The Untelling (10 page)

“How bright can she be if she’s hooked up with Head Cheese?”

I let that go. It’s never smart to criticize other people’s relatives. And besides, I liked Maurice. I agreed that he wasn’t a good choice for a young lady who wanted something lasting, but I understood how Denise could have been persuaded to give it a shot.

Dwayne sat up in bed, propped against his pillows, fiddling with a brass lock he’d brought home from work. The key was probably in his jacket pocket, but Dwayne wanted to try and open it using only metal prods. “This lock—it’s an ASSA—is supposed to be pick-proof.”

“Well, is it?”

“ASSA is good. But I’m a Medeco man myself.” He let out a low whistle between his teeth as he slid the strip of spring metal into the slot again. “What I am trying to do is reach in and lift the pins. But ASSA, their locks are sort of doubled up.”

“Sleep on it,” I said.

This had been my favorite sort of evening, when we played house. I’d cooked dinner for the group, family food: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole. Denise and I had washed dishes together while the guys drank Jack and Cokes while watching
SportsCenter
. Cheese’s parade of dates served as a sort of personal abacus for Dwayne and me. Each girl a wooden bead, marking the length of time that Dwayne and I had been together.

Dwayne’s apartment was at the front of the complex. The lights and sounds from Windy Hill Road kept the bedroom glowing with a gentle light and buzzing with a subtle roar. I didn’t care much for this type of living. If I enjoyed spending time here, it was only because it all felt so Dwayne-like. The sheets on the sleigh bed smelled like him—a cozy combination of strawberry incense and foot powder. The gym schedule on the refrigerator was his. The bed was covered with a bear claw quilt hand-sewn by his favorite aunt.

Even so, I found the genericness of it all to be rather disconcerting. The walls were painted a blue-white that reminded me of skim milk. I was sure the floors in every single unit were covered with the same carpet, dead-mouse gray. And if you were to pull up the rugs here, you’d find only cheap foam padding and particleboard. The first thing Rochelle and I did when we moved into our house was get rid of the seventies-chic shag, rust-colored and matted. Underneath we found wonderful hardwood floors. Of course they still need some work to buff off the paint stains and old varnish, but the potential for elegance is there. Lawrence tapped on the wall in my bedroom and told me that he thinks there is another fireplace just behind the Sheetrock. But here, what you see is what you get. Two rooms, full bath, a kitchen. That’s it. This apartment is no better than what it seems to be.

In bed I moved toward Dwayne and snuggled against his sleeping back. I bent my own knees to match the angle of his until it was as though he sat on my lap while lying down.

“Dwayne,” I said into the smooth space between his jutting shoulder blades.

He didn’t answer, so I snaked an arm under him and hugged him hard across his chest. “Wake up.”

“What?” he said, turning over, knocking me in the chin with his shoulder. He touched my face. In the shine of the outside light I made out the outline of his crooked smile. “Is this your way of saying you need some attention?” He burrowed against my neck and draped his leg over my hip.

“I have something to tell you.”

“Okay,” he said, withdrawing his kisses and his weight. “Do you need me to turn on the light?”

“You don’t have to. I can see fine. And anyway, I have something to
tell
you, not something to
show
you.”

“Is it serious?”

“Yes.”

“Bad news or good?”

“Good,” I said. “Basically good. I think. In the long run, good for sure.”

“This sounds like the kind of conversation that you need to have the light on for.”

“No,” I said. “Please.” I felt braver in the dark, when we could hear each other, touch each other, but not quite see. “Did you mean it the other day when you said I could move in over here?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”

“I want us to live together,” I told him. “But not over here. We’re going to need a house.”

Because of the streetlamps just outside of his window, Dwayne’s bedroom was dim rather than dark. The greenish light reflected off his eyes as he spoke. “It takes a long time to get a house. You need a down payment. You have to get qualified.”

“I know,” I said.

“So let’s just live here for a while, see where it goes.”

“I know where it’s going.”

The light reflected on his eyes while he waited on me to continue.

“I’m pregnant.”

He took two complete deep breaths and shut his eyes before hugging me, but this embrace didn’t have the iron lining or red heat we’d shared a few minutes before. This was the physical expression of a sympathetic sigh. “Who all knows?”

“Nobody,” I whispered. “Just you.”

“Aria,” he said, rocking me in the near dark. “Baby. What do you want to do?”

“Get married?”

He stopped breathing for a moment. Long enough for me to blink twice and swallow. The pause was like a skipping CD. Just a moment of silence before the music continued to play, picking up just where it had left off.

“We could do that,” he said.

“We would need to do it soon,” I said. “Before I start showing. If I’m waddling down the aisle, my mother won’t come.”

“You don’t mean like tomorrow, do you?”

“No. Maybe in like six weeks?”

“How many months are you?”

“I can’t say for sure.”

“So you aren’t positive?”

“I know. I know my body. I’m throwing up left and right. I’m late, late, late. Remember I got off the pill in February? And remember what happened last month.”

“Rubber broke,” he sighed.

“We don’t
have
to get married. My daddy is dead, so there’s no one to hold a shotgun to your back.” I turned away from him and faced the wall, taking in my air in shallow breaths, waiting for him to touch my shoulder, force me to face him so he could beg my pardon, explain that it was all just such a shock. Of course he’d marry me. Of course he would.

I waited.

I wiped my nose on the bear claw quilt and I waited.

One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, to keep track of time. When I got to one hundred twenty, I was leaving. I wouldn’t even take time to get dressed. I’d drive across town in his pajamas and my underwear and he would never see me again. He had only forty-two Mississippis to go.

Dwayne got out of bed and turned on the light at two hundred eighty Mississippis. He threw back the covers, heaved himself to his feet, and headed to the closet. I watched him retrieve a large shoebox, big enough to house a pair of size fourteen Nikes. He sat back on the bed with the box on his lap and patted the space beside him. We sat close enough that my bare calf touched his through the flannel pajamas.

“I hope this doesn’t make you mad or make you feel cheap.” He gave my goose-pimpled thigh a firm squeeze. “Cheese has a brother, Jay. A straight-up crackhead. He stole my wallet a couple years ago, on Christmas Eve, can you believe that? Everybody says I must have lost it, but I know what happened to it. It’s jacked up because me and him were tight when we were young. When Cheese went to the service, I used to look out for Jay. But now I don’t fuck with him. But my auntie, his mama, never wants to face facts about Jay. She acts like he’s the baby Jesus or somebody.

“So one time I was home for Easter and I was in the barbershop and who come walking in but Jay. He got all kinda stuff he’s trying to sell—an old raggedy VCR, two fitted sheets, and his mama’s wedding band. I wasn’t tripping about the VCR and the sheets, but when I saw Aunt Iola’s ring, I just got up from the chair and snatched it out his hand. I should have punched him in his jaw.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. He didn’t weigh but a buck oh five before he got cracked out, so you know how skinny he is now. He just looked at me, bird chest twitching up under his shirt.

“So I went to my aunt’s house to give her the ring back. I drove straight out there, didn’t even wait for the barber to line me up. And when I got to the house and told her what all had happened, she looked me square in the face and told me that wasn’t her ring.

“I’m sitting there looking at the reverse suntan on her finger where the ring used to be and she’s looking me in the face telling me that lie. So I got pissed, put it in my pocket, and left. I figure she knows where to find me if she wants it back.”

He took the top off of the shoebox and poured the contents on the bed. There, along with his stiff new passport, a dead carnation, and three snapshots of Trey, was his aunt Iola’s stolen ring.

“Cheese don’t even know about that,” Dwayne said, turning his face, not exactly kissing me, but pressing his lips to my jawline, my temples.

“You’re sweating,” he said.

“I’m so nervous.”

“Don’t be.” He held his aunt Iola’s ring out to me. “You can wear this, to have something on your hand, until we can get you the real thing.”

Looking at the ring, I could picture his aunt Iola, the type of woman who would order a piece of jewelry from a catalog, seduced by the little banner that promised payments as low as ten dollars a month. I could even imagine the description, a short paragraph under a photo that had been “enlarged to show detail.”
A cluster of diamond accents sets this ring aglow with 1/2 carat TW of sparkling elegance. The 10K gold nugget setting gives a modern look to this time-honored classic.
The half carat of diamond accents was made up of about six tiny stones, arranged to look like a three-carat solitaire. I forced it over my chubby knuckle. The tip of my finger tingled with the loss of circulation.

“Thank you,” I said, looking at my hand.

“Okay.”

We sat together on the side of the bed thinking our separate thoughts. “We don’t have to,” I said finally.

“No,” he said. “It’s a good idea. I mean, we weren’t really at the marrying stage, but we were sort of headed in that direction.”

“Rochelle is moving out in January. We could take over the lease.”

He shook his head. “I can’t live around all those crackheads.”

I wanted to explain to him about the hidden fireplaces, how workmen could be hired to raise the ceilings, restore the wraparound porch, but he’d heard all this before. “The neighborhood is really up-and-coming,” I said.

“Well,” Dwayne said, “we can live there once it has up and came. Don’t fight me on this one, Aria. You don’t want our kids to be on a first-name basis with drug addicts, do you?”

I thought of Cynthia but didn’t argue with him. “Please smile,” I said. “I need you to be happy.”

He did smile for me, a pained expression. Lawrence once told me that it takes forty-two muscles to smile. Watching Dwayne, I could see the strain in every single one of them.

Finally he turned off the light and lay back on his oily pillowcase. “Come here, girl,” he said, pulling me up on his chest. “Let me show you why they call it making love.”

I left the next morning after Dwayne had left for the gym to play basketball with Cheese and some other friends. I envisioned him on the court, telling everyone he saw, accepting claps on the back, claiming me and the baby both. He probably wouldn’t play very well, missing easy layups, because he’d be distracted by thoughts of the long run. I knew the kind of man Dwayne was. He would spend the next seven months or so figuring the best way to save for a college education. He’d wonder what sort of grandfather he’d be.

I, on the other hand, was consumed by my visions of the short run. There was no way we could plan an elaborate ceremony like Rochelle’s; we hadn’t the time or the money. And even if we had been from well-off families, we would need to save to support the baby. I looked forward to declining social invitations, pleading poverty. I had to do that often enough now. Just last week Rochelle invited me to do a spa day with her and her mother. I didn’t have the money to go; I’d been honest about it and it was a little embarrassing. But now, when I explained that my priorities had changed, it would give my lack of discretionary income a sort of moral clout.

Hopefully we could have the ceremony as soon as possible. I didn’t want to run over to the justice of the peace, but I wanted to be Mrs. Upshaw long before my body changed. It was vanity, mostly. I was a grown woman—certainly no one thought I was a virgin—but there was something shameful about being pregnant out of wedlock, no matter how times have changed. I know that there are women out there who are single moms by choice, who never considered living as part of a family of three; I have read about these women in magazines. But personally I have never met a single mother who wouldn’t rather have a partner.

I made it home, ran into the living room with the soles of my sandals smacking on the wood floors, calling Rochelle’s name with my left hand held in front of me. She’d be happy for me. Hadn’t I been happy for her when she announced her engagement in February? It was my turn for hugs, kisses, and oh-my-Gods. She’d be a good sport about me beating her to the altar. We weren’t in a competition, and even if we were, she’d win hands down. I might be getting married first, but she was the one with the crepe lisse, the reception at the Egyptian Ball Room, and the five-hundred-person guest list.

Only Kitten was home to greet me. On the oak table was the evidence of Rochelle’s breakfast, chunks of milk-soaked granola and grapefruit skins. Disappointed, I poured kibble into Kitten’s ceramic bowl and replaced the batteries in his water filter. I ate an overripe banana and watched the cat chew a few mouthfuls. When he was done, I scratched him between his pointy ears. Good news and nobody to tell it to was more frustrating than all dressed up and no place to go.

I scooped Kitten onto my shoulder, stroking him like a baby. Dwayne doesn’t like cats, so we wouldn’t have a kitty of our own once we got married. Giving up Kitten was such a paltry sacrifice in exchange for the life I would be leading, I didn’t know why I even thought about it. And besides, Kitten belonged to Rochelle, like everything around here worth having.