The Untelling (8 page)

I followed her into the kitchen and watched as she spread the food on a metal mesh table that looked like part of a patio set. “You want a tostada?”

Sitting on a metal chair felt like I was settling into the foliage. It seemed that we should spread a blanket over the worn carpet and have a picnic. “Just one taco, please.”

She unwrapped a taco, the orange oil pooling in the crease. My stomach lurched, sending me stumbling in the direction of the bathroom. I emptied my stomach, closed the toilet, and rested my face on the carpet-covered lid.

“Damn, Miss Aria,” Keisha said from the doorway. “I’m the one that’s pregnant.”

“Me too,” I said. The words slipped from between my teeth easily, like oiled melon seeds. It was a dumb thing to do. I knew this before I finished my sentence, just like you know that you’ve locked your keys in the car even before the door slams, but there is nothing you can do but watch.

Keisha lowered herself beside me on the bathroom tile. “For real, Miss Aria? You’re pregnant? I didn’t even know you had a man.” She leaned toward me, one of her synthetic curls grazing my cheek. “You not going to have an abortion, are you? I don’t believe in that.”

She waited for me to answer her questions, but I closed my eyes beside her, silent and horrified with myself. Keisha went on, still close enough to kiss me. “I guess I don’t really know anything about you. You won’t tell anybody where you live, how old you are, nothing like that. That’s one thing I can’t stand about social workers. Y’all know everybody else’s story, but you don’t let anybody get even a sniff of your business.” Her breath was cool on my sweaty neck.

I squeezed my eyes tighter, hoping the tears would run back into their ducts. This was another of life’s Greek myth moments. When you’re pregnant, it matters who you tell first. It shows where your heart is, where your priorities are. Dwayne should have been the first person to know. There should have been a moment when this news was only ours. I put my hand in my hair, twirling my twists until they strained at the roots and hurt.

“How many weeks are you?” Keisha wanted to know. “Six or something like that? Who’s the daddy?

“Oh, come on,” she said when I didn’t respond. “You can’t tell me that you’re pregnant and then decide it’s not my business. Come on, Miss Aria, you know everything about me.”

And she was right. I knew more about her than I knew what to do with. Over the course of the term, Keisha had shown me her archives of pain. In March she’d missed a week of class. I’d dialed her phone number and gotten the polite message that the number I’d reached had been disconnected. Lawrence had just shrugged. These things happened. Teaching was contribution enough. No one expected us to roam the street rounding up truants. But I had gone to find her anyway, using a city map that my mother had given me years ago, when I first got my driver’s license.

The moment my knuckles had touched the foil- covered door, I struggled with the urge to bolt. Who knew if this was Keisha’s real address? It occurred to me that I didn’t know who she lived with and under what circumstances. Spring was still young enough that the evenings were cool. I could hear the noises of televisions wafting from the open windows of the apartments around me. It seemed as if everyone was tuned in to the same station. The artificial cheeriness of a sitcom laugh track came through in bursts and starts. After several seconds had passed, I made up my mind to leave. I’d done my best. Then Keisha had opened the door, bleary-eyed; her braids, gathered in a rubber band, were slack like filthy yellow ribbons. Her skin was grayish, as though she had been dusted all over with flour. Yawning, she rubbed the blanket print crisscrossing her cheek. She paused for a moment, as if processing who I was, and then invited me in, asking if I was allergic to plants.

“I tried to call,” I explained.

“It’ll be back on soon,” she said.

From the living room I could see the sink piled high with dishes that stank of sour milk and rotting food.

“My mama is in the hospital. Her blood pressure is too high for them to send her home.” She shrugged inside of a baggy T-shirt. She touched the sides of her belly as if to steady it. “Our money is funny. It’s always funny, but Mama hasn’t been to work in three weeks and I haven’t been working either, trying to see about her.”

“Can I turn on the light?” I asked her.

“Go ahead.”

I turned the knob on the base of a plastic lamp, igniting a low-wattage bulb. The light seemed to bounce off the gloom, never penetrating it, like headlights in fog.

She sat on the couch and stripped the leaves from a potted gardenia. “Too bad we can’t sell some of these damn plants.” She gathered the leaves in her hands and tossed them up like confetti.

I sat on the edge of the sofa, ignoring the dead- animal smell of the kitchen. I slapped at something inching its way up my neck before I realized that it was just a leaf. “It will work out.”

“I’ve been on some hard times. I’ve done some things for money. My mama too.” She rubbed her stomach like a crystal ball. “Everybody has, I guess.”

“The credit card situation?”

“That, and other stuff too. And I didn’t steal that credit card. He gave it to me. I earned it, you know?”

I nodded.

She began to rock herself and worried a keloid on the underside of her ear. “I never told this to anyone before,” she said. “Not even my mama, because we don’t really talk about things. But it wasn’t turning tricks. Sometimes you have to get a man to help you out. It’s hard out here. When I tried to use the credit card and they told me to wait, I didn’t think nothing about it. He had gave me the card to use. Promised me before anything even happened between us. So I was just standing there while the saleslady went in the back and called the police. When the security people came and got me, I didn’t even tell them how I had permission to use the card, how me and him had been together and everything. Because I felt like I deserved what I got. Like I had crossed a line, backed up, and crossed it all over again.”

When I nodded, she gave me a smirk. “You don’t know nothing about this here.”

But I did know. Not about having sex for money, but I knew about doing things that made you feel nasty, that made you feel like you deserved whatever you got. I didn’t argue with her, though. I didn’t want Keisha to know all the things I’ve done or the shame I’ve felt. “I brought your assignments,” I said.

She took the sheaf of paper and set it on the coffee table. “My boyfriend, Omar, said he was going to help us out when he gets paid, but that’s not for another week.”

I nodded again, thinking about my mother, how she gently corrected anyone who called her a “single mother.” She was a
widow
, she explained again and again. Keisha didn’t even have any pretty language to fall back on. “Single mother” was what people would call her when they wanted to be polite.

Keisha and I never talked about my visit to her apartment. She returned to class in less than a week, pretty and clean, her hair rebraided and fresh. After school, she had given me directions, as though I had never been to her home. But still, her disclosures were between us, making our relationship lopsided.

“I don’t know nothing about you, Miss Aria,” she said again.

“I’m not trying to be secretive,” I told her. “I am still thinking it out. I haven’t even told Dwayne yet.”

“That’s your boyfriend’s name? Dwayne? You didn’t tell him yet? How long y’all been together? I’m the first one you told?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How many weeks are you?” Keisha asked again.

“I’m not sure. Haven’t been to the doctor yet. Five weeks maybe.”

I put my face in my hand and breathed in the rosewater scent of my hand lotion.

“Lay down on the couch, Miss Aria,” Keisha said.

I followed her to the gray couch. I stretched out on the cracked vinyl, although I really wasn’t tired and no longer wanted to be there. The ceiling was scarred with brownish water marks. Keisha knelt before me and slid off my cloth loafers. Kneading my feet through my stockings, she said, “When you’re pregnant, you have to take good care of your feet. It’s like everything that’s on your mind gets trapped in your feet.”

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feel of her hands. I tried to banish my superstitions. It wouldn’t matter that I had opened my mouth when I shouldn’t have. Keisha rubbed the base of my foot with her knuckles. This was going to be the best part of being pregnant, the way people tried to anticipate your needs. Rochelle would host my baby shower and think of intelligent party games for the guests. Maybe Dwayne would propose without me having to ask him to. And my mother would be pleased, a son-in-law and grandbaby, all within the space of a year.

Lying on Keisha’s sofa, I wished for Hermione. When I was a teeny little girl, before the accident, she was the one I ran to with my stories of grade school trauma. When I was thirteen, she washed her hands of me, marrying Mr. Phinazee, our father’s friend, the summer she finished high school. They moved to Lawrenceville, thirty miles north. When I tell people these days that my sister lives in Lawrenceville, they don’t react. But Lawrenceville is a lot closer to Atlanta now than it was ten years ago. Then it was as though Hermione had moved to a distant unsettled land, as though she had moved to live on a ranch in Wyoming. Now Lawrenceville is just another suburb. People drive all the way out there just to shop.

When she first married, I used to call her up, hoping that she’d put clean sheets on the fold-out bed and invite me for a sleepover. She had always been polite enough when I’d call, hinting that I wouldn’t mind the drive, but she claimed that the house was too junky, or she and Earl needed some alone time, or something like that. Now she pretends to want to save me the hassle of struggling with northbound traffic. “You don’t want to drive way out here. I-85 will be constipated at this time of day.”

I tell her that I don’t mind driving. You would think that cars would terrify me, that I’d cry at the very idea of four-wheeled transportation. This is how these things worked on television. But I never understood the car to be the cause of my family’s misfortunes. I blame the magnolia we hit and the dogwoods that watched. The sight of them each spring causes my body to tremble, just below the skin where no one can see, but I can feel it.

“See,” Keisha said, stroking the sole of my foot with her acrylic nails. “It’s not the end of the world. People get pregnant every day.”

When I made it back home from Keisha’s apartment, I found Cynthia in the driveway, kneeling in the gravel. I watched her for a while as she rooted around in the dirt. I called her name and walked toward her. She stood when I came near; in the golden light I noticed the tiny rocks embedded in the skin of her bare skinny knees. She wiped her forehead with the tail of her T-shirt, flashing her abdomen, striped with stretch marks.

“Miss,” she said, “can you help me?”

“I don’t have money,” I said, patting my empty pockets.

“You owe me a dollar. For that hair bow.”

“I can go in the house and bring the barrette back to you.”

“Then I would owe you your dollar back. Keep the bow,” she said. “I don’t need it.” She dropped herself again to the driveway, collapsing suddenly like she had lost use of her legs. “Are you going to help me?”

“Help you what?”

She looked up from the dirt and pebbles sifting through her fingers. Her skin was gray with dust. “I dropped something out here this morning.”

“What?”

She didn’t tell me; she just took another handful of gravel and examined each pebble.

“When did you drop it?”

“Ten o’clock. While you was at work.” She grabbed two handfuls of driveway gravel and held them to her face, urgently scanning the contents. She plucked a pill-sized rock and put it in her mouth and quickly spat it out. “Damn,” she said. “I thought that was it.”

I stepped back and she spat out another dirty pebble. “Cynthia, you’re not going to find it.”

“Could you turn on the light?” Her eyes were on me as a halo of gnats circled over her cornrows, which were caked with dandruff and dirt. “Could you at least cut on the light for me? I’m not asking you for no money or nothing like that.”

I went into the house and fastened all the locks on the door. They were good locks, Dwayne’s four-inch dead bolts. I leaned on the door with my heart knocking against my collarbone. I wasn’t shutting the door against Cynthia herself. She was just a dried husk of a woman. She may have been a thief, but she had never struck me as a violent person. I shut my door and locked it against the intensity of her need. Pressing my stomach with the flat of my hands, I swallowed back sadness and bile.

I checked the locks once more before dragging the phone from the living room into my bedroom. The air conditioner still hadn’t been fixed; the air in my bedroom was murky and dense. But still, I crawled under the limp sheets of my bed and even pulled the store-bought quilt over me before dialing my sister’s number. The machine picked up—“You have reached the Phinazees . . .”—and I didn’t leave a message.

Still thinking of my sister and of dogwoods, I returned to the living room and from the safety of the window, watched Cynthia bowed in the gravel. Small clouds of dust bloomed around her fast-moving hands. Watching her, I thought about Keisha and the way she traced words with her fingers when she read.

I flipped the switch, washing the driveway in harsh white light. Cynthia looked to the house with a wave and a little smile. I sat in the window until I didn’t want to watch her any longer.

Chapter Four

I
have never been good
at playing hard to get, that faked indifference that is supposed to make everyone love you. In romance it wasn’t a matter of promiscuity, no matter what my mother may have said. I’ve never slept with any man just for the thrill of it, just because I was curious about how he might move, how it might make me feel. It was more that I was desperate and optimistic at the same time. When a decent-seeming man asked me to lunch or to dinner, or just asked for my phone number, my optimism said that he could be the one. My desperation is what made me cooperative, wriggling out of my clothes after only a few kisses.

In a manner that is both different and identical, I am the same way with Hermione, constantly offering myself to her, in the form of cookies baked to honor some greeting card holiday or volunteering to babysit, although she always refuses. Sometimes she will come home from work to find me sitting on her porch with my back propped against her oak front door. I smile as she drives up, holding out her mail. Today I sat on her step, jittery with coffee and worry. When I was little, Hermione was the person I went to when I was in trouble, when I’d done wrong. Today I drove all the way to Lawrenceville not to tell her about the baby, but to tell her that I hadn’t told Dwayne. I wanted her to show me what I could do to right that wrong, to set things back on their proper course.

Dwayne would love Hermione’s neighborhood, the deliberate order of it, the newness of the houses, the inky asphalt road. Hermione and her family lived in a pinkish-white house, three stories, stucco front. Five or so shrubs, lollipop round, framed the front steps, while an orderly arrangement of crepe myrtles marked the perimeter. This was a new subdivision. No dogwoods or magnolias that took hundreds of years to grow.

The heat had broken for the evening, leaving behind sluggish humidity and hungry mosquitoes. Slapping them dead against my grimy neck, I waited for my sister to come home. I peeked into the stained-glass door pane, looking for mobile shadows that would tell me that she was inside, just ignoring me. Through the blue glass I saw only the carpeted staircase rendered in kaleidoscope, and nothing more. I mashed the bell again, listened to the chimes play Beethoven, and squinted through the glass. Finally I sat down again, nearly convinced that there was no one home.

Once, when I was eleven and Hermione sixteen, our mother locked us out of the house. At the time, we had lived on Willow Street only eight months and were still smarting over the loss of the house on Bunnybrooke Drive. I was in sixth grade.

The elementary school let out an hour earlier than the high school. I could have walked home right afterward, when the other kids from our block made their way to their houses, where their cheerful, normal mothers either waited on them or left sandwiches in their stead. The kids used to wait for me—no doubt their parents had told them to be nice to me, the poor thing who’d watched half her family die. They would linger, fastening their jackets extra slow, waiting for me to gather my books and follow. But day after day I gently dismissed them, explaining that I was waiting on my sister. They would nod their heads and leave quietly, assuming quite correctly that this had something to do with my father being dead and my mother being crazy.

I waited on Hermione on the stone porch that spanned the entire length of the elementary school. Sometimes she would be prompt, showing up just after I’d finished my math homework. On other occasions she’d appear after five o’clock when all the teachers had gone home, leaving me by myself with only the custodian, Mr. Henry, to look after me. These were my favorite days.

“You still out here?” Mr. Henry would ask me when he came outside to empty his mop bucket into the vacant parking lot.

“Yes, sir.”

“You want me to let you in the building so you can call your mama?” Mr. Henry would smile down at me. His face was brown and crinkled like a grocery bag that had been reused. I liked him.

“No, sir.”

“You sure?” He would pat his pocket with a clank. “I got keys to all the offices, you know. I ain’t supposed to let anybody in, but they ain’t supposed to leave little children all alone. Wasn’t even last year that someone was snatching kids right around here.”

“No, sir,” I said again. “I don’t have anyone to call. But my sister is on her way.”

“When you get ready to go, tell me, so I can know you safe, hear?”

“Yes, sir.” I’d give him a solemn nod, knowing I’d no intention of knocking, setting his mind at ease. When I spotted Hermione rounding the corner, I would creep away, purposely leaving something of mine behind. Once, I’d left my ballerina pencil box, scattering the pencils and denting the case with my heel. The next day the case was waiting for me in the lost and found and Mr. Henry peeped into my homeroom to make sure that I was alive and safe. I waved the case at him, mouthing the words “thank you.” He couldn’t have been more relieved had I really been his pretty little daughter.

Mama locked us out on Halloween. Hermione showed up at the school well after six, wearing her regular clothes, but pale yellow bunny ears jutted from her straightened hair. I’d gone to school that day dressed as a robot in a costume I’d made myself: a large box covering my clothes, with holes cut out to accommodate my head and arms. A second small box served as a helmet, with holes cut out for my eyes. The costume won me a flashlight and a certificate that read “Most Creative.”

Mr. Henry congratulated me on my award. “You come up with that idea all by yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, hearing my voice echo inside my cardboard headdress.

“You’re a smart one. Make sure you let me know when your sister comes to get you. Last time, you scared me half to death. Don’t do an old man like that. You got a jacket up under them boxes? There’s plenty sweaters in lost and found. Nobody would notice if you put one on.”

I would have liked to borrow a sweater. The October wind easily permeated the boxes and the leotard I wore underneath. But I didn’t want to take the boxes off in order to put on warmer clothes. I’d chosen this costume because it hid my body, the heavy curves that made everyone stare at me. “I got on clothes enough under here already.”

When Hermione finally arrived, I searched my bag for something to leave behind. My canvas pack held only generic items—plastic pens, chewed pencils, rubber coin purse—that could have belonged to any girl at my school. I turned on my award flashlight, for one last look at the glowing red bulb, before smashing it against one of the white pillars in front of the school. I scattered the broken glass, leaving my mangled prize for Mr. Henry to find.

In those days my sister was plump and sexy. In the year since the accident she seemed to celebrate her ripe figure, favoring push-up bras and wide belts that emphasized her thick hourglass. On this evening she wasn’t feeling so pretty and was in a terrible mood. I could tell even before she clomped over to where I kneeled struggling to repack my book bag. The cardboard costume had rubbed my underarms raw.

“Hurry up,” she snapped.

“I’m trying,” I whispered. “It’s hard with this thing on.”

“Why don’t you just take it off and throw it away? Halloween is over.”

“But we didn’t trick-or-treat yet.”

“Do you really think Mama is going to let you out of the house?”

“She might,” I said, feeling tears gathering behind my eyes. “I won a prize for my costume. I want to keep it.”

“I don’t care what you do with it,” Hermione said. “I just want to get home. It’s six-thirty.”

I didn’t ask her where she had been for the last three hours. Her white turtleneck was grimy with makeup that she used to hide blue-red scars on her neck; she had told me these were called passion marks.

“Do you ever wish you were dead?” she asked me once we had left school grounds.

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“Not wishing you were dead enough to do anything about it. But do you just wish someone would pull the plug on you?”

I turned toward her, but I couldn’t catch a look at her face through the small eyeholes in my costume. In the yellow streetlight, making out the shape of her, all I could think was how much I loved my sister. “If you were dead, who would take care of me?”

“Maybe your mother?” Hermione laughed. “Don’t freak out. I am not going to kill myself. I might kill somebody else, but I am not going to kill myself.” She laughed and I tried to laugh with her.

She punched the cardboard box I wore on my head. “Take this thing off. It’s weird to talk when I can’t see your face.”

“I don’t want to.” Lately my forehead had erupted in a crop of pimples hidden under my fluffy bangs. Precocious acne, my mother called it, using one of her favorite words. Several mornings a week she looked at me just before I went to school and said, “Precocious puberty. Help me, Jesus.”

A gaggle of boys dressed as superheroes charged by us, smelling of sweat and bubble gum.

Hermione said, “There is so much stuff that you think matters that turns out to be nothing. Just bullshit.”

“Like what?”

“Good grades. Virginity.”

“What’s that?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

I didn’t have to look at her to see that she was irritated. I walked beside her, working hard to match her pace despite my bulky costume. I didn’t mean to be so stupid. “Like the Virgin Mary?”

“A virgin is a woman who hasn’t known a man in the way that a woman knows a man.” Hermione laughed and chucked a mini candy bar at a parked car. “It’s all bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

“I know,” I said, eager to agree.

“You don’t know,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“We may be the sorriest family on the planet,” Hermione said. “There should be a Gallup poll.”

I stayed quiet. My sister enjoyed teasing me, talking way over my head, watching me jump, like the smallest kid in a game of keep-away. The night was very cold. I knew that beneath this cardboard my nipples were standing up—“headlights,” as Hermione would say.

“So what do you think about Earl?” she asked me.

“Mr. Phinazee? He’s nice. Makes me think about Daddy.”

“Air makes you think about Daddy,” Hermione said.

I turned my head to see if she was being mean, but the night and the cardboard conspired against me again.

“What if he wanted to marry Mama?”

“He would be our stepdad,” I said. “And we could be sort of a normal family.”

“As long as Eloise is our mother, we will never be normal. Lord have mercy. I am so high.” My sister laughed loud, beautiful, and mysterious into the night.

I saw the pumpkins first, dozens of them lining the driveway, framing the porch like track lighting. The jack-o’-lanterns were fabulous, complicated faces, glowing with ritual candles.

“I know I am not
that
high,” Hermione said.

I stopped and lowered myself beside one of the driveway pumpkins. Its eyebrows hunched together with worry. Mother had carved narrow, suspicious eyes.

“Get away from those things before you set your boxes on fire. Now,
that
would be really fucked up.”

I stood in the middle of the driveway while Hermione inspected the other carvings. She examined three or four and returned to where I stood. She snatched the cardboard box off my head, causing me to squint against the cold. Hermione before me was large and pretty, her cleavage puckered with chill bumps. “Oh, Ariadne,” she said. “Don’t you wish we had someplace else to go?”

“I like the pumpkins,” I said. “They are the best on the block.”

“Aria,” she said, “look how many of them she made. It’s the whole goddamned pumpkin patch.”

A clutch of children crossed in front of our house. “Why don’t they come here to trick-or-treat?”

“Because they can tell,” Hermione said.

I took my sister’s hand and we went to the front door. Hermione slid her key into the top lock and then the bottom. She turned the handle, but the door opened only a few degrees before it stopped, secured by the safety chain.

“Mama,” Hermione called, “we’re locked out.” She punched the doorbell a couple of times.

Hermione pressed her face in the open space between the door and the jamb. Her makeup was chalky in the white light spilling out from the house. “She’s in there,” Hermione said. “I’m looking at her.”

“Maybe she didn’t hear us ringing.”

“Aria, she hears us right now. She’s sitting in the dining room pulling the guts out of more motherfucking pumpkins.”

“Did we do something to make her mad?” I tried to recall the details of the morning. Had I remembered to put my gown in the hamper? Had I rinsed my cereal bowl and put it in the dishwasher?

“It’s Earl,” Hermione said. “I know this has to do with Earl.”

Hermione took a couple of steps back and then hurled herself against the door. The yellow bunny ears flipped and flopped with her effort. The door groaned, but the chain stayed firmly attached. “I
see
her,” Hermione said again. “She is such a bitch.”

“Don’t break the door, Hermione,” I begged. “You’re going to make her mad.”

“She’s making
me
mad,” Hermione said. “It’s not right.”

We sat on the porch. My sister was soft and lovely in the light of the jack-o’-lanterns. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “What does she want from us? We were there, just like she was. She knows there wasn’t nothing we could have done.”

Hermione cried and I touched her hair. When she uncovered her face, she said, “See what I mean about wishing to be dead?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Good,” Hermione said. “I don’t want you to.” Standing up, she dusted off her broad bottom. She gave a chortling jack-o’-lantern a sharp kick and punted a scowling one half across the yard. It smashed against the trunk of the old hickory tree. “I need you to help me, Aria.”

I struggled up and with a running start kicked a melancholy pumpkin into an azalea.

Hermione laughed. “Not with the pumpkins. Fuck the jack-o’-lanterns.” She bent at her thick waist. “Lord have mercy,” she said in between crests of laughter. “I must still be buzzing. I need you to help me push the door in.”