Disgruntled (12 page)

“I mean, if your mom is happy, does any of this really matter?” asked Phyllis, reminding Kenya why she preferred conversations with Zaineb alone.

“Well, maybe it’s weird to have to hang out with a guy that’s not your dad,” said Lolly. “My dad is, like,
so great
. I can’t imagine.”

“It’s not that,” said Kenya, looking at Zaineb. “He’s just—it’s just…”

“I just wonder if you’re trying to, you know, be difficult?” asked Zaineb. “I mean, I can’t stand my dad, but I’d be so pissed if they broke up and my mom brought someone else home.”

Kenya wondered. Was there no way to like Teddy Jaffrey? She tried to imagine how it might be to appreciate having him around. She would enjoy it when he came into the house and got her involved in some confusing handshake. She would find it charming when he asked her if she’d ever been to Kenya and then laughed at his own cleverness. She would understand why her mother looked at him, pulling at her flattened hair, her eyes glazed over with—what? Love?

“I don’t know,” Kenya told them. The conversation turned to a new boy, Whitby Bradford, who knew all of the Beastie Boys’ songs by heart. Later that night, while Teddy Jaffrey and her mother were upstairs, Kenya called Zaineb.

“He’s not himself,” she told her, without saying hello. “That’s what I don’t like. You can tell that he never says what he’s thinking. He says something else.”

“Maybe you don’t want to know what he’s thinking,” said Zaineb.

*   *   *

Once upon a time, back when they lived in the city, Kenya had breathlessly watched a cartoon miniseries of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and become convinced that the White Witch lurked in the upstairs hallway. Kenya didn’t remember the day she forgot her fear of the witch, who made it always winter and never Christmas (which it also never was in Kenya’s real life). But she recalled the taste of terror in her mouth she used to get as she climbed the lonely stairs in the old house, when she woke one night in her new house to find someone in her room.

It was a Saturday night, after Katherine Stein’s birthday party at Radnor Rolls. Kenya had skated almost nonstop, pleased to discover something she could do that made her feel like she was flying. And, unlike at school dances, there was no question of being chosen or spurned. She didn’t mind that Katherine’s mother kept giving her that smile, the one that convinced Kenya that she’d been invited out of a sense of racial charity; she didn’t even care that Phyllis Fagin was trying to create a drama between herself and a scarily blond guy in a letter jacket who looked like the villain in
The Karate Kid
. “It’s like he doesn’t even know I’m alive,” Phyllis whined, a well-founded complaint. Kenya ignored her, whirling around, yelling “Nineteen-ninety-nine, don’t you wanna go?” She skated faster and faster, flying into the barricade. She fell, laughing.

After the party, Kenya found herself pleasurably exhausted but also cranky that life offered opportunities to do things like roller-skate only in the briefest of intervals. Instead one’s time on earth was taken up with sitting at the dinner table with one’s mother and her boyfriend, eating boiled hot dogs and listening to him complain that all of the guys he knew who’d failed the real estate licensing exam (like him) were black and that the guys who passed it were white—and Chinese. Of course the whites might let a few Chinese pass, he complained. It was black men they were afraid of.

“May I be excused?” asked Kenya.

“I’m sorry, Kenya,” said Teddy Jaffrey, putting back the laughing mask. “This talk might be a little strong for you.”

“Kenya knows how things are,” said her mother. “We—I—never hid anything from her.”

“I’m just tired,” said Kenya. But then maybe she was the one—not Teddy Jaffrey—who never said what she thought. Because she was thinking that he was a petty, stupid man. Was being black and not passing the real estate licensing exam his idea of a racial conspiracy? She remembered the majestic narratives her father had spun, aligning presidents, the pope, and the local court system—actual conspiracies. It made Kenya miss him suddenly, so sharply that it was a pain in her side. The shame of being alive was listening to Teddy Jaffrey’s woes and watching her mother ooze sympathy.

But she had skated and felt good, so Kenya looked at her mother’s boyfriend and said something she did not mean. “I’m sorry about the exam. I’m sure you’ll pass next time.”

Then Kenya went upstairs and collapsed in bed, where she slept so heavily that it felt like minutes later when she woke to find a man standing over her in the dark. She tried to wake herself up from this bad dream, but the figure was still there.

“Baba?” she whispered.

“You fell asleep with your clothes on,” said Teddy Jaffrey. “I came to turn off the light.”

“Thanks,” said Kenya. Fully awake now, she felt ashamed that she had called her father’s name.

“You’re welcome.” He sat down on the foot of her bed. “You went to bed early. Must have been tired. Pretty fun party, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Let me help you into your PJs,” he said, reaching for the covers, but Kenya held them tightly.

“Teddy, where’s my mom?” she asked.

“Asleep,” he muttered.

“Teddy.”

“So, folks, even though she never says it, she knows my name,” Teddy said to an imaginary audience, whispering in his jocular voice. He managed to laugh in the same whisper.

“Teddy, I’m going to go to the bathroom,” Kenya said slowly, quietly, and clearly. “I guess you should go to bed.”

The figure disappeared.

The next day at breakfast, Teddy Jaffrey was exactly the same person he’d been before he came into her room. He was not especially fawning over Kenya; nor was he indifferent. He sang along with the Luther Vandross record her mother played, always coming in a little too early. It was, Kenya thought, as if he wanted to be sure everyone knew that he knew the words.

“Since I lost my baby,” he sang.

(
Since I lost my baby
, repeated Luther Vandross.)

“You are
no
Luther,” said Sheila, stacking pancakes on a plate next to the stove. Aunt Jemima on Sunday morning, same as back in the city. Kenya knew now that she should be grateful for the things that had stayed the same—especially now that her mother also cooked a pile of bacon for Teddy. Sometimes Sheila even ate a piece of it, sitting at the table with her permed hair in a scarf and rollers, a woman Kenya had never known.

Kenya sat at the kitchen table nearest the stove where her mother stood, and though she didn’t have anything in mind to say, she was suddenly gripped with the fear that if she were to speak, her mother would not be able to hear her.

*   *   *

Devi Warren was an extreme rarity at Barrett: a midyear transfer. Her family had moved from New York City and the rumor, an unusual one, was that they were very rich. No matter how echoey and marble-floored the mansions she’d been to, no Barrett girl yet had admitted to being rich. If it came up, which it rarely did, they said, with the same inflection, “I’m not
rich
,” as if the word
rich
were like the word
dumb
or
dirty
. Kenya had done the math on her own situation; she knew that her mother’s salary was $37,000 and that they were not paying for the house or their old Subaru, or for much of the tuition at Barrett. If these girls who hired cotton candy machines for their parties and had Porsche convertibles in their rounded driveways weren’t rich, what did that make her and Sheila?

Of course no one would ask Devi Warren to confirm or deny, but she did look the part in a way that Kenya would not have recognized back before Barrett. “The more money these kids have,” her mother had declared once, on their way home from a school picnic, “the worse they look. The ones who look like orphans in Dickens—there’s your Rockefellers.” Devi Warren wore a gray kilt like everyone else, but her Tretorn sneakers had been battered almost beyond brand recognizability. It looked as if someone had eaten part of the collar of her dingy white polo shirt, and her short brown hair was streaked with a dirty blonde that
actually
looked dirty.

For about a month, leading into winter break, Devi Warren ate lunch at one of the two center tables in the dining room. Her air of glamour and mystery had earned her a probationary period among the popular girls. Meanwhile, at Kenya’s table, Phyllis whispered, “I heard she’s, like, the biggest lesbo.” The class had recently learned that word—distinct from the all-purpose insult
gay
—and the accusations had immediately begun. In retrospect, Kenya found it remarkable, in the way of ant colonies and elephant funerals, that the girls never accused Tuff Wieder and Sharon McCall of being lesbos, even though they’d been holding hands on the swings and sharing a sleeping bag at slumber parties since anyone could recall. (Of course, that might have been because no one wanted to anger Tuff, who cursed casually, played rough at lacrosse, and had a mysterious scar over her right eyebrow.) When Devi materialized, with her David Cassidy haircut and brusque manner, it was as if the use of the word had called her into existence.

“I heard she has a boyfriend in New York,” said Zaineb, her eyes going soft at the prospect. “That’s pretty much the opposite of being a lesbian.”

“But she totally looks like a guy,” said Lolly.

“Maybe that doesn’t mean anything,” Kenya said. “People are not how they seem.” Kenya had recently begun making several versions of this statement. It was all she could bring herself to say about Teddy Jaffrey. She had not told anyone about what had possibly not happened the Saturday night after the roller-skating party. The only person she could imagine telling was Zaineb, but Zaineb was not a vault. She was just an eighth-grade girl who sometimes ran out of things to talk about just like anyone else. Kenya could easily hear her saying, “You know Kenya’s mom’s boyfriend?”

She had not told her mother. She had not put into words why, not even in her journal, where she had written only “Teddy Jaffrey.” Kenya loved her mother and her mother alone. It was a variety of images, scenes from possible outcomes, that kept Kenya silent. She imagined her mother saying an enraged and tearful goodbye to the dazzlingly handsome Teddy, throwing an accusing glance back at Kenya
,
who’d sent him away. She imagined her mother living out her days as a single woman, enjoying an occasional can of beer, wearing the same clothes year after year, like some of the unmarried teachers at Barrett.

Yes, it would be Teddy’s fault. But really it would be Kenya’s.

Then there was the image of her mother, face contorted in pain, clutching her bleeding shoulder, the one in which she’d been shot. Kenya’s fault, too.

All of this was bad. And there was another scene that sometimes intruded upon her, one where Sheila asked “But did he
do
anything to you?” and kept asking until Kenya had to say “Wasn’t that enough?” Where would they be then?

Nor did Kenya mention to her mother that she had been having trouble sleeping. That would mean explaining that she was trying to stay awake just in case Teddy Jaffrey came into her room again. She negotiated a later bedtime, which sometimes meant that she stayed downstairs after Teddy Jaffrey and her mother had retired. She went up dutifully at 10:30, but instead of sleeping she lay in bed imagining a conversation where she asked Sheila for a lock on her door. In the imagined conversation, her mother would frown slightly and ask,
Why?
To which Kenya would say,
You know I’m getting older, just for privacy
, and her mother would ask,
Why? Why do you need a lock on your door?
Then, instead of telling her why, Kenya would start the reel in her head from the beginning.
Mom, can I please have a lock on my door?

*   *   *

It was not clear whether the popular girls tired of Devi Warren or she tired of them. In any case, after winter break, Kenya encountered Devi in what was traditionally her seat with the other girls at lunch. Kenya usually sat next to Zaineb and across from Lolly and Phyllis at one of the long tables at the edge of the room. Now she had to sit on the fringes of the group, the last in an ungainly row of three. Across from her was Dorrie Futter. Kenya thought that Devi would quickly move on to another, more interesting group of girls so she could reclaim her seat. But she came and plopped herself down day after day for a week. The other girls listened to her talk about her life back in New York with rapt attention. Kenya thought she was, as they used to say when she was growing up, “on herself.”

Zaineb had an unusually alert expression on her face as she listened to Devi complain about the Upper East Side, which she’d hated, as it was full of snobby old ladies and little dogs. Her best friend in the neighborhood was a bum named Artie, to whom she used to give part of her lunch money. She had gone to a school called Dalton, which was, she said, a “rich skank pit.”

“We moved just in time. They were about to kick me out—just because I didn’t fit in with those moronic rich sluts.”

Kenya tried to catch someone’s eye—Zaineb’s—because, again, wasn’t this someone rich pretending otherwise? But of course she had never discussed this issue frankly with Zaineb, whose family was rumored to own several luxury hotels in Europe, though she always said her father sold rugs. Besides, she knew the look on Zaineb’s face as she listened to Devi. It was hunger.

“Did you ever go to, like, Greenwich Village?” said Zaineb, trying to put a shrug in her voice. Kenya thought that if Zaineb ever succeeded in getting Devi into her house, she’d first have to take down all of her New York posters, including the map of Greenwich Village.

“It’s Gre-nich, silly,” Devi said. “Yeah, I was actually born in the Village. We lived there until I was five. It’s cool. That’s where all the gay boys are.”

“Don’t a lot of them have AIDS?” asked Phyllis.

Lolly hit Phyllis. “
God
, Phyllis! Shut up!”

Phyllis’s eyes glistened briefly as she caressed her injured shoulder. “God, Lolly!”