Disgruntled: A Novel Page 6

  Each day at Barrett was a new sensory experience for Kenya: chilly stone hallways; clammy modeling clay; picking impossibly sticky long hairs off her schoolbag; a school uniform of scratchy bloomers with a navy-blue dress called a tunic or a gray skirt called a kilt; a rubbery-tasting mouthguard for field hockey; the sound of hand bells; what shall we do with a drunken sailor; the distinct sneaker-fart funk of the school bus; a gym teacher with a British accent; dreidl (dreidl, dreidl); cupcakes for Trinity Howell’s birthday, cupcakes for Katherine Stein’s birthday, cupcakes for Sengu Gupta’s birthday; body on fire with cold as Kenya finally, after two weeks of increasingly irritable cajoling from Mrs. Winston, forced herself into the pool in gym class.

  Once Kenya was underwater, she tried to stay as long as she could. The murky echoes, soft shapes, and slow movement suited her. Everyone at Barrett was so nice. The school was so nice. Yet she did not want to come back up to the surface.

  Being black on the Main Line was no fuckin’ picnic, her father had said.

  Kenya was careful never to say to these new girls that her parents were “divorced,” but she led them to believe this was the case. Divorce, so shocking to her before, was almost fashionable at Barrett. Cynthia Malder and Kristin Shoenbaum were children of divorce. Tuff Wieder and Sharon McCall were children of long-term separation. Mothers were starting interior design businesses and dating old men. Fathers were buying sports cars and dating young secretaries. All Kenya said was that her parents were “not together,” and that she didn’t talk to her father very much. No, she didn’t go live with him and a bitchy stepmother in the summer. No, they didn’t go on vacation.

  The fifth graders who attended the Barrett School for Girls had heard a lot of crazy things about the city. They’d heard that kids their age carried knives to school, and that everyone was on welfare. They’d heard that being on the street after dark was a sure way to get mugged. They’d never heard the one about the family where the father was cheating on the mother, the father-not-husband because they were never married, the one where the father suggested that they all live together in a polygamous arrangement. They didn’t know the one that ended with the sleepwalking daughter shooting the mother with the father’s gun; they didn’t know the one that began when the father, trying to keep the daughter out of foster care, said he would take the blame—then disappeared into America with his pregnant girlfriend. Kenya wasn’t going to tell them any of those.

  * * *

  Sheila said little to Kenya about their new lives. In the void, as Kenya learned to sing in French and play lacrosse, she kept hearing Johnbrown’s voice. The “shame of being alive” was in fact the shame of being black and having a mere ten minutes to untangle your hair in the locker room after swimming. And some days she heard his voice saying: “Meanwhile, some kids in West Philly don’t have books. Shit don’t make sense.”

  Back in her other life Kenya’s parents had even argued over whether they should allow Kenya to participate in the Mentally Gifted program at Lea School. The principal had been a parchment-colored snob who was so excited about the twenty white students who went there that all of them, even an excitable boy named Benjamin, whose knuckles practically dragged on the floor, were in MG. Johnbrown, who had originally talked about homeschooling her until it became clear that he would have to be the teacher, thought MG would make Kenya “an elitist.”

  “You’re being a fanatic,” Sheila had said. “But I’m not drinking your Kool-Aid. It’s not like we’re talking about private school.”

  “And we never would, Sheila, we never would.”

  “Well, with only one of us working, we could never afford it.”

  “Oh, is that why? Because I didn’t know that was the reason. I thought the reason was we were raising a black child who wouldn’t hate herself any more than this sick society already wants her to.”

  “Don’t you dare give me one of your speeches, Johnbrown.”

  Sheila’s winning the battle over Mentally Gifted meant mainly that Kenya got to go to movies and plays where the characters had British accents. (“Satisfied?” her father asked her mother, rolling his eyes when Kenya missed an entire day of school to go to a local production of A Christmas Carol.)

  “How is the Barrett School for Girls?” her mother would ask now, every evening at their sad dinners at the kitchen counter in the Ardmore Arms. Sheila cooked on the same schedule as before, but now everything was drier. She had started going to Weight Watchers, which surprised Kenya, who’d never thought about her mother’s weight.

  Most nights Kenya said that school was “fine,” which, she supposed, it was. But one night, struggling to swallow baked ziti without enough sauce, she said, “Remember that fight you and Baba had about private school? He never wanted me to go.”

  “Well, I didn’t either.”

  Kenya blurted, “What do you think he’d say if he knew about Barrett?”

  “He wouldn’t care,” Sheila said in a brassy voice.

  Kenya felt the hit in her chest.

  “I shouldn’t put it that way,” said her mother, more softly. “The truth is he’s got his own problems.”

  What Kenya knew was that Johnbrown was doing okay somewhere in America. A few months after she and her mother moved into the Ardmore Arms, the first postcard arrived. Kenya had looked without seeing it, an ugly picture of St. Louis, which she put in the mail pile. Sheila had an old library school friend who lived in San Francisco and traveled a lot. No matter where she went, Houston, Bermuda, or Mexico, she sent a faded-looking postcard. That afternoon, Kenya looked up to see her mother in the doorway of Kenya’s room, holding this one.

  “Your father sent this,” she said.

  “I thought it was Aunt Sandy.”

  “Nope.”

  The postcard was written in block letters. Thinking of you every day, it said. Every day, thinking of you. All my love. B.B.

  “How do you know this is from him?” Kenya asked.

  Sheila wrinkled her nose at Kenya’s unmade bed and started making it up. She spoke as she moved. “We used to talk sometimes at Seven Days meetings about if one of us had to run.”

  “Run from what?” If they’d had this conversation more than once, she hadn’t heard it.

  “It was just talk as far as we were concerned. But you know back in the day a lot of movement people wound up on the wrong side of the law. Anyway, sometimes those people would run because they knew they wouldn’t get a fair trial. And if they had to leave family behind, they would send cards sometimes, but not from anyplace they were currently.”

  “So all this says is he’s not in St. Louis.”

  “It says more than that.”

  Kenya rolled her eyes. “You mean it says he loves me?”

  “Well, it does,” Sheila said.

  “Mom, how long is this going to go on? I mean, what would happen if he got caught?”

  Sheila looked around Kenya’s room, furnished with the small child’s desk they’d borrowed from Grandmama and the tall shelf of books of which Kenya was proud. There was a dresser, a couple of orange crates full of board games brought from the city, and that was basically it. Kenya hadn’t decorated the ugly yellow walls, feeling too angry at the Black History Month calendar pictures and UNICEF posters of the world’s brown children that her mother had hung in her old room back in the city, but not knowing where to go next.

  Instead of answering, Sheila said, “You would think you would go crazy in here with nothing on the walls.”

  “Mom!”

  “I don’t know what would happen, okay? There’s a warrant out for his arrest for … what happened.”

  Kenya looked down, but the world kept spinning and her mother kept talking. “I told them I wouldn’t testify against him, but he claims the prosecutor is out to get him.”

  “Is he?”

  “I don’t know. But the other thing is…” And here she managed to roll her eyes, even as they filled with water. “There’s stuff I didn’t know
about.”

  “What?”

  Sheila sighed. “Well, I guess your father and Cindalou were going around vandalizing police stations? So your father’s on probation and he already spent a night in jail.”

  Kenya remembered when she’d awoken to the sound of her parents arguing about where her father had spent the night. He claimed he’d fallen asleep in the library. Maybe he’d been in jail. Or, she thought, feeling queasy, making a baby with Cindalou.

  “What’s going to happen?” she asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Sheila said, her face wet with unacknowledged tears. Then, as if she absolutely couldn’t stand up anymore, she sat down on Kenya’s bed.

  It was not the tears but the sitting that did it. Kenya found that when she went to ask her mother more questions, her mouth would not move. How could you not know all of this? Is Baba a crazy person?

  “Okay,” said Kenya. “Okay.”

  Shortly after that conversation, Kenya realized she’d squandered what might have been her last chance to ask about what had happened to their family. The subjects of Johnbrown, Cindalou, and even the Seven Days had been sealed up underground, like the man in the Edgar Allan Poe story she had read at school.

  One subject that didn’t need to be closed, as it had never been opened, was how Kenya, sleeping, came to hold a loaded gun, and why she chose to aim it at her mother. The one thing Kenya felt sure of was that she had not had to unearth the gun from its hiding place in the basement. One of her parents had taken it out. She never found out which one it was. She could easily imagine Sheila going for it in a moment of indignant rage, or Johnbrown moving it to keep it from Sheila’s hands. Or maybe it was the desperate Johnbrown trying finally to win a fight.

  When Kenya asked herself, of all things, why, even sleeping, she would shoot her mother, no answer suggested itself. Whenever she found herself pondering this question, she felt that a cord had snapped and she was flying away from her body.

  * * *

  That December, Sheila and Kenya did not have to make a special secret trip to Bryn Mawr to see Grandmama. Instead they were invited to Christmas dinner at her house. “Nothing fancy,” she had promised.

  Knowing Grandmama, like attending Barrett, was a constant education for Kenya about the well-to-do. For instance, while she dreamed, in spite of Grandmama’s warning, that the house would be decked out with scarlet ribbons and softly glowing white candles, there was only a squat businesslike tree hung with a few pink balls and an ugly clay ornament that Kenya had made at Barrett. At the top sat a black angel with a white chip in its cheek.

  “When your father was young,” Grandmama said as they sat at the dining room table, “we would all go with the man who worked for us to chop down a tree. I thought it was splendid fun. But oh, John would moan and groan about the weather.”

  “He never did like the cold,” Sheila said with a distant look.

  “Kenya, we’ll have to take you to the Christmas farm one day to pick out a real tree,” said Grandmama. “You seem like you might be made of some pretty sturdy fiber.”

  More education: sometimes for Christmas the upper classes served slices of turkey and pale stuffing out of Acme supermarket cartons, and gifted ill-fitting sweaters that smelled distinctly like basement. All of this made Kenya feel she had not been cheated by Kwanzaa after all. But then again, Kwanzaa dinner back on Irving Street was an altogether different beast from the one she now shared with her mother on Umoja at the Ardmore Arms. Kenya had never enjoyed listening to her father talk about the stifling confines of the slave hold while supposedly enjoying a holiday. But now she longed to hear anyone talk with interest about anything at all as she pushed around her mother’s brandied chicken, which had been more edible in the pre–Weight Watchers days.

  Though it seemed like it would have been Johnbrown’s idea, Sheila had been the one to push for Kwanzaa. Johnbrown thought Karenga was a huckster who would one day become rich from something called “licensing.” He often brought up the fact that Kwanzaa was an American creation, rather than an African tradition. “It’s a Hanukkah rip,” he had once said, “and that’s barely a real holiday to start with.”

  “So why do we do it?” Kenya had asked.

  “It’s not always about complaining and tearing everything down,” Sheila said firmly. “People need celebrations.”

  The word celebration would not have come to anyone’s mind observing Kenya and her mother during the seven nights of their first holiday in the suburbs. At one time Kenya had viewed the length of Kwanzaa as an advantage over Christmas, which was one lousy day that peaked well before noon. But now, Kenya dreaded each night of Kwanzaa in the Ardmore Arms, where she would face her mother at the kitchen table, making promises like being extra kind to the girls in Daughters of Isis, the black students’ group, and working harder on her math homework. On the second night they hosted Grandmama, who kept saying how interesting it all was and insisted on trying to pronounce the pertinent Swahili words.

  “You know, Kiswahili is not a real language,” she announced, clearing her throat, after a botched attempt to say Kujichagulia. “It’s a mishmash of other languages.”

  “Well, it’s a trading language,” Sheila said without commitment. Kenya noticed that her mother rarely disagreed with Grandmama.

  That night, after Grandmama left, Sheila mysteriously produced a can of beer, which she sipped as she cornrowed Kenya’s hair. They watched It’s a Wonderful Life without really watching, and Kenya remembered her father’s running commentary about “fantasy capitalism.” She recalled that the Seven Days once bitterly debated Christmas and whether it was “categorically antirevolutionary,” as her father put it, which especially angered Earl. As if reading her mind, Sheila said, “They knew.”

  “Who knew what?”

  “All of them knew about your father and Cindalou.”

  Kenya twisted around to look at her mother’s face. “You mean the Days?”

  “Yeah, the Seven Days,” snorted her mother.

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  “They didn’t have to. How could they not know? And if I know your father, he was building his case to them.”

  “Ow,” Kenya said. Her mother’s braiding became unpredictable when she grew agitated.

  “I know that didn’t hurt,” Sheila said.

  Kenya didn’t contradict her.

  “Oh fuck this. It’s making my teeth hurt,” her mother said, indicating the television with her head. She worked the remote control until she landed on an old episode of Star Trek.

  “Mom,” said Kenya, “wouldn’t someone have told you? Yaya?”

  “You would think,” she said in an acid voice. “But I guess they didn’t want to break up their precious group.”

  “You were part of it, too.”

  “Not like them, Kenya. I mean, yeah, I was part of it. And I believed in it. But not like your father.”

  Kenya did not ask her mother to elaborate, but she continued talking anyway. “I’m going to level with you. You know I grew up in the projects. It wasn’t bad when I was little. It was just a decent place you lived with a bunch of other black people who worked hard, but it fell apart when the drugs and guns came in. Folks started going to jail, getting strung out, getting dead. The way I figured it, not getting pregnant, going to college, having a decent job, and taking care of my family was doing something for the community.” Sheila had taken her hands out of Kenya’s hair to make a mock-grandiose gesture when she said community. Then she turned Kenya back around roughly and continued to cornrow.

  “On the other hand, people like your father, or even Yaya and Robert, they grew up with daddies and all of that. They had a little bit more to prove, especially your father. He liked to tell a lot of stories, but did he ever tell you the one about when he used to run with some Panthers and a bunch of them got picked up by some white cops?”

  Kenya shook her head no.

  “Keep your head still. Yeah, well, everybod
y got slammed against some brick wall. They were all about to get hauled downtown and strip-searched, and your father pulled out a little card his mother had snuck into his wallet and gave it to them. So he got to go home without a hair out of place.”

  “Okay,” said Kenya.

  Sheila laughed. “I mean shit, I was the community. ’Course, I wasn’t a backwoods charity case like some people.”

  Cindalou.

  “Uhura,” Sheila said, now talking about the black woman in an aerodynamic minidress on the television. “You know she wanted to quit this show and Martin Luther King called her and asked her not to? Because she was a role model? Like Martin Luther King didn’t have anything better to do that day?”

  * * *

  The summer before Kenya’s second year at Barrett, Grandmama died of lung cancer. Kenya had grown used to her cough and didn’t think it was unusual that Grandmama often excused herself for several minutes of hacking in the bathroom. Kenya had also gotten used to finding the occasional tissue delicately spotted with blood around Grandmama’s house.

  “You need to get that cough checked out, Eveline,” her mother would say gently.

  “For what?” Grandmama would ask drily. “For them to tell me it’s a cough?”

  At Barrett, Kenya’s science class had been subjected to a terrifying weeklong unit on smoking. Phyllis Fagin had run weeping out of class and tried to win an audience at lunch wailing that her dad smoked cigars, which was even worse! It was true that Phyllis was, as the other girls said, a “drama queen,” but maybe Kenya might have cried, too, if she’d thought something like cancer could happen in her family. Family such as it was.

  When she died, Grandmama’s few remaining friends were dreaming away their days in nursing homes, which she called “the poppy fields.” Her funeral was a small cemetery affair on a muggy July morning, attended by Sheila, Kenya, a few neighbors, and Grandmama’s oldest sentient friend, a black dentist. Kenya had met the large, slow-moving, and deep-voiced Dr. Walton before. Grandmama had spoken proudly of his accomplishments as the only black dentist on the Main Line, but bitterly of what she characterized as his eagerness to get his hands into the mouths of white people.