Zaineb glared at Phyllis. “Shut up, Phyllis,” she said.
“You shut up, Zaineb,” said Lolly. As they told one another to shut up in a round, Kenya imagined them at her grandmother’s house having the same conversation over vegetarian pizza options and cake. She’d invited a haphazard group of fifteen girls, nearly half of the class, but she knew she could count on only a few people to show up. This lunch table crowd would probably be it.
Kenya woke up on Saturday to a grim parody of the TV shows and books in which children got out of bed, raced to the window, saw snow, and celebrated. Now Kenya and Sheila had switched places; Kenya suddenly hopeful and “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” and Sheila murmuring “We’ll see” with a pained expression. But the snow wasn’t just falling; it was blowing in the gray darkness with mute violence. Kenya sat in front of the television in her pajamas, glued to dispatches from Ukee Washington, the black weekend weatherman, whose voice was so reasonable she thought any minute he would call the whole thing off.
Zaineb called to say there was “a ninety percent chance of a foot of snow and a zero percent chance that I’ll make the party.” Then Kenya listened as Sheila took a similar call from Alma Lewis. It seemed from the one side of the conversation Kenya heard that Alma had used the occasion to crow about Lolly’s July birth and to reminisce about the wonderful pool parties she’d thrown over the years. Phyllis Fagin called and took forever to state the obvious, while bringing Kenya up to date on area historical records of snowfall and like, oh my G—
“Phyllis,” Kenya said while Phyllis was still screeching, “Lolly said your underarms look like the Thing.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Kenya.
“Oh my God, what did you just say?”
“My mom has to use the phone. It’s a snow-related emergency.”
Kenya didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until she woke up to the dreary Saturday-TV buzz of neglected sports (figure skating in this case) and her mother standing over her.
“Kenya, I have to pick up your cake.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s ready and I put a deposit on it. I paid good money.”
“But they said it’s really dangerous to drive. Is the bakery even open?”
“Yes, but not for long. I have to go. You’ll be fine here.”
“Not if you get killed in this blizzard!”
“Shut up, Kenya,” Sheila snapped; she sometimes thought that when people said things like that it would make them happen. “Look, I have to go before it gets worse. There’s deli turkey and bread and Ellio’s pizza. And the chips…”
“You can’t just leave me here!” yelled Kenya. It was the mention of Ellio’s that did it. Kenya imagined herself chewing the cardboard crust with its promise of a bitter aftertaste and eating the sauce, which came off in shards. The disappointment that had been floating in the air since Kenya had woken up to the metal-colored sky finally settled on her chest. There would be no party. But most galling of all was that she hadn’t even cared before. When had she started caring about the party?
“I’m so sorry,” her mother said, actually looking sorry. “We can have it next weekend. We can even freeze the cake.”
She was still talking about that fucking cake!
“You’re still going? I mean, how much money is it, anyway?”
“Don’t talk to me like that. I know you’re upset, but you’re not one of your little friends and neither am I.”
“Don’t I know it?” Kenya said, not quietly enough. For a moment, she thought her mother might smack her.
But Sheila was on her way out of the door. “Be dressed by the time I get back,” she said. “You’re starting to smell like a cheesesteak on my new sofa.”
Kenya watched the door close. Though her mother had not, in fact, hit her, her eyes watered and her cheek stung anyway.
In the three hours that passed before Kenya’s mother reappeared triumphant with snow-coated hair and eyelashes, the cake, a real pizza, and a story about a man who’d helped her out of a snowdrift, a lot happened, most of it in Kenya’s head.
She stayed where she was for a while, stinking up the new purple couch, and entertained the thought of downing a bottle of aspirin. She imagined her mother in the front pew of an imaginary church, weeping about how she’d abandoned Kenya in a historically significant blizzard to hold on to a measly deposit for a cake, and even before that, forced her to have this party, and even before that, yanked her out of the city and into this surrealness.
There was the problem of Johnbrown. She wondered how Sheila could get in touch with him if Kenya killed herself. There had to be a way, because otherwise it meant Johnbrown didn’t care enough about her to be reachable in case she died. Also distressing was the thought of Barrett’s reaction to her suicide. Her funeral would be crowded with hysterical white girls pretending she’d been their best friend, and their parents, who would suspect that her being black was the reason she’d killed herself, which would be only partly true. Phyllis Fagin would put on a show of crying the hardest. Alma Lewis would manage to work superiority into her condolences.
But maybe, Kenya thought, she could take enough pills to generate a hospital scene but not enough to kill herself. Her mother would feel sorry for all of the same things, but now she could promise to make it better. She would also exhaust all means to get in touch with her father, who would show up at her hospital bed, just so Kenya could spurn him.
“You did this,” she would say. He would cry, like he did that night, choking and dripping all the way to University Hospital, and Kenya would hate him even more. The whole thing would be like the hospital scenes she’d seen countless times on her mother’s VCR recordings of The Young and the Restless, which Sheila now watched openly. She imagined that most Barrett girls would avoid the hospital but that she could at least count on Zaineb to visit and apologize for her “zero percent” crack.
Then Kenya remembered a recent story on the evening news about a young man who had tried to commit suicide. He had been found too soon—and yet not soon enough. Now he traveled about in a wheelchair pushed by his elderly mother and had to work extremely hard to pull his tongue into his mouth to form words. One of his eyes was permanently shut, making him look like the cat in the Bloom County comic strip. He went around the state lecturing about why you shouldn’t commit suicide. The news showed footage of him on a stage in a school auditorium. “You might miss,” he garbled.
Kenya thought briefly about destroying her grandmother’s house as redecorated by her mother and the nutty Lars, tearing lacy curtains, puncturing throw pillows with geometric designs. But she would sooner chance suicide. Finally she pictured herself lying on the couch, still in her pajamas when her mother came home, not so much defiant as paralyzed with grief and despair. But she knew she couldn’t even do that. The only option was to get up.
After she was showered and dressed, she put in a tape she’d made of the nightly countdown on Hot 98 and listened to “Owner of a Lonely Heart” over and over again, thinking that it sounded like being trapped in a snowstorm. Then she remembered the blank purple book that smelled like perfume that she’d bought at the card and candy store. The girls in the novels she read kept diaries, journals, or important notebooks a la Harriet the Spy. Kenya had never felt like writing in hers, because she didn’t know where to start. She pulled her journal out of her desk drawer and stared at a blank page for several minutes. After rewinding back to the beginning of the song again, she wrote the date and the song’s title, and then underlined it with a flourish. She closed the journal and hid it in her underwear drawer.
She ate chips, half a family-size bag of cheese curls, and two and a half slices of the crappy pizza, which she was too impatient to heat all the way through. When the urge to vomit passed, she got the piñata off of the dining room table and took out the plastic bat they’d bought to hit it with. She put the lumpy thing in the middle of the living room floor, pushed the glass co
ffee table away from it, and slammed it. Then she hit it again. To make sure it stayed steady, she put a foot on it and hit it again and again. Each time she made contact, it felt as if the thing was gathering strength against her. Apparently, she and her mother had fortified it with gluey paper to the point of indestructibility. So when Sheila returned, Kenya was back on the couch watching TV and the piñata was back on the dining room table, completely intact.
* * *
A week later, Mr. Jaffrey (“call me Teddy”) finally breached the piñata. Then he grinned proudly at Kenya.
“How ’bout that?”
He had used an actual wooden bat—he just happened to have one in his car—to make a dent, and then a hammer to finish the job, making one small hole. Teddy Jaffrey was the man who had pushed Sheila’s car out of the snow on the disastrous afternoon of Kenya’s party. After Kenya voted down the idea of rescheduling the party and the two of them made it official by giddily making their way though most of the cake, Sheila invited him over for dinner the following Saturday to thank him for his help.
Teddy lived with his parents nearby on one of the cramped-looking blocks traditionally occupied by the black servants of the Main Line.
“Do you think he knew Baba?” Kenya asked as Sheila set the table hours before he arrived. She did not pause her movements to answer.
“No.”
“But they’re both from Bryn Mawr. I mean, how many black—”
Sheila spoke in a low voice, as if she could not both talk clearly and fold napkins. It sounded as if she said the man was ten years younger than “your father.” Then something hit Kenya.
“Are you going to date this guy?” asked Kenya. The divorced mothers at Barrett did not date. A couple of the girls had stepfathers, but there was no talk of how that had happened. It was almost as if those marriages were arranged.
“Who said anything about a date?” said Sheila, who, Kenya noticed, was cooking spaghetti instead of Saturday night’s usual turkey franks. She was also forming actual meatballs instead of just crumbling beef into sauce like she usually did for Wednesday’s dinner.
“Well, a man is coming over. Did you say he was ten years younger than you?”
“Look, I don’t know if he’s single,” said Sheila. “And how ’bout you stay out of grown folks’ business?”
“I’m trying to. But you’re bringing home dates. Wait, is he old enough to date?”
“I’m going to hurt you, Kenya,” Sheila said lightly.
Kenya became sure that the evening was a kind of a date when Mr. Jaffrey stepped into the house. She considered her father’s pale complexion, his wiry build, and the fact that he was never what anyone would call tall, barely emerging above Sheila. This man stood at least two heads above her mother, his complexion favored the birthday cake icing, and he looked able to toss a heavy box with one hand. He did not look like Billy Dee Williams, and certainly did not have Billy Dee Williams’s suspicious hair texture. Yet he made Kenya think of Billy Dee Williams as he stood in the foyer holding pink flowers that seemed anxious to die.
“Hello, Mr. Jaffrey,” Sheila said. “These are lovely!” She flitted around, taking his caramel-colored coat, which looked heavy and expensive to Kenya. She thought of a trip she’d taken to the Second Mile Thrift Store with her father. There he’d bought what became his favorite tweed jacket, despite its having one torn cuff and a missing button. Her mother had often threatened to burn it. (“But then I’ll be cold,” Johnbrown would say. “I mean, when the fire goes out.”)
“Hello, Mrs. Price,” Teddy Jaffrey said, confusing Kenya. She wondered if her mother was using a fake name. Were they also on the run? Then she remembered that her mother had gone back to using her maiden name. Curtis had been her fake name.
“That’s Miz, okay?”
Mr. Jaffrey laughed. “Roger that,” he said. “And who is this young woman?”
“This is Kenya,” Sheila said, smiling more than Kenya thought she would have.
“Kenya,” he said, extending his hand. “It is great to meet you.”
“Hello,” said Kenya.
“And though your mother may call me Mr. Jaffrey for her own mysterious reasons, I think Teddy will do just fine for us.”
“Okay,” Kenya said. She certainly wouldn’t call him Teddy and hoped he wouldn’t become “Uncle” Teddy. China, whose father had died of a heart attack when she was small, had an “Uncle” DeWitt, an older man; she sometimes encountered his teeth floating in a glass in the bathroom.
“I have home training, right?” Teddy Jaffrey was saying. “So usually when I’m invited to someone’s home for dinner, I like to be civilized, sit down, catch up. But something smells very good in here. I might need to eat that very soon.”
Sheila laughed. “Well, since this dinner is to thank you for saving my you-know-what, you can have it when you want it.” Then she led them into the dining room, where the table was set for the first time with Grandmama’s dishes.
Later it would become difficult for Kenya to remember the first dinner they’d had with Teddy Jaffrey, because before long he was there more nights than not and each of these nights was the same. It was like watching badminton, sitting at the table as he and her mother batted the birdie of their chatter toward each other. Sheila talked about her desire to stop commuting into Philadelphia and transfer to one of the nearby, suburban libraries. Teddy, who was getting his real estate license, talked about housing prices in the different towns—Paoli, Haverford, Devon—and wondered aloud if these white folks would buy a home from a black man. The game fell apart every so often when someone tried to lob the birdie at Kenya. It was difficult, Kenya thought, for her mother to flirt with this man and talk to her daughter at the same time, because Sheila had to keep a smile in her voice when she said things like “Kenya, you might have to go out and get a little job to pay for the Winter Ski Trip. I’m not made of money like these girls’ parents.”
As awkward as it was for Sheila to be Kenya’s mother in front of Teddy Jaffrey, at least Sheila knew what to say. Kenya, on the other hand, found it challenging to talk to him. She wasn’t at all sure how to answer questions like “Do you know how proud it makes me to hear of a young lady like yourself going to Barrett?” or how to respond when he extended an imaginary microphone and said, “Tell us, Kenya, what is it like to have a five-star chef for a mother?” Even saying hello to him was fraught, because she never knew when he was going to try to give her a complicated soul handshake and then say, “I bet they don’t teach that at the Barrett School for Girls.” Kenya began to long for the lonely, calm dinners on chipped dishes she’d shared with only her mother, which had now become a rarity.
Teddy was a dork. But that wasn’t the thing that had bothered Kenya since she first saw him. The sense of an unsolved mystery about him nagged at her until her mother engineered a sleepover at China’s house one Friday evening, despite bitter complaints from Kenya. So it was a long night of eating cheese curls (which she hadn’t touched since her birthday a month and a half ago), putting white cream on their faces, which China insisted ladies did at night, and listening yet again to the plot highlights of Purple Rain.
The next morning, when Sheila and (surprise!) Teddy Jaffrey came for Kenya, China pinched her arm hard and whispered hot in her ear, “Oh my God, he is, like, so gorgeous!”
Then Kenya realized it was this that had been bothering her like a small stone in her shoe: Teddy Jaffrey’s gorgeousness. Because though her mother’s face, with its lush eyebrows, bright eyes, and gapped front teeth, had always made something soar in Kenya, she knew that Sheila was not what most people called beautiful. It made her wonder what Teddy wanted from them.
* * *
One spring afternoon, not long after the sleepover at China’s, Kenya sat in her room with the door open, struggling with algebra. She thought about the old days when she would ask her father for help. Back then her mother was often at work or in purposeful motion at home, but Johnbrown couldn’t st
ay focused on the task long without tumbling into a tirade about the American education system or the great mathematicians of ancient Kush. Finally her mother, who had adored math in school, would appear or pause what she was doing to save the day. Kenya thought of that now, musing that her mother wouldn’t be home for at least an hour and a half. Her mind jumping to the occasional mouse problem they had, she yelped in terror when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.
“It’s just me,” her mother called.
“You scared me! Why aren’t you at work?” Kenya yelled back.
“I had an appointment.”
“Are you okay?”
“Kenya, can I have a minute?”
Kenya heard the bathroom door click shut. A terrifying thought flew into her head and she closed her eyes to entertain it. Her mother had left work early to see a doctor, and had run home to the bathroom, where she was undoubtedly crying because she was fatally ill.
Her mother was dying!
After an agonizing interval, which the clock claimed was less than two minutes, Sheila appeared in the doorway of Kenya’s bedroom. Kenya noted her expression first. It was embarrassed, pleased, defensive, a mess. Then she saw that her mother’s hair now framed her face in smooth, though limp, curls.
The hair was pretty enough, but it belonged somewhere else, like on Mrs. Huxtable or on a doll.
“Time for a change,” Sheila said, reaching up self-consciously.
“That’s a change.”
“It doesn’t look so bad, does it?”
“No,” Kenya said. “No, Mom.”
They looked at each other in silence. There was no way, Kenya thought, to ask the questions she wanted to ask. Unconsciously, she fingered her own hair, still in rather girlish cornrows done by her mother.
“I’m going to start dinner,” Sheila said. “Teddy is coming tonight.”
After watching her mother walk away, Kenya pulled her purple book out of its hiding place in her underwear drawer. My mom got a perm, she wrote. She thought back to a few moments ago, when she thought her mother was dying, and imagined her in a coffin, doll’s hair framing her face.
Disgruntled: A Novel Page 8
