The Vanishing Half: A Novel (20 page)

Her stomach sank.

“Loretta, I—”

“No, I understand,” Loretta said. “I don’t blame her. It all comes from the home, see. And like a fool, I let you into mine. The loneliest goddamn woman in this whole neighborhood. I should’ve known. You stay away from me.”

Loretta quivered, powerless in her anger and all the angrier for it. Stella felt numb. She guided her daughter back across the street. As soon as she shut the door, she grabbed Kennedy and slapped her. The girl yelped.

“What’d I do?” she asked, crying again.

Behind her, the crowd on the television roared, Blake cheering along. Stella stared into her daughter’s face, seeing everyone that she had ever hated, then she was looking at her daughter again, gazing at her with watery eyes, a hand covering her reddened cheek. Stella fell to her knees, pulling her daughter close, kissing her damp face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. Mommy’s sorry.”

Y
EARS LATER
, Stella would only remember speaking to Reg Walker three times: One morning when she stepped out to collect the newspaper as he was leaving for the set, and he paused on the driveway and said, “Lovely day, ain’t it?” She agreed that it was, watched him climb into his sleek black car. The second time, when he came home to find her sitting on the couch with his wife and paused a little in the doorway, as if he’d walked into the wrong house. “Hi there,” he’d said, suddenly shy, and Loretta laughed, reaching for her glass of wine. “Sit with us awhile, baby,” Loretta said. He didn’t, but before he left, he
leaned over to light her cigarette, their eyes meeting in a glance that felt so intimate, Stella looked away. And the third time, when Reg helped Stella unload her groceries. She should’ve recoiled as he came near but she let him carry her bags inside, the walk from the driveway to the kitchen counter feeling unnaturally long. Even Loretta hadn’t been inside her home before. She walked with him down the lonely, sterile hallways, where he set the bags on the counter.

“There you go,” he said. He didn’t even look at her. But a week after Christmas, sitting around her sewing circle, she told Cath Johansen and Betsy Roberts that he made her uncomfortable.

“I don’t know,” she said, plucking at her misplaced stitch. “I just never liked the way he looked at me.”

Three days later, someone threw a brick through the Walkers’ living-room window, shattering that tiled vase Loretta had bought in Morocco. Tom Pearson and Dale Johansen both claimed credit, although it was neither of them—instead, Stella later discovered, it was beet-faced Percy White, who’d taken the new neighbors as a personal slight, as if they had only moved in to mar his presidential term. Some applauded him, although it made others uneasy.

“This is Brentwood, not Mississippi,” Blake said. Tossing bricks through windows seemed like something the gap-toothed trash did. But a week later, a different man, desperate to prove himself one, left a flaming sack of dog shit on the Walkers’ front steps. Days later, another brick sailed through the living-room window. According to the newspaper, the daughter was watching television at the time. The doctor had to remove glass shards from her leg.

By March, the Walkers left the Estates as suddenly as they’d arrived. The wife was miserable, Betsy Roberts told Stella, so they’d bought a new house in Baldwin Hills.

“I don’t know why they didn’t just do that from the start,” Betsy said. “They’ll be so much happier there.”

By then, Stella hadn’t spoken to Loretta since Christmas Day. But she still watched, through the blinds, as the yellow moving van pulled up, and a pack of young colored men slowly carried cardboard boxes out of the house. She imagined marching across the street to explain herself. Standing in Loretta’s cavernous living room, Loretta balanced on one moving box while taping another shut. Loretta wouldn’t look angry to see her—she wouldn’t look like anything at all, and her blank face would hurt even more. Stella would tell her that she’d only said those terrible things about Reg because she was desperate to hide.

“I’m not one of them,” she would say. “I’m like you.”

“You’re colored,” Loretta would say. Not a question, but a statement of blunt fact. Stella would tell her because the woman was leaving; in hours, she’d vanish from this part of the city and Stella’s life forever. She’d tell her because, in spite of everything, Loretta was her only friend in the world. Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.

She imagined Loretta pushing off the box and stepping toward her. Her face frozen in awe, as if she’d seen something beautiful and familiar.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she would say. “It’s your life.”

“But it’s not,” Stella would say. “None of it belongs to me.”

“Well, you chose it,” Loretta would tell her. “So that makes it
yours.”

If you went to the Park’s Korean Barbecue on Normandie and Eighth, during the fall of 1982, you’d probably find Jude Winston wiping down one of the high tables, staring out the foggy window. Sometimes before her shift started, she sat in a back booth reading. The noise never distracted her, the other waiters didn’t understand it. She told Mr. Park on her first day that she’d practically grown up in a restaurant—a diner, really—even though she’d never waitressed before. She did not tell him that most of that time had been spent reading, not watching her mother run the place, but maybe as a father himself, he was sympathetic to restaurant kids. Maybe he respected her eagerness to find a job—barely a week after her college graduation, and she wasn’t lazing about on the beach like his own sons would have done. Or maybe he just remembered her from the past spring, always sitting at a high top studying a worn MCAT book she’d borrowed from a teammate. When he’d brought her pork belly and asked how she was doing, she always got a dazed look in her eyes, as if he’d asked in Korean. She was a smart girl, he could tell. Plenty dull boys wanted to go to medical school but only smart girls found the nerve to apply. He’d finished two years of medical school himself, back in Seoul, so he understood her anxiety and wished her luck. He
was always wishing her luck now, even though she told him she wouldn’t hear back from any schools for months. Ah well, good luck, then.

“You don’t need luck,” Reese said. “You’re gonna get in.”

He stole a shrimp off her plate with his chopsticks. He visited sometimes during her dinner break, but Mr. Park never minded. He was a fair boss; she was lucky to work for someone like him. And still, she could only think about the letters that would arrive in the spring. Rejections mostly, but maybe one yes. You only needed one yes to be happy—medical school was like love in that regard. Some days her chances seemed promising, and other days she hated herself for clinging to this ridiculous dream. Hadn’t she muddled her way through chemistry? Struggled in biology? You needed more than a good GPA to get into medical school. You had to compete against students who’d grown up in rich families, attended private schools, hired personal tutors. People who had been dreaming since kindergarten of becoming doctors. Who had family photos of themselves in tiny white coats, holding plastic stethoscopes to teddy bear bellies. Not people who grew up in nowhere towns, where there was one doctor you saw only when you were puking sick. Not people who’d stumbled into the whole idea of medical school after dissecting a sheep’s heart in an anatomy class.

Seven schools were reading her application right now and would, in a few months, decide her future. Made her sick to even think about.

“I figured out how to fix that ceiling,” Reese said. “I know it’s been drivin you crazy.”

It was November, and already unreasonably wet. Every morning this week, they’d driven through deep pockets of rainwater on Normandie, worried the car would stall. At home, they nudged a silver bucket underneath the leaking ceiling, which Reese dumped on the sorry patch of grass behind the Gardens Apartments. The Edenic
name of their building always made him laugh. Why not call this building the Brick Slab, or the No Hot Water, or the Hole in the Roof? But Jude didn’t find that funny. She glanced back at the clock, only five minutes left of her break.

“Why don’t you just call Mr. Song?” she said.

“You know he’s too old to be climbin up that ladder.”

“He should hire someone, then.”

“Too cheap,” he said, squeezing her hip.

He’d found a new job at the Kodak store, selling cameras and developing photographs. He missed the camaraderie of the gym, but the Kodak store offered an employee discount on film. Not that he’d needed any lately. He hadn’t taken a new photograph in six months. He spent his free time helping Mr. Song mop up water from the basement or plant mouse traps or whatever little chores he could do around the building to earn reduced rent. He unclogged the Parks’ toilet, fixed the Shaws’ broken pantry shelf, fished into the kitchen sink for Mrs. Choi’s fallen wedding ring. If he came across a job he didn’t know how to do, he called Barry for help.

“I told you that place was a dump,” Barry said. But what were they supposed to do? Their old landlord had jacked up the rent, so off to Koreatown it was. In a way, it was an adventure. The new foods to try, the signs you couldn’t read, the language spoken around you, on the bus or the street, that allowed you to drift off into your own thoughts. The neighbors in the Gardens, mostly elderly like the Chois and the Parks and the Songs, who pitied those two young people living in the apartment with the leaky ceiling and brought them sticky rice cakes for Christmas. But the ceiling. The cramped bedroom. The tiny kitchen. Reese said that if he helped enough around the Gardens, maybe they’d save so much on rent they could find a new place. But by then, Jude hoped that she would be gone.

“You worryin about nothin,” her mother told her once over the phone. “You a smart girl.”

“Plenty of people are smart, Mama.”

“Not like you,” her mother said.

Whenever they hung up, Jude always felt a little guilty knowing that the life she most feared was the one her mother was already living. Waiting tables forever, living in a cramped home. At least she had Reese. At least she wasn’t in Mallard. She could be grateful for that, even if she couldn’t stop herself from projecting into the future. Each time she mentioned spring, Reese shifted a little, a distant look falling over his face, like he didn’t want to talk about it.

That night, after she closed Park’s, they walked home, Reese’s arm around her shoulders. On the corner outside the Gardens, a pale dark-haired woman passed and Jude held her breath. But it was just a white woman gliding underneath the streetlights.

I
T COULDN
’
T BE
S
TEL
LA
. For years after that Beverly Hills party, Jude had thought of little else.

Sometimes the woman in the fur coat looked exactly like her mother, down to the curve in her smile. Other times, she was only slender and dark-haired, a passing resemblance at best. After all, she’d only caught a glimpse of the woman before the wine splashed against her leg. Then she was scrambling to pick up the shattered glass while the whole party gawked. This, of course, stayed with her too. How she’d groped along the table for cocktail napkins before Carla pushed her out of the way, frantically blotting the ruined rug. By the time she’d dumped the wine-bloodied napkins into the trash, Carla told her to leave and never come back. She’d quietly gathered her purse, too embarrassed to glance around the room lest she lock eyes with one of the many
witnesses to her humiliation. She looked up once as she shut the door behind her and she didn’t see the woman at all, only the girl with the violet eyes watching her leave, pink lips curled into a smirk.

A dark-haired woman who could have been anyone. Maybe she just missed her mother so much, she’d convinced herself of the resemblance. Maybe she felt guilty about not going home, about never going home, and this woman was a projection of her subconscious. Or maybe—no, she wouldn’t even consider that possibility. That she had been in the same room with Stella, that she’d caught eyes with her even, before she’d dropped that wine bottle and shattered everything.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Reese had asked later that night. “You’re shaking.”

They were walking to meet Barry at Mirage. She hadn’t said much since she’d returned home early but Reese looked worried, pausing under the stoplight, and she knew that she had to tell him the truth.

“I lost my job,” she said.

“What? What happened?”

“It’s stupid. I saw Stella. I mean, I thought it was her. I swear she looked just like her—”

She felt even crazier saying it aloud. That she’d gotten herself fired because she’d caught a glimpse, through a crowded party, of a woman who may have resembled her mother.

“I can’t believe I was so stupid,” she said.

He pulled her into a hug.

“Aw, it’s all right,” he said. “You’ll find another job.”

“But I wanted to help you. I thought if we both put money away—”

He groaned. “That’s why you were workin so crazy?”

“I just thought if the both of us—”

“But I didn’t ask you to do that,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I just wanted to. Don’t be mad, baby. I just wanted to help.”

She wrapped her arms around him and after a moment, he held her back.

“I’m not mad,” he said. “I just don’t like feelin like some charity case.”

“You know I don’t think of you like that.”

“You gotta tell me things,” he said. “You’re so hidden away sometimes.”

Maybe that was what drew them together. Maybe this was the only way they knew how to love, drawing near, then ducking away. He touched her cheek and she tried to smile.

“Okay,” she said. “No more hiding.”

F
OR YEARS
, Stella drifted through her dreams. Stella draped in mink, Stella perched on a ledge, Stella shrugging, smiling, slipping in and out of doors. Always Stella, never her mother, as if, even asleep, she could tell the difference. She always awoke shaken. She was tired all the time. She found a new job dishwashing in a campus cafeteria for two dollars an hour, where she spent her shift alone, steaming piles of cruddy plates clean. Each evening, she came home with pruned fingers, her shoulders stooped. At one point, she was three weeks behind on a history paper and her GPA was teetering so dangerously, her track coach called her into his office.

“You’re smarter than this,” he said, and she nodded, chastened, springing from the claustrophobic office as soon as he dismissed her. Yes, yes, she would work harder, apply herself more. Of course she took school seriously, of course she wanted to compete in the spring. Of course she couldn’t lose her scholarship. She was just a
little distracted at the moment, nothing too serious. She would shake out of it. But she didn’t, because every time she tried to study, she only imagined Stella.

“Do you still think about her?” she asked her mother one afternoon.

“Who?”

Jude paused, wrapping her finger around the telephone cord. “Your sister,” she finally said.

She couldn’t bring herself to say Stella’s name, like it would conjure her again. Stella strolling by on the sidewalk outside, Stella appearing in the fogged window.

“Now why you askin about all that?” her mother said.

“I don’t know, I’m just wondering. Can’t I wonder?”

“No use in wonderin,” her mother said. “I stopped wonderin long ago. I don’t think she’s even here anymore.”

“Living?” Jude said. “But what if she is? I mean, what if she’s just out there somewhere?”

“I would feel her,” her mother said quietly, and Jude began to think of Stella as a current running under her mother’s skin. Under her own skin, dormant until that party when she’d locked eyes with Stella across the room. Then a leap, a spark, her arm jolting from her side. Now she was trying to forget that charge. She thought, once or twice, about telling her mother about the woman at the party, but what good would that do? It was Stella, it wasn’t, she was dead, she was alive, she was in Omaha, Lawrence, Honolulu. When Jude stepped outside, she imagined bumping into her. Stella pausing on the sidewalk, admiring a purse through a shop window. Stella on the bus, hanging on to the vinyl strap—no, Stella in a smooth black limousine, hiding behind the tinted glass. Stella everywhere, always, and nowhere at the same time.

I
N
N
OVEMBER 1982
, a musical comedy called
The Midnight Marauders
opened in a nearly abandoned theater in downtown Los Angeles. The playwright, a thirty-year-old still living at home in Encino, was determined to make it in a city where, he claimed to friends, no one valued theater. He’d written
The Midnight Marauders
as a joke, and of course, the joke always being on him, it was his only success. The play ran at the Stardust Theater for four weekends, was nominated for a local award, and earned tepid praise in the
Herald-Examiner
. But Jude would have never heard about it if Barry hadn’t landed a spot in the chorus line. For weeks leading up to the audition, he was a nervous wreck, bouncing on his heels as he practiced “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He had never sung in front of anyone before dressed only as himself.

“I felt naked out there,” he told her after the audition. “I was sweatin like a hog on Easter Sunday.”

She was happy for him when he earned his spot in the company. He sent her tickets for opening night, but she told Reese that she had to work.

“Ask for the night off,” he said. “We gotta support him. And we never go out anymore. We should have a little fun.”

The previous month, his car engine had died and he’d emptied his savings to fix it. All those crumpled bills in his sock drawer, gone. He’d started working the door at Mirage to make extra cash on the weekends. The muscle, technically, although he was mostly just a handsome face greeting the customers. So far, he’d only broken up one drunk fight and earned a cut on that handsome face as gratitude. In the bathroom, he’d winced as Jude dabbed the cut with alcohol, missing those weekends they used to spend chasing sunlight across the marina in search of the perfect shot. Reese biting his lip as the
shutter clicked. Now on Friday and Saturday nights, he left in a black T-shirt and black jeans and came home at dawn, his hands flecked with glitter from helping the go-go dancers onto the stage. Then off to the Kodak store, or helping Mr. Song. Some days, she barely saw him at all, only feeling him drop into bed beside her.

She couldn’t afford to miss a night of work in order to sit in a damp theater, enduring three hours of amateur acting in hopes of catching a glimpse of Barry in the chorus line. Still, she agreed, running her fingers through Reese’s hair. They needed a night out, one night where she didn’t think about spring decisions, where he didn’t obsess over money, where they wouldn’t worry about anything at all.