Warning: Some content published on this website contains potentially offensive language.
By Ra’Niqua Lee
On her knees, hands gripping the toilet, Tilly finished puking the party out of her gut. A plastic daisy slipped from her afro into the commode and floated on top of the mess like a water lily. The pregnancy test was positive. Woozy in the head, she grabbed the thing from the bathroom waste bin and went to fight Spike, boyfriend of Tilda, Tilly’s mother.
Springtime humidity in Georgia stuck to skin like flypaper. Sweat made swamps of Tilly’s armpits. With the dampness between her legs, she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t peed herself. She added “shower” to her mental to-do list, right after “put foot to middle-aged ass.”
Spike was on the patio, draining the Wi-Fi and waiting for Tilda to come home.
“Useless, son of a—”
Tilly swayed against the coffee table, thrifted and bearing hieroglyphs of wear and tear. “Fuck.” Her foot caught the suitcase near the couch’s end. A striped tie snaked from the open mouth. She kicked the case again because she had on boots, and two one-track wheels and a single zipper compartment couldn’t hurt her back.
Patio blinds aside, she leaned out onto the third-floor balcony. Music and voices came from somewhere nearby, another party, another balcony in their apartment complex. Such was typical of any night of the week, so that Tuesday could be Friday, and Monday never quite looked as starched and tucked as Tilly knew it could.
Spike looked up from his phone screen. Its glow caught the undefined folds below his jawline, a toothless smile beneath the frown. So ugly, but Tilda liked him for now, liked all things in spurts that lasted too long. That had to be how she had come to name Tilly after herself. What had sounded good for a moment turned into a lifetime commitment for her daughter.
“We should talk,” Tilly said.
Spike sipped diet Coke and said, “We’re talking now, aren’t we?”
He didn’t live with Tilly and Tilda in their cramped two-bedroom. For the last four months, he came over every Friday around five and saw Tilda off to work. Sometimes, he stayed the night, hence the suitcase, but this didn’t happen quite frequently enough to justify overt outrage. He wasn’t supposed to last long. They never did. Like every person in Tilda’s past relationships, Spike would hang around until Tilda started chaining the door when he came knocking.
“She doesn’t love you.” Tilly had dangled the truth out for the others like a lure. She wanted to hook them, not to keep. She wanted to set them free. Tilda’s boyfriend before Spike—a man named Big G, skin and bones and dressed in Nike—had laughed in Tilly’s face when she told him. Most of the others looked relieved.
Tilly showed Spike the pregnancy test. Thin, flimsy plastic—insignificant for what it was.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked.
Spike frowned. “What does it look like?”
“You got her pregnant.” Tilly jabbed the test at him. “She’s an old woman.”
“Shouldn’t talk that way about the woman who birthed you.”
“You’re old, too.”
Tilly dropped the test onto Spike’s fat legs, and he lumbered to his feet.
“Why were you walking around with that thing anyway?” he asked.
“Why did I have to find out the news in the garbage?”
April wind shook the daisies in Tilly hair. She got them at the party—a BYOB, hot box in the shower sort of deal. The thought of it turned her sour stomach, and she retreated to the living room for a place to sit before the dizziness took her over. She hadn’t had good balance since she fell off a kitchen counter at six years old, trying to use the microwave. Alcohol made it worse. If she drank enough, she could trip standing still.
She focused on the time on the stove, perpetually flashing midnight. Georgia Power shut off the electricity the previous month. Tilda and Tilly had survived on cinnamon candles and key chain flashlights until they could scrape up enough money to have the power reconnected. Bills were tricky. Another month, another mailbox full of envelopes. Emails. Phone calls. It was the cycle of it all that bothered Tilly. She could never get ahead of what kept coming back
Now, a baby.
Spike closed the patio door and flipped the lock.
“You all right?” he asked.
Tilly groaned into her hands.
“Where is Tilda?” she asked.
“Work.” Spike crushed his can and dropped it into the kitchen recycling, his only household contribution. “I’ll let her know you want to talk, but get some sleep.”
Tilda stocked shelves and ran the register at the Pick ‘N Save from five until eleven. Despite the time displayed on the stove, it was well after midnight, so no, Tilda was not at work. No one worked longer than what was required. Except maybe Spike, who was a bank teller at American Trust, the bank with the begonias out front—a fact she only knew because he had told her. He wore blue-striped ties and fed that line from the commercials to customers. “You can trust in American Trust.” He could have left all of that at his job—people did worse for money—but he carried it with him, that do-gooder, love-all bullshit that did not exist outside of TV and official spaces. Probably, Spike didn’t even know what Tilda would do about a baby. Keep it? Maybe. If Tilda was smart enough to consider other options, Tilly wouldn’t have been alive.
Tilly jumped up and grabbed Spike’s truck keys from the dining room table.
He sprang at her and hooked a hand, fleshy and warm, on her elbow.
“No, you don’t,” he said.
Tilly pulled away. A daisy came loose from her hair. At the party, a white girl in sandals and a crop top had a satchel full. The girl had taken advantage of Tilly, jabbing them into her hair as if it were a cork board. Tilly had been too drunk to consent to the flowers, to the guy in the corner who had grabbed her ass, or the rideshare driver who informed her that he could see up her skirt.
Spike’s keys in hand, Tilly took off into the apartment stairwell. He yelled after her, asked her where she was going. She yelled back, “To find Tilda.”
**
Up all night was Tilly’s pre-dropout idea of partying. She and friends lounged on their dorm beds with school colors in their windows, textbooks under their pillows, old takeout and fruit molding rotten in their mini fridges. They hadn’t been old enough to buy beer. Their conversations sustained them as much as the coffee.
Tilly lay on a top bunk, mere feet from a warped ceiling browned with watermarks, old and worn but as nice as any place she had ever lived.
“Someone, choose my major,” she said, a joke that immediately turned serious in her mind. Her friends didn’t notice the switch.
“Not how it works,” laughed Jaz or Marie. They had the same laugh, like trying to force air through a deflating balloon, one of their many similarities.
Tilly punched a pillow and hugged it to her chest.
“Then tell me what to do about my mom,” she said.
“What about your mom?” asked Florence, finally concerned. “She okay?”
In another week, Tilda would show up in front of their dorm in an idling Oldsmobile that sounded like a train. Having just been evicted, she would make a proposition. Tilly and Tilda would become roommates, split the bills fifty-fifty, and survive the world that way. This was all impending as far as Tilly could tell from their phone conversations. An eviction notice was not the same thing as an eviction, so Tilly figured she had at least thirty days before her mom called crying about being temporarily homeless. That was thirty days to pretend the problem did not exist, the only logical solution when no other solutions could be found. Tilly had broken her own college rule, though. She had learned at orientation not to mention Tilda after listening to the tenth freshman claim that their mother was their hero.
“My mom is fine,” Tilly said, lied. She meant that her mother was serially bad with money and equally bad at decision-making. “I’m fine. Just help me pick a major.”
“Biology?” Florence suggested.
“I don’t understand life science,” said Tilly.
“Mathematics, like me,” said Jaz. “We need more women in STEM.”
“I barely passed Algebra two.”
“Chemistry?”
“That’s just math on crack. Not interested in either.”
A moment of silence passed, and then came another laugh like a whoopie cushion.
“You know we have advisors who get paid to listen to people shit on their advice.” That was definitely Marie.
“Fine. I’ll see my advisor.”
Each time Tilly had met with the frizzy blonde who controlled her enrollment, Tilly spent too much time examining the photo of her family—two towheaded kids, a husband in a sweater vest, and a chihuahua dressed to match the husband. The advisor had been of little help when Tilly finally came for advice about her mom. She gave Tilly the number for a student hotline and said, “I’m sorry that your home life is so difficult.” The chihuahua looked more sympathetic.
Tilly peered over the bunkbed rail until a wave of dizziness hit like a flood. She pressed herself against the mattress. Count to three and breathe in deep, Tilda would tell Tilly every time she began to lose her balance, but her head always slipped before she did, and she never made it to three before she hit the floor.
**
Half a dozen stand-alone buildings had been painted a sickly green to look like something people might want. Tilly’s vision blurred and watered as she searched for Spike’s truck in the windy lot, a nineteen-ninety-something Ford, old and rusted-out—Spike if he were made of steel and rubber instead of fat. He lumbered when he walked. He often hammered his fist into his chest either to burp or to keep his heart beating. There had to be a reason he only drank diet Coke. Maybe he was diabetic, or he suffered from hypertension, ugly words more fitting of the elderly than someone about to become a father. Tilly wondered if he already had his own children. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was dying of heart disease and high cholesterol and Tilda’s consenting uterus was his only shot at kids.
Spike followed behind her.
“Whatever you want to say to Tilda can wait?”
“Says you.”
“This type of thing’s not appropriate for a person’s place of work,” Spike continued. “Tilda’s been pulling double shifts. She needs that job.”
“She’s not at work.” Tilly slipped between two cars parked at the curb.
“Where, then?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She turned. “Don’t pretend like you do.”
Spike stopped short. He was so fragile. He squinted into the wind like he was trying to turn the world rosy red, American Trust red.
“You go joyriding in the state you’re in, you’ll wind up pinned to a tree,” he said.
“That’s a solution,” Tilly said.
“What are you going to say to Tilda when you find her, huh?” Spike asked when they were standing beside his truck.
“Bitch.”
Tilly moved off campus spring semester of her freshman year once Tilda turned up, needing a place to stay. They moved in together. Tilly agreed to pay half the rent. She slept through her classes. By her third semester, she wound up on academic probation. She lost her funding by the end of her fourth. That’s the way she remembered it. The dorm, Tilda, the apartment, academic probation, then nothing.
So Tilly said, “bitch,” and Spike stared for a moment like Tilly had called him the bitch. Then he grabbed her hand and managed to pry the keys from her fingers.
“Let me drive,” he said. “Or I’ll report the truck stolen. Your choice.”
Tilly rolled her eyes and held up her hands. “No choice at all.”
Spike’s truck stank of menthols even though he didn’t smoke, as far as Tilly knew. She buckled herself while staring at his hair, coily and speckled gray. His dark skin bulged around his neck. He knocked at his chest and cleared his throat. His baby would be a chunk.
“So where do you think we’ll find Tilda at this time of night?” he asked.
Tilly gave him general directions and faced the window as they started out of the lot, slow and steady. Spike approached stoplights like they might explode.
They lived in a college town, just north of Georgia swampland. The university was everywhere. As they drove, the mascot, Duff the Jackrabbit, dribbled a basketball on a billboard for a waffle joint, gave a thumbs up in a mural of smiling children under the old railroad bridge, and stood cast in plaster in front of the countless pawn shops and liquor stores. As a student, Tilly had gotten discounts at the movie theater and free refills on coffee at the indie bakery across the street from the sports fields. What had welcomed her before, now made her feel on the outside of everything. Her student ID didn’t work anywhere she had to scan it. She still kept it tucked behind her driver’s license and a credit card with the account in collections. She kept the ID for the same reason she kept the credit card. She told herself she would need them again, but she had not thought about either in months.
Ra’Niqua Lee is a PhD student of English at Emory University, where she works as an editorial associate for the online, open-access research journal Southern Spaces. She received an MFA in fiction writing from Georgia State University, where she was a Paul Bowles Fellow. She has a vested interest in seeing her particular visions of the South represented in print.