Disgruntled: A Novel

by Asali Solomon

  In the drugstore, she said: “Your father was the smartest person I’d ever met, white or black. He wasn’t slick. I knew a lot who were slick, but he was smart. That really impressed me then.”

  As they hulled the strawberries without the aid of the German woman, who had gone off to open a restaurant, she explained: “But I’m not trying to say that he tricked me into anything. I was a grown woman.

  “I felt so bad, though,” she said as they walked back from the chicken coop. “Your mother had been so kind to me. I was used to girls hating me. All the girls in Greenwood called me a conceited yallow bitch and thought I was trying to steal their boyfriends. My only friend was this other light-skinned girl who actually was conceited and did steal this one girl’s boyfriend. But them boys wasn’t shit anyhow. I was just the closest thing to a white girl they could get their hands on without getting lynched …

  “Me and your mom had the best talks,” she recalled as they sat at the kitchen table. They were supposed to begin preparing a stew for lunch, but all Cindalou had done was take out carrots. “It was like having a sister. Now you know, my real sister was eleven years older than me, but with your mom, it was like we’d grown up together.

  “And the thing with your dad—I mean, we cared for each other deeply, but we were out of our minds. It would be funny now if things hadn’t gotten so crazy—a grown man spray-painting police stations while I was the lookout? I don’t know if you remember that terrible woman Marjorie, but I hooked up with her just to have someone to talk to about all of this. Anyway, when I found out I was pregnant, I thought hard about not having it, but that wouldn’t have been my first time doing that. The other time was down South in some dirty woman’s house and I nearly bled to death. And I had that stupid Marjorie talking in my ear about murdering babies … so I was just going to break it off with him and then move back home to have the baby. I wasn’t even going to tell him. But he guessed. And then…” Cindalou paused, making some calculation. “Then he told me he and your mom were on the verge of breaking up anyhow and it wasn’t because of me.”

  Oh did he? thought Kenya, wondering if that had been true.

  “And then he told me about his idea. Now it seems totally crazy, like did I really think somebody as together as Sheila would go for it? But it was such a beautiful vision. We could all be together. We could raise our children together. They would be my family. You could be my family. I mean, I hope you feel like that now.”

  Cindalou suddenly looked at Kenya, as if just remembering that she had been there all along. “Well, do you?” she said.

  “What?” said Kenya, her eyes darting around the kitchen for some help. She saw that it was nearly noon. Everyone congregated at the table at half past twelve. The stew would have to be very quick.

  “Feel like I’m your family?”

  “Well, I guess Amandla’s my sister. I guess you’re sort of like my stepmother? Or one of them?”

  Cindalou’s eyes went flat.

  Since that had already happened, Kenya asked, “Where did Sharon come from?”

  Cindalou sighed. “The Graterford Prison Visual Arts Initiative.”

  “But…?”

  “She’s mostly okay. She means well. Some of them do mean well, you know. That was even true in the South—maybe even more true down South. But it’s also true that if you’d have told me ten years ago that I…” She trailed off and rubbed at her temple, looking weary and innocent, like a very tired small child.

  Kenya remembered the feeling she used to get from being near Cindalou, always wanting to laugh. Back then, she had seemed so excited that it made you excited to be around her. She remembered her attempts at Sheila’s hairdos. Now her hair was long and she wore it in a bun, like Charlena’s mother used to. But where Charlena’s mother’s bun had been immaculate, Cindalou’s was sloppy, and Kenya could swear that her hairline was receding.

  Cindalou sighed again and looked at the kitchen clock. “Guess we’ll have sandwiches,” she muttered. Then she picked up the carrots and walked to the refrigerator, which she opened forcefully. When she spoke she seemed to address the food inside of it.

  “You know I do love Sharon. And I think of Nannie and Dennie as my own.”

  But? thought Kenya.

  Cindalou slammed the refrigerator shut.

  Kenya steeled herself to shadow Sharon.

  * * *

  “Amandla will be very relieved,” Sharon said. “She usually gets stuck helping me with this.”

  Sharon was weaving a wool tapestry based on some Incan method she’d learned traveling across Latin America in her twenties. According to Cindalou, she sold the tapestries for outrageous amounts. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “they are pretty, but we’re talking, like, ten thousand dollars for a rug.” Kenya had seen some of the ones Sharon had not sold hanging around the house and had to agree: they appeared to be regular old rugs.

  Sharon looked like a different person in her studio, wearing large black glasses, her wispy hair atop her head. Since, according to Cindalou, she shunned deodorant and used a soap that was as close to no soap as possible, the warm room was redolent with a ripening white girl smell so familiar from her Barrett life that it made Kenya feel surprisingly wistful. It also smelled like wine.

  There was a desk in the office and two chairs, but Sharon sat on the floor against a kind of pillow apparently called a husband. The loom sat on her legs. There didn’t seem to be much for Kenya to do, but Sharon gave her the job of helping keep the wool threads in their place with a tiny wooden stick and using flat larger sticks to keep stretching the fabric.

  “You got it,” she kept saying.

  “But I’m barely doing anything,” said Kenya.

  “You’re doing plenty. And I hope this is a nice break from all that studying you did at Barrett. I heard that is some school.”

  “Yeah,” Kenya said.

  “I went to a school like that in New York,” she said. Then she sighed. “Bad old Dalton.”

  “Did you say Dalton?” Kenya said, feeling a ghost move through her.

  “You heard of it? It nearly killed me,” she said lightly. “You’re doing a lot better than I was after graduation. They had to scrape me up off the floor to pack me off to college. And that wasn’t much better.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “My parents wanted to send me to Dartmouth, because my dad went there and it was far away, but I told them if they made me apply to a school in freaking New Hampshire I would make the application a suicide note. So I went to Penn, which was the only other Ivy that would take me.”

  Kenya sucked in a breath. Sharon looked concerned.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” she sang. “No, I did not know your father back then.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” Kenya lied.

  Sharon shrugged. “It’s fine if you were,” she said, smiling. “Anyway, I thought Philly was a backwater, but it saved my life. I would probably be shooting up in some basement on the Lower East Side if I hadn’t gone down there.

  “Tell you the truth,” said Sharon. “It was a backwater. Still is; no offense. But it was exactly what I needed. I took a lot of art classes at school and I loved that, but I didn’t hang out there. Outside of class, I used to run around with these crazy hippies wandering around barefoot, giving out flowers. That’s where I got into yoga and gave up meat. I was even a raw fooder for a while. I was like a walking garlic clove.” She laughed. “I stunk to high heaven. My roommate moved out.”

  “Luuuuuuuuuuuunch!” called Cindalou.

  “But, Kenya, hold on a minute.” Sharon spoke with theatrical singsong inflections most of the time. But like other people Kenya had known—even some black ones—Sharon sounded whiter when she wanted to get serious. The only time Kenya had heard her call her children “Nneka” and “Denmark” had been in these clipped tones.

  “I don’t want to waste this time we have together. I want you to know that I will answer any question
you have, okay?” The idea, Kenya supposed, was intimacy. But she felt like Sharon was preparing to give a deposition.

  And of course Kenya didn’t have to ask any questions. The next day in the studio, Sharon resumed the story of how Philadelphia had saved her life.

  His name was Forest. He was the janitor at the elementary school where Sharon volunteered at an after-school art program. Sharon hadn’t known that a janitor could be so young. The ones in the Upper East Side building where she’d grown up and at her school had been older than her father—though of course they called him “Mr.” and her mother “Mrs.” (“Always hated that, even when I was a little girl,” she said.)

  Also, she hadn’t known that a janitor could be so good-looking, but there he was. And there was Sharon, hanging around every day, lingering and hoping to get a chance to talk to him. She had felt so worldly before, coming to Philadelphia from “big, bad New York,” but he made her feel like a clumsy little girl—especially when she compared him with the boyfriends she’d had. The most interesting ones had fancied themselves rebels of one sort or another, but they were all milk-fed brats. Even the hippies knew they could always go home to their rich parents, and eventually most of them did.

  Forest, on the other hand, had just returned from two years in Vietnam. He wanted to go to college, but he had to work two jobs to help support his family. She couldn’t believe it when after months of their “little talks,” he asked her to go for a walk.

  Yes, she’d lived in New York City, but had she ever actually known a black person, besides Beatrice, who cooked her family’s meals? There were no black students at Dalton, though there was a diplomat’s daughter with the prettiest olive skin. So it seemed incredibly embarrassing now, but Forest was her first black friend. She was terrified that he’d find out she was nothing but a paper doll, but he always treated her with respect and interest. She fell hard, but not just for him. Where he’d really gotten her was when he brought her among his family, when she met his mother.

  “I always remember her arms. They were so feminine, but also incredibly muscular. It was like she spent her days carrying the world or something. I could not stop staring at them. And she was so funny! She called me That White Girl. No, really, it was hilarious. She’d say, ‘Hi, That White Girl.’ She didn’t mean me any harm. I mean she called Forest and his brothers and sister the Lil’ Nigs. She’d say”—and here Sharon put bass in her voice—“‘You heard of Diana Ross and the Supremes? Well, this is Forest and the Lil’ Nigs.’”

  Forest didn’t care much for the Baptist church in which he’d been raised, but he made the mistake of taking Sharon once; she loved it and wanted to go all the time. It was wrong, she thought, how movies were always making black religion out to be a freak show. When she went to Forest’s church it was solemn, “but joyful, you know.” It was the first time she felt God.

  “Uh-huh,” said Kenya.

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this stuff,” Sharon said suddenly, shaking her head. “I haven’t talked about this in years! I guess since, well, since I met your father.”

  Kenya shifted in her seat.

  “Hey,” Sharon said softly, “I’m not freakin’ you out too much, am I?”

  “No.”

  “Is it four yet? Oh, what the hell,” she said, taking a gulp of warm white wine that had been sitting on her desk in a jelly jar since the day before.

  “Anyway, the pressure of everything going on at that time was too much for the family. Forest’s dad went and got himself strung out. And his mom picked that time to start drinking, so they took away two of the children. Forest tried his best to raise them himself but it was really too much. I tried to help. I told my parents I needed extra money for art classes, but I really couldn’t support his whole family. So you know, Forest wanted … got into … some street shit. And by the time I was graduating, he was headed up to Graterford and it was just all a big fat sad cliché.”

  “Oh,” said Kenya. And then, “Do you mind if I take a break?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.

  “You don’t have to ask. This isn’t a sweatshop, you know,” Sharon said with an edge to her voice. When Kenya stepped into the long hallway, Cindalou was right there, fussing with a framed poster of Denmark Vesey hanging outside of the twins’ room. She pulled Kenya into the room and closed the door. Then she held her stomach and shook with quiet laughter.

  “What? What is it?” Kenya asked.

  “God love white folks,” said Cindalou, wiping her eyes. “She in there telling you about that pimp and how much she learned from him?”

  “What?”

  “That dude was a big-time pimp. I mean major. White girls! He was like the connection in the community. That’s why he went to jail!”

  “Did he pimp Sharon?”

  “Well, supposedly he never could get her to do that. But as you can see, he did turn her out.”

  Cindalou laughed even after it seemed as if she had to force herself to do so. Kenya made her face smile and shook her head. In middle school, she’d gone on a field trip to a nursing home. A woman with wild blue eyes and a stiff helmet of dyed brown hair had seemed desperate to keep her there, repeatedly calling her Louise and reminding her about all the things she needed to do for Harry. She mustn’t forget Harry. No one had told her, but Kenya had known that Harry was dead. The feeling she’d had then was the one she had now, in the company of the women in this house.

  * * *

  Besides a couple of quick check-in calls when she’d first arrived, Kenya hadn’t spoken to her mother. Slowly it began to dawn on her just how angry she was with Sheila. But after listening to Sharon talk, she imagined laughing with her mother over the folly of Johnbrown’s white(!) wife(?). They would probably laugh less over Cindalou’s muted desperation.

  Kenya never did get the chance to call.

  After dinner, on the last night she shadowed Sharon, Johnbrown yelled for Kenya when the phone rang. He said she could take it in his office. Kenya wondered if he’d answered and what on earth her parents had said to each other. She steered around Johnbrown’s books and papers and picked up the phone, feeling suddenly excited.

  “I was totally just about to call you,” Kenya said.

  “Baby, it’s so good to hear your voice,” Sheila chirped.

  Things sounded strange on her mother’s end. She hadn’t even stopped to mock Kenya for saying “totally” in a totally Barrett fashion. Also, the house was quiet even though it was Teddy Jaffrey’s traditional TV hour. Or one of them, at least. And it sounded to Kenya like her mother was using one tone of voice to paper over a more hysterical one.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Kenya.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing,” she repeated. “I want to hear about your summer. What’s it like out there on your father’s compound?”

  “Weird.” Kenya had imagined herself doing an imitation of Sharon, but she realized she’d have to work up to it. “Did you know he lives with another woman besides Cindalou?”

  “I knew something about that,” her mother said blandly.

  “Did you know that she was white?”

  “He didn’t come right out and say it. I’m not surprised. So did Cindalou finally get fat? I always felt she might get a little hippy in her old age. She always tended that way.”

  “She’s kind of the same,” Kenya said, feeling strangely protective.

  “Uh-huh,” said Sheila, but it didn’t sound as if she was listening.

  “Mom, what’s going on? You sound weird.”

  “Kenya, you have to give me a minute,” Sheila said, alarming Kenya.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just need a minute.”

  No matter how taut the terror, the fall proceeds to its dregs. Kenya had been reading a book called Maud Martha. Nothing much happened in it, but a bunch of the lines stayed with her.

  According to Sheila, Teddy knew nothing about the forged title scheme that his partner had been
running. Sheila had never liked Bert, for the simple reason that she couldn’t imagine an honest white man as rough around the edges as he was going into business with a black man. But Bert had stuck up for Teddy when they were children, he’d said. Because of those long years of trust, all of this had gone on right under Teddy’s nose.

  “Mom, Teddy tried to molest me when I was thirteen,” Kenya blurted.

  “What did you say?” asked Sheila. Kenya saw that the sky outside of her father’s office had changed from bloody plum to blue. She knew her mother had heard her.

  “Well, he … came into my room. I had gone to a roller-skating party.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom,” Kenya said, her voice shaking. “Listen. I had gone to a roller-skating party.”

  “And?”

  “I woke up and he was sitting in my room in the dark.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Well, I didn’t let anything happen. I told him to leave.”

  Kenya could hear her mother breathing. “So nothing happened? He didn’t touch you or anything?”

  “He offered to help me get into my pajamas.”

  “But you said you didn’t need help?”

  “I told him to leave.”

  “And that was all?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure that was all?”

  “Did you want more?”

  “Did you?”

  “What?” gasped Kenya. “What?”

  “I mean, you never liked Teddy,” said Sheila, sounding outrageously calm. Kenya thought of her fights with Johnbrown and suddenly felt sympathetic toward him. It was nasty business being the emotional one. Very nasty.