The Untelling (16 page)

Mama prayed a moaning prayer into Hermione’s breast.

The workers kept shoveling red clay with small spades. Listening to their grunts, rhythmic like the men on a chain gang, I remembered my father’s voice. “Have you taken Ariadne to the doctor?”

I had just gotten home from school, fourth grade.

Mama said, “I made an appointment. It isn’t exactly an emergency.”

Daddy said, “I saw her today, walking up the driveway. Just out of the corner of my eye. She looked like a grown-ass woman.”

I’d gone into my room and looked at myself in the tall, narrow mirror tacked to the back side of my bedroom door. I had been wearing a navy-blue pullover with my green jumper, even though the weather was warm, so boys couldn’t see my bra strap. My B-cup breasts pushed against the green and white embroidered flowers on my girl-sized sweater. I may have looked like a grown woman, but at the same time, I looked like me. I’d kicked the door with my orange and white sneakers, hoping to ruin the mirror in an angry smashing of glass. But it had stayed whole, reminding me how much I’d grown in the last year.

When we left the cemetery, the girl was only half buried.

Mama noticed her as we walked back to the car, three unhappy women. “It’s so hard to lose a child.”

The phone was ringing when I got home from Westview. I undid the locks in a hurry, hoping that it was Dwayne. He often called when I was just walking in the house, like he knew somehow that I was available. I scurried into the kitchen, racing for the wall phone. I needed to hear his voice to remind me that he was still mine.

Rochelle was home, sitting at the oak table with her fiancé, Rod. They were drinking organic beer from purple bottles. I’ve never quite gotten used to their fantastic otherworldly appearance as a couple. There was Rochelle with her dark skin and silver hair; Rod was nearly her perfect inverse. He was about as white as you could get and still be black. His inky locks fell just below his shoulders. I wondered what sort of children they would produce.

Rochelle shook her head as I reached for the phone.

“It’s your mother,” Rod whispered as though she could hear us through the phone.

“She called four times already,” Rochelle added, just as my mother’s voice spoke out from the answering machine.

“Rochelle, this is Mrs. Eloise Jackson. I am trying to reach my daughter.”

Rod pulled two beers from a cardboard carton and handed one to me. “She was crying when she called a few seconds ago.”

I took the beer, feeling slightly embarrassed. How much had Rochelle told him about me?

Rochelle said, “How’d it go?”

I said, “Everyone’s still dead.”

Rod winced.

Rochelle massaged my shoulder with one hand and held tight to her bottle with the other. I tilted my face and kissed her fingers before taking a swallow of beer, which tasted faintly of raspberries. They talked honeymoon destinations and made fun of their travel agent. I tried very hard to care, or at least appear to care.

When my mother called again, I talked loud over her voice streaming from the answering machine. I tried very hard not to care, or at least to appear not to care.

The phone rang a third time as Rod was making the case for honeymooning in a developing nation.

Rochelle said to me, “Do you want to take that in the living room?”

I could imagine my mother sitting at the smoky-glass kitchen table, still wearing her beige suit with gold brocade. She’d have removed her contact lenses, experiencing the world by touch through her blurry gaze. I didn’t know why she wanted to talk to me, but my mother is a woman who doesn’t strive to be understood. I didn’t want to have this conversation, but I had to. I took the call with a two-beer buzz, lying on the hardwood floor, staring at the water-stained ceiling.

“I’m worried about you,” she said.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “I just got a little emotional out there, that’s all.”

My mother sighed. “My girls just lie and lie. Hermione’s so good at it. She should figure out a way to make her living from bending the truth. Do you think I would have let her marry Earl Phinazee if she had been honest about it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“But you are not much of a liar. You try, but it’s just not you. I am your mother. I know you. I was the first person to ever see your face.”

“I know.”

“So tell me,” she said. “What’s going on?”

It felt like a question that wasn’t really a question, as though Mama knew already and just wanted to see if I was capable of honesty, if I would fess up, tell the truth.

“Dwayne is going to leave me,” I said at last.

Kitten padded into the room and settled himself on my chest. I rubbed his furry back and waited for my mother to speak.

“What did you do?” she said.

“Nothing.” I stroked the cat and he closed his slit-eyes. “I just think he’s going to leave me, that’s all.”

“Oh, baby,” she said. “What happened?” Her tone was soft and sugary. This was the way mothers were supposed to be. Warm and omniscient at the same time. Her words were like kind hands, soft and scented. I wasn’t used to this sort of affection from her. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes.

“I don’t know.”

“He wouldn’t leave you with a child to raise on your own. He has his shortcomings; I won’t lie and say he isn’t a little rough around the edges, but he wouldn’t abandon you.”

“There are so many things about me he doesn’t know.” I was crying for real now. I’m sure Mama was surprised; she hadn’t seen me cry since Hermione left us. “So many things about me that you don’t know.”

“I’m your mother. I’ve known you since you were born.”

“If Dwayne leaves me, I’ll have a breakdown. I know I will.”

“He’s not going to leave you,” Mama said. “And if he did, you wouldn’t break down. You’re a strong girl. Always have been, always will be.”

I was reminded of a story that my mother likes to tell to show the world how “strong” I am. When I was four, I mentioned that there was a sore on my little arm. Mama was late for work; Daddy was out of town. She promised to look at it later and dropped me off at kindergarten. The “sore” was some sort of oozing, ulcerous wound that had to be lanced, drained, and stitched. The upshot of this story is that I didn’t cry. Not even while the doctor sewed the wound together with hard tugs. Of all my childhood stories, this is one of my least favorites; it seems to me that someone should have noticed my condition earlier. Do you have to cry for your own mother to notice that your arm is festering?

And then there’s another story that nobody likes to tell but that everybody remembers: I was only ten when Daddy died, but I didn’t cry then either. I wore my nappy gray coat in the overwarm sanctuary to hide how my lace dress strained across my chest. Beside me, my mother and Hermione both cried quiet, ladylike tears. From the corners of my eyes, I watched each of them dab her eyes with the hand that was not holding the other’s. I faced forward with my eyes on the box, so gray it was nearly silver, and tore at my cuticles with my nails. When that didn’t hurt enough, I used my teeth. Blood scribbled down the first joints of my fingers and settled in the creases of my knuckles, where it dried. When I flexed my fingers, it flaked like old paint.

“I miss Daddy,” I said into the telephone.

“Don’t tell me about missing Lincoln. I know all about missing Lincoln.”

When I first got my period, I didn’t tell Mama for four months. Daddy hadn’t been dead a month. I had known it was too soon for me to hit puberty and she would cry, so I used my sister’s supplies for the first two times. Then I got caught trying to figure out how to use a tampon and Mama shook me hard by the shoulders and said that keeping secrets was the same as lying.

With a queasy sense of déjà vu I said, “I went to the doctor the other day. I’m sick.”

“Oh my God,” she said. “Is it HIV?”

The phone was slick in my wet, hot hands. I wiped them on the carpet and said, “They don’t know how it happened. Maybe I was exposed to radiation, or maybe it’s just because I got my period so early in the first place. It’s not lupus, they checked for that.”

“Cancer?”

“Mama, I’m menopaused. Already.”

“You’re twenty-five,” she said.

“I know.”

She was silent, even after I called her name three times. On the fourth time, I spoke loud enough to bring Rochelle trotting in from the kitchen. When my mother answered with a quiet “yes,” I shooed Rochelle away.

“Mama?” I said. “You still there? Don’t worry about what I just said. It’s not that important. We can talk about it later. You’re not crying, are you?”

She didn’t say anything, but she was still on the line. I heard the clicks as she tapped her tongue against her teeth. “Mama?”

“He
is
going to leave you.” She made this pronouncement almost casually, as if she were predicting rain. I could picture her busy, tidying up the kitchen as she spoke to me. “Oh, Ariadne, why didn’t you meet somebody in college?”

“Mama, who was I supposed to marry in college? Nobody asked me.”

She said, “It’s the way you carried yourself.”

“Mama, I’m sick. Are you listening to me?”

“It’s the way you carried yourself,” she said. “You and your sister both. I’ve been telling you about that ever since you were in high school. You stayed out all night when you were just sixteen. How did you think things were going to turn out?” Her voice splintered with tears. “You always thought it was cute to run around with this boy and that one. That’s why nobody is on their knees for you—because you’re always on your knees for them.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said.

“Nothing is ever your fault,” she said.

“I wanted to meet somebody,” I whispered. “I tried.” And this was true. What I had wanted from college, more than anything, was to star in a love story just like my parents’.

I hung up the phone and crawled to the corner of the empty living room, held Kitten close. I tried to be grateful. What my mother had said to me was bad, but it could have been worse. Kitten pressed my thigh with his paws as if he were kneading bread. Rochelle once said he does this because he was taken away from his mother when he was too small.

When the phone rang, Rochelle and I picked up at the same time, giving a simultaneous hello. My mother on the other end sounded confused, disoriented. Her voice quaked a bit, giving me a fleeting sense of what she would be like when she was old. Rochelle hung up, leaving me alone on the wires with my mother.

“Ma’am?” I said to her.

“Ariadne, we’ve been foolish. There are doctors, you know. Don’t worry about money. Don’t worry about anything. I am going to get you all fixed up.”

Having delivered her message, she hung up, leaving me cradling the quiet handset in my trembling hands.

Chapter Ten

K
eisha failed the GED examination.
She hadn’t missed it by much, but this was a pass-fail situation. Like so many things in life, almost didn’t count for anything. She came to my office on the Wednesday afternoon that she had gotten the results. I hadn’t seen Keisha in nearly a month. Her session was over and I had a new class of students. These were traditional GED students, adults who wanted nothing from me but assistance in learning to read.

Rochelle and I shared our office, which had been a bedroom in LARC’s earlier incarnation. It was a good-sized room and we shared it like feuding sisters. While there was no clear line of demarcation separating her side from mine, it was obvious that the space was shared by two very different women. I was something of a minimalist at work. I brought the things I needed to help me do my job and that was it. My desk was nearly free of all clutter save a large calendar/blotter and a brandy snifter filled with potpourri. On the wall was my framed college degree and a plaque of the Serenity Prayer. Rochelle’s desk was littered with photos in eclectic frames, snapshots mostly of herself, documenting each of the phases of her life. My favorite was a faded and cracked picture of her at the age of about four. She was in a petting zoo, all dressed in yellow and green. The photographer caught her fighting a baby goat over a cone of cotton candy.

Whenever people came into the office, even my students, they went right to Rochelle’s side, drawn by the pull of something invisible but irresistible. I was marking papers when Keisha tapped on the door.

“Come in,” I said, smiling when I realized that it was her.

Keisha walked in and snatched a photo from Rochelle’s desk before plopping herself into a chair. The frame seemed to be carved from a coconut shell.

“Which one you got there?” I asked her.

She turned the shell toward me so that I could see a three-by-five of Rochelle and Rod dressed in ski gear. Rochelle’s hair was as white and sparkly as the snow.

“You ever been skiing, Miss Aria?”

“Nope,” I said, snapping the top onto my red pen and putting it in my desk drawer. “Where I’m from, black folks don’t ski.”

“Me either,” she said. “I haven’t ever really seen snow. I mean real deep snow.”

“Me either.” I smiled at her. “Look at you.” It’s amazing how much a pregnant woman can change in just five weeks. The last time I’d seen Keisha, she was obviously pregnant, but the evidence was only in her middle. From the breasts on up and the hips on down, she had looked like the other seventeen-year-old girls in the neighborhood—slim-faced with thin arms and shapely legs. But today she looked pregnant all over. Her cheeks were round and her forehead shiny. Her ankles protruding from under her sleeveless dress were thick and bloated. She wore her sandals unfastened.

“I don’t know what I am going to do, Miss Aria.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I failed my GED.” She handed me the pink computer-generated report. Looking at the little column of numbers, I wasn’t terribly surprised. Only about fifteen percent of our students make a passing mark the first time around. Keisha had been my favorite student in terms of personality, but there had been others who worked harder.

“You’ll take it again in the fall.”

She shook her head. “It’s not fair. Other people have their high school diplomas and they can’t read and write and do math any better than me. I know all kinds of people who got their diploma and they don’t even know what an adjective is.” She reached her hand into her hair and scratched, shifting her blond braids up and down. “I’m fixing to have a baby and I don’t have anything at all. I’m living with my mama, my job is tired, and now I failed my GED.”

Her eyes were shiny with tears and I opened my desk drawer, offered her a tissue, and then returned the box to its place. She dabbed her eyes carefully so as not to disturb her fluorescent eyeliner.

“You can take it again. Brush up on vocabulary and take it again.”

“I don’t want to take it again. I want to have my GED right now.”

Lawrence tapped on the door. He stuck his head in and I smiled at the way he had arranged his curly hair to camouflage the thinning patch in the middle.

“Come on in,” I said.

He entered the room, bringing his citrusy cologne. He wore his usual uniform of khakis and rumpled oxford shirt. “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said. “I just need to get some paperwork from Rochelle’s desk.” He went to the desk and surveyed the heaps of manila folders. His hand hovered over the piles. “Do you think there is some sort of system here, or will I have to look at all of them until I find the one I want?”

“Well,” I said, “I think the stuff closest to the center is what she was working on last.”

“Aha,” Lawrence said, reaching across the desk to pluck a green file folder from the middle. “NEH,” he read aloud from the tab. “Just what I am looking for.” To Keisha he said, “How are you, young lady?” He smiled and gave a nod of his head that seemed almost courtly.

“Terrible,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

“GED results came back this week,” I said, looking at him over her head as though we were her parents.

“Bad news?” Lawrence said.

“She almost passed,” I said. “I am trying to cheer her up.”

Lawrence knelt before her with crackling knees and said, “Lots of people don’t pass the first time.”

Keisha shifted in her chair. “Don’t try and be nice to me.”

Lawrence eased up with more knee-popping and took a step back. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not getting my baby,” she said. “Just because you have money and a nice job. I know what you’re thinking. You think that now that I failed my GED, I really don’t need to be raising a child.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking at all,” Lawrence said.

“It was,” Keisha said. “It is exactly what you’re thinking.”

Lawrence looked to me, but there was nothing that I could do to help him. He looked at his watch as though he had just remembered some pressing appointment. “I’ll have to bid you ladies adieu,” he said.

“I can’t stand faggots,” she said when he was gone. “If God had meant for them to have babies, he would have gave them the right equipment to make them.”

“Keisha,” I said, “you know hate speech is not allowed at LARC.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Aria,” she said. “But people make me mad how they always think that they are better than you.”

“Lawrence is a really nice person,” I told her. “His partner, Eric, is nice too.”

She rolled her eyes. “They are not getting my baby.”

“Okay,” I said. “No one is trying to force you to do anything. But you could do worse.”

Lawrence and Eric did want to add a baby to their family. Lawrence more so than Eric, I thought. They tried to go through an adoption agency, but they couldn’t get approved. As Eric put it, “There is no way in hell that the state of Georgia is going to give a newborn to two faggots like us.” Lawrence tended to say things like, “Times are changing, but I don’t know if things are going to change in time for Eric and me.” The bottom line was they wanted a baby and they didn’t have a way to get one. A couple of years ago they were negotiating with a pair of Senegalese lesbians. The women wanted green cards and Lawrence and Eric wanted a baby. I am not sure what became of that situation. All I know is that the ladies stopped coming around and Lawrence was depressed for three months.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” said Keisha.

So we sat in my office thinking our separate thoughts. Keisha fiddled with her hair. I used my teeth to peel dead skin from my lips. She put the coconut back on Rochelle’s desk and picked up a red glass frame.

“I don’t know why I am so depressed,” Keisha said, looking at Rochelle, twelve years old, wearing a pale green pageant gown. “It’s not like I was going to get my GED and my whole life was going to change. I would still be working at Subway. It’s not like somebody promised me a raise. I just wanted to have it before the baby got here.”

I nodded.

“And Omar, he has his diploma and I know he’s not smarter than me. He’s the one gave me money to take the test, and now I have to tell him that I failed it. I get tired of disappointing everybody.” She leaned forward and planted her elbows on the edge of the desk and rested her face in her hands.

“What are you doing now?” I asked her.

“I’m sitting here.” She rubbed her stomach.

“I mean this evening.”

“I have to work at ten,” she said. “But until then, nothing really.”

“Dwayne is coming to pick me up in a few and we are going to get something to eat. Do you want to go with us?”

“I’m on a budget,” she sighed.

“Dwayne will pay.”

“I don’t eat pork.”

“That’s okay.”

I sent her to the front porch to look out for Dwayne. As she walked toward the front door with her sandals flapping against her heels, I tiptoed to Lawrence’s office and tapped on the door.

“Yes?” he said.

“I just wanted to tell you that I am leaving.”

“That’s fine,” he said, flipping through the green folder that he had taken from Rochelle’s desk.

“I’m sorry about that scene in there.”

He looked up from the folder and raised his eyebrows and tried to appear arch. “Nobody said working nonprofit was easy.”

“She didn’t mean it the way it came out,” I said.

“Yes, she did, Aria. Your gifted student and the state of Georgia are of one mind.” He turned his face back to the folder. “Lock the front door when you leave. I’m going to be here until late.”

I wanted to tell him that I knew how he felt, though I probably did not. How can you know what another person is going through when your own life is so different from his? People had done this to me often enough, telling me that they knew how I felt because they had suffered this or that loss, felt some sort of pain. The words were in my mouth to tell Lawrence that I knew what it was not to be able to make the family you want to have, not because you are a bad person or because you haven’t tried hard enough, but because you just can’t. I could predict his response, his words, polite enough, thanking me for my empathy, my generosity of spirit. And I could imagine his thoughts, that no, I couldn’t possibly empathize. Our situations were not the same at all.

I told Lawrence to have a good night. I asked him to say hello to Eric for me, easing myself out of the room and closing the door gently so as not to disturb him more.

Keisha waited on the wooden swing on the front porch. She moved herself back and forth by bending her legs. “Dwayne’s not going to mind that I’m coming with you?”

Assuring her that it would be all right, I sat on the wooden swing beside her and we watched bees force their way inside the buttercups growing in the yard. Keisha picked at a bump over her brow. I moved her hand from her face. She smiled over at me and I realized how much I’d missed her over the last five weeks.

When Dwayne pulled up in front of the house, I waved at him. He let down the window and smiled. Keisha got in the back and I slid into the front passenger seat. Dwayne leaned over and kissed me quick on the lips. He did this every time that I got into the car, but it seemed more special when we had an audience. I introduced him to Keisha and she gave him a demure hello.

“Where do you want to go and eat?” He looked into the rearview mirror when he spoke.

“I don’t care. Something American,” she said.

Dwayne nodded his head. “That’s what I’m talking about. I’m going to start bringing you with us every time we go to dinner. I need another vote for regular food. Aria, she always wants to try something different—Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian. Keisha and me are in the mood for plain old American.”

“Let’s get pizza,” Keisha said.

“There’s Felini’s on Ponce,” I said.

“Let’s find some regular pizza,” Dwayne said. “I don’t want no pineapple or artichokes on mine.”

“Gross,” Keisha said.

“Where’s a Pizza Hut?” Dwayne looked to me.

“Nearby?” I said, thinking. “There’s one all the way on Fairburn Road. We used to go there when I was little. Make a U-turn and go the other way down MLK.”

He put on his blinker and I breathed deep to still my twitching stomach. Why did I insist on doing this to myself? I could have sent him down I-20 or we could have taken Cascade Road and crossed over. The way we were headed, we would pass the curve, the bend in the road where my father had veered from the pavement into the bark of a one-hundred-year-old magnolia.

Keisha asked Dwayne to turn the radio up and she sang along in a reedy soprano. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breath. Breathe, Rochelle said on the answering machine, and you will know peace. I pulled the air inside of me and let it out. I pulled it in again and again. My head floated with so much air. I touched my forehead to the glass and looked the other way while Dwayne rounded the curve easily, driving with only one hand, and didn’t hit anything at all.

We passed Westview Cemetery a few moments later. “That’s where my father and sister are buried.”

Keisha stopped singing and Dwayne gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “Sorry,” Dwayne said. “Sorry,” echoed Keisha. We rode the rest of the way in silence. I’d ruined the mood. “Sorry,” I said.

Pizza Hut was closed. Not closed for the day, but closed for good. The burgundy building with its triangular panels had been converted to a beauty salon. A sign staked into the dirt said “Walk-ins Welcome.” We could see the four barber chairs and shampoo bowls, but a Pizza Hut still looked like a Pizza Hut no matter what you did with it.

“When was the last time you were here?” Dwayne asked me.

“I don’t know. A few years?”

“So now what?” Keisha said. “I’m hungry.”

I was disappointed that the restaurant was gone. Pizza had been Hermione’s and my favorite treat. In the seventies food was different than it was now. Then pizza delivery was an innovation that existed only on television shows, along with Chinese food that you ate right out of paper cartons. If we wanted pizza, we had to go to Pizza Hut on Fairburn Road. It was an expensive meal, so we went only on special occasions like birthdays, but the Pizza Hut Man, tall and lean, always remembered us. Mother had taken us there only once after the accident; the Pizza Hut Man must have seen the article, recognizing us from our family Christmas photo, printed on the crease of the morning paper. He didn’t ask after Daddy or Genevieve, nor did he charge us for our meal. Mother thanked him; I realize now that we never went back.