White Girl

by Divya Maniar

“Could—could this have somewhat of a postcolonial edge to it?” She flicked a few strands of light red hair out of her face, leaning back in her seat in the front row with a near frown. The chair reached the end of its range of motion, backrest straining downward just far enough for her to be sitting at a hundred-and-maybe-twenty-degree angle. She breathed once, twice. Deeply, with a sense of importance. Her words now carrying the impossible weight of a historical trauma she had chosen to speak on; this trauma danced on her thin and trembling lip, a lip which would have been pale without the nude lip liner that she reapplied at forty-minute intervals, using her webcam as a mirror. 

And then she turned, softly, quietly, to look at me. She looked expectant, as though I would blurt out some sort of affirmation or addition. As though my approval of what she had just said was a matter of extreme urgency. 

It was just a prerequisite class, a survey of literary theory. It was unclear why she looked so engaged all the time, so interested, especially when anyone mentioned Edward Said or Frantz Fanon. It was borderline obscene. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, even when not looking directly at her. She always pursed her lips together as she nodded and opened her eyes so wide that they looked as though they were about to burst.

I hated to admit that she was pretty, thin lips or not. Her green eyes had flecks of brown, and these eyes were so delicate and so warm that I almost failed to notice the desperation behind them. It was a pathetic desperation I knew well. It was a want for acceptance, which said little other than hey, you. You’re allowed to come in. You’re in the club now. Maybe I should have disengaged right at that moment. Maybe I should have ignored her. But I couldn’t. I enjoyed being, for once, on the right side, looking pensively over somebody’s qualifications; more than this, I enjoyed her attention, as I did the attention of any beautiful person who looked at me with any kind of longing at all. A certain sense of excitement at being noticed, at being desired, even if that desire was wrapped up in this troubling dynamic between us. How embarrassing it was, actually, that I wanted so badly for her to notice me. 

I leaned forward, bringing my face closer to hers. I said, loudly, confidently: “Yes. I agree with Annie. There is a sense of Orientalism to this passage. I’m noticing, in this text, a clear triangulation between femininity, primitivity, and imperialism.” 

She beamed.

She followed me on Instagram after class. Her profile icon was her shadow, a pretty silhouette against a yellow wall. A tease. I set a timer for two hours on my phone. After the alarm rang, I followed back. I never wanted to seem too desperate on social media.

That night, stalking her profile for an inordinately long period of time, I sifted through exactly what I had expected to see: a grid of artfully taken selfies and close-ups of furniture, artwork, light fixtures. She always found the right things to photograph. The light show in the basement of Dia Beacon; protest art from MASS MoCA; pretty lines from poetry were scattered everywhere. Everything was a pop of color, as though she was trying to tell her audience that her intelligence manifested itself in a beam of neon light. Pink, yellow, red. Three months ago, she took a picture of herself with a bright violet sign at a club, which said PLEASURE BEGINS HERE. 

I wondered if she left her friends to take that picture, ducking away mid-dance to stand in front of the glowing wall of text and find the best angle for it.  

I wanted to have light hair that looked, in the sunlight, like a reddish halo; I wanted to have a thin lip and pale skin; I wanted to feel important rather than defeated when I pointed out a text’s “postcolonial implication”; I wanted, above all, to live my life as though I were on stage, tweaking the bells and whistles of my public persona, knowing always that the consequence of messing up would be humiliation rather than subjugation, a small personal loss instead of an earthquake of identity. 

People like me had to manage their appearances not to satisfy a curatorial drive. Rather, we did it to survive, to avoid being underestimated. People like me sometimes had to resort to invisibility; sometimes, I chose not to say anything at all in class, purely for the satisfaction of knowing that nobody was owed even an inch of my interiority. I wondered what it felt like to be so perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the world that the act of differentiating oneself, or even and at the very least, the attempt to differentiate oneself, could be so lighthearted and simple. 

I wanted to be her, but I could not. Maybe the next best thing was to want her. As though the possession of a shiny object would be a draught for my own dullness. Maybe that’s why I felt this debilitatingly and shamefully attracted to her. Maybe. 

It would have been simpler if my crush remained unreciprocated, or at least unrealized; she would pass in and out of my life swiftly, the way a train moved through a station. Instead, she messaged me. 

Annie_x95: hi! really liked meeting you in class. coffee sometime? 

dinahmp: sure ☺ when works for u?

Over lunch, as I gave Noor some updates, she laughed and told me to try my best not to think about how annoying Annie was. “Can’t take the ‘white’ out of a white girl,” she said. I nodded. I chuckled. It was true. Some things were impossible. White girls were white girls, no matter what. The only thing to be fixed was me, maybe, because no matter what I did there was still a gnawing feeling in my stomach, an erratic churning.

Though initially I had neglected to tell Noor about my upcoming date, she knew me well enough to see through the blurriness of my resentment and into the strange clarity of my desire. We ate our dining hall pasta, which was cooked nearly to the point of formlessness, and the red oil slipped down the lines on the sides of each misshapen cylinder. We ate and we went back to her room to do sheet masks. It was a Sunday. I had class the next day, and a maybe-date with Annie right after. “Just cancel on her if she’s making you nervous,” Noor said, patting her mask down and looking like a little ghost in her white T-shirt. 

“That’s probably the right thing to do,” I said, nodding. 

“But you won’t do it,” she said. 

“No,” I admitted, lying down on her bed. My mask was cucumber and hers was rose. We passed time watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on her laptop. “It’s a bad show,” she said. 

“I know,” I said. We laughed and kept watching, even after we took the masks off at the twenty-minute mark. 

By the time I went home, snow had begun to fall onto the quad, landing lightly on blades of grass, which stood still and erect in the cold night, like the hair that stuck out of my goose pimples.

In class the next day, Annie was uncharacteristically quiet. It seemed that she had not done much of the reading. Or maybe she had a sore throat. We made fraught eye contact, lingering for moments at a time in the cage of each other’s glances. Let me in, her looks seemed to say. Let me wear your skin, walk around. Let me feel like I belong here, where you stand. In the class. The one brown girl surrounded by all us white people. Let me into your history. Let me traverse your territory, which is so bountiful and sunlit and foreign. 

Though gatekeeping was said to be a bad thing, I sometimes wondered what the alternative was. Did I just have to watch these performances of allyship, pretend they did not make me seethe? It was not just her, and it was not just this. 

It was a big class. 

There was the vague Orientalism of the East Asian Studies majors who were in Japanese 100 because they liked anime. 

There were girls who flicked their dating profiles to “Everyone” once a week and browsed images of other girls that they wished they were attracted to if only to assert to everybody and themselves that they were more than just a boring white straight girl. This was incredibly inconvenient to those of us who swiped right on them wishfully, only to, inevitably, be ghosted; my profile, doubtlessly, gathered dust in the inboxes of tens of attractive yet regrettably heterosexual women.

With all these characters, and me, packed together in the glass-walled room, there was a palpable awkwardness in the air, a thickness which smelled of pretense and collegiate insecurity. 

Thankfully, this time, class was only fifty minutes long, and we were being lectured on Hegel. Nobody had very strong feelings, so there was not very much discussion, and I spent the time browsing for bikinis online. Summer was a while away, but online shopping was therapeutic because I loved to project, and to imagine. I imagined myself on some volcanic sand beach. I imagined myself smelling the Pacific Ocean air. 

I imagined a lot of things, before I heard the shuffling of papers, and looked around to see everybody packing away their things, and Annie, her tote bag hanging off her shoulder, walking toward my desk.

We walked to a small coffee shop on Wickenden Street. She moved quite slowly, though, because the platforms on her shoes were high and the pavement was slippery from the night’s snow. “Sorry,” she kept saying. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I said that it was okay, that I did not mind.

She held the door for me to a small corridor-like room, with a little wooden bar at one end and a soft green couch at the other, which was occupied by two men wearing matching grey beanies and discussing something very specific and inaccessible about modernist architecture. I ordered matcha and she ordered a chai latte, but with almond milk. She turned to me and said she was vegan, as though her choice of almond milk needed qualification. We took our drinks outside, to a tiny circular table that had been set up on the sidewalk next to a space heater. “This place is cute,” I said, on the precipice of a shiver. 

“Yeah,” she said, perking up. “It is! I found it recently. They’re only open sometimes, though, and they don’t really post anywhere when they’re closed. I’m glad I didn’t just make you walk all the way here for nothing.” 

I laughed nervously. “So, this class, huh?” 

She nodded in her characteristic way. “I’m really liking it. I feel like they tried to make the syllabus diverse, you know?” 

“Mmm,” I agreed, stooping to sip my matcha.

“And I really like the things you’ve contributed. Especially that week on Orientalism. I feel like I learned some stuff, so, well, thanks.” 

I didn’t really know how to respond to her gratitude, which felt, all at once, sincere and facetious. “Oh,” I said, “It’s not—well, no problem, I guess.” 

“That was really awkward of me,” she said, “wasn’t it? To thank you, I mean.”

At this point, I was not so sure what she wanted of me, and I was fairly certain that she did not know either. We sat there, watching each other and watching the cars drive by. We were both bundled up in puffy jackets, with scarves around our necks. Her hand was placed very delicately on the table. She wore an opal ring on her pointer finger. My hand was not too far away. I wanted to inch it closer, but stopped myself.  

“No,” I said, finally, “it’s fine.” 

When we finished our drinks, she asked me where I lived. I told her which dorm it was. I also told her about my roommate and the two boys that lived across from us. 

“I live near here, actually,” she then said, pointing down Transit Street. “You can come in, if you want. It’s pretty cold out.”

Her room had lots of posters. Hokusai and Monet, and some vintage European gallery adverts. Movie posters. The Grand Budapest Hotel, Chungking Express. She had a record player, but I did not sift through her vinyl collection. She had notebooks in a neat stack on the desk. There was one splayed open on her bed, with colorful sticky notes and neat writing. It looked like the kind of notebook that people shared on study blogs: perfect in a way that was much too high maintenance for most of us. Before I could think on it for much longer, she closed it and put it on the bedside table. “You can sit anywhere,” she said. I opted to sit on the edge of the bed. “I’d love to, you know, hear more about you. Like. I just realized I don’t know where you’re from, and what you major in, and all of that.” 

“I’m from India,” I told her.

“I’m more boring,” she said, “I’m just from New York.” 

“Why’s New York boring?” 

“It’s not but, it’s also, like. It’s just right there, you know,” she said, pointing at nothing. “So near and really normal. Tell me about India, though. I’m sure it’s beautiful.” As she sat next to me on the bed, the mattress squeaked and I felt myself sink deeper into it, our combined weight building more tension in the springs. I was afraid to turn and look at her, knowing now that, if I did, our faces would be drawn close together. So I looked away. “I don’t have much to say about it,” I told her, “I don’t think it’s that cool or anything. It’s just where I’m from.” 

“Oh,” she said, stuttering. “Of course. Maybe that was insensitive of me. Do you miss home?”

I did not think it was that insensitive, but I let her believe that I did. I looked up, then out the window. I wanted her to think that I was uncomfortable. “Yeah,” I said, finally. “And my parents.” 

“I’m sure,” she said. “That must be hard. I’m sorry, again.”

Sorry. I liked that coming out of her mouth. I liked her mouth in general, but I hated that I liked it. I hated that I liked it so much. Sorry: it was a nebulous word that meant everything and nothing. A contradictory word expressing two conflicting desires: I know that I am wrong, and I want you to like me. 

And there was something about the moment, the airy afternoon in her house with its high ceilings and its wood-and-white furniture which looked like it came out of some influencer’s post––all the plants that sat against the wall by the big window and the paper towel that lay open with little cuttings on the sill. There was a certain magic in it, a magic which, without her, I would not be able to access. I would never buy new furniture or start raising a bonsai or trade seedlings with my neighbor. Some part of me always held on to the fact that my presence in this country was temporary, lasting only so long as my F-1 status held. My lifestyle was tenuous and sparse, nowhere near airy and spacious enough to accommodate ferns and crafting tables and billowy white dresses. She leaned forward a bit, and the sunlight caught in her hair. It glinted, as though it was bouncing off something metallic. I began to count the freckles on her cheeks. 

One, two, three, four—I realized too late into the kiss that she wanted to kiss me. Nine, ten. Her lips tasted sweet, of coconut. The new Glossier lip balm, I think. Both of us kept our mouths closed, planting kisses that were light and fluttery and furtive. Sixteen, seventeen. 

We did this for long enough that I lost count of the freckles, and she lost her sense of tentativeness, leaning in, finally, with more conviction. I matched her newfound fervor, even though a part of me still felt as though all of this was a mistake. 

I knew, even as I lay back on her bed as we kissed, that my resentment for her would never disappear. I could not wish it away; I resented her as a person but also as an ideal to which I never had the opportunity to live up. Still, I sat with her on her bed, hand clenching her goose-feather duvet as I mused internally that it was strange to be vegan and still have a goose-feather duvet. I began to reach for her, first tentatively, and soon enough with more confidence. Then I was atop her. 

It felt hypocritical of me to be sleeping with her, to be acting on a desire of which I was ashamed. I reminded myself that one can possess the things that one hates. Easily. Yes. It felt good to sleep with her. To despise her in such an intimate way. As I ran my finger down her cheek, I thought of all the annoying things she had ever said in class. I knew Noor would laugh at me, especially after I bitched about this girl every week. I groaned partly in pleasure and partly in regret.  

We lay in bed for a while after, both quiet. I looked over at her and her red hair, which fell lazily over the pillow. She was still the white girl in my class who irritated me even though there was no real ill intent on her part, and whom I hated even though I wished I did not; she was the white girl I resented for a whole array of reasons, but most of all because my resentfulness was a waste of energy, and I could not help but plunder so much of myself for her. 

When she looked at me, I imagined that she was confused as to what this whole interaction meant for her and her anti-racist praxis. Maybe she thought this would have changed something for her. It would have been a balm to the desperation she had felt, satisfied the desire to be let in, to “understand,” for lack of a better word, the “Other,” for lack of a better word.

I was struck suddenly with the fear that she slept with me not because she wanted me but because she wanted to want me, because she felt that it would be unfair of her not to want me just because I was brown. That would have been unequal, right? If I wanted her because she was beautiful and she wanted me out of a sense of pity. 

I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror across from her bed. Her body, white and covered in hair too thin and light to see. Mine, brown and scarred and stretch-marked. Maybe I just saw my flaws because I was more used to looking for them, but I still sat aghast for some time, and wondered why she had it so much better than me. But here I was in her bed in my underwear and nothing had changed in the long run because she was no closer to being a brown woman than I was to being a white one and all we could do was sit and gawk at each other and realize again and again that we were irredeemably different. 

She blinked her sun-catching eyes and reached out to touch my hand and hold it and squeeze it but I could not bring myself to squeeze hers back. Instead, I looked into the mirror and thought that this could be a painting, or a tastefully explicit photograph of the two of us. Could—could this have somewhat of a postcolonial edge to it? After all, it was the kind of visual that someone would project on a screen in class, only for a white girl to look at it, to ask that same damned question, feeling very pleased with herself.

Published August 7th, 2022