The Vanishing Half: A Novel (15 page)

And yet, the morning after the association meeting, Stella floated for hours in her swimming pool, still thinking about it. Clouds drifted overhead, rain, maybe, on the way. She wore a red bathing suit that matched her plastic raft, and she was sipping on a gin and soda that she’d poured secretly as soon as she’d seen her daughter off to school and hoped, sipping again, that it looked like water to Yolanda, bustling around in the kitchen. Obviously it was too early for gin, but she was trying to steady that uneasiness creeping inside her since last night. Blake said that there was no chance the bid for the Lawson house would be approved, but why would Percy have even called the meeting unless it was possible? Why had he looked so shaken, standing in the front of the room, as if he’d already known that there was nothing he could do? The country was changing every day, she read all about the marches in the newspapers. Restrooms and universities and public pools desegregating, which was why when they’d first moved to Brentwood, Blake insisted on building one in the backyard. A private pool seemed too lavish to her, but Blake said, “You don’t want Ken in the city pool, do you? Swimming around with whoever they let in there now.”

He’d grown up in Boston, swimming in whites-only pools. She’d swum in the river or, occasionally, at the Gulf beach where the white lifeguards instructed them to keep to the colored side of the red flag.
Of course the water mixed from one side to another, and if you peed on the colored side—which Desiree, giggling, always threatened to do—it would eventually make its way to the white side. But Stella agreed that Blake was right, they couldn’t send their daughter to a city pool. The only solution was to build their own.

Over the years, she’d come to appreciate the pool and everything else Blake insisted they needed in Los Angeles: her red Thunderbird, her maid, Yolanda, and all the other little creature comforts he provided. She loved that phrase, loved imagining comfort as a plush Pomeranian curling around her ankles. Before Blake, she’d never felt comfortable. She didn’t realize this until after she’d met him, marveling as he ordered an entire steak for himself, remembering the nights she’d fallen asleep, her stomach hollowed. Or watching Blake try to decide between two neckties and, in the end, purchasing both, when she used to walk to school, toes cramped against her shoes. Or stepping into the kitchen to see Yolanda polishing the silverware, when, years earlier, she’d been staring at her own reflection in the Duponts’ forks.

Back then, she was responsible for cleaning a home filled with expensive things that she would never be able to afford. Picking up after those bratty boys and dodging Mr. Dupont, who followed her into the pantry, shut the door, and stuck his hand up her dress. Three times he’d touched her and himself too, panting, his breath thick with brandy, while she tried to get away, but the pantry was too small and he was too strong, pressing her against the shelves. Then it was over, as quick as it started. Soon her fear of him became worse than the touching. All the days she worried that he might creep up behind her ruined the ones when he didn’t. After the first time, she’d asked Desiree, that night in bed, what she thought of him.

“What’s there to think about him?” Desiree said. “He’s just a skinny ol’ white man. Why? What you think about him?”

Even in their darkened bedroom, even to Desiree, Stella couldn’t bring herself to say. She always wanted to believe that there was something special about her but she knew that Mr. Dupont only picked her because he sensed her weakness. She was the twin who wouldn’t tell.

And she didn’t. Her whole life, she would never tell anyone. But when Desiree came up with the plan to leave after Founder’s Day, Stella felt Mr. Dupont shoving her against the pantry shelf and knew she had to go too. In New Orleans, when Desiree began to waver, Stella felt his fingers worming inside her underwear and found the strength to stay for the both of them.

But that was a lifetime ago. She slipped a toe over the edge of her raft, skimming her foot along the water. Now this was comfort—a languid morning spent floating across a swimming pool, a two-story house with cabinets always filled with food, a chestful of toys for her daughter, a bookshelf that held an entire encyclopedia set. This was comfort, no longer wanting anything.

She was growing sleepy in the midmorning haze, lulled by gin, so she forced herself out of the water. When she padded, still dripping, onto the kitchen tile, Yolanda glanced up from dusting the dining-room furniture. Her feet were still damp, and she realized, a moment too late, that Yolanda had already mopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Look at me, dirtying your floor.”

She still spoke to Yolanda like this sometimes, as if Stella were the visitor in her home instead of the other way around. Yolanda only smiled.

“It’s okay, miss,” she said. “Your tea.”

Stella sipped her sweet tea, the towel draping lazily across her shoulders, as she headed to the shower. At least the pool would be good exercise, she’d told herself at first. But most mornings, she didn’t swim at all, only floated on the raft. On the best mornings, she floated with
a cocktail, sipping slowly as she drifted beneath the sunrise. It felt deliciously wrong, enjoying a drink so early, but at the same time, it was pitiful that this passed as excitement. Her days blended together, refracting each other, as if she were trapped in a hall of mirrors like the one Desiree once led her to at a fair. As soon as they’d entered, she’d skittered off, Stella calling hopelessly after her. At one point, she’d seen Desiree behind her, but when she turned, no one was there. She was only staring at her own face reflected strangely back to her.

Life felt like this now, her days duplicating one another, but how could she complain? Not to Blake, who’d worked so hard in New Orleans and Boston, until he’d earned the attention of a firm in Los Angeles, of all places, a major international market. He worked endless hours, traveled constantly, fell asleep in bed studying colorful charts. Her days probably seemed like a dream to him, especially if he knew how little she actually did. How often the cakes she iced when he arrived home came from a box, how the sheets he climbed into at night were washed by Yolanda, how even her daughter’s life sometimes seemed like another area of the household she’d delegated to someone else.

That afternoon, she sat in the multipurpose room at Brentwood Academy, slowly trailing her celery sticks through ranch. At the head of the room, Betsy Roberts was scribbling down volunteers for the spring dance. Stella knew she should raise her hand—when’s the last time she’d volunteered to do more than bring a punch bowl?—but instead, she stared out the window at the perfectly manicured lawn. She always grew listless during these meetings, listening to debates about which color streamers to hang. Which flavor brownies to bake, which end-of-the-year gift to give to Principal Stanley. God, if she had to listen to another conversation about some kid she didn’t know—how Tina J. stole the stage at the talent show or Bobby R. won the tee
ball game or any other number of inane accomplishments. Her daughter never managed to accomplish anything special, but even if she did, Stella, at least, had the decency not to force everyone to hear about it.

She knew what the other mothers thought of her—there goes that Stella Sanders, a snooty you-know-what. Well, fine, let them think that. She needed to keep her distance. Even after all these years, she still felt nervous around white women, running out of small talk as soon as she opened her mouth. When the meeting wrapped up, Cath Johansen scooted over and thanked Stella for speaking up last night.

“It’s high time someone stood up for what’s right,” Cath said.

The Johansens were native Angelenos. Dale’s family owned acres of orange groves in Pasadena, and once, he’d invited her and Blake to tour the farm, as he called it, as if it were a humble little homestead, not a million-dollar estate. Stella suffered his pretentiousness only by breaking off from the group and wandering alone between the rows of trees. On the drive home, Blake suggested that she and Cath might make good friends. He was always doing that, trying to coax her further outside herself. But she felt safe like this, locked away.

A
WEEK AFTER
the association meeting, Stella started to see the signs that her worst fear had come true. First, the literal one: a red
SOLD
sign on the Lawsons’ lawn. She didn’t know the Lawsons well; she rarely spoke to them, beyond the expected pleasantries at the neighborhood potluck, but she still forced herself to wave down Deborah Lawson in her driveway one morning. Deborah glanced back at her, harried, as she ushered her two tow-headed boys into the backseat of her sedan.

“The new family,” Stella said. “Are they nice people?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Deborah said. “I haven’t met them. The broker handles all that.”

But she wouldn’t look directly at Stella the whole time, brushing past her to climb into the car, so Stella knew that she was lying. Later, she would learn the full story about Hector Lawson’s gambling problem, which submerged his family in debt. Half the neighbors would pity him, the other half blaming his irresponsibility for their current predicament. You might feel sorry for a man who’d lost so much, but not when his bad luck hurt the entire neighborhood. Still, Stella held out hope that her suspicions were wrong, until Blake came home from racquetball, wiping his sweaty face with his T-shirt, and told her that the association had rolled over.

“The colored fellow threatened to sue if he wasn’t let in,” Blake said. “Hired a big lawyer too. Got old Percy running scared.” He noticed her fallen face and squeezed her hip. “Aw, don’t look like that, Stel. It’ll be fine. I bet they won’t last a month here. They’ll see they’re not wanted.”

“But there’ll be more after them—”

“Not if they can’t afford it. Fred told me the man paid for that house in cash. He’s a different breed.”

He almost sounded as if he admired the man. But what type of person threatened to sue his way into a neighborhood where he would not be welcomed? Why would anyone insist on doing such a thing? To make a point? To make himself miserable? To end up on the nightly news like all those protesters, beaten or martyred in hopes of convincing white people to change their minds? Two weeks ago, she’d watched from the arm of Blake’s chair as cities across the country lit up in flames. A single bullet, the newscaster said, the force of the gunshot ripping off King’s necktie. Blake stared mystified at devastated Negroes running past flaming buildings.

“I’ll never understand why they do that,” he said. “Destroy their own neighborhoods.”

On the local news, police officials urged calm, the city still roiling
from the Watts riots three years ago. She’d stepped into the powder room, a hand clasped over her mouth to muffle her crying. Was Desiree feeling hopeless on a night like this? Had she ever felt hopeful at all? The country was unrecognizable now, Cath Johansen said, but it looked the same as it ever had to Stella. Tom Pearson and Dale Johansen and Percy White wouldn’t storm a colored man’s porch and yank him out of his kitchen, wouldn’t stomp his hands, wouldn’t shoot him five times. These were fine people, good people, who donated to charities and winced at newsreels of southern sheriffs swinging billy clubs at colored college students. They thought King was an impressive speaker, maybe even agreed with some of his ideas. They wouldn’t have sent a bullet into his head—they might have even cried watching his funeral, that poor young family—but they still wouldn’t have allowed the man to move into their neighborhood.

“We could threaten to move out,” Dale said at dinner. He was rolling a cigarette between his fingers, peering out the window like a sentry on lookout. “How’d the association like that, huh? All of us, just up and leave.”

“Why should we be the ones to leave?” Cath said. “We’ve worked hard, paid our dues.”

“It’s just a tactic,” Dale said. “A negotiating tactic. We leverage our collective power—”

“You sound like a Bolshevik,” Blake said, smirking. Stella hugged herself. She had barely touched her wine. She wanted to think about anything other than the colored family moving in, which was, of course, the only thing that anyone could talk about.

“I’m glad you’re having a big laugh about all of this,” Dale said. “Just wait until the whole neighborhood looks like Watts.”

“I’m telling you it’ll never happen,” Blake said, leaning over to light Stella’s cigarette. “I don’t know why you all are getting so worked up.”

“It better not,” Dale said. “I’ll see to that.”

She couldn’t tell what unnerved her more, picturing a colored family moving in or imagining what might be done to stop them.

D
AYS LATER
, a yellow moving van crept slowly up the winding streets of the Palace Estates, halting at each intersection, in search of Sycamore Way. From her bedroom window, Stella peered through the blinds as the van parked in front of the Lawsons’ house. Three lanky colored men climbed out the back in matching purple shirts. One by one, they unloaded a leather couch; a marble vase; a long, furled rug; a giant stone elephant with a flared trunk; a slender floor lamp. An endless parade of furniture and no family in sight. Stella watched as long as she could until her daughter sidled up behind her and whispered, “What’s happening?” As if they were playing some spy game. Stella jolted away from the blinds, suddenly embarrassed.

“Nothing,” she said. “Want to help Mommy set the table?”

After weeks of worrying, her first encounter with the new neighbors was both accidental and unremarkable. She ran into the wife early the next morning while ushering her daughter out the door for school. She was distracted, trying to balance a diorama as she locked the door, and she almost didn’t notice, at first, the pretty colored woman standing across the street. She was neat and slender, pecan-colored, her hair bobbed like one of the Supremes. She wore a goldenrod dress with a scooping neckline, and she held the hand of a little girl in a pink dress. Stella paused, clutching the shoebox diorama against her stomach. Then the woman smiled and waved, and Stella hesitated before finally lifting her hand.