Disgruntled: A Novel Read online

  The boss continued, “Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing serious. She said she had a bad headache. Say, Kenya, do you need something to read? Or one of the new filmstrips? Have you watched Really Rosie?”

  Kenya thought about Pierre-I-don’t-care in the lion’s mouth and was about to ask to see it again when her father spoke.

  “We’d better go check on her mother,” Johnbrown said.

  After chatting briefly about his day (more breakthroughs in The Key, all reported with a kind of fake cheer), Kenya and her father walked home in the boring and unsettling silence that she had anticipated. She wouldn’t ask him again what was wrong or anything else; it was too tedious. When Sheila was angry she let you know and she let you know why. The atmosphere around Johnbrown was a mist that might evaporate or turn into a rainstorm. It was as mysterious—and as bothersome—as bad weather.

  Kenya tried to lose herself in other parts of the walk by studying West Philadelphia. She gazed without comprehension at the large, neat houses near the campus painted with Greek symbols, and wondered why the young white men sat shirtless on the porches. She and her father passed the Acme supermarket, where Kenya had spent many dreary hours, the stuffy Laundromat they frequented before Sheila defied Johnbrown and bought a washer-dryer on credit. They passed the delicious Koch’s Deli, where Kenya’s parents agreed they would never go again. After an altercation with a black customer who had left the store, the cashier had hissed to the guy making sandwiches, “He doesn’t know how it is! I could get him lynched!” Johnbrown never stopped regretting that all he’d done was walk out, claiming that he had been afraid of what he might do.

  On days like this, Kenya noticed every pile of dog crap, every bit of trash, abandoned Hug bottles, newspaper sections. She wondered why her family couldn’t live closer to the campus, where the streets were orderly and cooler. Of course she knew—money and race—but still. These thoughts and her father’s droopy and ominous silence made her angry. His slow shuffle reminded her of Aslan moving slowly with Susan and Lucy to the stone table, where he allowed himself to be killed. But Aslan had made a deal with the White Witch to nobly sacrifice himself for the traitor Edmund. If Johnbrown was sacrificing himself, what was it for?

  * * *

  The house was in chaos. Papers and envelopes covered the floor; winter coats from the downstairs closet were piled on the couch. Nearly half of the books seemed to be missing from the shelves. Kenya tasted terror.

  Her father stood behind her gripping her shoulder. He said her name in an alarmed way, as if he was about to give her an order. Kenya wondered if he had time to get his gun.

  But then something changed.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, moving Kenya aside and bounding up the stairs. “Sheila!” he called. “Sheila!”

  Kenya followed him. They both stood at the top of the stairs, where they could see Kenya’s mother in her room, which looked hurricane-tossed. Sheila, who had been known to spend hours folding underwear to pack for trips to the Jersey Shore, was throwing things into her suitcase.

  “Sheila?” said Johnbrown again.

  She did not stop what she was doing. “What the fuck do you want?”

  Kenya knew they had forgotten her. In a flash she was looking at the closed door of her parents’ bedroom. She heard the lock click.

  “What is going on?” Johnbrown asked. “What—”

  “You know what the fuck is going on!” Sheila screamed, her voice hoarse, as if she had spent the day screaming.

  Kenya stood in the hallway picturing different ways to get into that room. She imagined banging on the door. She thought of falling down the stairs, but she knew she couldn’t do it loudly enough without seriously hurting herself. She imagined screaming her voice raw. Then it dawned on her that it didn’t matter. She could hear everything they said, though her father was speaking in a low voice. It was all wrong. Usually Johnbrown was the one screaming, and Sheila was the one you could barely hear. Kenya felt the floor tipping at angles and fell in a slump against the door.

  “I thought you didn’t even like that bitch! ‘She’s not my cup of tea,’ you said! Remember when you said that shit? I should have known: you don’t even say that! You don’t even drink tea!”

  “Sheila, it’s not—”

  “Not what? It’s not what I think?”

  “Let me talk, please. Let me—”

  “Explain? Apologize? What the fuck is the point of that?”

  “I was going to talk to you about this today. I swear, baby, I was going to talk to you about this today.”

  “How could—?”

  “Sheila, Sheila, it’s not what I wanted. You know it’s not what I wanted, but I think we can work this—ouch! Stop—now!”

  They had never fought with their hands. Kenya stood up and banged on the door.

  “Mom! Baba! Baba!” she yelled. No one answered her. She heard only an occasional curse, scuffling, and a slap. A dull thud. She slid down the door and sat on the creaking wood floor. She wanted to go somewhere else in the house and ignore them, or even walk out the front door. That would show both of them—if they ever came out of that room.

  Their muffled voices started up again and she covered her ears and hummed. Then she started singing all of the songs she knew by heart; songs she liked (“My Cherie Amour”) and songs she hated (“Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” to which the fifth grade had to perform a humiliating dance on May Day), songs that made no sense (like Here’s my chance to dance my way, out of my constrictions). She was trying to sing a solo fugue when the door whipped open and she fell backward.

  “Kenya!” her mother yelped, and then abruptly leaned down, pulling Kenya up into her arms. Her eyes were ringed with black. Kenya hadn’t known she wore eye makeup. It made her cry. “Shhhhh,” Sheila said. “Shhhhhhhh. It’s okay. I’m going to make dinner.”

  “Hi, Monkey,” her father said. He still stood in the room, amid ruins.

  “Are you going to get a divorce?” Kenya mumbled into her mother’s chest. She couldn’t believe she was asking this, that this was happening. She remembered how confident she’d been the year before when she’d comforted Charlena, how sure she’d been that Charlena’s family would fall apart, and that hers would stay together.

  “I’m sorry you heard all of that, Kenya. We’re all going to sit down and have dinner and talk,” said Sheila.

  Johnbrown and Sheila moved stiffly about the downstairs as if there was some danger of their touching. Kenya stood staring out of the window like TV characters did when they were thinking about something weighty. But all she could see were the boards on the windows. Sheila had gone from suggesting dinner in a calm voice to slamming pots in the kitchen, as if she’d just remembered reality. Johnbrown came over to Kenya and smoothed her cornrows.

  “You’re my life,” he said.

  But apparently she wasn’t.

  It seemed that Johnbrown Curtis and Cindalou Matthews had fallen in love, and that Cindalou Matthews was carrying Johnbrown Curtis’s baby, Kenya’s brother or sister. At that Sheila snorted, “Half,” as they sat at the table, picking over spaghetti.

  “Don’t be like that, Sheila,” said Johnbrown. “We’re not like that. We’re not like my mother.” It seemed crazy to Kenya that Johnbrown was still talking. She nearly emptied the canister of powdery Parmesan cheese onto her plate, stopping only when her mother said her name sharply.

  “So are you going to get a divorce?” Kenya asked again.

  Her parents looked at each other. Johnbrown cleared his throat.

  “Well, now is as good a time as any to speak to you both about something I wanted to ask.”

  If Kenya had been older, she would have seen her mother’s eyes fill with anticipation and the hope that whatever Johnbrown offered would save them all. As it was, all Kenya saw was a withering glare. Not that it mattered, given what her father said next.

  “With your permission, Sheila and Kenya, I’d like for Cindalou and the baby to move in here. I’
d like for us all to be a family.”

  “What did you say?” Sheila asked. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and looked genuinely as if she hadn’t heard, as if she was asking for a small clarification: Did you say “cream or sugar”? Lemonade? You want me to pass the lemonade?

  “Well, Cindalou and I have been going to some events at the Yoruba temple and—”

  “Oh, you actually go out? Of the house? Glad to hear that.”

  “And I don’t think the temple is for me. I mean, organized religion is organized religion, but some of the families, in the traditional African—”

  “Get back to the point. So you want to move that bitch and her bastard up in here? Where I pay the mortgage? I’m not understanding what this has to do with the temple. Because from what I know about traditional West African polygamy (Lord Jesus have mercy!), the man supports the family. No, brother. I make the money.” And here she laughed. “What you proposing is pimping and—”

  “Sheila,” Johnbrown said.

  “—I AM NOT A WHORE!”

  Kenya was tired of crying. Her head hurt. She was thirsty but the thought of apple juice on her tongue made her nearly hysterical. Her mother looked at her across the table, her purple skin and wide brown eyes in a gorgeous blaze.

  “No, Kenya,” she said, lowering the volume and sweetening her voice with a flourish, “your father and I are not getting a divorce because we never got married.”

  “Sheila!” Johnbrown yelled.

  “Stop saying my name.”

  Kenya felt sure that she’d never been more miserable. Then, as if to make herself feel worse, to see how much she could stand, she fell again into the memory of Charlena and the girl’s fear about her parents breaking up. Kenya remembered how smugly secure she’d felt about Johnbrown and Sheila’s marriage. Marriage! Now Charlena’s mom was pregnant and their family was moving to a bigger house. Charlena might even have to transfer schools. Frankly, Kenya was more broken up about that than Charlena was. Now it was Kenya who sometimes proposed playing Star Wars, and a little desperately at that.

  “But you—” Kenya tried again with her parents.

  “We thought it would confuse you. Also, I don’t know that we ever agreed on the whole setup. See, your father, this principled man here, doesn’t believe in marriage. He didn’t see why the government had to be involved in our family life. He didn’t need a piece of paper to be committed to us, he said. But maybe, you know if I ever speak to that bitch Cindalou again, I should tell her she needs to get that paper.”

  Johnbrown rubbed at his temples, staring down at his plate. “This wasn’t what I wanted at all. This wasn’t the way to go about this at all.”

  “Go about what? Is there a way to go about cheating on your wife with her girlfriend? Oh no, you’re probably talking about some bullshit like the right way to propose half-assed polygamy to your family. Maybe there’s a strategy of some sort, or some literature I could have brought from my job! The one I keep to support this family.”

  Something, Kenya wasn’t sure what, switched over and her parents assumed their normal fighting positions.

  Johnbrown screeched at Sheila that her problem was that she wouldn’t let a man be himself.

  Sheila asked calmly what Johnbrown thought a man was and how he thought the definition applied to him.

  Johnbrown said this was exactly the kind of conversation he never had with Cindalou. Abruptly, Sheila said, “I see your mother every year. She gives us money.”

  Johnbrown clenched his fists. “I need to go,” he said. “I just need to get out of here, because otherwise—”

  “So GO!”

  But he didn’t, not just yet. The three of them sat trapped, not eating their cold spaghetti in the dim dining room. By now it was probably night outside, but Kenya couldn’t tell.

  Then, after an eternity, with a final pleading look at Sheila, Johnbrown got up and left. No one ever found out where he went, because of what happened when he returned, what happened with a sleepwalking Kenya and his lawfully registered gun.

  The Little Princess

  Sometimes Kenya thought that if the world before the walk she took with her father could be real, then the world on the other side could not be. Sheila had been shot. It was years before Kenya could say in her mind I shot my mother in the shoulder. Whether she’d been asleep or not, it made her want to die.

  That late-spring night was a blur that reminded Kenya of a sickening amusement park ride. Johnbrown, who did not have a license, driving them crazily to the hospital; Sheila cursing, sobbing, and bleeding; Johnbrown ordering Kenya to stay quiet at the hospital when they asked what happened. He would take the blame for the shooting, he said. Kenya should not worry. He would take the blame, he kept repeating. The last image of her father Kenya had for a long time was him kneeling, as if praying, as he dripped tears on her mother’s hospital bed.

  After it became clear that Sheila would be okay, Johnbrown had fled the hospital, off with Cindalou, her mother guessed, to who knows where. But to Kenya it felt like she and her mother were the ones who had disappeared, going to stay at Grandmama’s home. Kenya now noticed that the air there was always damp and the house contained odd things, like an extensive collection of old used toothbrushes and all of her dead husband’s shoes.

  In Johnbrown’s absence, it was Sheila who mustered the “brave” smiles. Also, even after she healed and stopped taking pain pills she often stared into the distance, reminding Kenya of Brother Camden and his loose eye. It occurred to Kenya sometime after everything happened that she wouldn’t even mind seeing Brother Camden now.

  On the other hand, the thought of Cindalou and her dumb fruity smell made Kenya’s stomach lurch. One sweltering afternoon, Kenya walked past the room where her mother slept and heard ragged crying. Until then, her mother hadn’t cried, or at least Kenya hadn’t heard it. Now the sounds she made seemed to hurt. Kenya went into her own room, with its ugly series of Harlequin pictures and its scratchy afghan, made by Grandmama’s mother. She took out a notebook and pen and wrote: CINDALOU MATTHEWS.

  Then she went into the backyard by the ugly pink rosebush, made sure no one was watching, took out one of Grandmama’s cheap lighters, and burned the paper, watching it blacken and curl.

  * * *

  Just before the school year started, Sheila and Kenya moved into a place of their own in the town right next to Grandmama’s. Sheila did the house hunting on her own, so by the time Kenya laid eyes on the large apartment building of yellow-brown brick, it was her home. A well-maintained sign that reminded Kenya of fifties sitcom credits advertised it in cursive as the Ardmore Arms. At the desk in the entryway, which smelled of bad breath, there was a fat white guard, who watched Sheila struggle with a box so she could sign in. He greeted her only when she finally said a starched “Hello.” This was how they would interact until Kenya and Sheila moved out nearly a year later.

  The apartment, with its yellowed-ivory walls and beige carpets, was the kind of place that Kenya had heard Sheila call “charmless” in the past. “Here we are,” Sheila said in a flat voice the first time they entered. Kenya recalled books she’d read where families had to move and mothers and fathers pleaded with reluctant children to admire the new backyard swing or their brand-new blue bedroom. Sheila said nothing of the sort; she never asked whether Kenya liked it or not. So Kenya never mentioned how intrigued she was by the sensation of wall-to-wall carpeting underfoot, or how much she enjoyed having boardless windows. At a certain time of day, the apartment, including her chalk-yellow bedroom, would flood with light and things would seem okay. In the beginning, at least.

  While Grandmama’s initial plan had been to send Kenya to the best local public school, she also insisted that Kenya take the test for the fancy private one down the road. So before she even set foot in the local junior high, Kenya was accepted to the Barrett School for Girls, with a decent scholarship. This was all provided she would repeat fifth grade, as was standard for all entrants fr
om the city school system.

  Completely unmoved by Kenya’s indignation about being held back, Grandmama was insistent. “Of course you’ll go there! My mother used to wash the floors and clean the bathrooms for those filthy—little girls.” Grandmama’s parents had been of the generation that was middle class on the weekends, at their churches and social clubs, but cleaned floors and swallowed bitterness during the week. “Now you’re going there,” she said, coughing, which she sometimes did until her eyes watered, and clapping her hands. “You’ll show them.”

  “How to become a filthy little girl?” Kenya asked.

  “What a little colored girl can do!”

  While Grandmama plotted her revenge, Sheila offered up a faint smile. She didn’t even try to catch Kenya’s eye the way she used to when Grandmama said colored. When Kenya whined about repeating the grade, Sheila shrugged.

  “Maybe starting last year all over again is not such a bad idea,” she said.

  Kenya could not argue with that.

  * * *

  At one end, the Barrett School for Girls looked like a castle, with its stone walls, decorative roofs, impossibly high ceilings, and ancient-looking tapestries. At the other, it was low and sleek, like something in one of the architecture magazines Kenya’s father had collected during a brief phase. In fact, whatever wasn’t old at the school seemed extremely new. The white desks reminded Kenya of spaceships, and many of the rooms had track lighting.

  The cafeteria was called a dining room. There you could eat roast chicken for lunch, served up by black women—the only black adults in the building besides the cleaning ladies. As they spooned mashed potatoes onto her plate, they beamed Kenya smiles she was too embarrassed to return. She wondered if they traded smiles with the smattering of other black girls who went to Barrett (twelve by her count the first week). She could not imagine Lolly Lewis, the only other black girl in her grade, who lived in Wynnewood and had gone to Barrett since kindergarten, joining in this conspiracy of greeting.