The Vanishing Half: A Novel (25 page)

On a Saturday morning, she and Blake helped their daughter move in. Blake assembled furniture in the bedroom, and Stella wiped down the kitchen drawers, remembering the apartment she and Desiree had shared in New Orleans. The walls were paper thin, the floorboards always creaking, a water splotch growing across the ceiling. And yet, in spite of that, she’d loved that place. She’d been so
grateful to leave Farrah Thibodeaux’s floor that she hadn’t even cared how tiny and cramped this new apartment was. It was hers and it was Desiree’s, and she’d felt as if they were both on the cusp of lives too big to even imagine. She teared up, and Kennedy startled her, hugging her from behind.

“Don’t get all sappy,” she said. “I’ll still come by for dinner.”

Stella laughed, dabbing her eyes.

“I hope you like this place,” she said. “It’s a nice little apartment. You should’ve seen mine in New Orleans.”

“What was it like?”

“Well, it could’ve fit in here, twice over. We were always on top of each other—”

“Who was?”

Stella paused. “I’m sorry?”

“You said ‘we.’”

“Oh. Right. My roommate. This girl I lived with, she was from my town.”

“You never told me that before,” Kennedy said. “You never tell me anything about your life.”

“Kennedy—”

“It’s not about that,” she said. “It’s not about that girl at all. It’s just like, it’s impossible to know anything about you. I have to beg you just to tell me about some roommate you had and you’re my mother. Why don’t you want me to know you?”

She’d imagined, more than once, telling her daughter the truth, about Mallard, and Desiree, and New Orleans. How she’d pretended to be someone else because she needed a job, and after a while, pretending became reality. She could tell the truth, she thought, but there was no single truth anymore. She’d lived a life split between two women—each real, each a lie.

“I’ve just always been this way,” Stella said. “I’m not like you. Open. It’s a good way to be. I hope you stay that way.”

She handed her daughter a sheet of shelf paper, and Kennedy smiled.

“I don’t know any other way to be,” she said. “What do I have to
hide?”

In 1988, exhausted from her pursuit of artistic seriousness and, more importantly, pushing thirty, Kennedy Sanders would begin to appear on a series of daytime soap operas, and a month after she turned twenty-seven she would finally land a three-season arc on
Pacific Cove
. It would be her longest acting job ever, and even decades later, she would sometimes be stopped in the mall by some gooey-eyed fan who called her Charity Harris. It was the role she was born to play, the director told her, she just had a face for the soaps. She must have frowned because he laughed, touching her arm way too close to her tits.

“It’s not a knock, babe,” he said. “I just mean—well, I can tell you have a flair for the dramatic.”

There was nothing wrong with melodrama, she told her parents when she’d called to share the news. In fact, some of the greatest classic actresses—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo—trafficked in it from time to time. Her father was glad that she was moving back to California. Her mother was glad that she was working. After she hung up, she wandered around a Burbank shopping mall where, a year later, she would be stopped by a middle-aged woman outside a shoe rack and asked for an autograph. She was jolted each time
someone approached her in public. They recognized her? Just as she was, before costumes, before hair and makeup? At first, she was thrilled, then it unsettled her, the idea of anyone noticing her before she noticed them.

A
N INCOMPLETE LIST OF
characters she played in the soap world before landing
Pacific Cove
: a conniving candy striper who steals a baby; a teacher who seduces her student’s father; a stewardess who spills water on the lead, maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally, the script was unclear; the mayor’s daughter who gets seduced by the show rogue; a nurse who gets strangled in a car; a florist who hands the star a rose; a stewardess who survives a plane crash to later be strangled in a car. She wore black wigs, brown wigs, red wigs, and eventually, when she played Charity Harris, her own blonde waves. She only played white girls, which is to say, she never played herself.

On the set of
Pacific Cove
, the cast and crew referred to her as Charity, never her real name, and later, in an interview with
Soap Digest
, she would tell a reporter that it helped her stay in character. She preferred readers to think that she was a method actor than know the truth: that no one had bothered to learn her real name because they did not expect her to stick around. Three seasons in the soap world was like three seconds anyway, and when the show ended in 1994, Charity Harris would appear in the finale for a millisecond as the camera swept over photographs on the wall. Only the most passionate fans would remember her most prominent arc, the nine months she’d been kidnapped by her lover’s stalker and tied up in a basement. For months, she’d twisted in the chair—screaming, pleading, begging—and not until years later would she realize that her biggest storyline was not being a real part of the show.

She brought her mother to set once. She’d warned her beforehand
that the soundstage could get chilly, so ridiculously, her mother had worn a bright blue sweater in spite of the ninety-degree heat in Burbank. Kennedy gave her a little tour around the sets, pointing out the exterior of the Harris house, the town hall, the surf shack where Charity worked. She even brought her to the basement where Charity was currently trapped, only three months into her abduction.

“I sure hope they let you out of there soon,” her mother said, collapsing Kennedy and Charity like the rest of the crew. It was the most her mother had ever validated her as an actor. Strange that the greatest compliment an actress could receive was that she had disappeared into somebody else. Acting is not about being seen, a drama teacher told her once. True acting meant becoming invisible so that only the character shone through.

“You should just change your name to Charity,” the
Pacific Cove
director told her. “No offense but when I hear your name, I just think about a guy getting shot in the head.”

H
ERE
’
S SOMETHING
she hadn’t thought about in forever:

Once, when she was seven or so, she was sitting in the kitchen on a step stool, watching her mother frost a cake. She was wedged in a corner, trying to learn a new yo-yo trick so halfheartedly that she was just flinging the toy, sending it clattering to the tile, waiting for her annoyed mother to tell her to stop. She did things like that often—desperate things, too small to get her in trouble but irritating enough to earn attention. But her mother wasn’t even looking at her—she wasn’t the type to transform a chore into a bonding opportunity. Honey, let me show you how to knead bread. Or come here, baby, this is how you make frosting. Her mother seemed relieved once Kennedy aged out of asking to help in the kitchen.

“It’s not that I don’t want your help,” her mother always said. “But
I can do it faster on my own.” As if that last part contradicted the first one, not justified it.

Why was she baking a cake in the first place? She wasn’t the type to bake for no reason. She contributed store-bought cookies to bake sales, transferring them into a tin so nobody would notice. Her father’s birthday, maybe. But it was summer, not spring, or else she wouldn’t have been home from school in the middle of the day, bored, watching her mother smooth the tiny ripples of frosting.

“How’d you learn to do that?” she asked.

Her mother, concentrating hard, like she was restoring a damaged oil painting.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Picked it up over time.”

“Did your mom show you?” She’d thought her mother might say yes, call her over and hand her a knife. But she didn’t even look up.

“We didn’t have money for cakes,” she said.

Later, Kennedy would realize how often her mother used money to avoid discussing her past, as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything: why her mother owned no family photographs, why no friends from high school ever called, why they’d never been invited to a single wedding or funeral or reunion. “We were poor,” her mother would snap if she asked too many questions, that poverty spreading to every aspect of her life. Her whole past, a barren pantry shelf.

“What was she like?” Kennedy asked. “Grandma.”

Her mother still didn’t turn around, but her shoulders tightened.

“It’s strange to think of her like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“A grandmother.”

“Well, she is. Even if you’re dead, you’re still somebody’s grandma.”

“I suppose so,” her mother said.

Kennedy should’ve dropped it there. But she was angry, her
mother so focused on that damn cake, as if it were the important thing, as if talking to her daughter was the dreaded chore. She wanted her mother to stop what she was doing, to notice her.

“Where did she die?” she said.

Now her mother turned around. She was wearing a peach apron, her hands speckled with vanilla frosting, and she was frowning. Not angry, exactly, but confused.

“What type of question is that?” she said.

“I’m just asking! You never tell me anything—”

“In Opelousas, Kennedy!” she said. “The same place I grew up. She never left and never went anywhere. Now don’t you have something else you could be doing right now?”

Kennedy almost cried. She cried easily and often back then, embarrassing her mother, who only cried during the occasional sad movie, always laughing at herself after, apologizing as she swept tears from the corners of her eyes. Kennedy cried on the supermarket floor if she wanted a pink bouncy ball that her mother, dragging her down the aisle, refused to buy. On the playground when she lost at tetherball. At night, when she woke from nightmares she couldn’t remember. And she blinked back tears then, even as her mother said something that she knew was wrong.

“That’s not where you’re from,” she said.

“What’re you talking about? Of course it is.”

“No, it’s not. You told me you were from a little town. It starts with an
M
. M-something. You told me when I was little.”

Her mother was quiet for so long that Kennedy started to feel crazy, like Dorothy at the end of
The Wizard of Oz
. And you were there, and you were there too! But the story about the town was real, she just couldn’t remember all the particulars, except that she’d been in the bathtub, her mother leaning over her. But now, her mother only laughed.

“And when was I supposed to have told you this?” she said. “You’re little now.”

“I don’t know—”

“You must have remembered wrong. You were still a baby.” Her mother stepped forward, the cake behind her smoothed on the top and edges. “Come here, honey. Want to lick the spoon?”

This was the first time Kennedy realized that her mother was a liar.

T
HE TOWN CLUNG
.

She couldn’t shake it, even though she didn’t remember its name. Because she didn’t remember its name, even. For years, she never mentioned it to her mother again. But one night in college, a little high, she’d pulled an encyclopedia off her boyfriend’s shelf. “What’re you doing?” he asked halfheartedly, more interested in the joint he was rolling, so she ignored him, flipping until she landed on Louisiana. Down, down the page to the list of cities and towns in alphabetical order. Mansfield, Marion, Marksville.

“Hey,” he said, “put that shit down, you’re not supposed to be fucking studying right now.”

Mer Rouge, Milton, Monroe.

“Come on, man, that book can’t be more interesting than me.”

Moonshine, Moss Bluff, Mount Lebanon. She would know its name when she saw it, she was sure. But she scanned the whole list and not one of them seemed familiar. She slid the book back on the shelf.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

After that night, she never tried to search for the town again. It would be something that she would always know she was right about but could never prove, like people who swore they’d seen Elvis
wandering around the grocery store, knocking on the melons. Unlike those loons, she wouldn’t tell anyone. A private crazy—she was okay with that. Until she met Jude Winston. That night, at the cast party, Jude spoke the word
Mallard
and it sounded like a song Kennedy hadn’t heard in years. Ah, that’s how it goes.

I
N 1985
, nearly three years after
The Midnight Marauders
closed, she saw Jude again in New York.

She was still new to the city then, half surviving her first winter. All her life, she’d never imagined living outside of Los Angeles, but the city had started to feel smaller by the second. She hadn’t seen Jude since the cast party, but she imagined bumping into her whenever she turned a corner. She saw her sitting in the windows of restaurants. Once, she’d flubbed her lines in
Fiddler on the Roof
because she’d spotted Jude in the front row. The woman looked just like her—dark, leggy, a little insecure, a little self-possessed—but by the time she realized her mistake, she’d ruined the whole scene. The director ordered the stagehands to remove her things from the dressing room before curtain. She blamed Jude. She blamed her for it all.

“I don’t understand it,” her mother said, when she announced that she was moving to New York. “Why’re you going all the way out there? You can become an actor right here.”

But she wanted some space from her mother too. At first, her mother refused to engage with Jude’s claims. Then she tried reason. Do I look like a Negro? Do you? Does it make any sense that we could be related to her? No, it didn’t, but little about her mother’s life made sense. Where had she come from? What was her life like before she’d gotten married? Who had she been, who had she loved, what had she wanted? The gaps. When she looked at her mother now, she
only saw the gaps. And Jude, at least, had offered her a bridge, a way to understand. Of course she couldn’t stop thinking about her.

“I really wish you’d stop worrying about that,” her mother told her. “You’ll drive yourself crazy. In fact, I’m sure that’s why she said all those things to you. She’s jealous and wants to get in your head.”

She’d answered Kennedy’s questions, irritated but never angry. Then again, her mother was normally calm and rational. If she were to lie to her, she would do so as calmly and rationally as she did anything else.

In New York, Kennedy lived in a basement apartment in Crown Heights with her boyfriend, Frantz, who taught physics at Columbia. He was born in Port-de-Paix but raised in Bed-Stuy in one of those red-brown project buildings she passed by on the bus. He liked to tell her horror stories about growing up—rats gnawing on his toes, cockroaches gathered in a corner of the closet, the dope boys who lingered in the building lobby, waiting to steal his sneakers. He wanted her to understand him, she’d thought at first, but later she realized that he just liked having a dramatic backstory that contrasted with the man he’d grown up to be: careful, studious, always cleaning his horn-rimmed glasses.

He wasn’t cool. She liked that. He wasn’t one of the black boys she’d admired from afar, smooth boys slouched in beat-up cars or gathered in front of the movie theater, whistling at girls walking by. She and her friends pretended to be annoyed but secretly delighted in the attention from these boys they could never kiss, boys who could never call home. Oh, the little crushes she had on these boys. Safe ones, the way Jim Kelly sent a thrill through her. She’d perch on the arm of her father’s chair during Lakers games just for a glimpse of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in those goggles. Harmless crushes, really, but she knew better than to tell anybody about them. Frantz was her first black lover. She was his fourth white one.

“Fourth?” she said. “Really? What were the other three like?”

He laughed. They were standing in his faculty adviser’s kitchen during a department party, drinking ginger beers. They’d just started dating then and she was overdressed—she’d worn a long skirt and heels, imagining herself in some glamorous 1960s movie, hanging on the arm of her bespectacled professor husband in a smoke-filled living room. Instead, she was crowded with a bunch of grungy thirtysomethings in a third-floor walk-up, listening to Fleetwood Mac.