White Teeth by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

contracts (
I’ll never have sex, I’ll never smoke another joint, I’ll never wear another skirt above the knee
) if only He could assure her that Ryan Topps had not rung her mother’s doorbell looking for shelter from the wind.
    â€œClara! Come out of de cold.”
    It was the voice Hortense put on when she had company—an overcompensation of all the consonants—the voice she used for pastors and white women.
    Clara closed the front door behind her, and walked in a kind of terror through the living room, past Jesus who wept (and then didn’t), and into the kitchen.
    â€œDear Lord, she look like someting de cat dragged in, hmm?”
    â€œMmm,” said Ryan, who was happily shoveling a plate of ackee and saltfish into his mouth on the other side of the tiny kitchen table.
    Clara stuttered, her buckteeth cutting shapes into her bottom lip. “What are you doing
here
?”
    â€œHa!” cried Hortense, almost triumphant. “You tink you can hide your friends from me forever? De bwoy was cold, I let ’im in, we been havin’ a nice chat, haven’t we, young man?”
    â€œMmm, yes, Mrs. Bowden.”
    â€œWell, don’ look so shock. You’d tink I was gwan eat ’im up or someting, eh Ryan?” said Hortense, glowing in a manner Clara had never seen before.
    â€œYeah, right,” smirked Ryan. And together, Ryan Topps and Clara’s mother began to laugh.
    Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair than when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee’s mother? As the nights got darker and shorter and it became harder to pick Ryan out of the crowd who milled outside the school gates each day at three-thirty, a dejected Clara would make the long walk home only to find her lover once more in the kitchen, chatting happily with Hortense, devouring the Bowden household’s cornucopia of goodies: ackee and saltfish, beef jerky, chicken-rice-and-peas, ginger cake, and coconut ices.
    These conversations, lively as they sounded when Clara turned the key in the door, always fell silent as she approached the kitchen. Like children caught out, they would become sullen, then awkward, then Ryan would make his excuses and leave. There was also a look, she noticed, that they had begun to give her, a look of sympathy, of condescension; and not only that—they began to comment on her clothing, which had become steadily more youthful, more colorful; and Ryan—what was happening to Ryan?—shed his turtleneck, avoided her in school,
bought a tie.
    Of course, like the mother of a drug addict or the neighbor of a serial killer, Clara was the last to know. She had once known everything about Ryan—before Ryan himself knew it—she had been a Ryan
expert.
Now she was reduced to overhearing the Irish girls assert that Clara Bowden and Ryan Topps were not dealing with each other—definitively, definitely
not
dealing with each other—oh no,
not anymore.
    If Clara realized what was happening, she wouldn’t allow herself to believe it. On the occasion she spotted Ryan at the kitchen table, surrounded by leaflets—and Hortense hurriedly gathering them up and shoving them into her apron pocket—Clara
willed
herself to forget it. Later that month, when Clara persuaded a doleful Ryan to go through the motions with her in the disabled toilet, she squinted so she couldn’t see what she didn’t
want
to see. But it was there, underneath his sweater, there as he leaned back on the sink was the glint of silver, its gleam hardly visible in the dismal light—it couldn’t be, but it
was—
the silver glint of a tiny silver cross.
    It couldn’t be,
but it was.
That is how people describe a miracle. Somehow the opposites of Hortense and Ryan had met at their logical extremes, their mutual predilection for the pain and death of others meeting like perspective points on some morbid horizon.