The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  “They came in here,” I said to Rochelle as soon as we stepped into my bedroom.

  “Maybe not,” Rochelle said, taking her turn to re- assure me. “I bet nothing is missing.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said, feeling suddenly ill. The nausea left me unsteady, like an overfull bowl of soup.

  I didn’t own much that was of value to me, or to anyone else. What I do care about I keep in the top drawer of my nightstand. Seventeen monogrammed handkerchiefs, cheap cotton purchased at Zayre or Woolworth, one of those stores that have long since gone out of business. These were my father’s. The day after the accident, my mother gathered all his handkerchiefs in a basket for mourners to use and take away as souvenirs. Like personalized matchbooks from a wedding reception. I’d emptied the basket, stuffing them into the pockets of my gray wool coat. Also among my keepsakes was a mangy dust rag. Years ago, I’d been oiling my mother’s buffet when I noticed that the ragged scrap in my hand was a baby’s diaper. Maybe it had been mine, maybe Hermione’s, but I hope it was Genevieve’s. Under these items was the most personal of everything I’d saved: a cache of unsent letters I wrote to Hermione after watching The Color Purple three times in a single afternoon. The nightstand drawer was shut crooked on its tracks. Someone had opened it, fondled all my best things, and hadn’t found them to be worth stealing.

  “I’m sick,” I said.

  “Nothing’s missing,” Rochelle said. “Nothing’s missing.”

  I sat carefully on my bed and willed myself to be completely still. I imagined the contents of my stomach roiling in waves, then settling, like water after a struggling swimmer has finally drowned. Rochelle’s hand was smooth and cool against my cheek.

  Whoever had broken in had not bothered anything in the kitchen or bathroom. Rochelle’s prescriptions—some of which could be used recreationally, I supposed—were still in the medicine cabinet in their orange containers. The beer bottles still lined the refrigerator doors; the blue jug of vodka lay on its side in the freezer. Nothing was missing from my room either, though the drawers had been opened and the comforter pulled from the bed and heaped on the floor.

  “It’s freaky,” Rochelle said. “Like they broke in just to look around.”

  “It wasn’t Cynthia,” I said.

  “No,” Rochelle said. “Nobody ever heard of crackheads breaking in without stealing anything.”

  Without discussion we headed back onto the porch. I was a little bit scared, but more than that, I just didn’t like being in the room so recently occupied by a curious intruder. Despite Cynthia’s eyewitness account, the burglar in my mind’s eye was a woman, opening the jars and creams on the bathroom counter, sniffing, making a face. Mocking my choices and Rochelle’s. I thought that I could still smell her, that I caught a whiff of magnolia perfume.

  “Sometimes I wonder what we were thinking when we moved in here,” Rochelle said, settling her narrow hips onto the Huey Newton Seat. “We’re not like these people, you know.”

  “Maybe you’re not like them,” I said.

  “Come on, Aria,” she said. “This isn’t a value judgment. Just an observation. You’re not like these people either. You didn’t grow up in a neighborhood like this.”

  She was right. While I did grow up in Southwest Atlanta, this wasn’t my corner of that corner. My folks didn’t have money like Rochelle’s family, but I didn’t grow up in shouting distance of drug addicts. We had burglar bars on our windows, but they were the fancy kind, as much for decoration as for safety. The bars on windows here were metal and ugly, like braces on teeth. The house on Willow Street, the one we moved to after losing Daddy and the house on Bunnybrooke, didn’t have central air and there was no garage for our car, but the neighborhood was stable. People didn’t get killed. When someone broke a windowpane, they replaced it with new glass. No one taped plastic film over the hole, waiting for payday. But here on our block, entire houses stood empty, the windows secured with plywood, “No Trespassing” spray-painted in orange.

  “I want a drink,” Rochelle said.

  “We have vodka in the house.”

  “If I don’t come out in five minutes,” she said, “come in and get me.”

  She moved through the door in the way that she did things. She was unafraid, no matter what she had just said to me. Her kindness was like that. She didn’t want me to feel bad for feeling the way that I did. My sister Hermione had been that way when we were little. We had gone to the zoo together with our parents, each of us wearing yellow balloons looped to our wrists with cotton string. Somehow mine came untethered and floated upward, over the monkey house and the birdcages. When I began to cry, Hermione bit through her string, releasing her balloon as well. “Don’t cry,” she’d said. “I don’t have one either.”

  Dwayne arrived just as Rochelle emerged from the house carrying a plastic pitcher of fruit punch and the frozen bottle of vodka. I was embarrassed at how pleased I was to see him. I hadn’t gone to Spelman just to grow into the sort of woman who feels all the tension drain from her body at the sight of her boyfriend’s car. It would have been better if I could have been more like Rochelle. She and Rod were in love definitely. Theirs was the sort of engagement of which everyone approved. Even Dwayne, who didn’t care too much for Rod, agreed they were made for each other. But Rochelle didn’t seem exactly grateful for Rod, the way I thanked God for Dwayne. My boyfriend was a large man, six feet four and solid in his oversized clothes. He was the type of man that made you just want to climb up and hide in his branches.

  Rochelle seemed surprised to see Dwayne’s car at the curb.

  “I called him,” I said. “You didn’t call Rod?”

  She shrugged.

  “It is sort of Dwayne’s line of work,” I said, reminding her that there was a practical reason for him to be here. Dwayne is a locksmith and someone had just pried open our front door. Rochelle’s Rod was a nice guy, a dentist, the sort of man that any mother would embrace as a son-in-law. But he was only useful if you had a problem that originated inside your own mouth.

  In a way, you could say that Dwayne is my first boyfriend. Not my first lover; I’ve slept with more men than I will easily admit. But Dwayne is the only man who had really claimed me. We’d only been going out for a month when he started referring to me as his “woman.” Rochelle laughed at this, saying it all seemed so “retro”; she and Rod called each other partners. But she couldn’t know what it means to me to be acknowledged in public like that. It’s been nearly a year and Dwayne has never come out and said that he loves me, but he doesn’t have to. More than one man has whispered those words to me, but none of them were telling the truth. When I speak, Dwayne stoops a little, angling his head downward, showing the world that he’s listening, that he cares what I have to say.

  Climbing onto the porch, Dwayne gave me a quick kiss before looking at the damaged door or even saying hello to Rochelle. I smiled despite the situation as he knelt before the violated threshold.

  “Shit,” Dwayne said. This was not the first time he had made a professional call to our house. Less than a month after I’d met him, I locked myself out of this same front door and he opened it with metal gadgets he stored in his glove compartment. He was so confident and competent inserting the silver prods, moving them this way and that, sweet-talking the door the way a farmer might murmur to a skittish cow. He talked to the lock, moving his fingers until it yielded.

  On that day he had been pleased to be of service—our romance was still fairly new; we were still trying to impress one another, each of us eager to prove to the other that we could be useful. But now he seemed agitated. “It looks like somebody just got in here with a screwdriver. You can’t blame the lock. It’s a Baldwin.” At this he glanced over his shoulder at me.

  I nodded. Dwayne had installed the brass-faced dead bolt himself.

  “It’s the wood,” he explained. “A lock can’t be no better than the door you set it in. When is your lease up?”

  �
�February,” Rochelle said. “Right after my wedding.”

  “I can install you a four-inch dead bolt,” Dwayne said. “Maybe that’ll hold you over until then. February is what? Eight months away?”

  I felt my pulse flutter at the very idea of measuring time in months, for there were dynamics to this situation of which Rochelle and Dwayne were unaware. Namely, that by February my own life would be different, my body too. I was almost three weeks late and had thrown up three times in four days. A person didn’t have to be an ob-gyn to know what that meant.

  As I watched Dwayne rummage through his tool-box, I imagined myself telling him that we’d soon be parents. His face would be sober and serious, but then he’d look at me, searching my face for his cue. I’d give him a smile to let him know that it was okay to be happy, that this was a good thing. He might not say, right then, that he was excited, that he loved me, but there is more to life than what you do and don’t say to one another.

  Dwayne removed the lock, leaving a clean hole in the door. “Rochelle, why don’t you just go and stay with Rod? He’s got a nice house.” Now Dwayne made eye contact with me. “And my apartment isn’t all that big, but I got a Medeco Grade One on my front door. Nobody can get past that.”

  Again I felt my pulse move like something eager and excited.

  “Is this a private moment?” Rochelle said. “I could go inside.”

  “No, no,” Dwayne said. “I’m not trying to run you off. I’m just thinking aloud.” He slipped his screwdriver inside his collar to scratch his back. “I’m just talking. I know you two are determined to tough it out over here.”

  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

  People 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 Freshwomen!” 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.