by Tayari Jones
“If I eat that, I’ll throw up too.” She pulled the powder-blue baseball cap down so low that I could no longer see her eyes. Using her fingernails, which were long and unpolished, she prodded the cluster of pimples on her chin. One of them burst; a spot of dark blood bloomed against her chalky brown skin. She took a napkin from the empty chair beside her and pressed it to her face. “I’m so gross.”
“Are you okay? You look a little peaky.”
“I don’t feel good, that’s all,” she said. “Do you know when we get paid?”
“At the end of the week.”
“Do you know if they are going to take money out for taxes and everything?”
I leaned in and looked at her more closely. Rochelle was not the sort of person who I would have figured to be strung out on drugs, not with all her talk about field hockey and exercise, but I had heard rumors that there were girls at Spelman who took all their parents’ money and sucked it right up their pampered noses. This was the story I heard from the girls I worked with at the newsstand. They had never seen this in action, but they had heard it from reliable sources. They’d looked at me to confirm or deny, but I wasn’t the right person to ask. If my classmates were doing things like that, they would have kept it secret, and no one shared their secrets with me.
“Yeah, they take the taxes out. They always do.”
She nodded. “I figured they would.”
“Are you sure you don’t want a cracker?” I said to her. “You can have the last one.”
She licked her lips. “I’ll eat when I get back to campus.”
We went back into the office and found our places in our cubicles. I put on my headset and pushed the button, thinking about Rochelle as I waited for someone to answer the phone. I didn’t know much about drug addicts. I knew a few guys who smoked a lot of weed, but they weren’t drug addicts, exactly. When they ran out of smoke, they were irritated but not desperate. But Rochelle was a changed person from the one she’d been when I met her in the dean’s office, just six months ago. Her ponytail was heavy and dirty, hanging lank through the vent in the back of her baseball cap. Her face was all broken out and her cuticles looked like she’d been chewing on them. And I could tell that she really needed the money.
On the days that followed I avoided her in the break room, snatching my crackers out of the machine and heading to the parking ramp with everyone else. I could feel her eyes following me as I gave a casual hello, breezing past her and heading outside. I knew she wouldn’t follow me. She had said that the smell of the urine and exhaust made her ill, but I knew that she was too afraid to try and socialize where she so obviously didn’t fit in. I did feel a little sorry for her, but I didn’t want to associate with drug addicts. I had seen Lady Sings the Blues. I couldn’t afford to be friends with someone who would drag me down any lower than I already was. I complimented myself on keeping my sympathy in check and letting my good sense prevail as I ignored her, sitting shivering in her cubicle.
Out on the parking ramp I leaned on the concrete railing and looked out over the city. Maxine, whom I knew from working seasonal gift wrap at Rich’s, stood beside me. She was just twenty-five but seemed much older. She lit a menthol cigarette.
“Smoke bother you?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
She sucked on the cigarette with a little popping sound. “Are you getting a lot of surveys done?”
“Enough,” I said. “Not a lot, but enough.”
Maxine said, “It’s hard to stay cool. Calling white people in Dahlonega and shit asking what they think about race relations. Then they hang up and you lose your commission.”
I shrugged. “I hate having to ask them about abortion.”
Maxine exhaled smoke as she talked. “Fifteen dollars an hour, my ass. You got sixty cents? I want to get a Coke.”
I handed her my can. “I only took one sip.”
She took it from me and drank. “What’s up with your girl?”
“That’s not my girl. I know her from school, that’s all.”
“Her cube is right next to mine. She’s not getting any surveys done. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they let her go. I can hear her.” Maxine raised her voice in pitch to imitate Rochelle’s. “‘Hello, I’m calling from the TelePoll Research group.’ I hear her saying it over and over, so I know that she is having to make new calls because nobody is talking to her.” Maxine chuckled. “That’s what she gets.”
“You don’t have to laugh,” I said. “I sort of feel sorry for her.”
“You work every day; do you think she feels sorry for you?”
“But she looks so bad,” I said. “And she’s nice, most of the time. I’ve seen her around at school.”
“Well, she looks like shit on a soda cracker right now,” Maxine said, looking behind her and twisting out the cigarette on the heel of her sneaker. “Not that I look much better.”
Payday rolled around finally. I had to call the people at Sears and beg them not to restock my word processor before I could get to the store on Saturday morning. On the last day of the job, we all organized our tools in our work areas, like second graders straightening up their cubbies. Earphones had to be wiped down with alcohol pads and then cords twined tight around. The keyboard was to be square in front of the monitor and the stapler and tape accounted for as well. Our boss took a look in each person’s cube, surveying the contents before handing over our pay. I made my body stiff and still as the boss grunted over my shoulder. “Yep, yep, yep,” he said as though crossing off items on an invisible list. He paused before letting out a final yep and handed me my check. It was one of those cardboard deals where you have to tear off the edges and unfold the whole thing to see how much you made. I suppose it’s how the company saves on having to buy a whole separate envelope for each person. An old lady that I temped with last Christmas ripped her check down the middle trying to get those edges off. She taped it back up, but the bank wouldn’t take it.
I owed $250 on the word processor. That included taxes and everything. My check was only $232, but I could come up with the rest. I’d worked twenty-seven hours over the two weeks. Base pay about six dollars an hour, but I got an extra dollar for every survey I’d finished. Uncle Sam got his part right off the top, but all in all it wasn’t too bad. I slipped it into the flap on my backpack and waved good-bye to Maxine.
“How’d you do?” she asked me.
“Good enough,” I said.
Maxine tipped her head toward Rochelle, who hadn’t left her cube. “Be grateful, girl, everybody ain’t able.”
To get out of the door, I had to pass Rochelle. I tried to tarry, adjusting the straps on my backpack, pulling my socks up, but Rochelle just sat there. Our boss bent over his desk writing something on a clipboard.
“Y’all hurry up, hear?” he said.
“I’m headed out,” I said.
“Me too,” Rochelle said.
I walked toward the door at a fast pace, planning to just blow by her. Make my way without looking. This girl was in trouble and I didn’t need trouble. Doing drugs was like shoplifting. When I was in high school, my friend Yolanda used to steal Super Glue and eyeliner from the SupeRx at Greenbriar Mall. When she got caught, both our mothers were called, although I hadn’t stolen a thing. I’ll never forget Yolanda’s glossy mouth cursing at the security guard as he dumped the contents of her fake Gucci on the counter. Drugs worked the same way. If I had a friend strung out on cocaine or whatever Rochelle was on, nobody would believe that I wasn’t doing it too.
When I reached her cube, Rochelle called my name. Not my given name, but the name she had given me in the chapel six months before. “Penny. Wait up.”
I stopped and waited up. I told myself that I was being a sucker. That she never called me Penny in Manley Hall on a Friday afternoon when she milled about trying to make weekend plans. But I waited on her. Maybe it was the sound of her voice pleading and pretty. Or it could have been the name itself, Penny, the orphan
girl who found a new mother and somehow grew up to be Janet Jackson.
Rochelle gripped my wrist as we left the office and tugged me into the break room down the hall. She shut the door with a click and leaned herself against it, blocking my way. Her face, what I could see of it under the bill of the cap, was strained and ashen. I felt my hands go cold, the way they did when I was scared.
“How much did you get paid?” she asked me.
“Not that much,” I said.
She moved from the door, letting herself fall onto one of the dirty-cushioned chairs, and covered her face with the palms of her hands. “I only made thirty-two dollars.”
“That’s because you were only here half a week.”
“I didn’t find out about the job until late. I would have been here the whole time if I had known.” She bent at the waist, resting her head on her knees. “I really need the money.”
“What for?” I asked, testing to see if she would tell me, if she would let me into this secret world that was happening right there in my dormitory, this world that was so secret that I lived there and didn’t see it.
“I have only forty-five dollars to my name,” Rochelle said, raising herself enough to pull off her baseball cap and toss it across the room. The hair underneath was shoulder-length and stiff. I touched my own hair, short but soft and delicate, like spider’s silk.
“Can’t you get the money from your parents?”
“No.” Rochelle pulled a ballpoint pen from her book bag, drove it through her coarse hair, separating it into halves. She grabbed a hank of hair in each hand. “You want to know how I got the forty-five dollars that I have? I didn’t get my hair done.” She leaned forward, showing the groove where she’d split her hair apart with the pen. The part, marked with blue ink, was flanked by Rochelle’s new growth; her real hair was kinky in texture and the soft gray color of old roads.
“My hair started going gray in middle school.”
“Does it run in your family?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m adopted.” Rochelle stood up, her eyes darting around the room until she spotted her cap. She picked it up from the floor, covering her hair even before she stood back up, and returned to her chair beside me.
“It’s okay,” I told her, eager to assure her that I could be trusted. “I’m not going to tell anybody. About your hair or this whole thing with the money.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I knew why she was so fraught for cash, that her need and distress were written all over her. How could I? In just a moment she had offered me what I needed, what made me desperate. She’d told me her secret, something that other girls didn’t know.
“So I had this idea,” Rochelle said. “I would let people charge things on my gas card and give me the cash. I would offer a discount, you know?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
“But my mom had already cut my card off. I shouldn’t have told her I needed the money, then she wouldn’t have known to cut the card off.”
“Your mother sounds like my mother,” I said.
“Do you know what my mom said when I told her? She said, ‘At least you know you’re fertile.’” Rochelle looked into my face and gave a little smile as the meaning of her words made its way into my brain. “You didn’t know that part, did you?”
I shook my head. “I thought that you were on drugs.”
She sighed and worried the bumps on her chin. “I wish that was all it was.”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“Why not?” I asked, thinking of the thin, bookish upperclassman I’d once seen her kissing at the back gate, just before curfew. “He seems nice.”
“He is nice,” she said. “Nice enough to want to get married or something like that.”
“Really?” I said, thinking how romantic it would be to be engaged. “Is he a senior? It wouldn’t be a shotgun wedding if it’s his idea.”
Rochelle threw the powder-blue baseball cap on the floor. “I don’t want to be married. I want to be on student government.”
The right thing to do would be to sit beside her and hug her the way her mother should have, with her head just below my collarbone and my arms around her waist. I would rock back and forth a little bit and make shushing sounds. But I knew that if I did, I’d have to give her the money. Rochelle looked at me with expectant eyes; she knew that I was deciding whether or not to help her. To her credit she didn’t try to convince me. She had told me her truth and shown me her hair and it was now up to me.
This was not my first experience with a girl in trouble. When I was in high school, a pretty girl named Leesha Anderson had come to me to find out where she could get help. She figured that I was the kind of person who knew about such things, since I was famous for things that weren’t decent. I’d helped Leesha get what she needed and she’d promised me an invitation to the Sweethearts Ball—a dress-up affair, admit-cards only. After I’d dropped Leesha at the clinic, I’d gone to Rich’s to choose my dress, a lavender drop-waist that I really couldn’t afford. She never sent the invitation. Now I see that I wouldn’t have had a good time anyway. An invitation wouldn’t have made anyone accept me. People would have whispered and laughed at my hair, at my date who was much too old to attend high school functions. But I didn’t know this then and I had opened my locker each day waiting for the printed invitation with its gold lettering.
But Rochelle Satterwhite was no Leesha Anderson. I remembered Rochelle’s campaign speech, so earnest and out of touch. And then I thought about my twenty-point list. When I got back to my dormitory, I would revise it. Item seven would be changed to DO something decent.
“How much do you need?” I said to Rochelle.
She crossed the small break room and knelt before me, pressing her face into my abdomen. “Thank you. Thank you.”
I patted her head through the dirty canvas cap. “It will be okay.”
I think back to times like that and it’s as though I am watching a movie about myself. It makes me feel like I am getting old, because I can now look at my younger self like she was a different person from who I am now. I often find myself wanting to go back and whisper into my own ear, explaining the things that once confused me. I wish I could have told myself how things were going to turn out.
There are many ways to get old, to ripen. Hermione was just past eighteen when she got married, and she became a grown woman in less than a week. I saw her just three days after she’d run away, and she was older already; her extra weight didn’t seem like plump tight baby fat anymore. She looked like a woman who had had two or three kids. She had that look like her body had been used for something.
I’ve aged just this month. In a single morning that I retched over the toilet and realized that I was pregnant. It’s not the pregnancy itself that was the milestone, but how pleased and satisfied I was to realize it. The news zipped through me like something fast and shiny. I’d spent the last decade worrying about the possibility of a baby taking root in my body. Maybe the fact that I can say I’ve been doing anything for a decade says something too, about aging. Every month when my period arrived, I gave a quick thanks to God. Other girls complained about the possibility of ruining white pants or having to postpone certain types of rendezvous, but I’d always just turned my face upward and murmured my gratitude. One of my missions had been to prove my mother wrong. I wasn’t going to get pregnant and ruin my life. This was not what Dr. King died for. And on this my mother and I agreed.
But now I was a grown woman. More than a fourth of my life was gone, assuming that I would live a normal life span. When my father was my age, his life was three-quarters gone. I was ready to start my own life, have my own family. After this baby, when people asked, “Do you have a family?” I would say yes and tell them about Dwayne and the baby. I would not mention my mother, my sister, or the ones who were dead. I could answer without acknowledging any of them and this would not be a lie.
Chapter Three
I don’t think that anyone would have guessed that I would grow up to be a teacher. It wasn’t my calling or my dream. As a kid I never cared much for school, sitting in hot classrooms trying to learn on demand. I didn’t admire my teachers, any of them—not the young pretty ones who forced shy boys to ask us to dance or the old ladies who were obsessed with penmanship. I didn’t hate it enough to dedicate my life to changing the system, however a person would go about doing such a thing. In third grade a guest speaker asked all the girls if they would rather be nurses or teachers; I said that I wanted to be a hairdresser and spend my life helping people look better. As soon as I got old enough to understand obvious things, I set my goal as getting into a good college. At Spelman I had chosen sociology because it seemed like something a regular person could do well in. A subject in which I could earn Bs or As if I just did my homework and went to the library. Rochelle had majored in English because she is supposed to have a gift for language. Dwayne didn’t go to college at all, but went into locksmithing because even when he was little, locks loved him. When his baby sister had trapped herself in the bathroom, Dwayne was the one who got her out. His daddy was outside on a ladder trying to force the window, and five-year-old Dwayne just goosed the handle and the door swung open. I don’t have a special gift, not one that I have noticed anyway. But I do fine in the classroom.
Before meeting my boss, Lawrence, at a job fair, I’d worked at the Institute for the Blind, where my mother manages the front office. She is a force in that place, well dressed and stern. Mama is the secretary that runs the entire operation. When I finished college and couldn’t find a job on my own, she found something for me at the Institute.
My job was to read aloud. I sat at my desk in a tight, windowless room and read any papers that the clients brought in. Sometimes I read letters from family members or important official documents. These I read carefully, using phonetics to pronounce Latin legal terms. Sometimes the clients would ask me for interpretations. “So what does that mean? Am I going to lose my house?” I would tell them that I didn’t know the answers, that I only read aloud, and then referred them to Legal Aid. My other responsibility had been to read the newspaper, each word, to whoever chose to assemble in the lounge every day at noon. I didn’t mind reading the articles and features, but the advertisements threw me. I wasn’t sure if I should inflect to convey the exclamation points and bright colors. I felt dumb bellowing, Huge clearance! Everything must go! Many of the people I read to didn’t seem to have a preference. They just sat around me like a circle of kindergartners, leaning on their canes or stroking their big dogs. A reel-to-reel recorder made a record for those who might want to listen later.