The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  Hermione stretched her lips into one of those smiles that don’t show teeth. “Mama thinks she’s cornered the market on misery.”

  “But what do you think, Hermione? Don’t you think it was worse for us? I mean, she had her whole life before everything happened. We were kids.”

  “Aria, what’s the point of even thinking about things like that?”

  “Come on, Hermione, please tell me what you think.”

  My sister took a potato chip from a plastic bowl, broke it into pieces, and spoke to the crumbs. “Before I had Link, I would agree with you. But now that I have a child, I think that Mama was hurt more. Because of Genevieve.”

  “But Link is the only child you have. Mama still had us.”

  Hermione licked the tip of her finger and touched her finger to the crumbled chips. Tapping the pieces onto her wet tongue, she said, “Don’t get so upset, Aria. I don’t know why you even spend your time thinking about these things. It’s not really the point.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “The point is your life right now. I think about you all the time, Aria. I’ve been thinking about Dwayne too. You are just going to have to tell him.”

  “I’m going to tell him tonight,” I told her.

  “I’m serious about the egg,” Hermione said. “You say the word and we can harvest the next day.”

  “That costs money,” I said.

  “Earl will pay. He’d do anything for you, Aria.”

  I wasn’t comfortable having this conversation outside like this where our words could carry on the wind. Dwayne was over at the barbecue now, painting sauce onto the chicken. Mr. Phinazee laughed. I’d forgotten how men were together. After the accident we hardly ever had men at our house, and never more than one at a time. I’d forgotten how they play together like young horses, drink, and laugh. How they seem to make each other happy.

  “I want a big wedding,” I said to Hermione. “I want to invite three hundred people. An outdoor reception.”

  “Oh God,” Hermione said. “Earl and I stood up before the judge and that was that.”

  “Three hundred guests isn’t that many people. Rochelle is having twice that.”

  “You don’t even know three hundred people. Who would Mama invite? A bunch of blind people? You’d be a fool to spend a thousand bucks on a dress to wear in front of a bunch of blind people.” She laughed a little. When she choked on her potato chip, I refused to clap her on the back.

  Link toddled over to us with his arms outstretched. “Hey, birthday boy,” Hermione said. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  Link didn’t speak, he just waddled closer with his arms open. Hermione picked him up and plopped the wet baby across her thick thighs. “Have you been swimming?”

  He nodded the way some children do, bobbing his entire upper body.

  Suddenly shy, Link hid his face in the front of Hermione’s tunic, making a dark wet spot.

  “Let’s dry you off,” Hermione said.

  She moved toward the sliding glass door with Link riding her hip. I marveled at how easily she carried him, how snugly he fit there, clamped to her side with his wiry legs.

  I followed Hermione into the bedroom that my sister and I had shared in the years before her famous elopement. Mama kept the space just as I left it when I moved eight miles away to a dormitory at Spelman. She’s not the kind of mother to preserve our artifacts as a shrine to our childhoods. It was more like she had no use for this room once we were gone, no reason to alter or visit it. The posters I had loved as a teenager—Michael Jackson dressed in a yellow cashmere sweater and Prince wearing an impossible purple blazer surrounded by a haze of smoke—still hung on the wall, secured by pushpins shaped like daisies. Our narrow twin beds still pressed against opposite walls and were covered with the same green plaid spreads worn thin in places. While Hermione dried Link with a heavy towel, I lifted an ancient lipstick from what had been my side of the dresser. The pink plastic case caused me to smile a little, remembering how expensive and elegant Fashion Fair makeup had seemed to me then. How sophisticated I had been to buy makeup from a department store counter, rather than stealing from the drugstore. I twisted the tube and found it empty. I must have used a brush to dig out every expensive purple bit. The bottom of the case bore a round sticker, “chocolate raspberry.” I held it to my nose and remembered the strong perfume of Fashion Fair, a scent so overpowering that it flavored your food and your kisses.

  “It’s weird to be in here,” I said. The air in the room was cooler than the rest of the house.

  Hermione laid Link on the bed that had been hers and pulled off his wet trunks. The baby looked horrified and covered his private parts with his small hands. “Are you shy?” Hermione said. “Nobody is looking at you.” She leaned down and kissed his hernia scar with a smack.

  “The scene of the crime,” Hermione said, rummaging in the diaper bag, which also matched her clothes. “This whole house is a crime scene, really.”

  Hermione slipped a pair of pull-ups onto Link, snapping the elastic around his waist. “Now you don’t have to be so shy.”

  “I think I want to adopt a baby,” I said to my sister.

  Hermione continued to dress Link, smoothing lotion on his skinny legs, tickling his potbelly. There was only the rustle of clothing and Hermione’s coos and clucks.

  “Then I won’t even need the egg.”

  “You can have the egg, Aria.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. And I told her about Keisha. “It’s going to be a real good baby,” I assured her.

  “What did Dwayne say?”

  “He wasn’t all that enthusiastic. But he might change his mind once I tell him about my medical problems. See, right now he’s looking at it out of context. When I tell him, he’ll see how it all fits together, how it is more fate than anything.”

  “He’s not going to go for it,” my sister said. “This baby is due in a month? It’s too soon.”

  “But it’s a special situation,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hermoine said. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s men. I know how they are.” She swung Link back to his place on her hip and moved toward the door. He crossed his arms around her neck, holding on like he was drowning.

  For a moment I wanted to rise from my bed and snatch Little Link, to untangle him from her and hold him on my own lap. My sister could be terribly smug, secure in what she had. She was the kind of person who could make a way out of no way. She had found a way out of this house, out of this room, by latching on to Mr. Phinazee, our father’s best friend. An old man even when we were little, five years older than our father. Hermione thought herself to be very smart, and I supposed she was. Who could have known that old Mr. Phinazee had the ruby slippers all along?

  But maybe it was my turn to be at the right place at the right time.

  “Do you have any idea,” I said to my sister, “what a big deal it is for someone to offer you a baby? It means that she trusts us, that she thinks we will be good parents.”

  “Goodness, Aria,” Hermione said. “You said this kid’s seventeen and doesn’t even have a GED? Of course she’s going to think that you and Dwayne would be a better option for the kid. I mean, think about it.”

  I didn’t have a response to this remark. Of course Hermione was right, on some level. Everything she said about Keisha was true, but this bare outline didn’t capture the heart of the matter. I was still trying to think of something to say, some way to explain, as Hermione and Link moved toward the door. My nephew gave me a backward wave, with his palm facing his own face.

  “When you tell Dwayne,” Hermione said, “tell him about the egg. At least that way he can have his own child. Trust me.”

  I stayed in my bedroom a long time, watching Dwayne through the window. No one seemed to notice that he kept his distance from me this afternoon, cavorting with my mother and even horsing around with Mr. Phinazee, but saying nothing to me. I suppose it was because Kei
sha’s offer was between us. Until we talked about that, there was really nothing else to say. Through the metal burglar bars I saw Dwayne swing Link around by his arms, my nephew’s bony shoulder blades like undeveloped wings.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At four o’clock, after Little Link had blown out the candles on three cupcakes, Mama lowered herself onto the blanket where I had spread myself out, enjoying the warmth of the day on my eyelids, reliving the moment in Keisha’s house when I sank to my knees and hugged the girl. Dwayne hadn’t been a part of that moment. If he had been there and felt what passed from Keisha’s skin to mine, from my body to hers, he would understand that this was what was meant to be. From where he had sat on the couch he could only feel the sadness, but I had been near enough to feel the love.

  Beside me, Mama lay on her stomach. She looked good for a woman her age, for one that has seen what she has seen. There were shallow pleats at the corners of her eyes, but that was all.

  “Ariadne, do you think your sister is happy?”

  “As happy as anybody,” I said.

  I rolled on my stomach to watch Hermione bouncing Little Link on her lap and covering his face with lipsticked kisses. He looked like a cartoon sweetheart, his face wallpapered with prints the shape of his mother’s mouth. He didn’t bend his face, but his eyes seemed happy enough.

  “Mama, did I laugh when I was a baby? Little Link never smiles at anything.”

  “He didn’t get that from our family. You laughed all the time when you were a baby. You laughed so much that I took you to the doctor. Sometimes you can think a baby is laughing and it is really having a seizure.”

  “Mama, that is a really morbid thought.” But I liked the idea of myself as an unnaturally happy infant, smiling without obvious provocation.

  She touched the tip of her nose. “Honeysuckle. Do you smell it?”

  I suppose the fragrance was there all along, but it seemed like she released the perfume in the air with her words. As I breathed fantastic sweetness, she pointed toward the back fence and I saw the vines, twined through the chain-link. They, too, must have been there all along, but it seemed like my mother conjured them with the tips of her fingers.

  “Genevieve would have been fifteen this year. Can you picture that?”

  I remembered myself at fifteen, overgrown and undercherished. “It’s hard to picture what we would be like if the accident didn’t happen.”

  “Your sister thinks I should move on with my life. She thinks I should date. Can you picture that?”

  I turned myself to face her strong profile. “You’re not too old.”

  “You girls were just children, and children have no choice but to grow. But for me to move on? Move on to what?”

  We lay there on the blanket, on our tummies, our chins cushioned by our folded hands. Dwayne and Mr. Phinazee sat facing each other in plastic lawn chairs, their knees almost touching. Lying beside my mother, watching everyone, I thought about my mother and wondered when was the last time anyone had touched her. Maybe this was why she liked working with the blind: there was much unintentional brushing of skin. Occasionally someone might actually touch her face. Angling my face toward my mother, I moved to kiss her forehead, like Hermione kissed Link, but timidity seized me, some strange notion of protocol. Mothers kissed daughters, not the other way around. Instead, I studied her neck, softly speckled with freckles. I placed my hands there, where her neck disappeared into her cotton blouse, just where her pulse throbbed lightly against her skin.

  Mama’s hand jerked upward, but she didn’t move my fingers. “Genevieve would have been fifteen this year, did I say that already?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You did.”

  My mother rolled onto her side, so close to me that she spoke these words almost into my mouth. It felt like CPR, the way someone forces your lungs to accept air.

  “It could have been avoided. There were no car seats back then. Everybody held their babies on their laps. So when Lincoln swerved off the road, I held her hard to my chest. It was reflex, I didn’t think about it. There was no plan. Children are delicate, you know.”

  I remembered my mother running from the car with Genevieve and the impossible angle of her little head.

  “That’s not what happened,” I said. “She probably hit the windshield or the dashboard.”

  “No,” Mama said. “I would never let my baby hit a windshield. I held her to my heart.”

  I reached toward my mother again, resting my fingers in her soft hair. “I always wanted you to hold me to your heart.”

  “You aren’t hearing me.” She rolled herself over, leaving me to stare at her slender back.

  “Yes, I am. Keep talking. Mama, please turn back around.”

  She did keep talking, but without turning to face me. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “Mama,” I said, “I know you didn’t. Please turn around.”

  I reached for her shoulder and she let me move her. Mama lay on her back now, staring into the bright sky without shading her eyes. “You’re not hearing me.”

  “I do hear you.”

  “Then why don’t you say something?”

  “There’s nothing really to say, Mama.”

  She seemed to lose control of her hands then. They clenched and unclenched at her sides, with a clatter of bracelets, then flew to her head and tugged at her delicate graying hair. Her eyebrows buckled with her effort. I looked around the yard for Hermione but saw only Dwayne and Mr. Phinazee, huddled deep in conversation. I covered my mother’s hands with mine, prying open her fists, freeing her hair. She struggled still, but my hands were larger, stronger, and younger.

  “Is that what it was, Mama? All these years, that’s what it was?”

  “You say it like it was nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. But you could have told us.” Her hands still resisted my strength, but I held them still. “You should have told us a long time ago.”

  Her hands went slack, as though suddenly disconnected from whatever source powered them. I released them, slowly, carefully, ready to stop her, but she let them lie unmoving on the blanket.

  “Hermione knows,” Mama said. “I know that she knows.”

  I smoothed her hair where she had ripped at it. “She doesn’t know.”

  “Yes, she does. She was there with me. You stayed in the car with Lincoln. But your sister was with me.” Her fingers gave little jumps.

  “No, Mama,” I whispered until her hands lay quiet again.

  “Ariadne,” Mama said, “if she doesn’t know, then why did she leave us?”

  When I didn’t answer, Mama stood up, nearly herself again. She straightened her clothing and walked toward the picnic table. While she stacked plastic cups and paper plates, I rolled myself onto the warm space she had left. With the hands that had touched my mother’s hair I felt my own dancing pulse, parting my lips as I slept, tasting the honeysuckle air.

  I opened my eyes to find myself alone on the blanket, the rubber tip of Dwayne’s sneaker just inches from my nose.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said, wishing that there were better words to start a conversation as important as this one. Somewhere between dream and memory was the image of my mother and her guilty, dangerous hands. I saw her neck, the veins straining under her loose skin. See, she seemed to be telling me with the bunched muscles of her face. Her hands tearing at her hair in desperate sign language. This is what my secret has done to me.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said again to Dwayne, stretching out my hand. “Pull me up.”

  Steady on my feet, I rubbed my arms, swollen and blotchy with insect bites. It was after sunset; lightning bugs dotted the air like incandescent snowflakes. The air was still rich with honeysuckle.

  “We need some privacy,” Dwayne said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Where can we talk?”

  I said, “Let’s talk when we get home.”

  “I want to talk now.” Dwayne
walked toward the house in long, hard strides.

  “No,” I said. “Not here.” I wanted to do this in my own space, in my own house with all its promise and possibility.

  Dwayne pushed open the sliding glass door, and the rolling noise seemed too loud. I planted my feet on the soft grass outside, but he tugged me over the threshold. In the living room the television was still on, but no one was watching.

  “Where is everybody?”

  Dwayne sat on the couch and rubbed his palms against his ashy knees. “Earl’s daughter called, said she had a gift for Link. So Earl took Link over to her house to get it. They’ll be back after a while to get Hermione.”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “In the kitchen with your sister. Aria, I need to talk to you right now.”

  The urge to run was as strong and undeniable as the impulse to duck when there’s a softball spinning toward your head. I went into the kitchen, where my mother and sister stood at the double sink washing and rinsing serving dishes.

  “Hermione?” I said, not knowing quite what I wanted to ask her.

  They both turned toward me with stricken faces. I had never noticed the strong resemblance between them, but there they were, mother and daughter. As alike as Keisha and Mary.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Hermione caught her lip with her teeth.

  “No one died,” Mama said. “No one is hurt.”

  I nodded, glad to process that information, waiting for the rest. Dwayne’s feet trod on the carpeted hallway behind me with a hissing like water scattered on a griddle. I left the kitchen and took quick steps to my former bedroom and shut myself in, pressing the little button in the handle to lock the door.

  Sitting on the low twin bed where I slept for most of my childhood, I crossed my arms over myself, looking for a way to escape. But were there a hidden hatch, a trapdoor, an unbarred window, I think I would have discovered it years ago. There on the bed I closed my eyes hard, covered my ears to shut out his knocking. “I can’t hear you.”

  The door opened, of course it did. I opened my eyes a crack, half hoping to see Coco, hoping that she would sing to me. But Dwayne filled the threshold.