The Untelling (22 page)

“Sort of,” Cynthia said. “Over by the Beautiful Restaurant. You know where that is?”

“For real?” I said. “That’s where I grew up.”

“Where you go to high school?” Cynthia asked me.

“All over,” I said. “My mama pulled me out of school every time I had a boyfriend.”

“I went to Brown High,” Cynthia said.

“I went there for a minute.”

“We could have knew each other,” Cynthia said, brushing off the Huey Newton Seat before sitting down.

I dragged the love seat so I could sit beside her. Cynthia smelled clean, like dish detergent and new clothes. “Do you get along with your mother?”

Cynthia picked at a gray scab on her forearm. “She’s okay. She’s my mother and everything like that.”

“My mother doesn’t understand me,” I said.

“That’s just how it is.”

We watched the kids in the street. These were grade-schoolers writing letters in chalk because they had just learned how. They wrote mostly three-letter words, in big letters—a foot high at least. They laughed, pleased with themselves.

“What’s it like for you?” I asked as she pried a small scab on her wrist. A bubble of blood rose to the surface. “What’s it like when you do what you do?”

“Miss, you don’t want to know about me.” She stood up and walked back to the driveway, tripping a bit on the rotten step. Through the new shirt I could see a hump forming at the top of her spine. She returned to the driveway, kicking the gravel with her new tennis shoes.

“I do want to know about you.” I followed her. “Do you have children?”

“I’m telling you,” she said. “You don’t want to know about me.”

She squatted, causing her jeans to ride up, exposing ankles shiny with Vaseline. She picked up a handful of rocks.

I put my hand on her arm and tried to tug her to a standing position. “Not with all the kids out here.”

“Not like I’m doing something that’s X-rated,” she said. “These kids seen worse than what I’m doing. And anyway, they stole that chalk, you know.”

I looked to the children in the road, who had switched from writing to drawing a hopscotch board. Three girls drew careful blocks.

“You never seen a rock before, have you?” Cynthia said, smiling as she caressed the gravel in her hands.

“Not in real life.”

“Well,” she said, “it looks like a rock. That’s why they call it that.”

“I don’t think there’s anything out here, Cynthia. Don’t you think you would have found it by now?”

She said, “Keep hope alive.”

I looked at the pebbles in her palm. Most of the rocks in this part of the country were chunks of gray granite, pieces of Stone Mountain, the South’s answer to Mount Rushmore. Granite was an igneous rock. This was the sort of thing I learned in grade school, the sort of information that was utterly useless, but I couldn’t seem to forget.

A gray roly-poly bug crawled out onto the tips of Cynthia’s fingers. She turned her hand over, sending the rocks to the ground and dirt floating up into our faces.

“So tell me,” I said. “Do you have children?”

She was still squatting, her head about level with my hip. She looked up. “I told you. You don’t want to know about me.”

“Tell me,” I said. “I just want to know. Do you have any kids? Do you want children?”

She shrugged. “What do you think?”

Bugs congregated around my head, trying to drink my sweat. “I don’t know.”

“You know,” she said.

I didn’t answer her. The children in the road hopped around the grid they had made. I wondered if they had stolen the chalk and I wondered what difference this made.

Cynthia looked at me with an expression that was hard for me to translate. Her mouth was stretched, turned up at the corners like a smile, but her face wasn’t amused or warm.

“You know.” She stared hard at me with that same not-smile.

“I’m going in the house,” I said, scared suddenly and backing away. “I got company.”

“Just stay with me a little while longer,” she said. “You see I didn’t say nothing about that money you owe me.”

“I gave you that dollar a long time ago.”

“No, you didn’t,” Cynthia said. “But I’m not tripping about it. I’m just asking you to help me with this, that’s all. Help me a little bit and we can talk about what all you want to know about. Come on.” She patted the driveway beside her and gave me what looked to be a real smile. “We’re friends, right?”

I lowered myself beside Cynthia and picked up a handful of dirt, although I had only the vaguest idea what I was looking for.

“You have kids, don’t you?” I said.

“You want to know how many I had, or how many I got?”

“Whichever.”

“I had three. Don’t have none with me.”

“Where are they?”

She shrugged. “Don’t make me get to lying. I lost track of them. I move around too much.”

“I really have to go back in the house. They are probably wondering what happened to me.”

“I’m just asking for a little company,” Cynthia said. “I gave you my good hair clip and didn’t ask you for nothing. All I’m asking you to do now is just sit out here with me for a little while. I just want somebody to talk to.” She grabbed my wrist. The move was sudden and the force of it almost tipped me forward.

“It’s cool. I’m not going anywhere.” I tried to make my voice relaxed so she would let me go. Her hand was ropy with veins, the nails beige and thick. As I looked up, Cynthia met my eyes. Her pupils were pinprick tiny, the whites the color of candlelight.

“Why you act so biggity? You don’t have nothing, besides that diamond on your hand. Y’all don’t even have a couch, just some fold-up bullshit. Liquor in the freezer, like you don’t want nobody to find it. Clothes strewn all over the bathroom floor. Panties right there in front of the bathtub.” At this she squeezed my wrist, my left hand went limp, my ring heavy and bright.

“Cynthia,” I said, “you were the one who broke in our place?”

“I didn’t take nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to see. And I saw everything.” She laughed a wet laugh, still holding tight to my wrist.

“Let me go,” I whispered. “What do you want?”

“I want what everybody wants.” Cynthia leaned in close enough to kiss me. Her breath smelled of mint over rot. “Stay out here with me,” she said. “You said you was going to keep me company.”

I pulled myself into a standing position, and Cynthia, still attached to my left wrist, rose with me.

Cynthia was wire thin in the way that only drug addicts can be. I was a big girl, healthy looking. She wasn’t a physical threat, exactly. I didn’t doubt that I could overpower her. But the idea of grappling with her, having her touch me, maybe wrestling me to the ground and covering my body with hers, was terrifying in the way that a nest of daddy longlegs is terrifying even though you know the spiders are blind and can’t hurt you.

“A whole drawer,” she said, “with nothing but snot rags.”

With my free right hand I slapped her, hard across her chapped mouth. I swung hard like I was trying to hit the back of her head from the front. Cynthia’s skin was softer than I would have expected. She took a step back and I took one forward. I balled my hands into fists and struck her mouth again. Her teeth nicked my knuckles before she grabbed me, two handfuls of my hair, close to my scalp. She pulled my face toward her.

“Don’t you ever touch me again,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I said, reaching for her hair, but it was too short and oily to catch. I looped my fingers through her plastic hoop earrings. “Fuck you,” I said. “I’ll pull them out.”

“Do it,” she said with her lips scraping my cheeks. “Do it and I’ll kill you, motherfucker.” Her hands tightened in my hair.

“Those handkerchiefs were my father’s,” I hissed into her ear. “He’s dead.”

She didn’t respond as I waited for my words to sink in, for her to fully understand the extent to which she had invaded my privacy, how she had desecrated my father’s memory by merely looking at his handkerchiefs with her yellow eyes.

Finally she spoke. “Cemetery is full of people’s daddies.”

She let go of my hair then and I retracted my fingers from her cheap earrings. We stood there for a moment, looking at each other across the humidity of the afternoon. I took steps toward my house, walking backward, facing her. She eased away in the same fashion, understanding that she should never turn her back on me again.

Chapter Thirteen

F
or Little Link’s birthday
Dwayne bought a shiny metal cap pistol, leather holster, and a dozen or so rolls of red and black caps. Dwayne had volunteered to shop for the birthday present and I’d let him. For one thing, I didn’t want to drive all the way to Buckhead to find a decent gift. Although the West End was crawling with children, there were no toy stores in at least a ten-mile radius. The only potential gifts for sale at the West End Mall were miniatures of expensive basketball shoes or tiny versions of teenagers’ baggy pants and athletic jerseys. The other reason I let Dwayne take control of the gift buying was that I liked the idea of him asking to be the representative of our relationship. Whatever he bought would be presented to Link, to Hermione and Mr. Phinazee, and to my mother as a gift from Dwayne and me. A gift from our branch of the family to theirs. The fact that the gift was of Dwayne’s choosing made it clear to everyone involved that he was as committed to the institution of our tiny family as I was. This was just further proof that he and I would
stick.

Dwayne brought his package into the house in a paper shopping bag. It banged against his legs as he bounded up the porch steps, almost tripping when his shoe snagged on the gap where the brick had fallen out.

“I got something good,” he said, kissing me lightly on the lips.

“Come on in the kitchen,” I said, tugging his hand.

Rochelle had insisted on buying a gift for my nephew, even though she and Rod were not invited to the party. Now she and Rod sat at the kitchen table staring at a wooden xylophone with painted metal keys. At Rochelle’s elbow was a single sheet of gift-wrapping paper, blue with yellow sailboats and a coordinating bow. Rod looked to the glittery sheet of paper and back to the xylophone. “I don’t know,” he said to Rochelle.

“That’s what y’all got him?” Dwayne said, pretending to cover his laughing mouth. “Don’t no little boy want an accordion.”

“It’s a xylophone,” Rochelle said. “Kids like things that make noise.”

Rod said, “I had one of these when I was little. It was one of my favorite toys.”

“Admit it.” Rochelle hit his shoulder. “You still play with it.”

As everyone laughed, Rod used two of his locks to tie the rest into a ponytail. “How to wrap this thing is an entirely different matter.”

“I kept telling you to just buy a gift bag,” Rochelle said. “The gift bag is the best thing to happen to American consumerism since the invention of the credit card.”

“But little kids like unwrapping toys. They rip open the paper, throw the ribbon around.”

I am sure that Rochelle and Rod had problems, like all other couples. More than once, she had told me that relationships take
work.
In my experience people only say this when their significant others are getting on their last nerves, so I was fairly certain that all was not perfect with my roommate and her fiancé. Even so, they seemed to get along easily with their implied consensus on everything from pizza toppings to the suitability of this gift for my nephew.

“So,” Dwayne said, “you think I should wrap this?” With a sharp crackle of the paper shopping bag he pulled the cap pistol from under the table. He pointed it at Rod’s forehead, twirled it around, then blew a puff of air over the barrel. It was a good-looking toy. Realistic, as far as I could tell. The barrel was real metal, not molded plastic; the handle shimmered with mother-of-pearl.

Rod was the first to speak. “Um, do you really think that is appropriate?”

“It’s better than a xylophone.”

Rochelle said, “Maybe something a little less violent?”

Dwayne aimed the gun again at Rod’s forehead, pulling the trigger. “It’s a
toy
. Why do you have to take everything so serious?”

Rod flinched at the hollow crack of the metal hammer. “Not to be judgmental. But with so many black men in prison for violent crime, don’t you think we should try to be a little bit more positive with our gifts?”

“What do you know about kids anyway?” Dwayne said to Rod. “I got a little boy back at home. And I gave him this exact same gun when he was three. Trey is ten now and he’s not turning out to be some sort of freak. He’s a good kid. He ain’t no punk, but he’s a good kid.”

Rod said, “You can’t deny that there are certain correlations . . .”

“You going to tell me you never played cowboys and Indians when you were little?”

“Actually,” Rod said with a glance toward Rochelle, “my parents had a political position against that sort of thing.”

“Whatever,” Dwayne said, crunching the bag under his arm. He stalked out of the kitchen, moving toward my room. I looked over my shoulder at Rochelle as I trotted out behind my boyfriend.

“Ouch,” she whispered.

Dwayne yanked open the door to my bedroom, flopping himself onto the bed. “What was that all about?”

“Rochelle and Rod just don’t think that kids should have toy guns. A lot of people think like that.”

Dwayne tossed the brown shopping bag onto a chair and lay down on my half-made bed, covering his eyes with his large hand. Seeing him stretched over on my flowered sheets, I was aware of how much of a man he was, how much space he occupied. He was dressed for the birthday barbecue in long denim shorts that reached his knees and a purple and gold basketball jersey. Tufts of wiry hair protruded from under his arms. “I don’t know how you live over here. It’s the worst of both worlds. You live in the ghetto with a bunch of bourgie Negroes. Did you look at Rod’s face when he saw what I had bought Link? You would have thought I was fixing to give the little boy a box of pornos or something.
Do I think that is appropriate?
Just the way he was talking. Your girl was trying to be nice, but you could tell that they are of one mind.”

I sat on the edge of the bed beside him. I knew how he felt. It was hard to move in a world where you don’t know the language, can’t quite figure out the rules. I pressed my face to his chest and stroked his muscular arms. I’d missed him over the last week. “Don’t worry about them,” I said.

“I’m not worried about them,” he said. “Like I said, I have a son myself. It’s not like I never thought about what kind of things are good to give kids.” He rubbed his hand over his short hair. “Trey is still my boy. I might have signed the papers, but you can’t sign away blood. He got my hair, my mama’s big feet, my sister’s dimples.”

“You’re right,” I said. “He’s still yours.”

“So Rod don’t have no right to talk to me like he’s the first person in the world to have ever thought about something. It’s like that all the time when I come over here. They will be sitting there eating something crazy like tofu and Triscuits and I’ll bring in a pizza and they will just look at me like I’m crazy because it’s got pepperoni on it.”

“Dwayne,” I said, “don’t read too much into this.”

Dwayne struggled to sit up, forcing me to move my head. “It’s not about reading into things. Disrespect is disrespect.”

The ringing of the phone startled me. I jumped, biting through the soft meat of my jaw.

“It’s for you,” Rochelle called.

At first I didn’t catch Keisha’s voice. She spoke quietly and carefully, as though she were reading her words from a cue card.

“Miss Aria,” she said, “are you busy?”

“In a way,” I said. “I’m on my way to my mother’s for my nephew’s birthday party.”

“Who’s with you?”

“Everybody. Rod, Rochelle, Dwayne.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Could you come over here? Could you come over here and bring Dwayne with you? It’s important.”

My impulse was to tell her that we couldn’t make it. Little Link’s party was in less than an hour. My mother didn’t believe in the notion that late could ever be fashionable. I didn’t want to make her angry and possibly ruin the party with one of her creative tantrums.

“Please, Miss Aria?” Keisha said. This time she was begging. Not in the pouty teenage girl way that she employed to convince me to take her to Taco Bell after school, or to keep me from being mad when she didn’t turn in her homework. In her voice was the pleading that occurs on a soul level. How could I refuse?

We took Dwayne’s car to Keisha’s apartment. He didn’t talk much on the drive over. I could tell from his flexing jaw muscles that he was still angry about the scene in the kitchen. I knew that his mind was racing, zipping with things that he could have said if he had only thought of them in time. I empathized. I knew exactly what it was like to think of the right thing to say years too late.

I guided him through the twisting parking lot to reach Keisha’s place. He pulled halfway into a parking space and then backed out, seeing green bottle glass scattered on the pavement. He chose another space and backed in.

“This is worse than your neighborhood,” he remarked, chirping his car alarm. “At least where you live, people are spread out. Here, they are all on top of each other. Look at all this trash.”

I shrugged. I’d been here so many times before, the jagged asphalt and soiled mattress jutting from the Dumpster barely registered with me. My mind was on Keisha. The more I thought about her phone call, the less I liked it. It was her, certainly—I recognized her voice—but she didn’t sound like herself. Even the first time I’d come here, when she’d missed so many days of school, she’d seemed like herself. She had been tired, defeated, but she was still the girl I knew.

At the foil-covered door of the apartment I grabbed Dwayne’s hand before knocking.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered.

“Something,” I said just as the door opened.

I was startled not to find Keisha standing in the doorway. Instead, we were invited in by a small woman who looked to be a little older than Hermione.

“Come in,” she said. “LaKeisha will be right out.”

Dwayne and I stepped over the threshold into the living room. Inviting us to sit on the couch, the small woman snapped a dying leaf from a creeping philodendron plant. Dwayne ducked to keep from knocking his head on a hanging flowerpot.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the small woman said. “We don’t get too many tall folks in here.”

“It’s all right,” Dwayne said. “I’m Dwayne.”

“Yes,” said the woman. “That’s what I figured. And this is the famous Miss Aria.”

I gave a little nod and sat on the couch, close to Dwayne. He took my hand, stroking my knuckles with his palm.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Dwayne said.

“I’m Mary Montgomery. LaKeisha’s my daughter.”

I looked closely at Mary and I could, in fact, see the resemblance. I don’t know why I didn’t assume that she was Keisha’s mother as soon as she opened the door. I knew that Keisha lived with her mother, that her mother was the one responsible for all of the foliage. But since I’d never seen her, the woman was only an abstraction for me, like the ever-absent mother in
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Keisha emerged from the back room at last, wearing the same skirt and blouse set that she had worn to ink Rochelle’s invitations a week ago. Her hair was held back from her face with a blue grosgrain ribbon. Dwayne and I were dressed for a barbecue. I shifted, feeling half naked in my tank top and shorts.

“I don’t know why you got all dressed up,” Mary said.

“I’m not dressed up,” Keisha said. She gave me a shy smile and sat in the covered chair at her mother’s end of the sofa. I will admit that I felt a little hurt that she didn’t choose the chair that was closer to me. It was awkward being in the apartment with Mary. I felt like the Other Woman. Mary was Keisha’s mother, her blood, so of course Keisha would sit beside her. I shifted a little so that I would be closer to Dwayne. He was my family, in a way.

“I went to the doctor today,” Keisha began.

Dwayne’s hand tightened around my fingers.

“Can we turn on some lights?” Mary wanted to know. “It’s so dark in here. It’s like a haunted house.”

Keisha got up and went to the doorway and turned a plastic knob. The room filled with a gentle yellow light.

“See,” Mary said. “That’s better. Go on, baby.”

“Like I was saying, I went to the doctor today.” She patted her belly and didn’t say anything more.

“Is everything okay?” I flexed my legs to rise from the sofa, but I stopped myself, wondering if it was appropriate to comfort someone else’s daughter.

“Everything is fine,” Mary said. “The doctor said that Keisha is having a healthy baby. A big healthy boy. You brought the ultrasound pictures to show them?”

Keisha looked stricken. “I didn’t bring them, Mama. I should have brought them.”

“It’s okay,” Dwayne said. “We can see them another time.”

Mary spoke. “I know you had wanted a little girl. Keisha told me. But a little boy is good to have as your first baby. Sometimes I wish that Keisha had a older brother to look out for her.”

“Any child at all is a blessing,” I said.

“I knew you’d feel that way,” Mary said. “From everything Keisha told me about you. She talks about you all the time. Miss Aria says this, Miss Aria says that. Miss Aria got a diamond ring. Miss Aria’s fiancé is so nice. You know, like that. The way young girls can be.” There was a bit of an edge to her voice. Dwayne heard it too; I felt his body stiffen into something hard and even more solid.

“Miss Aria,” Keisha said, “I know I failed my GED and everything. But I have a good mind. You even said that yourself. It’s nothing wrong with my mind. My little boy, I think he’s going to be smart. And he’s going to be really big and healthy. The doctor told me that.”

“That’s good,” Dwayne said. “And we don’t mean to be rude. But we have to get over to Aria’s mother’s house in a few.”

I, too, was wondering about the occasion for this gathering, but I was embarrassed that Dwayne would be so direct. Keisha looked away from us, studying her mother’s profile.

“Mama,” she said softly, so quiet that Dwayne didn’t hear, but I heard it and so did Mary. She didn’t nod or nudge Keisha, she just turned herself to look into her daughter’s face. Keisha pushed herself up from the flowered chair and stood in front of Dwayne and me. She carefully lowered her pregnant bulk until she was kneeling in front of us.