Adela
Simone was right. He called a day later and I answered. He apologized and I was fragile enough to not care whether he meant it.
Simone, Emory, and the rest of the Girls didn’t hate me as much as they had, but they didn’t trust me either, and so I’d wander town, find them at the beach or the lake or rolled up in a parking lot laughing or dancing or talking, and I’d know from the squirms on their faces that I wasn’t part of them, not really. They kept me at the outer ring of their family, where they could see and know me, but I would not know them, didn’t belong to them, never would.
But I was a part of Chris. Chris still wanted me, even as he spat about the child that wasn’t his whenever I asked him to put down the toilet seat or get me a glass of water. And then I’d be racing out the door screaming never again and he’d be calling after me to get the fuck out and only in the silence of the after, when Noni braided my hair back and then held my heavy cheek in her hand, would I remember Simone’s words.
And then he’d call, and I’d answer, and we’d do it all again.
I returned from my thirty-nine week appointment and went over to his place. I tried not to upset him. I even let him take me from behind, the only way he liked it when I was big-bellied. After it was over, as I got dressed again, I heard him grunt. I twisted around to see him slumped on the mattress, glaring at my back.
He shook his head. “Why you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Get dressed right after I fuck you, like you don’t even wanna be here. You do that with your baby’s daddy? You let him come inside you like it’s nothing too?”
I hated when he talked to me like that. It was dirty. It was crude.
“I told you, it was one time with him. And I wasn’t pregnant and my bladder wasn’t pulsing every time I moved and I didn’t even love him like I love you, okay?” Despite myself, I leaned down to him and stroked his beard. “He’s not her dad, you are. I love you.”
He swatted my hand away. “How come he gets you when you all sexy and trying and all you ever wear ’round me is joggers that don’t even fit you no more?”
I shrunk back. “I thought you thought I was sexy.”
He fizzed and shook. “How am I even s’posed to know, when I’ve never seen you when you’re not all big?”
Criticism wasn’t new to me. I’d been examined, weighed, whittled to the smallest imperfections that could increase the time of my freestyle, the depth of my lung capacity. I did it to myself too, every time I faced the reflection that taunted me, I seethed at the sight of who I was.
But Chris was the one who was supposed to love what I didn’t. Where I saw a droughted river, he was supposed to see a bubbling creek. Where I saw a spoiled swim penetrated by rainfall, he was supposed to see a chorus of water all colliding into one. Where I saw a ruined young girl, he was supposed to see a flourishing grown woman.
Tears spit from my eyes back onto him and, this time, I didn’t scream at him or cling to myself, or silence my cries. This time I spoke clearly, like my voice was the drip of one well of water into another, resounding but steady.
“Never again, Chris.”
He slung insults at my back as I wove through the hall and out his front door and I thought, for the first honest time, I would truly never come back.
Every morning of the past few weeks of pregnancy was brutal. Waking up after only a few hours of restless sleep, to feel the full weight of me. The plumbing in the basement bathroom was broken and old sewage water came up anytime I turned on the faucet or shower, so now Noni and I were sharing the upstairs bathroom, and every morning I had to walk the flight of stairs before I’d even put my contacts in.
I was sleeping less and less, my back spasming, my eyes itching to open in the deep night, the baby punching me from the inside, and so I rose earlier and earlier until I was up before Noni even left for work most days. Today I sat up in bed until the sun rose to light the basement silver, and then threw the blankets off me. I clawed for the staircase banister, used it to guide myself up the stairs, and reached for the bathroom doorknob, pushing it open.
Noni yelped. I could see her blurry figure by the shower, standing on the bath mat, a blue towel wrapped around her. “Knock before you come up on a grown lady in the restroom,” she panted, clutching her chest.
“Sorry, I just need my contacts.” I felt for them on the vanity counter and breathed relief when they settled in my eyes and everything became clear again.
Noni had switched her towel out for her robe and was cleaning up the plaits on the side of her head before she placed her wig on for the day. I started to wash my face, a six-step process that used to take two minutes and now took twenty since my pregnancy breakouts began. Noni came up beside me and started to powder her face.
I watched her, the way she traced the lines of her skin, the way she still glowed after all her years, and then I saw myself again. I looked worn, swollen, unkempt, and it didn’t seem to matter what makeup I put on or how I did my hair. Chris was right, I didn’t look like I used to. I wasn’t what I had promised him I’d be. For the first time since I’d left his place yesterday, I was contemplating going back. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to be angry with him. Of course he was disappointed.
“Wipe that look off your face.” Noni tsked.
“What look?”
“Disgust. Like something’s rotting right in front of you. I don’t see nothin’ but life in that mirror.”
Noni continued to put on her makeup, lining her lips, placing her wig, and I just stared. I didn’t know if I could believe her. She had to see me and feel just an ounce of disgust too. They all must. But Noni was honest, if nothing else. She hadn’t lied to me yet.
“Noni?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
Noni put her lipstick down, her mouth plum now. “Lord knows you’re much more than that.”
“But…do you think people like me? The way I look, I mean.”
I watched Noni find me in the mirror, her eyes slate as they dropped down to stare at mine through the glass.
“What you think someone liking how you look’s gonna get you? Far as I know, nobody liking how you look mean you loved or fed or got a roof over your head. Truth is, always gonna be somebody in this world who likes how you look and somebody that don’t and neither of ’em gonna change nothin’ about who you is.”
I shook my head. She was being nice, but that wasn’t how it worked. “If people like how you look, then you’re more likely to succeed. Have you ever seen an ugly millionaire?”
“You ever seen a happy one? I don’t know where you got this idea that if you’re pretty and rich you’re gonna be successful, but I’ve known a whole lotta people in my life, Adela, and success don’t got nothin’ to do with money.”
“Dad says—”
Noni turned to look at me, not through our reflections but really, truly at me.
“Your daddy works for people that make their money off protecting companies full of folks so sad inside they go ripping off any poor soul they can find just so they can make a couple extra coins. And then they go on and hire somebody like your daddy to cover it up so they can make everybody forget they got holes bigger than their fists inside them and they’re not afraid of using those fists on their poor wives’ faces just to get rid of all that emptiness. You listen to me now.” Noni looked at us both in the mirror, four silver eyes in the sterile bathroom light.
“Beauty don’t got nothing to do with it. You think your great-great-grandmother got freed ’cause she pretty? No, she freed herself with her own two feet, a whole lot of luck, and the will to have something just a hair bit better for her babies, even if it meant living in the swamps of Florida. Beauty’s nothin’ but a scapegoat for some dollars. That’s why they gotta say Black folk ain’t beautiful, ’cause they worried then they gotta pay us. You know why I told your daddy he could send you to me?”
“So no one at home would know I was pregnant.”
Noni tilted her head in the mirror. “That’s why they asked to send you, that’s not why I said yes. I wanted you here ’cause I needed you to know where we came from. I wanted you to know this land, understand the way the earth in these parts works. Sand’s not like nothing else in this world. It can’t die. It can condense and blow away and erode, become unusable or inhospitable, but every grain and molecule of sand that’s out there on the beach or in this backyard or in between your great-great-grandmother’s toes still exists somewhere out here. Might be hidden or underwater or all the way in your daddy’s old suitcase in Indiana, but it don’t never disappear.
“Your parents are real concerned ’bout what this child means, so is this town, this country even and don’t get me wrong, I care about what happens to that baby, but I wanna make something real clear to you, Adela. You can add new sand on top of the old sand and you can sew all kinds of new clothes for a child that don’t exist yet and you can find some boy who wants to give you a life that sounds a little more acceptable, but none of that makes the old sand go away.
“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong. So if you’re asking me if I think you’d be prettier if you was skinny as a reed, you’re askin’ the wrong person. I don’t much care if you’re skinny or pretty, and don’t you start thinking they’re the same thing, but I sure as hell am always gonna think you prettiest when you’re breathing, when you’re fed and housed and happy.”
Noni’s foundation was striped in bare skin and the mirror suddenly looked dusty and ancient, like it had lived so many lives and shown so many people themselves and I was just another in its history, to be consumed and thrown back in my truest form. I wanted to turn to Noni and ask for a hug, but I wasn’t sure what would rupture if I did.
“How do I be happy?” I whispered.
Noni turned back fully to the mirror and took her bottle of homemade perfume and spritzed it on her face, neck, wrists, rubbed it on each inch of visible skin, and then turned to me, spraying a cloud of it in front of my face. Eucalyptus and ocean water. She clicked her tongue as she did this and then sighed.
“Eat the sand. I don’t mean you should go out to the beach and spoon sand into your mouth, though I’m sure it’s full of all kinds of good things. I mean that if everybody’s always shoveling new sand to cover old shit that’s always gonna be there, then you best find a way to make that old shit really disappear. Can’t nothing go away till you stare it in the face”—Noni pointed to herself in the mirror—“so you eat the sand and somewhere inside you, it’ll make itself known and you’ll reckon with what’s been done and be able to do somethin’ different when you shit it out.”
I laughed, wiped my cheeks, and found the tears sparkling on my hand.
“Can I tell you something, Noni?”
“Course you can.”
“I think I know what I want to do. With the baby.”
When our eyes met in the mirror now, and then flitted to look at ourselves, I could see what she meant. Swollen and balmy, scarred and fatigued, when you peeled it all back these were the same eyes that looked into every face I’d ever loved, same hands that Kai and Luck and Lion reached for, same skin that had been pulled and pressed and pummeled by Simone and this world and, most of all, by me, and nothing I did or didn’t do would change that.
Maybe the purest part of me couldn’t be seen in the falsehood of a mirror or the glare of a man. I was all covered in sand and the one thing that’s true about sand is it’s a bitch to ever rid yourself of. Maybe I could eat it, but maybe all I needed to do was learn to live with my skin a chalky mess, my eyes a swollen truth, my body a changing thing.
“Tell me,” Noni said. And I did.
That day, when Chris called to apologize again, I didn’t answer. When he called ten times in one hour the next day, I turned my phone off. When he showed up at my door while Noni was at work, I listened to him knock and stopped every part of me that wanted to throw the door open. When he came back the next day, I did throw the door open. And then I saw his face and remembered every searing word he’d flung at me and slammed it shut again.
It was an undying fight, to remember he did not make me who I was, that I existed without him, but in the mornings, when I washed my face and stood in front of that mirror, I saw my skin start to dip and dimple and then I saw a smile, and it looked glorious on me. Not pretty. Not sexy. Not likable. It was more wild than that. It was what I saw in the Girls the first time I let myself love them: a fierce dedication to be what no one wanted them to be. Abundant. Knowing. Big.