The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  “Did you ever think you’d live to see it?” she called to Mama.

  “See what, child?” Mama flipped the knob on one of the burners, and the boiling bubbles that had licked the rim of the pot of corn seconds before began to recede.

  “Our first Black president. I thought about you and Eli on Election Day. Papa, too. I hate that he didn’t get to vote for Obama.”

  “You live long enough, you’re bound to see a lot of things. Good and bad.”

  “I know you’re proud.”

  “Let’s just hope they don’t kill him. If he gets too high and mighty, they will. And my pride can’t save him. Yours, neither.”

  “He’ll be fine. The country’s changing.”

  Mama walked over to the buffet, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the Kennedy photo. “What happened to him?” And then she pointed to the pictures of King and Jesus. “And what about them? Hmm? If they killed Jesus, what makes you think they won’t do it to a Black man in the White House?”

  When Mama’s mind was made up, there was no swaying her. Making her way to the living room, Ruth saw Papa’s old brown recliner with the loose threads and white cotton puffs poking through the holes. Whenever Mama expected company, she would put a bath towel over the seat cushion to hide the rips and tears. Ruth slowly lowered herself into the recliner, nervous, as if Papa might see her and playfully run her off his favorite chair. Sinking into the upholstery, she let her fingers glide over the fabric of each arm.

  Glancing up, she caught Mama watching her, leaning on the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. “He loved that old chair. I told him he was going to die in that chair, and that rascal had the nerve to go ahead and do just that.”

  Shortly after feeding Papa his lunch, Mama had hollered a question to him from the kitchen. When he didn’t answer, she found him in his chair, chin on his chest, dead. No matter how many years passed, this chair would always be Papa’s. If you sniffed really hard, you could smell his tobacco and aftershave.

  “It feels nice sitting here. Kind of like I’m closer to him, you know. After all these years, it’s still hard to believe he’s not going to come around the corner and tickle me until I get out of his chair.” Her last few words caught in her throat.

  “Oh, yeah. He loved clowning with you and your brother.” Mama smiled.

  “And with you, too.” Ruth winked, but Mama ignored it.

  Papa would come home from the plant with black grease on his hands and sink into this chair, waiting for Mama to walk by. Then he’d grab her from behind, leaving his fingerprints on her skin, and tuck her into an embrace she’d squirm out of, her giggle saying just the opposite, that she hoped he’d pull her closer.

  Sometimes, they’d fire up the turntable and slow-dance to the Temptations while she and Eli laughed or covered their faces, embarrassed. Then other times Papa romanced Mama by swiping the latest issue of Jet magazine from the plant’s break room, sticking it in his lunch pail to bring home for her to read about the stars of her favorite shows or some Harlem rapper bleaching her skin.

  Now, Ruth scanned her grandmother’s face for a glimpse of that woman, but she couldn’t find her.

  After Papa died and before those he left behind slunk off into their own corners of misery, they’d shared stories about things the old man used to say and do. Sometimes Ruth couldn’t be sure if her memories were her own or someone else’s.

  By the time the sun set, Ruth and Mama were sitting down to a meal of fried chicken, creamed corn, green beans, and mashed potatoes. They ate without speaking, only the sound of their forks against the plates breaking the silence.

  Ten

  Ruth

  There were few pictures around the house of Ruth’s years at Yale, little evidence it ever happened except for Ruth’s diploma. Whenever former classmates emailed old college photos, she cringed at the bowl-shaped mushroom hairstyles and the tracksuits they used to rock in loud colors. Students on campus wore oversized sweaters and slouchy, baggy pants. The only saving grace of late-nineties fashions had been that they helped her hide the leftover pooch she carried in the months after the birth of her baby.

  When she got to Yale, no one knew her. The handful of kids from Ganton who did go to college stayed in-state. Her little corner of Indiana tethered Ruth to her past, to the possibility of questions she couldn’t answer, forcing her to lie. But in Connecticut she could be somebody else. Start over. Create a new life.

  Freshman year, she roomed with Emily Fontaine, a white girl from Greenwich. Ruth hadn’t spent long periods of time with anyone white except for Lena back home. But Ruth soon realized that she didn’t count. Lena wasn’t like the white people she met at Yale.

  Emily was petite, with tousled brown hair that she must have intentionally mussed to give it that careless look. She walked with her toes pointed outward, a sign that she’d studied dance. No one would consider her pretty in the purest sense of the word, but she had enough money to manufacture the illusion of beauty and make it look effortless.

  The daughter of an anesthesiologist and a hedge fund manager, Emily came from money, like most of Ruth’s classmates. Two older brothers had followed in her father’s footsteps and worked on Wall Street. Ruth and Emily exchanged these obligatory, polite details when they first met outside their dorm and then had to begin negotiating how to fit each of their belongings into the cramped space of one dorm room.

  After showering in the mornings, Emily would return to their room and flip her drenched hair forward and back, spraying water on everything within a two-foot radius.

  “It’s so weird. I never see you wash your hair,” Emily said from time to time with practiced indifference that irked Ruth even more than if the girl had come right out and said, I think Black people are dirty.

  Ruth could have told her she visited a salon in New Haven once a week for a shampoo and blow dry or roller set. But that would have led to a discussion on why some Black girls washed their hair once every week or, God forbid, two weeks, only serving to reinforce misperceptions. Ruth said nothing and just glared as Emily moved through the room with proprietorship as if it were her room and not theirs.

  When Emily’s friends visited, they sat on Ruth’s bed and plied her with questions: Where are you from? What do your parents do? Where do you summer? She’d never heard anyone use summer as a verb. And it wasn’t just the white kids who were elitist. Even the Black kids came off bougie as hell, recounting tales of their summers in the Hamptons and Links cotillions back home. Soon she realized this was how people distinguished themselves, figured out their place in the socioeconomic order of things.

  These kids knew nothing about the real world. She wanted to say, I created a life over the summer, thank you very much. She wanted to tell them she had carried another human being inside her body, nourishing and growing it for nine months. Then she pushed it out into the world to live on its own.

  She wanted to tell them that Papa had done backbreaking labor in a plant until he couldn’t work anymore. That her grandmother had to button his shirts, feed him toast small bite by small bite, and lift him onto the toilet those last few months. When the bills piled up, Mama had to go back to work again at the Majestic Inn, picking up used condoms and cleaning beer-soaked sheets left behind by guests. Ruth had learned early on not to judge people by how they made their money as long as it was an honest living.

  Just survive and make it through these four years. That’s what Ruth told herself to stay sane. She attended the white keg parties and got her buzz on there first. Then she settled in for the night at the Black Greek ones where bodies pressed against each other in the darkness, sweat and weed thickening the air. Whenever Ginuwine’s “Pony” came on, she’d be grinding in a corner with boys she’d seen on the yard or with townies, the local guys who infiltrated the campus’s party scene. But if “Killing Me Softly” played in the DJ’s rotation, she had to leave the party in tears because it reminded her too much of Ronald and what could have
been. No one at Yale knew about him or the legacy he’d left in Ruth’s life.

  One of those tearful nights she came back to the dorm buzzed and saw Emily emerge from the communal shower naked. Smooth as wax paper, her flat stomach shimmering with fresh dew.

  Ruth stared and, without thinking, said, “You are so beautiful.”

  Obviously mortified, Emily grabbed a ratty T-shirt from the bathroom counter and frantically slipped it over her head. “Oh my God, you’re weirding me out right now. I’m flattered, but girls aren’t my thing. Nothing personal. Really.”

  Ruth blinked, embarrassed she’d been so spontaneous. She didn’t really think Emily was beautiful. Why had she said that? It was just that the girl’s stomach transfixed her. Looking away, Ruth scratched her own midsection through her nightshirt, thinking of what lay underneath, the dimpling of flabby flesh and the stretch marks that itched constantly. Then she glared at her roommate.

  “Look, I was just being nice. I don’t get down like that, okay? And if I did, you wouldn’t be my type. So, get over yourself.” Nothing between them flowed smooth after that. They shared meager square footage and breathed the same air, nothing more.

  Most days, Ruth couldn’t stop thinking about her baby. She burrowed in the cathedral of books at the library, where she could lose herself in differential equations and probabilities, but she had trouble focusing. She wanted to fall in love with math again the way she had in high school, but the numbers became indecipherable and began to resemble a foreign language.

  Doubt gnawed at her and panic crawled up her spine when she considered that the one thing she could always count on no matter what was slowly slipping away. Even as an unwed, pregnant teenager, she was still smart. Her mistake couldn’t erode something so innate. All that changed at Yale, where she was often one of the only Black students in her class. It soon became apparent to her that an A in Ganton schools equaled a C in the prep schools these rich kids came from.

  She couldn’t flunk her classes and lose her scholarship, returning to Ganton a failure. Not after all her grandparents and brother had sacrificed to give her this opportunity. On one late night of studying, she dropped a quarter and a dime into a pay phone outside the library, then dialed her home number.

  “Hello.” Mama’s voice croaked like she hadn’t used it in hours.

  “Were you asleep? Did I wake you up?”

  Clearing her throat, her grandmother said, “No, baby. I was up. What’s wrong?”

  A deluge of tears gathered in the back of Ruth’s throat. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine, Mama.”

  Silence stretched between them for what felt like minutes but had to be only seconds. She heard Mama’s heavy breathing on the other end and found it oddly comforting.

  “If you need money, I can talk to Eli and have him send you a little bit. He doesn’t get paid again until this Friday. So, you may have to wait till then.”

  “I’m good on money. I still have some left from what you all sent last time.”

  “All right then. How are your studies coming?”

  From her backpack, Ruth pulled her quiz sheet from Multivariable Calculus for Engineers and stared at her failing grade under the light of a streetlamp. She crumpled the paper in her fist. “Classes are good. You know me. I love school. Things are fine. Look, I know it’s late. I’m gonna let you go now.”

  “Ruth?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “You deserve to be there just like those other kids. Don’t forget that. I’m proud of you, baby.”

  Pressing the phone to her ear, Ruth cradled it, tucking Mama’s words and her voice in her memory. Afraid her own voice would betray her, she gently placed the receiver back into its cradle.

  Chemical engineering had a reputation for punching out those who couldn’t cut it. Professors seemed to revel in this up-or-out approach to academia. When engineering students formed study groups, it was the Darwinian process of picking teams in grade-school gym class all over again. In the survival-of-the-fittest game, they chose Ruth last or simply left her out.

  Desperate for motivation to fight, she conjured the memory she usually pushed to the corner of her mind because it was too painful to remember. Her baby boy’s eyes and the disappointment she’d left in them. Walking away from him couldn’t have been all for nothing. So, she found a tutor through the National Society of Black Engineers and burned that midnight oil, as Papa used to say when he took on extra shifts at the plant. Determined to not just stay afloat, but swim, she climbed from failing grades to solid B’s in every class.

  Ruth dug out Mama’s Bible and flipped to the back, where she knew her grandmother kept photos that hadn’t made it into the family photo album. A shot of Eli as a kid on his skateboard, jumping over a crack in the sidewalk. One of Mama’s brother, Uncle Mitch, in his crisp white U.S. Navy uniform, smiling like he was excited to go off to war when he’d actually just been unlucky in the draft. Ruth found a few snapshots of herself when she couldn’t have been more than three or four, cheesing for the camera, poking her tongue through a gap in her front teeth.

  She riffled through the photos until she landed on a picture of her mother as a teenage girl. Mama and Papa had named their only child Joanna, after a woman from the New Testament whom Jesus had healed once and come to rely on as a traveling companion.

  In this shot, Joanna wore a ratty fuchsia coat that could only be described as gaudy, flaring at the hips and stopping midthigh. If she was wearing a skirt, you couldn’t see it, so she may as well have been naked from the waist down. A glaring, brassy necklace obviously on the cheap side sat on her neck catching the camera’s light.

  Mama and Papa had Joanna late in life, and from what Ruth could tell, they’d spoiled her, entertaining the girl’s every whim, giving her a wide berth. Joanna had taken full advantage of her freedom and indulged in anything and everything she wanted, including crack cocaine.

  It never made sense that Joanna chose that poison over her own children. How did a mother make that calculation? But who was Ruth to judge? You could say Yale had been her crack. The lure of it so potent she left her baby behind for it.

  As a girl, Ruth asked her grandparents where her mother had gone. They always said she was sick and needed time away to recuperate. Leaving the door open for a miraculous, triumphant return someday. A prodigal daughter moment that never came, and Ruth began to wonder if her mother was even alive.

  At school, students drew pictures of their mommies and daddies and explained their occupations as best they could with their childlike comprehension of the world. When Ruth received this assignment in Miss Albert’s first-grade class, she pressed the crayon hard on the dark green construction paper, drawing a brown outline of Papa. Big hands. Big work boots. And for his hair, she left part of it bare on top and colored in the sides with gray crayon. She used the same gray crayon to fill in Mama’s curls that framed her face beautifully.

  “Why isn’t your mommy and daddy’s hair black?” The loud, accusatory question came from Loretta Jenkins, a smart, wiry little girl who always wore three thick braids, one on either side of her head and one in the back.

  “Because it isn’t,” Ruth answered her with a hint of defensiveness, without knowing why the distinction about hair color mattered, only that it did.

  Knowing that Loretta’s question had left Ruth off-balance triggered the other children to giggle, all their laughter directed at Ruth. Children didn’t need details or context to understand differences and seize upon them.

  Encouraged now by the other kids, Loretta piped up again, making her point plain. “They look old. Old as dirt.”

  Heat rushed to Ruth’s head and she wanted to lob an equally hurtful blow back at the girl but couldn’t think of a single thing to say with all those eyes on her and their laughter charging the air. She didn’t dare tell Mama and Papa about it. She was too embarrassed. For them as much as herself. Instead, she confided in Eli. Loretta’s brother, Kenneth, was in his class, and Eli marched rig
ht up to him the next day and socked him in his jaw. Hitting a girl was out of bounds and Eli knew this. Kenneth’s innocence and ignorance of the whole matter was irrelevant, and when everyone saw his busted lip, Loretta kept her mouth shut for the rest of the school year.

  Not until much later and after years of prodding did Ruth learn about Joanna’s drug addiction. It began during the eighties crack epidemic and she was a textbook case: starting with marijuana as the gateway and then graduating to harder, more dangerous drugs. One of those stories that seemed a bit hyperbolic but parents told their kids anyway as a cautionary tale. It worked as a deterrent for Ruth, who swore off drugs. In that one area of her life, she could claim moral superiority.

  It was a man—a boy, actually—that had been Joanna’s downfall. Ruth often wondered whether Joanna had a Ronald in her life. Had she gotten caught up with a guy she thought she loved, someone who pounded away at her body until the pain went away? Mama and Papa would only say they didn’t know the identity of Ruth and Eli’s biological father.

  You’re better off without him, Papa used to say, sure that his love could fill the gap.

  Mama usually dismissed the topic. You don’t need him, whoever he is. You got people. Not everybody can say that.

  But a little girl needed a daddy: the first man she would ever try to impress, a man who could spin her around and never let her fall, one who would set the bar so high that no other man could ever reach it.

  For a long time, Ruth would look at men’s faces wistfully, hoping that one of them would claim her as his own. She did this until she moved away from Ganton to go to college.

  And then the object of her focus changed, and she began inspecting little boys’ faces, wondering if one of them could be her child. Had her son done the same thing in search of her?

  Ruth couldn’t help but think of her husband, a good man who desperately yearned for children while a man like her biological father had ducked his duties. But then again, she had done the same thing. How was she any different from the man who had sired her? Whoever said the apple didn’t fall far from the tree had been right, and the pain of that truth never dulled.