Disgruntled: A Novel

by Asali Solomon

  At some point Kenya had begun flattering herself that Oliver had been struck with passion when she appeared and had been slowly working his angle. She thought about him sitting alone at that first party; she imagined that he had been waiting patiently for her. As it turned out, she could explain everything more easily using logic. Oliver was just a drug dealer who had tried to use her. Now, as she sat in the cleanest-looking corner of a holding cell, filled with a colorful variety of Philadelphia’s female lawbreakers, she thought, if someone would just be quiet for a moment, she could figure out how it had all gone this wrong. But—

  “Bad girls,” sang two young women wearing boots and shorts though it was November. One wore a blond wig. The other had braided extensions down to her waist. “Sad girls,” they sang.

  “This ain’t Star Search!” yelled a twitching woman with yellow eyes. “Shut the fuck up!”

  “You shut the fuck up!” said the blond wig.

  “You shut the fuck up, Marilyn Monroe!”

  “Alla youse need to shut the fuck up,” said a mountain of a woman with a strong white Philly accent and a short haircut that reminded Kenya of The Outsiders. Her “fuck” sounded like “feck.” Then she began banging on the bars. “You need to let me out of here! I have seizures when I get stressed! I’ll sue your feckin’ asses…”

  Most of the women, black and white, sat quietly on the bench and floors. Despite the singing and yelling, there remained an air of tense boredom in the small space. The woman sitting nearest to Kenya chewed on her finger. She was young and white with a dark, neat ponytail and a clear porcelain face. She looked the most normal, which was why Kenya had sat near her. Too late she discovered that the woman, who looked about her age, seemed to be sitting in a puddle of her own urine. But Kenya didn’t move. Instead, she tried to make herself still and small, fearing television scenarios where one of the rowdier women in the cell noticed that she, Kenya, wasn’t one of them and tried to test her.

  She had watched the things going on around her in Commodore and Oliver’s apartment, hoping without hoping that even if something was not right, it would be as unremarkable as those pork chops at Trinity Howell’s, which had not made her sick at all. Yes, there were a lot of parties where there was a lot of weed. And once, she’d barged into Oliver’s room and two white boys with wolfish facial hair jerked their heads up from a mirror on the bed, where they were cutting lines of cocaine. She had shut the door quickly and not mentioned it to anyone.

  It was not that night, but sometime after she’d met Mary Elizabeth, that Kenya had the conversation with Oliver. Despite what Oliver said, it seemed that Mary Elizabeth and Commodore were serious. Oliver was a cheery fount of gossip about her, having been friends with her twin brother in high school. Mary Elizabeth had a terrible reputation, he said, because she was a tease.

  “She doesn’t seem to be teasing now,” said Kenya.

  “I mean, she might be giving it up to him,” Oliver said. “But not really.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Kenya. “And I told you I didn’t care.”

  “Yes, you didn’t care so much that you had to slam a door in my face. Well, you will know what I’m talking about when he starts coming around all long-faced, talking about ‘I need to get back to my art.’”

  Kenya had to laugh. She remembered back in high school, after the Pippa debacle, how Commodore had gone on about making his art a priority.

  At the next party Oliver, who usually had only a few beers, drank what seemed like an entire six pack and sat on the couch next to Kenya, chattering too quietly. Finally, he slurred, loud enough to hear, “You know what would really fix him, right? You know what we need to do?”

  Commodore and Mary Elizabeth were tossing themselves around to what they claimed was their favorite song, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” They screamed into empty beer bottles like microphones. Some people cheered. Oliver had once told Kenya that when they met, Commodore was listening to Keith Sweat. Now somebody was hollering to turn that shit off and put on the Beastie Boys. Somebody else countered that the Beastie Boys had “fell off.”

  “So you know what we should do?” Oliver was saying again. Kenya had not had anything to drink, but had let him show her for the umpteenth time how to get high. It had never worked before as far as she could tell, and probably was not working now, but she wondered if there was some connection between being high and the fact that he said, in answer to his own question, “Fuck.” That what they should do to “fix” Commodore was to fuck.

  “We need to fuck,” he repeated.

  “Maybe,” Kenya said. But she hadn’t meant it. It was a placeholder—like the snowy blank TV screen between channels. She wasn’t even sure she was altogether there in this room, in this reality.

  “Maybe, huh?” said Oliver. He laughed. “Wait a minute,” he said like a confused vaudevillian drunk. “Wait a minute. Are you, like, a virgin? Touched for the very first time?” he slapped his thigh.

  Kenya said nothing.

  “It’s totally okay if you are,” Oliver said.

  Whoooooooooooooooo, screamed Poly Styrene, seeming to tear her throat apart. Commodore was toppling. Mary Elizabeth and Kevin, the too-old-for-the-party black dude who was always there, caught him and led him back to his room. Somebody changed the record and Kenya heard the tingtingting opening of “Girls,” a song that she hadn’t heard in years, but that had once been so ubiquitous, she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten it.

  “Think about it,” said Oliver, suddenly sounding crisp and sober. He got up and walked away.

  Kenya was afraid to stand. Girls to do the dishes, girls to do the laundry, everyone sang, including the girls.

  She woke up alone in the dark on the couch, the apartment tidied as usual. No matter how late it was, Oliver always scrubbed the place clean after people left. But what had happened was still there: he had said what he had said. Wide-awake, she went into Oliver’s bedroom and climbed into the space between him and the wall. He curled around her as if this was how they slept every night. At that, some music of flutes and strings welled up in her; she thought of trips with her mother to the Plymouth Meeting Mall.

  The next night, they tried to have sex. It was difficult and embarrassing. Kenya screwed her eyes shut. The condom smell reminded her of her job at Dr. Walton’s. Oliver hurt her and muttered that he would get “that jelly stuff for next time.” They were not successful. She told herself there would not be a next time. But then when it was over, he hooked his arm around her and they curled into each other and she floated on music, which spoke of polished department store floors, glass walls streaming with light, a mint chip ice cream cone with chocolate sprinkles from the food court. Drifting off to sleep, she noted that his nails had been neatly trimmed.

  They continued to try, and he eventually got it in, but Kenya was in it for the spooning. All she had was the Green Apple and this apartment with its musty smell of boys, the endless parties, and no family and no future and lousy memories. On top of that, her alliance with Oliver had not interested Commodore one bit. One afternoon she bumped into him as she stepped out of Oliver’s room. She couldn’t help it; her heart jumped in anticipation. “All right,” he said, grinning. “My man.” Then he rushed off to meet up with Mary Elizabeth and her parents at a South Street restaurant where Simon LeBon had once eaten. Everything was horrible. Everything was horrible except this, she had thought, wrapped in Oliver’s arms, mercifully facing the wall.

  In the police station at Thirty-Ninth and Lancaster, the prostitutes were still singing with quiet defiance. I’ll be your freak-a-zoid; come on and wind me up! The mountainous white woman mumbled and rocked herself on the floor, sweat streaming down her face. The ponytailed girl who smelled like urine asked Kenya in a whisper if she had a cigarette.

  The police—led by Kevin, who, as it turned out, was too old for these parties but perhaps in the prime of his undercover narcotics career—had burst into the apartment early that
morning. The party the night before had raged until four, and Kenya remembered working on sex with Oliver again—they jokingly called it “penetration”—weeping as he flailed on top of her. They had pretended that this was some kind of emotional breakthrough and that she was crying because it meant something to her. But that wasn’t why at all. And thank God (the Creator? she thought) it wasn’t. Because not only did Oliver not say a word when the police, in the process of tossing her room, found what was evidently a felony charge’s worth of marijuana, he also remained silent when they handcuffed Kenya along with him and Commodore.

  “What is that doing in my room?” Kenya kept saying, the walls moving forward, the floor falling away. “What is that doing in my room? Who put that in here?”

  Oliver let out a strange bark that was clearly meant to sound ironic.

  She couldn’t believe she’d had the poise to throw on real clothes before they burst into her room. She was grateful to her father and his riff about being prepared if the police burst in. About how they’d take you to the station naked just for fun—that is, if they didn’t shoot you in your sleep. She remembered her mother stifling a snort. Kenya wondered if they had ever been in love.

  As she sat in the back of a police car, absurdities threatened to come bursting out of her mouth. She wanted to say that she’d gone to the Barrett School for Girls. That she couldn’t even get high properly; coffee was the drug that made her heart sing. That Oliver was repulsive, and getting close to him had been like summoning up her courage to dive into that cold swimming pool at Barrett all those years ago. That she didn’t know anything about anything, which was true in so many ways.

  “But you knew Oliver Gold was selling illegal substances?” asked a cop in an interrogation room, who didn’t look anything like she thought a cop would look. He looked like an overweight Italian Rob Lowe.

  “I knew they—he—smoked a lot of weed. But I didn’t know he sold it.”

  “But you knew there were illegal substances in the house?”

  Look, she wanted to say, I never asked if it was pork, so I didn’t know it was pork.

  “I told you all I know.” She sighed. Suddenly she was thirsty. “Can I have some mother?” she asked.

  The policeman looked at her strangely. “Did you want water? Or did you want to make your phone call?”

  She did want water. But she wanted her mom more. Now she sat in the cell wondering about Sheila’s foster sister, the one who’d gone to prison. She thought about the butler, who’d died in jail. Her father hadn’t included that part in his story. Maybe he was writing it now.

  She’d had time to read and reread the pages her father had given her. She had begun to think that they were some kind of apology to her for leaving. But did he really think of himself as a servant in the early 1900s? Was that what living with her and Sheila had been like? Kenya felt insulted. Other times, she thought maybe it was true what he said at the farm, as flaky as it was. That the story, which was true in its broad strokes, after all, had sprung into his head and directed itself toward Kenya. That it was the only thing he had to give her.

  She wondered what had happened to the woman, “Elizabeth,” who was pregnant with the butler’s baby? What had happened to the baby?

  It was a girl, she decided.

  The police officer finally understood that she had nothing useful to say. He escorted her to a phone in a cramped room where a guard read the newspaper. The recording told Kenya that the phone had been disconnected. Not knowing what else to do, she tried the same number twice more. Then the guard told her it was time to go back to the cell.

  Her quiet cellmate with the ponytail whispered at the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  * * *

  Sheila screeched to a halt across from the police station, calculating that she would get a ticket but not towed. The late-October air was pregnant with rain, which made the shoulder in which she’d been shot ache. She knew the rain, when it came, would be cold.

  Walking into the station, she tried not to think about what it must have been like for Kenya to call and get the musical tone and the cheery recorded announcement that the phone had been disconnected. When the house sale went through and Sheila had to leave, she begged the phone company to let her keep the phone number. She’d gone down there in person bearing a flyer with a picture of Kenya, and wept in the office of a pleasant but unyielding blond man. She’d toyed with the idea of trashing the office, but decided she’d spent enough time in jails as it was, between visiting Johnbrown and the fucking incompetent con artist to whom she was currently married (though not for long). And now instead of Parents’ Weekend at Wesleyan, which she’d marked on the calendar when they’d gotten the admittance packet the previous spring, here she was at jail again.

  There was a black officer at the desk with a look of intelligence and a gentle air that surprised Sheila. This, she saw, was the station’s rather smart approach to dealing with the constant stream of anguished women—many black—who flowed through. He had a warm smile and seemed deeply concerned that someone had given Curtis an extra s in the paperwork.

  “Was it you who called me?” Sheila asked him. “From Missing Persons?”

  “Ma’am?” he said with a puzzled look.

  Of course it wasn’t him. “I’ll just…” Sheila said vaguely, and sat down to wait for Kenya. But after a few minutes, she was up again. Was he sure Kenya hadn’t been transferred already? Was she on her way? Officer Rivers seemed to get calmer and more assured each time she went up to the desk with a question. Sheila had just begun to feel he was truly on her side. But then a loud woman in soiled clothes with her wig askew entered, talking fast, and he treated her with the same elegant deference.

  Finally her daughter was there, wearing a fancy peach-colored blouse and faded green sweatpants. Her short hair was ragged around the edges. But she was beautiful. Sheila crushed Kenya into her chest, gratefully inhaling her staleness.

  “But your phone—” Kenya said.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m here,” Sheila said.

  Sheila knew that when some women observed the progress of time in their getting-older children, they flashed back to them as infants. But Kenya’s infancy was a time of blurry terror that Sheila rarely thought about. Instead, when she noticed Kenya getting older, as she did now in the police station, she remembered her at four and five, asking questions with serious eyes: questions about nuclear war, death, God, the making of babies, the color of skin. She thought of Johnbrown and his reckless conversations with the little girl. At the time, Sheila had thought maybe a preschooler did not need to know that, yes, the earth would one day be consumed by the sun, or about slaves being hobbled for trying to escape. On the other hand, she didn’t want Kenya to grow up in the same ignorance she had. Sheila had known that with Johnbrown in her life, Kenya could be proud of who she was. She wouldn’t grow up thinking that white people were gods or superheroes. Sheila herself had known very few white people, since none lived in the Richard Allen projects or went to her schools. From television and occasional car trips, she knew they lived in houses with lawns and station wagons in front of them. She once asked her mother if white people were better than black people. “They sure got more money,” her mother had replied.

  Officer Rivers cleared his throat softly, indicating forms to sign. When their business was concluded, he nodded with his smile. It occurred to Sheila that after Johnbrown had left, she should have married a man like that. She imagined Teddy at the desk, acting as if he’d done a magic trick to produce people’s sons and daughters and boyfriends, after detaining them with bullshit conversation.

  Teddy. She gripped Kenya’s hand. Then she pulled her daughter’s head to her shoulder, even though it made for awkward walking out of the station doors, and though it made her shoulder hurt even more. In all of these years, nearly ten, she had taken great care never to betray to Kenya that it still caused her pain.

  “You got a ticket,” Kenya s
aid as they approached the car.

  “Yup,” said Sheila. She yanked the paper off of her windshield and shoved it into her purse without looking at it.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Kenya, starting to cry as soon as she was in the car.

  Sheila wiped away her own tears. “Yeah, you are sorry,” she said. “Do you know how many stations I went to filling out missing persons reports? Do you know your father came down here and we spent a week driving all over the fucking Greater Philadelphia metro area looking for you? I had to spend a week listening to him go on about the farm and all of his financial problems. And he kept saying, ‘She’s okay, I just know it.’ I wanted to strangle him.”

  At this Kenya burst into fresh sobs that Sheila didn’t understand. “What?” she said.

  “Do you?” Kenya began.

  “What, baby?”

  “Have a tissue?”

  Sheila laughed as Kenya blew her nose and dabbed at her cheeks. Before long, they were on Irving Street, in view of the small, peeling houses where all of this had started. She stopped the car directly in front of their old home, whose windows now bore lace curtains.

  “What are we doing here?” Kenya asked in a panicked voice.

  “Long story,” Sheila said.

  She knew she should walk in front because she had the key, but instead she followed Kenya’s thin, sagging figure. Sheila felt as if the figure was her. She had borrowed against, and then sold, the house in the suburbs. She’d used all of her savings and much of her pension to pay for lawyers for the con man and to put up bail for her daughter. She was breathlessly awaiting a call about part-time work at a used bookstore that reeked of cats. Before Missing Persons had called to tell her where Kenya was, she’d been very close to walking out into the Philadelphia streets naked and screaming. But now that her daughter was back, she knew it was all going to work. Somehow the two of them had to make it all work.

  Kenya looked at the house and back at her mother. She remembered seeing it with Commodore, their arms brushing. Her knees buckled slightly. “Am I going crazy—or having a dream?”