God Says No

by James Hannaham

  “That’s disgusting,” I said flatly. Inside, I was going berserk with shame. I backed out of the stall and washed my hands and face with lots of pink soap. Since we were still alone in the bathroom, Dickie kept on harassing me, asking if I didn’t want to change my mind. “Don’t you want to get off?” he prodded.

  Just when I’d had enough, he came right up next to me and whispered in my ear. “I love me some chocolate chubbies,” he said, giggling. “It ain’t enough around these parts for me.”

  The use of cutesy words upset me, and Dickie’s lust made me sick and ashamed. I hated my body, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to be naked with it. The saggy, baggy folds of skin depressed me. If I never looked at myself, I could imagine that I had a normal body, like other men, and go about my day. When I saw my hugeness in a mirror, the slabs of fat hanging on my womanly chest and waist destroyed that fantasy.

  Without looking back, I skedaddled right out of that bathroom with my hands still soapy, dropped a few bills on the table, and left the restaurant. It didn’t occur to me until much later that my hiccups had gone.

  “Thank you!” the waitress called. “Y’all come back now!”

  Outside, a heavy Florida thunderstorm was already in progress, and I had to duck into it to cross the parking lot. The rain was so heavy it blinded me, running down my face and into my eyes. I almost couldn’t find my car. The raindrops stung my shoulders, and then a bunch of little mothball-type things started crashing down on my head and bouncing everywhere. Hail. It made a frightening racket on the hoods of all the cars, like a huge drum corps, like my punishment coming down direct from Heaven.

  I drove slowly, with the windshield wipers on high. I could hardly see through the gray-green water coming down like a curtain on my Chevy Malibu. Since I had to drive so slowly, I worried that Dickie had decided to follow me. No telling how far he’d go to get a chubby.

  When I got home, I pulled the chain across the door. I kept trying to decide how to confess to Annie, trying to second-guess the future. Would she cry? would I? Would she leave me? Would I even have the guts to tell her? Wouldn’t that ruin her life? I took off my wet things, sat on the bed, and stared through the sliding glass window. After a time, the rain trickled away and children came out to splash in puddles all over the parking lot. Laughing and chasing each other, they could have been the same kids who’d shunned me at school, staying forever young while I grew older.

  I put my Jesuses side by side and knelt by the nightstand. Clasping my hands, I put my forehead right up against them. “Lord, I can’t live this way,” I said. “You’ve got to change me right this instant. I have to be normal by Saturday.”

  As I waited for His response, I tried to see a message from Him in everything that happened for the next hour. The clouds broke, and solid beams of light poked through them. Was that it, lord? The phone rang. That was strange because I had no service. Was the Lord contacting me by phone? Slowly I reached out and picked it up. A man’s voice on the line asked for Connie. Was he an angel? “I’m sorry, there’s no Connie here,” I said. “Good-bye.” I really was sorry; I hated disappointing anybody, even strangers.

  I got myself up off the floor. Now I thought I had proof that the Lord would never work a miracle in my life. He had nothing to say except a hailstorm. The storm hadn’t even been a personal message to me, because it had fallen on the entire area. God wasn’t singling me out. The thought made me almost happy—I finally had my answer. Nope, the Lord wasn’t listening, watching, videotaping, or anything.

  Annie’s reputation would be okay. People would know that I’d meant to marry her. I stood and went to the medicine cabinet, where I found a plastic bottle of pills that Mama gave me when I had trouble sleeping freshman year, and shook two into my palm. I tried to swallow the yellow and blue capsules without water, but I choked. I got up, filled a glass, and sat back down on the bed. I gulped two of them down, then another two. Then four. I got up to twelve and ran out of water. Once I refilled the water glass, I downed one more. Was that enough? I stuck my finger into the bottle and poked around, but it was empty.

  Sitting on the bed again, I watched the kids outside, waiting for the pills to take effect. Their sounds of happiness would be the last thing I ever heard. I opened the window to let their joyful noises bounce around the stucco walls and brighten my lonely room. Taking the pad and pen from beside the phone, I thought about what to write as a suicide note. Nothing came to me except what I had said to the wrong-number man. “I’m sorry. Good-bye.” I wrote that and put down the pen.

  I lay face up on the bed, my hands at my sides, getting comfortable for my final rest. I thought back to corpses I had seen in coffins at funerals and tried to put on an expression like theirs, sort of serious and sad, but also peaceful and satisfied, like life hadn’t been a total bust after all. I closed my eyes and waited. I took a few long, deep breaths and let them out very slowly, wondering if maybe I’d exhale my soul with the last one.

  A slew of memories went through my head as I tried to settle on a final one. Kids slapping my back after the one home run I ever made in a kickball game. Ocean mist tickling my face on a boat trip. Licking sweet potato pie batter off my Mama’s finger as a little boy. Drinking sun tea out of a jar as big as you please after me and Joe picked tobacco for one of Daddy’s friends, tar all over our hands. Annie and me riding Space mountain, screaming, lifting up our hands, falling into the darkness.

  I sat up with a sudden jolt. I had no thought except a violent feeling that I didn’t want to die. I’d go to Hell, definitely. Annie would be a single mom, and my baby wouldn’t have a daddy. My own daddy would curse my name and Mama would probably die of grief. I didn’t want to have to face Mama in the afterlife—she’d come down to Hades to get me, crying and giving me a tongue-lashing for all I’d done. Let alone Daddy, who would surely beat my behind back to life. It was harder than it seemed to leave behind everything and everybody I knew. Even though life had made me miserable, even though I felt like it would kill me not to leave it. I know now that this happens to a whole lot of attempted suicides. We think that death will take away our problems, but nobody’s life is all problems, and the Grim Reaper doesn’t let you keep the good parts. Once it hits us that we can’t come back—never, ever—we don’t want out anymore.

  I ran to the bathroom and leaned over the commode, pushing down on my tongue with my index finger. When that didn’t work, I stuck the handle of my toothbrush down my throat. But I couldn’t gag. Trying to cough up the pills, I must have sounded like a cat spitting up a hairball.

  Desperate and sweaty, I left my apartment to search for a phone. My neighbors weren’t home. The kids outside had no supervision and wouldn’t let me into their apartments. So I hopped into the car and drove around like a crazy person until I spotted one outside the Publix supermarket in the next town. By that time I was panting like a dog, convinced that I was going to fall asleep and crash the car. I parked about twenty yards away from the entrance and walked over, careful not to trot because that might make the drug spread through my bloodstream faster.

  At the bank of phones, I dialed the emergency number and found myself talking to an operator immediately, like she’d been waiting on the line already.

  “I took some pills,” I blurted out.

  A few clicks sounded on the line, then it went silent for a second until a male voice crackled through.

  “Poison Control.”

  At the sound of the man’s voice, it dawned on me that although thirty minutes or so had passed since I first swallowed the sleeping pills, I didn’t feel drowsy at all. My arms and legs and eyelids didn’t have any heaviness in them. Come to think of it, those pills hadn’t worked so well when I took them freshman year, either.

  I watched shoppers taking buggies and turned around toward the slow parade of cars to test for any shift in my alertness. I didn’t feel different. My balance was stable; I wasn’t dizzy. I thought of the paper label on the bottle of p
ills, yellow and buckled from years of resting on my mother’s dressing table. I reckoned the active ingredients had lost a whole lot of strength.

  The Poison Control man asked for my location. He wanted me to stay on the line, talking. I was right about to hang up, too, but I couldn’t, because, well, the guy sounded like he might be sort of handsome. He had a silky Alabama drawl, kind of like Russ.

  “Taking thirteen sleeping pills, I should feel something after a half hour, shouldn’t I?”

  “Yes, sir. Most people would be out cold by now.”

  “They must have been duds.”

  “Just stay on the line, sir. We’re sending a truck out.”

  “Yeah, they must have been duds.” I got the shivers when I thought about what the cost of the ambulance and the hospitalization would add up to. I had no health insurance. What if this was just a false alarm? I couldn’t even afford the ambulance part, what with buying all the clothes and food and rings for the wedding.

  I didn’t notice any change during the call. I had to work the 6:30 to 10:30 shift at Daytona Reports that night. I could still get to work on time. “I think I’m okay,” I said to the guy. “Tell the ambulance not to come. I’ll call you back if I start to feel like something’s really wrong.”

  “Sir—”

  I shoved the receiver back into the cradle—fast, like it might bite me otherwise.

  There turned out to be a small ice cream stand right at the supermarket entrance. When I moseyed over there, I found that they sold a smorgasbord of rich flavors: mint chocolate peanut butter, vanilla nut cookie dough, coffee marshmallow Heath bar. It took a few minutes to decide which one to get, but eventually I bought myself a large pistachio fudge in a waffle cone with multicolored sprinkles.

  Just as I pulled money out of my wallet, I saw an ambulance turn in to the yellow striped zone at the front of the lot. An EMT worker hopped out. He walked toward the entrance and searched the horizon for me. Even though I hadn’t told him what I looked like, I turned away. I dropped my change out of nervousness and went inside.

  Walking around, I thought I’d see how I felt and maybe go to my shift. I didn’t want to die anymore, but I couldn’t quite figure how to start over again, either. Could I keep my secrets from Annie without the guilt overwhelming me? The pistachio fudge made life okay, but only for right then. In the chilly aisles of the supermarket, I remained well aware of my sobriety. As I moved through the merchandise, daydreaming of meals, I eventually relaxed.

  Entering the dreamy state of the other shoppers, I pushed the last nub of cone into my mouth and licked a blotch of green cream off my thumb. I wiped my hands and grabbed a basket from underneath a checkout belt in the front of the store. I tried to remember what I had written down on the grocery list at home. Canned corn, I thought. Cheerios.

  My thoughts kept flashing back to the shameful part of the day, so I shopped more aggressively to keep everything that had happened with the bathroom man from flooding into my mind. The most thrilling memory hadn’t stopped looping in my brain—when I felt the spasms of Dickie’s climax right before that colossal boner erupted everywhere. That moment kept repeating, so I said “Cheerios” out loud to stay focused.

  Publix had a sale on the thirty-six-ounce size of Cheerios, and only a few boxes remained. They sat on the bottom shelf, where the Cheerios always are. I had to lean over to see them—they were hiding in the back. It turned out that a few had toppled over on the very rear of the display shelf, their packaging ripped and crushed. I decided to look closer at the damaged boxes to see if they might be worth my while, so I put my basket down, squatted, and reached for a box. I couldn’t get at either of the two left. I had to kneel. In due course I wound up with my head and shoulders on the shelf and the rest of me lying across the aisle. The linoleum floor was freshly waxed, so I didn’t worry about my knees getting dirty. I stuck my head and shoulders in above the empty metal pegboard.

  Finally I grabbed hold of a Cheerios box. Its nutrition panel had been sliced off and the plastic bag inside had a rip in it, probably from the box-cutter. Little OS had scattered across the shelf like mini life preservers after a mini shipwreck. I stared at the back of the box, disappointed that it was no longer okay to buy, wondering if somebody had damaged it on purpose to steal the baseball cards inside.

  The scramble puzzle on the back of the box had me stumped, and the sound down there made me think of being inside a metal room. I sang a note to hear how different my voice would sound, but the note was sour and rang in my ears. Still, something made me stay down there, in the weird private place between the shelves. Something slowed me down. My head felt heavy. I put my face against the cool green shelf, and wouldn’t you know, I slept for the next nineteen hours.

  FIVE

  On waking up many hours later at Florida Hospital, an IV taped to my arm, a tube up my nose, I saw Annie camped out by my bed. The doctor had told her I had blood poisoning; I suppose he didn’t want to assume I’d tried to commit suicide. In the gap left by that half-truth, I saw a way to make things easier, so when she asked, after massaging my feet and moisturizing my face for a while, I muttered that I’d been bitten by a snake. On the TV, CNN showed a whole mess of angry Chinese people and tanks.

  “We’ll have to postpone, won’t we?” she sighed. The wedding was going to happen in three days. Struggling in my bedclothes, I said no as forcefully as I could, assuring her that I’d recover quickly.

  “Everybody’s already made plans,” I wheezed. Whatever excuse we gave for postponing we’d have repeat to all my relatives, who had organized the event. And it went without saying that if we waited any longer, the truth would come out about the baby. I didn’t want to raise the slightest suspicion that anything had gone wrong with me or Annie. Keeping one big secret felt impossible, but keeping three huge, interlocking secrets was unavoidable—almost easy.

  “You’re sure?”

  I muttered something jumbled. They kept me another two days at the hospital; I went home the night before the wedding. I felt okay, physically.

  On Sunday, June 11, 1989, at my Aunt Vietta’s farm outside Savannah, Georgia, Annie and I were joined in holy matrimony. I wore a peach tuxedo to match Annie’s satin gown. The day was fresh, warm, and windy. Large, slow clouds with flat bottoms flew near to the ground like blimps in a white sky stained with a bit of blue. Vietta had arranged plastic forks in all different colors in a fan shape on a table and put tiger lilies in the punch bowl. Hand in hand, Annie and I climbed the small steps Vietta had decorated with bright fabric and gardenias, to listen to the minister speak of the perfect union of one man and one woman. My mother sat in the front row, sobbing.

  “Do you, Gary Gray, take this woman, Anone Palolo, to be your lawfully wedded wife?” the minister asked me. He’d pronounced Annie’s name wrong, and I nearly told him, but Annie nodded at me not to say anything. I swallowed spit and said “Yes!”

  The minister squinted at me. “I mean, I do.” My head grew light and I thought I might pass out, so I took a deep breath. The minister said I could kiss the bride, so I bent down, which helped with the lightheadedness, lifted the veil, lowered my lips toward Annie’s, and we kissed. I was downright ashamed at where my lips had been only a few days before, and so shaky that I wobbled slightly. Our teeth banged together and I almost bit her, but if anybody noticed, they didn’t mention it. When I stood up, I was married, and almost normal. I had just turned nineteen.

  My nearby relatives and friends of mine and Annie’s made up most of the guests. My brother Joe even came. I hugged him and squeezed his shoulders and slapped him on the back. For me it was like he had come back from the dead.

  But Joe and my parents stayed on opposite sides of the wedding. They denied him like two Peters. I overheard my mother tell somebody that I was her only child, even with Joe across the yard. The person just nodded his head. What Joe had done wasn’t moral or honorable, that’s true. My father never went back to work. But that wasn’t all Joe’s fa
ult, because Daddy had also developed a disease that made his skin and toes get hard and his mouth dry up. He needed my mother to help him move around the lawn and up and down stairs. When the photographer took pictures it upset me to pose with my arms around my mother and father while Joe watched from afar.

  Later, in a private moment by the buffet table, my mother leaned toward me, staring at Annie as she fixed my eighty-six-year-old great uncle Linton’s boutonniere. “So one her parents black and the other Chinese?” she asked, a pin between her teeth. Annie’s skin had grown tan from our trips to the beach. Timidly, I shook my head.

  “What is she?”

  “She’s from Samoa.”

  “Sam-who-a?”

  “Samoa. It’s in the South Pacific.”

  “And she not mixed at all? I swear that girl is mixed. You mean to tell me that with that flat nose—?”

  “No, Mama, there’s no black.”

  “Samoa,” my mother repeated, the way she might have if I’d brought home a girl from another galaxy. “That’s a new one.”

  Great Uncle Linton showed his teeth and said, “Have Samoa.”

  Aunt Vietta had set a group of round tables along one edge of the property for the reception. On another set of long tables, she’d put an eye-popping spread of crab cakes, pots of greens and gumbo, candied sweet potatoes, and chicken fried chicken on trays that looked just like real crystal. Two huge bowls of bright yellow wedding punch rested on a complicated arrangement of palm leaves and irises.

  The wedding had been a gospel wedding, so polite dancing was allowed at the reception, and the party went on quite a long while—until about 10 p.m. Mama and Aunt Vietta had chosen the music, so we all had a wonderful time clapping and waving our hands to old-time gospel tunes like the Reverend James Cleveland’s “Get Right Church” and “Something’s Got a Hold On Me,” and Mahalia Jackson’s “Didn’t It Rain.”