Disgruntled: A Novel

by Asali Solomon

  Like everything else around them, her mother was changing. Kenya had intuited that she shouldn’t say anything negative—not about Sheila’s alliance with Alma Lewis (which continued though Sheila frequently mocked her), nor about the hours and money spent on Lars the decorator, who painted the powder room black and pouted when Sheila wouldn’t approve a mini-chandelier in there. Now, most solidly with the perm, Kenya knew to keep her feelings about the rate and dramatic quality of these changes to herself.

  She felt all of this even more painfully a few weeks later when Sheila asked her how she felt about Teddy Jaffrey moving in with them.

  “I guess it would be okay,” Kenya said. Given everything that had happened, and the fact that he seemed nice enough, Kenya couldn’t think of an honorable reason to object. She had heard her mother saying on the phone to Alma Lewis that Teddy was an incredible second chance. He was almost too good to be true, she said. And perhaps Alma Lewis had said something about him still living with his parents, because Sheila came back with “Like I said, almost too good to be true.”

  The night that Sheila told Kenya about Teddy Jaffrey moving in, she didn’t say it, but he was clearly on his way over. She had set the table with the nice dishes and had reapplied lipstick. Kenya stood in her mother’s doorway while Sheila sat at her dressing table, propping up curls with a few touches of the hot iron. Kenya sneezed at the smell of singed hair that quickly filled the room.

  “Do you think you’ll marry him?” asked Kenya.

  “We’ll just see how this goes first,” her mother said. It sounded like a threat.

  The next morning Kenya woke up from a too-vivid dream of having been down in the basement of the house—a too-vivid dream and extremely dusty feet. She didn’t tell Sheila.

  * * *

  “So, young lady,” Teddy Jaffrey was asking at dinner, “tell me about your boyfriend.”

  Kenya tried to read his expression. Was he making fun of her? Genuinely interested? Was this part of his Uncle Teddy act? She glanced at her mother, but incredibly, Sheila looked as if she was eagerly awaiting the answer.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” Kenya said, trying to sound neutral.

  Boys had been in the air for a while but had only really shown up just as the Teddy Jaffrey era was beginning. It had started gingerly with the sixth-grade mixer, and now, near the end of seventh grade, people were murmuring their names: Phil McCartney, John Jessup, David Beloff, Matt Smith. They went to Haverford, Episcopal Academy, and Friends. They did not go to the Catholic school across the street from Barrett, which was for mallchicks and guidos. Phil was a joker, John was his best friend, David was so cute, and Matt was so nice. Kenya imagined them as trading cards. And there were less-mentioned others. One day at lunch Phyllis Fagin said, “Oh my God, Kenya, I was at a thing at my cousin’s house and I met a guy you would love.”

  “Who?” Kenya asked. Years later, it would seem so absurdly, stabbingly obvious where this was going that Kenya would want to go back in time to that conversation and punch herself in the face.

  “He’s really nice,” Phyllis said.

  “How does he know your cousin?”

  “He goes to Germantown Friends.” Kenya’s mother would have preferred her to go to Germantown Friends. Though far from where Kenya had grown up, it was in the city, and not as stuck-up as Barrett. But they’d offered a measly scholarship. Later Kenya found out that Grandmama had stipulated that she would only help Sheila pay for Barrett. Perhaps if Grandmama’s mother had cleaned Germantown Friends, it would have gone differently.

  “He’s so cool,” Phyllis continued.

  “So why don’t you like him?” Zaineb asked. “If he’s so cool.”

  “I just really think Kenya would like him,” said Phyllis.

  “What’s his name?” said Kenya.

  “Tyrell Smith,” said Phyllis.

  “Ew,” said Lolly, “what kind of name is Ty-rell?”

  It turned out that Phyllis barely knew Tyrell Smith; he didn’t seem to remember her a week later when they ran into each other at a mixer at Episcopal. The music was loud and the conversation confusing. He walked off distractedly in the middle of being introduced to Kenya.

  “You thought I would like him?” she asked Phyllis. Tyrell Smith’s forehead was a map of acne scars, and he was overdressed for the dance, in a pressed paisley shirt and creased pants.

  “He looked better when I met him,” said Phyllis ruefully.

  “He’s a total dog!” said Lolly.

  Kenya stood there in the blare of the unfamiliar gym, where she, Tyrell, and Lolly were the only three black people. She looked around at her classmates, who had smeared themselves with makeup in the bathroom. Ever since the night she’d woken up shooting her mother, she had moments where she had to reassure herself that yes, she was in this room, in this body, on this earth. No, she wasn’t part of someone’s dream. In the months after she and her mother moved out of the city, she sometimes spent whole days reminding herself that she was here. It happened less now, but every so often, she had to go over the whole thing in her head again.

  “I don’t know,” said Phyllis, “he reminded me of Kenya for some reason.”

  Zaineb began laughing. “I wonder why!”

  “What—could—it—have—been?” Kenya said between fake giggles.

  “I have no idea!” said Zaineb.

  “You guys are so obnoxious,” said Phyllis. “I was just trying to be nice.”

  Lolly stared off into the air. Kenya wondered if Lolly sometimes went to the same place she herself went, the place that was nowhere at all.

  Phyllis wasn’t the only one who tried to help Kenya with her love life. After boys appeared, it became a semiregular occurrence: someone Kenya was friendly with, or even someone she didn’t talk to that much, would tell her about Barry Jackson/LeVaughn Smith/Charles Williams III and a boy named Allmon, whose name sounded faintly familiar. Allmon, Allmon, Allmon, she said to herself, trying to place it.

  Sometimes when people kissed on television or in a movie, or when a man looked at a woman a certain way, Kenya got a warm, ticklish feeling in the center of her body. Sometimes she poked and plucked at herself in the dark, then got up and scrubbed her hand raw like Lady Macbeth, whom she’d gotten to play in the seventh-grade English drama project. But getting a boy involved seemed as possible as China taking Prince to the prom. Most of the boys around were white, and everyone around Kenya conspired to keep her and white boys apart. There was her mother, with the long-standing, unstated “no white boys” edict, and the memory of her father’s theories about slave masters and slave women. There were the girls at school, frantically suggesting Barry Jackson/LeVaughn Smith/Charles Williams III. But the biggest barrier to romance with the John Jessups, David Beloffs, and Matt Smiths of the world was the white boys themselves, who looked straight through Kenya.

  At one mixer, Phil McCartney, popular in spite of always wearing Hawaiian shirts and being perpetually sweaty, bopped over to her. Kenya was dancing to “Word Up” with the other girls, and it was unclear if he was actually moving next to her or dancing with Phyllis. Unlike most of the girls, Phyllis had actual cleavage, which you could see above the V-neck of her sweater.

  But he was looking directly at Kenya. “Word up!” he hollered. Kenya panicked, wondering how to act, what to say, how to stay cool. Phil did the bump on her, rather violently, she thought.

  “That’s the word!” she finally thought to say, but by the time she spoke, probably too quietly, he was boogeying away. “Whoo hoo!” he yelled.

  “Oh my God!” said Phyllis, elbowing Kenya.

  “That was Phil McCartney,” hissed Lolly, spit flecking Kenya’s ear.

  “Say it, don’t spray it,” said Kenya, trying not to smile. Nearby, Lizzie Canwell and Lindsey Carroll whispered together, looking at her. It had been said that Lindsey Carroll used to go out with Phil McCartney.

  There were a couple of good-looking and self-composed black boys, but
most were either aggressive nerds, loud good-time types, or some Frankenstein of both, like LeVaughn Smith, who had gotten on the front page of the local paper for a patent he took out on a science project but who also tried to grab the DJ’s microphone at dances. Unlike the white boys, who ignored her, these boys seemed specifically to hide from Kenya, occasionally venturing forth to ask Lolly, with her bulging hazel eyes and knobby knees, to dance. She went with them grudgingly, always returning to complain that “no cute boys” ever asked.

  Kenya didn’t blame any of the boys for disregarding her. She had eyes just like anyone else, and her house was full of mirrors that Lars claimed “enlarged a space.” She was not tall or cutely miniature, and she had a completely average B-cup chest. Her skin was not light, her brown eyes unremarkable, her hair standard-issue nappy; at dances she wore it in a ponytail with bangs that kinked up fiercely if she began to sweat while dancing. Despite her mother’s new look, Kenya was not allowed to perm her hair until high school. But she didn’t think it would matter anyway. For her, “boys” was Tyrell Smith walking away while Phyllis was introducing her. And the only time the idea of a “boyfriend” really came up for her was when Teddy asked about it, which he started to do repeatedly. “Don’t make me have to use my bat to break some boy’s kneecaps,” he’d say.

  * * *

  “What’s the worst thing about him?” Zaineb asked Kenya about Teddy Jaffrey one day at lunch while Kenya was complaining about her mother’s boyfriend. In the summer before and into eighth grade, Kenya had begun talking to Zaineb more than the other girls. Zaineb had never believed in Santa Claus and was reasonable about everything except New York City, about which she harbored outrageous fantasies of Bohemian life.

  “He does seem really irritating,” Zaineb continued, “but, like, what’s the number one worst thing?”

  “I mean, if your mom is happy, does any of this really matter?” asked Phyllis, reminding Kenya why she preferred conversations with Zaineb alone.

  “Well, maybe it’s weird to have to hang out with a guy that’s not your dad,” said Lolly. “My dad is, like, so great. I can’t imagine.”

  “It’s not that,” said Kenya, looking at Zaineb. “He’s just—it’s just…”

  “I just wonder if you’re trying to, you know, be difficult?” asked Zaineb. “I mean, I can’t stand my dad, but I’d be so pissed if they broke up and my mom brought someone else home.”

  Kenya wondered. Was there no way to like Teddy Jaffrey? She tried to imagine how it might be to appreciate having him around. She would enjoy it when he came into the house and got her involved in some confusing handshake. She would find it charming when he asked her if she’d ever been to Kenya and then laughed at his own cleverness. She would understand why her mother looked at him, pulling at her flattened hair, her eyes glazed over with—what? Love?

  “I don’t know,” Kenya told them. The conversation turned to a new boy, Whitby Bradford, who knew all of the Beastie Boys’ songs by heart. Later that night, while Teddy Jaffrey and her mother were upstairs, Kenya called Zaineb.

  “He’s not himself,” she told her, without saying hello. “That’s what I don’t like. You can tell that he never says what he’s thinking. He says something else.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to know what he’s thinking,” said Zaineb.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, back when they lived in the city, Kenya had breathlessly watched a cartoon miniseries of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and become convinced that the White Witch lurked in the upstairs hallway. Kenya didn’t remember the day she forgot her fear of the witch, who made it always winter and never Christmas (which it also never was in Kenya’s real life). But she recalled the taste of terror in her mouth she used to get as she climbed the lonely stairs in the old house, when she woke one night in her new house to find someone in her room.

  It was a Saturday night, after Katherine Stein’s birthday party at Radnor Rolls. Kenya had skated almost nonstop, pleased to discover something she could do that made her feel like she was flying. And, unlike at school dances, there was no question of being chosen or spurned. She didn’t mind that Katherine’s mother kept giving her that smile, the one that convinced Kenya that she’d been invited out of a sense of racial charity; she didn’t even care that Phyllis Fagin was trying to create a drama between herself and a scarily blond guy in a letter jacket who looked like the villain in The Karate Kid. “It’s like he doesn’t even know I’m alive,” Phyllis whined, a well-founded complaint. Kenya ignored her, whirling around, yelling “Nineteen-ninety-nine, don’t you wanna go?” She skated faster and faster, flying into the barricade. She fell, laughing.

  After the party, Kenya found herself pleasurably exhausted but also cranky that life offered opportunities to do things like roller-skate only in the briefest of intervals. Instead one’s time on earth was taken up with sitting at the dinner table with one’s mother and her boyfriend, eating boiled hot dogs and listening to him complain that all of the guys he knew who’d failed the real estate licensing exam (like him) were black and that the guys who passed it were white—and Chinese. Of course the whites might let a few Chinese pass, he complained. It was black men they were afraid of.

  “May I be excused?” asked Kenya.

  “I’m sorry, Kenya,” said Teddy Jaffrey, putting back the laughing mask. “This talk might be a little strong for you.”

  “Kenya knows how things are,” said her mother. “We—I—never hid anything from her.”

  “I’m just tired,” said Kenya. But then maybe she was the one—not Teddy Jaffrey—who never said what she thought. Because she was thinking that he was a petty, stupid man. Was being black and not passing the real estate licensing exam his idea of a racial conspiracy? She remembered the majestic narratives her father had spun, aligning presidents, the pope, and the local court system—actual conspiracies. It made Kenya miss him suddenly, so sharply that it was a pain in her side. The shame of being alive was listening to Teddy Jaffrey’s woes and watching her mother ooze sympathy.

  But she had skated and felt good, so Kenya looked at her mother’s boyfriend and said something she did not mean. “I’m sorry about the exam. I’m sure you’ll pass next time.”

  Then Kenya went upstairs and collapsed in bed, where she slept so heavily that it felt like minutes later when she woke to find a man standing over her in the dark. She tried to wake herself up from this bad dream, but the figure was still there.

  “Baba?” she whispered.

  “You fell asleep with your clothes on,” said Teddy Jaffrey. “I came to turn off the light.”

  “Thanks,” said Kenya. Fully awake now, she felt ashamed that she had called her father’s name.

  “You’re welcome.” He sat down on the foot of her bed. “You went to bed early. Must have been tired. Pretty fun party, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me help you into your PJs,” he said, reaching for the covers, but Kenya held them tightly.

  “Teddy, where’s my mom?” she asked.

  “Asleep,” he muttered.

  “Teddy.”

  “So, folks, even though she never says it, she knows my name,” Teddy said to an imaginary audience, whispering in his jocular voice. He managed to laugh in the same whisper.

  “Teddy, I’m going to go to the bathroom,” Kenya said slowly, quietly, and clearly. “I guess you should go to bed.”

  The figure disappeared.

  The next day at breakfast, Teddy Jaffrey was exactly the same person he’d been before he came into her room. He was not especially fawning over Kenya; nor was he indifferent. He sang along with the Luther Vandross record her mother played, always coming in a little too early. It was, Kenya thought, as if he wanted to be sure everyone knew that he knew the words.

  “Since I lost my baby,” he sang.

  (Since I lost my baby, repeated Luther Vandross.)

  “You are no Luther,” said Sheila, stacking pancakes on a plate next to the sto
ve. Aunt Jemima on Sunday morning, same as back in the city. Kenya knew now that she should be grateful for the things that had stayed the same—especially now that her mother also cooked a pile of bacon for Teddy. Sometimes Sheila even ate a piece of it, sitting at the table with her permed hair in a scarf and rollers, a woman Kenya had never known.

  Kenya sat at the kitchen table nearest the stove where her mother stood, and though she didn’t have anything in mind to say, she was suddenly gripped with the fear that if she were to speak, her mother would not be able to hear her.

  * * *

  Devi Warren was an extreme rarity at Barrett: a midyear transfer. Her family had moved from New York City and the rumor, an unusual one, was that they were very rich. No matter how echoey and marble-floored the mansions she’d been to, no Barrett girl yet had admitted to being rich. If it came up, which it rarely did, they said, with the same inflection, “I’m not rich,” as if the word rich were like the word dumb or dirty. Kenya had done the math on her own situation; she knew that her mother’s salary was $37,000 and that they were not paying for the house or their old Subaru, or for much of the tuition at Barrett. If these girls who hired cotton candy machines for their parties and had Porsche convertibles in their rounded driveways weren’t rich, what did that make her and Sheila?

  Of course no one would ask Devi Warren to confirm or deny, but she did look the part in a way that Kenya would not have recognized back before Barrett. “The more money these kids have,” her mother had declared once, on their way home from a school picnic, “the worse they look. The ones who look like orphans in Dickens—there’s your Rockefellers.” Devi Warren wore a gray kilt like everyone else, but her Tretorn sneakers had been battered almost beyond brand recognizability. It looked as if someone had eaten part of the collar of her dingy white polo shirt, and her short brown hair was streaked with a dirty blonde that actually looked dirty.

  For about a month, leading into winter break, Devi Warren ate lunch at one of the two center tables in the dining room. Her air of glamour and mystery had earned her a probationary period among the popular girls. Meanwhile, at Kenya’s table, Phyllis whispered, “I heard she’s, like, the biggest lesbo.” The class had recently learned that word—distinct from the all-purpose insult gay—and the accusations had immediately begun. In retrospect, Kenya found it remarkable, in the way of ant colonies and elephant funerals, that the girls never accused Tuff Wieder and Sharon McCall of being lesbos, even though they’d been holding hands on the swings and sharing a sleeping bag at slumber parties since anyone could recall. (Of course, that might have been because no one wanted to anger Tuff, who cursed casually, played rough at lacrosse, and had a mysterious scar over her right eyebrow.) When Devi materialized, with her David Cassidy haircut and brusque manner, it was as if the use of the word had called her into existence.