“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by ZZ Packer is a story that follows Dina, a young, poor black woman with unsteady identity through her first year at Yale; Dina is a surly, self-described misanthrope, singled out on her very first day of class when she says that if she were an object, she would be a revolver so that she could wipe out all of mankind. This statement lands her a year of psychiatric counseling and intrusive visits by campus staff in the name of her health, which she rebuts and avoids. Soon into this, a white stranger knocks on her door, crying, asking to be let in; Dina does not let her in until the stranger starts to recite a poem Dina loves, at which Dina throws open the door and calls her a plagiarist. The stranger turns out to be a young woman named Heidi who has a poetry class with Dina, and Heidi regales her troubles of a boy spreading rumors about their hook up, to which Dina said she thought she was a lesbian, and Heidi says she thought the same of Dina It leads to denial from both, Dina stating she likes no one at all, rejecting Heidi’s advances at friendliness. Dina shortly meets her assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Raeburn, an old, mellow man; briefly, Dina mentions how she hates her father. Heidi continues to try to befriend Dina until eventually, she convinces her to come to the dining hall together. During their meal. Heidi tells Dina about how she’s going on a date with the boy who was spreading rumors, and Dina grows unreasonably upset about this, anger only increasing when a boy hands them an invitation to a gay party.
Soon after, Dina and Heidi sign up as dishwashers in one of the Yale dining halls, leading to Dina showing Heidi how to kill a mouse stuck in the wall grates. Swiftly is the most painless way, Dina tells Heidi as she personally compares the mouse and her mother’s death but voices none of her genuine internal dialogue, heartless as she makes sure Heidi kills the mouse right. We soon return to another meeting with Dr. Raeburn, who asks Dina why she was so obsessed with the invitation to the gay party, and if she had ever had any romantic interest, following it up by saying he believes she’s having an identity crisis. Dina denies it, covering up by talking about a boy with nice shoes she met once while walking home with groceries, how he was kind and cute and offered to help her carry her groceries home; she conveniently leaves out that this offer made her freak out as she didn’t want a nice boy to see the poor area and home she lived in, and she ran from him. Dina lies to Dr. Raeburn, telling him that the boy and she went home and made out, but she senses the doctor doesn’t believe her, and it leaves her with an odd feeling. She feels jarred for the first time in the story, and when she gets home she thinks of her mother again, lost.
One night, after Dina and Heidi have just finished their dishwashing shifts late and are alone in the kitchens, Dina proposes they just “shower” with the cleaning guns in the kitchen instead of having to tramp back to the dorms first. Dina does it first without pause or shame, grateful to get clean, but Heidi is more hesitant. Dina stands for none of it, convincing Heidi to strip so she can clean up and shower; it becomes evident that Dina finds Heidi beautiful, and that she loves her in a way she cannot voice. Soon after continues a season of more casual intimacy, Dina and Heidi splitting the bed in Dina’s dorm to sleep, spending all their time in the dorm that winter, etc. One weekend, Dina returns home to Baltimore, and when she returns to campus, it’s ‘Coming Out Day.’ Heidi is at the forefront of a rally for it, proudly declaring herself a lesbian.
For weeks following, they don’t talk, until Heidi comes to Dina’s room to tell her that her mother is sick; Dina is at a loss of how to respond, words not coming out right. When Dina goes to Dr. Raeburn next, she explains how she said the wrong thing about death, that it is a big thing, but the world didn’t stop when her own mother died. The world doesn’t stop for things like that, so it can’t be a big deal at all. Dr. Raeburn seems to have a revelation, that Dina is “pretending,” but Dina doesn’t get what he means, ultimately ignoring it and pretending still.
Later, Dina gets news that Heidi’s mother has died, and she is invited to accompany Heidi to the funeral, all expenses paid. Dina goes to talk with Heidi about this, and they have their final confrontation as Dina just barely tries to make sense of the romantic aspect of their relationship, while Heidi has moved on and acknowledged that. Heidi’s mother is dead and still, Dina cannot stop pretending. Heidi leaves for the funeral alone, and Dina seems to drop out of school and go back to Baltimore to live with her aunt. She spends her days on the balconies, watching the street, and imagining visiting Heidi in Vancouver where the funeral is; there is but one exception where she imagines a perfect scenario where she is back in the dorm, free of all eyes on her, and Heidi comes to see her alone.
The chronic tension within the story is Dina’s general repression of her identity and self, while the acute tension is her entering Yale and her relationship with Heidi.
Dina as the main character is interesting to follow considering that when reading out a list of most of her character traits and the objectives, she seems unlikeable at best. She is blunt, reclusive, and obfuscates her actual feelings beneath layers of muddled thought and meaningless talk, moving almost aimlessly through the story, and yet, Dina is incredibly sympathetic. At the beginning of the story, in the only place she says her own name, she introduces herself as a revolver, a tool of destruction: “My name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I’d be a revolver,” and perhaps this should mark her as terrible, but then Dina seems to know this is the wrong thing to say the moment it reaches the air. She has an almost painful awareness of where her social cues have gone wrong, how she has irrevocably changed the image of herself in the rest of the gathered group’s eyes… This is but one example, but within the overall story she is blunt, rude, a revolver all in one, and ultimately the person she hurts most through these traits is herself, not others. Dina is not a good person, nor is she ever presented as one from this start, instead being shown as a struggling person whose flaws harm herself and her own relationships. Throughout the story, Dina is both the perpetrator and the victim of her own actions, creating an inherently sympathetic perspective as her life is shown rising and falling in waves. In addition, the way she struggles with her identity, parental relations, and money are familiar, and give a certain understanding, though never a justification, of her actions, generating further interest and sympathy.
In connection, it is Dina’s character arc that both centers the story and challenges our understanding of how a character arc should work. Salesses has remarkably little to say about character arcs in comparison to other definitions of his; he puts it as “How a character changes or fails to change,” but it’s enough. Does Dina, our main character, really change in this story? At the beginning of her time at Yale, Dina is isolated, coldly analytical, distanced from her own self, and self-destructive; by the end of the story, when she returns to Baltimore, she is still much the same. When she returns to Baltimore, she is still net 0 any kind of close relationship, unsteady in social situations, and unwilling to fully admit/commit to what she feels— that except now she wants, and that cannot be solved by pretending she does not. Dina, from teen years, has built herself on pretending; in one of the last scenes, she has an appointment with Dr. Raeburn, where he finally seems to grasp it saying:
“You construct stories about yourself and dish them out—one for you, one for you—” here he reënacted the process, showing me handing out lies as if they were apples.
Dina pretends that she is who she acts as— careless and cold, pretends her mother’s death did not mean something to her because it didn’t to the world, and, in some ways, pretends that this entire ordeal is only centered on the possibility of her being gay, not her entire fragile identity— balancing her race, class, sexuality, and idea of self. If this were a more standard story, her character arc could be classified neatly as the realization of her possible queerness, but as this story encapsulates a far larger topic, the narrative ends barely past the initial realization, the first possible step into revelation. At the conclusion of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Dina wants to have a single, vulnerable moment for the first time in many, many years. She tries to pretend it, imagining that the chance to reunite with Heidi is in a foreign, safely distant place in “some vague time in the future, deliberately vague, for people like me, who realign past events to suit themselves.” Dina attempts to separate the emotional experience from any possible reality, much like she did during the time of her mother’s death, seen earlier in:
[It was] the morning of my mother’s funeral. I’d been given milk to settle my stomach; I’d pretended it was coffee. I imagined I was drinking coffee elsewhere… Some Arabic country where I’d sit in a tented café and be more than happy to don a veil.
But with her love for Heidi, and her urge to see her again, Dina imagines a situation that is almost tangible:
But once I imagined Heidi visiting me. There would be no psychiatrists or deans. No boys with nice shoes or IP cashiers. Just me in my single room. She would knock on the door and say, “Open up.”
Here, Heidi would come to Dina’s dorm room, as she had so many times, and she would knock in that familiar way; their relationship would not be observed, pressured, analyzed. It would be vulnerable, honest; a type of genuine reality that Dina has pushed away since she was a child. Though Dina returns to Baltimore, seemingly the same as before Yale/ the start of the story, she has now been loved and wants to love, and that is a change, however minute. That is a character arc by Salesses’ own definition, even if thought incomplete by traditional media standards.
In regards to my own writing, I would like to steal/ mimic further the sectioning of the story and the way it feels like this grand middle point that is important on its own but will be passed through, will end and become the beginning of something else. I enjoyed the way Packer never lingered on anything for too long or rather anything that Dina wouldn’t have lingered on; the brief excerpts of the sessions with Dr. Raeburn and the conversation about Heidi’s mother’s cancer stood out in particular as they gave only what we needed to know if not less than that, keeping the dialogue natural and in a constant state of motion. This is also just the type of story that feels like a single part of a person’s long, detailed life; we do not know everything about Dina, honestly, we know fairly little in the grand scheme, but we know this story and we have the reaching tendrils of a life that occurred before this moment and a life that will follow after. The ability to create a sense of context and genuine life within this story amazes me with its careful balancing of how many past details are needed along with the constant question of how resolved any part of someone’s life can be without death.
Discussion Questions:
1. How is Heidi’s character arc far distinguished from Dina’s?
2. How do Matthew Salesses’ ideas of plot also relate to Dina’s character arc or this story at large? possibly w/ these quotes:
Coincidence, routine, unexplainable emotion, even the weather, can be profound. The king dies, and then the queen dies, but the people still have laundry to do, children to feed, love to love, lives that continue in all directions, not each independent of the other, but more meaningful for how they intersect.
&
“start when all but the action is finished” is useful, it is possibly because being in the world is much more about dealing with effects than with causes
the pva creative writing review 