Excerpt of the Zambia Wrap
I hadn’t expected to be dating this soon, online of all places. Match dot com, to be exact, before Tinder and the other swipe apps came along. The dates started off as harmless encounters with African-American women of various sizes and skin shades, presented as filterable thumbnails, all there awaiting a click. The site kept suggesting women in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, even Boston, but I confined my search to Sacramento. As the state capital, it drew people from every corner of California. State workers, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and recent arrivals. These were more profiles than I could ever answer, and I saw no reason to drive, let alone fly, further afield in search of romance.
Earlier, I had tried Great Expectations on Howe Avenue. They made us fill out partner-preference forms, then handed us binders of strangers and played videos of confident love-seekers. If someone caught your eye, a staff member presented you with a menu of contracts.
I remember feeling strange walking into the office, worried that someone would recognise me. Once inside though, I noticed the place was crowded. I felt relieved. Apparently, I was not the only one looking for love. But the relief didn’t last. I discovered they required a contract and membership fees. I was making $7.25 an hour shelving books, and here the cheapest membership cost of $1500 offered almost nothing. The packages that would unlock more services ran as high as $6000. This wasn’t my place, thankfully.
I fell in love with Match, which allowed free profile browsing and required only a small monthly subscription only after you started contacting women who interested you. The site came highly recommended by a co-worker who said she’d met her husband there and insisted I give it a try too. So, there I was, clicking my way through profiles, encountering potential wives. If someone caught your eye, you sent her a wink and hoped one came back. I loved the messaging that followed. Eventually, though, the women wanted to talk on the phone. I skipped the phone stage whenever I could, preferring to meet in person first. For them to learn who I was before deciding what to make of my accent.
Of course, I was a confident African man, and most women seemed to like that about me, but I wasn’t sure if the accent was always considered sexy, or worse, if it had ever been regarded so. It had sometimes been a point of comedy in my marriage, when my wife would grow annoyed as I butchered words like “bureau”, “debt”, or “fax”. She would say things like, ‘It’s bitch not beach! Get it right!’ Even I laughed sometimes, words like fax machine and spreadsheet became fucks machine, spreadshit.
I met five women in public. Two at Steve’s Pizza, two at Panera Bread, and the first at the Subway where my roommate worked. When I told him about the date, less than a week after I started browsing profiles, he insisted I bring her.
‘Come eat at my joint. I’ll hook you up,’ he said.
‘I can surely use that discount,’ I said. ‘Just don’t make it obvious.’
He spent the next few days laughing at me whenever the subject came up, as though he didn’t believe I would go through with it. My only concern was that she might suggest another place.
But she told me to choose.
He rang up our purchases, pretending not to know me, but later I became convinced the woman had figured out our plan. Whether she noticed the way he grinned when he handed me my receipt, or caught me glancing toward the counter, I don’t know.
He said he would give his verdict afterwards, whether I had “hit the jackpot” and whether she was worth keeping. But he never really did, and I didn’t ask.
For our next meeting, she chose a Round Table Pizza, where I suspected she had someone keeping an eye on us. She picked the table, far in the back.
Across from us sat a woman with a newspaper who occasionally looked up in our direction. I never saw her order any food.
My date, Shaunice, speaking in a low, slow voice, told me she found people interesting, their habits, their little ways. She didn’t have many friends, but she enjoyed people watching.
‘Are you watching me right now?’ I asked.
‘I’m looking at you,’ she said, no hint of a smile.
She had a serious face. Still, she was pretty, though not as polished as in her profile photographs, which showed her with a lighter complexion than she appeared in person. No one ever looked exactly like their profile. I suspect I didn’t either. Still, my two photos had gotten me dates.
‘So, what do you plan to do in this life, when you finish college?’ she asked.
‘I plan to be with you,’ I said, laughing.
‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘or should I say, before that?’
‘I sell books,’ I said.
‘That sounds like what you do now,’ she said. ‘How about your future?’ She looked at me with the same unsmiling face, and I felt interrogated.
I took a sip of water.
‘I work at Borders Books.’
‘I love Borders,’ she said. ‘How come I haven’t seen you there?’
‘I’m at the Davis branch, near the university.’
The woman with the newspaper stood up and walked out.
‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘What do you do?’
‘I am a parole officer,’ she said. ‘Before that, I was with the police force, SACPD.’
I didn’t expect that. When I joined Match, I knew I would meet people I would never have encountered otherwise. I just hadn’t expected a parole officer and former police officer to appear quite so early.
‘I can smell criminal behaviour and scams from a distance,’ she said, not laughing.
I laughed instead.
I moved on to other women.
The initial thrill lay in discovering how they looked in person. Only two of the women matched their profile pictures. They were, like me, ugly at first glance, but looked at longer, you began to notice curves, different shades of black, fine hairstyles. I didn’t mind talkative dates, so long as they smiled or generously laughed. One of them, four years my junior, boomed, especially when tipsy on Red Zinfandel, after just one glass. Corona Light remained my drink of choice—I never got drunk on it. I would joke that I drank it for hydration.
What I had going for me, besides the accent, which some women called sexy, was a sudden flash of a smile and what they described as an African hotness, whatever that meant. Yet those same qualities seemed to turn away the women who lost interest in a second date.
Linda had no time for accents. Patricia found the whole idea of Africanness off-putting. Then there was Zaire, pronounced Zaya, who informed me within minutes of meeting me that I smelled. She was right! I had decided it was perfectly reasonable to stop for a jog at McKinley Park before our date. That had been intentional, not the stinking, but the arriving in athletic apparel. The 72-hour deodorant let me down. I decided she stunk too and never looked back.
But at last, I met Euginia, whose name rhymed with Virginia, my high school crush. She had sharp profile photos, and I liked that she looked regal in her short-cropped hair. She replied to my wink instantly, and soon she was sending over a few raw, candid snapshots, unpolished glimpses of her carrying shopping bags or striding on hiking trail. I countered with a photo from my rural Zimbabwe days. She wrote back to say I looked hot, and the place, Mhototi, looked like heaven on Earth. I completely agreed with her and felt I had a special connection with her already.
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