The Untelling (4 page)

I nodded yes and Dwayne turned his hurt face back to his work. I rose from the love seat and knelt beside him, my ring finger tracing the downy hairs at the base of his neck. When the time was right, once I had all the details from my doctor, I’d tell him my plan—I wanted to live here in the West End with Dwayne and the child that we would have by spring. He was convinced that our home had been broken into because of the neighborhood, but I knew the reason was that we were two women living alone. But if he lived here with me no one would force the lock, no matter how curious they were about what we kept in our drawers, no matter how much they thought they could get for our television set. We could live here and make a difference, be the kind of family profiled in the Sunday paper. Atlanta from the ashes and all of that.

Chapter Two

P
eople often ask Rochelle
and me how we met. In this, best friends are a lot like married couples: people want to know how this union got its start. We tell them that we met in college, freshman year, which is true. In those days I was still struggling to meet all of the goals on my twenty-point list for self-improvement. Although I had only traveled about eight miles across town to go to Spelman, I considered it a fresh start. Distance was more than a matter of city blocks; because I had accepted my brother-in-law’s offer to pay my tuition, my mother spoke to me only twice during my first semester of school. It was as though I was three time zones away.

The list was jotted on a sheet of lined paper ripped from a spiral notebook. My years of living with a snooping mother had taught me that the best way to keep something private was to make it look unimportant. A leather-bound diary with a brass lock was an open invitation for invasion. No one would ever think to unfold the sloppy sheet of paper on which I’d inked everything I wanted in the world.

The items on my list were abstract and conceptual. When I met Rochelle, I was concentrating on item seven:
Be known for something decent.
Toward this end I had decided to run for freshman class office—nothing as extravagant as president, but I planned to make a bid for the post of recording secretary. When I wrote on my list that I wanted to be known for something decent, I had in mind something academic. I considered myself to be a basically smart person. Not a genius, but my test scores had always shown me to be a little above average. But I was only at Spelman a week before I realized that here the average was a little bit brighter than the averages at any of the high schools I’d attended. These were worldly girls who knew things, had taken lessons. Calinda, my roommate, was sleep-deprived and haggard as a result of staying up all night to whisper to her boyfriend, a real Italian, who lived in Naples.

The dean’s office was crowded with ambitious freshmen. This was the term I still used even though a large bulletin board in the hallway said “Welcome Fresh
women
!” I couldn’t get my mouth to say the word; it sounded a little vulgar and more than a little awkward. The dean’s secretary looked up at me and gestured to a stack of half-sheets of green paper.

“You have to fill that out to be put on the ballot.”

There were at least twenty-five girls in the office, all clutching green forms. I wondered how many of them were running for recording secretary. I took my form and sat on the carpet next to a girl who wore her gym uniform—navy-blue shorts and a white T-shirt knotted behind her to show off her slim waist. Smelling of sweat and baby powder, she inked her answers in the blanks fast, without worrying the end of her pen or scrunching her brow. I sat beside her with my own form, trolling through my canvas bag. I finally found a green felt-tip dented with toothmarks. The girl had finished her application by then and offered me her ceramic roller-point. It was a good pen, probably a graduation gift.

“Do you need this?” she said.

After I shook my head no, she stabbed the pen into her hair like a chignon stick.

“I’m Rochelle Satterwhite,” she said, holding out her hand. “As class president I’m going to do something about the athletic department. I turned down a volleyball scholarship to UMass to come here. And we don’t even have intramurals!”

I looked at her yellow-white palm for a second too long. Who knew that people could get scholarships for volleyball? When I didn’t make a move for her hand, she stretched her arm a little farther and caught me in her dry, snug grip.

“It’s more serious than you think,” she said. “Girls at white schools are playing all kinds of sports. We don’t even have field hockey.”

“I’ll vote for you, but I’m uncoordinated.”

“I think I know you,” Rochelle said.

“From the ice cream social?”

“You’re Calinda’s roommate, right?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s running for recording secretary.” Rochelle swiveled her head, surveying the crowd in the room. “She was in here a minute ago.”

One of the things that I prided myself on was my ability to conceal my thoughts. For example, Rochelle had no idea that I had never even heard of field hockey or intramural sports. I had just looked her in the face and made myself a mirror, frowning when she frowned, raising my eyebrows just seconds after she’d raised hers. But Rochelle noticed the change in me when she told me about Calinda’s candidacy.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t know that Calinda had been in here yet. I was just getting her form for her. But I guess she doesn’t need it now.” I chuckled and mashed the green sheet into a hard tight ball.

“Okay,” said Rochelle. “If you say so.” She stood up and looked down at me. “You sure you’re okay?”

I nodded.

“Okay,” she said again, and turned to walk toward the door.

“I’ll vote for you,” I called after her.

The motion in the room stopped for a second. I heard someone say, “That’s not fair. Campaigning isn’t supposed to start until tomorrow.”

I tucked my lips under and raised my eyebrows in a silent mea culpa, but Rochelle didn’t really mind. She grinned at me over her shoulder as she stepped into the breezeway. I watched her reading the flyers posted on the bulletin board outside of the dining hall. She snatched one down and slipped it into her backpack. I thought about my list, hoping I had just accomplished goal number four.
Make friends with someone you admire.

Steagall’s, a cross between a snack bar and corner store, was Rochelle’s unofficial campaign headquarters. She and five of her friends ordered chicken wings and wheat bread before settling at one of the plywood and cinder-block structures that passed for tables and benches. I ate there often, since cafeteria food didn’t agree with me and other restaurants didn’t agree with my budget. Besides, Steagall’s was close enough to campus that a person didn’t need a car to get there.

Rochelle and her friends went there nearly every evening to plan their strategies. I sat nearby with my order of wing-on-white, hoping that they might ask me to join them. I marveled at the six of them exchanging ideas in a quiet huddle in the noisy back of the restaurant. How had they bonded so quickly? I hadn’t even managed to connect with my roommate, who took her meals with her own peer group—a gaggle of girls who cursed their parents for not allowing them to go to Harvard.

Rochelle’s committee stayed at the restaurant late, until eleven-forty, when they all packed up to make it back to campus before midnight curfew. I packed up then too and tried to mingle with them as they walked back to Spelman at a quick clip, working hard to avoid eye contact with the neighborhood men we passed. The girls always allowed me to travel with them. I was not their friend, but I was their Spelman Sister and this was not the sort of neighborhood where young ladies like us walked alone.

I lived in the Howard Harrell Hall, the busiest dorm on campus. It wasn’t new like the Living Learning Center, where the honor students lived, nor was it charming and bright-shuttered like Abby Hall, named after one of the Rockefeller wives. Howard Harrell was a brick box sectioned into small, uncomfortable rooms, teeming with intent young women. The halls reeked of wild-cherry air freshener, butter-flavored popcorn, and singed hair. Every stereo in all 133 rooms seemed to be playing the sound track to
School Daze
, the newest Spike Lee film. The movie had been shot across the street from our campus; our dorm mother had worked as an extra.

I often closed myself into a narrow bathroom stall for a few moments of privacy; there, on the back side of the door, was a bright square of paper urging me to select someone named Renee Abernathy for class president. I snatched the flyer down and stuffed it into the napkin disposal. I moved to another stall; finding Rochelle’s flyer, I made myself comfortable. Stumbling upon her campaign materials made me feel like this was a place that I should be, that Rochelle had anticipated my being there and left the flyer as a personal greeting.

The morning of the campaign speeches, I walked over to Sisters Chapel early, before the dining hall opened for breakfast. This was something I found myself doing about three mornings a week, although this was not on my list of life-improving goals. As a matter of fact, it went against item number seventeen:
Stop being so weird.
And eighteen:
Grow up.
I tried to will myself to sleep in, to be like other people. But I slid out of my twin bed anyway, pulling on sweatpants under my nightshirt and creeping toward the chapel so early that the red brick housing projects on three sides of us were silent.

During public events it was easy to forget that Sisters Chapel was actually a chapel and not just an unusually ornate auditorium. When sophomore girls in high heels modeled leather dresses on this stage or successful alumnae stood in front of the microphone attempting to inspire us, even I almost forgot the sacredness of the building. At those times the wooden pews were just seats, the stained glass only windows. The pipe organ just an instrument.

But in the mornings, when I went there alone, I could feel God in that space. It wasn’t the sort of thing that I went around talking about, but its power danced along my skin, nudging my sluggish blood.

I tiptoed across the parquet wood floor of the stage, lowering myself at the edge, dangling my legs. Beside my hip was a small pewter plaque in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who lay in state in Sisters Chapel for one week in 1968. My parents and Hermione stood in line for three and a half hours on a damp April morning to see Dr. King’s body. Hermione was barely three years old, but she claims to remember it. She says that my father cried great, heaving sobs.

Mother says that Hermione can’t possibly remember, not in the way you remember most things. They took Hermione so that she would have at least seen the man, that the memory would implant itself inside the chambers of her heart and the spongy part of her bones, but she couldn’t possibly recall it in the way that she professes to. And, besides, my father didn’t cry. He paid his respects and his heart was certainly heavy, but he didn’t actually cry. He wasn’t a crying sort of man. My mother says this with authority.

In those early days of my college life I still hoped that I would glimpse my father’s spirit there in Sisters Chapel. There was something that I wanted to tell him, some things I wanted to explain. At times I imagined that he existed just inside my peripheral vision. When I faced the stained glass, my father was there near the organ pipes. As long as I was satisfied with this blurry, shadowy vision of him, he would stay there. If I turned my head to really see, like Orpheus, I’d lose everything.

I know now that life and death don’t quite work that way. But I felt something while sitting alone in the chapel so early in the mornings. In that quiet space, there was the possibility of safety and forgiveness.

Just after seven a.m. the back door scraped open. My heart flopped in my chest. I took deep breaths and tried to calm myself. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, was I? The back door had been unlocked, and there were no signs saying that a person couldn’t enter the chapel whenever she liked. I thought about my list.
Stop being so weird.
This was weird, hanging out in an empty chapel at the butt-crack of dawn. And it probably wasn’t so safe after all.

“Hello? Is someone there?” I called.

“I’m sorry,” said a voice that could have been anybody’s. High-pitched but uninflected like a newscaster’s. “Is it okay for me to be in here?”

“It’s not for me to say,” I called back into the darkness behind the stage.

Rochelle emerged from the wings, like an actress. Like me, she wore a nightgown tucked into sweatpants. Her hair was wrapped around big green plastic rollers, held in place by metal clips.

“Are you doing something personal?” she asked me. “I can go. I just wanted to see how the chapel was set up. I’m running for office and we have to give our speeches today.”

Stung, I smiled anyway. “I know. I’m Calinda’s roommate. Remember?”

She covered her mouth with her hands. “Shit. I’m sorry. Of course I remember. I’m just not awake yet.”

“I’m Aria.”

“That’s your real name?”

“My real name is Ariadne.”

“Where’s your string? I could use it.” She raised her eyebrows and looked satisfied, the way people do when they’ve said something smart.

“Are you nervous?”

She sat down beside me on the edge of the stage. When she spoke, the pins in her hair touched each other with a soft clicking. This time she smelled of cocoa butter and rubbing alcohol. “I’d really like to win something. I played sports in high school, you know.”

I nodded.

“You don’t care about sports, do you?”

I shrugged.

“Then what
do
you care about?”

I shrugged again.

“I mean,” she said, “out of all the colleges in the world, why did you come here?”

“My mom went here. This is where my parents met. I was thinking maybe the same thing could happen to me.”

“My dad went to Morehouse,” she said. “But I came here because Alice Walker went here.”

“She did? I read
The Color Purple
in high school. I saw the movie too.”

“She hated it here,” Rochelle said. “But that’s not the point.”

“You know who else went here,” I said. “Esther Rolle.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” Rochelle said.

We laughed together, and while laughing it was easy to forget that Sisters Chapel was a sacred place.

“I need to go back to my room and get some sleep,” she said. “I was up all night. See you later, Ariadne.”

“Aria,” I told her. “People call me Aria.”

She cocked her head. “You know who you look like?”

“Nobody,” I said.

“You look like Penny, on
Good Times
. That should be your nickname.”

“Aria is my nickname.”

“That’s not a nickname. That’s just a short version of your regular name. A nickname is something that your friends think up to call you.”