by Tayari Jones
I took a good look at this man who turned out to be Dwayne. He seemed like every other brother in the room in his straight-hem silk shirt and neutral-colored slacks. I liked his shoes, cognac leather with side buckles.
He grinned and said, “You know what? You look familiar. I’m not just saying that, you actually look like somebody I know.”
I shook my head.
“For real, though. You do.”
I raised my eyebrows and let him look me over and think about it.
“Do you talk?” His front teeth tilted toward each other, just a bit. It wasn’t enough to ruin his smile, but enough to let me know he’d grown up without money for braces and retainers.
“I talk sometimes.”
“Just not tonight? Just not to me?”
“I was just being quiet so you can figure out who I look like.”
“It’s somebody,” he said. “Let me ask my cousin. Hey, Cheese,” he called, and another guy ambled over. He and Dwayne looked alike, but Cheese was shorter, lighter, and older. “Don’t she look like somebody we know? Maybe somebody from home?”
Cheese looked at me and cocked his head to the side, squinted. “Janet Jackson. She looks just like Janet.”
“Not Janet,” I corrected him. “Penny.”
“Damn,” Dwayne said. “That’s it.”
Cheese laughed. “All you need now is a Band-Aid on your forehead.”
“All right, man,” Dwayne said. “You can go on back to where you were.”
“It’s like that?” Cheese said, backing up.
After Cheese had left, we were stuck together with nothing else to say. I’m not so good at talking to strangers, even on a Friday night, even when they are good-looking. I hummed along with the music. Anita Baker sang, “I’m missing you, baby.” I rubbed my sticky lips together. “Are you in town for homecoming?”
He looked a little puzzled and I was embarrassed for bringing it up at all. Taking a second look at him, I could tell that he wasn’t a Morehouse Man. He didn’t have that air of being the beneficiary of something large and invisible. “It’s homecoming for Morehouse. A lot of people are in town.”
“You went there?”
“No,” I said, becoming more embarrassed. “That’s for the guys. I went to Spelman. The women’s college.”
“I knew that,” he said. “I just had a little too much to drink.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And it’s late.”
“Late? It’s just two. Things are just getting started. Me and my cousin are headed to Atlanta Nights after this. They stay open till five. You have a man?”
“No,” I said, draining the last of the watery vodka from my glass. “No man. No drink either.”
He leaned toward the bar and said, “Excuse me.” He lowered his voice a notch, like he could see that the bartender was busy and he hated to add to her workload.
“Kids?” he said after apologetically placing his order.
“None.”
He said, “That’s cool. I don’t have nothing against women with children. But when I meet them at a club or somewhere, I always wonder why they’re not home with their kids.” He laughed, showing his pleasant imperfect smile.
“So, you have children?”
“One,” he said. “A boy.”
“How come you’re not reading Peter Pan?”
The bartender slid me my vodka and tonic; Dwayne peeled off seven one-dollar bills, then added an extra for tip.
“Thanks,” I said.
“The reason is that he don’t stay with me. He’s in Alabama with his mother.”
“That’s where you’re from?”
“Yeah.”
“You miss him?”
“Who?”
“Your little boy.”
“Trey? It’s weird,” Dwayne said. “It’s hard to just come out and say that I miss him, because I only spend time with him two, maybe three times a year. But when I think about him, I feel something here.” He spread his hand below the Africa pendant dangling from a silver chain. “It’s like I swallowed a hot buttered golf ball. So I know I must be missing something.”
I knew what it was to have a hole in your heart in the shape of someone you never really got a chance to know. Taking the damp napkin from under my drink, I cooled my forehead, listening to the soft jazz humming out from invisible speakers. Vodka was making me drowsy and reflective.
Dwayne fidgeted a little in his chair, rearranging himself on the barstool, peeking at his cousin a couple of times. Spotting Rochelle heading our way, he set his half-empty tumbler on the glass-topped bar. “This is how you know it’s time to stop drinking. You start confiding your personal business to strangers.”
“It’s okay,” I said, and it was. I usually made a point to avoid men with children, which had gotten more difficult after college. I did this because I regarded each man as a potential husband and a potential father of my own children. If he wasn’t involved with his children, I didn’t want to chance him abandoning me and mine. If he was involved, I’d be forced to negotiate the complications of a “blended family.” I didn’t find either of these scenarios to be particularly appealing. But meeting Dwayne that night seemed significant somehow; I was moved by his frankness about his pain and his loss. It felt fated. He, a father without his child, and me, a child without her father.
“It’s all right,” I’d said, fondling his silk sleeve. “Sometimes you just feel connected with someone like that.”
Dwayne and I still talked easily, spending at least a half hour each night on the telephone dramatizing the details of our days. He’d noticed over the past week that I wasn’t talking so much. How could I tell him about going to get my oil changed when what I really wanted to tell him was that I was having his baby? When he wanted to know what was wrong, I told him that I wasn’t feeling so well, which was true. Rochelle and I both were under the weather. If I didn’t know better, I would think that pregnancy was contagious.
On Saturday night we entertained Dwayne’s cousin Head Cheese and Cheese’s new girlfriend, Denise. I liked these get-togethers with other couples. They made me feel married. After we had shown Cheese and his date to the door, we showered and dressed in the pair of pajamas we shared. I used the green flannel top and he wore the drawstring pants.
“That was fun,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, sliding onto what I considered to be my side of his bed. “I like Denise.”
“Well,” Dwayne said, “don’t get too attached to her.”
He was right. Cheese had introduced us to at least five “girlfriends” over the last seven months. Denise was just the latest and the youngest. Sweet Denise, twenty, round-faced, and pleasant. She reminded me of Keisha with her curving acrylic nails, improbable hairpieces, and frosted lipstick.
“She’s bright,” I said. “You can’t play Scrabble if you’re stupid.”
“How bright can she be if she’s hooked up with Head Cheese?”
I let that go. It’s never smart to criticize other people’s relatives. And besides, I liked Maurice. I agreed that he wasn’t a good choice for a young lady who wanted something lasting, but I understood how Denise could have been persuaded to give it a shot.
Dwayne sat up in bed, propped against his pillows, fiddling with a brass lock he’d brought home from work. The key was probably in his jacket pocket, but Dwayne wanted to try and open it using only metal prods. “This lock—it’s an ASSA—is supposed to be pick-proof.”
“Well, is it?”
“ASSA is good. But I’m a Medeco man myself.” He let out a low whistle between his teeth as he slid the strip of spring metal into the slot again. “What I am trying to do is reach in and lift the pins. But ASSA, their locks are sort of doubled up.”
“Sleep on it,” I said.
This had been my favorite sort of evening, when we played house. I’d cooked dinner for the group, family food: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole. Denise and I had washed dishes together
while the guys drank Jack and Cokes while watching SportsCenter. Cheese’s parade of dates served as a sort of personal abacus for Dwayne and me. Each girl a wooden bead, marking the length of time that Dwayne and I had been together.
Dwayne’s apartment was at the front of the complex. The lights and sounds from Windy Hill Road kept the bedroom glowing with a gentle light and buzzing with a subtle roar. I didn’t care much for this type of living. If I enjoyed spending time here, it was only because it all felt so Dwayne-like. The sheets on the sleigh bed smelled like him—a cozy combination of strawberry incense and foot powder. The gym schedule on the refrigerator was his. The bed was covered with a bear claw quilt hand-sewn by his favorite aunt.
Even so, I found the genericness of it all to be rather disconcerting. The walls were painted a blue-white that reminded me of skim milk. I was sure the floors in every single unit were covered with the same carpet, dead-mouse gray. And if you were to pull up the rugs here, you’d find only cheap foam padding and particleboard. The first thing Rochelle and I did when we moved into our house was get rid of the seventies-chic shag, rust-colored and matted. Underneath we found wonderful hardwood floors. Of course they still need some work to buff off the paint stains and old varnish, but the potential for elegance is there. Lawrence tapped on the wall in my bedroom and told me that he thinks there is another fireplace just behind the Sheetrock. But here, what you see is what you get. Two rooms, full bath, a kitchen. That’s it. This apartment is no better than what it seems to be.
In bed I moved toward Dwayne and snuggled against his sleeping back. I bent my own knees to match the angle of his until it was as though he sat on my lap while lying down.
“Dwayne,” I said into the smooth space between his jutting shoulder blades.
He didn’t answer, so I snaked an arm under him and hugged him hard across his chest. “Wake up.”
“What?” he said, turning over, knocking me in the chin with his shoulder. He touched my face. In the shine of the outside light I made out the outline of his crooked smile. “Is this your way of saying you need some attention?” He burrowed against my neck and draped his leg over my hip.
“I have something to tell you.”
“Okay,” he said, withdrawing his kisses and his weight. “Do you need me to turn on the light?”
“You don’t have to. I can see fine. And anyway, I have something to tell you, not something to show you.”
“Is it serious?”
“Yes.”
“Bad news or good?”
“Good,” I said. “Basically good. I think. In the long run, good for sure.”
“This sounds like the kind of conversation that you need to have the light on for.”
“No,” I said. “Please.” I felt braver in the dark, when we could hear each other, touch each other, but not quite see. “Did you mean it the other day when you said I could move in over here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
“I want us to live together,” I told him. “But not over here. We’re going to need a house.”
Because of the streetlamps just outside of his window, Dwayne’s bedroom was dim rather than dark. The greenish light reflected off his eyes as he spoke. “It takes a long time to get a house. You need a down payment. You have to get qualified.”
“I know,” I said.
“So let’s just live here for a while, see where it goes.”
“I know where it’s going.”
The light reflected on his eyes while he waited on me to continue.
“I’m pregnant.”
He took two complete deep breaths and shut his eyes before hugging me, but this embrace didn’t have the iron lining or red heat we’d shared a few minutes before. This was the physical expression of a sympathetic sigh. “Who all knows?”
“Nobody,” I whispered. “Just you.”
“Aria,” he said, rocking me in the near dark. “Baby. What do you want to do?”
“Get married?”
He stopped breathing for a moment. Long enough for me to blink twice and swallow. The pause was like a skipping CD. Just a moment of silence before the music continued to play, picking up just where it had left off.
“We could do that,” he said.
“We would need to do it soon,” I said. “Before I start showing. If I’m waddling down the aisle, my mother won’t come.”
“You don’t mean like tomorrow, do you?”
“No. Maybe in like six weeks?”
“How many months are you?”
“I can’t say for sure.”
“So you aren’t positive?”
“I know. I know my body. I’m throwing up left and right. I’m late, late, late. Remember I got off the pill in February? And remember what happened last month.”
“Rubber broke,” he sighed.
“We don’t have to get married. My daddy is dead, so there’s no one to hold a shotgun to your back.” I turned away from him and faced the wall, taking in my air in shallow breaths, waiting for him to touch my shoulder, force me to face him so he could beg my pardon, explain that it was all just such a shock. Of course he’d marry me. Of course he would.
I waited.
I wiped my nose on the bear claw quilt and I waited.
One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, to keep track of time. When I got to one hundred twenty, I was leaving. I wouldn’t even take time to get dressed. I’d drive across town in his pajamas and my underwear and he would never see me again. He had only forty-two Mississippis to go.
Dwayne got out of bed and turned on the light at two hundred eighty Mississippis. He threw back the covers, heaved himself to his feet, and headed to the closet. I watched him retrieve a large shoebox, big enough to house a pair of size fourteen Nikes. He sat back on the bed with the box on his lap and patted the space beside him. We sat close enough that my bare calf touched his through the flannel pajamas.
“I hope this doesn’t make you mad or make you feel cheap.” He gave my goose-pimpled thigh a firm squeeze. “Cheese has a brother, Jay. A straight-up crackhead. He stole my wallet a couple years ago, on Christmas Eve, can you believe that? Everybody says I must have lost it, but I know what happened to it. It’s jacked up because me and him were tight when we were young. When Cheese went to the service, I used to look out for Jay. But now I don’t fuck with him. But my auntie, his mama, never wants to face facts about Jay. She acts like he’s the baby Jesus or somebody.
“So one time I was home for Easter and I was in the barbershop and who come walking in but Jay. He got all kinda stuff he’s trying to sell—an old raggedy VCR, two fitted sheets, and his mama’s wedding band. I wasn’t tripping about the VCR and the sheets, but when I saw Aunt Iola’s ring, I just got up from the chair and snatched it out his hand. I should have punched him in his jaw.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing. He didn’t weigh but a buck oh five before he got cracked out, so you know how skinny he is now. He just looked at me, bird chest twitching up under his shirt.
“So I went to my aunt’s house to give her the ring back. I drove straight out there, didn’t even wait for the barber to line me up. And when I got to the house and told her what all had happened, she looked me square in the face and told me that wasn’t her ring.
“I’m sitting there looking at the reverse suntan on her finger where the ring used to be and she’s looking me in the face telling me that lie. So I got pissed, put it in my pocket, and left. I figure she knows where to find me if she wants it back.”
He took the top off of the shoebox and poured the contents on the bed. There, along with his stiff new passport, a dead carnation, and three snapshots of Trey, was his aunt Iola’s stolen ring.
“Cheese don’t even know about that,” Dwayne said, turning his face, not exactly kissing me, but pressing his lips to my jawline, my temples.
“You’re sweating,” he said.
“I’m so nervous.”
“Don’t be.” He held his aunt Iola’s ring out to me. “You can wear this, to have something on your hand, until we can get you the real thing.”
Looking at the ring, I could picture his aunt Iola, the type of woman who would order a piece of jewelry from a catalog, seduced by the little banner that promised payments as low as ten dollars a month. I could even imagine the description, a short paragraph under a photo that had been “enlarged to show detail.” A cluster of diamond accents sets this ring aglow with 1/2 carat TW of sparkling elegance. The 10K gold nugget setting gives a modern look to this time-honored classic. The half carat of diamond accents was made up of about six tiny stones, arranged to look like a three-carat solitaire. I forced it over my chubby knuckle. The tip of my finger tingled with the loss of circulation.
“Thank you,” I said, looking at my hand.
“Okay.”
We sat together on the side of the bed thinking our separate thoughts. “We don’t have to,” I said finally.
“No,” he said. “It’s a good idea. I mean, we weren’t really at the marrying stage, but we were sort of headed in that direction.”
“Rochelle is moving out in January. We could take over the lease.”
He shook his head. “I can’t live around all those crackheads.”
I wanted to explain to him about the hidden fireplaces, how workmen could be hired to raise the ceilings, restore the wraparound porch, but he’d heard all this before. “The neighborhood is really up-and-coming,” I said.
“Well,” Dwayne said, “we can live there once it has up and came. Don’t fight me on this one, Aria. You don’t want our kids to be on a first-name basis with drug addicts, do you?”
