Disgruntled: A Novel Page 22

  “No, but—”

  Commodore snatched the box away. “I can’t let you get involved with that.”

  “Why not? You eat it.”

  “But I don’t want to be responsible for Johnbrown’s daughter putting pork on her fork. You can have the pizza. But at least pick the meat off. Please?”

  Kenya did as she was told, trying to stifle a smile at Commodore’s concern. But the urge to smile disappeared easily as she watched him scarf down the pieces of abandoned meat.

  * * *

  “He’s a mess,” said Oliver with a wry twist of his mouth, indicating Commodore, who was napping on the couch at eleven in the morning. Kenya and Oliver were moving a jungle of electronic equipment out of the room where Kenya would now sleep.

  Oliver continued, shaking his head. “It’s really time for him to get back to his art. I mean, unlike me, the kid is actually kind of talented.”

  “Umf,” Kenya said, trying to balance an awkwardly shaped amplifier and a stack of Led Zeppelin records. Oliver made her nervous, but she had to do some thinking to figure out why. It was true that he was odd and slightly gross. Besides being unusually tall, he had a tree trunk dreadlock that stuck straight up the middle of his head. He always smelled slightly of mildew. Though he had nice, shapely hands, the color of perfectly browned biscuits, the starkly irregular lengths of his nails ruined their pleasantness. But none of that was what put Kenya ill at ease. It was that though he also acted nervous, he seemed to want to give the impression of speaking casually. It was as if he had once been shy, but had been forced into a new personality. Conversations with him gave her a flash of Tuff Wieder, Barrett’s butchy star lacrosse player, stumbling across the dance floor in her heels at prom.

  Kenya took a break from hauling and went to the kitchen to pour a glass of orange juice. She drank it and watched Commodore sleep. She couldn’t help musing that if she’d created his face, she wouldn’t have done it any differently: not his skin, which actually looked like milk chocolate, not his discerning pug nose, not the mole at the side of his eyebrow. She remembered her mother remarking when they were little on the thick fringe of eyelash that had been wasted on him. After high school had ended, he had stopped having his hair cut in a high top like everybody else and wore a little round Afro that reminded Kenya of wooden paintings of Ethiopian Jesus she’d seen in the Penn Museum.

  “He’s just the cutest. Isn’t he?”

  She didn’t know how long Oliver had been standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching her look at Commodore. A smile played on his lips.

  Kenya rolled her eyes. “So how much do you want me to pay in rent?”

  “You got any money?”

  “A little. I mean—I’m going to get a job.”

  “Well, I guess you shouldn’t worry about it until you start getting paid.”

  “Thanks, Oliver.”

  “No big,” he said. Though he did not smile or even look at her directly, Kenya could tell he liked saying that.

  * * *

  “Would I be, like, a really bad son if I told my mom that I was moving to Alaska?” Oliver asked them one evening after he showed his mother out of the apartment. Though they were all technically adults, Kenya felt like she lived in a home for orphans at Commodore and Oliver’s. It was jarring, then, that someone’s mother had stopped by bearing brownies.

  Commodore said, “Trust me that I know about the need to pull away from the folks now and then. I think Kenya does, too.”

  “Yup,” said Kenya.

  Oliver turned to her. “So do you think I would be a bad son if I told her I was moving to Alaska? I almost did one summer. I saw this thing in the paper about salmon fishing.”

  Oliver’s mother seemed innocent enough to Kenya. She was thick-figured with dishwater-gray hair and a raspy voice. Kenya thought again of the ruddy-faced hag on Fifty-Second Street, then of Sharon drinking in the afternoon. In contrast, this woman had neat short hair and wore an untucked oxford shirt and jeans in the style of the most forgettable of Barrett mothers. Her crow’s-feet looked merry.

  “Careful with these,” she’d said about the brownies, winking in Kenya’s direction. Kenya’s first thought was that maybe, despite the woman’s suburban demeanor, the brownies were laced with pot. But it turned out that the secret ingredient was a pinch of coffee—decaffeinated.

  “Okay, Miriam. We’ll be careful,” Oliver had said, blowing air. Like his mother, just then he reminded Kenya of Barrett. She marveled disapprovingly, as she had in her Barrett days, at the patience of white women with their children.

  “She’ll just send the brownies to Alaska,” Commodore was saying now. “Then we won’t get any.”

  “Oh please, dude, she’d love to bake you your own pan. That woman loves herself some Commodore,” Oliver said.

  “It’s not personal,” said Commodore. He and Oliver laughed.

  Sometimes when she hung out with them, Kenya felt like one of the kids on The Cosby Show whose job it was to act like Dr. Huxtable was hilarious.

  “No, it’s not personal,” murmured Oliver.

  “What do y’all mean?” asked Kenya.

  “I’m like the black son she never had,” said Commodore.

  “Heh,” Kenya said, channeling Lisa Bonet, whom she’d always found the least convincing of the Cosby kids.

  “It’s true.” Oliver shrugged.

  Commodore’s parents never came by. He spoke to them every couple of weeks and often hung up feeling depressed. Alfred had steadily increased his drinking. Now he had liver disease and, though they still disliked each other, Yaya took care of him. Commodore thought disapproving of him was what united them.

  “Seeing as though they’re both pissed at me for dropping out, they’re more together than they have been for a long time. It’s kind of comical. Even when I talk to them separately, they say exactly the same things to me on the phone, like there’s a script.” These conversations always ended with him saying the word school repeatedly and so nastily that it sounded like an expletive. And yet he was always the one who called them.

  Sometimes Kenya feared that Yaya would show up at the apartment and that this would tip off Kenya’s mother. Sometimes she hoped for it. But as far as she knew, Sheila and Yaya hadn’t spoken in years.

  * * *

  Kenya opted out of the first party—the first of many, it turned out—they had after she moved in, claiming that she felt exhausted. She did. Earlier that day she’d walked to an interview at the Green Apple on Chestnut Street, midway between West Philadelphia and downtown. She figured she’d be working in a few days and might not have as much time and energy to do things like take long walks. She headed down to Center City after her interview, stopping to buy an ice cream cone.

  “Can I have a lick?” said a skinny man lurching along Chestnut Street.

  The even skinnier man with him cackled as Kenya hurried on. Though her legs grew tired, she walked all the way down to Penn’s Landing. She sat on a bench looking over at Camden, grasping for a memory of a boat ride with her parents when she was six. Her father seemed annoyed that day, though she hadn’t been sure why. In retrospect she supposed that it was because the boat trip was a tour of “Olde” Philadelphia, complete with talk about American history and how great it was for everybody. Her mother made a show of ignoring Johnbrown’s mood. She ordered Kenya to pose for pictures at the side of the boat, and listened brightly to the Ben Franklin lookalike tour guide. Kenya had been briefly amused by the novelty of being on water, but the boat moved so slowly that she lost interest. All that was left to notice was the humid stink of the river and the little boy in front of them who kept twisting around to stare at them with his mouth open. Kenya thought she heard the boy’s mother murmur kellerd. Thinking of it now, more than ten years later, she glowered darkly until a man in a blue-collar uniform suddenly loomed in her field of vision and ordered her to smile. She gnashed her teeth in reply.

  And so that night, despite halfhearted pleas
from Commodore to “come out and play,” she listened to the party from her room. Near midnight, she snuck out and into the bathroom, where she encountered some womanly indelicacy smearing the side of the toilet bowl. It made her wonder if Mary Elizabeth—whoever she was—was there. Kenya didn’t want to care but was feverish to know what she looked like. She walked into the living room and froze. While she’d heard the buzzer sound repeatedly, and the growing murmur of voices, she was still unprepared for the number of people crammed into the space. It must have been near fifty.

  Kenya wondered how it was that she and Commodore, children of the Seven Days, had wound up here. Aside from Commodore and Oliver, there was only one other black man throwing himself around to the music, and he looked a little too old for this party. She thought about the blue-lit all-black space of Commodore’s cousin’s barbecue, which might have been the best time she ever had. The thought dissipated as she saw Commodore play-fighting with a long-haired boy. Behind him, a small girl with sharp features and spiky short hair was trying to jump on his back. He spotted Kenya. “Double team!” he cried. “Kenya, help!”

  On her way back to her room, Kenya saw Oliver. He was sitting at the kitchen table alone, in the middle of the crowd, in a Red Sea–parted type of way. He saluted. There seemed to be some other reality pulsing beneath his and Commodore’s languid comings and goings, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to enter it.

  * * *

  “Calm down, homegirl,” Kenya’s manager at the Green Apple was saying as he used his fingers to comb his goatee. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”

  It was Saturday afternoon, and Kenya was standing in the dim, cluttered office, trembling and near hysterical. “I think it tried to jump at me!” she said. “Like the rat in Native Son! Didn’t you read Native Son? Luther, it was a rat!”

  “Look, I want you to call me Luth.”

  After three weeks of working at the Green Apple: a healthy cafeteria, Kenya understood why Commodore was throwing a party or getting high whenever he wasn’t there. If the job wasn’t an outright nightmare until seeing the rat, it had been an unpleasant dream in which Kenya had to unclog the occasional toilet, be called “homegirl” by her stinky young white boss, and encounter suspicious-looking turds on the industrial-size tomato cans in the storeroom (which now appeared to belong to rats).

  As Kenya left Luth’s smelly office, and his laissez-faire stance toward rodents in storerooms, she miserably reviewed the reasons she could not quit: it paid better than the mall jobs she had briefly explored and nearly as much as the ones she didn’t have the typing skills to get, and was one of the few non-fast-food restaurants that would hire someone with no experience. So when she got home that night, there was nothing she wanted to do more than enjoy the loud oblivion of one of Commodore and Oliver’s parties.

  Aren’t you glad you’re not a slave? she thought, sipping her one beer, slipping into the couch, trying to forget the day and the shift she had tomorrow. But the next morning came, and when she opened her eyes and thought of the Green Apple, she screamed. Commodore rapped on her door, yelling her name with alarm.

  “I just fucking hate work,” she called. Then she heard a gravelly female voice ask, “Is everything okay?” Mary Elizabeth.

  Kenya found them both in the kitchen, where Commodore was cracking eggs, though Kenya had never seen him cook before. Mary Elizabeth wore a long plaid shirt that fell to her thighs. Below, she wore thick, saggy socks. Kenya hoped there were panties under the shirt.

  “I told you,” Commodore said.

  “Told me what?” Told her that a scantily clad Mary Elizabeth would be there?

  “That you didn’t want to work there,” he said. “Hey, Kenya, this is Mary. Mary, Kenya.”

  “Hello,” said Mary Elizabeth.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” said Kenya, wondering if anyone had ever named their child Mary Kenya. To Commodore, she said, “But you didn’t tell me why I didn’t want to work there.”

  “I told you I couldn’t explain. Remember I told you how I wanted to do, like, a series of paintings about it, but that it didn’t even make good art?”

  “No,” said Kenya. “No, I don’t. But you need to make a portrait of the rat in the storeroom,” she said, waiting for Commodore to be shocked.

  “It’s cute you think it’s just one,” he said.

  “All food places have rats,” said Mary Elizabeth, not unkindly.

  “Well, I’ll admit I did think rats had better taste than the Green Apple,” joked Commodore. “I don’t get how food can be so spicy and so bland at the same time.”

  “And why does everything have kidney beans and tomatoes in it?” Kenya said, laughing. She had forced herself to eat the free food at work the first week. But after a few spectacular episodes in the employee bathroom, she stopped touching everything except the sweet potato muffins, whose dry crumbles she liked to meditatively roll on her tongue. She didn’t know how the students, who swarmed the place at lunch, could keep eating the chicken peanut stew and the “Health Nachos.”

  Mary Elizabeth shrugged. “The food is pretty bad there.”

  “It is,” said Kenya, trying to be friendly. But then she looked away as Mary Elizabeth began practicing pliés and relevés, possibly with no underwear on. “And why won’t Luther—”

  “Luth! Luth!” yelled Commodore.

  “—stop calling me homegirl?”

  “The better question is why he won’t stop calling poor Bronwyn homegirl,” said Commodore. “She’s just a little white girl from Narberth. What did she do to deserve that?”

  Mary Elizabeth laughed in her gravelly way. Commodore cursed; he was trying to get a bit of broken eggshell out of the bowl. Mary Elizabeth twirled a long strand of light brown hair around her finger and peered at the eggs.

  “You have to use a big piece of eggshell to get little ones out,” she said. “Like this.” She let go of her hair to scoop around in the bowl, and then triumphantly pulled out some goop.

  “Wowwwwww,” Commodore said. “That’s clever, ain’t it?” he asked Kenya.

  “My mom showed me that,” said Mary Elizabeth. “It’s, like, the only useful thing she knows.” She rolled her eyes and smiled at the ground.

  “I should probably get in the shower before Oliver gets up,” Kenya said.

  “That dude,” said Commodore, shaking his head. “It’s like using the bathroom after the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “What?” asked Mary Elizabeth.

  “There are, like, freshwater pools on the floor,” said Kenya.

  “What now?” Oliver called from his doorway. He wore a navy velvet monogrammed robe that he had mocked mercilessly when his mother gave it to him. But as far as Kenya could see, he wore it at some point nearly every single day, even when it was a little warm.

  The robe made Kenya think of her own mother, whom she’d thought of calling when the summer ended. For a week or so, she thought about it every day, but she was too angry. As far as she could tell, neither Johnbrown nor Sheila had figured out that she was gone. And if they had, they had not tried very hard to find her, even though the last anyone had seen of her she’d been on a Greyhound bus. Kenya imagined an alternate universe where she’d been abducted from the bus station and chained in some pervert’s basement. She wanted to weep with pity for herself.

  “Can I get in the bathroom first, Oliver?” she asked.

  “If you tell me what you said about me.”

  “Dude,” said Commodore. “Just admit once and for all that you throw buckets of water on the floor when you shower. Just admit it.”

  “Before I answer that, why don’t you tell me what you’re supposed to be doing? Who taught you how to turn on the stove?”

  Now Mary Elizabeth was the Cosby kid or maybe the Cosby mother, who also had to laugh at the jokes. Kenya closed the bathroom door and stood under the steaming water for as long as she could stand. She was using up the hot water and she did not care.

  W
hen she emerged, only Oliver sat at the table, reading the newspaper, eating eggs that looked dry.

  “Want some?” he asked. “They’re not too bad.”

  While she pondered an answer, a distinctly male giggle escaped Commodore’s room. Someone turned up music, throbbing and wordless.

  “It’s not serious,” said Oliver, looking at what Kenya could see were the obituaries.

  “What’s not serious?” Kenya asked. “Death?”

  “It’s never serious. But after her, there’s going to be another one just like her. Commodore’s endless summer of weed and white girls and never dealing with real shit.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Oliver looked up. “I mean a lot of cats truly fall in love with a white girl. Exhibit A, my dad, rest his soul. But our friend Commodore has this idea that they’re not quite real, and so he doesn’t have to be quite real about his life, about the shit with his parents. Which is why he can’t do his art and chase Mary Elizabeth at the same time.”

  “Not that I care, but where are you getting all of this?” asked Kenya, angry that she was talking to him, and because she knew that what he was saying was true.

  “You know me,” he said. “I’m the Watcher.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kenya said. “Watch this.” She walked to her room and slammed the door.

  “Touché!” called Oliver.

  * * *

  Once in fourth grade she’d had dinner at Trinity Howell’s house. She had been presented with a plate of meat, applesauce, and green beans. First she ate the beans, then the applesauce. The meat, crusted in gold, white on the inside, was still there. She knew that it was not chicken. She also knew that she was forbidden to eat pork, but there was no way she was going to explain that to the smiling Howells. If I don’t ask, she had told herself, then I don’t know that this is pork. Later she told her mother that they’d had fried chicken for dinner and Sheila had said, “Oh, fried chicken for the little black girl. Give me a break!” Her mother had been so frustratingly smug that it had been very hard not to blab the truth at that point. That night she lay in bed, expecting her stomach to explode.