The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  “Are there other options?” I said.

  “Egg donation. Your womb is in wonderful shape.” She went to her desk and pulled what looked like an X-ray from a cardboard sheath. Holding it carefully by its edges, she showed me the film, but all I saw were vague shapes in deepening shades of gray. “Look at it, look at the curve. It’s a beautiful uterus. You could carry a child to term with no problem.”

  “But why? What would be the point of going through the whole pregnancy ordeal just to give birth to another woman’s baby?”

  “We have a great egg donation program here. You use a donor egg and your partner’s sperm. We screen the donors for all sorts of genetic defects—diabetes, breast cancer, et cetera. It would be your baby in almost all ways—your womb, your placenta, your blood, everything. There’s only one problem.”

  “Besides the fact that it wouldn’t be my child?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Morrison said. “None of our donors are African American.”

  “That doesn’t really matter,” Hermione said. “If you have a black daddy, you end up a black baby no matter what.”

  “But she would sort of stand out,” Mama said. “We don’t have any really light-skinned people in our family, and Dwayne is rather dark.”

  Dr. Morrison waited until they finished jabbering and said, “And there’s the other option. You can use the egg of someone you know.”

  My mother was quiet only a second before speaking up. “My eggs are probably too old. But Hermione could help, if she wanted to?”

  “I would,” Hermione said. “I know that I owe you, Aria.”

  “This could work,” Mama said slowly. “This way Dwayne can still be a father, and you can have a child that is still part of our family. But things are never as easy as they sound.”

  “Is it expensive?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Dr. Morrison said. “Not compared to the other options.”

  “How much? Like in numbers.”

  Mama said, “Don’t worry about money. A decision like this shouldn’t come down to money.”

  I bit the nail away from my finger until I felt pain, kept pushing until I tasted blood. I understood why it would be best to have a family egg, but I didn’t want to give birth to Hermione’s child. I wanted Dwayne and me to make our own family, an immediate family, not some space-age extension of the family I already had.

  And how would Hermione feel? No matter what papers she signed, there would be a part of her that would consider my child to be hers. Like Dwayne, who still considered Trey to be his son, even though he had signed away his parental rights. Charla could draw up another set of paperwork for her new husband to sign, changing Trey’s last name, but he would still be Dwayne’s boy.

  And where would it leave me, to be the mother of a child and not its mother too? What about Little Link having a brother or sister that was also a cousin? There was something sordid in all of the overlapping of relationships, like in the movie Chinatown when the woman sobs, “She is my sister, she is my daughter.” In a healthy family the lines are clear, unassailable.

  Breathe and you will know peace. I breathed deeply, filling out my stomach and then upward to my chest. I did it again and again, inflating, deflating, until my head felt light and the room shifted in gentle waves. I lay back on the cold table, drunk with so much air.

  Mama and Hermione were still talking, but I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. It was as though they spoke in some exotic foreign accent, still speaking English but not in a way that I could understand.

  Dr. Morrison said, “Mrs. Jackson, would you and your daughter mind going out in the hallway? I need to talk to my patient alone.”

  I lay on the table looking at the ceiling as they left, biting my cuticles, chewing into the soft skin.

  After they had gone, Dr. Morrison turned to me and said, “How are you?”

  “Pretty bad,” I whispered, tucking my throbbing hand under my thigh.

  “Your family situation is difficult. Don’t you agree?”

  “Don’t talk about my mother, Dr. Morrison. You don’t know anything about us.”

  She handed me a box of tissues, although I wasn’t crying. “Do you want to talk to someone?”

  “Like a therapist?”

  “Yes, we can refer you.”

  “My health insurance won’t cover therapy,” I told her.

  “I see,” she said delicately. “Let’s talk about hormone replacement. It’s very important. We don’t want you to break your hip when you are thirty.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you want to talk about this without your mother?”

  “You might as well bring her in, or else I’ll have to tell her everything in the car.”

  “What about your fiancé?” Dr. Morrison said. “You shouldn’t have to go through this alone. Infertility is a couple’s challenge. It’s not your problem by yourself just because you are the one with the endocrinological obstacle.”

  “He doesn’t know,” I whispered. “I was hoping you could fix me so he wouldn’t have to know.”

  Dr. Morrison shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”

  I pulled a tissue from the flowered box. “Sorry seems to be an epidemic these days.”

  Mama and Hermione returned to the examining room simmering with the possibilities. Sitting there on the small sofa hip-to-hip, they seemed determined and relieved. I was still on the examining table, naked under my paper robe, freezing.

  Dr. Morrison wrote me a prescription for birth control pills. Ortho-Novum, twenty-eight-day cycle, the same prescription Dr. Blackwelder had recommended, the same prescription Hermione had taken me to Planned Parenthood for, just before she left home for good.

  “I don’t understand,” Hermione said. “She can’t have kids anyway, so why does she need birth control?”

  Dr. Morrison explained that for younger women she preferred to prescribe regular birth control pills. The medicine was almost the same as the hormone therapy. “But this way Ariadne will get to have periods each month. No one will look at her strangely at the pharmacy. In other words, it will make her seem more normal.” She turned the corners of her mouth down for a moment, considering, and then she scribbled out another prescription. “Something to help you sleep tonight.”

  Mama and Hermione nodded, satisfied.

  I sat bare and goose-pimpled on the edge of the table, trying to be like the blank-eyed blind children, the ones who never complained.

  Chapter Twelve

  Rochelle hired Keisha to address all five hundred wedding invitations in burgundy calligraphy. She would pay a dollar and a quarter for each invitation. This included the outer envelope, inner envelope, and reply card.

  “Do you know that is more than six hundred dollars?” Keisha said to Rochelle once she had made the offer.

  Rochelle nodded. “I’m giving you the going rate.”

  When Rochelle left the office, Keisha bounced in her seat. “That’s rent plus enough to get a good stroller for the baby. The kind that lays out like a crib on wheels. When you and Dwayne get married, I could do your invitations too.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said to Keisha. “Me and Dwayne won’t be having that kind of wedding.”

  “But other people with money, do they need people to do calligraphy? Because I am good at it. You know, you learn all this crazy stuff in vocational training, but you never think that somebody might really pay you to do it. Six hundred dollars.”

  “Just make sure you do a good job. I vouched for you.”

  “I know, Miss Aria. What am I supposed to wear?”

  “Something comfortable. Nobody cares what pregnant ladies wear.”

  She pouted her bottom lip. “That wasn’t a nice thing to say.”

  “I’m sorry, Keisha. I’m just in a mood. Ignore me.”

  This was a mood that had lasted the better part of a month. It had started as a sort of depression that intensified each time I saw Dwayne, each time he touched me with the for
ce of his intentions. But my sadness had sharpened into a sort of irritability, the way that dogs get mean when they are scared.

  Babies are all that Dwayne thinks about. The making of them.

  “Do you think you can tell right away if you conceive? My mother says that she can tell me the exact date that her and Daddy made me. She said she dreamed that her mother kicked her out of the house and she knew that she must be pregnant.” Last night Dwayne sat up in bed, sheet tucked tight around him, looking pleased with himself.

  I wanted to tell him then, let him know what I had learned from Dr. Morrison. At least now I could give him some options. Tell him about Hermione’s egg.

  “What if something went wrong?” I said to him. “Like if I just keep having miscarriages over and over. What if we had to do something sort of high-tech?”

  “Test-tube baby?” Dwayne reached for the remote control and turned on the TV to watch sports highlights. “You never hear about black people doing stuff like that.”

  “Really,” I said. “I’m worried.”

  “Don’t be worried. We haven’t even been trying but a few weeks. And look at last time: one little mistake and boom, you got pregnant. It was the same way with Charla.” He turned his eyes to the television and watched a few seconds of baseball. “And what did you tell me about your mother? That your little sister got born even after your mama had her tubes tied? Seems like we got some serious genes on our side.”

  “But what if something went wrong?” I said again. “I mean, what if we had to do something drastic? Like a surrogate mother.”

  “That’s too weird for me,” Dwayne said. “That’s the kind of thing they have on talk shows. Anyway, I’m trying to have a baby with you.”

  Then I cried, a soggy explosion of sadness and frustration and guilt. I twisted away from him, embarrassed by my own instability. This was not the sort of woman I wanted to be.

  He smiled. “You are acting like a pregnant lady already.” He pulled off his T-shirt and twisted me so that I had to face him. With the crumpled cotton shirt he dabbed my face delicately, the way my father used to comfort Hermione and me with his dime-store handkerchiefs.

  This didn’t soothe me the way I would have imagined. Dwayne’s gesture toward me, his kindness, all of it made me feel helpless and ridiculous, like a kitten stranded on the upper branches of a magnolia tree. I accepted his ministrations, allowed Dwayne to kiss me and fondle me after he’d scrubbed the tears from my face. I lay there through it all, wanting to go home, return to my own quiet bed. I missed the occasions when Dwayne would reach for me because he couldn’t help himself, when something about me—a flash of my thigh or the sway of my walk or even the way that I laughed—when something about me would motivate him to kiss me. Now sex was like work, some uphill battle, a pitiful aiming for a long shot.

  I slept a little, skimming only the surface of dreams, like a water bug, or maybe Jesus treading over the water’s transparent skin. In the morning, at first light, Dwayne would begin his new morning ritual, stroking me awake. I would comply, without opening my eyes. If I looked in his tranced face, I might tell him everything. Stop him in the middle of his passion and exertion, shout out the whole truth.

  And what would happen if I did? Would it be like Rochelle predicted, that Dwayne would be like her own kind father and reassure me that this was about love, not about babies? Maybe Hermione was right: that he would be disappointed but would go on with our plans. He’s the kind of guy, my sister said, who would be willing to make a sacrifice.

  Keisha ignored me, arrived at our front door dressed as though she were expecting a job interview. She wore a black gabardine skirt fastened over the broadest part of her stomach and an off-white satin shell. She walked up the driveway taking the mincing steps that high-heeled sandals required. She looked at the strip of paper in her hand three times before committing to the trip up our front stairs. I opened the door.

  “It’s the right house,” I said.

  She crinkled her nose. “I knew you stayed over here, but I thought you lived in one of the ones that was all fixed up.”

  I found myself constantly defending the house, the way you might take up for a lover who refuses to get a job. “It’s not such a bad place.”

  “It’s better than where I live at,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. But you kind of expect somebody who got six hundred dollars to spend just on envelopes, somebody like that is supposed to live someplace plush.”

  “Come on in,” I said, moving from the doorway to make space for her.

  Keisha rubbed her arms with her hands. “Y’all got the A/C cranked up like white people. I don’t know why rich people like to keep their houses so cold.”

  “I’ll warm it up a little bit,” I said. “Sit down on the futon. Rochelle will be right back.”

  “I’ll sit out on the porch,” she said. “You let me know when it’s warm in there.”

  I turned the thermostat up to seventy and joined Keisha on the porch. She had settled herself into the Huey Newton Seat and taken off the patent-leather sandals.

  “Where is Miss Rochelle anyway?”

  “She and Rod are gone to taste wedding cakes.”

  Keisha smiled. “For real?”

  “For real.”

  She smiled and then giggled. I laughed with her. It was nice for a while, having a laugh at Rochelle’s expense, Rochelle who could certainly afford it. Then Keisha stopped laughing. She pressed her hand to the center of her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “It’s not funny. Every time I see Miss Rochelle it makes me feel like shit. Just talking about her makes me feel bad.”

  “Don’t think like that,” I said.

  “But really,” she said. “She’s eating cakes and what am I doing? I’m so broke, I’m sitting around the house eating grits with no butter.”

  I got off the wicker love seat and squatted on the porch at Keisha’s knee. Her belly rested on her lap like a sack of groceries. “You have your health,” I said to her. “You have this baby coming.” I ventured to touch her extended stomach, its hard tightness spurring thrills down my arm.

  “Miss Aria, having a baby is not that much of a accomplishment. Even crackheads have babies.”

  I took in a sharp, wounded breath, imagining Cynthia skittering down the street with her electric hum. Yes, she probably could have a baby too. Most everyone could.

  “Still,” I said to Keisha, “there are women who all they want is to have a baby. And they just can’t.”

  Keisha said, “I get the point, Miss Aria. But I just wish I wasn’t having a baby right now. I want to get married, and Omar wants to get married or whatever. But since this is not his baby, the first thing he is going to want to do is have a baby, so me and him can have a kid together. To make it official. If you count Dante, I already got two kids with different daddies. This time next year it’s going to be three. And that is just so ghetto. And if things don’t work out with me and Omar, and I can meet somebody else, then they are going to want to have a baby too. Miss Aria, things are not looking good for me.”

  “But at least you can have kids,” I said to her. “If you meet somebody and he wants to have a baby, you can do that if you want to.”

  “That’s what I hate about men,” Keisha said. “They so baby crazy. But I am grateful, in a way.”

  I fingered the sleeve of her blouse.

  “You said Dwayne is giving me a ride home?”

  “He’ll come by after work,” I said.

  “Here is something anyone can be grateful for,” Keisha said, nodding toward the street. “Just be glad that you are not a crackhead.”

  I turned to see Cynthia making her way up the street. She walked close to the curb, not looking up at Keisha and me on the porch.

  “I’m not bothering you,” Cynthia said to no one in particular. She stopped at the foot of the driveway and shoved the gravel with quick thrusts of her white sneaker.

  “What is tha
t all about?” Keisha wanted to know.

  I pretended not to understand.

  “She lost a rock out there. I bet that’s what it is.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “It could be something else. Maybe she dropped her earring.”

  It was hot outside, the air thick and damp from last night’s rain. Cynthia squatted in the dirt, looking away from us, searching with the tips of her fingers.

  “Crackheads don’t care about earrings. At least not like that,” Keisha said. “Let’s go on in the house before she ask us for some money.”

  I followed Keisha into the house, without saying hello to my neighbor or even looking back.

  Rochelle came home a few minutes later, smelling of sugar. She smiled at us, flashing the results of years of orthodontia. “Sorry,” she breezed. “That took longer than we expected. Have you been here long? I brought samples.”

  We followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. Rochelle lifted four or five Styrofoam cartons from a brown shopping bag with handles. She grabbed two forks and a spoon from the dish drainer. “Eat,” she said to Keisha and me.

  She stood before us, still smiling, hands on her hips. “Eat.”

  I pressed a little tab on the carton nearest me, causing the cover to flop backward. In the center, resting on a paper doily, was a hefty square of single-layer cake. Both the inch-thick icing and the cake itself were chlorine-bleach white. I held my fork over a frosting flower, but I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it. “It’s too pretty to eat.”

  Keisha had opened a different carton. Her cake was the yellow of pollen, the icing buttercream beige. She sat frozen before it, one hand on the hump of her stomach. “I don’t want any,” Keisha said. “I just want to do the invitations for you.”

  Rochelle stood in front of us, amused, it seemed, and a little annoyed. “Can’t you at least just taste it? I need an opinion.”