by Tayari Jones
I was also pleased to see Coco, although the feeling was far from mutual. She had no use for any of the women in my family—not even my mother, who had been against Hermione’s marriage as much as Coco herself, and not me, who had no say in the matter. I never understood how she could throw us away so easily. She had been the one to rescue me from the car on the day of the accident. She had spoken my name in my ear and worked it into my heart.
“Is Hermione here yet?” I asked over the buzz of clippers.
Coco looked up from the fade she was working on, not smiling, not acknowledging me as anyone more special than one of the guys that came into the shop selling counterfeit watches and colognes. “You’re looking at everyone that’s here.”
I took a seat in a row of men variously aged and variously unkempt, each waiting for a seat in one of the barber chairs. A few years ago, right after I stopped relaxing my hair, I wore my hair in a short fade that required weekly visits to a barber. When I would walk in the door, the men would hush whatever conversations had raged before I arrived. I sat in the barber’s chair, feeling faintly guilty, an uninvited guest who had no other place to go. Phinazee’s wasn’t like that; Coco’s feminine presence shaped the character of the place. She didn’t do anything obvious like plant flowers out front or require the barbers to iron their shirts, but she managed to civilize it a little bit. It was like being in the home of a favorite aunt, the kind of woman who would let you drink but wouldn’t let you curse.
I looked at the clock over the wall of mirrors. A quarter past ten. Hermione was fifteen minutes late.
I picked up a year-old Jet that fell open to the Beauty of the Week. The Beauty was a big girl, one dessert away from a weight problem. Posing in such a way to emphasize her cleavage while deemphasizing her stomach, she reminded me of Hermione. Colette, on the other hand, was nothing like my sister. Short but lean, she wore a loose-fitting sundress covered by a white barber’s jacket. Her hair was Caesar shorn and neat. Her only ornamentation was a pair of heavy gold hoops.
“Your sister said for you to meet her here?” Coco said.
“That’s what she said.”
“I don’t understand people,” Colette said, swabbing her customer down with bay rum.
When the chair was empty, a young man stood, wearing the red and black uniform of the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Light-skinned and chunky, he reminded me of Head Cheese. And this, of course, reminded me of Dwayne.
“Coco,” I said, “did you know that I was getting married?”
“Colette,” she corrected me. “I think my father said something about that.”
“Colette. Do you think you would like to be in the wedding party, maybe?”
“You have a date already?” She folded the customer’s ear and buzzed the clippers behind it.
“Not this November, but the next one.”
“In my book,” Coco said, “it doesn’t count if it is more than a year away.”
“Okay. Maybe I’ll ask you later.”
She nodded to the guy from the Shrine. “Now, Jamal,” Coco said, “that don’t make no sense. Waiting this long to do something about your head.”
Jamal smiled. “My money been funny.”
“You need to sell some more bean pies, then.”
“The Shrine don’t sell bean pies.”
“All I know,” Colette said, snapping a black cape around his neck, “all I know is that it’s going to take me half the morning to turn you back into a human being.”
She chuckled and I remembered how kind she’d been before Hermione married her daddy. I suppose she had a right to her anger; Coco has known her share of loss too. Her mother died only three years before we lost our father. Lupus had taken Mrs. Phinazee. I was only seven or so, and the word was frightening and mysterious.
“I hope that you would be able to be a hostess, at least,” I said. “I think Little Link will be the ring bearer.”
“Uh-huh,” she said over the buzz of clippers.
I sat and looked out the plate-glass window, deciding not to say anything else to Coco. I was sincere in my desire to include her in my wedding, but I didn’t want to seem to be bragging. On more than one occasion I have run into some vague acquaintance in the mall or at the bank. The hellos would be barely over before the girl was shoving her ring in my face, gloating at the sight of my naked knuckle. Or at least that is how it always seemed to me. Colette wasn’t married, and as far as I knew, she wasn’t even dating anyone, had never dated anyone. But she didn’t wear her solitariness the way a lot of single women did. For her it seemed like a choice. For everyone else it seemed like a sentence.
I fidgeted in my seat, waiting to spot Hermione’s minivan. Some people look like their dogs, but my sister looked like her car: large, round, but strangely aerodynamic.
The road just outside Phinazee’s was busy like a Third World market. Vendors sold incense, bootleg CDs, body oils, T-shirts, and baked goods. Cars of all types, from SUVs with rhinestoned vanity plates to rusted Toyotas without air-conditioning, inched down Lee Street. Across the four-lane road, at Popeye’s Chicken, a couple of pedestrians used the drive-through. There were also a few college students, the ones who didn’t go home for the summer, seeming both at home and out of place in this environment. I could spot them easily, not just because the girls wore knit shorts with the name of their school stitched across their behinds, but because of their way of moving place to place, gesturing with their pretty hands, noticing only one another.
Among the throngs of people, I noticed a pregnant girl buying incense from a skinny Rastafarian. I got up from the chair and pushed open the front door. The brass bells jangled behind me. “I’ll be right back,” I called to Colette.
I trotted out of the shop, but slowed down and stopped myself several paces behind Keisha, who held three sticks of Egyptian Love incense to her nose.
“Buy five,” the Rasta said, “I’ll give you one free.”
“You not trying to cheat me, are you?” Keisha said. “You see I’m pregnant and everything.”
“No, sister,” said the Rasta. “I wouldn’t cheat my queen. Buy three, I’ll give you two.”
She seemed different somehow than she did sitting in my office. Her blond braids and airbrushed nails were not so garish. Her pregnancy was more graceful; her motions as she traveled were evidence of the perfection of nature, like the clumsy bumblebees who manage to fly anyway. I raised my hand to call out to her, but I closed my mouth, not wanting to interrupt whatever magic was working for her this afternoon.
Keisha turned toward me as though she had heard my unvoiced greeting; I pretended to look at a selection of T-shirts offered by a nearby vendor, hiding my face among silk-screened cartoon women with Scarlett O’Hara waists and Hottentot behinds. Souvenirs from the last Freak-Nic. Half off if you bought two. The shirts buckled in the dirty breeze, waving their arms like they were struck with the Holy Ghost. Smiling, Keisha turned her attention back to the Rasta and went away with six sticks of incense without having to pay for any of them.
“Hey,” I called finally. “Keisha!”
She turned on the ball of her foot, bobbing a little as she scanned the faces around her. I waved again, but somehow Keisha managed not to see me. I let her go, feeling oddly shy amid the throng.
When I returned to Phinazee’s, Hermione’s van was parked in the handicapped spot at an almost forty-five-degree angle. She was waiting in the shop, sitting in front of the shampoo bowl, arms crossed hard over her big chest.
The easy laughter and camaraderie that had enveloped the shop just fifteen minutes before were gone. The men were still there and the television was still turned to SportsCenter, but the only people in the room that mattered were Hermione and Colette.
“I was here at ten o’clock,” I said as soon as I saw her expression.
“She was,” Coco said, still working on the same guy’s head.
“Let’s go,” Hermione said. “Let’s just go.” On her way out sh
e grabbed two bottles of shampoo from a glassed-in display case. “Get whatever you want.”
I looked over at Colette.
“That shampoo is six ninety-five,” she called.
Hermione took another bottle. “Tell my husband to give you the money.”
Hermione left. I was embarrassed to follow her, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Hermione’s minivan smelled of old french fries and vanilla air freshener. My seat was covered with a purple bath towel.
“Little Link spilled juice there,” she explained.
At the stoplight, just before the freeway, a filthy man approached the window.
“Can you help me out?” he said.
Hermione thrust a bottle of shampoo into his pleading hands. He was still examining it when we drove off.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “for being in such a bad mood. Colette is such a bitch.”
“Why did you meet me over there in the first place? You know she has issues with us.”
“Earl wanted me to hand-deliver her invitation to Link’s birthday. Like that would help. That bitch makes me crazy.”
“She used to be nice.”
“I used to be nice too.” Hermione changed the subject. “Are you ready to go see the wizard?”
This was the whole point of the escapade. Mama had made an appointment for me to see a reproductive endocrinologist at Emory University Hospital. My insurance wouldn’t cover it, but Mother was prepared to pay out of pocket. According to Hermione, Mama was going to use the money from the college funds we never got to use.
“What’s Dwayne saying about all of this?” she asked me.
“He doesn’t know.”
“About the appointment?”
“About any of it.”
My sister put on her blinker and pulled into the parking lot of John A. White Park. We were technically out of the West End. The area was still sort of blue- collar, but it was what Rochelle would probably call blue-collar middle-class. A neighborhood very much like the one where I grew up. The parents here had money to pay for Little League but probably suffered from preemptive ulcers whenever they thought about the cost of college educations. But no one was worrying about that today; kids suited up in baseball uniforms milled about, laughing and knocking each other’s caps off. Parents set up lawn chairs and wore ridiculous hats with umbrellas on top. Hermione put the van in park and turned toward me.
“He doesn’t know that you’re sterile?”
“Hermione,” I said, “can we use a different word? ‘Infertile’ is what people say now.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did know what she meant, but there are some words that I just don’t care for. If it were up to me, people would not be allowed to use the word “sterile” at all, not just when talking to me. The two syllables just hung in the air, like a mist of cheap perfume.
“But he doesn’t know?” my sister persisted. “You’re getting married and he doesn’t know?”
I shrugged and looked at the debris on the floor of the minivan. Saltines ground to powder, stray napkins, ketchup packets. “If this doctor is everything she is supposed to be, there may be nothing to tell him.”
“Aria,” she said, “have you ever heard of honesty?”
“Why are you even asking?” I mumbled. “It’s not like we are close.”
“Would you believe me if I told you I feel terrible about that?”
“No,” I said, softening my voice. “Not really.”
I turned my face toward the tinted glass and watched a little boy swipe a granola bar out of the lunch cooler while his mother laughed with another lady. It was a beautiful Saturday morning and it made me want to cry. More than cry, weep. What would it be like to roll in the grass, beat my fists against earth, and just cry, scream, howl even? I’d been crying dainty tears for nearly three months now, but I didn’t feel any better. It was like my emotions were constipated, caught in my gut and making me ill.
“Living at home was just too much,” Hermione said. “You and Mama act like you were the only ones in the car that day. I was there too. Fifteen years old. Not as young as you. I respect that it must have been tough being in the car with Daddy all that time. But I was a child too. I was there when they took Genevieve. I was the oldest, but I was a kid too.”
“You never talked to me after you got married. Never took me anywhere.”
“I just wanted to escape,” she said. “I love Earl and I am so happy with my life and with Little Link. But when I was eighteen and he said he would marry me, all I was thinking about was getting out. Getting away.”
“Getting away from Mama? She was never mean to you. Not like she was with me.”
“Please,” Hermione said. “What do you know? You were just thirteen.” She took a pack of cigarettes out of the glove compartment.
“You smoke?”
“There’s so much that you don’t know about me.”
She opened the car door. “Let’s walk. Earl doesn’t like me to smoke in the van.”
I got out and followed her to the far side of the park, where the bleachers stood empty. I plunked down beside her on the third row. She shook a dainty Capri cigarette out of the box and offered it to me. I took one, though I didn’t smoke.
She lit hers and inhaled, then she took mine and held it to the red tip of her own until it caught. I took it from her, held it between my fingers, and took a foul-tasting breath.
“When I started seeing Earl, I was almost seventeen. Remember how he used to take us out right after Daddy died? I think he was trying to impress Mama, show her how good he was with the kids.” She sucked hard on her cigarette, contracting her jaws. She blew rings. “See?” she said. “Bet you didn’t know I could do that.”
I shook my head and tried to remember the days she spoke about. Mr. Phinazee used to pick Hermione and me up and take us to the movies. He’d ask Mama to go, but she’d say, “I don’t care for films.” He had been old even then.
“Then he started taking me out by myself. Remember? You must have been thirteen? Colette was the first one to figure it out. I was hanging out in the barbershop more and more. One day she pulled me aside and said, ‘You need to stay away from my motherfucking daddy.’ Just like that. I’m sixteen and she’s cussing me like that. This was right after she finished college.
“Anyway, I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about and she started crying, talking about how her mama was spinning in her grave. I told her that I can’t live my life worrying about offending the dead.”
I was shocked. “You said that to her?”
“You goddamn right.” Hermione pulled on her cigarette.
“What’d Coco do?”
“Slapped the shit out of me.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Just stood there, hating her. I think she was the one who told Mama. Remember when Mama started going through our stuff, making us take our baths with the door unlocked? Don’t you remember all of this?”
I nodded. I did remember our room in disarray when we came home from school. That was when Mama kept asking us, Why is it that you girls are determined to be sluts? I tried so hard to raise you right. I had to do it by myself but I tried so hard. Look at you. A slut and a slut’s apprentice.
“She really went apeshit.”
“And even before that. Remember when you got caught messing around with your gym teacher?” Hermione said.
“It wasn’t really like that. I didn’t sleep with him.”
“That’s because you got caught.”
“That wasn’t my fault. I was just in the ninth grade.”
She blew out a mouthful of smoke and waved it away. “I’m not trying to say anything about that. I’m trying to tell you what happened. Remember that dinner Mama fixed for us that night? The bloody chicken and the burnt potatoes?”
Of course I remembered this. We had been sitting at the glass table and Mama put out a platter of chicken and the bowl of pota
toes. I could see that the potatoes were crusted dark brown and the carbon smell filled the dining room.
“Eat,” my mother commanded us. “I cooked for you. I’ve been in the kitchen all evening. Eat.”
I had cut my eyes at Hermione. She had grown into her plumpness by now and looked like a ripe peach. She’d tightened her face on one side, a “hell no” expression.
Mama looked at me and said, “Are you hungry, Ariadne?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I had said, and spooned the potatoes on my plate and took a chicken thigh.
“And you ate it,” Hermione said. “I watched you. You ate it. You bit that chicken and the blood ran out. The meat was sort of see-through and slimy. I watched you chew it, swallow it, and when it started to come back up, you swallowed it again.”
“But I had to,” I said. “She was so mad about what had happened with Coach Roberts. And I felt guilty.”
“I knew right then that I had to get out. Get away from Mama, get away from you. All this craziness. I called Earl that night and told him he was going to have to marry me right away because I was pregnant.”
I tapped the ash of the slender cigarette into an empty Coke can. “You were pregnant?”
“No,” she said. “But I had to tell him something. I got the idea from soap operas.”
“So you lied too.”
“That was different,” she said, exhaling smoke.
“Different how?”
“Aria, Earl was our play uncle. It was sort of a bad situation from the jump. But where you’re at is different. You and Dwayne can be like regular people. Don’t screw it up playing these games. This is your chance to be normal. Don’t you just want to be normal, finally?”
Looking into the pink tip of the smoldering cigarette, I said, “I’ll never be normal.”
My sister took it from my hand and took a deep drag. “Look, Aria. I’m sorry. I am. I had to get away from Mama. Crazy is contagious. How could I live my life if I had to stay in that house, stuck like flypaper?”