by Tayari Jones
I tell her that I don’t mind driving. You would think that cars would terrify me, that I’d cry at the very idea of four-wheeled transportation. This is how these things worked on television. But I never understood the car to be the cause of my family’s misfortunes. I blame the magnolia we hit and the dogwoods that watched. The sight of them each spring causes my body to tremble, just below the skin where no one can see, but I can feel it.
“See,” Keisha said, stroking the sole of my foot with her acrylic nails. “It’s not the end of the world. People get pregnant every day.”
When I made it back home from Keisha’s apartment, I found Cynthia in the driveway, kneeling in the gravel. I watched her for a while as she rooted around in the dirt. I called her name and walked toward her. She stood when I came near; in the golden light I noticed the tiny rocks embedded in the skin of her bare skinny knees. She wiped her forehead with the tail of her T-shirt, flashing her abdomen, striped with stretch marks.
“Miss,” she said, “can you help me?”
“I don’t have money,” I said, patting my empty pockets.
“You owe me a dollar. For that hair bow.”
“I can go in the house and bring the barrette back to you.”
“Then I would owe you your dollar back. Keep the bow,” she said. “I don’t need it.” She dropped herself again to the driveway, collapsing suddenly like she had lost use of her legs. “Are you going to help me?”
“Help you what?”
She looked up from the dirt and pebbles sifting through her fingers. Her skin was gray with dust. “I dropped something out here this morning.”
“What?”
She didn’t tell me; she just took another handful of gravel and examined each pebble.
“When did you drop it?”
“Ten o’clock. While you was at work.” She grabbed two handfuls of driveway gravel and held them to her face, urgently scanning the contents. She plucked a pill-sized rock and put it in her mouth and quickly spat it out. “Damn,” she said. “I thought that was it.”
I stepped back and she spat out another dirty pebble. “Cynthia, you’re not going to find it.”
“Could you turn on the light?” Her eyes were on me as a halo of gnats circled over her cornrows, which were caked with dandruff and dirt. “Could you at least cut on the light for me? I’m not asking you for no money or nothing like that.”
I went into the house and fastened all the locks on the door. They were good locks, Dwayne’s four-inch dead bolts. I leaned on the door with my heart knocking against my collarbone. I wasn’t shutting the door against Cynthia herself. She was just a dried husk of a woman. She may have been a thief, but she had never struck me as a violent person. I shut my door and locked it against the intensity of her need. Pressing my stomach with the flat of my hands, I swallowed back sadness and bile.
I checked the locks once more before dragging the phone from the living room into my bedroom. The air conditioner still hadn’t been fixed; the air in my bedroom was murky and dense. But still, I crawled under the limp sheets of my bed and even pulled the store-bought quilt over me before dialing my sister’s number. The machine picked up—“You have reached the Phinazees . . .”—and I didn’t leave a message.
Still thinking of my sister and of dogwoods, I returned to the living room and from the safety of the window, watched Cynthia bowed in the gravel. Small clouds of dust bloomed around her fast-moving hands. Watching her, I thought about Keisha and the way she traced words with her fingers when she read.
I flipped the switch, washing the driveway in harsh white light. Cynthia looked to the house with a wave and a little smile. I sat in the window until I didn’t want to watch her any longer.
Chapter Four
I have never been good at playing hard to get, that faked indifference that is supposed to make everyone love you. In romance it wasn’t a matter of promiscuity, no matter what my mother may have said. I’ve never slept with any man just for the thrill of it, just because I was curious about how he might move, how it might make me feel. It was more that I was desperate and optimistic at the same time. When a decent-seeming man asked me to lunch or to dinner, or just asked for my phone number, my optimism said that he could be the one. My desperation is what made me cooperative, wriggling out of my clothes after only a few kisses.
In a manner that is both different and identical, I am the same way with Hermione, constantly offering myself to her, in the form of cookies baked to honor some greeting card holiday or volunteering to babysit, although she always refuses. Sometimes she will come home from work to find me sitting on her porch with my back propped against her oak front door. I smile as she drives up, holding out her mail. Today I sat on her step, jittery with coffee and worry. When I was little, Hermione was the person I went to when I was in trouble, when I’d done wrong. Today I drove all the way to Lawrenceville not to tell her about the baby, but to tell her that I hadn’t told Dwayne. I wanted her to show me what I could do to right that wrong, to set things back on their proper course.
Dwayne would love Hermione’s neighborhood, the deliberate order of it, the newness of the houses, the inky asphalt road. Hermione and her family lived in a pinkish-white house, three stories, stucco front. Five or so shrubs, lollipop round, framed the front steps, while an orderly arrangement of crepe myrtles marked the perimeter. This was a new subdivision. No dogwoods or magnolias that took hundreds of years to grow.
The heat had broken for the evening, leaving behind sluggish humidity and hungry mosquitoes. Slapping them dead against my grimy neck, I waited for my sister to come home. I peeked into the stained-glass door pane, looking for mobile shadows that would tell me that she was inside, just ignoring me. Through the blue glass I saw only the carpeted staircase rendered in kaleidoscope, and nothing more. I mashed the bell again, listened to the chimes play Beethoven, and squinted through the glass. Finally I sat down again, nearly convinced that there was no one home.
Once, when I was eleven and Hermione sixteen, our mother locked us out of the house. At the time, we had lived on Willow Street only eight months and were still smarting over the loss of the house on Bunnybrooke Drive. I was in sixth grade.
The elementary school let out an hour earlier than the high school. I could have walked home right afterward, when the other kids from our block made their way to their houses, where their cheerful, normal mothers either waited on them or left sandwiches in their stead. The kids used to wait for me—no doubt their parents had told them to be nice to me, the poor thing who’d watched half her family die. They would linger, fastening their jackets extra slow, waiting for me to gather my books and follow. But day after day I gently dismissed them, explaining that I was waiting on my sister. They would nod their heads and leave quietly, assuming quite correctly that this had something to do with my father being dead and my mother being crazy.
I waited on Hermione on the stone porch that spanned the entire length of the elementary school. Sometimes she would be prompt, showing up just after I’d finished my math homework. On other occasions she’d appear after five o’clock when all the teachers had gone home, leaving me by myself with only the custodian, Mr. Henry, to look after me. These were my favorite days.
“You still out here?” Mr. Henry would ask me when he came outside to empty his mop bucket into the vacant parking lot.
“Yes, sir.”
“You want me to let you in the building so you can call your mama?” Mr. Henry would smile down at me. His face was brown and crinkled like a grocery bag that had been reused. I liked him.
“No, sir.”
“You sure?” He would pat his pocket with a clank. “I got keys to all the offices, you know. I ain’t supposed to let anybody in, but they ain’t supposed to leave little children all alone. Wasn’t even last year that someone was snatching kids right around here.”
“No, sir,” I said again. “I don’t have anyone to call. But my sister is on her way.”
“Whe
n you get ready to go, tell me, so I can know you safe, hear?”
“Yes, sir.” I’d give him a solemn nod, knowing I’d no intention of knocking, setting his mind at ease. When I spotted Hermione rounding the corner, I would creep away, purposely leaving something of mine behind. Once, I’d left my ballerina pencil box, scattering the pencils and denting the case with my heel. The next day the case was waiting for me in the lost and found and Mr. Henry peeped into my homeroom to make sure that I was alive and safe. I waved the case at him, mouthing the words “thank you.” He couldn’t have been more relieved had I really been his pretty little daughter.
Mama locked us out on Halloween. Hermione showed up at the school well after six, wearing her regular clothes, but pale yellow bunny ears jutted from her straightened hair. I’d gone to school that day dressed as a robot in a costume I’d made myself: a large box covering my clothes, with holes cut out to accommodate my head and arms. A second small box served as a helmet, with holes cut out for my eyes. The costume won me a flashlight and a certificate that read “Most Creative.”
Mr. Henry congratulated me on my award. “You come up with that idea all by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, hearing my voice echo inside my cardboard headdress.
“You’re a smart one. Make sure you let me know when your sister comes to get you. Last time, you scared me half to death. Don’t do an old man like that. You got a jacket up under them boxes? There’s plenty sweaters in lost and found. Nobody would notice if you put one on.”
I would have liked to borrow a sweater. The October wind easily permeated the boxes and the leotard I wore underneath. But I didn’t want to take the boxes off in order to put on warmer clothes. I’d chosen this costume because it hid my body, the heavy curves that made everyone stare at me. “I got on clothes enough under here already.”
When Hermione finally arrived, I searched my bag for something to leave behind. My canvas pack held only generic items—plastic pens, chewed pencils, rubber coin purse—that could have belonged to any girl at my school. I turned on my award flashlight, for one last look at the glowing red bulb, before smashing it against one of the white pillars in front of the school. I scattered the broken glass, leaving my mangled prize for Mr. Henry to find.
In those days my sister was plump and sexy. In the year since the accident she seemed to celebrate her ripe figure, favoring push-up bras and wide belts that emphasized her thick hourglass. On this evening she wasn’t feeling so pretty and was in a terrible mood. I could tell even before she clomped over to where I kneeled struggling to repack my book bag. The cardboard costume had rubbed my underarms raw.
“Hurry up,” she snapped.
“I’m trying,” I whispered. “It’s hard with this thing on.”
“Why don’t you just take it off and throw it away? Halloween is over.”
“But we didn’t trick-or-treat yet.”
“Do you really think Mama is going to let you out of the house?”
“She might,” I said, feeling tears gathering behind my eyes. “I won a prize for my costume. I want to keep it.”
“I don’t care what you do with it,” Hermione said. “I just want to get home. It’s six-thirty.”
I didn’t ask her where she had been for the last three hours. Her white turtleneck was grimy with makeup that she used to hide blue-red scars on her neck; she had told me these were called passion marks.
“Do you ever wish you were dead?” she asked me once we had left school grounds.
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Not wishing you were dead enough to do anything about it. But do you just wish someone would pull the plug on you?”
I turned toward her, but I couldn’t catch a look at her face through the small eyeholes in my costume. In the yellow streetlight, making out the shape of her, all I could think was how much I loved my sister. “If you were dead, who would take care of me?”
“Maybe your mother?” Hermione laughed. “Don’t freak out. I am not going to kill myself. I might kill somebody else, but I am not going to kill myself.” She laughed and I tried to laugh with her.
She punched the cardboard box I wore on my head. “Take this thing off. It’s weird to talk when I can’t see your face.”
“I don’t want to.” Lately my forehead had erupted in a crop of pimples hidden under my fluffy bangs. Precocious acne, my mother called it, using one of her favorite words. Several mornings a week she looked at me just before I went to school and said, “Precocious puberty. Help me, Jesus.”
A gaggle of boys dressed as superheroes charged by us, smelling of sweat and bubble gum.
Hermione said, “There is so much stuff that you think matters that turns out to be nothing. Just bullshit.”
“Like what?”
“Good grades. Virginity.”
“What’s that?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
I didn’t have to look at her to see that she was irritated. I walked beside her, working hard to match her pace despite my bulky costume. I didn’t mean to be so stupid. “Like the Virgin Mary?”
“A virgin is a woman who hasn’t known a man in the way that a woman knows a man.” Hermione laughed and chucked a mini candy bar at a parked car. “It’s all bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
“I know,” I said, eager to agree.
“You don’t know,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“We may be the sorriest family on the planet,” Hermione said. “There should be a Gallup poll.”
I stayed quiet. My sister enjoyed teasing me, talking way over my head, watching me jump, like the smallest kid in a game of keep-away. The night was very cold. I knew that beneath this cardboard my nipples were standing up—“headlights,” as Hermione would say.
“So what do you think about Earl?” she asked me.
“Mr. Phinazee? He’s nice. Makes me think about Daddy.”
“Air makes you think about Daddy,” Hermione said.
I turned my head to see if she was being mean, but the night and the cardboard conspired against me again.
“What if he wanted to marry Mama?”
“He would be our stepdad,” I said. “And we could be sort of a normal family.”
“As long as Eloise is our mother, we will never be normal. Lord have mercy. I am so high.” My sister laughed loud, beautiful, and mysterious into the night.
I saw the pumpkins first, dozens of them lining the driveway, framing the porch like track lighting. The jack-o’-lanterns were fabulous, complicated faces, glowing with ritual candles.
“I know I am not that high,” Hermione said.
I stopped and lowered myself beside one of the driveway pumpkins. Its eyebrows hunched together with worry. Mother had carved narrow, suspicious eyes.
“Get away from those things before you set your boxes on fire. Now, that would be really fucked up.”
I stood in the middle of the driveway while Hermione inspected the other carvings. She examined three or four and returned to where I stood. She snatched the cardboard box off my head, causing me to squint against the cold. Hermione before me was large and pretty, her cleavage puckered with chill bumps. “Oh, Ariadne,” she said. “Don’t you wish we had someplace else to go?”
“I like the pumpkins,” I said. “They are the best on the block.”
“Aria,” she said, “look how many of them she made. It’s the whole goddamned pumpkin patch.”
A clutch of children crossed in front of our house. “Why don’t they come here to trick-or-treat?”
“Because they can tell,” Hermione said.
I took my sister’s hand and we went to the front door. Hermione slid her key into the top lock and then the bottom. She turned the handle, but the door opened only a few degrees before it stopped, secured by the safety chain.
“Mama,” Hermione called, “we’re locked out.” She punched the doorbell a couple of times.
Hermione pressed her face in the open spa
ce between the door and the jamb. Her makeup was chalky in the white light spilling out from the house. “She’s in there,” Hermione said. “I’m looking at her.”
“Maybe she didn’t hear us ringing.”
“Aria, she hears us right now. She’s sitting in the dining room pulling the guts out of more motherfucking pumpkins.”
“Did we do something to make her mad?” I tried to recall the details of the morning. Had I remembered to put my gown in the hamper? Had I rinsed my cereal bowl and put it in the dishwasher?
“It’s Earl,” Hermione said. “I know this has to do with Earl.”
Hermione took a couple of steps back and then hurled herself against the door. The yellow bunny ears flipped and flopped with her effort. The door groaned, but the chain stayed firmly attached. “I see her,” Hermione said again. “She is such a bitch.”
“Don’t break the door, Hermione,” I begged. “You’re going to make her mad.”
“She’s making me mad,” Hermione said. “It’s not right.”
We sat on the porch. My sister was soft and lovely in the light of the jack-o’-lanterns. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “What does she want from us? We were there, just like she was. She knows there wasn’t nothing we could have done.”
Hermione cried and I touched her hair. When she uncovered her face, she said, “See what I mean about wishing to be dead?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Good,” Hermione said. “I don’t want you to.” Standing up, she dusted off her broad bottom. She gave a chortling jack-o’-lantern a sharp kick and punted a scowling one half across the yard. It smashed against the trunk of the old hickory tree. “I need you to help me, Aria.”
