rosa P next spring semester, the first time Goldberg had agreed to teach on any college campus. Zara bragged that she received an email that Alice Walker was to teach a course in Creative Non-Fiction: The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. During one of their weekend conference calls of gossip, politics and sex, Zara swore them to secrecy and told them that Nabokov would be a visiting lecturer at Rosa P. It was one of Zara’s vainglorious moments, clearly a joke, but Angelica and Kelly had not called her back in some time, nor returned her calls.
Zara walked into the kitchen nude, took a pizza slice from the refrigerator, tossed it on a paper plate, and nuked it for sixty seconds. She folded it together, like a paper airplane, and took a large bite before the oozing amber grease dripped to the floor, her favorite part of the pizza. A sudden shiver rippled up her back and she rubbed both nipples with her left hand. If McCarthy had intended the violence to come off the page, and she was certain he had, he had succeeded with her. She drank a Gatorade, ate a banana and returned to her bedroom to finish dressing. Class was in two hours, and it took an hour to drive from South Jersey to Rosa P, which was located just outside Philadelphia past Villanova University. She picked up Blood Meridian and the second book assigned for tonight’s class discussion, Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and tossed them in her backpack with her notebook.
She felt exulted by Morrison’s wrenching use of language, as though Morrison were a maestro with the entire lexicon as her orchestra. If she could someday articulate on paper her particular perception of a thing half as well, she would be happy. No, she would not, she thought, pushing past the cliché to her own truth. She wanted to write better than Morrison, better than McCarthy, or Sapphire, better than Woolf or Faulkner, or at the very least, to be memorable. Paradoxically she sometimes felt diminished and ashamed reading Morrison’s moving, but relentless, naming of the parasitical nature of white freedom, in Playing in the Dark. She was excited but apprehensive about tonight’s class. Would she be expected to defend white authors, the white race? Was it a coincidence that they were discussing both books the same night?
Zara pulled on her bell-bottom blue jeans over bikini panties. She clasped the padded bra, pulled the cups around front, and slipped the straps over her shoulders. She held up the olive green sweater with the small gold Z appliqué placed off-center near her right shoulder. Her mom was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, and secretly knit the sweater for Zara as a birthday gift. Before her mom passed last year, she made her promise never to change her name from Zarathustra. Nietzsche had changed her life, her mom insisted, and she and Zara’s father, who died in a car accident when she was five, were reading together, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und, when Zara was still in the womb. They decided to name their greatest achievement together, whether boy or girl, after the book Nietzsche considered his masterpiece.
My mom has been the greatest influence in my life, dear reader, so here I am, named after a prophet, bred with a passion for literature, and attending an all-black college.
She pulled the sweater over her head, brushed her hair, slipped into clogs, grabbed backpack and keys, and waved to mom and dad sitting in matching urns on the coffee table in her living room.
We are not alone, dear reader, yet we are all in solitude, in crowds, rush hour traffic, packed speed trains, movie houses filled to capacity, in take-out lines at the fast food restaurant, and stadium church pews.
She sped toward the highway and over the pale green Walt Whitman Bridge in the VW bug her mother left her. I am in solitude two hours each day in traffic, listening to screaming advertisers, monotonous rap, or the music of deified dead men, she pondered. Today in the fast lane, every time she slowed enough to leave a cautioned cushion of space between cars, another car from the other lane jumped in front of her, and slowed to the crawl of the line.
The third time this happened she noticed it was the same sandpebble beige Kia Sportage that cut close in front of her two times prior. The license plate was from Indiana, customized, on a quite attractive sea blue, green and light purple background of leaves and the outline of a small pastoral town, obscured by seven personal letters in Arial and darker blue: M A R T O N E. So, this witty nitwit has read Martone or is Martone, Zara shouted, and speeded up closer to make sure no one else took her safe driving precautions as an entrance into her lane. She studied the M A R T O N E car as it swerved too close to the separated white lines on the right, and quickly corrected itself.
Zara glanced away at the billboard that attracted her gaze everyday at this point on the highway. It informed: time 5:24 pm, temp. 45 degrees, humidity 65%, and NW wind 5% in gigantic red numbers and letters. Her eyes returned to the road, although they had been cautiously bouncing from the billboard to M A R T O N E during the entire episode. She focused back to the highway and M A R T O N E had disappeared again. She sped up to fill the small gap so M A R T O N E or any other lane whore could not zip in front. If the car in front of me stopped suddenly, she thought, I would smash into the window shield cushioned by my airbag while the front of my car slammed through the back window of the other car, possibly crushing my legs and severing my spinal chord so that I will be a quadriplegic for my middle and sunset years, or die instantly from the impact. She slowed down just as the entire lane came to a stand still. She again gave more space to the car she was following and M A R T O N E, driving with methodical madness, whizzed in front of her.
She could not see the driver and perhaps the driver could not see her because the entire back window was plastered with bumper stickers. She began tailgating M A R T O N E in order to read them. All of them were red on white and seemed identical. They read: I Was Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her mouth fell open, and she stomped the brakes several times to avoid smashing into M A R T O N E. The stickers even covered the spare tire on the back below the window. The line began moving slowly at about ten miles per hour, the perfect speed for Zara to count the number of stickers.
If you have read Martone, dear reader, you know why. For the ten minutes it took to move two miles I was able to count forty-five stickers, twice. The moment I finished counting, MARTONE sped up, changed lanes and took the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit, presumably toward Interstate Route Seventy to Pittsburgh, through Columbus, into Indianapolis, and onto Interstate Sixty-Nine directly to beloved Fort Wayne. The lane loomed open in front of me for at least a half mile when M A R T O N E turned off. A black Hummer with tinted windows honked angry and revved past me, then crossed back over in my empty lane and sped down Interstate Seventy-Six. The Kia had been maneuvering in front of me, I realized, slowing down and leaving spans of car space in front of it, forcing me to read the bumper stickers, to count them, and check to see if all forty-five read: Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana! I felt like I had been violated, toyed with, and then left in my solitude to continue my commute to class. Everything happens for a reason, and somehow I knew M A R T O N E, whomever the driver, had driven hundreds of miles, to manipulate me into reading the 45 bumper stickers that all said the same damn thing. I wanted to dial 911, but there was no highway law against irritating, punkish acts. What was the point? Who was driving M A R T O N E?
There was no question in Zara’s mind that the name M A R T O N E on the custom license plate and the 45 stickers were intended to duplicate the Michael Martone by Michael Martone novel the class had read and analyzed at the beginning of the semester. Would Kelly and Angelica go this far to tease her because of the Nabakov crack?
She pulled into the parking lot near Overcome Hall, but could not find a parking space. M A R T O N E had made her late for Morrison, she cursed. She drove down the narrow cobbled stone driveway to the parking area next to Let Freedom Ring Science building, across from Fannie Lou Hamer Library, half the campus away. Spotting an open space, it seemed the only one left in the small rectangular parking lot, she wheeled the bug in sharply, shifted into neutral, then park, when she heard loud obnoxious honking. She squinted in her rear view mirror at a huge black military tank. Baffled, she pulled up the emergency brake and jumped out of the car. It was the big black hummer she had seen on the interstate, although she did not feel certain, because of the M A R T O N E distraction.
Apparently, dear reader, I’d taken its parking space. Right or wrong, I wasn’t going to move, I felt more compelled to get to my class than acquiesce a gas guzzling Hummer. I grabbed my backpack, locked my door and hurried in the opposite direction from the Hummer, past my car, to the small beaten path that led to class, without looking back. I ignored the loud distant yell, Hey! It was six-thirty. I eased into the packed class, and every chair was taken. Sapphire stood speaking at the head of the class, Morrison sat to the side behind her, dressed elegantly but simply, in earth tones, a necklace of pearls, her dreadlocks, shades of silver gray, braided back. The room was electric with spirits of Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved and all the stories Morrison had given birth, crowded in with us.
I reached as quietly as I could in the closet for a chair and nestled myself between Ayasha and Whitney, who graciously made room for me. It was nearing the end of the semester, and of course, I knew everyone in the classroom, if not by name by sight, but with a guest lecturer like Morrison, I was not surprised to see a new face around the long oak table. Nevertheless, this individual, sitting in the front to the left of Sapphire startled me, and our eyes locked immediately. Her glare was so strong, and so naked, that I glanced, nonchalantly, behind me to make certain her light brown eyes were intended for my own, that were the exact same color. Yet even more macabre, and what had nearly made me scream, was that this tall, thin, very dark black woman was wearing an olive green knitted sweater identical to my own with a gold appliqué of the letter S above her right breast just below the shoulder. I knew this was not possible, yet I was seeing it across the room as clearly as I could see Sapphire and Morrison. I stared back at her, too startled, too confused, too frustrated to look away. This should have been another dream but it was not. The woman’s hostile gaze dropped from my face, and I realized my right hand was covering my left breast. I removed it, shaking as a single leaf in a rushing breeze, opened my backpack, placed my books and notebook on the table, and searched through the bottom of my pack for a pen. When I looked back towards Sapphire, the woman’s attention had turned there as well, smiling bone white teeth.
The discussion was going strong. Jamal commented, without raising his hand like always, that he did not like McCarthy’s authorial tone in the book. He found it disturbing in its arrogance, that placed the Glanton Gang within the Nietzsche theory of beyond good and evil, specifically the Judge. It seemed, Jamal went on and on, McCarthy was equating the American notion of manifest destiny with the insane actions of these bloodthirsty murderers, and was somehow justifying that it had all led to our American democracy, the richest and most powerful nation in the world today.
Didn’t it though? Someone called out.
No it did not, Jamal spoke, our democracy today, if you want to call it that, is because of the resistance and corrections forced upon the body politic by people of color, women, gays, and white folks willing to abandon their privilege. Otherwise, we’d still be treated like the Glanton Gang did the Indians, Mexicans, Metizos, and Africans. They are all niggers really, is what Glanton says on page one hundred and fifty-five: If we don’t kill ever nigger here we need to be whipped and sent home.
What does that have to do with McCarthy? He’s writing the story from the point of view of the Gang, not the niggers? Benjamin added. There was laughter, and hands raised quick throughout the room. Morrison was expressionless; she seemed interested in the comments, yet aloof.
I felt the light brown eyes channeling in my direction, trying to lock me into her wavelength, but I ignored whatever the girl was doing, and raised my hand, looking at Sapphire. She pointed at me.
McCarthy, I argued, is doing something here that is much more powerful than writing the politically correct version of how the west was won. He’s depicting these men as Godless, ruthless, blood and gore seeking, as they probably were …
Before I could finish, the vicious-eyed woman interrupted, blunt and intolerant. She argued, McCarthy’s depictions in this story are no different from any other American western …
I returned the favor and cut her off. In the American western, heroes like John Wayne wore the white hats …
She retaliated. It doesn’t matter what color the hat is, it’s what color your skin is whether you prevail. Isn’t that who prevails in Blood Meridian, white men like John Wayne? She sat up on the edge of her chair and delivered each word to me like accusations rather than statements, daring me to answer.
I did not hesitate. You’re equating the Judge, who is like the devil, with John Wayne?
Morrison looked up at the woman, then squarely at me momentarily, from the text she had been perusing while listening to the dialogue. Sapphire pointed to another raised arm.
But Jamal jumped in, stating, Nietzsche says that God is dead, and that’s McCarthy’s authorial subtext throughout.
Actually, and I directed my comment to Jamal, to shut out the light brown glare, Nietzsche theorizes that there never was a God, but that people created him for their needs, and his point is, now that people no longer need God, he is dead.
Jamal added, the euthanasia of Christianity.
No one spoke for moments.
Isn’t the Gang killed by the Yuma Indians? Ayasha questioned, don’t they prevail in the story as well? Yes, a few voices agreed throughout the room.
Zara ventured. Maybe it’s extremely difficult for a writer to show evil, to perceive the world through those eyes without apology, the way McCarthy does.
Maybe it’s even harder to write humanity in all people! The light brown-eyed woman barked back at Zara.
Shoot, I love McCarthy, Ayasha said. She pat her chest and spoke, he gives me permission to tell my story. I don’t have to care about how certain people are portrayed. I can just tell my story.
There was silence.
What I find really annoying—Lai Cho, a Chinese American student spoke. Both of her hands were outstretched, palms up, and she continued to shake them for emphasis as she talked—is that people of color are always the ones running through the streets with Napalm burning their asses off, in some European’s tragic story. I mean, it’s not that I don’t agree with other critiques of McCarthy’s admittedly powerful narrative, like that the judge is evil and the kid is some Christ-like figure. I’m just fed-up, for heaven’s sake, with being the nameless minority in these stories.
We? I thought, why do Asians seem to share the same attitude as whoever is in the majority?
Morrison looked around the room, without a positive or negative expression.
There was contemplative silence.
I was livid about the political direction the discussion had taken. Listen, I shouted, I felt this book, and it’s not about some racial disrespect thing. I slammed my fist down on the desk and yelled, just write your own shit.
My nemesis stood up, stabbed her pen into her pad, and said with a whisper that singed, we do, but it’s not allowed in the white pedagogy.
Breathe, every body, Sapphire said, as she stepped to the front of the class. Let’s take the break now so we won’t be interrupted during the discussion with our guest, Toni Morrison.
Chairs banged, and most rose to stretch or leave the room, glancing as non-conspicuously as possible at Morrison’s every move. Zara stretched on her toes and shook her arms, then began rummaging her backpack for money for the vending machines downstairs. Morrison was standing, looking out the window into what appeared to be a radical change in the weather. It had been an average day, but now the wind had picked up and the night had come sooner and darker, accompanied by dense clouds.
Zara walked tentative in Morrison’s direction, deciding not to approach her if she remained facing the windows, but Morrison suddenly turned and they were face to face. Zara did not know what to expect from a book cover that had come alive and was now standing before her. She felt a soft, firm, brown hand that was cool on its palm but warmed as Morrison placed her other hand atop their handshake. Zara was taller than Morrison who appeared grand even in the fluorescence of a classroom. She was not smiling, per se, her glossed lips turned slightly up at one corner of her mouth, and her eyes searched Zara’s. What is your name? Morrison asked. Zara, Zarathustra. Morrison’s mouth opened and her eyes brightened. She had not released Zara’s hand and now pulled her forward into a hug. Morrison’s locks against the side of her face were soft, coarse, and smelled of lavender. My goodness young lady, is that your birth name? Zara beamed, proud to receive the attention, thinking simultaneously what she would text message Kelly and Angelica. My parents loved Nietzsche, she told Morrison. Morrison’s eyes followed her face from chin to hair and back to her eyes. Your life must be … Morrison started to say, but in Zara’s nervousness, she anticipated her comment, and interjected, you mean difficult being the only white student in the class?
Morrison’s smile erased. No, you are right where you belong. I was going to say, being Zarathustra.
She released my hand and without another word turned back to the storm that had arrived, thrusting thousands of silent raindrops against a wall of windows. Other students approached Morrison and she greeted them the same, with a handshake or hug, and asked their name. Zara made her way downstairs to the vending machines for a chilled cherry coke. The machine sucked her dollar the first time. Ayasha and Whitney walked up, smiled but said nothing.
Zara sprinted back up the stairs through the lobby. As she entered the hallway just outside the classroom, the young woman with the S on the exact sweater Zara was wearing, stepped out of the shadows where she had been waiting. You know who I am, she shouted at Zara, and stepped up only inches away, their faces almost touching. They were the exact same height and the young black woman’s arms were as threatening as her face, sprouting out like wings at her sides, her thumbs parked in the pockets of her tight jeans. Before Zara could think, she had pushed the girl away from her. Get away from me, you’re crazy, Zara screamed. Sapphire and several students came running into the hallway. What’s going on? Someone said. Zara saw Benjamin askance step to the beige telephone on the wall and mumble into the receiver. The woman’s gold S cast off a mesmerizing brightness in the direct white light where Zara had pushed her. She stood there expressionless now, bent slightly at the knees to maintain her balance. Sapphire instructed the students back into the classroom, after campus security arrived, and closed the door.
Zara and the light brown-eyed woman were told to leave the campus and that no further incidents would be tolerated. The women walked away in opposite directions, a security guard following each, until both had vacated Overcome Hall.
It was raining hard now in the blowing wind, but Zara made no effort to cover herself, her disappointment so great. When she arrived near her car the dark figure standing beside it did not alarm her. Zara did not slow her pace, but walked even faster toward the woman, fumbling in her backpack for her small canister of pepper spray, and then realized, she had grown comfortable on the campus and forgotten her protection for unexpected moments like this. She arrived at the car and stood before the black woman was standing without cover in the rain as well, her long nappy brown hair blowing across her wet face.
The woman did not seem as angry anymore, or had taken heed of Campus Security, and she addressed Zara with earnest conviction. Held me up on the highway, took my parking space. I’m driving a big black Hummer and you can’t see me? She shook her head and the nappy curls flung away from her face. Better awaken, Miss Z.
Zara said nothing, but stared stony defiance back at her. The woman turned away and strutted like a runway model in the persistent drizzle, towards her car at the end of the lot. She raised her arm towards the huge car and it beeped. A sliver of lightning sliced the sky above them, illuminating the darkness, as the Hummer lights came on and the engine started. The woman continued walking to her car.
Hey, who are you? Zara yelled after her, still angry.
The woman turned back to Zara, her eyes bewitching, even from the distance, like white ash coated coals in a brilliant fire. Superman, she hollered back, and slapped the S on her sweater. She climbed up and slammed the car door, and the Hummer backed out, its brake lights flooding the wet pavement with redness. Zara stood in solitude next to the VW in the wet wind, listening to the breaking thunder over Let Freedom Ring science building.
I met privately with Sapphire in her office later that week, and learned that Superman’s name is Sharon. She was invited to attend the Morrison presentation as a freelance writer preparing an article for Essence magazine, more free advertising for the college. She never wrote it, or it was never published.
However, Sharon had called Sapphire the next day to apologize and told her her mother had knit my sweater. Her mother is a Registered Nurse in the cancer unit at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden where my mother had been one of her patients. Apparently, my mother had admired the sweater she had knit for Sharon and asked her to knit an exact replica, a clone with a Z, for me. Why my mother claimed she had knit it herself is a mystery she took to the urn.
This conundrum has driven Zara to write this story. She has sent it as a simultaneous submission to seven journals each week, and began receiving rejections only weeks later. The rejections have been all polite, brief, form letters returned in her SASE. Except one editor or editor’s assistant or editor’s secretary or a graduate assistant assisting the secretary, or a dissenting member of a roundtable of graduate students flexing their MFA chops, wrote a short note, that he would be interested to know where M A R T O N E had gotten the bumper stickers.
I am not discouraged. I will continue to submit to seven journals each week until you, dear reader, have read my story.