The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  I often closed myself into a narrow bathroom stall for a few moments of privacy; there, on the back side of the door, was a bright square of paper urging me to select someone named Renee Abernathy for class president. I snatched the flyer down and stuffed it into the napkin disposal. I moved to another stall; finding Rochelle’s flyer, I made myself comfortable. Stumbling upon her campaign materials made me feel like this was a place that I should be, that Rochelle had anticipated my being there and left the flyer as a personal greeting.

  The morning of the campaign speeches, I walked over to Sisters Chapel early, before the dining hall opened for breakfast. This was something I found myself doing about three mornings a week, although this was not on my list of life-improving goals. As a matter of fact, it went against item number seventeen: Stop being so weird. And eighteen: Grow up. I tried to will myself to sleep in, to be like other people. But I slid out of my twin bed anyway, pulling on sweatpants under my nightshirt and creeping toward the chapel so early that the red brick housing projects on three sides of us were silent.

  During public events it was easy to forget that Sisters Chapel was actually a chapel and not just an unusually ornate auditorium. When sophomore girls in high heels modeled leather dresses on this stage or successful alumnae stood in front of the microphone attempting to inspire us, even I almost forgot the sacredness of the building. At those times the wooden pews were just seats, the stained glass only windows. The pipe organ just an instrument.

  But in the mornings, when I went there alone, I could feel God in that space. It wasn’t the sort of thing that I went around talking about, but its power danced along my skin, nudging my sluggish blood.

  I tiptoed across the parquet wood floor of the stage, lowering myself at the edge, dangling my legs. Beside my hip was a small pewter plaque in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who lay in state in Sisters Chapel for one week in 1968. My parents and Hermione stood in line for three and a half hours on a damp April morning to see Dr. King’s body. Hermione was barely three years old, but she claims to remember it. She says that my father cried great, heaving sobs.

  Mother says that Hermione can’t possibly remember, not in the way you remember most things. They took Hermione so that she would have at least seen the man, that the memory would implant itself inside the chambers of her heart and the spongy part of her bones, but she couldn’t possibly recall it in the way that she professes to. And, besides, my father didn’t cry. He paid his respects and his heart was certainly heavy, but he didn’t actually cry. He wasn’t a crying sort of man. My mother says this with authority.

  In those early days of my college life I still hoped that I would glimpse my father’s spirit there in Sisters Chapel. There was something that I wanted to tell him, some things I wanted to explain. At times I imagined that he existed just inside my peripheral vision. When I faced the stained glass, my father was there near the organ pipes. As long as I was satisfied with this blurry, shadowy vision of him, he would stay there. If I turned my head to really see, like Orpheus, I’d lose everything.

  I know now that life and death don’t quite work that way. But I felt something while sitting alone in the chapel so early in the mornings. In that quiet space, there was the possibility of safety and forgiveness.

  Just after seven a.m. the back door scraped open. My heart flopped in my chest. I took deep breaths and tried to calm myself. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, was I? The back door had been unlocked, and there were no signs saying that a person couldn’t enter the chapel whenever she liked. I thought about my list. Stop being so weird. This was weird, hanging out in an empty chapel at the butt-crack of dawn. And it probably wasn’t so safe after all.

  “Hello? Is someone there?” I called.

  “I’m sorry,” said a voice that could have been anybody’s. High-pitched but uninflected like a newscaster’s. “Is it okay for me to be in here?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” I called back into the darkness behind the stage.

  Rochelle emerged from the wings, like an actress. Like me, she wore a nightgown tucked into sweatpants. Her hair was wrapped around big green plastic rollers, held in place by metal clips.

  “Are you doing something personal?” she asked me. “I can go. I just wanted to see how the chapel was set up. I’m running for office and we have to give our speeches today.”

  Stung, I smiled anyway. “I know. I’m Calinda’s roommate. Remember?”

  She covered her mouth with her hands. “Shit. I’m sorry. Of course I remember. I’m just not awake yet.”

  “I’m Aria.”

  “That’s your real name?”

  “My real name is Ariadne.”

  “Where’s your string? I could use it.” She raised her eyebrows and looked satisfied, the way people do when they’ve said something smart.

  “Are you nervous?”

  She sat down beside me on the edge of the stage. When she spoke, the pins in her hair touched each other with a soft clicking. This time she smelled of cocoa butter and rubbing alcohol. “I’d really like to win something. I played sports in high school, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t care about sports, do you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Then what do you care about?”

  I shrugged again.

  “I mean,” she said, “out of all the colleges in the world, why did you come here?”

  “My mom went here. This is where my parents met. I was thinking maybe the same thing could happen to me.”

  “My dad went to Morehouse,” she said. “But I came here because Alice Walker went here.”

  “She did? I read The Color Purple in high school. I saw the movie too.”

  “She hated it here,” Rochelle said. “But that’s not the point.”

  “You know who else went here,” I said. “Esther Rolle.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Rochelle said.

  We laughed together, and while laughing it was easy to forget that Sisters Chapel was a sacred place.

  “I need to go back to my room and get some sleep,” she said. “I was up all night. See you later, Ariadne.”

  “Aria,” I told her. “People call me Aria.”

  She cocked her head. “You know who you look like?”

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “You look like Penny, on Good Times. That should be your nickname.”

  “Aria is my nickname.”

  “That’s not a nickname. That’s just a short version of your regular name. A nickname is something that your friends think up to call you.”

  I felt something warm spread to my face. She had said it. I didn’t. We were friends. She’d given me a nickname.

  “Well, Penny,” she said, “I really have to go to sleep.” She reached her hand quick to the neckline of my gown and gave a tug, snapping a loose thread. “Look,” she said. “It’s your string.”

  There was a decent showing for the speeches, but the chapel was not nearly full. Just a week before at the Fall Fashion Show, the pews had been stuffed with students. We Spelman women were all there, but guys from Morehouse had come too. For that event I’d sat at the end of the pew, squashed against the armrest. But this time I sat in the middle of the fifth row, a comfortable distance away from the young lady seated to my right. On her lap was a placard bearing one word: Renee.

  Rochelle made her way down the aisle to the stage looking fierce and determined, glancing neither left nor right. When she brushed by me, I could see that she hadn’t completely ironed the white cotton shirt which she wore under her dark blue suit. The cuffs and collar were pressed stiff, but the areas almost hidden by her jacket were rough-dried and wrinkled. I worried for her, hoped that the others wouldn’t notice this shortcut in grooming, that it wouldn’t cost her crucial votes.

  At the podium she set her jaw before producing a sheet of notebook paper folded down to the size of a playing card. The crackle of the paper was intensified by the microphone as she carefully restored
the page to its full size. With a shaky voice she promised to represent our interests with the dean of women. She mentioned Title IX. She also pledged to improve cafeteria food, hinting that fresh fruit would be added to the salad bar. Rochelle gestured as she spoke, holding her hands in front of her, unfurling her fingers like a magician producing a mockingbird out of thin air. I looked up into her face, trying to catch her eye to let her know that the speech was going just fine. Rochelle finished her talk the way all the candidates would, thanking us for our time and our support. She smiled.

  I jumped to my feet before I thought about it, before I had a chance to worry what I might look like. I clapped with my hands over my head, banging my palms together before I realized that the people around me gave polite applause, for we were basically a courteous group of people. A chuckle emanated from the middle pews, a laugh that I sensed was a laugh at me. I slapped my hands together twice more before I sank back down onto the wooden pew.

  The second candidate came to the microphone. She was a tall, brassy girl from Washington, D.C. “Divas!” she called to the crowd, who hollered back at her. The girl seated beside me held up her placard and waved it around, shrieking like white girls in that old footage of the Beatles.

  I looked at Rochelle, frozen there onstage in an ornate high-backed chair. The bottom of her face was stretched into a smile, but I could tell that she knew what I knew. Candidate number two was going to win the election. I shifted in my seat and looked behind me at clusters of freshmen wearing buttons that indicated that DIVA was some sort of acronym. Devastating, Innovative, Vivacious, Audacious. Once again I looked at Rochelle, my new friend, trying to make eye contact. Don’t worry, I wanted to tell her.

  Rochelle didn’t win, despite my vote. It wasn’t even close, according to Calinda, who was so angry at her own defeat that she demanded an exact accounting of the ballots from the dean of women.

  Rochelle and I didn’t speak again until the following spring. And this is the part that we have never told anyone:

  That March I had landed a pretty nice telemarketing job to supplement my pay from the newsstand at Lenox Square. My sister’s husband sent a check to Spelman each term to cover my tuition plus room and board, but the rest was up to me. The newsstand job was a decent gig—fifty cents over minimum wage—but I needed extra money that month. Having inherited my mother’s lifelong fear of credit, I’d selected a word processor at Sears and put it on layaway. It was a compact Smith-Corona with a screen that let you look at up to ten lines of text as you typed. The sociology major required that a person write a lot of papers and I wasn’t much of a typist. This word processor would beep when I screwed up and allow me to make corrections.

  And if word got around that I was a good typist, it could be a way to meet people. Guys were always looking for girls to help them whip their assignments into shape. And the girls pledging sororities were always looking for someone to help them with their schoolwork while they jumped through hoops for their big sisters. I would make myself useful. It would only be a matter of time before at least one person returned the favor.

  The cost of the machine, $500, was almost five times the cost of a six-week typing class. This my mother pointed out when I’d hinted that a word processor would be a great Christmas gift. So far I’d put down $275. I needed to pay off the balance by Friday, or my beautiful machine would be put back on the shelf and I’d lose my deposit.

  The position at TelePolls was a temporary job, lasting just two weeks. All I had to do was contact random Georgians to ask their opinions about the upcoming gubernatorial race. The flyer promised that you could make up to fifteen dollars an hour. I had worked enough to know that nobody earned the “up to” wage, but I figured that I would make eight or even nine. The headquarters, a large warehouse space across from the Fulton County jail, was divided into fifty cubicles, each furnished with a telephone and a computer. The atmosphere in the room was cool and watery from the air-conditioning and smelled of antifreeze.

  I didn’t mind telemarketing, but the work space wasn’t exactly inspiring. Temp work was better when I was the only one working short-term. In those cases, the other workers’ desks would be festooned with greeting cards, glass figurines, and family photos in plastic frames. Sometimes I was even given a desk decorated with the missing secretary’s memorabilia. But all of us at TelePolls were short-timers. Our cubicles were bare but for our useless tape dispensers and staplers.

  I knew better than to use the script the company provided, a silly little monologue which explained to the person that this was his chance to make his voice heard. Instead, I assured the person, just after “Hello,” that this wasn’t going to cost them anything. After that, I explained that I was a college student who really needed this job and if they would take just a few minutes to answer my questions, I could avoid being fired for another day. Most people had worked shitty jobs at some point in their lives and were willing to cooperate. The point of the polls was to find out their opinions about affirmative action, the death penalty, and abortion. I asked them if they thought that the families of murder victims should be allowed to participate in executions. I thanked them for their time. If they asked me if I was black, I told them that I wasn’t.

  Rochelle arrived two days into the second week, halfway through the project. I didn’t so much see her as hear her as she offered her name to our boss. I took temp work quite often and was not accustomed to seeing my classmates. Most of the workers were women in their thirties who used lots of gel to hold their hair slick against their heads. Sometimes there were other college students, but they mostly went to Clark, Morris Brown, or Georgia State. Rochelle and girls like her, the well-off ones without accents, didn’t do temp work.

  I peeped around the edge of my cubicle as the boss led her to a cube two spaces over from mine. None of us liked this supervisor; he was what my mother would call “mighty familiar.” As he showed Rochelle how to work the computer, his stubby fingers made slow circles on the nape of her neck, just below the baseball cap she wore. From where I sat I could see her simple but expensive leather purse hanging from the back of her chair.

  The boss must have felt me watching because he glanced at me over his shoulder, smiling with his big teeth. I turned my attention to my keyboard, pressing the button that caused the phone to dial. Just before it started ringing, I heard Rochelle ask when we got paid.

  “End of the week.”

  “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  She was different here, not the same girl I often saw in the student union on dress-up Fridays, crossing and recrossing her muscular legs, pretending not to know that she was being watched. There, she was what I wanted to be, what I had come to college hoping to become. Whenever I saw her leaning against the back gate sipping Diet Coke, she reminded me of photos of my mother, pretty and fit, stylish and sure-seeming. I had hoped Spelman would work its magic on me, turning me into a lady, the kind of girl that employers would want to hire, the kind of girl that boys would want to marry. It was already the second semester, but I was still myself. I bought the same makeup as the other girls, filed my nails into ovals, and learned not to switch my hips so much when I walked, but I never looked like a girl on the verge of something great. In pictures of myself I always looked too anxious, too easy. Too cheap.

  Here at TelePolls Rochelle seemed small and out of place. Despite the way she was dressed—in close-fitting, dirty jeans and an overly large baseball cap parked just over her eyebrows—she didn’t blend in with those of us in the cubicles. Maxine, who occupied the cube across from mine, gave me a playful kick in the shin. Although I didn’t return the kick, I saw Rochelle as the others saw her—useless, like a cut-crystal Christmas ornament. Although she was everything I wanted to be, here I was embarrassed to know her.

  Freshman year was nearly over, but I was still trying to realize the goals on my twenty-point list. Some were easier than others. Number two: Don’t get pregnant and ruin your life. All this took was one tiny pil
l swallowed down just after I brushed my teeth. There was a “family planning” clinic right on campus, just behind the dining hall. I went to the desk, gave my name, and just like that, was given a dial pack of twenty-eight pills. The lady dispensing them didn’t even look up or volunteer to counsel me. I was still trying to be known for something decent, but it was just too difficult to stand out at Spelman. I had managed not to make a reputation for myself, which was an improvement over high school; but there was still work to do.

  The break room at TelePolls looked like the waiting room in a mechanic’s shop. Gray walls, six wire-framed chairs with thin, worn padding in the seat. Along the perimeter were vending machines dispensing off-brand snacks. I slid three quarters in the machine and watched a metal coil wind backward until my cheese and crackers fell into a tray. I was alone in the break room, since all the others liked to take their free time on the parking ramp, despite the smell of exhaust fumes and pee. On the ramp, people could get away from the oppressive air-conditioning of the office and they were free to smoke their cigarettes.

  With a tiny plastic spatula I dug hardened cheese spread from the little cup as Rochelle entered the break room. We hadn’t spoken since she started working two days before.

  “Hey,” I said. “How you doing?”

  She turned to face me. “Ariadne, I thought that was you. But you’re always in your cube, I couldn’t tell.”

  “It’s me.”

  She looked at the snacks in the machine. “I know I need to eat. But I don’t feel like it.” She sat down, crossing her arms hard over her chest. “It’s so cold in here.”

  “You could go out to the ramp with everybody else.”

  “I’ll throw up if I go out there. The smell, you know.”

  I held out a cracker that I had spackled with cheese stuff. “Have some of this.”