The Untelling (18 page)

“Why does it seem so sad?” he said.

“It’s hard to lose someone.”

He stroked my face, kissing my shut eyes, then my forehead, then my mouth. I was touched by his tenderness and his earnest caresses. Making love is different when you are trying to make a baby. Dwayne was open to me in a way that he had never been before. He looked in my face as we moved together. He whispered that he loved me. I stared at the water-stained ceiling, listening to the noise of us, the noise of the television, and the noise of the night.

Chapter Eleven

P
hinazee’s, the barbershop,
is in a good location that has stayed pretty good for the last forty years. It’s on Lee Street, just a couple of blocks from the expressway—near where the east-west freeway crosses the north-south one. It’s convenient for anyone who wants a haircut bad enough. Mr. Phinazee likes to brag that in almost fifty years of business—when his father ran the business to when Earl himself took over—there has never been a robbery. “It’s because we are part of this community,” he said. “I let my little girl work in here by herself,” he said.

The little girl he is talking about is his thirty-four-year-old daughter, Colette, who more than
works
in the family business, she
runs
the place, although her daddy keeps all the paperwork in his own name. Before Little Link was born, Coco was heir apparent for the shop, which had grown to accommodate four chairs. It only made sense. Nobody said it out loud, but she could cut heads better than her daddy ever did. On top of that, she was gifted on the business end of things. She changed Phinazee’s to keep up with what the college students wanted without alienating the neighborhood types. A sign above the pricing sheet said “Locktician Available Upon Request.” She let her daddy come in on Wednesdays to take care of the old heads who wanted scissor cuts and hot-lather shaves.

When Little Link was born, Mr. Phinazee called his lawyer to change his will. When he dies, Phinazee’s will be handed down from father to son as it was in the previous generation. Even Hermione, who has no love for Coco and vice versa, protested that this wasn’t right. Mr. Phinazee listened to my sister and added a codicil indicating that Coco would always have the right to work there and if Little Link dies first and childless, Coco would be next in line.

“What if Link doesn’t want to be a barber?” Hermione asked.

Mr. Phinazee said, “Every man wants to be his own boss.”

“What if you die tomorrow?” Coco asked. “Who will sign the checks?”

“Baby,” Mr. Phinazee said, “I’m healthy. And I thought of that already. You’ll hold power of attorney until he’s old enough. And don’t be down in the mouth, Colette. I love you. I’ve taken good care of you, too, in my will.”

Coco didn’t greet me when I came into the shop. She lifted her head at the jangle of the brass bells, but she didn’t smile or say hello. Her silence is understandable, I guess. In addition to her anger about the lost inheritance, she was in her early twenties when Hermione married her father, and it must have been difficult to accept as a stepmother a kid she used to babysit. Even still, Coco knows enough about our family to know that we lived under extenuating circumstances. She was there the day of the accident. She was the one who answered the police’s call. She should know as well as anyone that none of us can be held completely responsible for the things that we have done.

Despite Coco’s territorial behavior and the general negative vibe, Phinazee’s was a historic landmark for my family as well. Daddy once worked here sweeping up clots of hair, washing toilets, and polishing the plate-glass window. Whenever I am in the shop, I picture him there wearing worn but clean clothes. This is an image concocted entirely from my imagination, I know, but it is as real to me as anything else.

Walking in the shop on a Saturday morning, I was glad to see that business was good. All three barbers were busy and five men waited for their turn in the chairs. I looked around to see what had been added since the last time I had come by, almost a year ago. Coco was always building, improving things. I made note of the credit card logo in the window. A glass case displayed shampoos and oils.

I was also pleased to see Coco, although the feeling was far from mutual. She had no use for any of the women in my family—not even my mother, who had been against Hermione’s marriage as much as Coco herself, and not me, who had no say in the matter. I never understood how she could throw us away so easily. She had been the one to rescue me from the car on the day of the accident. She had spoken my name in my ear and worked it into my heart.

“Is Hermione here yet?” I asked over the buzz of clippers.

Coco looked up from the fade she was working on, not smiling, not acknowledging me as anyone more special than one of the guys that came into the shop selling counterfeit watches and colognes. “You’re looking at everyone that’s here.”

I took a seat in a row of men variously aged and variously unkempt, each waiting for a seat in one of the barber chairs. A few years ago, right after I stopped relaxing my hair, I wore my hair in a short fade that required weekly visits to a barber. When I would walk in the door, the men would hush whatever conversations had raged before I arrived. I sat in the barber’s chair, feeling faintly guilty, an uninvited guest who had no other place to go. Phinazee’s wasn’t like that; Coco’s feminine presence shaped the character of the place. She didn’t do anything obvious like plant flowers out front or require the barbers to iron their shirts, but she managed to civilize it a little bit. It was like being in the home of a favorite aunt, the kind of woman who would let you drink but wouldn’t let you curse.

I looked at the clock over the wall of mirrors. A quarter past ten. Hermione was fifteen minutes late.

I picked up a year-old
Jet
that fell open to the Beauty of the Week. The Beauty was a big girl, one dessert away from a weight problem. Posing in such a way to emphasize her cleavage while deemphasizing her stomach, she reminded me of Hermione. Colette, on the other hand, was nothing like my sister. Short but lean, she wore a loose-fitting sundress covered by a white barber’s jacket. Her hair was Caesar shorn and neat. Her only ornamentation was a pair of heavy gold hoops.

“Your sister said for you to meet her
here
?” Coco said.

“That’s what she said.”

“I don’t understand people,” Colette said, swabbing her customer down with bay rum.

When the chair was empty, a young man stood, wearing the red and black uniform of the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Light-skinned and chunky, he reminded me of Head Cheese. And this, of course, reminded me of Dwayne.

“Coco,” I said, “did you know that I was getting married?”

“Colette,” she corrected me. “I think my father said something about that.”

“Colette. Do you think you would like to be in the wedding party, maybe?”

“You have a date already?” She folded the customer’s ear and buzzed the clippers behind it.

“Not this November, but the next one.”

“In my book,” Coco said, “it doesn’t count if it is more than a year away.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll ask you later.”

She nodded to the guy from the Shrine. “Now, Jamal,” Coco said, “that don’t make no sense. Waiting this long to do something about your head.”

Jamal smiled. “My money been funny.”

“You need to sell some more bean pies, then.”

“The Shrine don’t sell bean pies.”

“All I know,” Colette said, snapping a black cape around his neck, “all I know is that it’s going to take me half the morning to turn you back into a human being.”

She chuckled and I remembered how kind she’d been before Hermione married her daddy. I suppose she had a right to her anger; Coco has known her share of loss too. Her mother died only three years before we lost our father. Lupus had taken Mrs. Phinazee. I was only seven or so, and the word was frightening and mysterious.

“I hope that you would be able to be a hostess, at least,” I said. “I think Little Link will be the ring bearer.”

“Uh-huh,” she said over the buzz of clippers.

I sat and looked out the plate-glass window, deciding not to say anything else to Coco. I was sincere in my desire to include her in my wedding, but I didn’t want to seem to be bragging. On more than one occasion I have run into some vague acquaintance in the mall or at the bank. The hellos would be barely over before the girl was shoving her ring in my face, gloating at the sight of my naked knuckle. Or at least that is how it always seemed to me. Colette wasn’t married, and as far as I knew, she wasn’t even dating anyone, had never dated anyone. But she didn’t wear her solitariness the way a lot of single women did. For her it seemed like a choice. For everyone else it seemed like a sentence.

I fidgeted in my seat, waiting to spot Hermione’s minivan. Some people look like their dogs, but my sister looked like her car: large, round, but strangely aerodynamic.

The road just outside Phinazee’s was busy like a Third World market. Vendors sold incense, bootleg CDs, body oils, T-shirts, and baked goods. Cars of all types, from SUVs with rhinestoned vanity plates to rusted Toyotas without air-conditioning, inched down Lee Street. Across the four-lane road, at Popeye’s Chicken, a couple of pedestrians used the drive-through. There were also a few college students, the ones who didn’t go home for the summer, seeming both at home and out of place in this environment. I could spot them easily, not just because the girls wore knit shorts with the name of their school stitched across their behinds, but because of their way of moving place to place, gesturing with their pretty hands, noticing only one another.

Among the throngs of people, I noticed a pregnant girl buying incense from a skinny Rastafarian. I got up from the chair and pushed open the front door. The brass bells jangled behind me. “I’ll be right back,” I called to Colette.

I trotted out of the shop, but slowed down and stopped myself several paces behind Keisha, who held three sticks of Egyptian Love incense to her nose.

“Buy five,” the Rasta said, “I’ll give you one free.”

“You not trying to cheat me, are you?” Keisha said. “You see I’m pregnant and everything.”

“No, sister,” said the Rasta. “I wouldn’t cheat my queen. Buy three, I’ll give you two.”

She seemed different somehow than she did sitting in my office. Her blond braids and airbrushed nails were not so garish. Her pregnancy was more graceful; her motions as she traveled were evidence of the perfection of nature, like the clumsy bumblebees who manage to fly anyway. I raised my hand to call out to her, but I closed my mouth, not wanting to interrupt whatever magic was working for her this afternoon.

Keisha turned toward me as though she had heard my unvoiced greeting; I pretended to look at a selection of T-shirts offered by a nearby vendor, hiding my face among silk-screened cartoon women with Scarlett O’Hara waists and Hottentot behinds. Souvenirs from the last Freak-Nic. Half off if you bought two. The shirts buckled in the dirty breeze, waving their arms like they were struck with the Holy Ghost. Smiling, Keisha turned her attention back to the Rasta and went away with six sticks of incense without having to pay for any of them.

“Hey,” I called finally. “Keisha!”

She turned on the ball of her foot, bobbing a little as she scanned the faces around her. I waved again, but somehow Keisha managed not to see me. I let her go, feeling oddly shy amid the throng.

When I returned to Phinazee’s, Hermione’s van was parked in the handicapped spot at an almost forty-five-degree angle. She was waiting in the shop, sitting in front of the shampoo bowl, arms crossed hard over her big chest.

The easy laughter and camaraderie that had enveloped the shop just fifteen minutes before were gone. The men were still there and the television was still turned to SportsCenter, but the only people in the room that mattered were Hermione and Colette.

“I was here at ten o’clock,” I said as soon as I saw her expression.

“She was,” Coco said, still working on the same guy’s head.

“Let’s go,” Hermione said. “Let’s just go.” On her way out she grabbed two bottles of shampoo from a glassed-in display case. “Get whatever you want.”

I looked over at Colette.

“That shampoo is six ninety-five,” she called.

Hermione took another bottle. “Tell my husband to give you the money.”

Hermione left. I was embarrassed to follow her, but I didn’t know what else to do.

Hermione’s minivan smelled of old french fries and vanilla air freshener. My seat was covered with a purple bath towel.

“Little Link spilled juice there,” she explained.

At the stoplight, just before the freeway, a filthy man approached the window.

“Can you help me out?” he said.

Hermione thrust a bottle of shampoo into his pleading hands. He was still examining it when we drove off.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “for being in such a bad mood. Colette is such a bitch.”

“Why did you meet me over there in the first place? You know she has issues with us.”

“Earl wanted me to hand-deliver her invitation to Link’s birthday. Like that would help. That bitch makes me crazy.”

“She used to be nice.”

“I used to be nice too.” Hermione changed the subject. “Are you ready to go see the wizard?”

This was the whole point of the escapade. Mama had made an appointment for me to see a reproductive endocrinologist at Emory University Hospital. My insurance wouldn’t cover it, but Mother was prepared to pay out of pocket. According to Hermione, Mama was going to use the money from the college funds we never got to use.

“What’s Dwayne saying about all of this?” she asked me.

“He doesn’t know.”

“About the appointment?”

“About any of it.”

My sister put on her blinker and pulled into the parking lot of John A. White Park. We were technically out of the West End. The area was still sort of blue- collar, but it was what Rochelle would probably call blue-collar middle-class. A neighborhood very much like the one where I grew up. The parents here had money to pay for Little League but probably suffered from preemptive ulcers whenever they thought about the cost of college educations. But no one was worrying about that today; kids suited up in baseball uniforms milled about, laughing and knocking each other’s caps off. Parents set up lawn chairs and wore ridiculous hats with umbrellas on top. Hermione put the van in park and turned toward me.

“He doesn’t know that you’re sterile?”

“Hermione,” I said, “can we use a different word? ‘Infertile’ is what people say now.”