Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Dina, a young black woman, is at freshman orientation at Yale. She refuses to do a trust fall into the arms of “four scrawny former high school geniuses” (117), and the counselor excuses her as a black woman who “shouldn’t have to fit into any white, patriarchal system” (118). When the counselor asks the new students to name which inanimate object they would like to be, Dina shocks everyone, including herself, when she says, “a revolver.” Dina usually behaves and follows the rules, but this answer lands her in the dean’s office, and Dina is assigned a year of therapy. Additionally, her roommate’s parents decide that they are uncomfortable with her, so Dina ends up with her own room. She also receives regular visits from counselors, but Dina starts being naked when they arrive, and they give up.

One day, a weeping white girl shows up at Dina’s door, begging Dina to let her in. Dina resists, but the girl begs. Finally, Dina opens the door. The girl’s name is Heidi, and she is in Dina’s Contemporary Poetry class. She tells Dina that she wants to be called Henrik. Dina asks if she wants sexual reassignment surgery, and Heidi doesn’t answer. Heidi then sobs while telling Dina that she performed oral sex on a boy and is now being mocked and called a slut. Dina is surprised because she assumed that Heidi was a lesbian. Heidi says that she isn’t and asks Dina if she is gay. Dina claims not to like anyone, men or women. Heidi invites Dina to get dinner in the dining hall, but Dina shows her the mountain of ramen noodles that allow here to stay in her room. Dina suggests that Heidi avoid the mockery by doing the same.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Raeburn, asks Dina about her parents, and she replies, “My father was a dick and my mother seemed to like him” (124). Dr. Raeburn probes this statement, and Dina tells him that she hates her father. A few days later, Heidi shows up after Dina’s therapy appointment and invites her again to the dining hall. She puts her arm around Dina for a moment and then drops it. Dina jokes about chopping it off next time but admits that her arm felt nice. In the dining hall, the black students stare at Dina as if she is a traitor for walking past them with her white friend. The two girls find a table, and Heidi admits that she plans to see the boy again whom she was crying about when she first met Dina. Dina lectures her. Another student approaches them with an invitation to a party, which Dina crumples in disgust when she realizes that it’s for gay students.

Dina and Heidi get jobs in the cafeteria washing dishes, and one day they find a live mouse. Heidi is squeamish, but Dina tells her that they need to kill it quickly because that’s better than prolonging its death. Dina remembers her mother, who died slowly, supposedly of kidney failure. However, Dina suggests that her father caused her mother’s death by making her “so scared to live in her own home that she was finally driven away from it in an ambulance” (129). Dina talks about Heidi with Dr. Raeburn, and he asks if she has ever been romantically interested in anyone. Dina tells him about a boy in a nice neighborhood who helped her with the groceries she was carrying. She doesn’t admit that she ran so that he wouldn’t see where she lived, dropping the groceries and telling her mother that she lost their food stamps. Dina tells the therapist that the boy kissed her but admits to herself that she has never kissed anyone. That night, Dina dreams about her mother. 

One evening, Dina and Heidi finish cleaning the cafeteria kitchen, and Dina suggests that they shower there instead of going out in the cold, wet and covered in food. First Heidi hoses Dina off, and then Heidi shyly disrobes so Dina can spray her. Dina notes that that was the night she started to love Heidi, although perhaps she loved her from the moment they met. Heidi starts sleeping in Dina’s room, and they spend their free time together. They do nothing sexual, but their interactions are intimate. One day, Dina watches a Coming Out Day celebration happening outside her window. Several students give speeches, and then Heidi gets up and proudly exclaims that she is a lesbian. Weeks later, Dina has been avoiding Heidi, but Heidi shows up at Dina’s door to say that her mother has cancer. Dina awkwardly says, “It’s not a big deal” (142).

When Dina tells Dr. Raeburn, he suggests that perhaps her habit of saying something meaningless is a “survival mechanism. Black living in a white world” (144). Dina remembers her mother’s funeral, when someone gave her milk but she pretended to be drinking coffee somewhere else in a foreign country. When Heidi’s mother dies, she asks the dean to ask Dina to accompany her to the funeral in Vancouver. The school offers to pay for her plane ticket. Dina goes to see Heidi, who is surrounded by new friends. Heidi confronts Dina for avoiding her after she came out. Dina doesn’t go to the funeral and instead goes back home to Baltimore to live with her aunt. Sometimes she imagines visiting Heidi in Vancouver or having Heidi visit her, remembering the day Heidi knocked on her door.