The Untelling (6 page)

Out on the parking ramp I leaned on the concrete railing and looked out over the city. Maxine, whom I knew from working seasonal gift wrap at Rich’s, stood beside me. She was just twenty-five but seemed much older. She lit a menthol cigarette.

“Smoke bother you?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

She sucked on the cigarette with a little popping sound. “Are you getting a lot of surveys done?”

“Enough,” I said. “Not a lot, but enough.”

Maxine said, “It’s hard to stay cool. Calling white people in Dahlonega and shit asking what they think about race relations. Then they hang up and you lose your commission.”

I shrugged. “I hate having to ask them about abortion.”

Maxine exhaled smoke as she talked. “Fifteen dollars an hour, my ass. You got sixty cents? I want to get a Coke.”

I handed her my can. “I only took one sip.”

She took it from me and drank. “What’s up with your girl?”

“That’s not my girl. I know her from school, that’s all.”

“Her cube is right next to mine. She’s not getting any surveys done. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they let her go. I can hear her.” Maxine raised her voice in pitch to imitate Rochelle’s. “‘Hello, I’m calling from the TelePoll Research group.’ I hear her saying it over and over, so I know that she is having to make new calls because nobody is talking to her.” Maxine chuckled. “That’s what she gets.”

“You don’t have to laugh,” I said. “I sort of feel sorry for her.”

“You work every day; do you think she feels sorry for you?”

“But she looks so bad,” I said. “And she’s nice, most of the time. I’ve seen her around at school.”

“Well, she looks like shit on a soda cracker right now,” Maxine said, looking behind her and twisting out the cigarette on the heel of her sneaker. “Not that I look much better.”

Payday rolled around finally. I had to call the people at Sears and beg them not to restock my word processor before I could get to the store on Saturday morning. On the last day of the job, we all organized our tools in our work areas, like second graders straightening up their cubbies. Earphones had to be wiped down with alcohol pads and then cords twined tight around. The keyboard was to be square in front of the monitor and the stapler and tape accounted for as well. Our boss took a look in each person’s cube, surveying the contents before handing over our pay. I made my body stiff and still as the boss grunted over my shoulder. “Yep, yep, yep,” he said as though crossing off items on an invisible list. He paused before letting out a final yep and handed me my check. It was one of those cardboard deals where you have to tear off the edges and unfold the whole thing to see how much you made. I suppose it’s how the company saves on having to buy a whole separate envelope for each person. An old lady that I temped with last Christmas ripped her check down the middle trying to get those edges off. She taped it back up, but the bank wouldn’t take it.

I owed $250 on the word processor. That included taxes and everything. My check was only $232, but I could come up with the rest. I’d worked twenty-seven hours over the two weeks. Base pay about six dollars an hour, but I got an extra dollar for every survey I’d finished. Uncle Sam got his part right off the top, but all in all it wasn’t too bad. I slipped it into the flap on my backpack and waved good-bye to Maxine.

“How’d you do?” she asked me.

“Good enough,” I said.

Maxine tipped her head toward Rochelle, who hadn’t left her cube. “Be grateful, girl, everybody ain’t able.”

To get out of the door, I had to pass Rochelle. I tried to tarry, adjusting the straps on my backpack, pulling my socks up, but Rochelle just sat there. Our boss bent over his desk writing something on a clipboard.

“Y’all hurry up, hear?” he said.

“I’m headed out,” I said.

“Me too,” Rochelle said.

I walked toward the door at a fast pace, planning to just blow by her. Make my way without looking. This girl was in trouble and I didn’t need trouble. Doing drugs was like shoplifting. When I was in high school, my friend Yolanda used to steal Super Glue and eyeliner from the SupeRx at Greenbriar Mall. When she got caught, both our mothers were called, although I hadn’t stolen a thing. I’ll never forget Yolanda’s glossy mouth cursing at the security guard as he dumped the contents of her fake Gucci on the counter. Drugs worked the same way. If I had a friend strung out on cocaine or whatever Rochelle was on, nobody would believe that I wasn’t doing it too.

When I reached her cube, Rochelle called my name. Not my given name, but the name she had given me in the chapel six months before. “Penny. Wait up.”

I stopped and waited up. I told myself that I was being a sucker. That she never called me Penny in Manley Hall on a Friday afternoon when she milled about trying to make weekend plans. But I waited on her. Maybe it was the sound of her voice pleading and pretty. Or it could have been the name itself, Penny, the orphan girl who found a new mother and somehow grew up to be Janet Jackson.

Rochelle gripped my wrist as we left the office and tugged me into the break room down the hall. She shut the door with a click and leaned herself against it, blocking my way. Her face, what I could see of it under the bill of the cap, was strained and ashen. I felt my hands go cold, the way they did when I was scared.

“How much did you get paid?” she asked me.

“Not that much,” I said.

She moved from the door, letting herself fall onto one of the dirty-cushioned chairs, and covered her face with the palms of her hands. “I only made thirty-two dollars.”

“That’s because you were only here half a week.”

“I didn’t find out about the job until late. I would have been here the whole time if I had known.” She bent at the waist, resting her head on her knees. “I really need the money.”

“What for?” I asked, testing to see if she would tell me, if she would let me into this secret world that was happening right there in my dormitory, this world that was so secret that I lived there and didn’t see it.

“I have only forty-five dollars to my name,” Rochelle said, raising herself enough to pull off her baseball cap and toss it across the room. The hair underneath was shoulder-length and stiff. I touched my own hair, short but soft and delicate, like spider’s silk.

“Can’t you get the money from your parents?”

“No.” Rochelle pulled a ballpoint pen from her book bag, drove it through her coarse hair, separating it into halves. She grabbed a hank of hair in each hand. “You want to know how I got the forty-five dollars that I have? I didn’t get my hair done.” She leaned forward, showing the groove where she’d split her hair apart with the pen. The part, marked with blue ink, was flanked by Rochelle’s new growth; her real hair was kinky in texture and the soft gray color of old roads.

“My hair started going gray in middle school.”

“Does it run in your family?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m adopted.” Rochelle stood up, her eyes darting around the room until she spotted her cap. She picked it up from the floor, covering her hair even before she stood back up, and returned to her chair beside me.

“It’s okay,” I told her, eager to assure her that I could be trusted. “I’m not going to tell anybody. About your hair or this whole thing with the money.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I knew why she was so fraught for cash, that her need and distress were written all over her. How could I? In just a moment she had offered me what I needed, what made me desperate. She’d told me her secret, something that other girls didn’t know.

“So I had this idea,” Rochelle said. “I would let people charge things on my gas card and give me the cash. I would offer a discount, you know?”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

“But my mom had already cut my card off. I shouldn’t have told her I needed the money, then she wouldn’t have known to cut the card off.”

“Your mother sounds like my mother,” I said.

“Do you know what my mom said when I told her? She said, ‘At least you know you’re fertile.’” Rochelle looked into my face and gave a little smile as the meaning of her words made its way into my brain. “You didn’t know that part, did you?”

I shook my head. “I thought that you were on drugs.”

She sighed and worried the bumps on her chin. “I wish that was all it was.”

“What about your boyfriend?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“Why not?” I asked, thinking of the thin, bookish upperclassman I’d once seen her kissing at the back gate, just before curfew. “He seems nice.”

“He
is
nice,” she said. “Nice enough to want to get married or something like that.”

“Really?” I said, thinking how romantic it would be to be engaged. “Is he a senior? It wouldn’t be a shotgun wedding if it’s his idea.”

Rochelle threw the powder-blue baseball cap on the floor. “I don’t want to be married. I want to be on student government.”

The right thing to do would be to sit beside her and hug her the way her mother should have, with her head just below my collarbone and my arms around her waist. I would rock back and forth a little bit and make shushing sounds. But I knew that if I did, I’d have to give her the money. Rochelle looked at me with expectant eyes; she knew that I was deciding whether or not to help her. To her credit she didn’t try to convince me. She had told me her truth and shown me her hair and it was now up to me.

This was not my first experience with a girl in trouble. When I was in high school, a pretty girl named Leesha Anderson had come to me to find out where she could get help. She figured that I was the kind of person who knew about such things, since I was famous for things that weren’t decent. I’d helped Leesha get what she needed and she’d promised me an invitation to the Sweethearts Ball—a dress-up affair, admit-cards only. After I’d dropped Leesha at the clinic, I’d gone to Rich’s to choose my dress, a lavender drop-waist that I really couldn’t afford. She never sent the invitation. Now I see that I wouldn’t have had a good time anyway. An invitation wouldn’t have made anyone accept me. People would have whispered and laughed at my hair, at my date who was much too old to attend high school functions. But I didn’t know this then and I had opened my locker each day waiting for the printed invitation with its gold lettering.

But Rochelle Satterwhite was no Leesha Anderson. I remembered Rochelle’s campaign speech, so earnest and out of touch. And then I thought about my twenty-point list. When I got back to my dormitory, I would revise it. Item seven would be changed to
DO something decent.

“How much do you need?” I said to Rochelle.

She crossed the small break room and knelt before me, pressing her face into my abdomen. “Thank you. Thank you.”

I patted her head through the dirty canvas cap. “It will be okay.”

I think back to times like that and it’s as though I am watching a movie about myself. It makes me feel like I am getting old, because I can now look at my younger self like she was a different person from who I am now. I often find myself wanting to go back and whisper into my own ear, explaining the things that once confused me. I wish I could have told myself how things were going to turn out.

There are many ways to get old, to ripen. Hermione was just past eighteen when she got married, and she became a grown woman in less than a week. I saw her just three days after she’d run away, and she was older already; her extra weight didn’t seem like plump tight baby fat anymore. She looked like a woman who had had two or three kids. She had that look like her body had been used for something.

I’ve aged just this month. In a single morning that I retched over the toilet and realized that I was pregnant. It’s not the pregnancy itself that was the milestone, but how pleased and satisfied I was to realize it. The news zipped through me like something fast and shiny. I’d spent the last decade worrying about the possibility of a baby taking root in my body. Maybe the fact that I can say I’ve been doing
anything
for a decade says something too, about aging. Every month when my period arrived, I gave a quick thanks to God. Other girls complained about the possibility of ruining white pants or having to postpone certain types of rendezvous, but I’d always just turned my face upward and murmured my gratitude. One of my missions had been to prove my mother wrong. I wasn’t going to get pregnant and ruin my life. This was not what Dr. King died for. And on this my mother and I agreed.

But now I was a grown woman. More than a fourth of my life was gone, assuming that I would live a normal life span. When my father was my age, his life was three-quarters gone. I was ready to start my own life, have my own family. After this baby, when people asked, “Do you have a family?” I would say yes and tell them about Dwayne and the baby. I would not mention my mother, my sister, or the ones who were dead. I could answer without acknowledging any of them and this would not be a lie.

Chapter Three

I
don’t think that anyone
would have guessed that I would grow up to be a teacher. It wasn’t my calling or my dream. As a kid I never cared much for school, sitting in hot classrooms trying to learn on demand. I didn’t admire my teachers, any of them—not the young pretty ones who forced shy boys to ask us to dance or the old ladies who were obsessed with penmanship. I didn’t hate it enough to dedicate my life to changing the system, however a person would go about doing such a thing. In third grade a guest speaker asked all the girls if they would rather be nurses or teachers; I said that I wanted to be a hairdresser and spend my life helping people look better. As soon as I got old enough to understand obvious things, I set my goal as getting into a good college. At Spelman I had chosen sociology because it seemed like something a regular person could do well in. A subject in which I could earn Bs or As if I just did my homework and went to the library. Rochelle had majored in English because she is supposed to have a gift for language. Dwayne didn’t go to college at all, but went into locksmithing because even when he was little, locks loved him. When his baby sister had trapped herself in the bathroom, Dwayne was the one who got her out. His daddy was outside on a ladder trying to force the window, and five-year-old Dwayne just goosed the handle and the door swung open. I don’t have a special gift, not one that I have noticed anyway. But I do fine in the classroom.

Before meeting my boss, Lawrence, at a job fair, I’d worked at the Institute for the Blind, where my mother manages the front office. She is a force in that place, well dressed and stern. Mama is the secretary that runs the entire operation. When I finished college and couldn’t find a job on my own, she found something for me at the Institute.

My job was to read aloud. I sat at my desk in a tight, windowless room and read any papers that the clients brought in. Sometimes I read letters from family members or important official documents. These I read carefully, using phonetics to pronounce Latin legal terms. Sometimes the clients would ask me for interpretations. “So what does that mean? Am I going to lose my house?” I would tell them that I didn’t know the answers, that I only read aloud, and then referred them to Legal Aid. My other responsibility had been to read the newspaper, each word, to whoever chose to assemble in the lounge every day at noon. I didn’t mind reading the articles and features, but the advertisements threw me. I wasn’t sure if I should inflect to convey the exclamation points and bright colors. I felt dumb bellowing,
Huge clearance! Everything must go!
Many of the people I read to didn’t seem to have a preference. They just sat around me like a circle of kindergartners, leaning on their canes or stroking their big dogs. A reel-to-reel recorder made a record for those who might want to listen later.

Working at the Institute had shown me that my mother and I had things in common after all. We were the best-dressed women there. Makeup and hose, even though most of the clientele couldn’t appreciate our efforts. I think we both knew it was silly, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We never spoke of it, but we dressed the way we did because we spent most of our day around white people and we didn’t want to give them any reason to think they were better than us. Mother had come by this insecurity quite honestly—she’d grown up during Jim Crow—but I learned it from her and from whatever had come twined into my DNA.

Drew Alexander had been blind only three or so months when I met him. Some sort of congenital problem, he’d explained to me. His eyesight just got worse and worse and now he couldn’t see at all. He was young, less than thirty, and angry.

“Bum genes,” he said. “Something passed down from my father. I never met him, but he left me something to remember him by, didn’t he?” His accent was sugary, southern white. Whenever I heard someone speak that way, the words so lazy they seemed to be lying down, it made me feel like only white people were really southerners. That the rest of us were just squatters.

Drew Alexander laughed with good-looking teeth, blue-white and shiny. He was a living endorsement for his designer jeans. Slim, cornflake blond, masculine, but leaning toward androgyny. He smelled nice, like spearmint and lemon zest.

“Did you want me to read something for you?” I said. “I read for people.”

“How do you get a dog? That’s what I want. A big German shepherd.”

“I can refer you to someone. You’ll probably get a yellow Lab. I see a lot of Labs.”

“I don’t care what you see.”

I became very quiet. This was how you made yourself invisible to blind people.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Would you like me to read something to you? I can read a book if you like, a magazine. We have some here; or maybe you brought something with you?”

“Are you pretty?” he said. “What do you look like? I can tell from the way you talk that you’re African American. I don’t mean any offense by that. But y’all talk different than white people.”

I nodded, though he couldn’t see me.

“So what do you look like? Are you sexy? Do you have big tits?”

“Mr. Alexander,” I said, “this is not appropriate.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “Mea culpa. I just keep getting out of hand. I don’t mean you no harm. It’s hard not being able to see things. Waiting for somebody to tell you what’s in front of your face. It’s hard. But I do have something I need to get read to me. Let me just pull it out of my bag.”

He bent down to rummage through his sack and I noticed that his hair was dyed blond. The roots were dark as dirt. I wondered who colored it for him. Did they assure him that it looked good, that it brought out the green of his eyes?

He placed a worn magazine on my desk. Pornography. The real stuff. Not
Playboy.
This was hard-core. I rolled my chair away from my desk and started toward the door, but Drew Alexander blocked my way. He reached for me, holding me around the waist. He took his shades off and showed me his eyes, hazel and empty. His lips were against my cheek; he spoke, scraping my skin with his tongue. “Don’t be so mean. Don’t be scared. It don’t matter if you’re ugly.”

I struggled to get away from him and he held me harder, pressing me against the wall. The light switch gouged my shoulder blade.

“Help,” I screamed, hoping my voice would carry through the shut door. “Fire!”

“Don’t be so mean,” he said, squirming against me. It didn’t matter how quiet I made myself now. He was touching me. “Be nice.”

I pitched my voice louder. “Help!”

My mother opened the door. “What is the problem?”

Drew Alexander released me. My impulse was to run to my mother, receive the hug that should have been her impulse to offer.

“Mama,” I said, returning to my desk and handing her the magazine. “He brought this in and then he grabbed me.”

My mother glanced at the magazine and rolled it into a club. “Mr. Alexander, I believe you were banned from the Institute a month ago? I am asking you to leave. Or do I have to call security?”

“Where’s my cane?” he said. “I can’t see to get out without my cane.”

I took it from the arm of his chair and gave it to him. He tapped out with a delicate noise.

I sat down on the sharp edge of my desk and buried my face in my hands.

“That was awful,” I said to my mother. “He attacked me.”

“It’s you,” Mother said. “Only you could almost be raped by a blind man in a public place. Is this what Dr. King died for?”

The next week, I noticed a newspaper ad for a job fair sponsored by the Urban League. When I read this notice aloud, the enthusiasm in my voice was real.

The job fair was held in a huge conference center, crammed with business-suited black people scuttling around rows of tables decorated with various corporate logos. I pulled my résumé from my leather portfolio several times, to assure myself that it was still there and that it looked good. It listed anything I thought would make me more attractive to employers, including a bulleted list of “personal traits”: self-starter, creative, great people skills, mature. I’d spent more than three hours checking it for errors, consulting the real dictionary when I doubted the accuracy of my word processor’s spell-check. As an extra flourish I’d spent an additional ten cents a page for heavy paper the color of pigeons.

The recruiters reclined in their chairs, waiting for an irresistible candidate to show herself. They all had that slightly bored, cocky attitude like obviously rich or handsome men in nightclubs. They spoke to each other with knowing looks as they sipped soft drinks. I handed a lady from Coca-Cola my résumé; she nodded, put it on the bottom of a stack of other people’s histories, and shoved a red and white brochure in my direction. I repeated this scenario at a few other tables—Georgia Power, Delta Airlines, BellSouth.
Hi, my name is Aria Jackson. Here’s my résumé; I look forward to hearing from you.
And, true to the nightclub model, they all promised to call.

Walking toward the back of the room to get one of the free Cokes chilling in a humming cooler, I ran into a chubby man wearing a wool suit; it wasn’t a great suit, but it was decent. He was older than most of the other job seekers. I put him at about forty-two. Maybe he’d been laid off and was now looking for a second career. I felt a little sorry for him, but he seemed to be in a grand mood, winking at me as he reached into the cooler.

“Having much luck?” He handed me a caffeine-free Diet Coke.

I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Nobody flat-out refused to take my résumé.”

“What kind of work are you looking for?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I was thinking maybe I’d like to get into advertising or PR.”

“How come?”

“I want a job that’s positive. Upbeat.”

“What have you been doing till now?”

I shrugged. “This and that.”

He took the can from me and opened it with a gadget on his key chain. “I hope I’m not being too forward, but I think you would squander your talents in advertising. What would you do all day working for Georgia Power? Get people to use sixty-watt bulbs? That’s a waste of time. I can promise you, people are going to burn electricity with or without you.” He took a slurp of Cherry Coke before handing me a business card, a flimsy one, obviously run off on his laser printer. “Do you have any experience working with special populations?”

“I won’t work with blind people,” I said.

“I can guarantee you that there are no blind people in my organization. We do literacy, and not in braille. Think about it. Call me.”

Two weeks after the job fair none of the employers had contacted me for an interview. I called Lawrence on Friday. He asked me if I could come in Monday morning for training. My mother was furious with me for leaving the Institute on such short notice, but I was glad to get away before I had to read the Sunday paper with all its coupons and comics.

Literacy Action and Resource Center is a lot of name for an organization that consists of three people: Lawrence, Rochelle, and me. Rochelle came on board about two years ago to replace this guy named Khafre who quit working at LARC in order to go to law school. Rochelle had just dropped out of Emory University, where she was working toward a Ph.D. in English. “It was just so esoteric,” she had told Lawrence when she met him at the NAACP job fair. They’d run into each other at the blood pressure machine. Later I found out that Lawrence went to the fairs but didn’t pay to set up a table. Instead, when he needed someone, he roamed the venue looking for the kind of person he wanted.

Lawrence hired Rochelle that very day; he liked that she used the word “esoteric.” After he decided she was too valuable to be cooped up in the classroom all day, Rochelle was named “development coordinator,” but she taught one section of general literacy every other year. Her job was a little better than mine. Same pay but more prestige. She was the one who represented LARC at fund-raising luncheons. Rochelle made conversation with the donors, laughing at their esoteric jokes and making smart comments beginning with “actually,” while Lawrence and I listened politely and tried not to draw attention to ourselves or mispronounce anything. Rochelle was kind enough to never mention this invisible caste system, not even in jest.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I teach GED prep to twelve teenage girls who are “under the supervision of the Fulton County Court.” This twist in the clientele is due to Rochelle’s flair for grant writing. She’s always proposing new classes in order to tap new sources. This prison thing has been a bonanza all the way around. Lawrence teaches two sections a week at the federal prison in Reidsville, sleeping over in a Days Inn in nearby Vidalia. Of course this means that some of our general literacy sections have been put on hiatus, but our numbers are up. This year we’ve accommodated thirteen percent more students than the year before.

At first I had been a little apprehensive about taking on juvenile offenders. It wasn’t the offender dimension that upset me so much as the juvie part. After walking through the fire at six high schools in four years, I didn’t want to be even a
spectator
to adolescence. But here I was, three times a week in front of an eclectic class of unlucky girls. The youngest ones were fifteen, and the old ladies of the group were nearly twenty. Knowing how it feels not to be the teacher’s pet, I tried to treat each of my students equally. But I was partial to Keisha Evers—seventeen and just a tiny bit pregnant.

Usually it takes about three weeks for the classroom dynamic to jell, but this term we had all found our places on the very first day. As usual I started class by asking each girl to give her name, age, and something that made her unique. Keisha did as she was told, then blurted, “It wasn’t like they said it was. He told me I could use his Discover to get me some clothes and everything. Then when the bill came, he let his wife call the law, saying I stole it when he was supposed to be mentoring me.”

I looked at the roll to remember her name, then said, “LaKeisha, that is a little more information than I asked for.”