Chapter Ten

voice message 7:23 p.m.
Sean—
Hi. It’s Zenny. I don’t know if you have my number yet, and so I didn’t know if you’d know who this was, and I…um, I’m rambling now, sorry. I was actually kind of relieved when you didn’t pick up the phone because it’s easier to talk into the void, as it were, than to talk directly to you, especially when your voice does that thing. You know the thing? Where it goes low and rough and the tiniest bit hoarse, almost like you’re already in bed. Do you do that on purpose?
Uh…this is not why I called. To talk about the voice thing.
I called to talk about me.
When I got home this afternoon, I started flipping through my prayer journal. It’s something my novice mistress has me keep, and for the last year, I’ve kept it faithfully. But even though I’ve been detailed and diligent with it, I realize there’s something missing.
Openness.
You know my family, you know my parents. Dad is Dr. Jeremiah Iverson, physician-in-chief at the city’s top teaching hospital, and Mom is the Honorable Letitia Iverson, and they wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up...as long as it was a doctor or a lawyer.
So when I chose nursing and midwifery—and then when I decided I wanted to be a nurse-midwife for God—they were so upset. The private schools, the Jack and Jill meetings—it was all supposed to a make a certain kind of young black woman—and the young black woman I wanted to be was something different.
I knew I’d be disappointing them, and I guess it made me a little stubborn. Defensive. But it’s the first time I’ve ever chosen things for myself, you know? When it came to school and clothes and even my first boyfriends—it was all to make them happy, to earn their approval, and it wasn’t until I was staring at the Spelman application my mom gave me that I realized how limited my choices had become. Mom went to Spelman, so I should go to Spelman. Dad studied abroad his sophomore year, so that’s when I was going to study abroad. I would have one year to pick pre-law or pre-med, and I would date a boy from Morehouse, and I would be Catholic but not too Catholic, and I would volunteer for one charity and one political campaign, but it had to be a national one—
Do you see? Can you feel it? It was like my entire life was decided for me before I’d even lived it, and I was suffocating under the weight of the future Zenny, the Zenobia Iverson everyone wanted me to be. But then I realized that there was one person who wanted differently for me, who would want me to find my own path and find something that made my soul sing with excitement.
I know you don’t believe, so I won’t say much about that moment except that it was maybe the moment I became truly aware of God. God wasn’t just a word anymore, a reason to get up every Sunday and sit in the first row. Not just a theory behind the all-girls Catholic high school I went to and the charity events my parents helped organize. He or She became real. I could feel Him or Her or Them—or whatever the best pronoun is—I could feel God’s presence like fingertips across my own fingertips. I could hear God like whispers from another room.
Except that changed somewhere, and I don’t know where, just that it did. I’m going through the pages of this journal and I’m seeing someone say: I’ll do anything for God…as long as it’s what I want too.
I’ve refused to be open to possibility. To God’s whispers.
Anyway, none of this substantially changes what we talked about this afternoon, but I wanted you to know and to hear why this is so important to me. I have to make sure that I’m listening for God everywhere and I want to make sure that I haven’t made an idol out of my own Future Zenny the same way my parents did.
I want to be my own Zenny. And I think this is how I do it.
Okay, this was long, way longer than I thought it would be. Um, I’m excited and hopeful about tomorrow and I hope you’re having a good night, and I’m just going to hang up now because I have no idea what to say next. Goodbye, Sean.
<end message>