The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  I struggled up and with a running start kicked a melancholy pumpkin into an azalea.

  Hermione laughed. “Not with the pumpkins. Fuck the jack-o’-lanterns.” She bent at her thick waist. “Lord have mercy,” she said in between crests of laughter. “I must still be buzzing. I need you to help me push the door in.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to take that box off.”

  I hesitated. It was dark out and there was no one in the yard but my sister and me, but the street was crowded with trick-or-treaters, many of them boys. “Can’t I help in what I have on?”

  “Shit, Aria,” Hermione said. “It’s cold.”

  I slid my arms through the holes in the box and crossed them over my chest. When Hermione pulled my costume over my head, I closed my eyes.

  “You must be freezing,” she said, seeing that I wore only a long-sleeved leotard and tights. “You must be freezing to death.” Hermione rubbed my arms and held me to her, and I pressed my face into her neck where the passion marks were. “Mama,” Hermione sighed. “Why do you have to be such a bitch?” Squeezing me, she pressed her lips to the top of my head, and it was all worth it for that moment of closeness.

  “On three. We are going to rush the door. Okay?”

  I nodded, still warm and electric from her embrace.

  “One, two.”

  I took a deep breath and readied myself.

  “Hang on,” Hermione said. “Tonight is an exception. Tonight the goal is to get into the house. But after this the goal is to get out. Okay?”

  I nodded, naked and vulnerable in the October air.

  “All right,” said Hermione. “Ready, Freddy?”

  I’ll never forget my sister just as she was that night—busty and bad, high out of her mind, hurling herself again and again at the front door. We did it together until we tore the chain from its mounting. Tumbling into the living room, we tangled together like a heap of puppies. Mama was waiting for us in the dining room. With a paring knife, she hollowed out the eye of a smirking jack-o’-lantern. The too-warm house stank of pumpkin guts and damp newspapers.

  “You will not have a car, Hermione. I will not allow it.”

  Hermione touched my shoulder. “Why didn’t you come open the door for us?”

  Mama said, “When I was young, they used to call me Iron Pants. I am forty-one years old and I can count the men I’ve known on one hand. One hand, Hermione Sophia Jackson. One hand and I still have fingers left.”

  Bewildered, I looked to my sister, who rolled her eyes.

  “Mama, I can’t believe you locked us out,” Hermione said.

  “Keep it up, Hermione. Just keep it up. No one is going to marry you.”

  Hermione pulled the bunny ears from her hair and let them drop on the pile of orange seeds and pulp. “We had to break the door.”

  Mother turned her attention back to her carving. “I knew you’d find your way in.”

  Two years later my sister found her way out. She married Mr. Phinazee, my dad’s best friend. He gave her the car he’d promised her and a house too. A home of her own that she could get into or out of whenever she liked. When she was expecting Little Link, he bought her a new house, bigger and just a bit farther out of town. Now I sat on the steps of that house waiting for her, hoping to be invited inside.

  I had been there more than an hour when the sun sank and the lawn sprinklers clicked on, spotting my jeans. I pushed myself up and headed for my car. I felt as though Hermione was standing me up deliberately, with this being just another reminder that she had her own life now. Yes, we were sisters, veterans of the same war, but that was then, this was now. I walked down her unmarked driveway to where my car waited, dribbling oil onto the cul-de-sac. I moved toward the curb in mincing baby steps, allowing my sister a few extra seconds to intercept me and welcome me into the beige rooms of her home.

  I do believe she loves me. Hermione is my sister, my very first friend. She was simply living a different life, a matter of circumstances. When she left home, Mr. Phinazee had opened the trunk of his silver Brougham and she had tossed in only one hard-sided suitcase. Everything else she left behind, even thirteen-year-old me.

  I tried to keep in mind that Hermione had only been eighteen, with the ink still wet on her diploma. To me she had been an adult, mature and fully formed. But really she had been just older than Keisha. I suppose any time would be a fine time to start a new life. Isn’t that what we tell the girls at LARC?

  I placed my hand over my still-flat stomach. A new life was just behind my palm. A busy cluster of dividing cells. I sat on the hood of my car and waited for Hermione. I would wait all night if I had to.

  Mr. Phinazee drove up in the middle of the second sprinkler cycle. He pressed a gadget on the sun visor of the minivan and the garage door yawned open, showing the empty slot for Hermione’s miniature Mercedes. My sister loved to drive. I used to fantasize that she and I would take a road trip together, drive to California in her Mercedes, me riding in the front seat, squinting at a map and saying, “Just go west. We’ll get there if we keep going west.” In my daydream she and I are in the car alone; Little Link, Mr. Phinazee, Mama, and all the other people we know are just outside of the frame, keeping themselves busy, not bothering us.

  “Look who’s here,” Mr. Phinazee said, unstrapping my nephew from his filthy car seat. Little Link is one of those children that look like short, solemn adults. Did they jinx him naming him after my father? My nephew stared at me with interest but didn’t say anything. Hopefully my child will be a baby of a more lively sort. A little girl that women in the grocery store will coo at. I’ll have to teach her not to take gifts from strangers. I’ll worry how to impart this without making her distrustful. My daughter will have big eyes and smile with pink gums.

  “Hermione went to the gym,” Mr. Phinazee said. “She said she might go out with some of the other girls for a smoothie.” He said the last words as though pronouncing a foreign language. “Me and my boy here, we been to the barbershop.”

  I never knew quite what to say to Mr. Phinazee. For so long, I had thought of him as an uncle. His daughter, Colette, used to tell people that Hermione and I were her cousins. When our father died, my sister and I stayed at their house for four days. On the night before the funeral, Colette snuck us out to watch the midnight showing of Saturday Night Fever. I still like Colette even though she stopped being social with us after Hermione married her father.

  “Wanna come in for a Coke?” he said. “Hermione will be back after a while.” He set Little Link down on the garage floor. The boy took a couple of tentative steps. Mr. Phinazee smiled at his son. “I don’t mind babysitting. Hermione needs to get out sometimes. She’s young yet.”

  I followed him into the house. The whole place was infused with the chemical odor of the air fresheners jutting from the wall sockets. The cloying scent of magnolia tickled my throat and I coughed. The kitchen was very modern and white, the counter cluttered with graduated canisters, all clearly labeled: Rice, Cornmeal, Coffee.

  Little Link plopped down and pushed a wooden train across the tile floor. I sat on the floor too and tried to make him smile.

  “He’s an old soul,” Mr. Phinazee said, unscrewing the Coke bottle with a hiss. He handed me a blue tumbler. Looking up at my sister’s tired husband, I regretted having come over unannounced.

  Mr. Phinazee seemed exhausted. Not the kind of tired that comes from a day of hard work, but the kind of weary that comes from what you’ve seen and done over a lifetime. His skin hung loose from his cheeks. The whites of his eyes were the same beige as the walls.

  “Do people ever tell you how much you look like your daddy?”

  I shook my head. “Mama says that Genevieve was the one that looked like him. I just look like myself.”

  “Lincoln was my best friend, you know that? When he went courting your mama for the first time, I lent him my shoes.”

  I nodded at this information I already knew. Mr. Phinazee�
�s father had owned the barbershop where my daddy used to sweep the floor. I also knew that they fought once. Daddy knocked loose one of Mr. Phinazee’s teeth. After that they were friends. That’s how things were between men.

  We drank Coke without talking. The only sounds in the room were the quiet hums of expensive appliances and the clicks as Little Link shoved his train.

  “I was glad to send you to school,” Mr. Phinazee said to me. “Glad to do it. Lincoln was my best friend. He was like a younger brother to me. You know that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir,” he said. “Call me Earl.”

  I nodded and didn’t speak.

  “I would have sent your sister to Spelman too, but she wouldn’t go. Said she already had her Morehouse Man.” He laughed and poured more Coke, gulping it down like whiskey.

  Little Link made a town of wooden blocks and knocked it over with his train. Squares of colored wood tumbled across the Mexican tile. Mr. Phinazee made as if to kneel, but I stopped him.

  “If I get down there”—he smiled—“I might not be able to get back up.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “You’re not old.”

  I put Little Link’s blocks back into their canister. “I guess I should get going back home. It’s a long way.”

  He held out his hand and I used it to pull up. His fingers were long and spindly, knuckles sprouting coarse white hairs. His skin felt as though it were merely draped over his bones and muscles.

  “You got yourself a fella?” he asked me once I was standing. I could smell him—a male combination of bay rum and sweat.

  I smiled. “His name is Dwayne.”

  “Serious?”

  “Very serious.” I knew that he would be pleased by my news, to know that I, like my sister, had found someone who would help me make a new start. Someone who would give me a fresh family, a fresh set of possibilities. But I kept myself quiet. To tell my sister’s husband before telling my sister herself would compound the sin I’d already committed by being loose-lipped with Keisha. “Dwayne is a good one.”

  “How old is he?”

  I liked these questions, the sort of thing that my father would have probably asked. It made me think of Mr. Henry. “He’s twenty-eight.”

  “That’s good. Don’t marry an old man.” He held up his shirtsleeve and showed me a nasty scrape, scabbed over with puckered pink skin. “Nothing is more pitiful than seeing an old buzzard bust his behind on the playground.”

  I could think of a thousand things more pitiful, but I didn’t bother to list them. I turned myself toward Mr. Phinazee and hugged him hard around his fragile middle. I felt him stiffen; then he gave my back a few uneasy pats. I tried to memorize the feel of him.

  “You were the one I always worried about,” he said, gently unwinding himself from my greedy grasp.

  Chapter Five

  I wanted to give my daughter an invisible name—something that would neither offend nor delight. Something easy to pronounce. I was leaning toward Monica for a girl and Brian for a boy. Two ordinary names. Bad things don’t happen to people named Monica and Brian. If my daughter grew up to be an actress and wanted to change her name to Cleopatra, that would be fine with me, but I wanted to give her a quiet start with a blank-slate sort of name.

  I tried to explain this to Keisha, who suggested that I name my daughter Alexandra.

  “Too much like a soap opera,” I said.

  “Alexandra is a successful-sounding name. And if things are in alphabetical order, she will always be first.”

  “People tend to alphabetize by last name,” I reminded her.

  Rochelle came into the classroom then, carrying two canvas tote bags and a laptop computer case. “I just wanted to say hello,” she said. “I gotta go to the office and put this stuff down. Fulton County grant deadlines are this week.”

  She didn’t say hello to Keisha, who seemed to be concentrating on wiping down the dry-erase board.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “And I have bad news. The A/C went out again. Landlord is MIA. I called a repairman. Also, the fridge is really on the blink. When I came down this morning, there was enough water to swim in.”

  “Kill my landlord,” I said.

  She laughed. “See you at home.”

  After Rochelle had shuffled down the short hallway and closed the door to the office we shared, Keisha said, “She rubs me the wrong way.”

  “Really? Everybody likes Rochelle.”

  “I don’t like the way she looks. Her hair all matted up like that, and then the whole thing has the nerve to be gray.”

  “Now, Keisha, that’s not right. She can’t help her hair color. I think it looks beautiful.”

  She waved her hand as though she was fanning imaginary smoke. “I know she can’t help it, and if I liked her I wouldn’t say anything about it. But she acts like I am invisible or something. She talks to you and she talks to your boss. That’s it. Nobody else even exists to her.”

  “She’s not like that,” I told Keisha. “She’s real down-to-earth. She’s my best friend.”

  “Did you tell her yet?”

  “Not yet,” I admitted. “I wanted to tell Dwayne first. I’m telling him tonight. I’ll tell Rochelle in the morning.”

  “I can’t believe you waited this long. It’s been almost a week.”

  “But I wanted to wait until I had been to the doctor so I could have a due date and one of those fetus snapshots.”

  “They don’t do the sonogram until way later, Miss Aria. You watch too much TV.”

  “I can’t get into the gynecologist for three weeks.”

  “Take a pee-in-a-cup test.”

  I sighed. “Peeing in a cup won’t give me details.”

  “Well,” Keisha said, “Dwayne don’t need to know exactly how pregnant you are. I bet he won’t even ask about your weeks. He just wants to know the basic facts: you’re having a baby and it’s for him.”

  “Lower your voice,” I said.

  “Miss Aria, you act like we’re having an affair or something. All this whispering. You don’t want nobody to know we have lunch together and stuff. I’ll be glad when I get my GED so we can be friends out in the open. Then you can give me a baby shower and I could give you one back.”

  “I just haven’t decided how I want to handle everything. So I need to keep this low.” It was getting warm in the closed classroom, but I didn’t open the door. Lawrence and Rochelle were only two doors away.

  “You nervous about telling Dwayne? I was already pregnant when I met Omar, but I didn’t come right out and tell him. I just waited until he noticed. He got all mad at first, cussing and everything. Talking about how since it wasn’t his he wasn’t giving me no money or nothing like that. You know how they do.” She dislodged a tuft of lint from her braid. “Then he got used to the idea. He got two kids already, you know? One is in Louisville with his baby’s mother and the other one he don’t know where it is. So you can see how he wasn’t too excited.” She put both hands on her stomach. “But now he’s so good. Gave me money to take my GED.”

  Dwayne has a son, Dwayne III; they call him Trey. Ten years old. He stays in Anniston, Alabama, Dwayne’s hometown. It’s not a secret. He told me the night we met, at the Leopard Lounge in midtown.

  We had been drinking. Vodka tonics for me; he’d been downing Crown and Cokes with his cousin Maurice, the one they call Head Cheese. Neither Dwayne nor I had been exactly drunk, but we were buzzed enough to be a little more flexible and tolerant than usual.

  Rochelle, on the other hand, had crushed about a half dozen Kir Royales. They tasted like champagne spiked with Robitussin, but she seemed to be enjoying them and they seemed to be treating her right that evening.

  This was in October, homecoming weekend. We had been out of college almost five years, but we still marked the date on our calendars. Someone in her complicated network of almost-friends had told Rochelle all the people who had come to town for the festivit
ies would be at the Leopard Lounge. We’d been sitting long enough for her to get rip-roaring drunk and we hadn’t seen one familiar face. Rochelle was disappointed; every few minutes she would look at the door and then call the name of a person I didn’t remember. “I know that Joe Johnson said he was coming down for homecoming. He always comes. Him and Alex Fontenot both.”

  “I don’t think I know him.”

  “You know Joe,” she’d say. “People used to call him Joey. Econ major. From Grambling.”

  I’d shrug, feeling a little embarrassed not to know Joey or any of the other people she was looking for. It was nearly midnight and none of them had shown. I was glad. I never knew how to behave at these reunions at which I knew no one.

  Rochelle ordered herself another drink and went to the bathroom. I thought that maybe I should go with her, provide some sort of supervision, but I didn’t feel like getting up, and what if someone took our seats while I was gone? So I just sat at the bar, looking at my reflection in the mirror behind the bottles. I wore an outfit of Rochelle’s, a close-fitting backless dress, and an expensive new lipstick, the color of pennies. Still, the mirror showed me to be plain as wax paper.

  A man leaned toward me. “Your girl okay?” he asked, watching Rochelle wobble like a drunken angel on her chunky-heeled boots.

  “She’s all right. Feeling good, that’s all.” I had to raise my voice and lean toward him to make myself heard over the dull roar of voices. There was an occasional shriek of laughter, far too loud for the sophisticated decor.

  “Well,” he said, settling onto the tiger-striped barstool that Rochelle had just vacated, “she’s feeling good and you’re looking good. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

  He didn’t have a well-deep voice, but it was male enough and flecked with good humor. I was glad to talk to him, pleased to have the attention. I don’t really feel comfortable in any of the martini lounges that have sprouted up on the north side of town. It’s not that the clientele is rude, color-struck, or anything like that, but the citrus smell of their expensive hair products makes me feel like I’m at least two fashion cycles behind. Rochelle doesn’t care. She goes wherever she wants, wearing whatever moves her. Sometimes I pause a moment before going in and she takes my hand, tugging me across the threshold. “Fuck them if they can’t take a joke.” But that wasn’t the problem. It seemed like there was a joke out there that I just couldn’t seem to get. So usually I sat quiet as a fish, hoping to eventually catch on.