Disgruntled: A Novel Read online

  “None over here. Objections, I mean,” said Cindalou.

  “Kenya, do you—” Sharon started.

  “Um, I think not,” said Johnbrown, a shadow crossing his face. A similar shadow crossed Sharon’s and she held her tongue.

  “What’s for dessert?” asked Nannie. “Are we having birthday cake?”

  “Nannie,” Amandla despaired. “Your birthday was”—she counted quickly on her fingers—“seven months ago.”

  “It’s okay, my love,” said Sharon to Amandla. “Nannie has a small person’s sense of time. Like you used to. Remember last year you sent away for those stickers and asked me about them every day?”

  “They never came,” Amandla muttered darkly.

  “Nannie, would you like some peach cobbler?” asked Cindalou. “I made it special for Kenya, but I think it might be almost as good as birthday cake.”

  “I want birthday cake,” said Nannie.

  “That’s fine, because nobody is getting any peach cobbler unless their name is Johnbrown Curtis,” said Johnbrown.

  “No, Baba,” cried Dennie. “Peach coddler is my favorite.”

  “Dennie, you’ve never even eaten peach coddler,” Johnbrown said. “You kids are insane.”

  “They come by it honestly,” said Cindalou, winking at Kenya.

  * * *

  After the cobbler with ice cream (homemade, of course), and after she’d sat at the table until she could sit no more, Kenya begged off to the Zen room. As she attempted to scale the bed, she wondered if there actually was some trick Amandla could have shown her about getting up into the loft. Gripping the metal ladder immediately hurt her hands, and one rung shy of the top, she was sure she would fall. But when she finally got up there and felt her bones melting into the mattress, she forgot all of that.

  She could hear the noises coming from different parts of the house: a toilet flushing, a sink turned on and off. From the kitchen she heard the clatter of plates, then voices of her father and the women (his women?), the low hum of jazz. She thought she recognized a song Johnbrown used to play.

  Space is the place

  Space is the place!

  She was wondering how he had kept his records all of these years—in jails, prison, and halfway houses—when her name jumped all the way from the kitchen up the stairs and into the loft.

  “… just like you,” said Sharon’s voice. “I mean a spitting image!”

  “… can see Sheila,” said Cindalou. Then she said something about Kenya’s hair. Kenya could not tell if it was a compliment or not.

  Kenya’s body tensed with listening, but now they all seemed to get quieter. She heard her father’s voice, and then only the plucking of bass strings in a long pause. When they began to talk again, it was clearly of other things.

  She imagined herself making fun of them for someone, a new, imaginary person—not Zaineb, Commodore, or Sheila, but someone else who could understand just how absurd her father was, from failed revolutionary to imprisoned novelist and finally contented interracial polygamous family man. She imagined mocking Sharon and her strange children with their sharp little teeth and Cindalou, the now-obsolete home-wrecker who was still hanging on.

  * * *

  Even before she got to the farm, Kenya had been waking up confused about where she was. In the moments before opening her eyes, she didn’t know if she was a small girl in her tiny bedroom in West Philadelphia, if she’d slept over at Zaineb’s, if she would wake up to the yellow walls of her room back at the Ardmore Arms. Now she was alarmed when she opened her eyes and found that she was way above the floor—and that someone was standing in the doorway.

  “Good morning,” said Amandla. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay,” said Kenya.

  Amandla looked down, studying her sneaker.

  Kenya said, “You can come in.”

  “Amandla!” called Cindalou. “Let that girl sleep!”

  “She’s already up,” Amandla called back.

  “I’m glad you woke me,” said Kenya. “If I sleep too long, I start to have bad dreams.”

  “Me too!” said Amandla.

  “Amandla!”

  “Shouldn’t you go see what she wants?” said Kenya.

  “I’ll go in a minute.”

  The night before, when she’d studied her at dinner, Kenya had seen Amandla as a browner Cindalou. But now, looking at the girl’s jaw, she saw Johnbrown as a preteen girl. She had his slanted eyes behind her glasses, and shared his faint air of disdain. She looked somber for someone wearing a T-shirt bearing a large pink flower at the center.

  “Did you sleep well?” Amandla asked.

  “Very well, thank you. What about you?”

  Amandla made an okay, not great motion with her hand. Because of Barrett, Kenya thought comme ci, comme ça.

  “Do you ever sleep up here?” Kenya asked.

  “Once when I was sick I got to sleep up there with my mom.”

  “Well, maybe we can have a slumber party sometime. I mean, not if you’re sick.”

  “Really?” said Amandla.

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” Amandla said, with a frown, “Nannie and Dennie might want to come, too, and we can’t all fit up there.”

  “Why can’t they just sleep in the woods with the other fawns and foxes?” she asked.

  “What?” Amandla said, but she giggled anyway.

  It occurred to Kenya that she was being reckless with the little girl. But perhaps not as reckless as some had been with her.

  * * *

  For a week, Kenya ate, slept, and observed her father’s new life at what they jokingly called Curtiswood. She noted the changes in Johnbrown, who was now the type of man who could build a loft bed. His outdoor work here had tanned him more deeply brown than she remembered, and his arms looked powerful. He also had gray hair at his temples and a paunch packed with Cindalou’s food.

  Kenya thought of her father’s old daily schedule when she saw the large, complicated chart that hung in the TV-less den, where the family often gathered after meals. According to the chart, everyone except Dennie and Nannie took turns waking up early to milk the lone cow and tend to the chickens. Cindalou cooked and did the shopping, and she was also in charge of household finances. During the fall and winter, Johnbrown homeschooled the children, but in the summer he took care of the crops alongside local and migrant workers hired during planting and harvesting seasons. Sharon was a working artist. Otherwise, she yelled at the kids to make their beds and pick up their toys, and she made the house presentable for the woman who cleaned every week.

  The kids had chores, and even though it was summer, Johnbrown had loaded them down with reading and math exercises. They also had to take cooking lessons with Cindalou and do art with Sharon. Everyone had time in the day, at least forty minutes, when they were permitted to do whatever they liked. Nannie and Dennie played little games in the woods; Kenya imagined them reverting to a wild state, snarling and howling. Amandla, whom Kenya wrongly assumed to be an avid reader as she had been, wandered about the house, appearing to play hide-and-seek with herself and singing endless made-up songs in her flat but appealing voice. Sharon used Kenya’s room if she wasn’t in it to stretch or meditate. Johnbrown was still working on The Key. She wondered if he was still making up stories about the butler but felt shy asking. Their meeting in the prison visiting room seemed so long ago, as if they had been children who had since become orphans.

  Each afternoon during her siesta, Cindalou fell asleep on the couch in the den with a book. One late afternoon, Kenya noticed that it was Remembrance of Things Past.

  “Ugh,” Kenya said when she saw it. “We were supposed to read part of that in French class this year. But our teacher, Mademoiselle Lambert, said we were trampling it up like ignorant elephants and we wound up reading a children’s book.”

  “That must be some school you went to. I’ve been reading this on and
off for about—is that right?—five years. One of your father’s recommendations. I could tell he thought I wouldn’t finish it.” She rolled her eyes.

  “We were just reading part of it.”

  “Yeah, but you know how to say trampling all over it like ignorant elephants in French.”

  Kenya laughed a little, and then felt awkward in the silence that followed. She stood abruptly from the big chair she’d been sitting in, the one that the kids had argued over the night before, cramming in and jostling each other. “I don’t want to disturb your quiet time,” she said.

  “I think the quiet is something you can share,” said Cindalou.

  Kenya lowered herself back into the chair and opened up an early Alice Walker novel she’d plucked off a shelf in a room the kids called the Free Library. That was as opposed to Johnbrown’s library, where borrowing a book involved actual paperwork and solemn vows about returning the book in such-and-such condition.

  Cindalou glanced over. “Whew. That one makes The Color Purple look like that French children’s book you were reading.” Kenya didn’t tell Cindalou that when the title character, a little boy, died at the end of the children’s book, Mademoiselle had wept about it. Cindalou went on. “I’m tellin’ you, early Alice is rough. I mean, if you think about the ending, Color Purple was obviously her idea of a fairy tale.”

  Cindalou and Kenya turned pages, drifting in and out of conversation about The Third Life of Grange Copeland. (“Let Hollywood try to turn that into a movie,” Cindalou muttered.) But just when Kenya relaxed, feeling that silence between them was okay, she heard Cindalou say, “Your mother turned me on to Alice.”

  Kenya was trapped.

  “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear this,” Cindalou continued. “But I miss her. I been missing her this whole time.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Kenya. And then, to her horror, Cindalou was wiping away tears. “You know, not in a sexual way of course, but I think I was just as much in love with her as I was with him. But everything got so…”

  They heard footfalls on the stair and then the shuffle of the Chinese slippers Sharon wore around the house.

  “My goodness, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “We’re just catching up,” Cindalou sniffed.

  Sharon placed a hand on her chest and looked sympathetic. “You all must have so much to talk about. Don’t let me, you know, stanch your flow.” Then she fidgeted in the doorway to the kitchen, looking uncomfortable. “So,” she said, “would you like me to start dinner?”

  “Yeah, Sharon. I want you to start dinner,” Cindalou said in a hard voice.

  “It’s just ’cause the kids—”

  “You think I don’t know what time the kids eat?”

  “Come on, Cinda, don’t be angry. I didn’t mean anything.”

  “You never do, Sharon.” Cindalou got up and stormed past Sharon into the kitchen. She slammed cabinet doors and pots, muttering loud enough to hear: no-cookin’ ass if I want her to start dinner can’t nobody eat that mess …

  Sharon smiled at Kenya and rolled her eyes. Then she poked her head into the kitchen. “Rarf!” she said. “Rarf! Rarf!” She whimpered, holding limp paws in front of herself. She glanced back out at Kenya, who remained pinned to the chair, smiling weakly.

  The back door to the kitchen opened and the sounds of the children and their father filled the downstairs.

  “In the doghouse again, huh?” he said. Nannie, delighted with her mother, commanded her to sit.

  * * *

  “I have a suggestion,” Johnbrown announced on a Sunday at the beginning of Kenya’s second week at the farm. He had decided that Kenya would shadow each member of the household for a week (even Nannie and Dennie, so they wouldn’t feel left out) to see what they did all day and how she might fit in that summer.

  “Me first!” said Cindalou. “It would be nice not to have to hire that smelly German lady to help with the canning.”

  “I thought maybe we’d let Kenya choose first.”

  “Okay,” said Cindalou. “But last year ’Mandla said she saw that woman pick her nose.”

  “Mama, you saw that.”

  “Well, somebody saw it.”

  Kenya imagined being a captive audience for Cindalou, Sharon, or her father. “Well, I don’t want, um, nose picking in the jam,” she said. “But I thought I’d spend some time with the kids.”

  “Yay!” yelled Dennie. “Ken-ya! Ken-ya! Ken-ya!”

  She had meant Amandla, but it was too late now.

  By Monday night, Kenya was exhausted. Despite the elaborate chart in the den, it wasn’t clear to Kenya what Nannie and Dennie usually did all day, because their time with her seemed to revolve around getting her to do things with them that the other adults either wouldn’t do or wouldn’t do for long. Instead of doing the exercises they’d been assigned, they demanded that she read them every storybook in the house and then tell stories of her invention. They wanted to play dress-up in the attic clothes, dry-rotting castoffs that would probably never make it to the nearest Salvation Army—180 miles away—and they wanted her to dress up, too. Dennie demanded that she play an idiosyncratic version of backgammon for kindergartners that “my baba” had taught him. Chess was Nannie’s game; “my baba” had taught her that, too. Both of the twins were intolerable, weeping losers and horrible winners, and they were never more distraught than when they suspected that Kenya was letting them beat her.

  On Tuesday afternoon, which was blistering, they wanted Kenya to walk them a sweaty fifteen minutes down to the creek, where they were allowed to play only with adult supervision. Kenya, whose main experience in the wilderness had been on a Barrett trip to the Pocono Mountains where the cabins had microwaves, immediately despised the creek’s muddy water, which was lush with thick, slimy weeds.

  “Do you all think the creek is, um, sanitary for the kids?” she asked the adults that night after the kids had gone to bed. She had showered hours ago but still felt itchy.

  Johnbrown laughed. He said, “We can cut their ‘week’ short, you know. I’m not sure they’ll know the difference.”

  “Please, Baba, you’re their teacher. Nannie definitely knows how many days are in a week,” Kenya said. “And it’s only Tuesday. I’ll survive.”

  At the beginning of the week, they listened to her. In addition to the matter of obeying Sharon, Cindalou, and Johnbrown, who reminded them every day to respect their big sister, they had made pleasing Kenya a competition. But as the week progressed they began to challenge her. By Thursday, Kenya was beginning to feel hysterical; they were back at the creek, where the kids demanded to go every afternoon. The weeds caressed her legs, and the same horsefly kept landing on her arm. About a foot away, Nannie listlessly whipped her body back and forth, making herself a human sprinkler.

  “That’s it, guys,” Kenya said. “It’s time to go back and get washed up for dinner.”

  “Can we stay a little longer?” said Nannie.

  No matter when Kenya announced that it was time to stop one thing and move on to the next, Nannie always tried to bargain for more time. Kenya had learned to start preparing the kids to stop what they were doing before it was necessary, in order to accommodate Nannie. But now she thought she would scream if one more insect buzzed in her ear.

  “I think now, Nannie.”

  “But I’m not ready.”

  Dennie didn’t care much for the creek. One of his earliest memories was of his mother holding him in a pool in New Jersey, and it was evidently the country of his soul. He usually raced Nannie into the water, splashed around, and then exited quickly. He would dry off carefully, clean the mud from between his toes, and sit down to imitate birdcalls.

  “Maybe we should go,” he said.

  Kenya said, “I really appreciate that, Dennie. We have to wash up for dinner. You know Cindalou doesn’t like us sitting down to eat with creek water on us.”

  Nannie looked up at the sun, as Johnbrown had no doubt taught her. “It
’s nowhere near dinnertime. And it’s Mama Cindalou.” She kept moving back and forth, whipping up water. “Why don’t you call her Mama Cindalou?”

  “Because she’s not my mother,” Kenya said. Heat rose in her chest and throat and she folded her arms to tamp it down. Nannie folded her arms in imitation and crossed her eyes. Then she cackled.

  “Let’s go, Dennie,” Kenya snapped, reaching for the boy’s hand. Then she turned away from Nannie and began walking toward the house.

  “Nannie,” Dennie cried, twisting back toward his sister. “Come on!”

  “Bye, y’all,” yelled Nannie. “I’m swimming to the other side!”

  Kenya stopped short and weighed her options. The shallow creek floor dropped in the middle and Nannie couldn’t swim—not really. Dennie made a whimpering noise and she realized she was crushing his small hand. She dropped it when she heard loud splashing and turned to find Johnbrown striding into the water. He had appeared out of nowhere just in time to see Kenya abandon Nannie.

  “Baba!” the girl cried happily.

  He didn’t say anything. She kept saying his name and he kept ignoring her until she turned it into a sob, Baba, Baba, Baba, but Johnbrown remained silent, his face a bland mask. At dinner, he was in his usual calm and expansive mood. He did not reprimand Kenya or even address the incident. She never found out what he told Sharon or Cindalou. But he must have told somebody something, because the next morning she found herself being ushered out to the Paul Bunyan supermarket in town with Cindalou.

  “We were thinking you must be tired of them wild beast kids,” Cindalou said with a laugh as they walked out to a maroon station wagon, one of three cars in the gravel lot. “Wear you down to the gristle, don’t they?” she said.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Kenya lied.

  The car door closed and before Kenya could stop it, Cindalou started talking.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’ when I came up to Philly,” Cindalou began, as if she and Kenya were in the middle of an interview. The narrative continued for the rest of what was meant to have been the twins’ week, as they ran errands in Freedom’s semiabandoned shopping district, with its dilapidated bars, junk stores, ancient post office, and sour-looking white people in yesteryear’s fashions. It continued organically into a week of shadowing Cindalou as they sorted enormous piles of laundry, made chicken stock, and drove around in the car. Cindalou would pull on a thread of her narrative, drop it to pay a vaguely hostile cashier or issue a cooking directive, complain about the multitude of country stations on the car radio, and then pick it right back up.