The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Aria is no stranger to tragedy. Fifteen years ago, a family outing took the lives of her father and baby sister, leaving remaining members of this fractured family struggling with their own guilt—real and imagined. At twenty-five, Aria believes she can reinvent herself through her planned marriage with all its promise of a family of her own. Her infertility changes her life as swiftly and irrevocably as the urban landscape around her. With prose that is both eloquent and unflinching, Jones charts the emotional journey of her characters as they explore the painful territory of truth and the healing landscape of forgiveness.

Release date: October 15, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

Prologue

Ariadne, my given name, the one that’s on my driver’s license, is the sort of name that you’re supposed to grow into. It was my mother’s idea. Her parents underestimated her when they called her Eloise, a name that had strained at the seams before she was old enough to spell it. Our mother’s gifts to the three of us were lush, extravagant, roomy names. Names that fit us like oversized coats, trimmed in seed pearls, gold braid, and the hides of baby seals. My father had wanted us to have family names, with at least one of us girls named after his mother, Lula. My mother, who indulged my father in many things, could not give him this. Why, she wondered, would someone in this day and age give a child a name that was so Mississippi? “That is not what Dr. King died for.”

People shook their heads with each pink birth announcement; teachers squinted at class rolls and said, “Who ever heard of black people with names like that? Those kids are going to be confused.”

Mama never forgave us for not appreciating our names. When my older sister, Hermione, came home from first grade and announced that she wanted to be called Sonja, Mama had said, “Why do you have to be so ungrateful? Your name is from Shakespeare.” My name, Ariadne, is taken from the Greek. Mama explained that I was named for a princess. My tenth-grade English book gave me the rest of the story. Ariadne was a Greek princess; this much is true—my mother is not the type to lie. The princess Ariadne saved her lover’s life with a length of string which he used to wind his way out of a deadly maze. To show his gratitude, he married her. After only a few weeks he dumped her on a rocky island and sailed off. When I confronted my mother with this story, she insisted that there was a happier ending, that Ariadne ended up marrying the god of wine, but for me the story ends when she is sitting on the island watching the black-sailed boat churn away.

My other sister, the baby, Mama’s miracle child, the one who got born despite the tied tubes, her name was Genevieve, for the patron saint of Paris.

Nicknames were forbidden.

I was there when Daddy said Genevieve was too much name for a baby. Couldn’t we at least call her Jenny? Mama sighed and waved her hand, one of her elegant gestures that let everyone know that she was more than just an Eloise.

I was nine, sitting on the floor between Mama’s knees while she threaded clear plastic beads onto my braids. I felt hot prickles of jealousy over my lip. Why hadn’t Daddy stuck up for me and my name? “Ariadne” was obviously the worst of the lot. Genevieve, who had the best name, a name that someone had at least heard of, she lay on a white receiving blanket and chewed on her toes.

I looked up and met my father’s eyes, and turned my face to the orange carpet before they could accuse me of listening to grown folks’ conversations.

Mama said, “Lincoln, maybe it is too much name for a baby. But Genevieve will not be a baby forever.”

I looked up again, fast this time. Mama lost her grip on my braid; heart-shaped beads fell on the floor and rolled under the couch. We were all still for the duration of three heartbeats. This had been one of those Greek myth moments, when you could just hear the gods look up from their newspapers and raise their eyebrows.

On the Saturday before Easter 1978, Genevieve was six months old, teething and blowing spit bubbles, when the whole family piled into our burgundy Buick. I liked her. Hermione often told people that I was jealous of the baby because of her soft hair and bleached pine bedroom set. But I wasn’t jealous. Genevieve was a beautiful thing, all curves and folds of flesh, smelling of rose water and drool. This is what I remember and this is the truth.

We were on our way to the spring performance at the YWCA, where I took ballet, tap, and jazz. The recital was to be held in a large gymnasium that smelled of Pine-Sol and feet, but all of us were dressed up and looking good. Daddy wore a white shirt with “creases sharp enough to shave with,” he’d said, running his fingers down his stiff sleeve. According to Mama, Hermione’s pants were too tight, but they looked good; on her the snugness seemed deliberate, a taunt. My mother outdressed us all, but that was her way. She wore a butter-colored suit and matching pumps. Genevieve was just a little brown face in a nest of aquamarine lace and ruffles. I’d put on a green jumper over my pink leotard and white tights. This was my favorite dress, worn at least once a week, pulled hot from the dryer each time. I liked it because it covered the raised outline of my training bra, the first of anyone in beginning tap dance. When I wore it, I seemed to be like any other girl with my tight plaits and heart-shaped beads.

Hermione hadn’t wanted to go. She was almost fifteen and would have rather stayed home alone, staring at the phone and wondering why boys didn’t call her. It was because she was fat. I knew this because I had read her red clothbound diary. Must lose weight, she had scrawled. Orthodontia—expensive. Necessary? I was glad that she was there, even gladder that she hadn’t wanted to be. Staring sullen out of the window, she was making a “sacrifice,” a word we’d talked about last week in Sunday school.

Why hadn’t we taken a photo of ourselves before piling into the car? Just a Polaroid, or a quick snap with Hermione’s 126 camera, creating something that I could use to compare with the images in my head, so that I could be sure exactly what was remembered and what was invented or just wished for.

I scooted closer to Hermione, breathing big gulps of her honeysuckle perfume. I lifted the red velvet cake from her lap. It was a big one, three layers, and dusted on top with chopped pecans. This lovely cake, slightly extravagant, was our family’s contribution to the recital reception.

I was happy. I do remember this.

I had been telling the story of the dogwood trees, raising my voice over Hermione, who sang along with the staticky car radio.

“I’m trying to talk,” I said.

“I’m trying to sing.”

Daddy turned down the radio. Mama bounced Genevieve on her lap and said, “Shh, sweetie,” to the baby and “Go on, honey,” to me.

“Before Jesus,” I told them, projecting from my diaphragm, like my Sunday school teacher had taught me, “the dogwood was as tall and mighty as the oak and pine.”

“Please tell me that’s not your Easter speech,” Hermione said. “You know that’s just a myth, don’t you?”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say. You didn’t let me finish.”

Hermione shrugged her heavy shoulders. “You were about to say that they used the dogwood to make the cross and now the tree is so shamed that it grows all little and hunched up.”

“That’s a good story,” Daddy said. His eyes smiled at me in the rearview mirror.

“And,” I said, “there’s the part about the flowers. On every one of the petals is a little red spot. That’s the blood so nobody could forget about Jesus.”

“Daddy,” Hermione said, “can you turn the radio back up? Did they even have dogwood trees where Jesus grew up, in Bethlehem or wherever?”

I know what happened next, although I didn’t see it. My eyes were on the nut-crusted sides of the red velvet cake when a blue El Dorado barreled down the left side of Hunter Street, just after Mosely Park. I’d snuck my finger under the cellophane for a taste of icing and was trying to silently work my thumb to my mouth when Daddy said, “Jesus,” and I thought we were still talking about dogwoods. Then the car lunged to the right, to the left, and back again.

I ruined the cake when our car crumpled against the bark of a hundred-year-old magnolia. I hugged it to me, grinding the white icing and red meat of the cake into the bib of my jumper. When the car stopped moving, I didn’t look up right away. I stared at my lap and the mess I’d made, dark red like watermelon, busted and overripe. Then, Mama wailed and Genevieve stayed quiet. Daddy barked, “Wait!” and Hermione cursed softly, enunciating each filthy word while I stuffed a handful of cake into my mouth, choking on its buttery sweetness.

Then the women came, some streaming, some tumbling, from frame houses built among the dogwoods. They ducked under blooming branches, using the flats of their hands to keep sheer scarves on their heads. They hurried toward me and my family, screaming at children to call the ambulance. These were the sort of women who could stop cars by placing their bodies in the roads. They hustled across the street without looking and the cars did stop. They ran to help us while speaking the name of God.

I watched all of this through the lined rear windshield of the Buick. On the radio the Commodores sang, “I’m easy like Sunday morning.” I wasn’t hurt. Later I bit my finger until it bled, but when the metal bumper connected with the hundred-year-old bark, I was fine. I regarded it all with slight disbelief, like I was watching a movie with bad actors. My mother bolted from the car, holding Genevieve, who was silent and impossibly bent. When Mama sprang from the car, Hermione clambered out behind her. I scooted toward the open car door, but my sister turned. “You stay here with Daddy,” she said, pushing me down onto the ruined cake. I said, “Okay,” mashing the metal plates of my tap shoes into red velvet sludge.

Daddy was slumped but not silent against the leather-covered steering wheel, taking in the stinking air with jagged breaths. I dug old french fries from crevices in the car seat and ate them.

A light-skinned lady wearing pink hair rollers tapped on the window. I cranked it open, letting in a sweet whiff of magnolia and daffodil. She pushed her face into the car, blocking my breeze.

“You all right in there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“What about everybody else?”

“I’m stuck,” Daddy grunted. “I’m hurt some.”

“Don’t move, then,” the lady said. “You’re not supposed to move when you’re hurt.”

“I want to get out and see my mama. I got icing on my shoe. The cake got mashed.” I reached down for a handful of oily red cake and held it out to her.

The lady looked at my hands and then turned to where Mama was. “Jesus,” she said. “Go on and stay where you are, sweetheart. Help be here in a minute. Everybody’s tending to your mama. She got your sister there with her. Holler if you need something.”

In the backseat I wiped my hands on my tights and then twisted the button on the pocket of my jumper until it came loose. Then I popped the pearlized plastic in my mouth, chewing with the stale french fries until a pain in my jaw reached my ears and I could almost cry. I wanted to leave the car and escape my father’s groaning, but that would have been the sort of cruelty that could never be forgiven.

“You hurt, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Want me to climb up there?”

“No. Stay where you are.”

“But I’m by myself.”

“No, you’re not. I’m here.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“Spring,” he said.

Daddy smelled bad, like sweat and something hotter and thicker. “What about the cake?” he said with words that were more air than voice. I felt something swelling inside me, like what was supposed to happen if you swallowed watermelon seeds. The fruit would grow, crushing you to death from the inside.

“I think I’m going to die,” I told him.

“No, baby. You’re not going to die. Tell me about the cake.”

I looked down at the chunks of moist red cake and off-white icing on the rubber floor mats. “It’s ruined.” I felt my face collapsing. I opened my mouth, but there was no air to cry with.

“Ariadne, baby,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

He started to sob in gasps and coughs. I stuck my fingers in my ears and sang nursery rhymes. I sang about Georgie Porgie, Mary and her lamb, even nasty rhymes I had heard boys sing at school. With my hands tight over my ears I ignored my father, my good kind father with the space between his front teeth. My sweet daddy who gave me two-dollar bills for every A on my report card. To the only man who had ever loved me I said, “I’m not listening. I can’t hear you.”

Since we had no relatives, the police called Mr. Phinazee, my father’s best friend. He was out of town, so his daughter, Colette, came to pick me up. She was only about nineteen, but she seemed like a woman to me. She wore the white barber’s coat she wore to work at her father’s shop.

“Come out,” she said to me, opening the door.

I scooted to the other side of the car, pressing against the door. My hands were still sweet from cake and I pressed them to my mouth, nicking my skin on the edges of my teeth.

“Come on,” she said, crawling in. A heart-shaped locket bounced at her throat.

She was close to me now. Colette’s face was young, as smooth as cardboard and the same color. Hands around my waist, she tugged me from the canal of the backseat into the spring day.

When the paramedics came to remove my father from the car, she held me to her and used one rough hand to press my face into her collarbone. “Don’t look up,” she said. Her other hand rubbed my back in slow, easy circles. I stiffened, worried that she would feel my bra through the armor of my jumper. But she just rocked me like an infant and hummed a quiet tune.

Many times since then, I’ve tried to identify the song that was on her lips that afternoon. Sometimes I am convinced that she hummed “Amazing Grace” while they strapped my father to the stretcher and hurried him away. But every now and again I will hear a scrap of music that pierces my heart and I will think that maybe this is the song she played in my ear, the song that separated me from my pain for a few moments on the worst day of my life.

“Aria,” she said softly into my hair. “Shh, Aria.”

I knew that she was talking to me, although no one had ever shortened my name.

“I like it when you call me that.”

Aria wasn’t a name that I needed to grow into, something I could appreciate later. It was a name I could use right then, leaning against a police sedan on the side of the road near a hundred-year-old magnolia. I slid into this new name, pulling it close around me like a donated blanket.

“Are my daddy and Genevieve going to die?” I asked Colette.

“That’s up to God,” she said, laying me down on the backseat of her father’s Brougham.

As we pulled away, I looked back at the dogwood trees that lined the road, staring at the bloody blossoms clustered on the branches like a hundred dying butterflies.

Chapter One

I still live in Atlanta. All of us do—Mama, Hermione, and me. Mama still lives on Willow Street, in the house we moved to after losing the split-level on Bunnybrooke Drive. She stays there out of spite, I think. This way no one can forget the cruelty that life has done her. Hermione and her family live in a suburb called Lawrenceville, halfway to Athens, which is as far away as you can get without actually leaving town. I can picture my sister leaving us for good, moving to France, doing a Josephine Baker, wearing a dress made of fruit. She can likely envision such scenarios for herself as well. But she stays here in Georgia because of her husband, Mr. Phinazee, who is far too old to learn any new tricks.

I make my home in the West End. Little plaques affixed to the street signs insist that it is “The Historic West End,” a designation secured by real estate interests. For the last twenty years people have predicted that this area was on the rise. They point to Grant Park, which has become a Victorian oasis, smack in the center of town. It’s only a matter of time, they say, urging yuppies and buppies alike, until gentrification elevates the West End, the historic West End, too. I hope they are right. I only rent my house, so I have no real financial stake in the prospect, but I like the idea of imminent transformation and appreciation.

The West End is a hard place to wrap your mind around. My house is off People Street, not too far from the Wren’s Nest—where, depending on your take on things, Joel Chandler Harris either wrote or plagiarized the Uncle Remus stories. Just over a mile away is Spelman College, my alma mater, built where there were once Civil War barracks. And across the street from Spelman are some of the meanest housing projects in the South. I guess the only really consistent variable in the West End is that nearly everyone within a five-mile radius is black. From the bourgie girls I went to college with, all of whom seemed to be doctors’ daughters or professors’ kids, to my neighbors, cracked out and depressed, everybody is black. My landlord, crooked and mean, is every bit as black as the people who run the homeless shelter on the corner of Landrum and Cascade.

Lately white folks are moving into our neighborhood, one by one. I’m not bent out of shape about it. A gay couple, Jewish, according to my roommate, Rochelle, bought the pale yellow bungalow across the road, which has recently been restored to its turn-of-the-century splendor—wraparound porch and stained-glass panels in the mahogany door. Rochelle and I considered taking them a gift to welcome them to the neighborhood. She suggested baking cookies, but then we worried that they might not trust us enough to eat what we had prepared. The very idea of this offended us as though we had actually offered them the cookies and they’d refused. So we never introduced ourselves to them and they never introduced themselves to us.

Quiet as it’s kept, the house where Rochelle and I live is identical to the showplace across the street. Ours is a fixer-upper that hasn’t been fixed up yet. The paint flakes like green dandruff; underneath, the wood is dotted with termite tunnels. Inside, however, is much nicer. The wood floors might be paint-flecked and scarred, but you can still tell that it is good pine. In my bedroom there is a great old fireplace, but the mantels were stolen decades ago, when all the houses in the West End stood empty and abandoned. Still, the mantels can be replaced along with the crystal doorknobs and brass window cranks.

Last March, crackheads stole two potted ficus trees and a wrought-iron mailbox from the house across the street. The three of us—me, Rochelle, and my boyfriend, Dwayne—watched from my front porch. The porch is one of the best places in our house, despite the fact that it is not screened in. Our landlord let us keep the wicker patio furniture left by the previous tenants. There were two pieces, a love seat that could seat two people comfortably and three in a pinch and a high-backed throne that Rochelle called the Huey Newton Seat. At night we left the love seat on the porch, figuring that it was too bulky for crackheads to steal; but the Huey Newton Seat was stored in the living room when it wasn’t in use. “It’s a cultural antique,” Rochelle insisted. I told her that most people didn’t even remember who Huey Newton was, but she said that they would steal the chair anyway. It was like stealing a rare coin not because it’s rare, but because it’s a coin. It was a pain to haul the chair in at night—it was over five feet tall and the wicker was brittle with age. But Rochelle does what she wants.

Winter had just ended when my neighbor Cynthia and her cousin stole the Jewish guys’ mailbox and ficus trees. Dwayne and I had sat close and cozy on the love seat and Rochelle used the Huey Newton Seat. The day was cool, but the sun warmed our foreheads. It was the sort of afternoon that is hot and cold at the same time, letting us know that spring was ahead of us, but not quite allowing us to forget the winter behind. Rochelle and Dwayne had laughed as Cynthia, who lived three doors down, and her cousin dragged the dainty trees and their glazed pots down the repaved driveway. Dwayne said, “Remember the Alamo,” and this made us laugh. The mailbox was harder to steal. Together they tugged at the white post until it gave way, like a stubborn hunk of crabgrass. We laughed some more, now rooting against the taming and gentrification of our neighborhood. We delighted in the hardheaded nature of poverty, of a block that didn’t welcome change. We drank to Cynthia and her cousin, clicking the rims of plastic tumblers of lemonade, vodka, and ice.

So I’m not sure why I was stunned when I came home one May afternoon to find deep ruts in the soft wood around the dead bolt on my front door, the door itself hanging open just a bit, the way you do when you know company is coming and you don’t want them to bother to knock. Why did I stagger backward, a step or two from the opening, frightened and disbelieving at the same time, my eyes scanning the quiet road for a face that could explain things to me, straighten this whole thing out? Of course I knew that this wasn’t the safest of neighborhoods. My mother, who lives less than ten miles away but never visits, sends me news clippings snipped from the back pages of the Journal-Constitution, little news articles about rapes, murders, and drug busts in the West End. She keeps me informed so I will always be aware of how safe I am not. It wasn’t that I doubted the accuracy of the articles. Lying in bed, I often heard gunshots as distant as thunder and close as lightning. But I didn’t imagine that someone would one day dig out the locks on my door, rifle through my belongings, taking what they wanted, leaving the rest. This wasn’t supposed to happen to Rochelle and me.

We often joked that no one bothered us because everyone knew what we did for a living: nonprofit work at the Literacy Action and Resource Center. Even crackheads knew that there was no money in nonprofit. We’d borrowed this quip from Lawrence, our boss, who used the same rationale to explain why the Literacy Center—three miles away in Vine City—had never been vandalized, burglarized, or otherwise defaced. This, despite the fact that four homes on the block were boarded up, housing drug addicts and other vagrants. We really did believe that we were exempt from the crime in the area due to our vocation. Not because of our low wages, but because our neighbors understood that we were here trying to do something good. We taught people to read. Wasn’t that something that just about anyone could see was an honorable and decent way to spend one’s time?

I set my hand on the brass-plated doorkn. . .