The Untelling (15 page)

Dwayne made a little circular motion at his temple. “What the hell does she mean by that?”

“You know how she is.”

Rochelle’s mother’s voice sang out. She had seen a bouquet of burgundy calla lilies in a magazine. They were pricey but perfect. Could Rochelle call her back? The woman on the phone was Rochelle’s mother, gray hair or no gray hair, biology or no biology, right?

“Do you want all that stuff?” Dwayne asked me. “Their wedding is going to set them back how much?”

“Forty-five grand and counting,” I said.

He breathed through his teeth. “That’s a down payment on a house. A good down payment.”

I nodded, distracted.

“I can’t give you all that,” he said. “My sister, she just got married at our church. The reception was in the rec center. Wasn’t no calla lilies involved.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care about that.”

“Rochelle and Rod, they probably going to have their picture in
Jet
, huh?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“So what happened at the doctor’s?” Dwayne said.

I put my left hand to my mouth and spoke through the screen of my fingers, and I knew why this conversation felt so sad and so familiar. I’d made my share of confessions in my life. I knew how words got caught in your throat, clotted and thick. I had more than a passing acquaintance with shame.

“It’s got Down syndrome, epilepsy, or something?” Dwayne asked. He put his hands on my shoulders, twisting so that I had to look at him. He tightened the skin around his eyes, squinting, as though I were too small for him to see clearly. “Look at me, Aria. What happened? Was it a miscarriage?” His hands on my shoulders gripped hard, hurt just a little bit.

This was the time to tell him. To just say, “It was a mistake. I can’t have kids.” That would give him everything he needed to know. I thought of Keisha saying that men don’t care about the specifics, they just want the bottom line. But she was wrong; this news about my health, about my body, was what he would want to know, but it was the next-to-the-bottom line. The bottom line was that I loved him. That I wanted to make a family with him.

“I lost the baby,” I said. “I had to get scraped.”

After I said that, there was a new bottom line: I’d lied. From that moment on, this was all that would matter.

Dwayne moved his hands from my shoulders to the sides of my face. He pressed his lips to each of my closed eyes. “When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I called?”

“I didn’t want to disappoint you. I didn’t know what to say.”

“Are you okay? Are you in pain?”

“Yes,” I said. “I feel terrible.”

“You should be in bed,” he said. “Trying to recover.”

He helped me to my feet and we walked toward my bedroom. I leaned on him as though my ankle were sprained. Moving in tiny, careful steps, I concentrated on the scent of him and the squeak of his new sneakers on the wood floors. Dwayne was a good person and a good man. Generous and kind, all the things you would like in a person. Even Rochelle would agree with this. In all the things that really mattered, when you stripped people out of their bodies, out of the details of their lives, when you pared things down to the soul level, a person could do a lot worse than Dwayne. A person could, and I had.

“Can I get you something?” he asked me.

“Ice cream,” I said. “Macadamia brittle.”

“Okay,” Dwayne said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Take my keys,” I said. “So you can get back in.”

“I don’t need them,” he said, picking up my key ring anyway.

While he was gone, I pulled on a yellow cotton gown, applied a bit of lip gloss, and climbed into bed. Cynthia’s rhinestone barrette glinted under the glare of my bedside lamp; I fastened it around a handful of my twists. I lay there propped up in bed, trying not to think about what I had just done. I tried to think how lucky I was at that moment, in that instant. Dwayne was treating me the way you treat someone when you think you will love them for the rest of your life. I tried to gorge myself on this experience the way condemned men somehow manage to enjoy their final meal.

Dwayne wasn’t gone long. When he returned, he rang the doorbell before opening my door with my keys.

“They didn’t have macadamia nut,” he said. “I don’t know where you think you’re at. You have to go to the suburbs to get Häagen-Dazs.” He pulled a small tub of Sealtest chocolate out of a brown bag.

“That’s fine,” I said. “It’s what I used to like when I was a kid.”

I lifted the lid from the pint to find that the ice cream had melted and refrozen, a layer of gray frost covering the chocolate. I tilted the carton so Dwayne couldn’t see and chipped at the mess with the plastic spoon. “Thank you.”

“Are you going to be all right?” he said.

“Yes.”

Dwayne knelt beside my bed, rubbing my arm, and I spooned freezer-burned ice cream into my mouth. “We have plenty of time for babies,” he said. “Now we have time to do things right.”

The ice cream tasted like dirt, but I forced it to the back of my tongue and down my throat.

“Not that I am glad about what happened. I’m not glad that you had to go through what you went through. The scraping and all. But I am saying that this might be a blessing in disguise.”

“It is not a blessing,” I said. “You don’t know what has happened to me. If you had been there, you wouldn’t say it is a blessing.”

“Not a blessing, no, that’s the wrong word. I’m just saying that we can make some plans. Okay, I’m screwing this whole thing up. I’m not good at talking.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a blue velvet box. “Just take this.”

The spring-loaded box fairly jumped open at my touch. There, wedged in blue satin, was an engagement ring. It was a simple affair, narrow gold setting, round cut, a little more than a third carat, less than a half. It was more than good enough.

“You want me to have it?”

“Naw,” he said. “I just want you to look at it.”

I handed it back.

“I was just kidding,” he said. “Of course I want you to have it.”

“I thought you just asked me to marry you because I was pregnant.”

“It wasn’t just that. Well, at first it was just that, because of the way everything went down. But I sort of got used to the idea of having you around.” He smiled at me, showing his overlapping teeth, and I loved him so much that it made my head hurt.

I pulled the ring from its satin nest and gripped it tight, the metal prongs digging into my palm and me savoring the bite.

Chapter Nine

E
ach year my mother,
Hermione, and I set aside my father’s birthday as a day of remembrance. My mother shares with us her best memory of our father, the story of their courtship. She tells it the same way each time, as though reciting the language of a sacred text. As she speaks the words, I close my eyes to concentrate on the images produced in the factory of my imagination. Hermione shuts her eyes too, and though she would never admit it, I know that she does what I do: listen to the story and pretend that it had happened to me.

Daddy had gone to Morehouse, but he wasn’t really “Morehouse material.” He worked a couple of jobs to pay for his tuition and didn’t have enough left for textbooks or cafeteria lunches. After classes he would climb the stairs of Graves Hall to sit in his teachers’ offices, reading the lessons from their textbooks. He would eat a handful of peanuts for lunch before rushing off to sweep up hair at a barbershop. The barber, Old Man Phinazee, paid a dollar an hour.

When my father met my mother, she was eating a frosted cupcake, waiting at the front gate of Spelman for a ride. Daddy was hungry; he hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before and it was now three in the afternoon. Mama wore a green dotted swiss skirt that stopped at her knee, and white shoes that fastened at the ankle. He said that he remembered the shoes because he was too shy to look in her face while she enjoyed the chocolate cake, because she might look in his eyes and see how hungry he was.

Mama asked him if he had a church key and he said, “No, ma’am.” She laughed at him because they were the same age, both sophomores, nineteen. “I’m not your mother,” she said, and popped the rest of the cake in her mouth.

Daddy pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket, checked that it was clean, and offered it to her, to wipe the chocolate from her lips. She did, and gave him the handkerchief back smeared with cake and frosted lipstick. I like to think that he rubbed it to his own lips after he was out of her sight, tasting sweet icing and grease.

Daddy saved his money for six months, cutting his budget by not buying pencils (he wrote with stubs he found on the ground). He ran extra errands for the barber, sharpening scissors, scrubbing toilets, after hours. Then he came down with the flu, missing a week of work, forcing him to dip into his savings to pay his rent. But once he had the money, he asked her out to lunch and a movie. I’ve always wondered what he would have done with the money if she had said no.

Daddy met her at the front gate of Spelman and they walked a block to catch the bus on Fair Street. He was confident but shy in size twelve black penny loafers, borrowed from his best friend, Earl, the barber’s son. Mama was a beautiful coquette wearing a navy-blue shirtwaist with yellow trim. When they walked to the rear of the city bus, she took his hand. Embarrassed, Daddy wished that he had been patient, saved longer, and had enough money for a colored taxi. But at least the bus was empty, except for the driver; they didn’t have to walk past any white people as they made their way to the back.

The movie,
West Side Story,
lasted longer than they thought it would. Neither of them enjoyed it much, but they were happy to sit close together in the dark, fingers touching in the bag of oily popcorn. When they came down from the balcony—Mama always called it the balcony, never nigger heaven, which is what everyone else called it—it was twenty minutes until my mother’s six o’clock curfew. When I was a student at Spelman, our curfew was two a.m. on weekends. If we violated this rule, the punishment was “social probation,” which was more an inconvenience than anything else. But in 1962 the students wore white gloves on Sundays and the penalty for missed curfew was expulsion.

She would have to go home in a taxi. In his pockets Daddy had money for their bus fare and twenty cents that he had planned to use to treat her to an ice cream cone. Daddy gave her all he had in his pockets, and then he bent down and took two dimes from his borrowed loafers. Wondering where he would get the dimes to replace the ones he’d stolen from Earl’s shoes, he put her in the taxi. I can remember Daddy’s laugh when he told this story, saying that the wind smacked him all about the head and shoulders as he walked the six miles from downtown to the rooming house where he lived. His coat was thin and a little small for him. Earl’s shoes rubbed blisters the size of quarters. But Daddy said that even when it started to rain, he was warm because my mama had kissed his cheek before she climbed in that taxi.

This is my most vivid memory of my father, although it happened years before I was born. My father has been dead most of my life. I don’t have many real memories of him, no stories that haven’t been retouched from multiple tellings. This story, the one of how he loved my mother the moment he met her, is my best memory of him, even though it happened before I existed. It’s my favorite memory of Mama too. I like to imagine her through his eyes, pretty and swiss-dotted, chocolate- eating and laughing. My memories of my mother’s smile are as distant and blurred as those of my father’s face.

When I die, I want to be cremated. I don’t have plans for the ashes, but I want them to be discarded, dumped somewhere with no marker.

On my father’s birthday we go to the cemetery to lay flowers on his grave. We bring blossoms for Genevieve too, but we don’t make a special trip for her birthday. I suppose it would be more democratic to commemorate the April day that we lost them both, a day equally significant to a thirty-eight-year-old man and a girl less than one. But this would be dishonest somehow. Genevieve’s death was just insult. Daddy’s was the injury.

Lincoln and Genevieve Jackson are buried in Westview Cemetery, five gorgeous acres of grief. They lie side by side, like man and wife, under matching brass plates.

When I was a little girl, we used to cut through the cemetery to avoid the traffic on Gordon Road. As we wound through the green hills, I’d mash my face to the car window admiring the plaster angels, heavy-winged and weeping. In the center of the graveyard is a four-story tower with a notched top, the sort of structure where fairy-tale princesses are held hostage by ogres. Before I was ten, I never thought of the dead people under the elaborate markers. When I saw fresh dirt heaped under a green funeral tent, I only noticed the flowers.

Daddy and Genevieve are at the back of the cemetery, nearly a quarter mile from the nearest marble monument. In this section of Westview the graves are marked with flat metal plates, so that the groundskeeper can just roll over them with a riding mower. I wondered about the other families who buried their loved ones out here. Were they the sort of people who asked that mourners make donations to charity in lieu of flowers? Maybe they were wealthy misers who’d rather buy stocks instead of paying high rent for the dead. Or maybe they were like us, feeling guilty and poor as we passed some other “beloved father’s” monument. This back pasture plot was all that we could afford at Westview.

Although the cemetery itself is opulent, the neighborhood around it is decayed and rotting. I would never be willing to live over here. People like Dwayne think that all depressed areas are the same, but anybody who lives in a less-than-desirable zip code can tell you different. This stretch of MLK, just before it branches off to Abernathy, near the Marta station—this mile or two really has nothing to offer anyone. The real estate agents are not buzzing about its possibility. Even if you were to raze the buildings—the crumbling apartment buildings with No Trespassing signs, these condemned homes in which people live anyway, people with children—even if these structures were leveled, it wouldn’t be right to build on this land. The sadness permeates the soil like nuclear waste.

Mama sighed as we waited at a red light on MLK. When our family ran into the magnolia, this was called Gordon Road. Now the road bears the name of Martin Luther King and at the fork honors Dr. King’s number two man, Ralph David Abernathy. A neon sign advertised “Best Buy Caskets” to get the attention of the people of the neighborhood who would need both discounts and coffins. Beside it was a liquor store. My mother sighed again and I knew she was thinking that this was not what Dr. King died for.

“When I was a girl, it was nice over here, a real high-class area.” Mama shook her head. “But now that all of
us
have moved in here, just look around.” She snorted. “I bet the white folks wish they could have taken the cemetery with them when they all moved to Buckhead.”

“It’s kind of sad,” Hermione said.

“Don’t tell me about sad,” Mama said. “I know all about sad.”

I knew all about sad too. Dwayne gave me my engagement ring nine days ago. I was happy to have it, pleased to reach for items with my left hand. But I knew that this was a temporary happiness. I’d accepted the ring under false pretenses. I’d be found out eventually because there are some things that you just can’t hide. I lay awake many nights, fondling my engagement ring, tapping my nail against the stone, rubbing the narrow gold band like a magic lamp. I woke in the mornings exhausted from wishing and missing Dwayne in advance.

Hermione stopped the car and got out. The chirp of the car alarm startled a pair of squirrels sunning themselves on Genevieve’s marker. It was noon on the tenth of June. The heat and humidity swaddled us like a filthy blanket.

I wish that I could think of some other way to pay my respects to Daddy, to honor the memories that I think are mine. When I go to the cemetery with my mother and sister, I can’t tell which stories of him live in my head, what information was reported by my eyes, ears, and hands. Much about what feels like memory to me happened before I was born or in the hours after I was sent to bed. I know that he liked to drink seven-and-seven, that he loved his mother, that he was overly competitive at dominoes and bid whist. But these memories are not mine. The thought pictures that belong to me are the silly incidents recorded by a ten-year-old, a kid who didn’t know that these memories would be all that I would have to carry me into my womanhood.

So what I remember are things like this: Daddy chewed gum two sticks at a time, different flavors. He would force me to clean my room, and when I finished, he would come in, compliment me on the clean floor, and say, “This is a good start. Call me again when you’re finished.” Daddy never gave in to fake tears, but would melt if my sobbing was genuine. I remember things like this. Things that are not enough when I try to remember him as a father, let alone when I try to remember him as a man.

The graveside ritual never lasted for more than a half hour. There really wasn’t much to do. I put most of the flowers in the depression in the plaque with Daddy’s name and dates; we gave the rest to Genevieve. The three of us stood there quiet, as though we were waiting for something to happen.

“Lincoln would have liked Dwayne,” Mama said. “They are cut from the same cloth.”

I lifted my bowed head and looked at Hermione, who nodded.

Dropping my eyes to my navy-blue shoes, I wondered if my mother was right. I wondered what my father would have done if my mother had told him that she couldn’t have children. If she had whispered that truth while he fished through his pockets for a metal church key.

“Oh, Ariadne,” Mama said, touching my stomach. “Who’s going to give you away?”

The only time you could really see my mother’s age was when she cried. Tears snagged in the grooves under her eyes. On her neck the loose skin trembled with her quiet coughs.

Hermione took a few steps toward our mother, nudging me aside. My sister was taller than Mama, rounder and bigger as well. She pulled Mama to her chest and rocked her in a moment of role reversal that made me jealous, dizzy, and lonely. I stood there, beside them, quiet and respectful. My heels sank into the grassy yard and I twisted them in further, trying to ruin my good shoes, trying to sacrifice something, since I couldn’t make myself cry.

Two rows east, a funeral had just ended. The box, slim and baby pink, was poised over a grave, red and open as a mouth. A blanket of Astroturf hid most of the displaced earth. The casket, pastel and cozy, was perfect for a ten-year-old girl. Hermione rocked Mama, the two of them turning their memories over in their heads like dough.

With eyes so dry they burned, I looked over my shoulder at the men burying the girl. An orange bulldozer was parked nearby, but the workmen completed this job by hand, quietly piling shovelfuls of bloody earth, pausing to blot their sweaty faces with their dirty shirttails.

I remembered myself when I was ten, the age of the girl in the box. The year Daddy died. I had gone to the beauty parlor for the first time, on my birthday, for Shirley Temple curls, held off my face with a wide purple ribbon. I remembered how disappointed I had been not to look sweet like Cindy on
The Brady Bunch
. Instead, I looked like me, too tall and too developed to be just ten, a woman’s face under a mop of oily ringlets.

Where was Daddy at that time? Did he like my new hair? Did he try to cheer me up and tell me that I was pretty as Lena Horne? Did he worry about me? Did he know that I wasn’t safe at ten years old wearing a B-cup? Did he and Mama talk late at night about me, finally deciding that they would ignore it? Treat me like nothing was happening so that maybe nothing would happen?

Two rows over, the dirt fell on the pink coffin in a fine flurry like wedding rice. I shut my eyes respectfully and tried to remember my father. When had he decided that I was too much of a woman to sit on his lap? I was nine when I tried to climb up and he shoved me onto the floor. Was that when I decided that I wanted curls for my birthday?

I sucked in clean air to clear these memories. This is not what I wanted to recollect. I wanted to remember times that he took me for ice cream or maybe a time that he and I snuck out and went to the circus without Mama and Hermione. I am sure that we went on some special outings, just the two of us. After all, I had been Daddy’s girl, by all accounts. When he was alive, I was somebody’s favorite.

Why couldn’t I remember it?