The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  Rochelle tried all morning to convince me that this crisis wasn’t as serious as I figured it to be. She called it “an obstacle.”

  “Penny, Dwayne is not going to leave you,” she promised.

  I was sitting on the floor between her knees as she parted and twisted my hair. “You don’t know that,” I said. “He might.”

  “Dwayne’ll be shaken,” she said, “but he won’t care. If he loves you, he won’t care. Look at my parents. They’ve been together thirty years. It will work out.”

  I leaned into her promise, resting my head on the inside of her thigh as she separated the kinks of my hair. “But what if he does care? What if he wants his own biological children?”

  She rubbed her finger, slick with hair cream, onto my scalp. “I know that Dwayne is sort of literal. But still. I think people are becoming more flexible about these things.”

  I closed my eyes and enjoyed the tug of her hands. I climbed into myself then, pretending to be a little girl, pretending that this was the afternoon that my mother combed my hair and everyone in my family was still alive. “But will he still want to marry me? That’s the question.”

  “That shouldn’t be the question. Love is the main thing.” Rochelle’s hands were fast in my hair, her ring casting rainbows on the wall.

  Dwayne promised to come over after work; he left The Lock Shop over an hour ago, but I wasn’t worried. It always took him a long time to reach his destinations, due to his choice of vehicle, a Crown Victoria, the same make and model of your average police car. Whenever he drove on the expressway, other drivers tapped their brakes, slowing to below the speed limit, frowning in their rearview mirrors as they tried to figure out if he was a state trooper or not. I would have thought that one benefit of this association would be that the car was off-limits to carjackers and other crooks. But to be on the safe side, Dwayne had the car decked out with all manner of antitheft devices—from a handheld remote that deactivated the engine to a metal club which he locked over the steering wheel. All this for a boxy white car for which he had been the only bidder at the police auction.

  My handsome Dwayne arrived just after seven. He wore loose-fitting jeans and a stiff-ironed shirt with “The Lock Doctor” stitched on the pocket. Perched on his head was his favorite maroon baseball cap. It said the same thing. He looked comfortable and clean in his work clothes, like a local boy made good. Like the sort of man who would buy a big house for his mother were he to win the lottery.

  Cynthia knelt in the driveway, furious with her searching, her face flecked with orange mud. She didn’t even look up as Dwayne stood behind her, close enough to kick her hard in her hunched back. Shaking his head, he touched his pockets, feeling for his stereo faceplate, and bounded up my stairs, two at a time. I opened the door for him and he brought the heat of June into the cool living room.

  “How can you live over here?”

  “The same way you live anywhere, I guess.”

  Dwayne moved into the kitchen and helped himself to a beer, popping the top with his car key. He lifted his foot from the puddle of water in front of the fridge. “You and Rochelle are a trip. Most people work hard to get out of bad neighborhoods. I don’t know why y’all like living with a bunch of crackheads, refrigerator leaking, and shit.” He took a drink of beer and looked at the orange foil label. “What’s this?”

  I shrugged. “Something Rochelle and Rod like to drink.”

  Dwayne took a dainty sip. “Probably expensive. I’ll drink it slow.” He held the bottle out to me and then took it back just as I reached for it. “I forgot. No drinking for pregnant people.”

  “Let’s go to the living room,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

  Dwayne set the half-empty bottle down with a concerned look. He took off his maroon cap and shaped the bill with a quick motion of his heavy hands, then put it back on. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “I’m not mad,” I said. “It’s nothing like that.”

  He relaxed a little and I knew I’d misled him.

  Dwayne sat on the futon and ran his hands over the green and tan cover. “It trips me out to think that your mother made all of this.” He waved his hand to include the matching drapes, throw pillows, and runners.

  “She was on a sewing binge.” These days she was on a crocheting kick. My throat tightened as I pictured her hooking an entire wardrobe of baby booties, sweaters, blankets, and tasseled caps.

  Dwayne patted the space beside him. “Baby, what’s the matter?”

  I got up from Rochelle’s leather recliner and sat where he wanted me to. We both faced forward like we were watching a movie together. The dirty window across from the futon was topped with a tan valance, stuffed with newspaper. From where we sat we had a panoramic view of the backyard, carpeted with crabgrass and ornamented with cinder blocks and litter. A stray calico sat, licking itself, on top of a dead television.

  “Hey,” Dwayne said. “Where’s Rochelle’s cat? What’s his name?”

  “Kitten. He’s gone to the groomers for a clip-and-dip.”

  “Bourgie Negroes.”

  When there was nothing else to say, he took his hat off again, shaping the bill with careful squeezes of his palms. The cardboard core showed at the lip of the hat, where he had worn down the maroon fabric. When I spoke, I would talk to Dwayne’s cap, timing my words to the slow, regular rhythm of his busy hands.

  “Well?” Dwayne said over the scrape of cloth against his callused hands.

  “Things didn’t go well.” I aimed my words at his fingers, his nails, his wrinkled, scarred knuckles.

  Dwayne kept his hands on his hat. He cupped the bill, forcing it to mimic the shape of his palms. We were still sitting side by side on the futon, hips touching. He couldn’t see my face and I couldn’t see his.

  “They ran all these tests and everything,” I started again. “Blood tests. And they didn’t come out right.” There was a hitch in my voice. The pitch rising in my own ears. I breathed deep, tried to relax my throat enough to let the words out.

  Dwayne rubbed his palms on the knees of his jeans, then he took the hat in his hands again. “Is the baby all right?”

  The phone let off a shriek and we both snapped our heads in its direction. Dwayne and I were both old enough to remember when phones simply rang, they didn’t sound alarms. When I was a kid, our kitchen phone actually had bells inside of it. I remember peeking into the plastic shell and catching a glimpse of dark metal. The memory hurt somehow; I touched my throat to feel the flutter of my pulse.

  Rochelle’s recorded voice spoke from the plastic answering machine. “Breathe and you will know peace.”

  Dwayne made a little circular motion at his temple. “What the hell does she mean by that?”

  “You know how she is.”

  Rochelle’s mother’s voice sang out. She had seen a bouquet of burgundy calla lilies in a magazine. They were pricey but perfect. Could Rochelle call her back? The woman on the phone was Rochelle’s mother, gray hair or no gray hair, biology or no biology, right?

  “Do you want all that stuff?” Dwayne asked me. “Their wedding is going to set them back how much?”

  “Forty-five grand and counting,” I said.

  He breathed through his teeth. “That’s a down payment on a house. A good down payment.”

  I nodded, distracted.

  “I can’t give you all that,” he said. “My sister, she just got married at our church. The reception was in the rec center. Wasn’t no calla lilies involved.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care about that.”

  “Rochelle and Rod, they probably going to have their picture in Jet, huh?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “So what happened at the doctor’s?” Dwayne said.

  I put my left hand to my mouth and spoke through the screen of my fingers, and I knew why this conversation felt so sad and so familiar. I’d made my share of confessions in my life. I knew how words got caught in your t
hroat, clotted and thick. I had more than a passing acquaintance with shame.

  “It’s got Down syndrome, epilepsy, or something?” Dwayne asked. He put his hands on my shoulders, twisting so that I had to look at him. He tightened the skin around his eyes, squinting, as though I were too small for him to see clearly. “Look at me, Aria. What happened? Was it a miscarriage?” His hands on my shoulders gripped hard, hurt just a little bit.

  This was the time to tell him. To just say, “It was a mistake. I can’t have kids.” That would give him everything he needed to know. I thought of Keisha saying that men don’t care about the specifics, they just want the bottom line. But she was wrong; this news about my health, about my body, was what he would want to know, but it was the next-to-the-bottom line. The bottom line was that I loved him. That I wanted to make a family with him.

  “I lost the baby,” I said. “I had to get scraped.”

  After I said that, there was a new bottom line: I’d lied. From that moment on, this was all that would matter.

  Dwayne moved his hands from my shoulders to the sides of my face. He pressed his lips to each of my closed eyes. “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when I called?”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Are you okay? Are you in pain?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I feel terrible.”

  “You should be in bed,” he said. “Trying to recover.”

  He helped me to my feet and we walked toward my bedroom. I leaned on him as though my ankle were sprained. Moving in tiny, careful steps, I concentrated on the scent of him and the squeak of his new sneakers on the wood floors. Dwayne was a good person and a good man. Generous and kind, all the things you would like in a person. Even Rochelle would agree with this. In all the things that really mattered, when you stripped people out of their bodies, out of the details of their lives, when you pared things down to the soul level, a person could do a lot worse than Dwayne. A person could, and I had.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked me.

  “Ice cream,” I said. “Macadamia brittle.”

  “Okay,” Dwayne said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Take my keys,” I said. “So you can get back in.”

  “I don’t need them,” he said, picking up my key ring anyway.

  While he was gone, I pulled on a yellow cotton gown, applied a bit of lip gloss, and climbed into bed. Cynthia’s rhinestone barrette glinted under the glare of my bedside lamp; I fastened it around a handful of my twists. I lay there propped up in bed, trying not to think about what I had just done. I tried to think how lucky I was at that moment, in that instant. Dwayne was treating me the way you treat someone when you think you will love them for the rest of your life. I tried to gorge myself on this experience the way condemned men somehow manage to enjoy their final meal.

  Dwayne wasn’t gone long. When he returned, he rang the doorbell before opening my door with my keys.

  “They didn’t have macadamia nut,” he said. “I don’t know where you think you’re at. You have to go to the suburbs to get Häagen-Dazs.” He pulled a small tub of Sealtest chocolate out of a brown bag.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “It’s what I used to like when I was a kid.”

  I lifted the lid from the pint to find that the ice cream had melted and refrozen, a layer of gray frost covering the chocolate. I tilted the carton so Dwayne couldn’t see and chipped at the mess with the plastic spoon. “Thank you.”

  “Are you going to be all right?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Dwayne knelt beside my bed, rubbing my arm, and I spooned freezer-burned ice cream into my mouth. “We have plenty of time for babies,” he said. “Now we have time to do things right.”

  The ice cream tasted like dirt, but I forced it to the back of my tongue and down my throat.

  “Not that I am glad about what happened. I’m not glad that you had to go through what you went through. The scraping and all. But I am saying that this might be a blessing in disguise.”

  “It is not a blessing,” I said. “You don’t know what has happened to me. If you had been there, you wouldn’t say it is a blessing.”

  “Not a blessing, no, that’s the wrong word. I’m just saying that we can make some plans. Okay, I’m screwing this whole thing up. I’m not good at talking.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a blue velvet box. “Just take this.”

  The spring-loaded box fairly jumped open at my touch. There, wedged in blue satin, was an engagement ring. It was a simple affair, narrow gold setting, round cut, a little more than a third carat, less than a half. It was more than good enough.

  “You want me to have it?”

  “Naw,” he said. “I just want you to look at it.”

  I handed it back.

  “I was just kidding,” he said. “Of course I want you to have it.”

  “I thought you just asked me to marry you because I was pregnant.”

  “It wasn’t just that. Well, at first it was just that, because of the way everything went down. But I sort of got used to the idea of having you around.” He smiled at me, showing his overlapping teeth, and I loved him so much that it made my head hurt.

  I pulled the ring from its satin nest and gripped it tight, the metal prongs digging into my palm and me savoring the bite.

  Chapter Nine

  Each year my mother, Hermione, and I set aside my father’s birthday as a day of remembrance. My mother shares with us her best memory of our father, the story of their courtship. She tells it the same way each time, as though reciting the language of a sacred text. As she speaks the words, I close my eyes to concentrate on the images produced in the factory of my imagination. Hermione shuts her eyes too, and though she would never admit it, I know that she does what I do: listen to the story and pretend that it had happened to me.

  Daddy had gone to Morehouse, but he wasn’t really “Morehouse material.” He worked a couple of jobs to pay for his tuition and didn’t have enough left for textbooks or cafeteria lunches. After classes he would climb the stairs of Graves Hall to sit in his teachers’ offices, reading the lessons from their textbooks. He would eat a handful of peanuts for lunch before rushing off to sweep up hair at a barbershop. The barber, Old Man Phinazee, paid a dollar an hour.

  When my father met my mother, she was eating a frosted cupcake, waiting at the front gate of Spelman for a ride. Daddy was hungry; he hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before and it was now three in the afternoon. Mama wore a green dotted swiss skirt that stopped at her knee, and white shoes that fastened at the ankle. He said that he remembered the shoes because he was too shy to look in her face while she enjoyed the chocolate cake, because she might look in his eyes and see how hungry he was.

  Mama asked him if he had a church key and he said, “No, ma’am.” She laughed at him because they were the same age, both sophomores, nineteen. “I’m not your mother,” she said, and popped the rest of the cake in her mouth.

  Daddy pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket, checked that it was clean, and offered it to her, to wipe the chocolate from her lips. She did, and gave him the handkerchief back smeared with cake and frosted lipstick. I like to think that he rubbed it to his own lips after he was out of her sight, tasting sweet icing and grease.

  Daddy saved his money for six months, cutting his budget by not buying pencils (he wrote with stubs he found on the ground). He ran extra errands for the barber, sharpening scissors, scrubbing toilets, after hours. Then he came down with the flu, missing a week of work, forcing him to dip into his savings to pay his rent. But once he had the money, he asked her out to lunch and a movie. I’ve always wondered what he would have done with the money if she had said no.

  Daddy met her at the front gate of Spelman and they walked a block to catch the bus on Fair Street. He was confident but shy in size twelve black penny loafers, borrowed from his best friend
, Earl, the barber’s son. Mama was a beautiful coquette wearing a navy-blue shirtwaist with yellow trim. When they walked to the rear of the city bus, she took his hand. Embarrassed, Daddy wished that he had been patient, saved longer, and had enough money for a colored taxi. But at least the bus was empty, except for the driver; they didn’t have to walk past any white people as they made their way to the back.

  The movie, West Side Story, lasted longer than they thought it would. Neither of them enjoyed it much, but they were happy to sit close together in the dark, fingers touching in the bag of oily popcorn. When they came down from the balcony—Mama always called it the balcony, never nigger heaven, which is what everyone else called it—it was twenty minutes until my mother’s six o’clock curfew. When I was a student at Spelman, our curfew was two a.m. on weekends. If we violated this rule, the punishment was “social probation,” which was more an inconvenience than anything else. But in 1962 the students wore white gloves on Sundays and the penalty for missed curfew was expulsion.

  She would have to go home in a taxi. In his pockets Daddy had money for their bus fare and twenty cents that he had planned to use to treat her to an ice cream cone. Daddy gave her all he had in his pockets, and then he bent down and took two dimes from his borrowed loafers. Wondering where he would get the dimes to replace the ones he’d stolen from Earl’s shoes, he put her in the taxi. I can remember Daddy’s laugh when he told this story, saying that the wind smacked him all about the head and shoulders as he walked the six miles from downtown to the rooming house where he lived. His coat was thin and a little small for him. Earl’s shoes rubbed blisters the size of quarters. But Daddy said that even when it started to rain, he was warm because my mama had kissed his cheek before she climbed in that taxi.