The Days of Afrekete: A Novel by Asali Solomon

Author:Asali Solomon [Solomon, Asali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374140052
Google: f0sjEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-10-18T23:00:00+00:00

21

“You sure are spending a lot of time with this gay white man,” said Verity a few months later.

After Winn moved to Philadelphia, he and Liselle became constants. They talked on the phone like middle school girls and went downtown to watch art house movies: Rushmore, The Thin Red Line, and a revival of Thelma & Louise. Liselle showed Winn South Street, where he complained about the grease smell and the grimy kids begging with their dogs. “Why would anyone come here on purpose?” he asked, unimpressed by the folk art gallery or the hat store. On more successful outings, she took him to Robin’s Books or to Rittenhouse Square Park; they saw the Roots and Digable Planets perform at Electric Factory; once, when they were downtown, she pointed out the Gallery mall, afraid that if she stepped inside she would revert to an awkward teenager attending Masterman and living with her mother.

“I’m showing him the city,” Liselle told Verity. “What does gay have to do with anything? Besides, I don’t think he’s gay.”

“But you are, right? Gay?”

Liselle queried herself, as she often did, about why she spoke to Verity as much as she did. But she did not ask herself why she was spending so much time with Winn. She knew why: it was fun. He made a mockery of most aspects of his life: his staid family, the arrogant idiots at the firm where he worked. When she told him about the dreariness of her childhood, the routine deprivations of being Black, female, and gay in America, his interest made it all an ironic, hilarious story. Instead of swelling, tragic strings in the background, there was only his laughter. And he always paid for dinner.

There was another thread between them. Once, during a twenty-­five-­dollar cab ride back to her house from downtown, Winn had said, “I don’t know why, but you make me feel calm.” This moved Liselle, who’d been nicknamed for a predator, who’d tried to throw a woman out of a window, who’d wound up alone.

One weekend Winn couldn’t hang out because he had a date with someone named Shannon.

“I can’t tell if that name is pretentious or trashy for a white person,” Liselle said to Winn the next Friday at a happy hour in a little Manayunk bar by the river. Many of the doors they darkened she would never have ventured through as a Black woman alone.

He laughed. “What did Shannon ever do to you? She’s just an innocent, breasty paralegal from New Jersey.”

Liselle thought about how she’d tried to get a job as a paralegal, the extreme femme-­ness of the women at that office, the secretaries, paralegals, and the sole woman lawyer. She shook her head. “I thought you were better than that.”

“Am I, though?” Winn said. “She’s the same age as me. It’s not Working Girl or any of those Melanie Griffith movies. Did you see the one where the father hires her as a prostitute for his—­”

“But do you think that’s

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