Nella’s stomach protested as she gestured No, thank you. The glass barrier she’d been imagining materialized in her head again—this time with Hazel fixed on the other side.
“Okay, tell me: Did Vera send you The Lie yet?”
Hazel didn’t ask as though she was trying to taunt Nella. There seemed to be genuine concern in the way she crunched on her corn chips, wide-eyed. But the question stung so much that she almost lied and said that Vera had sent the manuscript.
Nella took a deep breath. No, she decided, Hazel wasn’t the problem here. Vera had to be trying to pit them against one another to keep Nella on her toes.
“Vera hasn’t sent it to me yet,” she admitted. “Would you mind maybe…?”
“For sure!” Hazel hurried back to her station. “I’m sure it just, like, slipped her mind. She has a lot going on.”
Nella listened to Hazel’s fingers rap her keyboard, feeling more than a little infantilized. Vera had never shared manuscripts with any other assistants before; in fact, she’d been one of the more private editors at Wagner. She rarely discussed books she was thinking about going after so early on in the process—not until she’d had enough time to decide how she felt about them.
It was odd to Nella, then, that she’d sent the Leslie Howard pages to a shiny new employee. It didn’t seem right. Not unless Vera had been purposely trying to ostracize Nella. Not unless she was still pissed about the Colin thing.
“Just sent it!” Hazel wheeled her chair around so that she was directly facing Nella.
“Thanks.” Nella checked the clock on her computer to see how much time she had before she could make an exit of her own. “Got it.”
When she looked over at Hazel a few moments later, she still had her chair turned toward Nella and was waiting, patiently.
“Hey. Thought you might want to hear this.”
“What?”
“While I was in there, Vera mentioned Needles and Pins to me.”
Nella cringed.
“You know I haven’t read a word of it,” Hazel continued, “but I tried to back you up on the Shartricia thing as much as I could.”
“Oh. You did? Thanks.” Nella turned her chair just a bit, so she wasn’t completely closed off by her cubicle wall. “And what did Vera say?”
“Well, she thanked me for weighing in. Then she emailed me the draft.”
“Really?”
“Yep. For a second opinion, I guess.”
“Hm.” On one hand, it was irritating that Vera hadn’t trusted Nella’s judgment. But on the other hand, didn’t it also mean that Vera did care, a tiny bit, about what Nella had said? Maybe Vera had reread the book and was second-guessing it. “Nice. Doesn’t Maisy care that you’re doing all this other stuff for another editor, though? I remember her getting super possessive of her last assistant.”
Hazel shrugged. “Maisy has been busy with personal things, I think. I’m not really sure what. But she’s been checked out and has pretty much left me to my own devices. I think Richard asked Vera to give me some things to do so I wouldn’t get bored. I’m still new here, so I guess they don’t think I can keep myself occupied.”
“Ah.” Nella realized for the first time how quiet it had been in their area for the last few days. Maisy had exploded into the office earlier, but had mysteriously departed no more than fifteen minutes later, a bundle of more bags than usual stuffed under her arms, her lips pursed even more tightly than usual. “I guess I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah. Since I have more time, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to read Colin’s shitty novel. And really,” Hazel said, lowering her voice, “having two negative Shartricia reviews from two Black girls could do wonders. Not that your opinion isn’t legit, of course, because it totally is, but… the more reads, the better. Right?”
Nella nodded, her make-believe glass wall sliding away as quickly as she’d put it up. “Totally.”
She’d been happy to go along with this narrative for the rest of the afternoon until she printed The Lie, gathered all of her things, and made her way to the train, ready to leave Manhattan after what felt like days. The freshly printed five-hundred-page manuscript pulled hard at her left shoulder as she went down into the depths of the subway, but she didn’t mind. It felt like a purposeful weight, like a full bag of groceries bought for a newly cleaned-out fridge. This tote bag held sustenance. She would gobble up the Leslie Howard text immediately and wow Vera with feedback she hadn’t even asked for. Simple as that.
Except, it wasn’t. Because as Nella stood on the train platform, resolved and ready to begin the next day on a fresh foot, she reached into her bag to pull out the manuscript—and instead pulled out an envelope she didn’t remember putting there.
An envelope with her name on it. Her name, again written in all caps. Her name, again written in purple pen.
How did that saying go? There’s always something. She wasn’t sure if it was a saying as much as it was a fact of life, like gravity or indigestion. The phrase was one her father had often said, especially over the last few months, since he’d finally bought a house in Chicago after renting a place not far from her grandmother’s senior care center for nearly four years. Just the week before, Nella’s father had described to her in great detail how he’d just finally gotten the hole in the roof fixed when he realized that the pipe connected to the washing machine had decided to air out its grievances, too. “That’s the thing when you buy a house,” he’d sighed into the phone, more to himself than to her. “There’s always something.”
These words drifted back to Nella now as she stared at the shiny new white envelope, her heart racing. It couldn’t possibly have been the envelope she’d already received a few days earlier, read, and lost sleep over; she had tucked that first one away in her closet.
No, this second note was indeed a second one—she knew that much. What she didn’t know was how it had gotten there, in her bag, while she stood on a subway platform that was beginning to get a little too crowded. She looked over her left shoulder and then her right, even though she’d been wedged between the same two people for the last fifteen minutes—a man who reeked of raw meat and an older nanny who seemed ready to fight her bratty charge.
Nella sighed and, holding the envelope close to her chest for privacy that was impossible to find on a crowded subway platform during rush hour, peeled back the flap.
LEAVE. THE LONGER YOU STAY, THE HARDER IT’LL BE.
WANT PROOF? CALL 518-772-2234. NO TEXTS. CALL.
A hand suddenly graced her lower back, causing her to almost drop the envelope on the tracks. She twisted around to see who was touching her, the words I don’t already forming helplessly on her tongue. But there wasn’t a familiar face from Wagner in sight—just the energetic young child who’d been the source of the nearby nanny’s anxiety.
“No, no, no! Bad Chloe!” the woman shouted, her words wrapped in an indiscernible Eastern European accent. She placed a heavy arm around the girl’s shoulders and reeled her in. “Little girl—stop that. You’re making every single person around here miserable. Including me.”
Nella usually hated to hear adults speak to children so harshly. Her parents had sometimes yelled at her when she was a kid, but they’d been respectful when they did it. As she stood there on that crowded platform, though—elbow-to-elbow with an antsy rug rat and Smelly Meat Man—she was inclined to agree with this Eastern European woman. No, no, no, no, no.
Diana
November 1983
Essex, Vermont
“What do we think—yes? No?”
I held up the auburn wig and wagged it high above my head the way I’d wagged around a potentially undercooked breakfast sausage earlier at the hotel. Two hours ago, he’d laughed agreeably before taking another bite of his eggs. But now, he didn’t crack. This didn’t surprise me. I’d counted how many times his reflection had paced back and forth behind me in the bathroom mirror (twenty), and how many times he’d checked his watch (far more than tha
t). I’d even offered to wet some paper towels in the sink so he could wipe up the beads of sweat that were gathering underneath his chin. But being who he was—Elroy K. Simpson, thick-necked and thirty-four; a man who never lost his cool in front of anybody, not even when he realized his hairline was beginning to recede—he politely nudged my hand away.
“Di. Hon…” He stroked the dark, soft beard that he’d started growing back when we first went away to school. “Don’t you think it’s about time we started to make our way downtown? It’s already half past ten, and I thought you said they wanted us there at eleven.”
I sighed as I carefully pulled at a curly tendril. The last time I’d worn this particular wig—in Vancouver, I think—it had left my scalp itchy for days afterward. I’d scratched it during dinner and on the subway and in the middle of the night, the violent swaying of the bed causing Elroy to curse my new antique furniture. I’d scratched during author interviews and watched as the amount of couch space around me seemed to grow.
I vowed I’d never wear it again. Now here it was, a contender in my beauty preparations. The hard things we do for easy hair, Mom always used to say.
“Makeup’s done,” I called to Elroy. “Clothes are done. Just need the hair. Five minutes.”
“You don’t need the hair. C’mon, now. We’re going to be late.”
“I tell you this every time, El—when the people running these things tell us to get there at eleven, they really mean twelve. They say eleven because they know we’re going to be late. Traffic, gas… you know. All those things.”
Elroy lowered himself onto the closed toilet seat lid and shook his head. “If that’s the case, baby, we should have left this place half an hour ago. At least. Or hailed a cab.”
I waved him off. “Eh. You and your perpetual earliness.”
“It’s not being early,” said El defensively. “It’s just that we don’t know how long it’s going to take to get to the playhouse. And we don’t know how long it’s going to take for me to get a cab around here,” he added, a softer way of reminding me that we were in completely unfamiliar waters. Vermont.
“Silly. The point is, we’ll get there when we get there.” I repinned a section of hair behind my ear to take care of a few strays. Then I stretched the mouth of the wig open and placed it on my scalp. “After all,” I continued, watching new hair swallow the old, “it’s not like they’re going to start the Q and A without me. No way Kenny would let that happen. She was always the headstrong one out of the two of us, you remember.”
Elroy grunted. In a manner of indirect protest, he undid yet another one of the buttons on the maroon silk shirt I’d bought him last week when we were at the mall. “Shoot, Di,” he said. “You know who you’re starting to sound like?”
I stopped my wig adjusting long enough to meet his eye and grinned. “Who?” I asked, wrapping my voice up in as much gold glitter and cashmere as I could. “Diana Ross?”
Elroy laughed that honey-coated laugh that had made me fall in love with him back in Newark, back when he’d followed me, Kenny, and Mani around school trying to sing and dance like a Temptation; and again almost ten years later, when we were home for the holidays and freshly graduated from our respective universities. But even as the usual four crinkles bracketed his eyes, I could see something sharper than mere playfulness lay beneath. Reproach, maybe.
I didn’t like it. Not even as he stood up from the toilet seat, came over, and kissed me on the cheek, contorting his body so he could get around the tall back of the wooden chair I’d dragged into the bathroom from the bedroom.
“No,” he said, twirling one of my new locks of hair with his finger. “Not Diana.”
“Who’s more diva than Diana?”
“Your mom,” he said. “And all those fancy Jack and Jill ladies she used to bring around the house. The ones we always made fun of back in the day, with the long white gloves.”
Elroy must not have seen me wince, because he continued on. “What was that one lady’s name? The one who had a different pastel outfit for every day of the week? Beverly Carter?”
“Uh-huh. No—Rebekah Carter,” I said, moving the brush and the toothpaste out of the way so I could reach for the curling iron. “Wife of Herbert Carter the Fourth.”
It was Elroy’s turn to wince, bracing himself with my chair. “Right. Rebekah with a ‘k’ Carter. Always so uppity.”
“ ‘It’s Re-beh-kah. Not Re-beh-kuh,’ ” I recalled, busting into a fit of giggles so convulsive that I almost burned my forehead. “Remember that time you called her Rebek-can’t to her face?”
“I was such a terrible kid,” Elroy admitted. “I’m surprised your mom still let me come by for dinner all those times.”
“She didn’t. Well—not really. Remember those nights I told you that you couldn’t come over because I was studying Swahili at Sidney’s house?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember ever hearing me speak one word of Swahili?”
Elroy laughed. “Makes sense. We couldn’t have little ole El from around the way messing up a Gordon dinner.”
“Tracking brown mud up and down all of Mom’s white carpets.”
“Updating everybody on the latest bad news. Getting to second base on the front porch… with all the lights off.” Elroy wiggled his eyebrows.
“Don’t forget feeding Bubbles to the raccoons. And that time we almost fed Jonathan to them, too.”
“Hey, hey, that was all you,” he said, smiling. “Jonathan and I were always cool. He was the only Gordon who could stand to have me around. Your dad? Maybe a little bit. But your ma, though… lord have mercy, the daggers that woman shot me whenever I came around, all because my dad was a doorman.”
I eyed Elroy again. Something had shifted beneath his ready-to-go exterior. An unsettling memory mixed with a rush of repulsion. Just like that, our reminiscing was over. His hands were still on the back of my chair, but his eyes were shut, and I could tell he was drifting somewhere else entirely. It almost always happened this way: a swift shift from perfectly okay to painfully wrong.
I returned to my reflection, feeling less confident about what I saw than I had moments before. For the first time, my blue eye shadow looked garish; my liner like a child had taken a crayon to my eyelids. My skin was too pale, much closer to the color of dry sand, much closer to the appearance of a sick person.
This was who was getting up onstage in front of three hundred people? My stomach lurched. I was going to look so washed out beneath those bright lights compared to Kenny, who would be all beautiful and brown and Harvard-polished.
I pinched my cheeks once, willing some color to come through, until I remembered that was something that really only worked for white women. Then I put my head in my hands and did the one thing you’re not supposed to do before a public appearance: I started to cry.
Elroy placed his hands on my shoulders, and I knew he was back. “I just… this satin shirt, your being late to your own event—it all feels kind of over-the-top, you know? I just don’t want you to become one of those…”
I blinked at him. He blinked back.
“The Rebekah Carter comparison might have been an exaggeration,” he continued carefully, “but you know what I mean. You know how much of a self-important devil she could be.”
He had a point. A “well-to-do” Black woman with café au lait skin and a heel for every occasion, Rebekah had been a fixture in my house nearly every summer morning from 1959 until 1967. Supposedly, she was lonely; supposedly, her husband’s line of work sent him all over the country. All I knew was that whenever I woke up and went downstairs to have breakfast, she was almost always chatting with my mother at our claw-footed kitchen table about politics or music or the latest Jack and Jill gossip. Sometimes, she’d comment on my shape or how dehydrated I looked, as though I were supposed to roll out of bed looking like I was ready to go find a husband. But usually—mercifully—she ignored me, too tied up with proffering this or that Bla
ck person to fulfill whatever latest need my mother had: a new grass-cutter, a new hairstylist, a new dentist.
Mom always referred to her as a lifesaver. At dinner—when Rebekah wasn’t present, of course, and when Mom was in a looser mood—Dad called her a life-sucker.
I reached up and squeezed one of Elroy’s fingers before going back to curling again. “Well, I know that as of at least fifteen years ago, Rebekah never finished reading a book in her life.”
Elroy stooped down and kissed me again, this time on top of my head. The feeling left much to be desired—I could barely feel the light peck through my wig. “I also know that you’re far, far prettier than she ever was. And far more brilliant. And more open-minded: No way she’d let a man put his hands in her—”
“See, now,” I quipped, pointing at him with the curling rod as he mock-ran out of the bathroom, “you should have stopped at ‘brilliant.’ ”
“Open-mindedness is sexy, too!” Elroy called over his shoulder.
I snorted. “Hey, where you going? You’re not leaving without me, are you? One more minute. I promise.”
“Calm down, woman,” he shouted from the bedroom. “I’m not going nowhere. The lighting just got unbearable in there, that’s all. Felt kind of claustrophobic.”
“Sixty seconds,” I sang, turning another piece of hair with the curler over and over again in my right hand the way I’d seen my mother do every morning for nearly eighteen years. Except it had been her own fine hair she’d been burning, not synthetic. I was always careful to make that distinction when I looked in the mirror: that even though I was hiding my own hair, at least it would be healthy for that one day I decided to let it out in the open. It wouldn’t start to fall out the way Mom’s did in her last few years—although, I suppose, the sickness had had a hand in that.
“Do you think this thing is tacky, El?” I asked, reaching for the hairbrush. “This red hair?”
“I think that’s a trap that I’ve known you too long to fall into.”
“But what do you think Vermont people are going to think about it?”
The Other Black Girl: A Novel Page 16