The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  The sweet stink of butter and sugar was thick in the kitchen. I touched the tines of my fork to the white icing, leaving a row of punctures. “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Fine,” Rochelle said, fastening the containers and stacking them on the counter. “We’ll wait until after dinner.”

  To Keisha she said, “Are you ready to get started?”

  Keisha nodded, saying something about a square brush. Rochelle mentioned Levenger ink. For my part I couldn’t pull my mind away from the squares of cake. I wondered if I would have eaten if Keisha hadn’t been here. Would the opulent perfection of the icing have seemed to be inedible had it just been me here, with my good friend Rochelle? I thought of the hand soaps in the bathroom. They came out of the box, gardenia-scented and -shaped, triple-milled, soft almost. We washed our hands with these soaps every day, wearing them down with our dirty palms until they were just sweet-smelling slivers. My mother kept such soaps on a china saucer in her bathroom. For decoration, she said. For our hands we used clunky rectangles of Ivory.

  Keisha said that being around Rochelle made her feel bad. Well, being around the two of them at the same time made me feel worse. I felt rich and poor at the same time. Deprived and wasteful, all at once.

  Keisha did have a gift for calligraphy. Rochelle and I watched as she wrote out the first ten or so RSVP cards, the square brush barely scraping the soft yellow envelopes, leaving rich burgundy letters in its wake. Her lips didn’t move when she did this sort of writing. Her face was firm, unmoving—determined, almost. Rochelle, satisfied, went to her room. I went outside to sit on the porch.

  Cynthia was still there, not sifting through the gravel, but sitting on a chunk of broken curbstone, watching a cluster of children draw on the street with chalk. She was still for once, not tapping her foot or worrying her neck with her busy fingers. Even though I could see only her back, I could tell she was tired.

  “Come onto the porch,” I called to her. “You can sit in the Huey Newton Seat.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I can just stay right here.”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” I said.

  We watched the children for a moment until Cynthia called over her shoulder, “I hate them Bebe kids. No respect. They got no respect at all.” She shook her head and stood up, straightening her clothes. She was dressed up in a men’s dress shirt, still creased from the package, and a pair of dark blue jeans; white plastic earrings hung nearly to her chin. She joined me on the porch, skipping the stair where the brick had come loose.

  “You look nice today,” I said.

  She smoothed her hands over her narrow hips. “My mama came around to see about me today. I haven’t been feeling so good. She brought me these clothes. Some food she had fixed.”

  “Your mama lives around here?”

  “Sort of,” Cynthia said. “Over by the Beautiful Restaurant. You know where that is?”

  “For real?” I said. “That’s where I grew up.”

  “Where you go to high school?” Cynthia asked me.

  “All over,” I said. “My mama pulled me out of school every time I had a boyfriend.”

  “I went to Brown High,” Cynthia said.

  “I went there for a minute.”

  “We could have knew each other,” Cynthia said, brushing off the Huey Newton Seat before sitting down.

  I dragged the love seat so I could sit beside her. Cynthia smelled clean, like dish detergent and new clothes. “Do you get along with your mother?”

  Cynthia picked at a gray scab on her forearm. “She’s okay. She’s my mother and everything like that.”

  “My mother doesn’t understand me,” I said.

  “That’s just how it is.”

  We watched the kids in the street. These were grade-schoolers writing letters in chalk because they had just learned how. They wrote mostly three-letter words, in big letters—a foot high at least. They laughed, pleased with themselves.

  “What’s it like for you?” I asked as she pried a small scab on her wrist. A bubble of blood rose to the surface. “What’s it like when you do what you do?”

  “Miss, you don’t want to know about me.” She stood up and walked back to the driveway, tripping a bit on the rotten step. Through the new shirt I could see a hump forming at the top of her spine. She returned to the driveway, kicking the gravel with her new tennis shoes.

  “I do want to know about you.” I followed her. “Do you have children?”

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “You don’t want to know about me.”

  She squatted, causing her jeans to ride up, exposing ankles shiny with Vaseline. She picked up a handful of rocks.

  I put my hand on her arm and tried to tug her to a standing position. “Not with all the kids out here.”

  “Not like I’m doing something that’s X-rated,” she said. “These kids seen worse than what I’m doing. And anyway, they stole that chalk, you know.”

  I looked to the children in the road, who had switched from writing to drawing a hopscotch board. Three girls drew careful blocks.

  “You never seen a rock before, have you?” Cynthia said, smiling as she caressed the gravel in her hands.

  “Not in real life.”

  “Well,” she said, “it looks like a rock. That’s why they call it that.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything out here, Cynthia. Don’t you think you would have found it by now?”

  She said, “Keep hope alive.”

  I looked at the pebbles in her palm. Most of the rocks in this part of the country were chunks of gray granite, pieces of Stone Mountain, the South’s answer to Mount Rushmore. Granite was an igneous rock. This was the sort of thing I learned in grade school, the sort of information that was utterly useless, but I couldn’t seem to forget.

  A gray roly-poly bug crawled out onto the tips of Cynthia’s fingers. She turned her hand over, sending the rocks to the ground and dirt floating up into our faces.

  “So tell me,” I said. “Do you have children?”

  She was still squatting, her head about level with my hip. She looked up. “I told you. You don’t want to know about me.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “I just want to know. Do you have any kids? Do you want children?”

  She shrugged. “What do you think?”

  Bugs congregated around my head, trying to drink my sweat. “I don’t know.”

  “You know,” she said.

  I didn’t answer her. The children in the road hopped around the grid they had made. I wondered if they had stolen the chalk and I wondered what difference this made.

  Cynthia looked at me with an expression that was hard for me to translate. Her mouth was stretched, turned up at the corners like a smile, but her face wasn’t amused or warm.

  “You know.” She stared hard at me with that same not-smile.

  “I’m going in the house,” I said, scared suddenly and backing away. “I got company.”

  “Just stay with me a little while longer,” she said. “You see I didn’t say nothing about that money you owe me.”

  “I gave you that dollar a long time ago.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Cynthia said. “But I’m not tripping about it. I’m just asking you to help me with this, that’s all. Help me a little bit and we can talk about what all you want to know about. Come on.” She patted the driveway beside her and gave me what looked to be a real smile. “We’re friends, right?”

  I lowered myself beside Cynthia and picked up a handful of dirt, although I had only the vaguest idea what I was looking for.

  “You have kids, don’t you?” I said.

  “You want to know how many I had, or how many I got?”

  “Whichever.”

  “I had three. Don’t have none with me.”

  “Where are they?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t make me get to lying. I lost track of them. I move around too much.”

  “I really have to go back in the house. Th
ey are probably wondering what happened to me.”

  “I’m just asking for a little company,” Cynthia said. “I gave you my good hair clip and didn’t ask you for nothing. All I’m asking you to do now is just sit out here with me for a little while. I just want somebody to talk to.” She grabbed my wrist. The move was sudden and the force of it almost tipped me forward.

  “It’s cool. I’m not going anywhere.” I tried to make my voice relaxed so she would let me go. Her hand was ropy with veins, the nails beige and thick. As I looked up, Cynthia met my eyes. Her pupils were pinprick tiny, the whites the color of candlelight.

  “Why you act so biggity? You don’t have nothing, besides that diamond on your hand. Y’all don’t even have a couch, just some fold-up bullshit. Liquor in the freezer, like you don’t want nobody to find it. Clothes strewn all over the bathroom floor. Panties right there in front of the bathtub.” At this she squeezed my wrist, my left hand went limp, my ring heavy and bright.

  “Cynthia,” I said, “you were the one who broke in our place?”

  “I didn’t take nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to see. And I saw everything.” She laughed a wet laugh, still holding tight to my wrist.

  “Let me go,” I whispered. “What do you want?”

  “I want what everybody wants.” Cynthia leaned in close enough to kiss me. Her breath smelled of mint over rot. “Stay out here with me,” she said. “You said you was going to keep me company.”

  I pulled myself into a standing position, and Cynthia, still attached to my left wrist, rose with me.

  Cynthia was wire thin in the way that only drug addicts can be. I was a big girl, healthy looking. She wasn’t a physical threat, exactly. I didn’t doubt that I could overpower her. But the idea of grappling with her, having her touch me, maybe wrestling me to the ground and covering my body with hers, was terrifying in the way that a nest of daddy longlegs is terrifying even though you know the spiders are blind and can’t hurt you.

  “A whole drawer,” she said, “with nothing but snot rags.”

  With my free right hand I slapped her, hard across her chapped mouth. I swung hard like I was trying to hit the back of her head from the front. Cynthia’s skin was softer than I would have expected. She took a step back and I took one forward. I balled my hands into fists and struck her mouth again. Her teeth nicked my knuckles before she grabbed me, two handfuls of my hair, close to my scalp. She pulled my face toward her.

  “Don’t you ever touch me again,” she said.

  “Fuck you,” I said, reaching for her hair, but it was too short and oily to catch. I looped my fingers through her plastic hoop earrings. “Fuck you,” I said. “I’ll pull them out.”

  “Do it,” she said with her lips scraping my cheeks. “Do it and I’ll kill you, motherfucker.” Her hands tightened in my hair.

  “Those handkerchiefs were my father’s,” I hissed into her ear. “He’s dead.”

  She didn’t respond as I waited for my words to sink in, for her to fully understand the extent to which she had invaded my privacy, how she had desecrated my father’s memory by merely looking at his handkerchiefs with her yellow eyes.

  Finally she spoke. “Cemetery is full of people’s daddies.”

  She let go of my hair then and I retracted my fingers from her cheap earrings. We stood there for a moment, looking at each other across the humidity of the afternoon. I took steps toward my house, walking backward, facing her. She eased away in the same fashion, understanding that she should never turn her back on me again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For Little Link’s birthday Dwayne bought a shiny metal cap pistol, leather holster, and a dozen or so rolls of red and black caps. Dwayne had volunteered to shop for the birthday present and I’d let him. For one thing, I didn’t want to drive all the way to Buckhead to find a decent gift. Although the West End was crawling with children, there were no toy stores in at least a ten-mile radius. The only potential gifts for sale at the West End Mall were miniatures of expensive basketball shoes or tiny versions of teenagers’ baggy pants and athletic jerseys. The other reason I let Dwayne take control of the gift buying was that I liked the idea of him asking to be the representative of our relationship. Whatever he bought would be presented to Link, to Hermione and Mr. Phinazee, and to my mother as a gift from Dwayne and me. A gift from our branch of the family to theirs. The fact that the gift was of Dwayne’s choosing made it clear to everyone involved that he was as committed to the institution of our tiny family as I was. This was just further proof that he and I would stick.

  Dwayne brought his package into the house in a paper shopping bag. It banged against his legs as he bounded up the porch steps, almost tripping when his shoe snagged on the gap where the brick had fallen out.

  “I got something good,” he said, kissing me lightly on the lips.

  “Come on in the kitchen,” I said, tugging his hand.

  Rochelle had insisted on buying a gift for my nephew, even though she and Rod were not invited to the party. Now she and Rod sat at the kitchen table staring at a wooden xylophone with painted metal keys. At Rochelle’s elbow was a single sheet of gift-wrapping paper, blue with yellow sailboats and a coordinating bow. Rod looked to the glittery sheet of paper and back to the xylophone. “I don’t know,” he said to Rochelle.

  “That’s what y’all got him?” Dwayne said, pretending to cover his laughing mouth. “Don’t no little boy want an accordion.”

  “It’s a xylophone,” Rochelle said. “Kids like things that make noise.”

  Rod said, “I had one of these when I was little. It was one of my favorite toys.”

  “Admit it.” Rochelle hit his shoulder. “You still play with it.”

  As everyone laughed, Rod used two of his locks to tie the rest into a ponytail. “How to wrap this thing is an entirely different matter.”

  “I kept telling you to just buy a gift bag,” Rochelle said. “The gift bag is the best thing to happen to American consumerism since the invention of the credit card.”

  “But little kids like unwrapping toys. They rip open the paper, throw the ribbon around.”

  I am sure that Rochelle and Rod had problems, like all other couples. More than once, she had told me that relationships take work. In my experience people only say this when their significant others are getting on their last nerves, so I was fairly certain that all was not perfect with my roommate and her fiancé. Even so, they seemed to get along easily with their implied consensus on everything from pizza toppings to the suitability of this gift for my nephew.

  “So,” Dwayne said, “you think I should wrap this?” With a sharp crackle of the paper shopping bag he pulled the cap pistol from under the table. He pointed it at Rod’s forehead, twirled it around, then blew a puff of air over the barrel. It was a good-looking toy. Realistic, as far as I could tell. The barrel was real metal, not molded plastic; the handle shimmered with mother-of-pearl.

  Rod was the first to speak. “Um, do you really think that is appropriate?”

  “It’s better than a xylophone.”

  Rochelle said, “Maybe something a little less violent?”

  Dwayne aimed the gun again at Rod’s forehead, pulling the trigger. “It’s a toy. Why do you have to take everything so serious?”

  Rod flinched at the hollow crack of the metal hammer. “Not to be judgmental. But with so many black men in prison for violent crime, don’t you think we should try to be a little bit more positive with our gifts?”

  “What do you know about kids anyway?” Dwayne said to Rod. “I got a little boy back at home. And I gave him this exact same gun when he was three. Trey is ten now and he’s not turning out to be some sort of freak. He’s a good kid. He ain’t no punk, but he’s a good kid.”

  Rod said, “You can’t deny that there are certain correlations . . .”

  “You going to tell me you never played cowboys and Indians when you were little?”

  “Actually,” Rod said with a glan
ce toward Rochelle, “my parents had a political position against that sort of thing.”

  “Whatever,” Dwayne said, crunching the bag under his arm. He stalked out of the kitchen, moving toward my room. I looked over my shoulder at Rochelle as I trotted out behind my boyfriend.

  “Ouch,” she whispered.

  Dwayne yanked open the door to my bedroom, flopping himself onto the bed. “What was that all about?”

  “Rochelle and Rod just don’t think that kids should have toy guns. A lot of people think like that.”

  Dwayne tossed the brown shopping bag onto a chair and lay down on my half-made bed, covering his eyes with his large hand. Seeing him stretched over on my flowered sheets, I was aware of how much of a man he was, how much space he occupied. He was dressed for the birthday barbecue in long denim shorts that reached his knees and a purple and gold basketball jersey. Tufts of wiry hair protruded from under his arms. “I don’t know how you live over here. It’s the worst of both worlds. You live in the ghetto with a bunch of bourgie Negroes. Did you look at Rod’s face when he saw what I had bought Link? You would have thought I was fixing to give the little boy a box of pornos or something. Do I think that is appropriate? Just the way he was talking. Your girl was trying to be nice, but you could tell that they are of one mind.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed beside him. I knew how he felt. It was hard to move in a world where you don’t know the language, can’t quite figure out the rules. I pressed my face to his chest and stroked his muscular arms. I’d missed him over the last week. “Don’t worry about them,” I said.

  “I’m not worried about them,” he said. “Like I said, I have a son myself. It’s not like I never thought about what kind of things are good to give kids.” He rubbed his hand over his short hair. “Trey is still my boy. I might have signed the papers, but you can’t sign away blood. He got my hair, my mama’s big feet, my sister’s dimples.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “He’s still yours.”

  “So Rod don’t have no right to talk to me like he’s the first person in the world to have ever thought about something. It’s like that all the time when I come over here. They will be sitting there eating something crazy like tofu and Triscuits and I’ll bring in a pizza and they will just look at me like I’m crazy because it’s got pepperoni on it.”