by Tayari Jones
Miss Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon
Requests the honour of your presence
At a soiree to celebrate her mother,
Mrs. Laverne Vertena Johnson Witherspoon,
On the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary
of
The Pink Fox Salon
June 17, 1987, at 7:00 p.m.
She stood up from the couch and hugged me to her in a firm grip. Her body shook against me as she cried on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I returned her hug, patting her back as she mewed like a newborn kitten. With the party invitation in her hands, she couldn’t get enough of the feel of us. She let me go and then reached for Uncle Raleigh and cried a wet spot onto his white shirt. Then it was Daddy’s turn, and she grabbed him like she had just won the Showcase Showdown on The Price Is Right. Then it was my turn again. “I never had something nice like this before,” she said. I didn’t say anything back, struck dumb by the energy of her startling embrace.
It’s funny how you think you can know a person.
20
BLOWOUT
NINETEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was the Year of the Party. First there was Ruth Nicole Elizabeth’s Sweet Sixteen in February, which showed everyone how it was done, and then there were a couple others which were almost as swanky. It got to the point where a person didn’t even feel right having a party if it wasn’t going to be catered. Bucking the trend, Marcus McCready came home from Hampton in April and decided to throw a spring break jam, not formal but Animal House—style, except that just about everyone that was invited was in high school. The bash was going to take place on the shore of Lake Lanier, about an hour and a half north of Atlanta.
Dana was so excited about that she didn’t go through her usual wishy-washy I can–I can’t routine. She said yes when I mentioned it and on the day of, she was waiting for me at the back parking lot of Greenbriar, on time and bearing gifts — two identical tube tops that would show everyone that we were best friends. It’s what she used to do with Ronalda, she said, as we changed in the backseat of the Lincoln, trusting the tinted windows to guard our privacy.
Ninety miles isn’t so far on the odometer, but you know the old joke: “Be careful when you leave Atlanta, because you’l end up in Georgia.”
Marcus’s family had bought the house on Lake Lanier after his father, a country boy from Mobile, remarried a woman from New York, who insisted that she needed a “country home.” Egged on by a real-estate agent who insisted that Lake Lanier was going to be the Martha’s Vineyard of the south, Marcus Senior made the purchase even though my daddy personal y warned him against it. “Forsyth County ain’t nothing but a clump of sundown towns.”
Once I had cleared the city limits and the traffic cooled off, I pul ed over to a gas station to fil up and get a look at the map.
“You always get ful service?” Dana said.
“I’m putting it on my dad’s card. He doesn’t like me pumping my own gas.”
She smirked.
“It’s not up to me,” I said, unfolding the map while a thin white kid screwed off the gas cap.
“I know the way,” she said. “I’ve been out there before.”
I must have looked puzzled, because she came at me with a little bit of attitude. “You’re not the only one who knows rich people.”
“That’s not what I was thinking,” I said. “I was wondering how come you didn’t tel me earlier. We’re supposed to be friends.”
“We are friends.” Dana turned in her seat, getting on her knees, crumpling my map. “This car has a huge backseat. You ever use it for recreational purposes?” She smiled in a way that made it seem like she had spent a lot of time in parked cars.
I had only done it once, and truthful y, it wasn’t al that comfortable. “Sex in a car is one of those things that only works in the movies,” I said, hoping to sound worldly.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew that nice-girl thing was just a front.”
I raised my eyebrows, trying again for sophisticated and mysterious, but Dana kept howling and hooting like she had won a bet. “I knew it!”
I felt my smile droop at the edges. “Not a lot of people. I mean, somebody, but nobody lately. Most of it was when I was in the tenth grade, and one time last summer.”
“Don’t get al sad,” Dana said. “You just have a history, that’s al . Who you got a history with? You don’t have to give me a ful roster. Highlights are plenty for me.”
“Jamal,” I said. “Jamal Dixon.”
“Whoa,” she said. “That big-time preacher’s son?”
“Yeah,” I said, not sure if I was bragging or confessing.
“He seems like a nice guy. Four corners, you know what I mean? I didn’t think he did statutory.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“Don’t get al weird,” she said, inspecting her own cleavage. “I understand where you’re coming from. Believe you me.”
“We went to the same church,” I explained. “Jamal is a nice guy. He cares about me.”
“I know,” she said. “I met him before. Marcus, on the other hand, is not a nice guy.”
“If you don’t like Marcus,” I asked her, “then why do you want to go to his party?”
“Because I hate him so much I can’t stay away from him.” She was stil smiling, but there was a bit of wildness in her face. I’d seen it somewhere before. She smiled again, but it was just a flashing of teeth, and I knew where I had seen the fury that creased her face right between the eyes. Once when I was on a road trip with my mother on our way to visit Grandma Bunny, we passed a group of prisoners on the side of the highway. Most of them were black, some were old, and al of them were picking up trash. There was construction on the road, so we drove by slowly. One man in the group looked at me. I waved my hand at him. He gave me the same teeth-only smile, but the rest of his face and even the angle at which he held his body let me know that he wanted to kil someone.
“Let’s hit the road,” Dana said.
“No,” I said. “I want to go back to what you said about hating Marcus. What are you going to do when we get there?”
“I was just playing,” Dana said, but she stil had that chaingang tension in her jaw. “I won’t make a scene. My feelings just got hurt a little bit, that’s al .” Her voice went powdery. “I know you know what I’m going through.”
I nodded. I did know. I told her that while we stil went to Mitchel Street Baptist Church, Jamal stopped talking to me in front of people. It wasn’t like he was mad at me, it was more like he couldn’t face me and his mama at the same time.
“Lean forward,” she said.
I did and she tugged my tube top, straightening the rainbow stripes. Then she stroked my I Dream of Jeannie. “It looks real y natural,” she said, reaching behind my head to smooth out the nappy hair at my neck. “Let’s go.”
Evening turned into night quickly. We were only five miles or so up 1-75 when I flipped on the headlights as Dana cranked up the music. “Can you dance?”
I shook my head. “My whole family is uncoordinated.”
“Your mama, too? She seems like she could shake a tail feather.”
“My mama is featherless,” I said.
“You have a good sense of humor.” Dana scrol ed the dial, trying to find something else to listen to. By the time she realized that we were too far from Atlanta to pick up another R&B station, she couldn’t even get the station she had in the first place. “While we’re on the subject,” she said, “any word on col eges?”
“I didn’t get into Mount Holyoke, any of the sisters. Spelman put me on a wait list.”
“Could be a blessing in disguise,” Dana said. “You never know.”
She had returned to the lost cause of the radio when we heard the bang. Dana ducked down in her seat as though it was a gunshot, but I knew it was a blowout.
It’s hard for me to remember what happened; to this day, I keep replaying the reel in my head, zooming in on d
etails, and in this tel ing I want so badly to say that I noticed the signs, that I felt something amiss. It’s embarrassing that I had nothing but my five dim senses to guide me.
“Hold on, hold on,” I said, keeping my elbows soft and steering into the swerve. I glanced at the speedometer and was grateful that we were going just fifty-five. The Lincoln was shaking like a washing machine. Strips of tire rubber flew around in my peripheral vision. Beside me, Dana whimpered like a stray puppy. I was breathing hard enough to bust out of my tube top, but I kept my wits, and handled it like my daddy had taught me. Final y, I was able to apply gentle pressure to the brakes until we came to a bumpy halt on the shoulder.
“What was that?” Dana said.
“Tire blew,” I said.
She sat up and took a deep breath, and then another one. “I thought we were dead.”
“The key,” I said, “is not to panic.” I turned on the hazard lights. The double arrows lit the car with regular bursts of yel ow light. We were going to have to ride the rim to the next exit. As I pul ed the car onto the roadway I told Dana, “It’s just going to be bumpy.”
She nodded and kept taking those bel y breaths.
“If you keep breathing like that, you are supposed to use a paper bag. You can hyperventilate.”
“Okay,” she said. “That was terrible. I thought we were going to die.”
“Wouldn’t it be terrible to die while you’re stil in high school?”
“It would be just my luck to die before I get to go to Mount Holyoke.”
I gave the car a little bit of gas and we clunked along a little faster. “You don’t have to rub it in. I’l probably have to go to Georgia State.” Maybe it was just the release of al the tension caused by the blowout, but I was suddenly very sad. I wanted to travel, to leave Atlanta. I had never thought about Massachusetts before, but now I wanted to go there more than anything. I had almost six thousand dol ars saved — that was a lot of five-dol ar hours — I wanted to spend it al on tweed blazers and lobster rol s. I wanted a future.
The exit had promised gas, food, and lodging, but the sign didn’t tel us how far off the interstate we would have to travel to find these services.
On the way back home, after everything, I would notice a sign letting me know that we were only a half mile from the freeway the whole time. But stil , a half mile is a long way when night is fal ing on two black girls alone in the sticks. The sound of the damaged car on the almost empty stretch of road was obnoxious in the quiet evening, like the noise of high heels in an empty hal way.
“Don’t cry, Chaurisse,” Dana said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”
21
THE MEN ALL PAUSED
THE GAS STATION was smal and out-of-date — not so oldfashioned as Andy Griffith but dated enough to let us know we weren’t in Atlanta anymore.
The pumps, boxy with flip-over numbers, did not display a sign saying you had to pay first. Just from the curb, you could tel that the convenience store didn’t sel anything but chewing gum, Coca-Cola, and motor oil. I aimed the Lincoln at the corner of the lot, where a pay phone was mounted in a glass booth.
When we stopped the car, the lights on the smal lot got a little brighter, like we were approaching a private home and somebody flipped on the floodlights. The clerk, a white lady about the age of my mother, stuck her head out the door and looked around. Her auburn updo, permed half to death, was proof that people should never be al owed to apply chemicals to their own hair.
Dana said, “She can’t help us fix the tire.”
“No,” I said. “The rim is al bent up by now anyway. We’re going to have to get a tow.”
“Towed to where?” She said it so fast that it came out like one word.
“Back home,” I said. “We’re not going to make it to the party.”
Her face took on that wild cast again. “It’s just a tire. Somebody can get us on the road again.”
“The rim is al bent out of shape. We drove on it for, like, two miles.” I spoke slowly, like I was talking to a child.
She answered speaking even more slowly. “No, Chaurisse. We are going to the party. You invited me to a party.” She picked at the hair around her temples. The gentle brown of her scalp gleamed through. “I’m going inside to ask for help. It’s a gas station; somebody in there has to know how to change a tire.” She hopped out of the car and jogged into the little store, leaving the car door open.
It wasn’t warm enough for our matching tube tops; this much was clear as I walked over to the pay phone. The superman booth made the whole setting seem make-believe, like we were on a movie set. “Col ect cal from Chaurisse,” I said to the operator.
“What is it, Buttercup? You okay?”
“I’m okay, Daddy. But the Lincoln’s not.”
“You had a wreck?”
“No, Daddy,” I said. “A blowout.”
I heard him say to my mother, “She’s al right.”
“I kept control of the car,” I told him. “I steered with the swerve.”
Daddy said, “That’s my girl. Where are you?”
“Up 1-75,” I said. “We got off at exit twelve. You’l see a Chevron.”
“You by yourself?”
“No, I’m with one of my girlfriends.”
“Wel ,” he said. “Me and Raleigh are headed out right now. You and your friend get back in the car and lock up. You do not want to fool with those peckerwoods out there.”
“Okay, Daddy,” I said, watching Dana prance out of the store with a skinny white guy. He wasn’t ful y adult, but he was plenty old enough to buy booze.
Dana said, “This is Mike. He’s going to change the tire for us.”
Mike grinned, surprising me with pretty teeth. “For a negotiable fee, of course.”
“It’s okay,” Dana said to me. “I can pay for it.”
Mike looked like the dream boys they write about in Sweet Val ey High romances. His hair was darker even than Dana’s and his eyes were the same blue as the stripe on her tennis shoes.
“Anybody ever tel you that you look like Robin Givens?” This was for Dana.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Now come around here and look at our tire.”
But Mike was busy now, looking at me. I reached up and straightened my I Dream of Jeannie. It’s funny how it is that a man looking at you can make you feel chopped into pieces. Self-conscious about everything — from the bulge where my shoulder met my torso to the acne scars slicked over with Fashion Fair — I reached up again and pressed the pins holding my hair in place.
“I’m trying to figure if you look like anybody famous.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“No,” he said, sadly. “I reckon not.”
“Mike,” Dana cal ed, so he went over to the ruined tire and whistled through his shiny teeth. “I’m surprised you didn’t run off the road.”
“I didn’t steer against the swerve,” I said, but he didn’t look up at me.
“Can you fix it?” Dana squatted down beside him. He put his hand on the smal of her back, touching the bare skin above her jeans where the tube top rode up.
“Not sure,” he said, stroking the fender with the hand that wasn’t stroking Dana. “This is a nice car. I always vote for Lincolns over Caddies.
Whose car is this?”
“My dad’s,” I said.
“He’s a chauffeur,” Dana explained, shooting me a look. “It doesn’t belong to him or anything.”
“I figured,” said Mike.
“So can you fix it?” Dana said.
“Maybe. If you got a jack.”
“Chaurisse? Do we have a jack?” she said in a sweet voice, batting her eyes at me like I was some stupid boy.
“We bent the rim, I keep tel ing you. My father is coming to get us.”
“What?” Dana said.
“My dad is coming to get us.”
“No,” Dana said. “Why did you cal him? I told you I was getting help. Why couldn’
t you give me ten minutes?”
Beating her hands on her thighs in the gas-station light, she didn’t look silver, she looked crazy.
Mike stood up with a crackle of knees. “Wel , since you got this al took care of . . .”
“Wait,” Dana said fol owing him. “Please fix our car. I can pay.” She stood on her tiptoes, lengthening her body so she could slide her fingers into the front pocket of her tight Gloria Vanderbilts. She moved her fingers like tweezers until she produced a bil folded into a paper footbal . She unfolded it and waved the crinkled money at him. “Don’t you want twenty dol ars?”
Mike looked at the money and looked at Dana. The light bounced off her makeup, making her face look like a jack-o’-lantern, lit from the inside.
“Twenty bucks,” she said.
“I can’t do nothing if your sister won’t give me the jack.”
“She’s not my sister,” Dana said.
“Look,” said Mike. “I’m not trying to get involved in nothing. I’m just going by what you told me.”
“Dana, calm down,” I cal ed to her. “Let’s just wait in the car.”
“I can’t,” she said. She spun toward Mike. “For twenty dol ars, wil you drive me to Atlanta?”
“To Atlanta?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I have the money right here.”
“Oh no, darlin’,” he said. “I am not going to Atlanta at night. I ain’t a coward, but my life is worth more than twenty bucks.”
He walked away in the direction of the store. Mike was Seventeen magazine in the face, but watching him walk away in his Levi’s, I kept thinking
“Jack and Diane.”
Dana hurried over to the phone booth and closed herself in. She covered her mouth while she spoke, like she was worried that maybe I could read her lips through the glass. Although it was impossible, I thought I heard my name and thought she said “Raleigh.” I know for sure that she said
“hurry up,” because she screamed it. Then she placed the phone back on its cradle, gentle, like it was made out of spun sugar, before taking a couple of chest-expanding breaths. She smiled at me, but her face was al chain-gang.