The Vanishing Half: A Novel (17 page)

“It’s too late for all that,” she finally said.

“Well, what’s it you like to study?”

“I used to like math.”

Now Loretta laughed. “Well, you must be some big brain,” she said. “Don’t nobody just like math for fun.”

But she loved the simplicity of math, a number growing or shrinking depending on which function you performed. No surprises, just one logical step leading to another. Loretta leaned forward, watching the girls play. She didn’t seem at all like the uppity wife everyone gossiped about, the one who wanted to force her way into the Brentwood Academy. She didn’t even seem like she wanted to live in Los Angeles at all. After college, she’d planned to return to Missouri, maybe earn her master’s. Then she’d fallen for Reg and gotten swept up in his dreams.

“So why did you move here?” Stella asked. “The Estates, I mean.”

Loretta raised an eyebrow. “Why did you?”

“Well, the schools. It’s a nice neighborhood, don’t you think? Clean. Safe.”

She gave the answers she ought to, although she wasn’t so sure. She’d moved to Los Angeles for Blake’s job and sometimes she felt like she’d had no say in the matter. Other times, she remembered how thrilling the possibility of Los Angeles had seemed, all those miles between there and her old life. Foolish to pretend that she hadn’t chosen this city. She wasn’t some little tugboat, drifting along with the tide. She had created herself. Since the morning she’d walked out of the Maison Blanche building a white girl, she had decided everything.

“Then don’t you think I’d want those same things too?” Loretta said.

“Yes, but don’t you—I mean, it’s got to be easier, isn’t it, if you—”

“Stuck to my own kind?” Loretta lit another cigarette, her face shining like bronze.

“Why, yes,” Stella said. “I just don’t know why anyone would want to do it. I mean, there are plenty of fine colored neighborhoods and folks can be so hateful.”

“They’re gonna hate me anyway,” Loretta said. “Might as well hate me in my big house with all of my nice things.”

She smiled, taking another drag of her cigarette, and that sly smile reminded Stella of Desiree. She felt like a girl again, sneaking a smoke on the porch while their mother slept. She reached for Loretta’s cigarette, leaning into the glow.

Y
OU HAD THE
J
O
HANSENS
, of course, on Magnolia Way—Dale worked downtown in finance, Cath served as secretary of the Brentwood Academy PTA, even though she hardly took minutes at all during the meetings, you couldn’t guess how many times Stella had glanced at her notepad and found it blank. Then the Whites over on Juniper—Percy worked in accounting at one of the studios, she couldn’t remember which, Blake would know. He was also association president, but he’d
only run because his wife kept pushing him to be more ambitious. Lynn was from Oklahoma, an oil family, and God only knew how she’d found herself saddled with Percy White. You’d understand if you took a look at him, but let’s just say he wasn’t what she had in mind when she’d dreamt of marrying a man who worked in Hollywood. Then the Hawthornes on Maple—Bob had about the whitest teeth she’d ever seen in her life.

“I think I’ve seen him,” Loretta said. “Big ones too? Kind of like Mister Ed?”

Stella laughed, nearly dropping the ball of blue yarn. Across the leather couch, Loretta smirked the way she always did when she knew she’d said something funny. Which was often, now that they were on their second glass of wine.

“You’ll see them all soon,” Stella said. “They’re all nice enough people.”

“To you,” Loretta said. “You know you’re the only one who’s darkened my door.”

Stella did know, but she tried not to dwell on that fact. She watched the yarn slip out in front of her, Loretta’s crochet hook winding through the air. When she’d called Loretta earlier and asked if the girls might want to play again, she figured they would meet up at the park. She did not expect Loretta to invite her over or for herself to accept. Now the girls were playing in the Walkers’ backyard—you could hear their yelps through the screen door—and she was tipsy from the wine, listening to Loretta talk about witnessing Reg’s acting career finally take off. How even though he found
Frisk
stultifying, he was grateful to play a cop for once, not another street hood snatching some lady’s purse in the opening credits. Loretta went to set with him from time to time, but found the whole business so dreadfully boring, she usually ended up in a corner somewhere, crocheting. It amazed Stella, how deeply unimpressed Loretta seemed by every
fantastic aspect of her life. Whenever Loretta asked her a question, Stella grew embarrassed, aware of how little she had to offer.

“I told you,” she said. “I’m really not that interesting.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that for a second,” Loretta said. “I bet there’s all sorts of fascinating things swirling around inside that head of yours.”

“I assure you, there isn’t,” she said. “I’m as plain as they come.”

She’d done one interesting thing in her whole life, but she would spend the rest of her days hiding it. When Loretta asked about her childhood, she always hedged. She couldn’t share any memory of her youth without also conjuring Desiree; all of her memories were cleaved in half, her sister excised right out of them, and how lonely they seemed now, Stella swimming by herself at the river, wandering through sugarcane fields, running breathlessly from a goose chasing her down the road. A lonely past, a lonely present. Until now. Somehow, Loretta Walker had become the only person she could talk to.

All summer, she waited for Loretta’s phone calls. She might be watching her daughter paint watercolors in the backyard when the kitchen phone rang, and just like that, she’d pack up the paint set, glancing carefully down the street before ushering Kennedy across. Or she might be on her way to the public library for storytime when Loretta phoned, and suddenly the overdue books were no longer as important as venturing across the cul-de-sac. When they returned home, she told her daughter not to mention the playdate to Blake.

“Why?” Kennedy asked. Stella knelt in front of her, untying her shoes.

“Because,” she said, “Daddy likes us to be at home. But if you don’t say anything, we can keep going across the street. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Her daughter put her hands on her shoulders, as if she were giving
her a stern talking-to, but she was only balancing herself as she stepped out of her tennis shoes.

“Okay,” she said, so simply it stung.

Like anything, lying to her daughter became easier over time. She was raising Kennedy to lie too, although the girl would never know it. She was white; she would never think of herself as anything else. If she ever learned the truth, she would hate her mother for deceiving her. The thought flashed through her head each time Loretta called. But each time, she steeled her nerve, took her daughter by the hand, and stepped across the street.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY AFTERNOONS
, the tan Buick pulled into the Walkers’ driveway just past lunchtime, and Cath Johansen called Stella to gossip. “I knew there wouldn’t be just one,” she said. She was convinced the colored women were there to scout out the neighborhood to plan their own eventual arrival. Stella clamped the phone against her cheek, peering through the kitchen blinds as Loretta’s girlfriends climbed out. The tall one was Belinda Cooper—her husband composed movie scores for Warner Bros. Mary Butler in the cat-eyed glasses was married to a pediatrician. She was sorority sisters with Eunice Woods, whose husband had just sold a screenplay to MGM. Stella knew basic things about the ladies that Loretta had told her, but she’d never expected to meet any of the women until one Wednesday when Loretta called to tell her that Mary was sick. Would she like to be their fourth hand?

“I’m not much of a bid whist player,” Stella said. She was terrible at cards, at any game that relied on chance.

“Honey, that’s all right,” Loretta said. “Sometimes we don’t even take out the cards.”

Playing bid whist, she learned, was mostly a guise for what the
women really wanted to do, which was drink wine and gossip. Belinda Cooper, halfway through her second glass of Riesling, kept going on about a movie actor having a sloppy affair with one of the secretaries at Warner, a pretty young thing but bold as you know what, taking messages from his wife, then slipping down to his trailer to deliver much more than a missed call.

“These girls are gettin bolder today,” Loretta said. She took another drag of her cigarette, not even touching her cards. “You know me and Reg went out to Carl’s the other day and ran into Mary-Anne—”

“How is she?”

“Pregnant. Again.”

“Lawd!”

“And you know what she had to say? Euny, it’s your hand, baby.”

“Mary-Anne never liked me,” Eunice said. “You remember that time at Thelma’s wedding?”

All of their conversations went like this, around and around in loops that Stella couldn’t follow. She wasn’t meant to understand their shorthand or glean complicated backstories from the cast of characters they introduced. To be there at all, really. But she was happy to sit quietly, fiddling with her cards, listening. If Belinda and Eunice had a problem with her being there, they didn’t say. But they spoke around her, never directly to her, as if to tell Loretta, this is your responsibility. Still, the afternoon passed pleasantly enough, until the girls rushed in for snacks. It always struck Stella how natural Loretta seemed around Cindy. The girl clambered to her side, rubbing against her like a cat, and Loretta, without even breaking the conversation, reached for her. She seemed to know what Cindy wanted before she even asked for it. When the girls ran back upstairs, Eunice took a drag of her cigarette and said, “I still don’t know why you so set on doin it.”

“Doin what?” Loretta said.

“You know what. I know this is your new life now—”

“Oh please—”

“But your girl’s gonna be miserable and we all know it. It’s not worth it, just to make a point.”

“It’s not about making a point,” Loretta said. “The school’s right down the street and Cindy’s just as smart as all those other kids—”

“We know, honey,” Belinda said. “It’s not about being right. You can be right til the cows come home. But this is your one child and this is her one life.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Loretta said. Her eyes flashed, and then, remembering herself, she laughed a little, stubbing out her cigarette. “Thank God all of us don’t think like you two.”

“Let’s ask your new friend,” Eunice said. “What do you make of all of this, Mrs. Sanders?”

Stella stared down at the card table, her neck already hot.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

“Surely you have some opinion.”

Eunice was giving Stella a smile that reminded her of a hunting dog with a rabbit in his teeth. The more you twitched away, the tighter those jaws fastened around you.

“I wouldn’t do it,” she finally said. “Those other parents will make her life hell, they’ll want to make an example out of her. You don’t know how they talk when you’re not around—”

“And I bet you jump right to her defense too,” Eunice said.

“That’s enough,” Loretta said softly, but she didn’t have to. By then, the mood had soured. Belinda and Eunice left before the game even finished. Stella washed the wineglasses while the girls cleaned up their toys upstairs. It was getting late, nearly four. Blake would almost be home. Beside her, Loretta silently dried the glasses with a plaid dishtowel.

“I’m sorry,” Stella said. For what exactly, she didn’t know. Sorry for coming over, for ruining the card game, for being exactly who
Eunice Woods accused her of being. She didn’t defend Loretta, not even to silly Cath Johansen. She conscripted her own daughter to lie, afraid her husband would find out she socialized with the woman.

Loretta gave her a strange smile.

“You think I want your guilt?” she said. “Your guilt can’t do nothin for me, honey. You want to go feel good about feelin bad, you can go on and do it right across the street.”

Stella set the wet glass on the countertop, dried her hands on the towel. So this is what Loretta really thought about her—a white woman swarming around to assuage her guilt. And wasn’t it true? She did feel guilty, but if anything, spending time with Loretta only made her feel even worse. Her real life seemed even more fake by comparison. And yet, she didn’t want to stay away, not even now, not when Loretta was angry at her. Loretta reached for the wet glass and knocked it off the counter, the glass shattering at their feet. She stared up at the ceiling, suddenly exhausted. She was too young to look this tired, but she must be, fighting all the time. Stella never fought. She always gave in. She was a coward that way.

Loretta bent to pick up the glass, but not thinking, Stella jutted her arm out and said, “Don’t, baby, you’ll cut yourself.” Then she was kneeling on the tile, cleaning up the mess she’d made.

F
IRST
M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
J
R
. in Memphis, then Bobby Kennedy in downtown Los Angeles. Soon it felt like you couldn’t open a paper without seeing the bleeding body of an important man. Stella started switching off the news when her daughter came bounding into the kitchen for breakfast. Loretta said that, a couple months ago, Cindy asked her what
assassination
meant. She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point.

Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.

Sometimes she still had dreams that someone was breaking into her house. More than once, she’d prodded Blake out of bed to check. “I told you it’s a safe neighborhood,” he grumbled, climbing back under the covers. But hadn’t she felt safe once, years ago, hidden in a little white house surrounded by trees? Now she slept with a baseball bat behind the headboard. “What’re you gonna do with that, Slugger?” Blake said, squeezing her tiny bicep. But when he traveled for business, she could never fall asleep without touching the worn handle, just to remind herself that it was there.