Disgruntled: A Novel Read online

  “Why don’t we sit at the table like civilized people?” he proposed.

  “What about watching TV?” Kenya suggested, though there was just Entertainment Tonight and game shows.

  “Ain’t nothin’ on but game shows and Entertainment Tonight.”

  Kenya pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “How is everything?” Teddy said.

  “Fine. Is there lo mein?”

  He rolled his eyes playfully. “Isn’t that your favorite?”

  For a few moments, the only sound was forks hitting plates. Then Teddy asked, “So are you looking forward to going away to school?”

  “Yesh,” said Kenya, her mouth full of noodles.

  Teddy’s laugh was hollow. “Getting away from your evil stepfather, huh?”

  Kenya looked at him.

  “No answer, huh?”

  Kenya shrugged.

  “I know what you think of me, Kenya. But I’ve always treated your mother right. And I’ve tried with you, I’ve really tried.”

  Kenya forged into new territory. “Tried what?” she asked.

  “Oh, you’re funny now. You being funny?” Suddenly he was standing and yelling. “Look, I’m not some genius like your father, I know that. But I work hard. And I’m tired of being disrespected in my own home!”

  Kenya yelled back. “If you don’t stop screaming at me, I’m going to call my mother.”

  “Oh yeah, what are you going to tell her? She already knows you’re a little sulky brat!”

  “Teddy, if you don’t stop, I’m going to—”

  “You’re going to what? Get a gun and pretend to shoot me in your sleep?” Now he faked a high-pitched laugh.

  It made sense, she knew, that Sheila would have told Teddy about all of that. After all, strictly speaking, it was what got them here. But still, she’d clung to the idea that Teddy didn’t know. What Kenya did next was directed at the both of them: Sheila for telling one of her worst secrets, Teddy for being the other.

  She stood from the table slowly and her hands began pushing things off it: containers of noodles, rice, and the gravy-soaked (and ever-disgusting) egg foo young, an open bottle of soy sauce, plates, an open bottle of cranberry juice all poured onto the dining room rug. Teddy was frozen. It was as if they were in a shared trance; she could not stop doing it and he could not stop watching. Just before she knocked the glasses to the floor, hoping they would splinter into hundreds of pieces, her stepfather jumped up and grabbed her to him. Her throat filled with terror as she struggled in his arms. He pulled her tighter into his sour all-day-pajamas smell. Then he made an angry noise and pushed her away.

  As soon as he let her go, she ran upstairs, shut the door, and put a chair against it. Lying on the floor, she sobbed with rage. For what seemed like hours, she listened to the sound of Teddy cursing as he cleaned up, and then finally she heard her mother come home. Teddy told Sheila nothing of the fight, and that made Kenya sure of something she’d suspected. When Teddy had pulled her to him, he’d had an erection.

  * * *

  The next morning during the rush out the door, Kenya told her mother that she’d decided to spend the whole summer at her father’s.

  “But what about your job at Dr. Walton’s?”

  “They’ll find someone else.”

  “You’re going to need spending money at school, you know.”

  “I have some savings. Other than that, I’ll just skip the fall wardrobe or whatever.”

  “Well, you know I’m not going to let you do that. But I mean, Kenya, this is your last—”

  “Mom, I’m sorry, but I can’t live in this house with your husband anymore,” said Kenya.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  As was typical these days, Teddy was not there to ask; he slept during the hours when other people got ready for work. He could be roused only to take calls from Bert. But that wasn’t the point, Kenya knew. Sheila donned her steely glare. “I’m asking you,” she said, her voice rising. “I’m asking you to tell me what you’re talking about.”

  The air was dry and the house seemed very bright. Kenya pictured herself across from her mother, a deep crevasse between them. If she spoke, who would fall? How would they get out? She had already shot her mother. Again she felt as if she was sleepwalking.

  Would her mother kick Teddy Jaffrey out so that it would be just her and Kenya again? The way it had been in the Ardmore Arms?

  What if she didn’t and he just stayed and nothing happened?

  Remembering the ragged crying she’d heard only once, Kenya choked back her own tears and babbled something she’d seen on a blended-family sitcom once, about her stepfather taking her mother away. Her mother held her. Two days after graduation, she was on a Greyhound bound for western Pennsylvania. Her mother and Teddy waved grimly as she pulled away.

  Freedom

  The town that greeted Kenya when the bus turned off the highway was dismal. Every other store on the main street was shuttered, and the handful of slow-moving shoppers had a grayish tinge to their skin. The families in the bus terminal sported heavy metal T-shirts and jagged, fried hair. Both of Kenya’s parents, but especially her father, had taught Kenya to fear the Philadelphia kin to these people and the neighborhoods where they dwelled: Roxborough, Fishtown, Kensington. But there in the center of this bus terminal, which reminded Kenya of the prison visiting area, was her father, a paperback under his arm, his hands in his pockets, as if he belonged there. He managed to look relaxed, though he stood straighter and taller than Kenya remembered.

  “Look at you,” he said, pulling her into a rough hug. “Look at you.”

  “Hey,” said Kenya, not wanting to call him Baba in the bus terminal. His hair was a little too long—an inch or two shy of Frederick Douglass–style—and full of gray. When he smiled wide, which he did repeatedly, he showed a missing tooth. But as shabby as he should have looked, there was something expensive and gracious-looking about his old, soft T-shirt and jeans, about his sweet, woodsy smell.

  This is my father, Kenya thought as they climbed into a red pickup truck. I’m here with my father. Johnbrown asked her about the bus ride, about Sheila, graduation. She answered, listening to the sound of her own voice.

  The house had Johnbrown’s same wood smell and a rustic glamour, with high, exposed ceiling beams and rough-hewn floors. Despite its old homey look, it also seemed to have a powerful and quiet air-conditioning system. It reminded Kenya of the Urban Outfitters store in University City. Kenya’s parents had told her that Urban Outfitters used to be a tiny hippie shop featuring a barrel from which you could take old clothes. Now it was impossibly chic in a way that seemed to go with its grand barn look. There was even a new downtown outpost of the store, where cute white salesgirls followed you around if you were black.

  “We’re home!” Johnbrown called as he and Kenya passed through a room full of muddy boots and jackets into the kitchen. They were all there around a table covered with what looked like a large meal in the making. Cindalou, who’d gotten heftier, clasped Kenya tightly, while Amandla, a chubby dark brown girl in glasses, gave a more mannered hug.

  There were three other people, too: a wiry white woman with a cloud of blond-going-gray hair floating around her shoulders, and two small sand-colored children. Kenya tried not to flinch as her father, who had not warned her of this at any point, told her their names. She wasn’t sure if the boy was Nannie or the girl was Dennie, but she knew the white woman’s name was Sharon and these were her children. Johnbrown’s children. Sharon took Kenya’s hands into her own. “So wonderful to meet you,” she said.

  Though Sheila had often said that black men loved themselves some white women, Kenya’s only previous point of reference for this, besides mixed celebrity couples, was a specter from childhood. Back in West Philadelphia, she and her mother had sometimes seen a sunburned-looking woman with a thin ponytail and missing teeth on Fifty-Second Street, begging ne
ar the McDonald’s with her three ragamuffin reddish-brown sons. “What happened to her?” Kenya asked once when she was little. “Some Negro,” Sheila had answered.

  “It’s good to meet you, too,” Kenya told Sharon. Then there was a pause where everyone waited for something.

  “Can I show Kenya the Zen room?” said Amandla finally, still studying her sister.

  “Why don’t you let her settle in?” said Sharon.

  “Isn’t that where she’s settling in?”

  “Don’t you have some beans to snap, Amandla?” said Cindalou.

  “We can all have a good visit at dinner, Monkey,” Johnbrown said to Amandla. “I’ll take her back there.”

  “Okay,” the girl said, pushing up her glasses and staring intently. It was a different stare from those of the two younger children. Kenya wondered if Amandla was looking at her hair, or rather her head, which she’d had shaved almost bald the day after she graduated from Barrett. She had imagined herself emerging from the barber chair looking like one of the first black supermodels in the 1970s, but sadly, no matter what pose she struck, she knew she only looked like a boy.

  The small room was at the back of the skylit second floor. It was sparsely furnished, with a few covered baskets and a large, low wooden chest topped by a large red-stone Buddha figurine, some candles, and framed photos. A deep purple rug sat in front of the Buddha. The biggest thing in the room was a kind of bunk bed with no bottom bunk, suspended from the ceiling by thick chains.

  “I built this myself,” Johnbrown said, gesturing toward it. “You use this to get up there,” he said, pointing to the metal ladder resting against it.

  For a few years, Kenya had assumed that she was no longer sleepwalking. But given what had happened in their family, it hit her with a force that her father must have completely forgotten. Or perhaps he was daring her to bring it up—the fact that she could, in her sleep, try to climb out of bed and go crashing to the floor, the same way she had apparently taken a gun and shot her mother in the shoulder.

  Kenya would not be the one to mention it. Instead she heard herself ask what the Zen room was usually for.

  “Amandla was the one who named it. I meditate in here, but everybody uses it. Sharon does yoga in here. Sometimes we send the kids in when they need to calm the hell down. It’s also for guests.”

  Kenya looked down from the floor to the height of the bed. “I guess you have pretty adventurous guests.”

  “Actually we have about zero guests. Well, that’s not true. Sharon’s parents came once but they were really too rickety to climb up there. But you’ll love it,” he said. “I would sleep there myself, but it’s only built for one person.”

  “Are you married to both of them?” Kenya blurted. She slapped her hand over her mouth but it was too late. The tension at home with Sheila had left her in knots. When she’d decided to come here, she’d promised herself that she would ask no serious questions of Johnbrown—or of any of these people, for that matter. But this one had overcome her like a belch.

  “It’s okay.” Johnbrown shrugged. “What I can say is that we’re a family,” he said. “Amandla, Nneka, and Denmark are all my children.” He looked at her.

  She nodded.

  “Monkey,” said Johnbrown, “you can’t know how happy it makes me that you came.”

  “Baba, maybe you shouldn’t call me that anymore, okay?”

  “Can I ask why not?”

  “Well, not to be petty, but a special nickname doesn’t seem as special if you’re sharing it with other people.”

  “Oh,” he said. They both heard a small throat-clearing sound from the hallway. Naturally it was the other monkey.

  “Oh hey,” said Kenya, feeling bad. She liked the girl, and not only because she found her instantly preferable to the sandy-haired imps.

  “Hey, Amandla,” Johnbrown said. “Since you butted your nose in, why don’t you show Kenya how to get up there?”

  “I’m sure she knows how to use a ladder, Baba,” Amandla said, wrinkling her brow. “Kenya, they said don’t worry about dinner if you’re tired. We can warm up a plate for you whenever you feel like eating.”

  “Well, are you going to have dinner with everybody else, Amandla?” Kenya asked.

  “Of course,” the girl said, pushing her glasses up on her small round nose. “I always have dinner with everybody else.”

  “Well, then so will I.”

  Amandla cracked a smile.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Johnbrown.

  At dinner, Kenya noted that the kitchen was clearly the heart of the place. She compared it with her mother’s house, where she felt most comfortable napping in front of the television on the pantyhose-colored sectionals when no one else was home. That was no heart compared with the spacious and bright room where she now sat in a very upright chair. Filled to bursting as it was with stuff and people, it was harmonious, or at least controlled. They sat at a thick table, set with matching plates and glasses and an array of colorful cloth napkins, each slightly different.

  “Mama made this,” said the imp girl, holding hers up for Kenya to admire.

  “That’s very nice,” Kenya said, taking the chance to study the twins, with their hooded gray eyes that made them look older than four. They both had wild hair, the girl’s in a messy ponytail, the boy’s in a shape that evoked Prince with bedhead or a post-concert Little Richard. Sharon had her children’s eyes, thin lips, and strangely small teeth. The three of them looked like frolicsome woodland creatures, though given their golden coloring, Nannie and Dennie could have easily been Cindalou’s children. The person they did not resemble was Johnbrown.

  “Mama made all of the napkins,” said the boy.

  “They’re very pretty,” said Kenya.

  “Dennie and Nannie,” said Sharon. Her tone was corrective, but she grinned. “When you meet someone for the first time, you’re supposed to ask them questions about themselves, not just talk their ears off.” To Kenya she said, “The problem with homeschooling, you see. This one,” she said, indicating Johnbrown, “took the time to teach them about the ancient civilization of Khmet, but he forgot basic manners.”

  Johnbrown rolled his eyes with a smile.

  “Uh-huh,” said Kenya.

  “Kenya?” said Nannie.

  “Yes?”

  “How old are you?”

  “One hundred,” she said. No one laughed. She coughed. “How old do you think I am?” Kenya asked.

  Nannie made deliberating noises and played with her counting fingers. She looked at the different people at the table as if that would help. “Mama, how old are you?”

  “Well, I’ll give you a hint,” said Sharon with a wink. “I’ve told you about thirty-six times.”

  “Mama! How old are you, Mama Cindalou?”

  “Thirty-two. But I’ve told you about thirty-two times that a woman who tells her age will tell anything.”

  “You’re thirty!” Dennie yelled at Kenya.

  “Now, Dennie,” said Sharon, who had turned a blotchy red.

  “She’s nineteen, Dennie,” said Johnbrown. “Much older than you, so be sure to listen when she tells you to do something. You, too, Nannie and Amandla.”

  Cindalou said, “Kenya, can I get you some more of the green bean and tomato?”

  “Actually, yeah,” Kenya said. “Everything tastes really good.”

  “Girl, you say that like you surprised,” said Cindalou. “You forgot my cooking?”

  “Cindalou puts her foot in it nightly,” said Johnbrown.

  “You put your feet in the food?” said Dennie, looking frightened.

  Nannie spit masticated chicken onto her plate. “Ewww!”

  Amandla sighed. “It’s an expression, you dummies.”

  “Enough, Amandla,” said Johnbrown. “Put her foot in it, it just means she’s a good cook.”

  Kenya was relieved by this scuffle. It meant she didn’t have to remind Cindalou that she’d never tasted her cooking.
How would she have, back then? Maybe Johnbrown could have brought home a plate from their clandestine meetings?

  “Are you a cook, Kenya?” asked Sharon.

  “No, not really.”

  “Well, this is a good place to learn if you’re interested,” said Johnbrown.

  “Baba, you don’t know how to cook,” said Amandla.

  “You sure are sassy tonight, ’Mandla,” murmured Cindalou.

  “This is true,” said Johnbrown. “I don’t cook. But you don’t know how to wring a chicken’s neck. Each according to need and ability,” he said, pointing a drumstick at her.

  “You can wring a chicken’s neck?” asked Kenya.

  “I taught him that,” said Cindalou. “This African right here was scared of chickens.”

  “I still am! Those mammers act irrationally and they have beaks and claws.”

  “Truly, I don’t see how you all do it. I don’t see how you kill them, don’t see how you eat them,” Sharon said, shaking her head. She was eating only corn bread and vegetables.

  “You see it nearly every day,” said Johnbrown. “We are some chicken-eating people right here. But for Sharon’s sake,” he said to Kenya, “we did experiment with vegetarianism some years ago.”

  “The fried tofu was pretty good,” said Amandla. “I liked that.”

  “And the pounds just melted off,” said Cindalou sadly.

  “Why’d you start eating meat again?” asked Kenya.

  “Oh God,” Sharon said. “Here we go. I was breast-feeding twins!”

  “Turns out this one had been sneaking off to eat ribs,” Johnbrown said with a smirk, now pointing the bone at Sharon.

  “And bacon!” Cindalou laughed.

  Johnbrown laughed, too. “I mean it was a whole swine binge. If I hadn’t smelled it that time, she would have got down to chitlins.”

  “Enough, enough. We don’t need to talk about chitlins at the table,” said Sharon. “Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think it’s wine time. Any objections?”