The Untelling (3 page)

“Is it in real bad shape?” Rochelle wanted to know.

“Is that your real hair color?” he said, reaching out to touch one of her silver dreadlocks.

Rochelle recoiled just slightly. I knew she didn’t like it when strangers felt licensed to touch her just because of her difference. The officer paused, but squeezed a hank of her hair between his fingers anyway.

“My hair’s been gray since I was a teenager,” she said.

“That’s a trip,” said the officer.

“What about the house?” I asked him.

“It looked okay to me,” he said. “Of course you are going to have to do a thorough look-see to know if anything is missing. But as far as I can tell, things seem undisturbed.”

A voice squawked out of his receiver, reminding me of the day of the accident. There were dogwood trees in our yard, but this time of year they just stood there leafy and benign.

We sat with him on the porch while he filled out paperwork. Rochelle signed on various dotted lines. As the policeman handed me the pink copy of the triplicate form, he stopped.

“You know who you look like?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Penny, from
Good Times
. You look like Janet Jackson would look if she was a regular person.”

“Is that all?” Rochelle said, holding her hand out for the form.

He shrugged, moving all of his heavy equipment with his big shoulders. “You can go through and see what’s missing if you want. But really—your TV and stuff was all in there. Did you have more jewelry?”

He was looking at Rochelle’s engagement ring. It was somewhat smaller than a dime but plenty large enough to sparkle like a disco ball. She put her left hand behind her. “It’s just costume jewelry.”

The policeman chuckled. “You can save that lie for the crackheads.”

I gave him a careful smile and waited for him to leave.

Rochelle and I held hands as we crossed our threshold. The officer had been right. It didn’t look like anything was missing. The red, white, and blue Priority Mail boxes containing various wedding implements were still stacked against the living room walls. The small television still rested in the particleboard entertainment set, the VCR still attached.

“Do you want to look in your room first, or mine?” Rochelle said.

“Yours,” I said, understanding that there was much more at stake here for her than for me.

Her room was disorderly, but Rochelle was just that sort of person. I couldn’t say for sure if some burglar had left the drawers hanging open or if Rochelle herself had dumped the contents of her jewelry box onto her unmade bed. Rochelle regarded the tangle of silver necklaces and gold bracelets without reacting.

“Let’s open the closet,” she whispered.

“I’m sure it’s still there,” I said, although my heart was suddenly knocking in my throat. Of course it was still there. What I said earlier was true. No one forces their way into a house just to steal a wedding dress. And Cynthia had said expressly that the robbers were men. Only a woman would know the value of a wedding gown.

We stood in front of the door, still holding hands like girls on a field trip. “It’s there,” I said again.

“What if it’s not?” Rochelle said.

“It
is
,” I said, pulling open the door to the shallow closet.

When the doorknob cracked against the wall behind it, we both jumped.

“I see it,” I said to Rochelle. “It’s still there.”

She let go of my hand to touch a fold of creamy white silk. “Thank God. I was so scared.”

Moisture gathered in the corners of Rochelle’s eyes, but she rubbed it away with her shoulder. “I can’t believe I am crying about this.” She laughed a little bit. “It’s just a dress.”

I stretched my hand to stroke the dress too. I had been there with Rochelle and her mother when they found this gown, the one dress that satisfied them both. Opulent enough to suit Rochelle’s mother’s agenda, with the signature of Amsale, the Ethiopian designer, to calm Rochelle’s opposition to spending so much when people around us had so little. I was pleased enough to tag along, as a member of her wedding, the only bridesmaid. I’d been moved by each of the dresses that Rochelle tried on, whether they were strapless or high-necked, floor-dragging or tea-length. To me every wedding dress was gorgeous with promise.

I wasn’t jealous. This is true. I had regarded Rochelle’s wedding preparation as a sort of apprenticeship for myself. Hands-on training for my eventual jaunt down the aisle. I never believed then that it wouldn’t happen to me. There were some things that were promised to a person. Some things were your birthright. I was just waiting my turn.

“They came in here,” I said to Rochelle as soon as we stepped into my bedroom.

“Maybe not,” Rochelle said, taking her turn to re- assure me. “I bet nothing is missing.”

“That’s not the point,” I said, feeling suddenly ill. The nausea left me unsteady, like an overfull bowl of soup.

I didn’t own much that was of value to me, or to anyone else. What I do care about I keep in the top drawer of my nightstand. Seventeen monogrammed handkerchiefs, cheap cotton purchased at Zayre or Woolworth, one of those stores that have long since gone out of business. These were my father’s. The day after the accident, my mother gathered all his handkerchiefs in a basket for mourners to use and take away as souvenirs. Like personalized matchbooks from a wedding reception. I’d emptied the basket, stuffing them into the pockets of my gray wool coat. Also among my keepsakes was a mangy dust rag. Years ago, I’d been oiling my mother’s buffet when I noticed that the ragged scrap in my hand was a baby’s diaper. Maybe it had been mine, maybe Hermione’s, but I hope it was Genevieve’s. Under these items was the most personal of everything I’d saved: a cache of unsent letters I wrote to Hermione after watching
The Color Purple
three times in a single afternoon. The nightstand drawer was shut crooked on its tracks. Someone had opened it, fondled all my best things, and hadn’t found them to be worth stealing.

“I’m sick,” I said.

“Nothing’s missing,” Rochelle said. “Nothing’s missing.”

I sat carefully on my bed and willed myself to be completely still. I imagined the contents of my stomach roiling in waves, then settling, like water after a struggling swimmer has finally drowned. Rochelle’s hand was smooth and cool against my cheek.

Whoever had broken in had not bothered anything in the kitchen or bathroom. Rochelle’s prescriptions—some of which could be used recreationally, I supposed—were still in the medicine cabinet in their orange containers. The beer bottles still lined the refrigerator doors; the blue jug of vodka lay on its side in the freezer. Nothing was missing from my room either, though the drawers had been opened and the comforter pulled from the bed and heaped on the floor.

“It’s freaky,” Rochelle said. “Like they broke in just to look around.”

“It wasn’t Cynthia,” I said.

“No,” Rochelle said. “Nobody ever heard of crackheads breaking in without stealing anything.”

Without discussion we headed back onto the porch. I was a little bit scared, but more than that, I just didn’t like being in the room so recently occupied by a curious intruder. Despite Cynthia’s eyewitness account, the burglar in my mind’s eye was a woman, opening the jars and creams on the bathroom counter, sniffing, making a face. Mocking my choices and Rochelle’s. I thought that I could still smell her, that I caught a whiff of magnolia perfume.

“Sometimes I wonder what we were thinking when we moved in here,” Rochelle said, settling her narrow hips onto the Huey Newton Seat. “We’re not like these people, you know.”

“Maybe you’re not like them,” I said.

“Come on, Aria,” she said. “This isn’t a value judgment. Just an observation. You’re not like these people either. You didn’t grow up in a neighborhood like this.”

She was right. While I did grow up in Southwest Atlanta, this wasn’t my corner of that corner. My folks didn’t have money like Rochelle’s family, but I didn’t grow up in shouting distance of drug addicts. We had burglar bars on our windows, but they were the fancy kind, as much for decoration as for safety. The bars on windows here were metal and ugly, like braces on teeth. The house on Willow Street, the one we moved to after losing Daddy and the house on Bunnybrooke, didn’t have central air and there was no garage for our car, but the neighborhood was stable. People didn’t get killed. When someone broke a windowpane, they replaced it with new glass. No one taped plastic film over the hole, waiting for payday. But here on our block, entire houses stood empty, the windows secured with plywood, “No Trespassing” spray-painted in orange.

“I want a drink,” Rochelle said.

“We have vodka in the house.”

“If I don’t come out in five minutes,” she said, “come in and get me.”

She moved through the door in the way that she did things. She was unafraid, no matter what she had just said to me. Her kindness was like that. She didn’t want me to feel bad for feeling the way that I did. My sister Hermione had been that way when we were little. We had gone to the zoo together with our parents, each of us wearing yellow balloons looped to our wrists with cotton string. Somehow mine came untethered and floated upward, over the monkey house and the birdcages. When I began to cry, Hermione bit through her string, releasing her balloon as well. “Don’t cry,” she’d said. “I don’t have one either.”

Dwayne arrived just as Rochelle emerged from the house carrying a plastic pitcher of fruit punch and the frozen bottle of vodka. I was embarrassed at how pleased I was to see him. I hadn’t gone to Spelman just to grow into the sort of woman who feels all the tension drain from her body at the sight of her boyfriend’s car. It would have been better if I could have been more like Rochelle. She and Rod were in love definitely. Theirs was the sort of engagement of which everyone approved. Even Dwayne, who didn’t care too much for Rod, agreed they were made for each other. But Rochelle didn’t seem exactly grateful for Rod, the way I thanked God for Dwayne. My boyfriend was a large man, six feet four and solid in his oversized clothes. He was the type of man that made you just want to climb up and hide in his branches.

Rochelle seemed surprised to see Dwayne’s car at the curb.

“I called him,” I said. “You didn’t call Rod?”

She shrugged.

“It is sort of Dwayne’s line of work,” I said, reminding her that there was a practical reason for him to be here. Dwayne is a locksmith and someone had just pried open our front door. Rochelle’s Rod was a nice guy, a dentist, the sort of man that any mother would embrace as a son-in-law. But he was only useful if you had a problem that originated inside your own mouth.

In a way, you could say that Dwayne is my first boyfriend. Not my first lover; I’ve slept with more men than I will easily admit. But Dwayne is the only man who had really
claimed
me. We’d only been going out for a month when he started referring to me as his “woman.” Rochelle laughed at this, saying it all seemed so “retro”; she and Rod called each other partners. But she couldn’t know what it means to me to be acknowledged in public like that. It’s been nearly a year and Dwayne has never come out and said that he loves me, but he doesn’t have to. More than one man has whispered those words to me, but none of them were telling the truth. When I speak, Dwayne stoops a little, angling his head downward, showing the world that he’s listening, that he cares what I have to say.

Climbing onto the porch, Dwayne gave me a quick kiss before looking at the damaged door or even saying hello to Rochelle. I smiled despite the situation as he knelt before the violated threshold.

“Shit,” Dwayne said. This was not the first time he had made a professional call to our house. Less than a month after I’d met him, I locked myself out of this same front door and he opened it with metal gadgets he stored in his glove compartment. He was so confident and competent inserting the silver prods, moving them this way and that, sweet-talking the door the way a farmer might murmur to a skittish cow. He talked to the lock, moving his fingers until it yielded.

On that day he had been pleased to be of service—our romance was still fairly new; we were still trying to impress one another, each of us eager to prove to the other that we could be
useful.
But now he seemed agitated. “It looks like somebody just got in here with a screwdriver. You can’t blame the lock. It’s a Baldwin.” At this he glanced over his shoulder at me.

I nodded. Dwayne had installed the brass-faced dead bolt himself.

“It’s the wood,” he explained. “A lock can’t be no better than the door you set it in. When is your lease up?”

“February,” Rochelle said. “Right after my wedding.”

“I can install you a four-inch dead bolt,” Dwayne said. “Maybe that’ll hold you over until then. February is what? Eight months away?”

I felt my pulse flutter at the very idea of measuring time in months, for there were dynamics to this situation of which Rochelle and Dwayne were unaware. Namely, that by February my own life would be different, my body too. I was almost three weeks late and had thrown up three times in four days. A person didn’t have to be an ob-gyn to know what that meant.

As I watched Dwayne rummage through his tool-box, I imagined myself telling him that we’d soon be parents. His face would be sober and serious, but then he’d look at me, searching my face for his cue. I’d give him a smile to let him know that it was okay to be happy, that this was a good thing. He might not say, right then, that he was excited, that he loved me, but there is more to life than what you do and don’t say to one another.

Dwayne removed the lock, leaving a clean hole in the door. “Rochelle, why don’t you just go and stay with Rod? He’s got a nice house.” Now Dwayne made eye contact with me. “And my apartment isn’t all that big, but I got a Medeco Grade One on my front door. Nobody can get past that.”

Again I felt my pulse move like something eager and excited.

“Is this a private moment?” Rochelle said. “I could go inside.”

“No, no,” Dwayne said. “I’m not trying to run you off. I’m just thinking aloud.” He slipped his screwdriver inside his collar to scratch his back. “I’m just talking. I know you two are determined to tough it out over here.”