by Tayari Jones
“Calm down. I just want to talk to you.” He closed the door and pressed the privacy tab. “I talked to Earl this afternoon.”
He sat on Hermione’s old bed, facing me. He spoke and I could easily picture the scene. Mr. Phinazee, well-meaning Earl, old enough to think that he knew what was best for everyone else. Mr. Phinazee had sat Dwayne down in a man-to-man way. Probably he had intended to pour vodka but discovered that Hermione and I had drunk everything in the liquor cabinet years ago, filling the bottles with tap water. So he and Dwayne had sat down with cups of spiked punch between them, and Earl had told him not to worry about money.
Dwayne said, “Aria, I thought he was talking about the wedding. That he would pay since your pops had passed and everything. So I am nodding my head, saying, ‘Yes, sir. I really appreciate it,’ and everything like that.”
I could see Earl, old and interfering, assuming everyone knew everything, explaining that he and Hermione would stay out of our business when it came to the matter of the child. To think of the egg as a gift. It was only the egg that Hermione would be contributing; the child, the baby itself, would be ours.
“Then he goes on about how lucky we are to be living in this day and age. When there is technology. He’s going on and on, talking about his wife that died and the daughter that don’t half speak to him. He’s talking about your sister and about Link and even about your dad, but I can’t get over what he just told me.”
Dwayne was on his feet now, pacing across the small room. His sneakers were dirty, leaving faint tracks on the already stained beige carpet. From the top of the chest of drawers, he picked up the glass ring-holder, shaped like a finger. He jiggled his hand as though weighing it, like he was considering throwing it, but he replaced it on the dresser top.
“I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you as soon as we got home.”
“So what’s going on, Aria?”
“It’s like Mr. Phinazee told you.”
Dwayne stood in front of the mirrored closet door and met my eyes in reflection. “No,” he said. “It can’t be like he said, because you were pregnant at first. I gave you my aunt’s ring because you were having a baby. You were sick in the morning. I heard you in the bathroom being sick.”
“The doctor said it was just a coincidence.”
He took two steps toward the door, three steps the other way, then again. His feet were too heavy for this room. The ceramic figures on the tops of the dresser and chest rattled with his walking. “You are telling me that you came down with the flu and decided that you were pregnant? Didn’t you take a test? Didn’t you at least pee in a cup before you started telling people?”
In the mirror I stared into his face, which wasn’t quite angry. His mouth hung open in something like disbelief, but his eyes were narrowed like he couldn’t bear to watch what would come next. I also looked at myself, sitting on my childhood bed, my face and hair appearing girlish and vulnerable.
Dwayne sighed, still pacing. “I gave up my boy behind this.” His voice was quiet, but I knew Hermione and Mama could hear him. This house had never been able to conceal private conversations. “I signed the papers, had them notarized.” Dwayne closed his eyes and let air out of his mouth. He uncurled his fist like a flower past its prime, unfurling until the petals fall to the ground. “So what am I supposed to do?”
I moved my lips to speak, but there was no air.
“I feel so stupid,” he said, sitting down hard on Hermione’s bed. “That thing with Keisha, that was a setup, wasn’t it? The whole thing. You and her on the floor hugging and crying. No wonder it all seemed so fake. Like TV instead of real life.”
“No,” I said, crossing the floor to sit beside him. “I had no idea what she called us over there for.”
“Let me tell you something, Aria. Let me tell you something about me. I want a family. A regular family. Even when I had Trey, we weren’t a family. I want a kid that can call me Daddy. When I call Trey on the phone, you know what he says? He says, ‘What’s up, Dwayne?’ I want a kid that can call me Daddy.”
“It would be the same,” I said. “We would raise this baby in our house, with us.” I reached for his hand; he let me hold it, but didn’t squeeze mine back.
“You are not hearing me, Aria. I don’t want no half this, half that. I don’t want no complicated mess in my family. It’s not just having a child that counts. It’s having a child that belongs to me, that belongs to my wife. I don’t want technology. I don’t want Hermione’s egg or Keisha’s baby.”
“What do you want?” I asked him. “Tell me what you want. If I can get it, you can have it. Just tell me that what you want is something I have.”
Dwayne didn’t answer, only shook his head with his lips folded between his teeth.
“We don’t have to have kids,” I said. “It can just be me and you. We’ll be Link’s favorite uncle and aunt, spoil him to death.” By now I was holding on to Dwayne’s forearm with both my hands. He looked at my fingers digging into his skin and I let him go.
Just like that, I let him go.
“I don’t want to be married to somebody who would look me in the face and lie to me. Somebody who will let everybody in town know what’s up except for me. I wasn’t raised like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So what are you going to do about it? Untell the lies? Unsign the papers for me to get my boy back?”
I could have cried then, using my tears to show the breadth of my regret. But the sight of my remorse spilling down my face would provide no comfort for Dwayne, no relief for me.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“So what?” Dwayne stood up with a sigh of box springs and headed toward the door.
I can imagine Dwayne leaving 739 Willow Street, snagging his foot on the roots of the hickory tree dominating the front yard. In my mind I see him starting the Crown Vic, looking at his own face in the rearview mirror, switching on the headlights before pulling away.
In my old bedroom I pulled back the plaid spread on my childhood bed, covering myself with those familiar sheets.
Chapter Sixteen
Rochelle eloped in the middle of August, on a Wednesday afternoon. “The ritual has obscured the meaning,” she explained to me that morning, without hinting of her plans. At lunchtime on the very same day, Rochelle floated into my office smelling of hot weather. “I love my mom, you know I do. But she is driving me crazy. If Rod and I do not get married right now, today, I will never speak to my mother again.” I was sitting at my desk, quietly eating bread and a slice of cheese.
I didn’t interrupt her as she spoke, spilling her rationale. This was how I was these days, more quiet, trying to listen to people when they talk. I hope that if I listen closely, someone will say something to me that will make the world easier to understand. I’m not depressed, as I had to explain to Rochelle. I’m just quiet.
Of course I agreed to be a witness, signed my name on the important line, used my best penmanship. The bride and groom wore what they had worn to work that day. Rod in his dentist’s scrubs, Rochelle in a knee-length denim skirt and canvas tennis shoes. The judge, young and worried-looking, assumed that I, wearing my linen dress and matching jacket, was the bride. After a few awkward seconds, he figured out who was who and proceeded to marry them. I took my role very seriously; I was there to witness.
I watched Rochelle answer all the judge’s questions with a sincere “I will.” I believed her, I loved her, and I envied her.
On the ride home she was reflective. “You know,” she said, “everything that seemed so crucial, so huge, so decisive, the dress, the guest list. None of that seems important anymore.”
Rod concurred, thoughtfully stroking his chin as he navigated through downtown traffic. “I agree completely. But I am not going to be the one to tell your mother.”
In the backseat I didn’t comment, but I was reflective as well. It wou
ld be easy to get married in tennis shoes when you knew you had seventeen yards of hand-beaded Chinese silk hanging in your closet. But I didn’t say anything. I am learning to listen more these days.
But Rochelle, being herself, and having the spooky ability to see into my heart, left two gifts for me. I know that I was supposed to give presents to the newlyweds, but she deleted all her registries, insisting that she needed nothing. She bequeathed to me Kitten and all of his toys and gadgets. This, she made in an official presentation after the movers had hauled all of her things to Rod’s home. The second gift I found later that evening, when I was alone in the house, so lonely that I could taste her absence.
Hanging in my closet, near the back, beside my winter coat, was Rochelle’s extravagant wedding gown with all its careful beadwork and brocade. She had used a seam ripper to remove Rod’s initials from the train. Tiny snippets of threads, like silken stubble, showed where his name used to be. Shoving all of my clothes to one side of the closet, I gave the gown room to breathe.
Keisha had her baby in October. A little boy, named Wellington, but everyone calls him Peanut. He’s hers, all eight and a half pounds of him. And she didn’t lie. He is a very good baby. She often brings him by LARC to visit us. He is a cute kid, all shining eyes and dark curls. Rochelle, Lawrence, and I take turns holding him over our shoulders and clapping his back. Lawrence whispers to the baby as he takes slow paces across the room.
Keisha herself is doing all right, working more and sleeping less. She seems older now, not in an old and haggard kind of way, just more adult. I do my best to help out. I’ve promised to look after Peanut on Wednesday evenings while Keisha sits in on Rochelle’s GED prep seminar. She will retake the exam just after Labor Day.
When I went to her house to tell her that I couldn’t adopt the baby, Keisha hadn’t been home. Her mother, Mary, had answered the door, had let me into the living room, where I took a place on the sofa. I stumbled around telling her how honored I was to have been asked. How very much I wanted a family.
“You’re not going to take the baby, are you?” Mary said.
“No, ma’am, I can’t.”
She crossed her legs and shook her head. “I told Keisha it wasn’t going to fly. I took one look at your boyfriend’s face and I knew it wasn’t going to fly. Keisha said she wasn’t asking Dwayne to take the baby as much as she was asking you. But I told her that if your man wasn’t having it, you wasn’t having it.” She raised her eyebrows, daring me to contradict her.
“I guess that’s what happened. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“Not for Keisha, it’s not.” She stood up. “I’ll give her your message.”
I didn’t stand up. “I want to tell her myself. I want her to know how sorry I am.”
Mary sat back down too. “Child,” she said, “Keisha has been the blessing and the burden of my life. She was premature, you know, tubes in her ears and everything. It was her idea to give this baby up for adoption. I agreed with the first one, she was too young. But this baby might be what she needs. Slow her down a little bit. Help her grow up some. She’ll be disappointed when I tell her that you won’t help her. But she’ll get over it. Don’t worry about Keisha.”
But of course I worried about her. I worry about her now. Mary was right. Peanut has slowed her down. I think I am the only one that’s not sure if this is a good thing or not.
Dwayne and I have been in touch, to handle practical matters such as his recouping of the engagement ring. We keep things friendly, talking about the things you talk about when you don’t want to hurt each other. It is uncomfortable to talk like this to someone that I have loved. Although I have never returned to our old house on Bunnybrooke Drive, I think that it might feel the same way, visiting a place where you lived only to find that the furniture has been all rearranged, that your bedroom is now a solarium or something like that.
I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can’t reuse or repair. I have been making a point not to think about it. “Don’t get philosophical,” Hermione says. Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures—this makes it only more potent.
Saturday is my mother’s birthday. She will be fifty-four; even if she lives to be one hundred, her life is more than half gone. I have not been to her house since Link’s party. The recent sadness coupled with the history of the house, the history of our family, the history of us, has been too much for me. But I will go visit on her birthday, and I will take her flowers, peace lilies tied with simple twine. I will present these blossoms to my mother, kissing her face to feel the warmth of her blood beneath her skin. Dwayne is right: blood does call to blood. I was always waiting for hers to beckon to mine, but I never considered that it would be my blood that would call upon hers.
Epilogue
I think about the dogwoods all the time. It’s winter now; without their leaves, they stand in the front yard short-trunked and twisted. Although I’ve known for years that Hermione was right, that the dogwood was never as tall or as mighty as the pine, there was a part of me that believed what my Sunday school teacher said, that the dogwood grows small and gnarled because its wood was used to make the cross. I understood a world in which there was no way for this tree to straighten itself, and it seemed fitting that even its blooms are marked with four-pointed stigmata so that no one could ever forget what this tree has done.
Just this morning, I walked into my front yard wearing only my nightgown to put my hand on the cold twisted branch of a dogwood tree. The street was quiet. Cynthia vanished weeks ago. As the cold moist ground soaked the soles of my slippers and wet the cotton hem of my gown, I wondered about my neighbor, hoping she was alive and understanding that I would never see her again.
Tomorrow, while the dogwoods are still honest and bare, before they hide their bent trunks with oval leaves, I will find Dwayne and tell him everything. By nightfall he will know what I told my mother and my sister, how I failed to deliver comfort to the dying. I will use my words to show him Eloise, the way she was then, and Genevieve, the baby she held too close to her heart.
Dwayne doesn’t understand what happened to him and me; he says he can’t see why I didn’t “just” tell the truth. But the truth is denser than he can imagine, yet it’s more delicate than my body; it’s more complicated than any love that ever passed between the two of us.
At the end of the summer, before the dogwood trees blazed with red leaves, I returned Dwayne’s ring, snug again in its velvet box. I offered it to him through a hole in the screen door. Taking it without brushing my fingers with his own, Dwayne slid it into his roomy pocket, asking just one question: “Why?” As he stumbled down the crumbling porch steps, I moved my lips, shaping the empty air, my words clotted in my throat.
Now the engagement ring is there in the shoebox where he stores all his disappointments, high on a closet shelf. Dwayne suspects that this is all there is. Maybe he believes that he will have occasion to touch the ring again, to tell someone else what he understands of his aunt Iola and of me, women frightened by the noise of the truth. But I am different now; today nothing scares me more than the hollow clatter of secrets.
There is balm in the telling, and in the hearing too. These words, these truths, will ride on the air like a ragged scrap of song. With every lamp burning I will speak while Dwayne touches my hands and listens. I will ask him what he knows about the dogwoods, crooked and ashamed, their stained petals an annual remembrance.
Although Hermione is right about a great many things, she was wrong about the nature of things gone by. This is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. But there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through.
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