would also exhaust all means to get in touch with her father, who would show up at her hospital bed, just so Kenya could spurn him.
“You did this,” she would say. He would cry, like he did that night, choking and dripping all the way to University Hospital, and Kenya would hate him even more. The whole thing would be like the hospital scenes she’d seen countless times on her mother’s VCR recordings of The Young and the Restless , which Sheila now watched openly. She imagined that most Barrett girls would avoid the hospital but that she could at least count on Zaineb to visit and apologize for her “zero percent” crack.
Then Kenya remembered a recent story on the evening news about a young man who had tried to commit suicide. He had been found too soon—and yet not soon enough. Now he traveled about in a wheelchair pushed by his elderly mother and had to work extremely hard to pull his tongue into his mouth to form words. One of his eyes was permanently shut, making him look like the cat in the Bloom County comic strip. He went around the state lecturing about why you shouldn’t commit suicide. The news showed footage of him on a stage in a school auditorium. “You might miss,” he garbled.
Kenya thought briefly about destroying her grandmother’s house as redecorated by her mother and the nutty Lars, tearing lacy curtains, puncturing throw pillows with geometric designs. But she would sooner chance suicide. Finally she pictured herself lying on the couch, still in her pajamas when her mother came home, not so much defiant as paralyzed with grief and despair. But she knew she couldn’t even do that. The only option was to get up.
After she was showered and dressed, she put in a tape she’d made of the nightly countdown on Hot 98 and listened to “Owner of a Lonely Heart” over and over again, thinking that it sounded like being trapped in a snowstorm. Then she remembered the blank purple book that smelled like perfume that she’d bought at the card and candy store. The girls in the novels she read kept diaries, journals, or important notebooks a la Harriet the Spy . Kenya had never felt like writing in hers, because she didn’t know where to start. She pulled her journal out of her desk drawer and stared at a blank page for several minutes. After rewinding back to the beginning of the song again, she wrote the date and the song’s title, and then underlined it with a flourish. She closed the journal and hid it in her underwear drawer.
She ate chips, half a family-size bag of cheese curls, and two and a half slices of the crappy pizza, which she was too impatient to heat all the way through. When the urge to vomit passed, she got the piñata off of the dining room table and took out the plastic bat they’d bought to hit it with. She put the lumpy thing in the middle of the living room floor, pushed the glass coffee table away from it, and slammed it. Then she hit it again. To make sure it stayed steady, she put a foot on it and hit it again and again. Each time she made contact, it felt as if the thing was gathering strength against her. Apparently, she and her mother had fortified it with gluey paper to the point of indestructibility. So when Sheila returned, Kenya was back on the couch watching TV and the piñata was back on the dining room table, completely intact.
* * *
A week later, Mr. Jaffrey (“call me Teddy”) finally breached the piñata. Then he grinned proudly at Kenya.
“How ’bout that?”
He had used an actual wooden bat—he just happened to have one in his car—to make a dent, and then a hammer to finish the job, making one small hole. Teddy Jaffrey was the man who had pushed Sheila’s car out of the snow on the disastrous afternoon of Kenya’s party. After Kenya voted down the idea of rescheduling the party and the two of them made it official by giddily making their way though most of the cake, Sheila invited him over for dinner the following Saturday to thank
“You did this,” she would say. He would cry, like he did that night, choking and dripping all the way to University Hospital, and Kenya would hate him even more. The whole thing would be like the hospital scenes she’d seen countless times on her mother’s VCR recordings of The Young and the Restless , which Sheila now watched openly. She imagined that most Barrett girls would avoid the hospital but that she could at least count on Zaineb to visit and apologize for her “zero percent” crack.
Then Kenya remembered a recent story on the evening news about a young man who had tried to commit suicide. He had been found too soon—and yet not soon enough. Now he traveled about in a wheelchair pushed by his elderly mother and had to work extremely hard to pull his tongue into his mouth to form words. One of his eyes was permanently shut, making him look like the cat in the Bloom County comic strip. He went around the state lecturing about why you shouldn’t commit suicide. The news showed footage of him on a stage in a school auditorium. “You might miss,” he garbled.
Kenya thought briefly about destroying her grandmother’s house as redecorated by her mother and the nutty Lars, tearing lacy curtains, puncturing throw pillows with geometric designs. But she would sooner chance suicide. Finally she pictured herself lying on the couch, still in her pajamas when her mother came home, not so much defiant as paralyzed with grief and despair. But she knew she couldn’t even do that. The only option was to get up.
After she was showered and dressed, she put in a tape she’d made of the nightly countdown on Hot 98 and listened to “Owner of a Lonely Heart” over and over again, thinking that it sounded like being trapped in a snowstorm. Then she remembered the blank purple book that smelled like perfume that she’d bought at the card and candy store. The girls in the novels she read kept diaries, journals, or important notebooks a la Harriet the Spy . Kenya had never felt like writing in hers, because she didn’t know where to start. She pulled her journal out of her desk drawer and stared at a blank page for several minutes. After rewinding back to the beginning of the song again, she wrote the date and the song’s title, and then underlined it with a flourish. She closed the journal and hid it in her underwear drawer.
She ate chips, half a family-size bag of cheese curls, and two and a half slices of the crappy pizza, which she was too impatient to heat all the way through. When the urge to vomit passed, she got the piñata off of the dining room table and took out the plastic bat they’d bought to hit it with. She put the lumpy thing in the middle of the living room floor, pushed the glass coffee table away from it, and slammed it. Then she hit it again. To make sure it stayed steady, she put a foot on it and hit it again and again. Each time she made contact, it felt as if the thing was gathering strength against her. Apparently, she and her mother had fortified it with gluey paper to the point of indestructibility. So when Sheila returned, Kenya was back on the couch watching TV and the piñata was back on the dining room table, completely intact.
* * *
A week later, Mr. Jaffrey (“call me Teddy”) finally breached the piñata. Then he grinned proudly at Kenya.
“How ’bout that?”
He had used an actual wooden bat—he just happened to have one in his car—to make a dent, and then a hammer to finish the job, making one small hole. Teddy Jaffrey was the man who had pushed Sheila’s car out of the snow on the disastrous afternoon of Kenya’s party. After Kenya voted down the idea of rescheduling the party and the two of them made it official by giddily making their way though most of the cake, Sheila invited him over for dinner the following Saturday to thank
Similar Books
The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire
Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus
