Tears on Tap
by Amina Gautier
The password is Becky. As soon as she whispers it, the bouncer urges her forward, clips the velvet rope behind her and lets her into the hottest, newest bar in town. She edges her way through the thick throng of all the beautiful black people who have found this secret place just as she has, who—like herself—have been seeking it for so long. She angles her body sidewise to squeeze between the barely walkable spaces among the groups of friends and colleagues, the couples or couples-in-the-making, the Old Heads looking for women to impress, the women who do not impress easily. The premium spirits are lined in rows and tiers behind the bar, illuminated by soft lighting, their labels easy and clear to read. She’s not here for them. Like everyone else in the crowded bar tonight, she’s here to taste the new drink on tap.
She hover nears the bar, waiting for a seat. A young man settles his tab and she slides onto his vacated stool. The bartender retrieves the tip and takes her order.
“What can I get you?” “The new new,” she says.
This new bar, it was said, had White Girl Tears on tap. Lately, there was such an excess of them, such a plethora, that the owner had come up with the idea to harvest them like hops and grapes. The rest of the process (fermentation? distillation?) he kept secret. Rumor had it that he’d culled tears from the woman who’d called the police on the black family having a cookout at a park in Oakland, from the barista who’d called the cops on two black men drinking coffee at a Starbucks in Philly, from the cashier who’d called the cops on the patron at the Waffle House who’d simply asked for cutlery, from the off-duty policewoman who entered a young black man’s apartment and shot him dead and then claimed she’d mistaken his apartment for hers and thought he was the intruder, and even from the missionary who pretended to be a doctor and caused the deaths of hundreds of children in Uganda with her fake medical diagnoses and treatments, but no one knew for sure. The owner was cagey about who, where, and when. Certainly there was no shortage of white girl tears—every time a Becky got caught and called out for taking it upon herself to monitor and police a black body, she cried buckets— really, the owner could have gotten those tears from anywhere.
The bartender holds a glass at a forty-five degree angle one inch below the tap faucet and grips the tap handle near the base, pulling it forward to open the flow. Once the glass is half full, he slowly tilts it upright to complete his pour. He places before her a pale pink drink with a one inch head of foam.
On either side of her the other patrons are drinking the same. “Must be good,” she predicts.
“Everyone tastes something different,” the bartender says, wiping down the counter.
“Bottoms up.”
The drink is tart and tangy, bitter and sweet. It puckers her lips and curls her tongue. This is a drink to put hair on one’s chest.
She’s caught by the drink’s complexity, by the way it pours like beer yet tastes like wine. She expects the White Girl Tears to taste like pumpkin spice, like lattes and Pilates, like yoga pants and asparagus, like fringed scarves and sheepskin boots, like flat asses and lack of rhythm, like tanning beds, like lip and butt injections—which it does—but in the body of the drink the subtle notes of other flavors emerge and once she drinks past the foam, she tastes bouquets of bias, caches of past cruelties. With each sip she tastes the pain of memories. Like the time her freshman year roommate offered to fix her up on a blind date because she was so pretty for a black girl. Like the time her elementary school principal asked her to let someone else—someone white—win for a change. Halfway through the drink, and the White Girl Tears taste like the time her colleagues invited her at the last minute to join their panel proposal because a diversity element would improve their chances of acceptance; like all of the times she went out shopping for clothes or food and white women stopped her to ask about merchandise or produce or sales or aisles because they assumed she worked there.
The bartender looks over, eyebrow raised, to see if she wants another, but one is more than enough. Determined to finish, she drinks down to the dregs; where the flavor is at its strongest; where the tears taste like a moment she’ll never forget—that time her teacher, a white woman, lopped off one of her braids in front of the class and then told her to stop crying because it was just hair and it would grow back, uncaring that it was never just hair to a black girl fated to spend the rest of her life being told to change her hair (press and curl it, blow it out, wrap it up) if she ever wanted to get a job and keep it, if she ever wanted to earn a living, if she ever wanted to be beautiful, if she ever wanted to be enough; where those last few drops, tasting of that time she first learned to swallow pain, leave an aftertaste, a bitter residue on her tongue, of when the self of a girl was first severed in two.
Amina Gautier, PhD, is the author of three award-winning short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award, Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, and The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction. More than one hundred and twenty-five of her stories have been published, appearing in AGNI, Blackbird, Boston Review, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Latino Book Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and Southern Review, among other places. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.