The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  And I wasn’t naive. I never believed myself to have a charmed life. I wasn’t like Rochelle, who assumed that people would like her, that landlords would be honest. She never counted her change, just stuffed it in her pocket, because in her universe things worked out. There are all manner of scams and cheats in my world. I have never been convinced that God is good. But there were some things I thought were unassailable. How many plastic dial packs of birth control pills had I added to Atlanta’s landfills. Maybe landfills and pollution were no longer my responsibility, since I no longer had a direct stake in the next generation? Again I wondered how exactly a person could tell when she was having a nervous breakdown.

  “I don’t feel well,” I said to the girls. “Let’s adjourn early.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Benita, the student with the worst attendance record. “You owe us another half an hour.”

  “Shut up,” Keisha said. “Ain’t like you paying for this.”

  “I pay taxes.”

  She was silenced by the other girls, who zipped their bags and slung them over their shoulders, eager to make it to appointments that I couldn’t imagine.

  After they had all filed out, Keisha approached me where I still sat in my chair.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  She leaned in and pressed her cheek to my forehead. I was overwhelmed by her smell, the combined scent of nail polish and banana taffy.

  “You don’t have a fever. It’s your stomach?”

  I hung my head and tried not to breathe too much of her.

  “You went to the doctor today, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “You got your weeks?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not pregnant.”

  Keisha covered her mouth. “You lost it?”

  I nodded.

  “You had to get scraped?”

  The word was perfect, described how I felt, captured my very condition. Nodding again, I imagined the procedure, how it must feel to have the life abraded from inside you. “It was awful,” I whispered, standing up.

  Keisha hugged me, pressing the bulb of her stomach into my abdomen. I wanted to tell her to get away from me, not to touch me. But I didn’t. I let my arms go limp and let Keisha press her swollen self into me and stroke the back of my neck. “I’m so sorry, Miss Aria. I’m so sorry.”

  I knew that I was the one who should be saying “sorry.” I should ask her pardon for my thoughts because all I could think was how unfair it was. What had Keisha done to deserve a baby? And what had her baby done to deserve to have a mere teenager for a mother? Keisha was without a good man, a good job. She couldn’t even read.

  When Keisha let me go, I closed my eyes to black out the sight of her. Alone in the empty classroom, I sat thinking of Drew Alexander, the man from the Institute with the dirty magazine, furious and blind.

  I made it home before Rochelle. Pushed through the doorway the cardboard boxes left for the bride. Took a handful of mail out of the box. Bills for me. A slip telling Rochelle to go to the post office for an insured package. Rochelle and all her abundance.

  I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for her. I could not help remembering the evening when we became friends, when I’d given her the money I’d earned so that she could end a pregnancy. Had I dirtied my hands by helping her? But why hadn’t Rochelle earned any punishment for herself? I’d been with her in the days after the procedure and even the years since. She didn’t spend much time looking back; there were no screaming nightmares, no sobbing scenes of remorse. She’d had her abortion, taken a few days off from classes, and then resumed her life. Maybe I was her portrait, the image of her that felt all the pain, that bore the evidence of all the damage, while she lived and loved and thrived. Waiting for Rochelle, I watched a somber procession of ants make its way to the sugar bowl. I watched and I wondered.

  Rochelle entered the house finally with a slap of the screen door and the tinkling of keys. My eyes watered with her patchouli scent, but I didn’t turn to look at her.

  “Hey, Penny,” she said, making her way to the leaky refrigerator for a Diet Coke.

  I didn’t answer. She repeated her greeting. I opened my mouth to respond, but my throat felt shut, like a drain clogged with dead hair.

  Rochelle drank her Diet Coke in rapid, lusty swallows. She did this while I watched the ants. If I were to remove the top from the sugar bowl, there would be a hundred busy creatures swarming inside. Behind me I heard her open the cabinet for a bottle of wine. There was the hollow pop as she removed the cork. I wasn’t crying. I did think about Genevieve, the wasted baby. She didn’t cross my mind often. My little sister was dead before she could talk. I’d saved all my mourning for my father. But now I knew a baby’s worth. My mind went to Keisha. I wondered what she knew. I put my finger on the trail of ants and they climbed over my flat nail.

  Rochelle sat herself directly in my line of vision. In front of her was a glass of red wine, dirty with crumbled cork. “Penny,” she said, “what’s up?”

  I didn’t speak. The crush of disappointment paralyzed my vocal cords. I looked at my friend across the table. Sunlight from the kitchen window illuminated her so she glowed like a stained-glass saint. I wanted to ask her how it felt to have everything you wanted.

  “I hope you’re not still mad because I joked about your ring,” she said.

  I was still as stone and as silent.

  “I’ve been thinking about it and I really am sorry. Dwayne is a good guy. He’ll be a good father. I’m sort of horrified with myself that I even said anything.” She stopped, her eyes falling on my finger and the ants crawling over it.

  “Aria,” she said slowly and softly, “say something. You’re weirding me out.”

  I still didn’t move; she took a small swallow of wine, set the glass down, and then moved my finger. Confused ants scattered in different directions.

  “Aria,” she said, “what is it?” Her voice climbed about an octave. I could tell she was getting scared. “Did something happen?”

  I shook my head. Reaching over, I took the top off the sugar dish. The ants swarmed over the sugar cubes like mobile flecks of pepper.

  Rochelle said, “Talk to me or I’m calling 911.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll call your mother.”

  I looked at Rochelle’s face, lined with concern. I thought about Mr. Henry, the custodian from elementary school.

  “I want to be you,” I said.

  Her face didn’t quite relax, but she didn’t move toward the phone. “What?”

  “Your father is a veterinarian and your mother is a teacher. That’s better than Cosby. You have Rod. Y’all are going to have kids and they won’t be all fucked up because you aren’t all fucked up.”

  Rochelle fastened the lid on the sugar dish. “Aria, my dad drinks too much. My mother is a martyr. Rod and I aren’t even sure we want kids.”

  “But you have that choice,” I shot back. My voice was too loud in my own ears. “You have all the choices. Do you want to change your name? Is it sexist for your father to give you away? All day you sit around deciding things. When we were in college, you had an abortion. Don’t forget about that.”

  The light in the room was different now. Rochelle’s face was as gray as her hair.

  “I don’t really understand why you’re bringing this up.”

  I didn’t want to cry in front of her, but I couldn’t help it. “I’m not pregnant.”

  She sucked in her breath.

  “If you tell me it’s a blessing in disguise, I’ll never talk to you again. I’m serious, Rochelle. Don’t say it.”

  And she didn’t.

  “I can’t have kids at all,” I said with a breaking voice. “The doctor almost cried telling me. Doctors have seen everything. This man has seen people dying of cancer and he almost cried when he told me. Everyone’s going to ask me what happened and I don’t know what I am going to say.”

  “Aria,” Rochell
e said.

  “Dwayne wants kids,” I said. “You don’t know how much Dwayne wants kids.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Kids.”

  “Then adopt,” Rochelle said. “If you want kids, you can get kids.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to get kids. I want to have my kids. I want them to come through me.”

  “Jesus,” Rochelle said. “People kill me with all this nonsense about biology. Penny, remember who you are talking to. I’m adopted, remember? You can’t tell me that my parents aren’t my parents, that I am not their daughter.”

  “I want my own kids.”

  Rochelle closed her eyes. “Don’t be so stupid. Don’t be so closed-minded.”

  “You don’t get it,” I told her. “Sure, adoption is great for the person being adopted. You got to go live with a couple of really nice people. But don’t you think about your mother? How do you think it felt when your hair went gray and nobody had any idea where it came from? I bet people in church were whispering, Well, you know they adopted that girl. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.”

  “So what if people feel sorry? You think my parents are wishing they didn’t adopt me because of what people think? Who cares? I’d rather have people feel sorry for me than to actually be sorry myself.”

  Rochelle was losing patience. But she didn’t know what it was like to be felt sorry for. When people are sorry for you, they look at your life and they go home and count their blessings. After the funeral for Genevieve and Daddy the neighborhood women came by with fast-food chicken presented on heavy crystal platters. Good cheddar shone atop their casseroles, but underneath there was only Velveeta, rubbery and bland. They came to our house, fed us box cakes, and touched our faces. They told us to pray about it. Reminded us that God was mysterious.

  When they left, Mona Lisa smiles tickling their lips, they went home to their husbands who cheated on them and to their ugly, lazy children. They ignored past-due notices on their mortgages. Feeling sorry for us, they didn’t worry about anything worrisome. When they went to bed that evening and many evenings to come, they slept easy, knowing that things could be much worse. They could have been us. Safe and secure that they were not, they counted their blessings on their fingers and toes.

  “I don’t understand why things keep happening to me,” I said. But this was a lie. I knew why things happened the way that they did. Every misfortune could be traced to its obvious source. I needed comfort now, but there was no comfort for me. Fifteen years ago my father had wanted comfort as he sat trapped in the driver’s seat, bleeding to death from the inside. He wanted me just to talk to him. Even at ten I knew what he wanted. But I’d plugged my ears and ignored him. He wanted so little and I gave even less. That’s the kind of thing God can never quite forgive you for.

  Chapter Eight

  There was so much explaining to be done. The very idea of it burdened me, causing a tenderness in my joints, the achy way I feel when I am coming down with the flu. I went into the bathroom, my favorite space in the house. It was a common area like the kitchen or the living room, but it was intensely personal, a space that Rochelle and I shared. The bathroom is a place where you find yourself naked and wet from the shower, standing on the scale to see if you have gotten too fat. Every month I stood in the room examining my breasts, anxiously kneading the fatty tissue, feeling for hard knots that might mean that I was dying.

  Standing before the sink, I turned my attention to the faucets, old-fashioned and shaped like daisies, the flowers that make you worry whether he loves you or loves you not. I twisted the left faucet, filling the sink with hot, cloudy water. Plunging my hands in up to the wrists, I concentrated on the throbbing in my fingers. Pain was good like that, cleared your mind.

  I pulled open the mirrored front of the medicine cabinet. All Rochelle’s supplements were there. Ginkgo biloba. She took this every day to preserve her memory. Sweet primrose oil was supposed to be good for her disposition. Dong quai to make her sexy. Then there were her birth control pills, fitted into a plastic compact like face powder. Hermione used to stash hers in the linen closet, between the folds of the fancy towels that we never used. My things were in the medicine cabinet too. Allergy tablets, bandages that didn’t match my skin tone. Condoms. Tampax.

  On the top shelf was the prescription bottle Rochelle’s mother had left behind after shopping for wedding dresses. I followed the instructions on the childproof cap, pressing and turning, and found fifteen blue pills in the vial. I eased the top off and borrowed only one. I liked the shape of it, perfectly round and scored in the middle. Alprazolam, the label read, but Rochelle called it Xanax. She saved them for special occasions. “These,” she had said, “are for high drama.”

  Were fifteen tablets enough to kill yourself? Not that I was going to. I just wondered in the way that people wonder about things.

  I chewed the tablet while running my bathwater. It was bitter, worse than Tylenol, but I liked the way it felt in my mouth, the taste brackish and utterly distracting. How would it make me feel? Xanax was a drug you heard about on talk shows. The new Valium. Something rich people take when they can’t cope.

  I stripped myself naked, mashing my dirty clothes into a ball. Balanced on the edge of the tub, I could see my body in the scarred mirror of the medicine cabinet. I held on to the towel bar scrutinizing my nude self like a used car on the lot. Things that I had taken for granted as just part of me were now symptoms, evidence of my malfunction. The skin on my legs was so dry that it was flaky, scored, and gray. Dry skin is a sign of estrogen deprivation. The pleats at the corners of my eyes. Weight gain. I slapped my thigh and watched the ripple travel down to nearly my knee. There were things happening, too, under the skin. My bones were likely hollowing out, especially at the hip. I had never wondered why old ladies broke their hips when they fell. Menopause. My body was aging, fast and sudden, like those little kids who start to wrinkle before they can walk, and fall over dead in third grade.

  I always wanted to be special. When I was little, I’d fantasized about contracting illnesses. I wanted to be admitted into the hospital, be fed by the nurses, and receive plush toys as gifts. I would have loved to be stricken with something serious, so that a famous person would come to my bedside and my picture would be in Jet. My fondest wish had been to almost die, to come so close that everyone would regret being so mean, but would still have an opportunity to make it up to me, to show the love they’d hidden. This was a complicated fantasy involving handsome, quick-thinking doctors and beeping equipment. But I would have settled for a raging case of tonsillitis and a three-day diet of peppermint ice cream.

  In real life I’d always been healthy. Horse healthy. I hadn’t even needed to go to the hospital the day of the accident.

  So now I finally had something. A sickness that would get me more attention than I could have ever wanted. It was embarrassing, really. The end of my menstrual cycle turned out to be as humiliating as the start of it. I remember how frightened I’d been that someone could somehow look at me and see that I had my period. I hid my supplies in the zippered compartment of my book bag, and even within that compartment I sealed them inside a makeup case. Now I worried that people would look at me and know that I was still different from other girls my age. That my body had stopped working in the way that a woman’s body works. Female trouble. Has there ever been a phrase more shameful?

  There was quite a lot of explaining to be done. Dwayne would have to be told. He had called three times, wanting to know what the doctor had said.

  “We’ll talk later. Tomorrow?”

  “At least tell me if you’re okay.”

  “I think I’m okay. I won’t know for sure until tomorrow.”

  The lie had come easy, surprisingly so, like fast labor. I knew I would have to tell him. Some things can’t be faked or pantomimed. It was only a matter of time before he realized that my stomach was still flat, that my breasts were still tight and small like sour
apples. He’d soon know that although I looked the same as I always had, things would not be the same again.

  The bathwater was not quite hot enough; it was only as warm as my body. It felt like slipping into a wet nothing. It would have to do. My mouth was still bitter from the pill, mashed bits of it jammed into the crevices of my teeth. I turned off the faucet, but the water still dribbled into the tub. I held my breath to feel the medicine working, to see if I felt like a rich lady who needed help to cope. I felt a little drowsy, but not different, transformed, or carefree. With wet feet I returned to the medicine cabinet and read the bottle. How many tablets did the doctor advise Rochelle’s mother to take? Only one for problems like hers. So I took another one, bit it in half, and chewed.

  “Are you depressed?” Rochelle had wanted to know after dinner. She was concerned in her genuine and sincere way. “Because if you are, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Behind me the toilet ran like Niagara Falls. A place to get married, a place to drown in a barrel. Up to my chin in murky water, I’d forgotten to rinse the tub or add bubbles. A greasy brownish ring remained from the last time Rochelle had soaked. A film settled on my skin as I studied the mildew patterns in the grout.

  I felt heavy and sleepy. Not relaxed. Was this coping? I felt pushed down and down, as if a man pressed his big hand on the crown of my head.

  There were so many things that needed explaining. I was going to have to tell my mother. I wished I could hire a lawyer who could send everyone complicated letters via certified mail. Party of the first part, party of the second part, until everyone got the picture: no babies, nobody was liable. It was just the way things were.

  This would be easier if Dwayne and I were already married. Then the matter of my ovarian failure would fall into the territory of “in sickness and in health.” We could have gone together to visit a specialist, holding hands, explaining that we had been “trying really hard.” Married, we’d be an “infertile couple.” Now, without the benefit of a wedding and shared name, this was my problem. It was me.