The Untelling (13 page)

I heard myself asking for a volunteer to read a passage beamed onto the white bedsheet used as a projection screen.

Keisha raised her hand and read carefully in her strong voice. She read slowly, considering each word, reading the way people read when they can’t really read. “The” became
thee
and “a” was pronounced
ay.
Thee butterflies nest in ay tree.
“Calling words” is how teachers described this. Not reading, just calling words. No inflection whatsoever.

The noise of her voice irritated me. I gritted my teeth with every syllable, her accent so slow it was almost bovine. I looked at the ceiling at each
thee
and
ay.
Keisha was somebody’s mother. All of the girls in this classroom either had children or had the potential to do so. Some of them were pretty with shiny eyes and glossy hair. A few were ugly with their bad skin and discolored lips. No matter, though, no matter what they looked like, no matter what they had done, their bodies were young and fertile, teeming with eggs, soggy with estrogen.

I asked Keisha to stop her reading. Told the class to write the main ideas in their own words. “Please,” I added.

Then I was bothered by the noise of their movements. All of them seemed to be wearing silver bracelets or multiple pairs of gold earrings. Their acrylic nails ticked together as they guided their pens across lined paper. The din was like every religious noise I have ever experienced or heard of. Like rosary beads clicking, the clanging of finger cymbals, the drone of church bells.

I turned away from them and wondered how a person knew if she was having a nervous breakdown.

Was I the only one in the world to ever notice that illiterate teenage girls under the supervision of the court smelled like candy? That they seemed to have a penchant for aromatic bubble gum? Did the smell of them make everyone nauseated, or was it just me?

I went to the window and jerked the green shade, sending it snapping onto its spool. I pushed up on the painted wood of the window frame, straining, using the heels of my hands, but the window stayed put.

“The windows are nailed shut, Miss Aria,” Keisha said. Like on the first day of class, she spoke for the group.

“But that’s a fire hazard,” I said. “It’s against the law.”

The ten girls shrugged in what seemed to be a unified motion.

I willed myself to turn around and face them, to smile and do my job. I thought of my mother, back at the Institute just two days after the funeral. “The blind children need my help,” she’d said. “Did you think they’ve all learned to see?”

I released the window, rubbing my sore hands together. With closed eyes I breathed in the fruit punch and sour-apple air, swallowing hard against the vomit rising in my throat.

“Let’s turn on the light,” I said. “Open the door and get some air.”

With the lights on they scribbled in their workbooks. I usually walked among them, pointing out errors or offering little pats of encouragement. But today I sat in my metal chair with my arms crossed over my chest and my legs folded hard at the knee. I stared into the four-bulb fixture wondering if I was blinding myself, then wondering if it mattered.

There are certain concepts that you shouldn’t think about when things go wrong. Fairness is one of them. You can’t think about what you do and don’t deserve. Hermione told me this years ago. “That’s how you go crazy. Look at Mama. And anyway, who told you life was going to be fair?” I know that question is supposed to be rhetorical, but everyone tells you that the world is fair, or at least they let you know that it is supposed to be. All the work we did here at LARC and even my mother’s work at the Institute. All that talk about leveling playing fields. That was about fairness. But what Hermione meant was that only a fool believes that she will get what’s coming to her. That she will get only what she deserves.

And I wasn’t naive. I never believed myself to have a charmed life. I wasn’t like Rochelle, who assumed that people would like her, that landlords would be honest. She never counted her change, just stuffed it in her pocket, because in her universe things worked out. There are all manner of scams and cheats in my world. I have never been convinced that God is good. But there were some things I thought were unassailable. How many plastic dial packs of birth control pills had I added to Atlanta’s landfills. Maybe landfills and pollution were no longer my responsibility, since I no longer had a direct stake in the next generation? Again I wondered how exactly a person could tell when she was having a nervous breakdown.

“I don’t feel well,” I said to the girls. “Let’s adjourn early.”

“Uh-uh,” said Benita, the student with the worst attendance record. “You owe us another half an hour.”

“Shut up,” Keisha said. “Ain’t like you paying for this.”

“I pay taxes.”

She was silenced by the other girls, who zipped their bags and slung them over their shoulders, eager to make it to appointments that I couldn’t imagine.

After they had all filed out, Keisha approached me where I still sat in my chair.

“You okay?”

I nodded.

She leaned in and pressed her cheek to my forehead. I was overwhelmed by her smell, the combined scent of nail polish and banana taffy.

“You don’t have a fever. It’s your stomach?”

I hung my head and tried not to breathe too much of her.

“You went to the doctor today, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“You got your weeks?”

I shook my head. “I’m not pregnant.”

Keisha covered her mouth. “You lost it?”

I nodded.

“You had to get scraped?”

The word was perfect, described how I felt, captured my very
condition
. Nodding again, I imagined the procedure, how it must feel to have the life abraded from inside you. “It was awful,” I whispered, standing up.

Keisha hugged me, pressing the bulb of her stomach into my abdomen. I wanted to tell her to get away from me, not to touch me. But I didn’t. I let my arms go limp and let Keisha press her swollen self into me and stroke the back of my neck. “I’m so sorry, Miss Aria. I’m so sorry.”

I knew that I was the one who should be saying “sorry.” I should ask her pardon for my thoughts because all I could think was how unfair it was. What had Keisha done to deserve a baby? And what had her baby done to deserve to have a mere teenager for a mother? Keisha was without a good man, a good job. She couldn’t even read.

When Keisha let me go, I closed my eyes to black out the sight of her. Alone in the empty classroom, I sat thinking of Drew Alexander, the man from the Institute with the dirty magazine, furious and blind.

I made it home before Rochelle. Pushed through the doorway the cardboard boxes left for the bride. Took a handful of mail out of the box. Bills for me. A slip telling Rochelle to go to the post office for an insured package. Rochelle and all her abundance.

I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for her. I could not help remembering the evening when we became friends, when I’d given her the money I’d earned so that she could end a pregnancy. Had I dirtied my hands by helping her? But why hadn’t Rochelle earned any punishment for herself? I’d been with her in the days after the procedure and even the years since. She didn’t spend much time looking back; there were no screaming nightmares, no sobbing scenes of remorse. She’d had her abortion, taken a few days off from classes, and then resumed her life. Maybe I was her portrait, the image of her that felt all the pain, that bore the evidence of all the damage, while she lived and loved and thrived. Waiting for Rochelle, I watched a somber procession of ants make its way to the sugar bowl. I watched and I wondered.

Rochelle entered the house finally with a slap of the screen door and the tinkling of keys. My eyes watered with her patchouli scent, but I didn’t turn to look at her.

“Hey, Penny,” she said, making her way to the leaky refrigerator for a Diet Coke.

I didn’t answer. She repeated her greeting. I opened my mouth to respond, but my throat felt shut, like a drain clogged with dead hair.

Rochelle drank her Diet Coke in rapid, lusty swallows. She did this while I watched the ants. If I were to remove the top from the sugar bowl, there would be a hundred busy creatures swarming inside. Behind me I heard her open the cabinet for a bottle of wine. There was the hollow pop as she removed the cork. I wasn’t crying. I did think about Genevieve, the wasted baby. She didn’t cross my mind often. My little sister was dead before she could talk. I’d saved all my mourning for my father. But now I knew a baby’s worth. My mind went to Keisha. I wondered what she knew. I put my finger on the trail of ants and they climbed over my flat nail.

Rochelle sat herself directly in my line of vision. In front of her was a glass of red wine, dirty with crumbled cork. “Penny,” she said, “what’s up?”

I didn’t speak. The crush of disappointment paralyzed my vocal cords. I looked at my friend across the table. Sunlight from the kitchen window illuminated her so she glowed like a stained-glass saint. I wanted to ask her how it felt to have everything you wanted.

“I hope you’re not still mad because I joked about your ring,” she said.

I was still as stone and as silent.

“I’ve been thinking about it and I really am sorry. Dwayne is a good guy. He’ll be a good father. I’m sort of horrified with myself that I even said anything.” She stopped, her eyes falling on my finger and the ants crawling over it.

“Aria,” she said slowly and softly, “say
some
thing. You’re weirding me out.”

I still didn’t move; she took a small swallow of wine, set the glass down, and then moved my finger. Confused ants scattered in different directions.

“Aria,” she said, “what is it?” Her voice climbed about an octave. I could tell she was getting scared. “Did something happen?”

I shook my head. Reaching over, I took the top off the sugar dish. The ants swarmed over the sugar cubes like mobile flecks of pepper.

Rochelle said, “Talk to me or I’m calling 911.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll call your mother.”

I looked at Rochelle’s face, lined with concern. I thought about Mr. Henry, the custodian from elementary school.

“I want to be you,” I said.

Her face didn’t quite relax, but she didn’t move toward the phone. “What?”

“Your father is a veterinarian and your mother is a teacher. That’s better than Cosby. You have Rod. Y’all are going to have kids and they won’t be all fucked up because you aren’t all fucked up.”

Rochelle fastened the lid on the sugar dish. “Aria, my dad drinks too much. My mother is a martyr. Rod and I aren’t even sure we want kids.”

“But you have that choice,” I shot back. My voice was too loud in my own ears. “You have all the choices.
Do you want to change your name? Is it sexist for your father to give you away?
All day you sit around deciding things. When we were in college, you had an abortion. Don’t forget about that.”

The light in the room was different now. Rochelle’s face was as gray as her hair.

“I don’t really understand why you’re bringing this up.”

I didn’t want to cry in front of her, but I couldn’t help it. “I’m not pregnant.”

She sucked in her breath.

“If you tell me it’s a blessing in disguise, I’ll never talk to you again. I’m serious, Rochelle. Don’t say it.”

And she didn’t.

“I can’t have kids at all,” I said with a breaking voice. “The doctor almost cried telling me. Doctors have seen everything. This man has seen people dying of cancer and he almost cried when he told me. Everyone’s going to ask me what happened and I don’t know what I am going to say.”

“Aria,” Rochelle said.

“Dwayne wants kids,” I said. “You don’t know how much Dwayne wants kids.”

“What do you want?”

“Kids.”

“Then adopt,” Rochelle said. “If you want kids, you can get kids.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to
get
kids. I want to have my kids. I want them to come through me.”

“Jesus,” Rochelle said. “People kill me with all this nonsense about biology. Penny, remember who you are talking to. I’m adopted, remember? You can’t tell me that my parents aren’t my parents, that I am not their daughter.”

“I want my own kids.”

Rochelle closed her eyes. “Don’t be so stupid. Don’t be so closed-minded.”

“You don’t get it,” I told her. “Sure, adoption is great for the person being adopted. You got to go live with a couple of really nice people. But don’t you think about your mother? How do you think it felt when your hair went gray and nobody had any idea where it came from? I bet people in church were whispering,
Well, you know they adopted that girl.
I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.”

“So what if people feel sorry? You think my parents are wishing they didn’t adopt me because of what people think? Who cares? I’d rather have people
feel
sorry for me than to actually
be
sorry myself.”

Rochelle was losing patience. But she didn’t know what it was like to be felt sorry for. When people are sorry for you, they look at your life and they go home and count their blessings. After the funeral for Genevieve and Daddy the neighborhood women came by with fast-food chicken presented on heavy crystal platters. Good cheddar shone atop their casseroles, but underneath there was only Velveeta, rubbery and bland. They came to our house, fed us box cakes, and touched our faces. They told us to pray about it. Reminded us that God was mysterious.

When they left, Mona Lisa smiles tickling their lips, they went home to their husbands who cheated on them and to their ugly, lazy children. They ignored past-due notices on their mortgages. Feeling sorry for us, they didn’t worry about anything worrisome. When they went to bed that evening and many evenings to come, they slept easy, knowing that things could be much worse. They could have been
us
. Safe and secure that they were not, they counted their blessings on their fingers and toes.

“I don’t understand why things keep happening to me,” I said. But this was a lie. I knew why things happened the way that they did. Every misfortune could be traced to its obvious source. I needed comfort now, but there was no comfort for me. Fifteen years ago my father had wanted comfort as he sat trapped in the driver’s seat, bleeding to death from the inside. He wanted me just to talk to him. Even at ten I knew what he wanted. But I’d plugged my ears and ignored him. He wanted so little and I gave even less. That’s the kind of thing God can never quite forgive you for.