The Untelling (12 page)

When he realized that we were mooning for him, he’d returned our attention, aiming the barrel of his camera at us again and again. He called me “Daffodil” and he called Hermione “Gorgeous.” He took our photo near the swings, holding hands, walking backward, smoothing the walls of a sand castle. When we left the park that afternoon, we were sure we’d be celebrities. Black Shirley Temples. We waited for several months, eagerly scanning the frozen food dessert case, but we never saw any black girls on Sealtest boxes. Daddy was dead by the time Mother saw the other girls. She recognized them, the second pair of sisters at the park. They hadn’t worn cute identical outfits; their hair hadn’t been oiled and ribboned. They had bad teeth. No one considered them to be competition. Mother fed us the ice cream in parfait glasses, saved the box, and hung it on the wall. To remind us, she said.

Dwayne put his finger on a framed snapshot of a snaggletoothed girl in a brown velvet dress. It was a department store portrait, complete with a pull-down holiday screen.

“Is that you?” he said. “My mama has the exact same picture of me.”

I smiled and said that it was me, although I had no idea who was in that photo. The girl seemed to stare past the camera, so I figured that she was one of the children from the Institute. Mama liked the blind children, especially the ones that didn’t cover their eyes, the ones who somehow pretended to see. “They don’t complain,” she said. “You would think they would have a lot to complain about, but they don’t. They just wait their turn.”

I touched a photo of Hermione and me wearing blue shirts with large white collars. “That’s me and my sister.”

He laughed. “I guess it was the seventies. When you meet my mama, she’ll show you all my Afro pictures.”

I took his hand and took him into the den, where Hermione sat on the brown shag carpet wearing a pistachio-colored pantsuit. The front was marked with nuggets of half-sucked candy. Little Link was sober and pensive, oblivious to Hermione’s efforts to teach him the difference between a circle and a square. Mr. Phinazee read the Sunday funnies.

“Hey, everyone,” I said. “This is Dwayne.”

Hermione looked up and clambered to her feet. She tried to pluck the candy chunks from her jacket. “Mama didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“I came by your house the other day.”

“I told her,” Mr. Phinazee said. “It was nice visiting with you.”

“I meant to call you,” Hermione said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

My sister touched her hair. “I look like shit. And you brought somebody with you.”

“Dwayne,” I said, “this is my sister, Hermione.” I picked Little Link up and put him on my hip. He was solid, real, and silent in my arms. “This is Lincoln, my nephew.”

“I’m two,” Link said, holding up three grimy fingers. He stretched his hands toward Dwayne, who took the little guy from my arms.

“And this,” I said, gesturing to my sister’s husband, “is Mr. Phinazee.”

“Earl,” he said gently. “Just Earl.”

“Earl, I’m Dwayne.”

“Nice to meet you, Dwayne. You’ve got a good haircut over there.”

I wasn’t fooled by my mother’s red oven mitts. I knew the meal had been catered. I recognized the menu from Seretha’s, the soul food restaurant near our church. Fried chicken, pecan candied yams, and three-cheese macaroni. The green beans, she probably poured from a can herself, but the coconut cake was definitely Seretha’s.

At my mother’s urging Dwayne said grace. He gave the standard prayers, thanking God for the food for the nourishment of our bodies, but he delivered it with a certain eloquence that made him seem like he could be a preacher if he wasn’t so humble. While everyone said, “Amen,” he squeezed my knee under the table.

I felt myself relaxing. My body temperature dropped and the water under my arms dried. It was as if Dwayne was some sort of antidote to my family’s usual tensions. Hermione laughed and Little Link scooped his vegetables with a rubber-tipped spoon.

I watched Dwayne flatter my mother, exclaiming over this bought meal. She grinned like a girl. I took a close look at my fiancé. He
did
look like a preacher with his fresh haircut and white shirt. Why had I never noticed this before?

“Earl,” my mother said, “more sweet tea?”

I swung my eyes to my sister. Like me, Mama usually called him Mr. Phinazee. But for Mama this was not merely the force of habit. Before he started sleeping with Hermione, she’d always called him Earl. She called him
Mister
as a matter of spite.

Mr. Phinazee said, “That would be nice.”

Hermione laughed and said, “Dwayne, we should invite you to join the family.”

He grinned in return and showed his crooked, charming smile. I felt his leg press mine under the table. Of course I noticed the lead-in so perfect it seemed to be scripted. I pressed his leg back, silently pleading with him to let the opportunity go, to wait until there was a moment less symmetrical, not so choreographed. I wanted this to feel like real life, not like television.

“Actually,” Dwayne said, setting his chicken leg on the good china and wiping his fingers on the linen napkin, “we’re engaged.”

“Praise God,” my mother said.

I sat beside him with my mouth stretched into a smile that cracked the dry skin on my lips. I willed myself to feel happier. To let some of the joy infect me too. Mr. Phinazee stood and shook Dwayne’s hand over the gravy boat. He pumped it up and down, repeating the word “congratulations.” Hermione took my left hand and examined the ring. “Don’t worry,” she said as she hugged me. “You can always trade up.”

Mother, from her place at the head of the table, tapped her glass with a salad fork. “When’s the date?”

“June twenty-fifth.”

“So soon?” Hermione said. “That’s just a few weeks from now.”

“I have a feeling,” said Mr. Phinazee, “that there’s more good news on the way.”

Dwayne gave a sheepish little-boy smile and said, “What can I say?”

My family laughed and clapped like a studio audience. Mother rose and returned with champagne flutes, cloudy with neglect. My fiancé’s name hovered on three pairs of lips, four if you counted Little Link, five if you counted the words uttered under my breath. What about me? I wanted to shout. I’m the one having the baby. It’s me that’s family. But I said nothing and raised my empty glass, trying to smile as everyone drank to Charming Dwayne.

When we climbed into the Jetta, I was so angry that my body burned with it. I pulled the neckline of my dress away from my sweaty skin and blew cool breath onto my cleavage.

“I think it went really well,” Dwayne said. “It wasn’t what I was expecting at all. They seem pretty cool.” He cleaned one of his molars with his fingernail.

“They are not usually like that.”

“Maybe they’ve changed,” he said.

I turned the air-conditioning vents toward me and looked out the window. It was seven o’clock and the sun had just started to set.

“What?” Dwayne said, showing a little pique of his own. “Seems like you’re disappointed that they didn’t hate me. Like you were waiting for the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.”

“You have chicken grease on your lip.”

“Maybe this is a mood swing or something, but you are definitely tripping.”

“You don’t know them,” I said. “
My mother
gets so excited she breaks out a magnum of champagne? That’s alcohol, you know. Eloise Jackson
kissed
you when we were leaving? Hermione says she’ll call me? Don’t you see why I’m pissed? They have never acted that way for just me. And stop being so impressed. My mother didn’t cook that food. She bought it.”

“So?” Dwayne said, merging onto I-20. “This isn’t even our car. It’s Head Cheese’s.”

“Just take me home,” I said.

We drove on, listening to the radio. The evening had set upon us quickly. Dwayne turned on his lights and the DJ announced that he would be playing slow jams from now until midnight.

“Maybe I did try a little too hard,” he said. “The coconut cake was good, but it wasn’t that good.” He looked at me with a smile. “But I wanted them to like me. Make things easier for us and for the baby.”

“I wanted them to like you too.” I didn’t turn away from the window. We were just past Ashby Street, the gateway to the West End. A tall desperate-looking man ran to our car and squirted the windshield with dirty dishwater. Dwayne fumbled to find the wiper controls and shooed the man away.

“Crackheads,” he said. “I don’t know how you stand it over here.”

“I wanted them to like you too,” I said again. “I just wasn’t ready for them to love you.”

Chapter Seven

T
he Atlanta Women’s Center
is part of a huge medical confederacy housed in a glass tower in the middle of downtown. When I got in the door, I told a pretty Latina my name and she handed me a manila folder. I took it and followed her instructions to a shabby upstairs waiting room. Two other young women sat beside me on a worn understuffed couch, watching a video demonstrating how to do breast exams when you’re in the shower. Neither of them looked too worried. They seemed confident and happy like they were just here to find out exactly how healthy they were. I, on the other hand, was starting to get a little sick. My muscles felt to be burning just under the skin. Sweat trickled from under my arms, down my sides.

When the breast video started itself over, I opened my folder. Inside was a handwritten note from Dotty, the nurse-practitioner who handled all my routine care:
6/3: Left message on answering machine, informing patient of “hormonal imbalance.”
Now, on the fifth of June, my stomach cramped, wrung like a wet dish towel. The quotation marks around the words “hormonal imbalance” seemed exaggerated, as if Dotty had announced “quote, unquote” before saying the words. It was like the things people say when they want to lie without committing perjury.

Before this, I’d liked Dotty. She was a tall, big-boned white woman who wore her stethoscope over a large flannel shirt and blue jeans. She liked to tell jokes with her hillbilly twang. She was the only health care professional who had ever made me feel at ease while naked and spread in stirrups. When she asked me questions about my sexual past and present, I told her the truth. Why would I lie to Dotty? We were almost friends.

When I’d gone in for my pregnancy test on Monday, I showed her my ring as she pumped the blood pressure cuff on my right arm. My fingers tingled and I was excited, talking way too loud. I giggled, explaining that my morning sickness had just lasted a week. The regular nurses, the ones who weren’t dressed like lumberjacks, glanced up from their paperwork, clearly annoyed.

Dotty handed me a paper cup. “Sounds like you’re a mama.”

“I know.”

I excused myself to the bathroom and returned holding the cup aloft, as if proposing a toast.

She left and I sat on the table wearing my paper robe and waited, swinging my bare legs. Dwayne had offered to come, but I let him off the hook, telling him that meeting my family was enough excitement for one week. I waited for him to insist, but he’d just laughed and accepted the reprieve.

True to her word, Dotty returned after only a few minutes, but her face was deliberately blank, like she’d pulled down a shade.

“Aria, we want to take some blood, okay?”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “But what about my pregnancy test?”

“It was inconclusive. We really need to draw blood before we can know anything for sure.”

“Come on, Dotty,” I said. “What do you think is wrong?”

“It’s inconclusive. I can’t really say.”

“But, Dotty, you can tell me
some
thing. You’re a doctor.”

Dotty sat down at the computer and tapped the keys. She didn’t look at me. “Aria, I’m just a nurse-prac. You’re really going to need to see the M.D.”

I recognized her tone. She was setting boundaries of the clear and firm variety. My pregnancy was not a personal matter between the two of us. She didn’t owe me any sort of explanation. Dotty was here to do her job, which she had done. No matter how it may have felt before, we were not friends.

“Dotty,” I said, making myself clear and firm too, “you cannot just send me away like this.”

She pulled a green page from the printer. “Take this to the lab. There’s really nothing to say until we get your blood work.”

That was last week. Two days ago she’d spoken to my answering machine, as though leaving a message for a stranger.

Once again Dwayne had offered to come with me. This time he’d insisted when I said no. “If there is something wrong with our baby,” he said, “I want to be there.”

“What would you do if you were there?”

“Be there for you.”

I shook my head. “I’ll give you a full report when I get back.”

Sitting alone in the waiting room, I regretted my decision to come alone. I surprised myself by not wishing for Dwayne. I wanted Hermione, bad and brassy, ready for anything. I could imagine her sitting beside me, smelling of orange hand cream.
This is not a problem, Aria.
I longed even for Keisha with her frank experience.
Don’t worry, Miss Aria. People get pregnant every day.
And I knew that they would be right. But I still could not break free of a premonition of doom. A sick feeling that started in my stomach, traveled up to my chest, and burned there.

A nurse emerged three times, calling names. When she finally called for me, I said, “Not yet.”

“Pardon?”

The robust woman beside me sighed and flipped through the pages of her pregnant-lady magazine.

The nurse weighed me, stuck something in my ear to read my temperature, took my blood pressure, and refused to answer any of my questions. “You’ll have to wait and speak with the doctor,” she said over and over. Finally she indicated that I should walk down the tiled hallway to room seven.

“Can I talk to Dotty?”

“Dotty is not here today. Your appointment is with the gynecologist.” Then she shoved me into the small room.

Room seven was an ordinary examining room. In the center of the space was the examination table; tasseled golf club covers stretched over each stirrup. The walls were decorated with posters that reminded you in a nonthreatening way that unprotected sex is how you get VD. I sat on an uncomfortable chair to wait for the doctor.

From the other side of a door painted purple, a big voice said, “In here.”

It had not come from a big man. Theodore Blackwelder was a little old white gentleman, dressed to the nines in a French-cuffed shirt and yellow and blue bow tie. His desk, an antique rolltop, belonged in a movie where the actresses wore dresses with bustles. Besides the desk, two chairs, and Dr. Blackwelder himself, the room was empty save several boxes of rubber gloves, syringes, and K-Y lubricant.

He walked across to greet me in his stocking feet; empty penny loafers peeked from under the beautiful desk. “Ariadne?” His amethyst cuff links shone under the fluorescent lights as he extended his hand.

“I go by Aria,” I said. “Like in opera.”

“Yes,” he said, straightening his yellow and blue bow tie. “That’s right. Do you like opera? I do, but my wife can’t abide it. So we compromise by going to the symphony.” He opened a folder and took out a couple of pages.

Dr. Blackwelder asked me a few questions about myself: what did I do for a living, where was I from, how did I manage to get rid of my accent, all of that. I knew he wasn’t really interested, that he was just trying to make me comfortable. I kept my answers short and rubbed my sandals against the fraying carpet. After nodding a couple of times at my monosyllables he told me a little bit about himself: he was from Cincinnati, had been in Georgia ten years after he retired from private practice, had a granddaughter my age, etc. Taking a deep breath, he pulled his desk chair from behind the rolltop so that he and I were close enough to touch. He rubbed his shock of white hair. It was time to get down to business.

“You came in a couple of days ago, complaining of amenorrhea?”

“No,” I said. “I came Monday for a pregnancy test.”

“Yes, but you said you had been missing periods? That was one of your symptoms, yes?”

I nodded.

“That’s what amenorrhea is,” he explained. “So we did some blood work to see what the problem was.” Now he handed me the pages he took from the folder. “These are your hormone levels.”

The page was divided into three columns. The first was a list of unfamiliar words. Beside the words were numbers. The last column said “OK” or it said nothing. Almost everything was marked “OK,” except two. I turned my eyes from the sheet and focused my attention on my shoes in an effort to relax myself enough to breathe normally. My lunch rose from my stomach to the back of my throat.

“Is something wrong with the baby? There’s Down syndrome on my father’s side.”

“See the line that says ‘FSH’?” He touched the page.

“Yes,” I said without looking.

Dr. Blackwelder scooted back to his desk and flipped through an orderly stack of papers. “There was a diagram here, but I can’t find it. Never mind. I can just explain it to you. The brain sends out FSH when it wants to tell your ovaries to release an egg. Your brain did just that. But the ovaries didn’t do it. So your brain let out more. Your brain’s yelling at the top of its lungs. It took out an ad in the
Times.
You’ve got
thrice
what’s normal for your age. Understand?”

“No, sir.”

He rubbed his chin. “So next we checked your estrogen. We need to see how much the ovaries are putting out. See it there.”

I said, “Yes,” again even though I wasn’t looking.

“Well, your estrogen is so low that we can’t even count it. Understand?”

“I understand what you just explained, but I don’t think I understand what it
means
.”

Dr. Blackwelder crossed his arms over his immaculate shirt and said, “In medical school we say this: when you hear the clatter of hooves outside of your window, it could be zebras, but it’s probably horses. Understand?”

“No.”

“That means that there are certain symptoms that almost always point to a certain diagnosis. When we see numbers like these, it generally indicates one thing.”

The quaver in his voice is what scared me; it was just a little hitch, like a damaged record. My throat seized shut and I couldn’t swallow the water that accumulated in my mouth. Female problems could kill you. Even if they didn’t, it implied something nasty. It was the sort of problem that you spoke about only in embarrassed whispers. Whatever was wrong with me was the sort of thing that could make a doctor’s voice crack.

“Premature ovarian failure.”

I shook my head.

“In people your age we call it premature ovarian failure. But most people call it menopause.”

I released the air that swelled my lungs. “That’s it?”

Dr. Blackwelder shook his head. “You don’t understand, do you? This means that you will be unable to bear children.”

His language was so stilted, he seemed to be speaking from the Bible, or maybe from God himelf. It sounded more like prophecy than a medical assessment. Then Dr. Blackwelder startled me by lifting my hand from my lap. “I’m so sorry, Ariadne.”

“No,” I said. “That’s impossible. I’m twenty-five. I had morning sickness.”

Dr. Blackwelder still held my hand. “Morning sickness, or were you just sick in the morning?”

I shook my head.

“Coincidence, most likely. Something you ate. A bug?”

“No.”

“Precocious menopause is very rare. . . .”

His use of my mother’s word is what convinced me. I pulled my hand from his and used it to cover my face while the awful weight of truth pressed over me.

Leaving the doctor’s office, I handed my parking ticket to the attendant, who opened the gate without charging me. I couldn’t believe that I had been in the office less than an hour, that it took only around forty-five minutes for my life to be changed so completely. I took the city streets, feeling too unstable for the quick and cutthroat expressways. Stopping for traffic lights, I thought about myself and how stupid I’d been. A sensible person, Rochelle, for example, would have taken a home pregnancy test first. I hadn’t because I was convinced that I knew my body. Now I couldn’t even take the expression seriously. What did it mean, to know your body? This was a phrase that I’d picked up from women’s magazines and television talk shows. I’d been living in this body twenty-five years and it was a stranger to me. I had gone through the Change and hadn’t even seen the signs. Dr. Blackwelder said that it was easy enough to miss, that my body had been responding to the years of birth control pills I’d swallowed, taking its cues from the synthetic hormones. But still, a person who knew her body should have known that something was seriously wrong. I felt like an idiot, like the wives who are always the last to know.

Despite everything, I taught my late class that afternoon. I considered taking the rest of the day off; the thought crossed my mind as I waited at a light on MLK. I could take a sick day, go home, and cry. But the idea of sitting alone in the house or sitting on the porch watching the crackheads made me even more unhappy, so I went on to LARC. At least there would be people there.

When I pulled into the driveway, I was relieved enough to weep. This was one of the benefits of teaching literacy, of do-gooding in general. It takes your mind off your own troubles. How could I worry that my eggs are all gone, that I have to tell my fiancé that we’re not pregnant and never will be? How can I worry what my mother will say when I spend my days with young girls who could as easily go to jail as go shopping? How can I, a college-educated person with an above-average vocabulary, a person who eats every day and enjoys full health benefits including eye and dental, feel sorry for myself when talking to a teenager who can’t even read? I work six-hour days, four days a week, and she works eight hours, six days, assembling submarine sandwiches. So how can I be sad? How
dare
I weep about my ruined ovaries?

The GED was in less than a month, so class attendance was fairly high and consistent. A couple of dropouts had quietly resurfaced. Early in the session we had spent our time reading poetry and talking about feelings, but during the final month I taught for the test and they learned for the test. It was boring, reading passages culled from instruction manuals for electronic devices; passages explaining the migratory patterns of certain South American butterflies. But this was the sort of thing that would be on the test, and this is what they were going to need if they were going to get their certificates.

I dimmed the light and clicked on the overhead projector. In the dark, with the door closed and the shades down, I was aware of the room’s narrow dimensions. It was silly, really, to think that an old house could be converted into a school just because Lawrence decided to use it that way. Idealistic and silly. This room was not a classroom. Where was the chalkboard and the pull-down map of the world? This was a bedroom and a small one at that. We were eleven people crammed into metal desk chairs, which were then all crammed into a guest bedroom. What did we really think we were accomplishing here? To teach students this far behind you needed computers, current hip textbooks. Hell, you needed a real teacher. Not just me and Rochelle, people hired for our “energy.”