Disgruntled: A Novel

by Asali Solomon

  Kenya was too freaked out to be polite. “Maybe we could just stay up here and play cards?”

  “My mother would come looking for us. She doesn’t like me up here alone with other people.”

  “Girls!” called Mrs. Warren right on cue.

  As Devi and Kenya passed through the sun porch, they could see Mrs. Warren on the other side of the sliding doors. She wore a black bikini, large sunglasses, and a floppy hat.

  In clothes, she had been a slightly stooped stick figure. Now the word cadaverous suggested itself.

  “Mom, you look skinny,” Devi said grudgingly. It took Kenya a moment to realize that this was a compliment.

  “Oh, I look old,” Mrs. Warren said, waving with a grin toward Kenya. “And it took thirteen years, but I think I finally lost the baby weight,” she said, pinching Devi’s thigh as she walked by.

  “Ouch, Mom!” Devi yelled.

  Kenya held herself underwater for as long as she could manage, as many times as she could. She came up and Mrs. Warren was challenging them to a race, which she won. Kenya came up again and Mrs. Warren was swimming with the dog. Afterward, Kenya lingered in the shower until Devi banged on the door and asked if she was okay.

  At dinner, Kenya ate her first shepherd’s pie (a food she resolved never to eat again) as quickly as she could without seeming impolite. She studied Mr. Warren, a thin man with large, sad eyes who said little, even at times when Kenya might have liked to hear his views. Like, for example, when the conversation veered toward yet another thing Devi hadn’t mentioned—the fact that the Warrens had left New York to get away from the atmosphere of “usury,” a word the class had learned during the Merchant of Venice unit in English. Dinner had concluded with fruit, which Mrs. Warren insisted on calling dessert, and now the girls were up in Devi’s room, where they had to leave the door open until they went to sleep.

  “I can’t believe school starts in a week,” Kenya said, because what else was there to say?

  “You can call your mom to come get you if you want,” Devi said in a low voice. “She’s going to try to make us go to church tomorrow.”

  “On Saturday?”

  Devi snorted. “You’re lucky she didn’t make us go tonight.”

  The dog appeared in Devi’s doorway. Sally was beginning to strike Kenya as a tragic figure, aligned as she was with the maniacal Mrs. Warren. Devi threw a Docksider at her and Sally made an injured semihuman sound.

  For the first time in years Kenya thought about Charlena. There were so many things she had forgotten to think about. She wondered if the girl was now just as devoted to her parents’ religion as they were. To Devi she said, “It’s okay. Everybody’s parents are crazy.”

  Devi jumped up off of her bed. “I’m closing this. I don’t care.” Despite the spirit of her declaration, she shut the door with a soft click. “Devi.” Her mother’s voice floated up. Devi snatched the door open. “Sally is bothering us!” she whined, sounding somewhat like the dog just had.

  Kenya heard laughter from downstairs. Devi shut the door again, this time more loudly, and then sat down on the bed so hard that she bounced.

  “I fucking hate it here!” she said.

  “You mean in Paoli?”

  “In this house. I hate them and I hate her. Did you get what she was saying down there? We left the city because there were too many Jews for her. And the Jews there were too many of? My father’s family!” Kenya had never seen Devi so upset; the bottom of her face stretched longer and longer. Then she flopped down on her bed and turned her face away from Kenya toward the wall.

  Kenya felt desperate and loose, the way she had felt when she attacked Devi. “My mother’s boyfriend tried to molest me,” she said.

  Hours seemed to pass before Devi Warren sat up slowly, wiping at her face. “Oh my God, what happened?”

  As best she could, Kenya told the story, which, as she listened, didn’t quite sound like a story. What was the plot? Climax? Resolution? But Devi’s eyes and mouth were perfectly round. “Didn’t you say he was really cute?” she asked.

  “So?”

  “That seems weird. I mean, you’d think he’d be, like, a loser. Didn’t you watch that movie Amanda’s Secret? The dad had just lost his job and he was getting fat so his wife wasn’t—”

  “He’s not like that.”

  “Is he, like, an urban type?”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Don’t get all weird, Kenya.”

  “I’m not, but maybe we shouldn’t talk about this anymore.”

  “Why not? I mean, now you know how messed up my family is,” Devi said. “I shouldn’t have even…” she started to say.

  “It’s okay,” said Kenya, though she didn’t know if it was. Then they talked as they usually did: Barrett gossip, celebrity talk, New York memories, until Kenya could tell that Devi was drifting off to sleep. If she didn’t ask now about Devi’s being adopted, she never could. But if she asked, what could the girl say? What on earth could she say?

  “Devi?” she said quietly.

  The only answers were Devi’s deep, even breaths.

  * * *

  “I shouldn’t have said what I said,” Kenya said, her heart pounding in her throat, “but I didn’t tell any lies.”

  “What was it exactly that you said, Kenya?” the matron asked in a voice as cold and calm as a glacier.

  “I t-told Zaineb that…”

  “Yes?”

  “She was telling people that my mother was an anti-Semitic religious freak! And it wasn’t just Zaineb!”

  The road from that summer night at Devi’s led back to where Kenya and Devi’s friendship had essentially started—the matron’s office. They again sat side by side across from her desk, a week after the start of ninth grade.

  “Is that what you said, Kenya?”

  “I said she was a little religious and that she talked bad about Jewish people. I shouldn’t have said those things. I—”

  “I should say not. Now, Devi, what did you say?”

  “She shouldn’t have been calling my mother a religious freak and an anti-Semite!”

  “I hear you, Devi. But now I’m asking you a question. What did you say?”

  Kenya tried her best. “Look, can we just forget about this? I mean, can we forget what she said to me? It’s nothing. I don’t care.” Before she knew it, she was crying.

  The matron slid a tissue box toward her with the slightest motion. “I know this must be difficult for you, Kenya, but it’s important that I find out what has happened.”

  Kenya wasn’t sure how she’d phrased it or how she got it out of her mouth, but she made the matron understand the rumor Devi had been trying to spread about Kenya and her stepfather.

  “Devi, did you say that?” the matron asked in a particular voice, a combination of concern and shock that made the hairs on the back of Kenya’s neck rise, even though she wasn’t being addressed.

  Devi jumped up abruptly in a motion so violent it overturned her chair. “Fuck this!” she screamed. “Fuck you, Kenya! You were supposed to be my friend!”

  “How could we be friends? You said you were adopted and that you were black! Why would you lie about that?”

  “Do I look black to you, you dumb bitch?”

  Then Mrs. Appleton, the daintiest fat woman Kenya had ever seen, was in the room with a French-manicured hand on Devi Warren, all of a sudden seeming more bodyguard than secretary. Devi’s eyes had gone black and she was screaming as if to tear her own throat.

  Kenya watched Devi Warren overturn a chair, slap away both the matron and her bodyguard, and knock everything off of the matron’s desk. It was like ballet, which Grandmama had sometimes made Kenya watch on Channel 12. It was beautiful. It was also the last time Devi Warren was seen at Barrett.

  * * *

  As terrified as she was of her mother’s fury, Kenya was still aware of feeling relieved that no one saw Sheila pull up to the school in a sputtering brown Dodge. Th
ey had traded in their old-but-decent car to help Teddy Jaffrey lease a navy-blue Mercedes. He needed to present “a certain image” to sell real estate, though Kenya had not heard about his passing the license exam yet. This car was cheap because it was a stick shift, which her mother was still learning how to drive. Kenya was grateful for the start-stop of the conversation, but the ride was perilous.

  “Last thing I heard, that girl was your ace boon coon. Now you all are acting so crazy that I have to leave work early? Goddammit,” Sheila said as the car jerked dead. “God fucking dammit!”

  It was too late to start from the beginning. Her mother was now Mrs. Jaffrey. At the very end of August, around the time of the nightmarish visit to Devi, there had been a depressing little ceremony at the town hall; Alma Lewis was the matron of honor and Teddy’s childhood friend Bert, a short white man with a mustache, had been best man. Kenya’s mother had bought her a dress that cost nearly one hundred dollars. They had all gone to lunch at the Cedar Grill, where Teddy had repeatedly used the waiter’s name, which he always did when the waiter was white.

  “I’m sorry,” Kenya said.

  “Yeah, you are sorry! You need to tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “Mom, I swear, there’s nothing to tell. I was friends with a girl and now I’m not. Just like you said.”

  “What did she do to you?”

  Kenya supposed she could have been grateful for this. The matron could have had a separate conversation with her mother and pressed on the issue of her stepfather. But she’d summoned everything inside of her to convince the woman that her stepfather had not touched her, which he had not. It was just, she claimed, that Devi really hated her own parents and was strangely obsessed with Teddy.

  “But you’re not overly fond of him?” the matron had asked.

  “He’s corny,” Kenya had said, and then she began telling stories that presented Teddy Jaffrey as the kind of non-lecherous stepfather that a cranky girl would surely come around to loving eventually. Ones that made it sound as if he tried too hard—popping popcorn on the stove instead of the microwave (which he did, with great ceremony), worrying about her when she came home a little late from school (which he didn’t). Kenya kept waiting for the matron to show signs of softening toward Teddy. She did not. Nor did she tell Kenya’s mother what Devi said. Kenya suspected that she would one day remember the matron as one of the good ones.

  Sheila said, “Kenya, this really isn’t like you, so I know you must be going through a lot. There have been a lot of changes. And I know Teddy is very different from your father. But this is our life now and you have to give it a chance.”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  “Is there something you wanted to say?”

  Kenya snapped her mouth shut and observed the glory of suburban fall foliage. When winter came, it would be two years since the birthday when her mother dragged Teddy in from the snow. Kenya couldn’t imagine her mother driving this car in the snow. At long last the car jerked into the garage. Sheila cut it off with a final curse.

  “I want to talk to Baba,” Kenya said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “You know that’s not possible,” Sheila said.

  “We could find him. I know we could. They do this kind of thing all the time on TV. We would just go out to where he last was, or find Cindalou’s family, or—”

  “Kenya, your father is in prison.”

  “What?”

  “He’s in prison.”

  “What are you talking about? You said you didn’t think anything would happen to him. Is he there for what I—”

  “No. I told you, he and his—Cindalou tagged up a bunch of police stations. Also, even though they couldn’t get me to testify against him for the—the shooting, the police don’t like it when you skip bail, which he did. I’m sorry.”

  Maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t, Kenya thought, her eyes drifting over the tools neatly hung on a pegboard in the garage. They’d been there since before they’d moved in: different types of saws, pliers and wrenches, a sledgehammer. She wondered what her grandfather the pharmacist had ever done with a sledgehammer.

  She got out of the ratty car, slamming the door, which Sheila hated. Her mother looked at her but said nothing. Just because your father is in prison doesn’t mean you can slam the car door, Kenya thought, feeling the hysterical urge to laugh.

  After minutes that passed like years, they sat at the dining room table while Sheila explained to Kenya that her father had been in prison for a year and would be there for at least two more.

  “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me what was going on.”

  Sheila sighed and clawed at her curls. “Like I said, there have been a lot of changes, Kenya. We didn’t want you to feel too … lost.”

  “We who?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said ‘we.’ So Teddy Jaffrey knows about this? You told Teddy Jaffrey something about my father that you didn’t tell me?” The heat that rose in Kenya’s body pushed her up out of her seat.

  “Sit down, Kenya,” her mother warned. “I know this is tough. Yes, I told Teddy. He’s my husband.” Which my father was not, thought Kenya. She slammed herself back down in her chair.

  “So where’s Cindalou?” she asked.

  A curtain fell over her mother’s face. Kenya was amazed, and in this moment pleased, to find that simply saying the woman’s name could still do that.

  “She lives in Mount Airy with her—with the child.”

  Sometimes Kenya forgot about that part of it. Of course there had never been any mention of a child in the cryptic postcards, which, she realized, had stopped coming some time ago. Now she realized she knew nothing about it—not even the sex. She also realized that going further with the subject might hurt her mother even more—so she did. “Is it a boy or a girl? Or should I say, do I have a brother or a sister?”

  “A sister. I mean, if you consider her your sister.”

  “You considered Melvina your sister and you didn’t have either of the same parents.”

  “I think I’m done talking about this for now,” said Sheila.

  “Oh is that right? Suit your fucking self,” said Kenya, knowing she was insane to speak like that. From her ex-friend Devi, she had learned the word nihilism.

  Sheila froze.

  They faced each other. It was all her mother could do, Kenya knew, not to knock her on the floor. Instead she savagely ripped open a drawer on the breakfront and threw a stack of thick envelopes in the general direction of Kenya’s face and stormed up the stairs.

  The envelopes landed on the table. They were stamped STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, GRATERFORD and addressed to Kenya.

  From The Key: A Prose Libation for Black Martyrs

  Draft #1, “The Martyr’s Tale”

  I meant to die. When I had dispatched each one of them, I tried to follow. But I was too weak to walk into the fire and too strong to succumb to the poison. Now it is true that searing pain shoots through my stomach and I’m lying in my own filth, but regretfully, I am alive.

  I can see through the small barred window that the sun is a crimson ball in the August sky, dropping lower. Earlier there was a crowd of white men cursing themselves hoarse, calling me out of my name. Then the mood turned suddenly celebratory, as if these farmhands and laborers took joy in a rare daytime moment to relax. Despite the early hour, they passed a bottle and made jokes. Then they remembered themselves and dispersed. I know that they will come back. After dark they will fill this cell and tear me apart like animals.

  What I have done is worse than anyone I know has done. I have gone beyond disgrace into horror. And yet I know that white men, even “innocent” ones, are worse. They who have labeled the rest of us savages, they who are always accusing others of eating human flesh, are the true cannibals. They devour the human soul.

  Their mouths were bloody on the island where I came from, whe
re my grandparents had worked in the sugar fields in the time of slavery and returned to the same sugar fields after. This was back home, where my father died of a heart attack, so hard did he work polishing a white woman’s silver, so eager to prove himself good as any white man. But of course white men did not polish silver where I came from. Where my sallow-skinned mother was so consumed with the life she would never have that she either ignored or beat me cruelly. The mouths of white men were bloody in New York, the filthy, freezing city where my wife, Elizabeth, and I first landed, in search of the something golden promised us in America. And now we are here.

  “These will be good white people,” my wife had said before we arrived. But Elizabeth, no matter how many times I have explained it, does not understand the hollow echoes of the term good white people. Like so many foolish and desperate Negroes, she acts as if there were a difference between a foot resting slightly on one’s neck versus one resting heavily. “Neither will allow you to stand,” I have told her. “Oh, but you are dramatic,” she says. Or used to say.

  There will not be a trial, so no one will ask why I did what I did, but I wonder what Elizabeth would say if they asked her. I wonder if she would tell them that I was never satisfied. Or defend the Architect’s mistress and her ugly, menacing children? I try not to, it makes me clutch my burning stomach, but I can see my wife sitting before a jury of white men, eyes cast down, telling them that I was insane.

  But truly it is not me who is insane. In the internationally famous home where we arrived to serve the Architect, where though some rooms blaze with sunlight and sky, we occupied a damp, stifling, and pitch-dark room in the basement (damp, freezing, and pitch-dark in the winter). In the widely photographed and much bragged-about home that the Architect continues to refine, we spent our days going in and out of a kitchen the size of the corner of the shack where my mother cooked our miserable meals. The light and air in that room came from a stingy ribbon of window. Was it insane to complain about dancing around each other (and the large Irish housemaid) in that tiny furnace on a floor slick with steam and sweat? Or about the squat entryway, some kind of perverse joke, that even my wife, in no way tall for a woman, must duck to enter? If I am insane, perhaps it is from the repeated blows to my skull I’ve borne forgetting to bend down as I go in and out of that dungeon.