by Tayari Jones
“Does he take after your husband?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
“Hypereducated single mother here,” she said, raising her hand. “But yes. Jelani is the spitting image of his daddy. When they are together, people make jokes about human cloning.”
She lowered herself onto the floor beside her son, then unwrapped a paper packet to reveal brown fabric the same color as her skin. She opened another, several shades darker, and then a third that was the peachy white that crayon companies used to call “flesh.”
“We are the world,” she said. “I believe this is enough to get us through to the new year. Inventory at the shop is pretty low. Celestial is going to have to be a lean, mean sewing machine if she wants to restock. I stay, trying to tell her to let me help, but she says that it’s not a poupée if she doesn’t sew it herself and write her John Hancock on the booty.”
I joined her on the floor, dangling my key ring to get the baby’s attention. He laughed, reaching for it. “Can I hold him?”
“Knock yourself out,” she said.
I pulled Jelani onto my lap. He struggled against me and then relaxed. Not having much experience with babies, I felt awkward and silly. The scene reminded me of a photo taped to Olive’s mirror—Big Roy carrying me when I was little like this. My father looked apprehensive as if he were cradling a ticking bomb. I bounced Jelani, wondering if this was the age I was when Big Roy made me his junior.
Celestial returned from the kitchen with two champagne flutes with tiny scoops of ice cream floating atop the bubbly. I took a sip and was reminded of Olive. On my birthday, she used to pull out her punch bowl to mix a ginger ale punch with gobs of orange sherbet bobbing on top. Greedy for the memory of it, I tipped the glass again. When Celestial returned with her own glass, mine was almost finished.
We sat there, the three of us, four if you counted the baby. Celestial and Tamar talked about fabric while I kept busy with Jelani. I tickled him under his chin until he gave his little baby laugh that sounded slightly hydraulic. It was amazing to think that here, in my arms, was an entire human being.
The son that Celestial and I didn’t have would have been four or five, I think. If a kindergartener slept in the back room, there is no way Celestial would be talking about how she’s with Andre now. I would say, “A boy needs his father.” This is a scientific fact. There wouldn’t be anything else to talk about.
But as things were, there was a lot to talk about, more words than could fit into my mouth.
Celestial
Eventually, Tamar gathered up her little boy, zipping him into a puffy coat that looked like something an astronaut might wear. Roy and I were both sorry to see her go. It was as though we were her parents, and she our busy, successful daughter who could spare only a few minutes for a visit, but we were grateful for every single second. We stood in the doorway, waving as she looked over her shoulder to ease out of the driveway. As she pulled away, her headlights became two more glowing lights on this block bedazzled for the holidays. My own house was dark; I didn’t even bother to hang the spruce wreath I’d bought a month ago. Old Hickey was festive, though. A string of lights candy-caned up the thick trunk. This was Andre’s work, his effort to assure himself that everything would be all right.
Even after Tamar was long gone, I stared down the quiet street and worried about Andre. He was in Louisiana now, trying to do the noble thing. I’d rung him from the store while he was on the road, making his way south. We’re worth it, I told him. How had so much changed in the span of a couple of hours? Absently, I reached in my pocket for my phone, but Roy swept my hand to the side. “Don’t call him yet. Give me a chance to speak my piece first.”
But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he guided my hands across the break in the bridge of his nose, along the scar at his hairline, small but punctuated twice on each side by pinpoint-raised scars. His face, the totality of it, rested in my palms, solid and familiar. “You remember me?” he asked. “You recognize me?”
I nodded, letting my arms hang at my side as he explored my features. He closed his eyes as though he couldn’t trust them. When his thumb passed my lips, I caught it in a light pucker. Roy responded with a relieved sigh. He led me through the house without turning on the lights, like he wanted to see if he could find his way by touch. A woman doesn’t always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Every one of us has lain down for a reason that was not love. Could I deny Roy, my husband, when he returned home from a battle older than his father and his father’s father? The answer is that I could not. Behind Roy in the narrow hallway, I understood that Andre had known this from the start. This is why he raced down the highway, to keep me from doing this thing that we all feared I would have to do.
How, then, should I classify what transpired between my husband and me the night he returned to me from prison? We were there in the kitchen, me with my back against the granite counter, melted sorbet soaking my clothes.
Roy snaked his hands under my blouse. “You love me. You know you do.”
I wouldn’t have answered even if he hadn’t cut off my breath with a kiss that tasted like desire streaked through with anger. Yes means yes and no means no, but what is the meaning of silence? Roy’s body was stronger now than it was five years ago when he last slept in this house. He was a commanding stranger breathing hot on my neck.
When he moved us in the direction of the master bedroom, the corner room that had originally belonged to my parents and was the space where Roy and I slept as husband and wife, I said, “Not in there.” He ignored me, leading me as though we were dancing. Some things were as unavoidable as the tide.
He removed my clothes as easily as you might peel an orange, then he leaned over to switch on a bright lamp. I was ashamed of my body, five years older than when he last saw me this way. Time can be hard on a woman. I drew knees up to my chest.
“Don’t be shy, Georgia,” Roy said. “You’re perfect.” He gripped my shin, gently tugging my legs straight. Don’t hide from me. Uncross your arms, let me see you.”
In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren’t. On those pages is a mysterious character that conveys what it is to have no volition even when you do. On the same page it is explained how once or twice in your life you will find yourself bared, underneath the weight of a man, but a most ordinary word will save you.
“Do you have protection?” I asked him.
“What?” he said.
“Protection.”
“Don’t say that, Georgia,” he said. “Please don’t say that.”
He rolled away from me and we lay parallel. I shifted, looking out the window at Old Hickey, ancestral and silent. Even when Roy planted his weighty hand on my hip I didn’t turn. “Be my wife,” he said.
I didn’t answer, so he flipped me over like a log and pushed his face into the hollow of my throat, wedging his hands between my thighs. “Come on, Celestial,” he said. “It’s been so many years.”
“We need protection,” I said, filling my mouth with the word, feeling its weight on my tongue.
He guided my hand below his rib where the skin was knotted and rubbery. “I got stabbed,” he said. “I never did anything to this dude. Never even looked at him, and he sharpens a goddamn toothbrush and tries to kill me with it.”
I let my thumb travel over the scar.
“You see what I’ve been through?” he said. “You didn’t know what was happening to me. I know that if you knew, you wouldn’t have done me like that.”
He kissed my shoulder and up toward my neck. “Please.”
“We have to use protection,” I said.
“Why?” Roy said. “Because I was in prison? I was innocent. You know I was innocent. When that lady got raped, I was with you. So you know I didn’t do it. Don’t treat me like a criminal, Celestial. You’re the only one that knows for su
re. Please don’t treat me like I got some kind of disease.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Well, can you at least listen?” He lifted stories from his box of memories, each one making the case for why he shouldn’t be forced to put a barrier between us.
“I accidentally killed a man,” he told me. “I’ve been through a lot, Celestial. Even if you go in innocent, you don’t come out that way. So, please?”
“Don’t beg me,” I said. “Please don’t do that.”
He moved closer, pinning me to the bed.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do this.”
“Please,” he said.
Picture us there in our marriage bed. Me, fixed to the mattress, completely at his grace. But is there any other way, even when love is true and pure, not dirty with time and betrayal? Maybe that’s what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person. I closed my eyes feeling his weight above me, and I prayed like I was supposed to when I was a little girl. If I should die before I wake. “Protection,” I whispered, knowing there was no such thing.
“I’m in pain, Celestial. Can’t you tell?”
And so I lay myself back again, seeing how he had suffered these years, seeing how he suffered then, with his head against the pillow. “I know,” I said to Roy. “I know.”
He turned to me. “Is it because you think I got something, that I did something while I was in there? Or is it because you don’t want to get pregnant again? Because you don’t want to have a baby for me?”
There was no acceptable answer to this question. No man welcomes this way of doing it but not doing it. Coming close but only so close.
“Tell me,” he said. “Which one?”
I flattened my lips, sealing the truths into myself. I shook my head.
He turned, pressing my chest with his own. “You know,” he said, with a trace of menace. “I could take it if I wanted to.”
I didn’t struggle. I didn’t plead. I braced myself for what seemed fated from the moment I entered my own home and felt that it was no longer mine.
“I could,” he said again, yet he raised himself from the bed, wrapping the sheet around himself like a winding cloth, leaving me cold and exposed. “I could, but I won’t.”
Roy
Davina didn’t do me that way. When I came calling, she opened her home. She opened herself. Celestial, my lawfully wedded, is playing me like Fort Knox. Walter tried to warn me. I was prepared to stomach that there had been another man, maybe even other men. A woman’s only human. I’m not naïve. Nobody survives prison being cute. But when a woman doesn’t divorce you, puts money on your books, and doesn’t change the locks on you—under these circumstances a man might think that he has a chance. And when you lean in to kiss her, she lets you, when you lead her by the hand to a bedroom, you know that you weren’t imagining the whole thing. I’ve been away five years, but not so long that I don’t remember how the world works.
Do you have protection?
She knew I didn’t. I came to her ready but not prepared. She is my wife. How would she feel if I broke out with a rubber? She wouldn’t take it that I was being considerate; she would take it that I thought she had been sleeping around. Why couldn’t it be like it was in New York, when we were almost strangers? How many times, when I was away, did I recall that first night? I flicked through all the details, a silent movie in my mind, and I guarantee there was no latex on the set. That night in Brooklyn, I felt like Captain America; I didn’t even care that I lost my tooth defending her honor. You don’t get that many opportunities to be a hero like that. Now she wants to act like it never happened.
I threw the bedsheet to the floor and straggled the house in the buff, searching for somewhere to lay my nappy head. The master bedroom was out of the question for obvious reasons, so I settled myself in the sewing room and flopped on the futon, although it was a little short for a man my size. The room was cluttered with poupées in various stages of creation. Beside the sewing machine was a cloth head, box brown, and a few pairs of arms topped with waving hands. I won’t lie and say it wasn’t disturbing. But I was already disturbed when I stormed in there.
The finished dolls sat up on a shelf, looking patient and friendly. I thought of Celestial’s assistant—was her name Tamara? I thought of her big, healthy boy. When Celestial left the room to get their coats, the girl touched my arm with her blue-green fingernails. “You are going to have to let her go,” she said. “Break your own heart, or they will break it for you.” My anger rose up the way smoke does, thick and suffocating. There was only one thing to say, but it wasn’t fit for polite company. “I’m telling you,” she said. “Because I know what you don’t. It’s not going to be on purpose, but you’re going to get hurt.” I was trying to figure out what kind of game this little girl was playing when Celestial returned with the coats and kissed the baby like he was her own.
It was maybe three o’clock in the morning; these were drunk thoughts, even though I wasn’t drinking. I reached up on the shelf, pulled down one of the dolls and punched it in the face. The soft head dented before it sprang back, still smiling. I stretched out on the futon, with my feet hanging over the edge, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I got up, crept down the hallway and stood outside the room where Celestial was sleeping, but I couldn’t bring myself to try the knob. If she locked the door against me, I didn’t want to know.
Back in the workroom, I picked up the phone and dialed Davina, who answered sounding frightened, as anyone would be at this hour.
“Hey, Davina, it’s Roy,” I said.
“And?”
“I wanted to say hello,” I told her.
“Well, you just did,” she said back. “Satisfied?”
“Don’t hang up. Please stay on the line. Let me say how much I appreciate you spending time with me. For being so nice.”
“Roy,” she said with a little melt in her voice. “You safe? You don’t sound solid. Where are you?”
“Atlanta.” After that, I didn’t have much in the way of words. There’s not many women who will hold the phone and listen to a grown man cry over another woman, but Davina Hardrick waited until I was able to say, “Davina?”
“I’m here.”
She didn’t say, I forgive you. But I was grateful for those two words just the same.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“Go on to sleep. Like they say, weeping endures for a night.”
“But joy comes in the morning,” I finished. This is the promise spoken at every Baptist funeral. I thought of my mama, and I asked Davina if she had been there for her home-going.
“Did you see Celestial and Andre? Were they together then?”
Davina said, “Why do you care so much?”
“Because I do.”
“I’ll tell you this. I saw them afterward when I was picking up some hours at the Saturday Nighter for my uncle Earl. They came in and started getting drunk in the middle of the day, her especially. I don’t think they were together, but it was coming. You could taste it on the breeze, like rain on the way. When he went to the bathroom, she leaned across the bar and said to me, ‘I am a terrible person.’ ”
“She said that? My wife?”
“Yeah. That was her exact words. Then old boy came back and she got herself together. Five minutes later, they were gone.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s all. Later on, your daddy came in. Black dirt on his clothes from head to toe. People say he buried your mother with his own two hands.”
I held the receiver hard, pressing it against my ear, like that would make me less alone. I wasn’t even a week out of prison and already I felt caged again, like a woman had used a length of clothesline to bind me to a chair. You hear these stories about men who shoplift a beer right in front of the security cameras so they can get sent back to the joint, to get back to where they know what to expect. I wouldn’t do something like that, but I’m not mystified by the choi
ce. Pulling a soft lap blanket over my hips, I thought about Walter, my father the Ghetto Yoda, and I wondered what he would say about all of this.
Davina said, “You there?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Get some rest. It’s hard at first, for everybody. Take care of yourself,” she said with a calming voice like a lullaby.
“Davina, I was thinking to tell you something. I’ve been thinking back.”
“Yeah?”
“I remember a boy named Hopper.”
“Was he okay?” Her voice was so low that I couldn’t say for sure that I actually heard it, yet I knew what she said.
“He was doing okay. That’s why I didn’t remember him, because there wasn’t much to remember.”
When I hung up, the large orange clock over the sewing machine announced that it was three thirty, a perfect right-angle o’clock. I figured Andre was at my father’s house, likely sleeping in my bed. In the dark, I smiled a little bit, picturing Andre’s expression when Big Roy told him I was gone to Atlanta. He was probably dressed in jeans and a T-shirt like an average person, but in my mind’s eye he was always wearing that skinny gray suit he wore for my mother’s services. Oh Mama, I thought. What would she think if she could see me now, sleeping on the couch in my own house, surrounded by happy baby dolls that Celestial was going to sell for $150 a pop?
“Only in Atlanta.” I said it out loud before I finally figured out how to sleep.
Andre
Roy’s father and I slept in the living room, with me on the couch and him in his recliner chair, like he didn’t trust me not to make a break for the door. He didn’t need to worry. By the time I covered myself with the crisp sheet and soft blanket, I was tired and ready to close the book on this insane day. The room was quiet except for the hiss of the gas heater in the corner, glowing blue and running hot. Still, we woke up several times in the night and shared a few words.