The Vanishing Half: A Novel (14 page)

“The Hardison Group is a very loyal client,” she said, “so on our best behavior tonight, yes?”

Her mere presence made Jude jittery. She could feel Carla appraising her as she chopped celery and pureed tomatoes, as she swept through the party balancing trays of rolled prosciutto or mixed cocktails at the bar. The retiring man was Mr. Hardison—he was stocky and silver-haired, wearing a gray suit that looked expensive, his young blonde wife hanging on to his arm. The crowd, all white and middle-aged and moneyed, toasted his career and raised a glass afterward to his successor, a handsome blond man in a navy suit. A girl lingered by his side. She looked eighteen maybe, leggy with wavy blonde hair, and she wore a shimmery silver dress cut scandalously above her knees. Halfway through the party, she stepped away from the man and sauntered over to the bar, tilting her empty martini glass.

“I’m not supposed to serve anyone under twenty-one,” Jude said.

The girl laughed, pressing a hand against her collar.

“Well, I’m twenty-one then,” she said. Her eyes were so blue, they looked violet. She tipped her glass again. “This party’s a drag anyway. Of course I need a drink.”

“Your dad doesn’t care?”

The girl glanced over her shoulder, back to the handsome man.

“Of course not,” she said. “He’s too busy trying to distract himself from the fact that Mother isn’t here. Isn’t that something? I came all the way in from school because he got some big promotion, and she couldn’t even bother to show up. Now isn’t that a bitch?”

She wiggled the glass again. She clearly didn’t plan on leaving until she got her way, so Jude poured her a fresh drink. The girl turned toward the party, slipping the olive through her pink lips.

“So do you like being a bartender?” she asked. “I bet you get to meet all sorts of fascinating people.”

“I’m not a bartender. Not all the time. I’m a student mostly.” Then Jude added, a little too proudly, “At UCLA.”

The girl raised an eyebrow. “How funny,” she said. “I go to Southern California. Guess we’re rivals.”

It wasn’t hard to tell which part seemed funny to her: that a stranger happened to attend her crosstown rival or that the black girl serving drinks had, somehow, managed to attend a school like UCLA. A white man in a tweed jacket asked for wine and Jude uncorked the bottle of merlot, hoping the girl might leave. But as she began to pour, she heard exclamations filtering in from the foyer. The girl turned to her glumly.

“Fun’s over,” she said, and drained her martini in a gulp.

Then she set her empty glass on the bar and started toward the entrance, where a woman had just walked in. Mr. Hardison was helping her out of her fur coat, and when she turned, passing a hand through her dark hair, the bottle of wine shattered on the
floor.

The night one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, a notice was pinned to the front door of every house in the Palace Estates, calling for an emergency Homeowners Association meeting. The Estates, the newest subdivision in Brentwood, had only called one emergency meeting before, when the treasurer was accused of embezzling dues, so that night, the neighbors gathered in the clubhouse, whispering hotly, expecting the hint of a scandal. What they did not expect was this: current president Percy White standing in front of the room, his face beet red as he delivered regretful news. The Lawsons on Sycamore Way were selling their house and a colored man had just placed an offer to buy it. The room sputtered to life, and Percy threw up his hands, suddenly finding himself in front of a firing squad.

“Just the messenger,” he kept saying, although no one could hear him. Dale Johansen asked what the hell was the point of having a Homeowners Association if not to prevent such a thing from happening. Tom Pearson, determined to outbluster him, threatened to withhold his dues if the association did not start doing their jobs. Even the women were upset, or perhaps, especially the women were upset. They did not shout like the men but each had made a certain sacrifice
in marrying a man who could afford a home in the most expensive new subdivision in Los Angeles County and she expected a return on that investment. Cath Johansen asked how they ever expected to keep the neighborhood safe now, and Betsy Roberts, an economics major at Bryn Mawr before she’d married, complained that their property values would plummet.

But years later, the neighbors would only remember one person speaking up in the meeting, a single voice that had, somehow, risen above the noise. She hadn’t yelled—maybe that’s why they’d listened. Or perhaps because she was ordinarily so soft-spoken, everyone knew that if she was standing to her feet in the middle of a raucous meeting, she must have had something urgent to say. Or maybe it was because her family currently lived on Sycamore Way, in a cul-de-sac across from the Lawsons, so the new neighbors would affect her most directly. Whatever the reason, the room quieted when Stella Sanders climbed to her feet.

“You must stop them, Percy,” she said. “If you don’t, there’ll be more and then what? Enough is enough!”

She was trembling, her light brown eyes flashing, and the neighbors, moved by her spontaneous passion, applauded. She never spoke up in their meetings and hadn’t even known that she would until she’d already clambered to her feet. For a second, she’d almost said nothing—she hated feeling everyone watch her, had wanted to run shrinking at her own wedding. But her shy, faltering voice only gripped the room more. After the meeting, she couldn’t even make it out the door without neighbors wanting to shake her hand. Weeks later, yellow flyers flapping on trees and light posts read in big block letters:
PR
OTECT OUR NEIGHBORHO
OD. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
. When she found one stuck in the windshield of her car, she was startled to see her own words reflected back to her, as foreign as if they’d come from a stranger.

F
OR WHAT IT
’
S WORTH
, Blake Sanders had been as surprised as anyone that his wife had spoken in that meeting. She wasn’t one for demonstrating. He’d never seen her riled up enough about any issue to do more than sign a petition, and even then it was usually because she was too polite to shove a clipboard back into some college kid’s face like he would’ve done. Sure, he wanted to keep the planet clean. He thought the war was rotten. But that didn’t mean that screaming in the faces of decent, hardworking people was the right way to go about any of it. But Stella indulged these idealists, listened to their speeches, signed their petitions, all because she was too sweet to tell them to bug off. Yet here she was now, somehow, as fervent as any of those young protesters in the middle of the association meeting.

He could have laughed. His shy Stella making a scene! Although maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. A woman protecting her home came from a place more primal than politics. Besides, in all the time he’d known her, she’d never spoken kindly of a Negro. It embarrassed him a little, to tell the truth. He respected the natural order of things but you didn’t have to be cruel about it. As a boy, he’d had a colored nanny named Wilma who was practically family. He still sent her a Christmas card each year. But Stella wouldn’t even hire colored help for the house—she claimed Mexicans worked harder. He never understood why she averted her gaze when an old Negro woman shuffled past on the sidewalk, why she was always so curt with the elevator operators. She was jumpy around Negroes, like a child who’d been bit by a dog.

That night, as they slipped out of the clubhouse, he smiled, offering his arm to her cheekily. It was a brisk April night. They passed slowly under the jacaranda trees beginning to bloom lavender over their heads.

“I didn’t know I’d married such a rabble-rouser,” he said.

He was a banker’s son who’d left Boston to attend college, he’d told her when they first met, although he didn’t mention then that the bank at which his father was an executive was Chase National, and the college he’d left to attend, Yale. She would later realize that these were signs that he truly came from wealth: how rarely he wore expensive clothes even though he could afford to, how little he talked about his father or his inheritance. He’d studied finance and marketing, and instead of heading to Madison Avenue, he’d followed his fiancée back to her hometown of New Orleans. The relationship fizzled, but by then he’d fallen in love with the city. That’s how he’d ended up working in the marketing department at Maison Blanche, and that was why he was hiring her, Stella Vignes, as his new secretary.

Even after eight years of marriage, Stella still felt a little squeamish when people asked how they’d met. A boss, his secretary, a tale as old as time. It made you picture a greasy-haired potbelly in suspenders chasing a young girl around his desk.

“I wasn’t some old lech,” Blake had said once, laughing, at a dinner party, and it was true. He was twenty-eight then, hard-jawed with ruffled blond hair and blueish-gray eyes like Paul Newman. And maybe that was what made his attention different. Back then, she’d withered when a white man noticed her. Under Blake’s gaze, she’d blossomed.

“Did I make a fool out of myself?” she asked later. She was sitting in front of her vanity, brushing out her hair. Blake eased behind her, unbuttoning his white shirt.

“Of course not,” he said. “But it’ll never happen, Stel. I don’t know why everyone’s getting all worked up.”

“But you saw Percy up there. He looked plumb scared.”

Blake laughed. “I love when you say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Your country talk.”

“Oh, don’t make fun. Not right now.”

“I’m not! I think it’s cute.”

He stooped to kiss her cheek, and in the mirror, she watched his fair head bend over her dark one. Did she look as nervous as she felt? Would anybody be able to tell? A colored family in the neighborhood. Blake was right, it would never happen. The association would put a stop to it. They had lawyers on hand for such a thing, didn’t they? What was the purpose of having an association if not to stop undesirables from moving in, if not to ensure the neighborhood exists precisely as the neighbors wished? She tried to steady that flutter in her stomach but she couldn’t. She’d been caught before. Only once, the second time she’d ever pretended to be white. During her last summer in Mallard, weeks after venturing into the charm shop, she’d gone to the South Louisiana Museum of Art on an ordinary Saturday morning, not Negro Day, and walked right up to the main entrance, not the side door where Negroes lined up in the alley. Nobody stopped her, and again, she’d felt stupid for not trying this sooner. There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.

In the museum, she’d glided slowly through the rooms, studying the fuzzy Impressionists. She was listening distractedly as an elderly docent intoned to a circle of listless children, when she noticed a Negro security guard in the corner of the room staring. Then he’d winked, and, horrified, she rushed past him, head down, barely breathing until she stepped back into the bright morning. She rode the bus back to Mallard, her face burning. Of course passing wasn’t that easy. Of course that colored guard recognized her. We always know our own, her mother said.

And now a colored family moving across the street. Would they
see her for what she was? Or rather, what she wasn’t? Blake kissed the back of her neck, slipping his hand inside her robe.

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” he said. “The association will never allow it.”

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
, her daughter woke up screaming, and Stella stumbled into the girl’s room to find her in the throes of another nightmare. She crawled into the tiny bed, gently shaking her awake. “I know, I know,” she said, dabbing at her tears. Her own heart was still pounding, although by now, she should have been used to scrambling out of bed, following her daughter’s screams, always fearing the worst, only to find Kennedy twisted in her covers, clenching the sheets. The pediatrician said that nothing was physically wrong; the sleep specialist said that children with overactive imaginations were prone to vivid dreams. It probably just meant that she was an artist, he’d said with a chuckle. The child psychologist examined her drawings and asked what she dreamt about. But Kennedy, only seven, never remembered, and Blake dismissed the doctors as a waste of money.

“She must get it from your side,” he told Stella. “A good Sanders girl would be out like a light.”

She told him that she used to have nightmares when she was young, too, and she never remembered them either. But that last part wasn’t true. Her nightmares were always the same, white men grabbing her ankles and dragging her screaming out of the bed. She’d never told Desiree. Each time she’d snapped awake, Desiree snoring beside her, she felt stupid for being afraid. Hadn’t Desiree watched from that closet too? Hadn’t she seen what those white men had done? Then why wasn’t she waking up in the middle of the night, her heart pounding?

They never talked about their father. Whenever Stella tried, Desiree’s eyes glazed over.

“What you want me to say?” she said. “I know just as much as you do.”

“I just wish I knew why,” Stella said.

“Nobody knows why,” Desiree said. “Bad things happen. They just do.”

Now Stella gently brushed back the silken blonde hair from her daughter’s forehead.

“It’s all right, darling,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

She held her daughter closer, pulling the covers over the both of them. She hadn’t wanted to be a mother at first. The idea of pregnancy terrified her; she imagined pushing out a baby that grew darker and darker, Blake recoiling in horror. She almost preferred him thinking that she’d had an affair with a Negro. That lie seemed kinder than the truth, momentary unfaithfulness a gentler deception than her ongoing fraud. But after she’d given birth, she felt overwhelmed with relief. The newborn in her arms was perfect: milky skin, wavy blonde hair, and eyes so blue they looked violet. Still, sometimes, Kennedy felt like a daughter who belonged to someone else, a child Stella was borrowing while she loaned a life that never should have been hers.

“Where are you from, Mommy?” Kennedy asked her once during bath time. She was nearly four then and inquisitive. Stella, kneeling beside the tub, gently wiped her daughter’s shoulders with a washcloth and glanced into those violet eyes, unsettling and beautiful, so unlike the eyes of anyone else she’d ever known.

“A little town down south,” Stella said. “You won’t have heard of it.” She always spoke to Kennedy like this, as if she were another adult. All the baby books recommended it, said it helped with developing language skills. But really, she just felt silly babbling like Blake.

“But where?” Kennedy asked.

Stella poured warm water over her, the bubbles dissolving. “It’s just a little place called Mallard, darling,” she said. “It’s nothing like Los Angeles.”

She’d been, for the first and final time, completely honest with her daughter, only because she knew the girl was too young to remember. Later, Stella would lie. She’d tell Kennedy, as she’d told everyone, that she was from Opelousas, and beyond that, she would barely talk about her childhood at all. But Kennedy still asked. Her questions always felt like a surprise attack, as if she were pressing her finger into a bruise. What was it like when you were growing up? Did you have brothers and sisters? What did your house look like? Once, during bedtime, she asked Stella what her mother was like and Stella nearly dropped the storybook.

“She’s not here anymore,” she finally said.

“But where is she?”

“Gone,” she said. “My family is gone.”

She’d told Blake the same lie years ago in New Orleans: that she was an only child who’d moved to New Orleans after her parents died in an accident. He’d touched her hand and she saw herself, suddenly, through his eyes. A lowly orphan, alone in the city. If he pitied her, he wouldn’t be able to see her clearly. He would refract all of her lies through her mourning, mistake her reticence about her past for grief. Now what began as a lie felt closer to the truth. She hadn’t spoken to her sister in thirteen years. Where was Desiree now? How was their mother? She’d slid the book back on the shelf before she even reached the end, and later that night, brushing her teeth, she heard Blake speaking to Kennedy.

“Mommy doesn’t like talking about her family,” he murmured. “It makes her sad.”

“But why?”

“Because. They aren’t here anymore. So don’t ask her anything else, okay?”

In Blake’s mind, her life before him had been tragic, her whole family swallowed up. She preferred him to think of her that way. Blank. A curtain hung between her past and present and she could never peek behind it. Who knows what might scuttle through?

A
COLORED FAMILY
in the neighborhood. It would never happen.