The Vanishing Half: A Novel (21 page)

On opening night, she slipped into a purple dress and glided panty hose up her legs as Reese, tying his tie, smiled at her through the mirror. They were overdressed because they never had anywhere nice to go; tonight was an excuse to pretend otherwise. They could pretend to be anything: a young couple on a first date, newlyweds sneaking away from the children, a pair of sophisticated theatergoers who never worried about money, never clipped coupons, never counted change.

“Fancy, fancy,” Luis teased, when they all met up in the lobby with a dozen of the other boys she used to see scrambling around backstage in bustiers. Soon they were all laughing, clambering into the mildewed theater, everyone giddy as the lights dipped.

“This better be good,” Reese stage-whispered, but he was so good natured about it, she could tell he didn’t care. He kissed her as the orchestra began to play a jaunty overture. The curtains parted, and she leaned forward, straining to see Barry. He was high kicking with the other dancers, wearing a fringed leather vest and cowboy hat. She giggled, watching him twirl a redhead. Then the dancers receded and the show lead appeared center stage, a blonde girl in a long, hooped dress. Her singing voice was pretty if plain; still, she was charming enough, delivering her lines with a wryness so familiar that, in the
darkness, Jude reached for her
Playbill
. And there she was, the blonde girl with the violet eyes.

A
FTER THE CUR
TAIN FELL
, after a beaming Barry took his bow, after the audience slowly trampled across the fading red carpet into the lobby, dissecting plot holes and glaring miscues, Jude circled with her friends outside the stage door. The group was chatty, debating drink plans while they waited for Barry to emerge so that they could embarrass him with thunderous applause. But she hugged herself, shifting from foot to foot, staring down the alley, expecting, at any moment, her mother’s ghost to appear.

She’d slipped out of the theater during intermission, certain that in the darkness, she had mistaken the girl in the
Playbill
for the girl at the Beverly Hills party. But there she was, in full light.
Born in Brentwood, Kennedy Sanders studied at USC but left early to pursue a career in acting. She recently played Cordelia
(King Lear)
, Jenny
(Death of a Salesman)
and Laura
(The Glass Menagerie)
. This is her first appearance at the Stardust Theater, though hopefully not her last.
In her headshot, the girl smiled, her wavy blonde hair falling angelically to her shoulders. She looked innocent here, nothing like the sassy girl who’d demanded a martini from her at a party, and she might have believed that this was a different white girl altogether if not for those eyes. She could never forget them.

If that girl was in the show, did that mean that the woman in the fur coat was here too? What if it was Stella? What if it wasn’t? She’d wandered around the lobby until the house lights flickered but she never saw a woman who looked like her mother. Now she felt even crazier than before.

“You all right, baby?” Reese asked.

She nodded, trying to smile.

“I’m just cold,” she said. He wrapped his arms around her, warming her up. Then the stage door opened, but instead of Barry wandering out, Kennedy Sanders stepped into the alley, fumbling with a pack of Marlboros. She looked startled to see the crowd waiting, and for a second, she smiled expectantly before realizing that no one was there to see her. Then her eyes flickered to Jude. She smirked.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

She remembered her, three years later. Of course she did. Who would forget a dark girl who’d spilled wine all over an expensive rug?

“My friend’s in this show,” Jude said.

Kennedy shrugged, shaking a cigarette into her palm. She was wearing a tattered Sex Pistols T-shirt that stopped above her navel, jean shorts over ripped fishnet tights, and black leather boots—she looked nothing like the Beverly Hills princess from that party. She started walking down the alley, and Jude scrambled after her.

“Barry,” she said. “He’s in the chorus?”

“Is that your boyfriend?” Kennedy asked.

“Barry?”

“No, silly. Him.” She jerked her head back toward the group. “The one with the curly hair. He’s a doll. Where’d you find him?”

“At school,” she said. “Well, really at this party—”

“You have a light?” Kennedy slid a cigarette into her mouth. When Jude shook her head, she said, “Just as well. Bad for the singing voice, you know.”

“I thought you were amazing tonight,” Jude said. She didn’t really, but she would have to flatter this girl to get anything out of her. “Your folks must be proud.”

Kennedy scoffed. “Please. They hate that I’m doing this.”

“Why?”

“Because they sent me to school to do something practical, you know. Not drop out and throw my life away. At least that’s what my
mother says. Hey, do you have a light?” She flagged down a shaggy-haired white man smoking on the corner. “Well, so long!”

She hurried over to the man on the corner, who smiled as he leaned in to light her cigarette. A flicker in the darkness, then she was gone.

B
ARRY SAID THAT
Kennedy Sanders was a rich bitch.

“You know the type,” he told Jude. “A couple of solos in the high school choir and now she thinks she’s Barbra Streisand.” He was putting on his face in the backstage of Mirage for the Sunday brunch show, the only time slot available now that
The
Midnight Marauders
had taken over his evenings. He hated the early call time and the thinner crowds but he loved being Bianca too much to wait three weeks until the play closed. He gestured behind him and Jude yanked the hairbrush jutting out of his gym bag.

“So what do her parents do?” she asked.

“Who knows?”

“They haven’t been by the theater?”

“Hell, no,” Barry said. “You think they’d come around that dump? No ma’am, she comes from real money. Some hoity-toity folks, big house in the hills, all that. Why you asking about her anyway?”

“No reason,” she said.

But that afternoon, she rode the bus downtown to the Stardust Theater. The Sunday matinee was starting in a half hour; the teenage usher wouldn’t let her inside without a ticket, so she paced on the sidewalk under the green eaves. She already felt foolish riding down in the first place. What would she even say to Kennedy? She tried to think of what Early might do. The key to hunting, he’d told her, is pretending to be someone else. But she’d never been able to be anyone but herself, so when the usher shooed her away, she slunk off to the
sidewalk. Of course right then she bumped into Kennedy hustling toward the entrance. She wore jean shorts so short, the pocket flaps were showing, and a pair of worn cowboy boots.

“Sorry,” they both said, then Kennedy laughed.

“Well, goddamn,” she said. “You following me or something?”

“No, no,” Jude said quickly. “I’m looking for my friend but they won’t let me inside. I don’t have a ticket.”

Kennedy rolled her eyes. “Like Fort Knox in here,” she said. Then she told the usher, “She’s with me,” and like that, Jude was fumbling after her through the lobby, past backstage, and into her dressing room. The room was barely bigger than a closet, the yellow paint chipping off the walls.

Under the dim mirror lights, Kennedy plopped into the worn leather chair.

“Donna wanted to skin you alive,” she said.

“What?” Jude said.

“After you ruined her rug. God, you should’ve seen her, running around like you’d slaughtered her firstborn. My rug! My rug! It was a riot. Well, not for you, probably.” She spun in her chair, eyeing herself in the mirror. “What’s your name anyway?”

“Jude.”

“Like the song?”

“Like the Bible.”

“I like it,” Kennedy said. “Hey Jude, not to be a bitch or anything, but I’ve gotta change.”

“Oh,” Jude said. “I’m sorry.”

She started to back out the door but Kennedy said, “Don’t go. You can help me. I can never get into this thing on my own.” She was tugging the big hooped dress from the opening number out of the closet. Jude smoothed the wrinkles out of the orange fabric as Kennedy
yanked her T-shirt over her head. She was slender and tan, wearing a matching pink bra and panty set. Jude tried not to watch, staring instead at the cluttered countertop covered in palettes of makeup, a curling iron, gold earrings, a crumpled candy wrapper.

“So where you from, Hey Jude?” Kennedy said. “Bring that over, will you? Jesus, I hate this thing. It always makes me sneeze.” She lifted her arms and Jude stared into the smoothness of her armpits as she helped lift the dress over her head. True to her word, Kennedy let out one dainty sneeze before slipping her arms into the sleeves.

“Louisiana,” Jude said.

“No kidding. So’s my mother. I’m from here. Well, I don’t know if you can say you’re from a place if you’ve never left. Can you? I don’t know how anything works. Zip me?”

She spoke so quickly, Jude felt dizzy following along.

“Which part?” she asked.

“Hey, can you hurry? Curtain’s in twenty and I haven’t done my makeup yet.” She pulled her blonde hair off her shoulder. Jude stepped behind her, tugging the zipper.

“What’s your mother’s last name?” she said. “Maybe I know her people.”

Kennedy laughed. “I doubt that.”

What was she doing? She’d seen a woman who may have looked like her mother and now she’d ended up stalking a white girl and helping her into a ridiculous costume? What did she care, anyway? She’d never even met Stella. Kennedy leaned into the mirror, powdering her face. For the first time, she was quiet and focused, like Barry right before a performance. “I have to get into my zone,” he always said, shooing Jude before his curtain call. Sometimes she lingered in the doorway and watched as a veil seemed to drop before his face. One moment he was Barry, the next, Bianca. She could see a similar
moment passing through Kennedy right now. It felt more intimate to witness than seeing the girl in her underwear. She turned to leave.

“You don’t know anyone named Vignes, do you?” Kennedy called after her. “That’s my mother’s name. Or was her name.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Estelle Vignes. But everyone calls her
Stella.”

Statistically speaking, the likelihood of encountering a niece you’d never met at a Beverly Hills retirement party was improbable but not impossible. Which Stella Sanders might have, at least intellectually, understood. Improbable events happened all the time, she tried to explain to her students, because improbability is an illusion based on our preconceptions. Often it has nothing to do with statistical truth. After all, it’s wildly improbable that any one person is alive. A particular sperm cell fertilizing a particular egg, producing a viable fetus. Twins are more likely to be stillborn, identical twins more vulnerable than fraternal twins, yet here she was, teaching Introduction to Statistics at Santa Monica College. Likely does not mean certain. Improbable does not mean impossible.

She’d discovered statistics unexpectedly in her second year at Loyola Marymount University. She didn’t call herself a sophomore then; she was ten years older than everyone else in the class, so the title felt silly. She didn’t even know what she wanted to study, only that she liked numbers. Statistics entranced her because so many people misunderstood it. In Las Vegas, she’d sat beside Blake in a smoke-filled casino as he lost four hundred dollars at the craps table, staying in the game longer than he should have because he was convinced that he was due. But dice owed you nothing.

“It doesn’t matter what’s already rolled,” she finally told him, exasperated. “Each number is equally likely if the dice are fair. Which they’re not.”

“She takes one class,” Blake told the man sitting next to them.

The man laughed, puffing at his cigar. “I always stay on,” he said. “Rather lose than know I would’ve won if I hadn’t played it safe.”

“Well said.” Blake and the man clinked their glasses. Statistical truth, like any other truth, was difficult to swallow.

For most people, the heart decided, not the mind. Stella was like everyone else in this regard. Hadn’t her decision to follow Blake from New Orleans been an emotional one? Or her choice to stay with him over the years? Or her agreement to, say, attend Bert Hardison’s retirement party, even cajoling her daughter to appear, because, Blake claimed, they needed to show a united front? One big happy family—it mattered to the rest of the partners. Blake was a marketing man who understood the value of his own brand, Stella and Kennedy merely an extension of it. So she’d agreed to go to that party. In spite of everything, she’d whisked around the living room, playing the dutiful wife even as Bert Hardison, smelling like brandy, crowded near her all night, his hand on her waist (as if she wouldn’t notice!). But Blake, of course, didn’t see, huddling in the corner with Rob Garrett and Yancy Smith, while Stella tried to make small talk with Donna Hardison, keeping an eye on her daughter, who kept inching near the bar, and avoiding the red stain on the white rug that a lanky black man was feebly blotting with soda water.

There’d been a disturbance earlier, a black girl spilling wine on the rug, which had, for a few moments, stolen the attention of everyone at the party. Stella had just arrived, so she’d only seen the aftermath. A charcoal girl frantically mopping an expensive merlot out of the even more expensive rug before Donna shrieked that she was only
making it worse. Even after the girl was dismissed, the party continued to discuss her.

“I just can’t believe it,” Donna told Stella. “What’s the point of hiring waiters if they can’t hold on to a damn bottle of wine?”

The topic bored Stella, to tell the truth. The type of minor skirmish that people fixated on during a party where there was nothing more interesting to discuss. Unlike the math department mixers, where conversations leapt from one topic to another—inscrutable, pretentious, but never boring. She always felt lucky to be in the presence of such brilliant people. Thinkers. Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.

That night, driving home from the party, she’d found herself thinking about Loretta Walker. Stella was wearing the mink coat Blake had surprised her with that Christmas and maybe the luxurious fur brushing against her calves reminded her. Or maybe because that morning, when she’d told Blake that she would be late to the party, they’d fought again about the job that she only had because of Loretta. For months after the Walkers left, she’d fallen into a depression that was deep even by her own standards. She was grieving for reasons that she could never explain. Like she’d lost Desiree all over again. Blake suggested she take a class, which he later regretted because she brought it up each time he complained about her working.

“You said it yourself,” she said, during their last argument. “I was going crazy in that house.”

“Yes, but—” He paused. “I thought you’d, I don’t know, take a flower-arranging class or something.”

But she’d always felt ashamed of being a high school dropout. She felt stupid when someone used a term she didn’t understand. She
hated asking for directions even when she was lost. She dreaded the day when her daughter would know more than her, when she would stare at Kennedy’s homework, unable to help. So she’d told Blake that she wanted to take a GED class.

“I think that’s great, Stel,” he’d said. He was pacifying her, of course, but she signed up for classes anyway. Two nights in a row, she sat in the parking lot outside the public library, afraid to venture inside. She would feel stupid, staring blankly at the chalkboard. When was the last time she’d done any math more complicated than balancing her checkbook? But when she finally went inside, the teacher began to explain an algebra problem and slowly, she felt sixteen again, acing Mrs. Belton’s tests. This was what she loved about math: it was the same now as it had been then, and there was always a correct answer, whether she knew it or not. She found that comforting.

Blake seemed happy for her when she finally received her diploma in the mail. But he was less thrilled when she announced that she wanted to take classes at Santa Monica College to earn her associate’s degree, or when she transferred to Loyola Marymount for her bachelor’s, or when, last year, Santa Monica College hired her as an adjunct for an Introduction to Statistics class. The job paid next to nothing, but she felt invigorated during her sections, standing at the chalkboard in front of a dozen undergraduates. Her faculty mentor, Peg Davis, was encouraging her to enroll in a master’s program next, even to start thinking about her PhD. She could become a full professor, earn tenure someday. Dr. Stella Sanders had a nice ring, didn’t it?

“It’s that women’s libber,” he complained, whenever Stella worked late on campus. “She’s the one putting all those ideas into your head.”

“Surprisingly, I have thoughts of my own,” she said.

“Oh, that’s not what I meant—”

“It’s exactly what you meant!”

“She’s not like you,” he said. “You have family. Obligations. She just has her politics.”

But when had Stella based her decisions on an obligation to family? That was heart space. And maybe it had always been her head guiding her. She had become white because it was practical, so practical that, at the time, her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be? Remaining what you were or becoming something new, it was all a choice, any way you looked at it. She had just made the rational decision.

“I’ve told you already, you don’t have to do this,” Blake always said, gesturing to the stacks of tests under her arm. “I’ve always provided for this family.”

But she hadn’t accepted the job because she was worried about money. She’d just chosen her brain over her heart, and maybe that was what Loretta had seen, tracing that long line down her palm.

“You missed my toast,” Blake said when they’d returned from the Hardisons. He was tugging off his tie in the doorway to their closet.

“I told you I had to enter grades,” she said.

“And I told you tonight was important.”

“What do you want me to say? I tried my best.”

He sighed, staring out the darkened window.

“Well, it was a nice toast,” he said. “A nice party.”

“Yes,” she said. “The party was lovely.”

“I
KNOW WHY YOU
’
RE HERE
,” Kennedy said.

In the half-crowded restaurant, one week after
The Midnight Marauders
opened, she smiled at Stella across the table, playing with the white tablecloth. She always showed all of her teeth when she smiled, which unnerved Stella. Imagine, revealing so much of yourself. One table over, an Asian woman was grading term papers in between
spoonfuls of split pea soup. Two young white men were arguing quietly about John Stuart Mill. Stella said that she had chosen a restaurant near USC’s campus because it was convenient, although that wasn’t, of course, true. She’d hoped the university crowd might prompt her daughter to rethink her own choices, or, at the very least, to feel embarrassed about them.

Stella unfurled her napkin, spreading it across her lap.

“Of course you do,” Stella said. “I’m here to have lunch with you.”

Kennedy laughed. “Sure, Mother. I’m certain that’s the only reason you drove all across the city—”

“I don’t know why you have to turn everything into some big conspiracy. I can’t go to lunch with my daughter?”

She hadn’t driven near campus in years, and even then she’d visited just a handful of times: the college tour, where she’d trailed behind her daughter, gazing skeptically at the trellises climbing the red brick, wondering how a girl with her grades would ever get in; move-in day, since lackluster test scores were nothing that family donations could not fix; a few shameful weeks later, to plead with the freshman dean after the resident assistant caught Kennedy smoking pot in her room. The drugs bothered Stella less than the indiscretion. Only a lazy girl would get caught, and her daughter was clever but lazy, blissfully unaware of how hard her mother worked to maintain the lie that was her life.

Now Kennedy smirked, slowly stirring her soup.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll just save your lecture for dessert.”

There would be no lecture, Stella had promised Blake. She would only nudge Kennedy to do what was right. The girl knew that she needed to go back to school. She’d only missed a semester so far—she could go to the registrar’s office, explain that she’d had a mental lapse, and beg her way back in. She would be one term behind her peers—maybe she could graduate after summer school. Stella worked out
various scenarios in her head, each time unable to land anywhere besides her own anger. Quitting school to become an actor! The idea was so idiotic, she could barely restrain herself from saying so as soon as she reached for the menu.

The most shocking part? She’d thought Kennedy had already been through her hell years. High school teachers calling because she cut class again, the awful report cards, the nights Stella heard the door creaking open at some ungodly hour and reached for her baseball bat before realizing that it was only her drunk daughter sneaking home. The mangy boys always hanging out of cars in front of the house, honking their horns.

“She’s my wild child,” Blake said once, chuckling, as if it were something to be proud of.

But her wildness only scared Stella, disrupting the careful life she’d built. In the mornings, she’d stared across the breakfast table at a child she no longer recognized. Gone was her sweet-faced girl, and in her place, a tawny, long-limbed woman who changed her mind daily about the person she wanted to be. One morning, a faded Ramones T-shirt hung off her gaunt shoulders, the next, a plaid miniskirt inched up her thighs, and the next, a long dress flowed to her ankles. She’d dyed her hair pink, twice.

“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.

“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it. Maybe something in the girl was unsettled, a small part of her
realizing that her life wasn’t right. As if she’d gotten older and started touching the trees, only to find that they were all cardboard sets.

“There’s no lecture,” Stella said. “I just want to make sure we’re thinking about next semester—”

“There it is.”

“You didn’t miss much time, sweetie. I know you’re excited about that play—”

“It’s a musical.”

“Whatever you call it—”

“Well, you’d know if you actually came to opening night.”

“How about this?” Stella said. “I’ll come to your play if you go down to the registrar—”

“Emotional blackmail,” she said. “That’s a new one for you.”

“Blackmail!” Stella leaned into the table, then dropped her voice. “Wanting what’s best for you is blackmail? Wanting you to get an education, to better yourself—”

“Your best isn’t necessarily mine,” her daughter said.

But what was Kennedy’s best, then? Stella had been shocked, and a little embarrassed, to learn that her daughter had spent the last semester on academic probation. “She’s young, she’ll figure it out,” Blake said, but Stella balked. She was some poor colored girl from nowhere Louisiana and even she’d managed a better showing than two C-minuses, two Ds, and a lone B-minus coming from a drama class. Drama wasn’t even a class—it was a hobby! A hobby that, months after that dismal semester, her daughter decided she was leaving school to pursue full time. What was the point, then, of giving a child everything? Buying books for her, enrolling her in the finest schools, hiring tutors, pleading her way into college—what was the point of any of it, if the result was only this, one bored girl gazing around a restaurant filled with some of the nation’s finest minds and playing idly with her soup?