Disgruntled: A Novel Read online

“You can play them sad songs downstairs on your sad little stereo,” Teddy said.

  * * *

  Kenya spent the occasional Friday or Saturday at a party that would have appalled Sheila as much as Sheila’s carrying on irritated Kenya. Kenya thought about this with some satisfaction one night as she sipped a beer in some girl’s crowded kitchen somewhere in Devon. She wanted to go sit down in another room but didn’t feel like fighting the crowd that was clumped up in the kitchen, avoiding the music until they got drunk enough to dance. Across the room, she saw Tuff Wieder. She nodded coolly, then went up the back stairs, Sharon McCall hot on her trail.

  “Those crazy kids,” she said to Phyllis, though she wished Zaineb had been there instead.

  “What?” Phyllis yelled. “Oh my God, Zach Vito is here. Oh my God. Did he see me? Is this zit terrible? Where are you going?”

  Kenya began pushing her way into the living room. These parties were all the same. They took place at sprawling but not overly interesting suburban houses crammed with extras from John Hughes movies. Tonight, as on many of those nights, she and Lolly seemed to be the only black people in some stranger’s house, and Kenya worked to stifle her instinctual fear of too-many-drunk-unknown-white-people—especially boys. As she made it into the living room, where people were beginning to fling themselves around, she could not help but be afraid, for example, that if she spilled her drink on some wild dancer, he might call her something nasty. Maybe it was crazy, but these parties recalled nothing so much as scenes of rabid segregation enthusiasts in Eyes on the Prize. It was not comforting that the soundtrack to these nights always included a lot of rap music, especially Public Enemy and N.W.A. Kenya wondered what kind of music the young racists of the fifties got pumped up to before going out to spit on children trying to integrate the schools. Black folks made all the music with a good beat back then, too.

  Still, though Kenya sometimes blew off invitations to eat mozzarella sticks or watch horror film sequels, she always rallied to go to parties, telling herself that anything could happen. And yet no matter how frantically she danced, how long her braids, or how tight her pants, nothing ever did.

  It was a serious improvement when Barrett social life suddenly brought Kenya back to the city, via Zaineb’s cousin Reggie, who lived in an actual house in downtown Philadelphia. Kenya had seen near-mansions on the Main Line, but had never been in anything as chic as a town house in Society Hill. Reggie threw spontaneous get-togethers at his parents’ glistening home on nights when his mother was away for work and his father had to report to the hospital. Reggie didn’t care much for people, but he loved drugs. He threw parties like nets, to draw in as many as possible.

  Partying in the city brightened up Kenya’s friends. Lolly would pretend to get drunker than she was and start grinding on the nearest girl, something she never did at parties on the Main Line. Phyllis, who shared Reggie’s passion for drugs, had a talent for figuring out who was holding the hardest thing and getting some for free; traditionally, she then made out with whoever had gotten her high. So it was that she became the only Barrett girl known to have tried crack. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Zaineb, the designated driver, was haunted by a TV special she’d seen about drunk driving, which featured a shot of bloody prom dress bits on a lonely highway. She wouldn’t touch alcohol, not even the one drink Kenya usually allowed herself, but in the city, she talked more animatedly than usual, preening about her connection to Reggie.

  There was always a smattering of black kids at these parties, but, as on the Main Line, the boys seemed not to notice Kenya. Besides the white girls with their obvious allure, there was Cary Benin, a creamy brown Jessica Rabbit type who went to the Catholic school across from Barrett, with her long, shiny, naturally straight hair. Cary dressed in February as if it were August (and don’t even ask about August).

  Even if no one seemed to see her, Kenya watched everything, and she always noticed the boy, white or black, whom everybody else noticed. There might be a group of contenders, but she always tried to narrow it down to the Man, the one who moved around with the most ease and commanded the most feverish greetings. Sometimes he was cute, sometimes less so. Sometimes he was white, other times black, or even racially ambiguous, as in the era of dashing Vincent Tran-Garcia, with his sumptuous swirl of hair. When Kenya came home, she shunned the bed that Teddy Jaffrey had threatened to climb into, secreting herself in her bedroom closet to entertain herself with deliberate fantasies of how the Man would approach her in the crowd. She didn’t even need to get to the part in the sequence when they touched. Just the image of her, the boy, a café table, two hot chocolates with whipped cream, and done.

  Of course she had preferences. She was not at all interested in Ned Samuels, for example, who was evidently the most popular boy at a party she ventured out to on a chilly April night. He went to the arts magnet high school in the city and there was a lot of murmuring about his talent as a painter. But with shockingly bright red hair and freckles so numerous they looked painful in the harsh light of the kitchen—where everyone milled near the liquor—Ned Samuels was a stretch for Kenya’s masturbatory fantasies. Then she noticed the black boy at his side.

  “Commodore!” she screamed.

  “What?” he yelled back.

  “Commodore!” she called again.

  “OOGABOOGAAAAAAAAAAAA!” he screamed, jumping up and down. He was tall, and the jumping made him almost freakishly so. “Oh my Gaaaaaaaaaaawd!” he yelled. They hugged each other, and since Ned Samuels was looking, everyone else in the kitchen looked, too. Kenya felt triumphant as Commodore introduced her to Ned, who nodded and pronounced her name to be sure he had gotten it right.

  “Whew, what’s it been, a hundred years? You look great,” Commodore said.

  “You look tall,” said Kenya, her face growing warm as she exaggerated an effort to look up at him.

  “I think you might be the same height you were in, what, third grade? Who knew you’d turn out to be such a squirt?” Commodore said. “Hey, want something to drink?”

  Kenya allowed him to make her a second drink for the night, something tasting of Hawaiian Punch. She felt both at home and in outer space as their conversation took them from the kitchen to a quiet corner of the living room.

  He went to the arts high school with Ned and had never heard of Barrett. He remembered Yaya saying that Kenya went to “some private school.” He lived in the same house Kenya remembered, in the area of West Philly called the Bottom. He told her that the neighborhood had gotten a lot worse.

  “It’s really fucking scary,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know who’s worse: the basehead zombies or the dealers. Our next-door neighbor got shot standing in her kitchen window. Guess you don’t know nothin’ about all that out in the burbs.”

  “We hear about it on the news. You know. We send money,” said Kenya. The punch thickened her tongue, but she congratulated herself that her mind still worked.

  “So what’s it like out there?” Commodore asked.

  “Everything is perfect. My mother married this great guy, and we live in a big house and I go to private school and…” Commodore’s eyes widened.

  “I mean it sucks dick like everything else,” she said, suddenly feeling as if she might actually blush, having raised such a specter, even in slang.

  “Your mother got remarried?”

  “Unfortunately,” Kenya said. Then she paused. “But actually ‘remarried’ is not the way to put that. It turns out my parents were never actually married.”

  “Say what?”

  “Yup.” It was delicious telling Commodore things that she usually couldn’t talk about in the world where she lived.

  “Why not?”

  “You know, Movement bullshit.”

  “That’s deep,” said Commodore. It was something the Seven Days used to say. They laughed. He said, “So not a fan of the new husband, huh?”

  “No,” she said simply.

  Commodore said, “I almost r
an into one of those situations myself. A stepdaddy. Well, maybe more of a brother in this case.” He giggled.

  “Yeah?”

  Commodore told a riveting story about how his parents had briefly separated. Yaya had left to live with a local conga drumming legend barely out of his teens, who deserted her after a few weeks. Alfred had let her come back, but he was so angry that he hardly ever spoke. Three years later, they still spent much of their time together in silence. Commodore suspected that Yaya might have another boyfriend.

  “I mean, they managed to slap it together again for my sake. But I don’t like being in that house, and I don’t think they like it either.”

  “That’s sad, Commodore.”

  “Is what it is. So have you heard from your”—and here he gave a small smile—“Baba?”

  “He’s in prison.”

  “What?” Commodore stood up and then fell back down. “All I heard is that he ran off with Cindalou. Where does prison come into it? Stop dropping these bombs! Prison for what?”

  He didn’t know, Kenya realized. Maybe none of the Seven Days knew about the night with the sleepwalking, the gun, and the hospital. Kenya left it in the little sealed box. “Well, there was some madness with tagging a bunch of police stations, and then he jumped bail. I saw him there, in prison. I guess he’s probably out by now.”

  Commodore said, “Maybe he’ll try to start it again. You know.”

  “The Seven Days?”

  “Yeah, ’cause obviously these niggers need something in their lives.”

  Kenya still had not trained herself to not wince at the word nigger, though it was a regular feature of Teddy Jaffrey’s speech.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Seems to me that’s where everything started.”

  “I guess you could see it that way,” said Commodore. Suddenly he made as if to pour his cup of red juice on the rug. “From the Creator, for the martyrs,” he said.

  “For the martyrs,” she repeated.

  They didn’t laugh.

  “Commie!” screamed a chunky white girl in combat boots and with thin pigtails. “You better fucking dance with me!”

  “Excuse me,” he said, rolling his eyes but not really. “I’ll be back. Or—you should come over in a minute.” He leaned close to her. “Save me.”

  Kenya wanted to go find one of the people she came with and tell them the miracle of what had just happened, but when she tried to stand, the floor seemed to fall away. Across the room, she watched Commodore moving to “Bonita Applebum,” a song that made her dizzy with happiness but also made her heart ache. It had a melancholy blackness that sounded like the music her father used to listen to. Kenya found herself wondering what had happened to her father’s old records: Doug and Jean Carn, Ornette Coleman, pre-disco Earth, Wind & Fire. Commodore moved languidly with the girl, but quickly enough to thwart her attempts to drape herself around him. Kenya imagined herself dancing with him.

  Commodore walked up to say he’d be back. Then he disappeared. She didn’t know how much time passed before Zaineb was standing over her saying that it was time to go and asking if she’d seen Lolly or Phyllis. After struggling to get off of the slippery leather couch, and a tenuous walk up the stairs, Kenya and Zaineb found them in the enormous master bathroom. Phyllis lay on the floor laughing and writhing while Lolly groped around under her short denim skirt.

  “Oh my God, you guys! Phyllis lost her tampon!” Lolly yelled.

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” Phyllis said merrily. “I totally forgot about it and I’m too blasted to get my hand up there! It’s been in there, like, nine hours or something.”

  “It’s not funny, Phyllis,” Lolly hissed. “You could get toxic shock syndrome.”

  Suddenly Reggie burst into the bathroom. “Phyllis, did you take those fucking ’shrooms out of my freezer?” he yelled. His eyes were bleary and his bare feet were filthy.

  “Get the fuck out of here, you pervert!” hissed Zaineb.

  “Phyllis, did you do mushrooms?” yelled Lolly.

  “Phyllis, where are my ’shrooms?” he yelled. “Hold on, what are you guys doing to Phyllis?”

  “Oh my God, who has ’shrooms?” Phyllis said, pushing Lolly aside and shooting up from the floor.

  Kenya closed her eyes and tried to wash it away. Even if they never spoke again, she was glad Commodore was in the world.

  * * *

  She resisted briefly, tried to push it down, but it was still there later when she thought of him, rising in her chest, flooding outward in her body. He wasn’t the Man by anyone else’s standards. When Kenya tried to mention him to Zaineb and the others, they didn’t remember who he was. But to Kenya he was cute. She concentrated on seeing him as he was at the party, tall and slender, maybe with muscular arms, cigar-brown, with a high, neat fade. And he was like her. He knew her in a way that no one else did these days. Or at least the way no one else—namely Sheila—admitted to knowing her.

  Commodore had been in the rooms filled with eccentric black people from Kenya’s childhood, and now inhabited the ones filled with drunken white people. She thought again and again of their conversation on the leather couch, her head swimming pleasantly with punch, surrounded by dancers who seemed to push her and Commodore closer together. She had gotten so absorbed in touching and retouching the fantasy version of the scene that she experienced something like fear one Sunday afternoon two weeks later when he called her. Kenya, who had her own phone, but not, like every other Barrett girl, her own line, didn’t even hear the phone ring. She was, at that very moment, dreaming of Commodore over her American history textbook. Her mother’s voice floated up to her through the door.

  “Who is it?” Kenya asked, though it was always Zaineb.

  “It’s Commodore,” Sheila said, her voice full of wonder, moving closer.

  By the time Kenya picked up the phone, Sheila was knocking on her door. She came in before Kenya could answer.

  “Ooga Booga!” Commodore said.

  “Oh hey,” said Kenya, feeling crazy. “Hang on.” Sheila was looking at her with wide eyes. “Mom,” Kenya said, “can you go hang up the phone?”

  “Tell him I said hello,” Sheila said, backing out. She shook her head as if she, too, had been interrupted in a reverie.

  Kenya felt as if she were the main character in one of the novels she hated but still read, the ones where the plain girl dreamed and her dream came true. He was calling to invite her to hang out downtown. She nearly tripped on the carpet going down the stairs, though she had tried very hard not to rush at all.

  “Mom,” she said, catching her breath, “can I have a ride to the train station?”

  “You didn’t tell me you saw Commodore,” Sheila accused. She looked up from where she liked to sit on her new furniture with the Sunday paper while Teddy watched basketball for what seemed like the entire day. During commercials he paced to the back of the house and glared at the lack of progress contractors were making on the “sun porch.”

  “Who’s Commodore?” Teddy said. “I thought you were too hip for Lionel Richie.”

  Kenya addressed Sheila. “I saw him at a party.”

  “Well, how did he seem?”

  “Fine. He goes to Creative and Performing Arts.”

  “Do they still live in the same place?” Sheila asked. She did not speak the name Yaya or Alfred.

  “Yeah. Commodore says it’s pretty bad over there.”

  “I should say so. This crack business,” said Sheila.

  “Uhm!” affirmed Teddy.

  “So,” said Kenya, “can I get a ride?”

  “Well, you know I don’t like to go out on Sundays,” her mother said, as she had perhaps ten thousand times, just before taking Kenya somewhere on a Sunday. Sheila never said anything about it and never asked questions, but it was clear that she would sacrifice even her at-home Sundays so Kenya could have some kind of social life.

  “Please?”

  Sheila raised her eyeb
row.

  “I mean, it doesn’t really matter,” said Kenya, too late. Her mother was already smiling.

  They met in Rittenhouse Square Park, where Commodore waited with Ned, an overweight black kid named Peter, and a whispering white girl named Dawn, who mostly looked out at Ned from under her bangs. When Kenya walked up, she heard Commodore saying, “I hate him.”

  “Who?” said Kenya.

  “Oog—I mean Kenya!” said Commodore. “What it do?”

  Ned said hello and extended his hand with cute formality, as if they’d never met. Kenya shook his hand and didn’t remind him.

  “So who is this that you hate?” she asked Commodore.

  “Ugh! This kid Oliver, at school. He is the worst!”

  “He’s not that bad,” said Peter, who had a rumbling bass voice.

  “He really is that bad,” Commodore said.

  The girl Dawn whispered something.

  “Of course he’s nice to you, Dawn,” said Commodore. “He wants to poke you with his long weird curvy penis!”

  Ned threw back his head and laughed. “Come on, Commie, what do you know about his dick? That’s a little gay.”

  “I don’t need to be gay. I can just tell that it probably looks like one of his gross dreadlocks. That guy is so wannabe, but wannabe what? Punk? Rasta? Pasta? A tragic mulatto indeed.”

  “Bro, you are wrong,” said Peter. “Ain’t he wrong?” he asked Kenya.

  They were sitting in a circle on a patch of grass. An older white man stood nearby looking at them pointedly while his large dog sniffed the ground in a preparatory fashion.

  “We need to get in out of the elements,” said Commodore.

  “Agreed,” said Ned.

  Kenya followed them to Ned’s parents’ condominium high above the park, with its exposed brick walls and gleaming honey-colored floors. The windows, which were taller than Kenya, looked down on the park. Kenya stood in the huge open space that seemed to be the main room, trying to look nonchalant. Commodore went to the kitchen and asked if anyone else wanted a Screwdriver. Dawn took off her sneakers. Peter flopped onto the suede couch and used several remote controls to turn on the television.