Disgruntled (11 page)

As awkward as it was for Sheila to be Kenya’s mother in front of Teddy Jaffrey, at least Sheila knew what to say. Kenya, on the other hand, found it challenging to talk to him. She wasn’t at all sure how to answer questions like “Do you know how proud it makes me to hear of a young lady like yourself going to Barrett?” or how to respond when he extended an imaginary microphone and said, “Tell us, Kenya, what is it like to have a five-star chef for a mother?” Even saying hello to him was fraught, because she never knew when he was going to try to give her a complicated soul handshake and then say, “I bet they don’t teach that at the Barrett School for Girls.” Kenya began to long for the lonely, calm dinners on chipped dishes she’d shared with only her mother, which had now become a rarity.

Teddy was a dork. But that wasn’t the thing that had bothered Kenya since she first saw him. The sense of an unsolved mystery about him nagged at her until her mother engineered a sleepover at China’s house one Friday evening, despite bitter complaints from Kenya. So it was a long night of eating cheese curls (which she hadn’t touched since her birthday a month and a half ago), putting white cream on their faces, which China insisted ladies did at night, and listening yet again to the plot highlights of
Purple Rain
.

The next morning, when Sheila and (surprise!) Teddy Jaffrey came for Kenya, China pinched her arm hard and whispered hot in her ear, “Oh my God, he is, like, so gorgeous!”

Then Kenya realized it was this that had been bothering her like a small stone in her shoe: Teddy Jaffrey’s gorgeousness. Because though her mother’s face, with its lush eyebrows, bright eyes, and gapped front teeth, had always made something soar in Kenya, she knew that Sheila was not what most people called beautiful. It made her wonder what Teddy wanted from them.

*   *   *

One spring afternoon, not long after the sleepover at China’s, Kenya sat in her room with the door open, struggling with algebra. She thought about the old days when she would ask her father for help. Back then her mother was often at work or in purposeful motion at home, but Johnbrown couldn’t stay focused on the task long without tumbling into a tirade about the American education system or the great mathematicians of ancient Kush. Finally her mother, who had adored math in school, would appear or pause what she was doing to save the day. Kenya thought of that now, musing that her mother wouldn’t be home for at least an hour and a half. Her mind jumping to the occasional mouse problem they had, she yelped in terror when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.

“It’s just me,” her mother called.

“You scared me! Why aren’t you at work?” Kenya yelled back.

“I had an appointment.”

“Are you okay?”

“Kenya, can I have a minute?”

Kenya heard the bathroom door click shut. A terrifying thought flew into her head and she closed her eyes to entertain it. Her mother had left work early to see a doctor, and had run home to the bathroom, where she was undoubtedly crying because she was fatally ill.

Her mother was dying!

After an agonizing interval, which the clock claimed was less than two minutes, Sheila appeared in the doorway of Kenya’s bedroom. Kenya noted her expression first. It was embarrassed, pleased, defensive, a mess. Then she saw that her mother’s hair now framed her face in smooth, though limp, curls.

The hair was pretty enough, but it belonged somewhere else, like on Mrs. Huxtable or on a doll.

“Time for a change,” Sheila said, reaching up self-consciously.

“That’s a change.”

“It doesn’t look so bad, does it?”

“No,” Kenya said. “No, Mom.”

They looked at each other in silence. There was no way, Kenya thought, to ask the questions she wanted to ask. Unconsciously, she fingered her own hair, still in rather girlish cornrows done by her mother.

“I’m going to start dinner,” Sheila said. “Teddy is coming tonight.”

After watching her mother walk away, Kenya pulled her purple book out of its hiding place in her underwear drawer.
My mom got a perm
, she wrote. She thought back to a few moments ago, when she thought her mother was dying, and imagined her in a coffin, doll’s hair framing her face.

Like everything else around them, her mother was changing. Kenya had intuited that she shouldn’t say anything negative—not about Sheila’s alliance with Alma Lewis (which continued though Sheila frequently mocked her), nor about the hours and money spent on Lars the decorator, who painted the powder room black and pouted when Sheila wouldn’t approve a mini-chandelier in there. Now, most solidly with the perm, Kenya knew to keep her feelings about the rate and dramatic quality of these changes to herself.

She felt all of this even more painfully a few weeks later when Sheila asked her how she felt about Teddy Jaffrey moving in with them.

“I guess it would be okay,” Kenya said. Given everything that had happened, and the fact that he seemed nice enough, Kenya couldn’t think of an honorable reason to object. She had heard her mother saying on the phone to Alma Lewis that Teddy was an incredible second chance. He was almost too good to be true, she said. And perhaps Alma Lewis had said something about him still living with his parents, because Sheila came back with “Like I said,
almost
too good to be true.”

The night that Sheila told Kenya about Teddy Jaffrey moving in, she didn’t say it, but he was clearly on his way over. She had set the table with the nice dishes and had reapplied lipstick. Kenya stood in her mother’s doorway while Sheila sat at her dressing table, propping up curls with a few touches of the hot iron. Kenya sneezed at the smell of singed hair that quickly filled the room.

“Do you think you’ll marry him?” asked Kenya.

“We’ll just see how this goes first,” her mother said. It sounded like a threat.

The next morning Kenya woke up from a too-vivid dream of having been down in the basement of the house—a too-vivid dream and extremely dusty feet. She didn’t tell Sheila.

*   *   *

“So, young lady,” Teddy Jaffrey was asking at dinner, “tell me about your boyfriend.”

Kenya tried to read his expression. Was he making fun of her? Genuinely interested? Was this part of his Uncle Teddy act? She glanced at her mother, but incredibly, Sheila looked as if she was eagerly awaiting the answer.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Kenya said, trying to sound neutral.

Boys had been in the air for a while but had only really shown up just as the Teddy Jaffrey era was beginning. It had started gingerly with the sixth-grade mixer, and now, near the end of seventh grade, people were murmuring their names: Phil McCartney, John Jessup, David Beloff, Matt Smith. They went to Haverford, Episcopal Academy, and Friends. They did not go to the Catholic school across the street from Barrett, which was for mallchicks and guidos. Phil was a joker, John was his best friend, David was so cute, and Matt was
so nice
. Kenya imagined them as trading cards. And there were less-mentioned others. One day at lunch Phyllis Fagin said, “Oh my God, Kenya, I was at a thing at my cousin’s house and I met a guy you would love.”

“Who?” Kenya asked. Years later, it would seem so absurdly, stabbingly obvious where this was going that Kenya would want to go back in time to that conversation and punch herself in the face.

“He’s really nice,” Phyllis said.

“How does he know your cousin?”

“He goes to Germantown Friends.” Kenya’s mother would have preferred her to go to Germantown Friends. Though far from where Kenya had grown up, it was in the city, and not as stuck-up as Barrett. But they’d offered a measly scholarship. Later Kenya found out that Grandmama had stipulated that she would only help Sheila pay for Barrett. Perhaps if Grandmama’s mother had cleaned Germantown Friends, it would have gone differently.

“He’s so cool,” Phyllis continued.

“So why don’t
you
like him?” Zaineb asked. “If he’s so cool.”

“I just really think Kenya would like him,” said Phyllis.

“What’s his name?” said Kenya.

“Tyrell Smith,” said Phyllis.

“Ew,” said Lolly, “what kind of name is Ty-
rell
?”

It turned out that Phyllis barely knew Tyrell Smith; he didn’t seem to remember her a week later when they ran into each other at a mixer at Episcopal. The music was loud and the conversation confusing. He walked off distractedly in the middle of being introduced to Kenya.

“You thought I would like him?” she asked Phyllis. Tyrell Smith’s forehead was a map of acne scars, and he was overdressed for the dance, in a pressed paisley shirt and creased pants.

“He looked better when I met him,” said Phyllis ruefully.

“He’s a total dog!” said Lolly.

Kenya stood there in the blare of the unfamiliar gym, where she, Tyrell, and Lolly were the only three black people. She looked around at her classmates, who had smeared themselves with makeup in the bathroom. Ever since the night she’d woken up shooting her mother, she had moments where she had to reassure herself that yes, she was in this room, in this body, on this earth. No, she wasn’t part of someone’s dream. In the months after she and her mother moved out of the city, she sometimes spent whole days reminding herself that she was here. It happened less now, but every so often, she had to go over the whole thing in her head again.

“I don’t know,” said Phyllis, “he reminded me of Kenya for some reason.”

Zaineb began laughing. “I wonder why!”

“What—could—it—have—been?” Kenya said between fake giggles.

“I have no idea!” said Zaineb.

“You guys are so obnoxious,” said Phyllis. “I was just trying to be nice.”

Lolly stared off into the air. Kenya wondered if Lolly sometimes went to the same place she herself went, the place that was nowhere at all.

Phyllis wasn’t the only one who tried to help Kenya with her love life. After boys appeared, it became a semiregular occurrence: someone Kenya was friendly with, or even someone she didn’t talk to that much, would tell her about Barry Jackson/LeVaughn Smith/Charles Williams III and a boy named Allmon, whose name sounded faintly familiar.
Allmon, Allmon, Allmon
, she said to herself, trying to place it.

Sometimes when people kissed on television or in a movie, or when a man looked at a woman a certain way, Kenya got a warm, ticklish feeling in the center of her body. Sometimes she poked and plucked at herself in the dark, then got up and scrubbed her hand raw like Lady Macbeth, whom she’d gotten to play in the seventh-grade English drama project. But getting a boy involved seemed as possible as China taking Prince to the prom. Most of the boys around were white, and everyone around Kenya conspired to keep her and white boys apart. There was her mother, with the long-standing, unstated “no white boys” edict, and the memory of her father’s theories about slave masters and slave women. There were the girls at school, frantically suggesting Barry Jackson/LeVaughn Smith/Charles Williams III. But the biggest barrier to romance with the John Jessups, David Beloffs, and Matt Smiths of the world was the white boys themselves, who looked straight through Kenya.

At one mixer, Phil McCartney, popular in spite of always wearing Hawaiian shirts and being perpetually sweaty, bopped over to her. Kenya was dancing to “Word Up” with the other girls, and it was unclear if he was actually moving next to her or dancing with Phyllis. Unlike most of the girls, Phyllis had actual cleavage, which you could see above the V-neck of her sweater.

But he was looking directly at Kenya. “Word up!” he hollered. Kenya panicked, wondering how to act, what to say, how to stay cool. Phil did the bump on her, rather violently, she thought.

“That’s the word!” she finally thought to say, but by the time she spoke, probably too quietly, he was boogeying away. “Whoo hoo!” he yelled.

“Oh my God!” said Phyllis, elbowing Kenya.

“That was Phil McCartney,” hissed Lolly, spit flecking Kenya’s ear.

“Say it, don’t spray it,” said Kenya, trying not to smile. Nearby, Lizzie Canwell and Lindsey Carroll whispered together, looking at her. It had been said that Lindsey Carroll used to go out with Phil McCartney.

There were a couple of good-looking and self-composed black boys, but most were either aggressive nerds, loud good-time types, or some Frankenstein of both, like LeVaughn Smith, who had gotten on the front page of the local paper for a patent he took out on a science project but who also tried to grab the DJ’s microphone at dances. Unlike the white boys, who ignored her, these boys seemed specifically to hide from Kenya, occasionally venturing forth to ask Lolly, with her bulging hazel eyes and knobby knees, to dance. She went with them grudgingly, always returning to complain that “no cute boys” ever asked.

Kenya didn’t blame any of the boys for disregarding her. She had eyes just like anyone else, and her house was full of mirrors that Lars claimed “enlarged a space.” She was not tall or cutely miniature, and she had a completely average B-cup chest. Her skin was not light, her brown eyes unremarkable, her hair standard-issue nappy; at dances she wore it in a ponytail with bangs that kinked up fiercely if she began to sweat while dancing. Despite her mother’s new look, Kenya was not allowed to perm her hair until high school. But she didn’t think it would matter anyway. For her, “boys” was Tyrell Smith walking away while Phyllis was introducing her. And the only time the idea of a “boyfriend” really came up for her was when Teddy asked about it, which he started to do repeatedly. “Don’t make me have to use my bat to break some boy’s kneecaps,” he’d say.

*   *   *

“What’s the worst thing about him?” Zaineb asked Kenya about Teddy Jaffrey one day at lunch while Kenya was complaining about her mother’s boyfriend. In the summer before and into eighth grade, Kenya had begun talking to Zaineb more than the other girls. Zaineb had never believed in Santa Claus and was reasonable about everything except New York City, about which she harbored outrageous fantasies of Bohemian life.

“He does seem really irritating,” Zaineb continued, “but, like, what’s the number one worst thing?”