Disgruntled (7 page)
Something, Kenya wasn’t sure what, switched over and her parents assumed their normal fighting positions.
Johnbrown screeched at Sheila that her problem was that she wouldn’t let a man be himself.
Sheila asked calmly what Johnbrown thought a man was and how he thought the definition applied to him.
Johnbrown said this was exactly the kind of conversation he never had with Cindalou. Abruptly, Sheila said, “I see your mother every year. She gives us money.”
Johnbrown clenched his fists. “I need to go,” he said. “I just need to get out of here, because otherwise—”
“So GO!”
But he didn’t, not just yet. The three of them sat trapped, not eating their cold spaghetti in the dim dining room. By now it was probably night outside, but Kenya couldn’t tell.
Then, after an eternity, with a final pleading look at Sheila, Johnbrown got up and left. No one ever found out where he went, because of what happened when he returned, what happened with a sleepwalking Kenya and his lawfully registered gun.
Sometimes Kenya thought that if the world before the walk she took with her father could be real, then the world on the other side could not be. Sheila had been shot. It was years before Kenya could say in her mind
I shot my mother in the shoulder
. Whether she’d been asleep or not, it made her want to die.
That late-spring night was a blur that reminded Kenya of a sickening amusement park ride. Johnbrown, who did not have a license, driving them crazily to the hospital; Sheila cursing, sobbing, and bleeding; Johnbrown ordering Kenya to stay quiet at the hospital when they asked what happened. He would take the blame for the shooting, he said. Kenya should not worry. He would take the blame, he kept repeating. The last image of her father Kenya had for a long time was him kneeling, as if praying, as he dripped tears on her mother’s hospital bed.
After it became clear that Sheila would be okay, Johnbrown had fled the hospital, off with Cindalou, her mother guessed, to who knows where. But to Kenya it felt like she and her mother were the ones who had disappeared, going to stay at Grandmama’s home. Kenya now noticed that the air there was always damp and the house contained odd things, like an extensive collection of old used toothbrushes and all of her dead husband’s shoes.
In Johnbrown’s absence, it was Sheila who mustered the “brave” smiles. Also, even after she healed and stopped taking pain pills she often stared into the distance, reminding Kenya of Brother Camden and his loose eye. It occurred to Kenya sometime after everything happened that she wouldn’t even mind seeing Brother Camden now.
On the other hand, the thought of Cindalou and her dumb fruity smell made Kenya’s stomach lurch. One sweltering afternoon, Kenya walked past the room where her mother slept and heard ragged crying. Until then, her mother hadn’t cried, or at least Kenya hadn’t heard it. Now the sounds she made seemed to hurt. Kenya went into her own room, with its ugly series of Harlequin pictures and its scratchy afghan, made by Grandmama’s mother. She took out a notebook and pen and wrote:
CINDALOU MATTHEWS
.
Then she went into the backyard by the ugly pink rosebush, made sure no one was watching, took out one of Grandmama’s cheap lighters, and burned the paper, watching it blacken and curl.
* * *
Just before the school year started, Sheila and Kenya moved into a place of their own in the town right next to Grandmama’s. Sheila did the house hunting on her own, so by the time Kenya laid eyes on the large apartment building of yellow-brown brick, it was her home. A well-maintained sign that reminded Kenya of fifties sitcom credits advertised it in cursive as the
Ardmore Arms
. At the desk in the entryway, which smelled of bad breath, there was a fat white guard, who watched Sheila struggle with a box so she could sign in. He greeted her only when she finally said a starched “Hello.” This was how they would interact until Kenya and Sheila moved out nearly a year later.
The apartment, with its yellowed-ivory walls and beige carpets, was the kind of place that Kenya had heard Sheila call “charmless” in the past. “Here we are,” Sheila said in a flat voice the first time they entered. Kenya recalled books she’d read where families had to move and mothers and fathers pleaded with reluctant children to admire the new backyard swing or their brand-new blue bedroom. Sheila said nothing of the sort; she never asked whether Kenya liked it or not. So Kenya never mentioned how intrigued she was by the sensation of wall-to-wall carpeting underfoot, or how much she enjoyed having boardless windows. At a certain time of day, the apartment, including her chalk-yellow bedroom, would flood with light and things would seem okay. In the beginning, at least.
While Grandmama’s initial plan had been to send Kenya to the best local public school, she also insisted that Kenya take the test for the fancy private one down the road. So before she even set foot in the local junior high, Kenya was accepted to the Barrett School for Girls, with a decent scholarship. This was all provided she would repeat fifth grade, as was standard for all entrants from the city school system.
Completely unmoved by Kenya’s indignation about being held back, Grandmama was insistent. “Of course you’ll go there! My mother used to wash the floors and clean the bathrooms for those filthy—
little girls
.” Grandmama’s parents had been of the generation that was middle class on the weekends, at their churches and social clubs, but cleaned floors and swallowed bitterness during the week. “Now you’re going there,” she said, coughing, which she sometimes did until her eyes watered, and clapping her hands. “
You’ll
show
them.
”
“How to become a filthy little girl?” Kenya asked.
“What a little colored girl can do!”
While Grandmama plotted her revenge, Sheila offered up a faint smile. She didn’t even try to catch Kenya’s eye the way she used to when Grandmama said
colored
. When Kenya whined about repeating the grade, Sheila shrugged.
“Maybe starting last year all over again is not such a bad idea,” she said.
Kenya could not argue with that.
* * *
At one end, the Barrett School for Girls looked like a castle, with its stone walls, decorative roofs, impossibly high ceilings, and ancient-looking tapestries. At the other, it was low and sleek, like something in one of the architecture magazines Kenya’s father had collected during a brief phase. In fact, whatever wasn’t old at the school seemed extremely new. The white desks reminded Kenya of spaceships, and many of the rooms had track lighting.
The cafeteria was called a dining room. There you could eat roast chicken for lunch, served up by black women—the only black adults in the building besides the cleaning ladies. As they spooned mashed potatoes onto her plate, they beamed Kenya smiles she was too embarrassed to return. She wondered if they traded smiles with the smattering of other black girls who went to Barrett (twelve by her count the first week). She could not imagine Lolly Lewis, the only other black girl in her grade, who lived in Wynnewood and had gone to Barrett since kindergarten, joining in this conspiracy of greeting.
Each day at Barrett was a new sensory experience for Kenya: chilly stone hallways; clammy modeling clay; picking impossibly sticky long hairs off her schoolbag; a school uniform of scratchy bloomers with a navy-blue dress called a tunic or a gray skirt called a kilt; a rubbery-tasting mouthguard for field hockey; the sound of hand bells;
what shall we do with a drunken sailor
; the distinct sneaker-fart funk of the school bus; a gym teacher with a British accent; dreidl (
dreidl, dreidl
); cupcakes for Trinity Howell’s birthday, cupcakes for Katherine Stein’s birthday, cupcakes for Sengu Gupta’s birthday; body on fire with cold as Kenya finally, after two weeks of increasingly irritable cajoling from Mrs. Winston, forced herself into the pool in gym class.
Once Kenya was underwater, she tried to stay as long as she could. The murky echoes, soft shapes, and slow movement suited her. Everyone at Barrett was
so nice
. The school was
so nice
. Yet she did not want to come back up to the surface.
Being black on the Main Line was
no fuckin’ picnic
, her father had said.
Kenya was careful never to say to these new girls that her parents were “divorced,” but she led them to believe this was the case. Divorce, so shocking to her before, was almost fashionable at Barrett. Cynthia Malder and Kristin Shoenbaum were children of divorce. Tuff Wieder and Sharon McCall were children of long-term separation. Mothers were starting interior design businesses and dating old men. Fathers were buying sports cars and dating young secretaries. All Kenya said was that her parents were “not together,” and that she didn’t talk to her father very much. No, she didn’t go live with him and a bitchy stepmother in the summer. No, they didn’t go on vacation.
The fifth graders who attended the Barrett School for Girls had heard a lot of crazy things about the city. They’d heard that kids their age carried knives to school, and that everyone was on welfare. They’d heard that being on the street after dark was a sure way to get mugged. They’d never heard the one about the family where the father was cheating on the mother, the father-not-husband because they were never married, the one where the father suggested that they all live together in a polygamous arrangement. They didn’t know the one that ended with the sleepwalking daughter shooting the mother with the father’s gun; they didn’t know the one that began when the father, trying to keep the daughter out of foster care, said he would take the blame—then disappeared into America with his pregnant girlfriend. Kenya wasn’t going to tell them any of those.
* * *
Sheila said little to Kenya about their new lives. In the void, as Kenya learned to sing in French and play lacrosse, she kept hearing Johnbrown’s voice. The “shame of being alive”
was
in fact the shame of being black and having a mere ten minutes to untangle your hair in the locker room after swimming. And some days she heard his voice saying: “Meanwhile, some kids in West Philly don’t have books. Shit don’t make sense.”
Back in her other life Kenya’s parents had even argued over whether they should allow Kenya to participate in the Mentally Gifted program at Lea School. The principal had been a parchment-colored snob who was so excited about the twenty white students who went there that all of them, even an excitable boy named Benjamin, whose knuckles practically dragged on the floor, were in MG. Johnbrown, who had originally talked about homeschooling her until it became clear that he would have to be the teacher, thought MG would make Kenya “an elitist.”
“You’re being a fanatic,” Sheila had said. “But I’m not drinking your Kool-Aid. It’s not like we’re talking about private school.”
“And we never would, Sheila, we never would.”
“Well, with only one of us working, we could never afford it.”
“Oh, is that why? Because I didn’t know that was the reason. I thought the reason was we were raising a black child who wouldn’t hate herself any more than this
sick
society already wants her to.”
“Don’t you dare give me one of your speeches, Johnbrown.”
Sheila’s winning the battle over Mentally Gifted meant mainly that Kenya got to go to movies and plays where the characters had British accents. (“Satisfied?” her father asked her mother, rolling his eyes when Kenya missed an entire day of school to go to a local production of
A Christmas Carol
.)
“How is the Barrett School for Girls?” her mother would ask now, every evening at their sad dinners at the kitchen counter in the Ardmore Arms. Sheila cooked on the same schedule as before, but now everything was drier. She had started going to Weight Watchers, which surprised Kenya, who’d never thought about her mother’s weight.
Most nights Kenya said that school was “fine,” which, she supposed, it was. But one night, struggling to swallow baked ziti without enough sauce, she said, “Remember that fight you and Baba had about private school? He never wanted me to go.”
“Well, I didn’t either.”
Kenya blurted, “What do you think he’d say if he knew about Barrett?”
“He wouldn’t care,” Sheila said in a brassy voice.
Kenya felt the hit in her chest.
“I shouldn’t put it that way,” said her mother, more softly. “The truth is he’s got his own problems.”
What Kenya knew was that Johnbrown was doing okay somewhere in America. A few months after she and her mother moved into the Ardmore Arms, the first postcard arrived. Kenya had looked without seeing it, an ugly picture of St. Louis, which she put in the mail pile. Sheila had an old library school friend who lived in San Francisco and traveled a lot. No matter where she went, Houston, Bermuda, or Mexico, she sent a faded-looking postcard. That afternoon, Kenya looked up to see her mother in the doorway of Kenya’s room, holding this one.
“Your father sent this,” she said.
“I thought it was Aunt Sandy.”
“Nope.”
The postcard was written in block letters.
Thinking of you every day
, it said.
Every day, thinking of you. All my love. B.B.
“How do you know this is from him?” Kenya asked.
Sheila wrinkled her nose at Kenya’s unmade bed and started making it up. She spoke as she moved. “We used to talk sometimes at Seven Days meetings about if one of us had to run.”
“Run from what?” If they’d had this conversation more than once, she hadn’t heard it.
“It was just talk as far as we were concerned. But you know back in the day a lot of movement people wound up on the wrong side of the law. Anyway, sometimes those people would run because they knew they wouldn’t get a fair trial. And if they had to leave family behind, they would send cards sometimes, but not from anyplace they were currently.”
“So all this says is he’s not in St. Louis.”
“It says more than that.”
