The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  “Just breathe,” Dr. Joshi said. “I’m looking for the strings.” The cold instrument pulled and stretched her vaginal walls. “Okay, got them.”

  With her eyes closed, Ruth balled her fists as the IUD slid through the opening of her cervix. She sighed loudly, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. When her eyes fluttered open, she saw Xavier’s smile hovering over her and then felt Dr. Joshi prying her fingers open to press ibuprofen into her hand.

  “You did just fine.” Xavier brushed her twists off her forehead so he could kiss her. A look passed between her husband and her doctor, one of satisfaction, as if they were in cahoots and some long-ago-conceived plan had finally come together.

  On the train ride home, Ruth wrapped her arms around her stomach. The el careened around a sharp turn, its roar and rumble vibrating inside her, aggravating her cramps.

  Xavier said, “You know we’d kill the parenting game, right?” He nudged her with his thigh. “Our first son should be Xavier Jr. Carry on my name.”

  Ruth swallowed her unease and played along. “Mmm. And if it’s a girl, how about Xena?”

  Xavier frowned. “What kind of name is Xena?”

  “Xena, the Warrior Princess? Hello? Any girl of mine will be a fighter. She needs a fierce name.”

  “Okay, if we’re going the cinematic route, let’s go real old school. When we have our second and third daughters, every one of them will just be Madame X. Kind of like George Foreman naming all his kids George.”

  Ruth punched his arm lightly. “First of all, what makes you think I’m birthing all these babies? And if I’m doing nine months of hard labor, the baby will have some variation of my name.”

  “As long as none of the boys is named Rufus, I’m cool,” he said.

  Up until now, their discussions about children resembled the way they talked about taking a trip to Antarctica. It made for good dinner table conversation, but they never called a travel agent or booked a flight. But this time, when Xavier slung his strong arm around her shoulders, she pictured those arms guiding their child’s swing of a baseball bat or pushing a little one off on a two-wheel bike for the first time.

  “We can do this, babe,” he said. “It’s time.”

  She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window, letting those fantasies marinate, when a commotion at the front of the train forced them both to sit up in their seats.

  A Black boy sat cross-legged on the train floor beating a five-gallon yellow bucket. He lowered his head until his long locs swung in a furious rhythm, thick ropes slapping the sides of the bucket, loose and free and defiant.

  When he turned his face, Ruth recognized him as one of the drummer boys who often tapped out beats for tips on the el platform. Never on the train, though, like this. Usually, the bucket boys were older, not boys with baby faces, but men in their early twenties. This boy couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

  Instinctively, Ruth glanced at the other passengers to gauge their reactions. A few white folks smiled appreciatively or simply stared, mildly curious at this oddity. Others jammed earbuds into their ears, pretending they didn’t hear the drumming or see the boy.

  A middle-aged Black woman pumped her fists in the air and swiveled her hips in her seat. “All right now. Do that thing. Yes, we can,” she said, echoing the familiar Obama campaign slogan, the high from that night still sweetening the air.

  The door to the train car in front of them swung open. A white police officer in uniform walked down the aisle. Xavier stiffened in the seat beside her.

  Many of the bucket boys came from housing projects near Bronzeville, and they were in and out of jail, often simply for drumming in the wrong places in front of people who didn’t embrace their entrepreneurial spirit.

  Ruth felt the tension in Xavier tightly coiled, as if he might spring into action. She put her hand on his arm and he flinched. Burying her nails in his skin, she tried to silently telegraph to him not to move.

  Her eyes stayed on the gun in the cop’s holster.

  She thought about her brother and how, when he was nineteen, a cop had stopped him for speeding and found a dime bag of weed in his car. Not a lot of weed. But enough to send Eli to jail for three weeks. A stupid kid move on his part, but not criminal enough to do time. Since that day, just the sight of a cop made her skin itch.

  No one on the train moved. They stayed quiet, whatever they had to say pushed down inside them by fear or shock or something else.

  The only sounds: the clatter of the train swerving along the tracks and the loud, insistent drumming.

  The boy, so carried away by the music he was making, hadn’t noticed the cop.

  Or the toe of his black boot almost touching the rim of the bucket. Not until the cop stomped. Hard, loud.

  The sticks went still and fell to the floor. The boy’s eyes, brown and wide with fear, slowly traveled upward and stopped at the officer’s gun in its holster.

  “Hey, kid. Get up! What the hell do you think this is?” The officer’s hands rested on his waist, inches from his baton and gun. Ruth heard Xavier mutter under his breath, “Don’t fight. Just do what he says,” and she squeezed his arm.

  Frozen, the boy sat there for a few seconds without moving. The officer stomped his boot again. “Are you deaf and dumb? I said get up, or I’ll haul your ass to jail.” This time the boy scrambled to his feet, tucking the bucket under his arm. He didn’t make eye contact with anybody. When the train lurched to a stop, he scurried off, the cop right behind him.

  Ruth didn’t realize her hands had been shaking until Xavier covered them with his own.

  Nothing bad had happened. No violence. No one hurt. It had been nothing.

  Yet her muscles contracted, leaving her body rigid. She thought of her own son, just a few years younger than that bucket boy. What if that had been him with his legs wrapped around a bucket and a cop standing over him?

  The country had just elected Obama president, giving their dreams wings. But that was then. Now, the clarity of a new day trimmed their feathers as it always had, making it damn near impossible to take flight.

  Back home, Xavier tugged at the hem of her shirt, and soon she lay on the sofa, staring at the halo of his neatly cropped Afro. His lips on hers held her in place, and she looked into his eyes, as soft and brown as chocolate orchids in bloom. She wondered if most people kissed with their eyes closed to block out all senses except for touch. But she needed to see his eyes, to determine how he might handle her truth if she ever found the courage to share it with him.

  She had tried to tell him so many times—during their Netflix binges, on the way to Firestone to get an oil change, or in bed when they recapped their days before falling asleep at night. Those times when they lay side by side, the quiet of the dark would sometimes give her permission to speak, and she rehearsed what she might say. Remember when we saw that cute kid at the mall? Well, I have one of those. Or You wouldn’t judge me if you found out I had a kid out there somewhere but didn’t know where, would you? All of it sounded ridiculous and impossibly wrong when she played it out in her head.

  A man took pride in his seed, a flag in the ground that said he’d been there. A Black man trying to find his way needed something to call his own, a part of him that would endure beyond anything the world threw at him. Ruth’s son didn’t grow from Xavier’s seed.

  “Not now. Not tonight,” Ruth said, peeling his hand from her thigh.

  “Okay, you’ve had a long day. Just let me hold you.” They repositioned themselves until they were spooning, her back pressed against his chest with his arms folded around her.

  Xavier had always been a patient man, proposing three times before she was finally convinced that happily ever after could be hers, too.

  “You’d be the perfect mother,” he’d whisper to her on the street as they watched grimy kids with potato chip crumbs at the corners of their mouths being cursed and dragged by baby-faced mothers.

  Ruth couldn’t tell her h
usband that she was no better than those young women and, actually, probably even worse, since she’d walked away from the life she’d created, leaving some other, nameless, faceless woman to mother her child.

  Three

  Ruth

  Chicago glittered at night along the Magnificent Mile, people bouncing along in a fog of unadulterated bliss. They passed pristine holiday window displays that Ruth swore had to be video frames lifted from a Hallmark Channel movie. The only discordant note was the car horns punctuating the strains of Christmas music floating along Michigan Avenue.

  Ruth inhaled to take it in fully, and a blast of cold air mixed with roasting coffee beans from a nearby café filled her nostrils. The muscle of this city flexed around her, and she stood so small next to the skyscrapers. In Ganton, the most massive structure in town was the Fernwood plant. But in Chicago, she got whiplash every time she walked in the Loop trying to absorb every sight.

  Tess and Penelope strolled a few feet ahead in their matching white pantsuits with white faux fur wraps. Their locs slapped their faces when they twisted their heads excitedly to point out various shops and gift ideas. Every few blocks, Ruth glanced up at Xavier to see if he was just being coy about not knowing where they were headed. With a hint of mischief on his face, he smiled, pretending to be more clued in than he really was. He carried a folding table under his arm like it was a newspaper and bounced along with that happy warrior countenance as usual. She swung a picnic basket by her side, enjoying the tingling sensation of flirting with the unknown. They were joined by other friends and casual acquaintances heading to the secret, undisclosed location, and the mystery added to their giddiness.

  Only the man at the front of the crowd, in the white top hat with the matching white cane, knew their destination. Victor was a casual acquaintance of Xavier’s, whom he’d met on the treadmill at the East Bank Club. Having lived in Paris for a few years, Victor had been a frequent attendee of Dîner en Blanc, the invitation-only, pop-up event that hadn’t made its way from France to the United States yet. When Victor relocated to Chicago, he’d brought his own unofficial, bootleg version with him.

  As the group of about forty moved west of Michigan Avenue, people on the street stared at this merry band of Black folks waving their white cloth dinner napkins. Crowds parted like the sea to let them go by. Ruth tried to imagine how they must have looked to the white and Asian people they passed. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself, Mama often said. They already think we do nothing but sing and dance. Don’t give them a reason to believe it’s true.

  You could pay a price for thumbing your nose at respectability. Ruth knew this. If she’d eschewed respectability, she wouldn’t have made it to Yale or the consumer-packaged-goods company. She wouldn’t have this life where she could put on a white chiffon dress and white leather boots to prance down the street this time of year just to be irreverent.

  Caught up in the magic of this night, though, Ruth didn’t care what anyone thought. She alternated between observing this bougie tribe of hers as if she were an outsider and taking in the actual experience of it. Strutting down State Street, loud and proud, the wind carrying their laughter.

  Parading through the Loop, Tess took Penelope’s hand in hers. It was the first time Ruth had seen them publicly act like a couple. A startled expression crossed Penelope’s face for an instant, and then she squeezed Tess’s waist. A subtle yet unmistakable act of possession. Ownership. Not ownership of each other as partners but of themselves, their identities, their place in the world.

  At one Yale alumni barbecue, Tess had pulled Ruth to the side. She said, “Don’t ever take this for granted.” Confused, Ruth asked what she meant.

  “I mean your husband.” Tess gestured to where Xavier stood getting a hamburger off the grill. “You can bring him here and to your work functions and nobody bats an eye. It’s just routine. Nothing is routine for me.”

  The urge to question Tess further passed and they never spoke of it again, but seeing her friend and Penelope showing affection so openly made her realize that something had emboldened them after Election Night.

  An odd sense of sadness overtook Ruth when she watched them and how free they’d become. She wanted to move into this new existence with them, but her feet remained stuck in the quicksand of her past. How could she enjoy that kind of ease when she carried something so heavy? Thoughts of her baby boy flooded her mind. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d relegated her son to a life of misfortune in Ganton.

  When they walked under the el tracks, Ruth spotted a Black man and woman huddled under a blanket, and she suspected they were close to her own age even though they appeared to be twice as old. The woman’s cheeks drooped, and her face had collapsed from all the missing teeth. Her companion, a man in a dingy brown overcoat and red plaid pajama bottoms, pulled a wrinkled, dirt-stained Obama T-shirt from under the blanket and waved it at them. Seeing the ragged couple troubled her on a personal level. Lately, she’d been having the same nightmare about a little boy, waif thin and filthy, in an alley begging for food. In her dream, she reached out to him, but he couldn’t see or hear her.

  “Ten dollars! Yes, we can,” the man called out in a tired voice, repeating the familiar campaign slogan.

  Consumed by their own revelry, no one in her group seemed to even notice the man’s postelection sales pitch.

  The man’s hollowed, bloodshot eyes found hers. When she slowed her stride, he zeroed in on her hesitation. “For you, miss, five dollars.” She held up an empty hand as if to say she had no cash.

  Xavier leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Just don’t engage.”

  The man tried again. “Hey, lady. At least I’m not out here robbing people. I’m a businessman.” The woman by his side rocked back and forth and Ruth inadvertently shivered, imagining how cold she must have been with only that threadbare blanket for cover.

  Ruth refused to meet his eyes again, even as guilt flipped her insides. The only way she assuaged that guilt was to remind herself that she and Xavier made annual donations to charities that qualified as tax-exempt with the IRS. Legitimate organizations with listings in the proper registries.

  Tugging at her white coat sleeve, Xavier pulled her along. “C’mon now. I admire that dude’s hustle, but you know those shirts are hot.”

  Penelope linked her arm with Ruth’s. “I’d represent you in court, but my fee would be about fifty times as much as that shirt costs. Probably not the wisest financial move.”

  “You don’t even do criminal defense work,” Ruth said, welcoming the light banter.

  “I took a class in law school. Close enough.”

  Ruth allowed herself to be swallowed back into the group as Victor led them toward an empty, rehabbed warehouse. The building stood as a gray ghost, windows boarded up, lips sealed about its industrious past. The rattle of an el train sounded overhead, and Ruth couldn’t imagine any kind of party in this drab place. But no more than a half hour later, the inside was transformed into a white wonderland.

  White tables. White linens. White flowers. White wine. Even a white bird squawked in a cage.

  “If that ain’t some internalized racial self-hatred, I don’t know what is,” Harvey had said half-jokingly when he declined their invitation to attend. In spite of their coaxing, he’d smiled and said, “Thank you, but I’ll pass.”

  If only Harvey could’ve seen how beautiful they were that night. A kaleidoscope of colors. Every shade of black popped against the white backdrop. They were sculptors and scientists. Bankers and builders. The world was their oyster. And they knew it. That had never been truer than now.

  They dined on blue cheese canapés with walnuts, melon caprese salads, and Parmesan tortellini bites. Each table and food display more extravagant than the last. No matter how many bougie parties she attended, Ruth would never get used to some of this fancy cuisine. She nibbled and moved food around on the tiny white plate.

  What would Eli think of this spread? She and h
er brother had grown up eating fried baloney, not bologna sandwiches on Wonder bread, and chasing it with red drink. You couldn’t retrain taste buds on a whim. But she had slowly groomed her palate to appreciate decadent desserts. Her contribution for the night: her famous chocolate martinis and Dom Perignon champagne truffles from Teuscher Chocolates on Michigan Avenue. Dark chocolate flown in every week from a kitchen in Zurich, Switzerland.

  A woman in a floor-length white mink applauded Barack Obama for marrying well, for choosing Michelle—an attorney with her own well-established career, an inherent sense of confidence, and beautiful dark skin.

  Tess agreed. “You don’t have to look twice to know she’s a sister!”

  Nodding, Xavier added, “I know that’s right. She’s a descendant of slaves. That matters.”

  In a French accent that hadn’t diminished in the five years he’d been back in the States, Victor tapped his white cane to get everyone’s attention. “You American Blacks are always consumed with the question of race.”

  Penelope shot back, “Since when is Detroit not in America? You were born in Detroit, right?”

  Bolstered by her friend and bristling herself at Victor’s condescension, Ruth raised an eyebrow and kept her voice low. “And who do you think you are? Are you not claiming Black these days?”

  Having been raised by grandparents who had lived through the ugliness of the Jim Crow South and the oppression that continued when they migrated north, she couldn’t let Victor minimize the lasting impact of racism in America.

  He lifted the rim of his top hat to reveal his hazel eyes. “I’m a citizen of the world, to put it plainly.” Ignoring the eye rolls in the room, he continued. “What we have to get a handle on is class warfare. We must lift ourselves economically, and I know we can do it.”