What's Mine and Yours

by Naima Coster

  Noelle shrugged. “A marriage is never harmonious.”

  “I suppose it depends on who you marry.”

  Noelle shook her head. “You think you know a person, and the problem is you do. You know exactly who they are, and you marry them anyway.” She sipped her bourbon. “At least with a friend, you never expect the other person to take away your loneliness.” Noelle nodded at the empty seat across from her. “Take Alma. You two are so bonded. I can tell. And you make it all work—your friendship, being roommates, the business. You could never do all that with a man.”

  “Probably not,” Diane said.

  “Please don’t tell Mama.” Noelle wiped her eyes. “This is all temporary. We’re going to get back on track.”

  “I won’t say anything.”

  “And don’t tell Margarita. Do you really think she’s going to show tomorrow?”

  “Sure. Papi gave her the money for her flight.”

  “Jesus, she had to bum money from Papi? Is our Hollywood empress not empress-ing?” Noelle was back to form, ready to focus all her judgment on their sister. “How’d she reach him anyway? He knows I’m here, and he’s not returning my calls.”

  “He’s the same with me. I’ll see him every once in a while, and then one day, I’ll call and he’ll say he can’t come and visit because he’s in Delaware. Like it’s nothing. Like he shouldn’t bother telling his daughter that he moved out of the state.”

  “Some family we’ve got,” Noelle said and drained her bourbon.

  Diane considered pointing out that Noelle had left, too, but decided against it.

  That night, after Noelle was asleep, Diane crept off the couch. Her sister was in the guest room they had told her was Diane’s; Alma was waiting in their bedroom. She had been aloof after dinner, but now she opened her arms for Diane. Her curls were tied up with a crimson head wrap, and she already smelled of sleep, musty and warm. Diane kissed her, and Alma reciprocated, but it was all too mild, as if Alma simply didn’t want to turn her away. Diane tried slipping her tongue into her mouth, sliding her hand between her thighs, but they never caught a spark. She gave up and put an arm around her. What she wanted most was to be close to her. She told her about the blue nose pit, how defenseless she had been in her terror.

  “Maybe she just couldn’t get unpinned. Maybe she’s not as strong as she looks.”

  “She is strong,” Diane said. “A strong, sweet girl.”

  Alma rolled her eyes. “They’re all sweet to you.”

  Alma cared for the dogs, but to her the day camp was mostly a business. She didn’t rely on the dogs, like Diane. She had a much wider life. Her Spanish book club and her knitting group. She was open with them about their relationship, and Diane didn’t mind. Her only hard line was her family, which was a relatively small exception in the scope of their whole lives.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” Alma said.

  “You saw how Noelle can be. She has something mean to say about everyone.”

  “So what do you care if she says something to us? It’s just the way she is.”

  “She’s my big sister.”

  “And you’re a big girl. Besides, she probably knows already. You really think she believes I’m your six-year roommate?”

  “They wouldn’t expect it from me.”

  “Wouldn’t expect you to love me?”

  “They have no idea who I am. And they like it better that way. It’s convenient for me to be Diane, the baby, the sweetheart. It keeps me out of the way while they wage their wars.”

  “You like it that way, too,” Alma said quietly. “You’re the one who’s hiding now.”

  Diane reached for her hand, but Alma pushed her away.

  “It’s getting to me. Soon Margarita will be here, and I’ll be putting on a show for her, too.”

  “You don’t get it—this isn’t New York.”

  “Please don’t start with your this is the South bullshit. You and I both know plenty of dykes in this town.”

  “My mother still hates Nelson. And he’s a man.”

  “She may be a bigot, but I still want her to know who I am.”

  “She grew up a different way—”

  “Jesus Christ, is this some Ventura family tradition? All this lying and pretending? No wonder they call you the good one. You cover for them all.”

  “What do you want from me? It’s not like you get to choose your family.”

  Alma squinted hard at Diane in the dark, thrust a pointed finger straight into her chest.

  “Yes, you do, Diane. Yes, you fucking do.”

  They picked up Margarita from the airport next day, and it struck Diane how natural it was to see her, to put her arms around her and inhale the blast of her perfume. She and Noelle embraced, too, and Noelle asked about the flight, offered to help with her bags. Margarita had brought them matching gifts: bath salts and fancy soap made with ossified flower petals. They piled into the car, Noelle riding shotgun, Margarita in the backseat filming out the window. “I forgot how green it is here,” she said.

  It gave Diane a sliver of hope. Maybe being sisters was simply this: seeing each other after a long time and finding it was wholly ordinary to be together again.

  A pop song came on the radio, a duet between two nineties stars. They all surged with recognition and sang along softly, instinctively. Noelle swayed her shoulders, and Diane tapped her hands on the wheel. Margarita hit a high note wrong to make them laugh.

  “You know, you should think about comedy,” Noelle said, raising her voice over the music. “At the theater, I used to meet people struggling to make it as serious actors, but they were so funny. So funny, and they couldn’t see it—”

  Margarita stopped singing, and Diane knew that Noelle had done it.

  “At the theater,” Margarita said, affecting a rarefied accent. “I don’t need pointers from you, Noelle. Atlanta independent theater isn’t exactly the big leagues.”

  “I’m just trying to be supportive.”

  “How could I forget?” Margarita was shouting now. “My big sister, my greatest champion. What were your last words of encouragement?” She scrolled through her phone. “Nice to see you’re not answering your phone because you’re busy doing big, important—”

  “We didn’t know if you were coming. I was pissed.”

  “How about ‘I’m sorry’? You think you could try that? I’d wait for you to come around, but I’m not Diane.”

  “Leave me out of this,” Diane said and turned off the music. “Can you all behave yourselves for just one day? This isn’t about us. It’s about Mama.”

  Margarita laughed. “Of course it is, manzanita. Even after all these years.”

  The girls arrived after lunch, and Lacey May couldn’t remember ever having seen them like that, all grown up together. It would have been the perfect time to take a picture if not for how worn she looked in her threadbare robe, her body bloated from all the machines whirring and pouring fluid into her.

  Margarita looked like a star, her hair streaked an artificial caramel color, her breasts larger than Lacey May remembered. Yet somehow, she was all Robbie. Diane seemed homely beside her, stocky and dark, her hair curling around her ears. The only pretty thing on her was the emerald charm around her neck, the one her father had given her when she was a girl. And Noelle was a great beauty wasted; she seemed so much older than thirty-two. Her body was soft and dimpled in strange places—her arms, her knees—and thin and brittle in others—her hands, her neck. She looked like a woman who had been changed by the swells and vacancies of pregnancies, one after another, and never enough time in between to put herself back together. But Noelle had no reason. She should have remained intact. Lacey May said none of this out loud.

  “My girls!” she said. “Come here, my girls!”

  There was a round of hellos and kisses as they descended on Lacey May. Hank stood at the foot of the bed, nodding at the girls, waiting to be embraced. Her poor man. He still acted like an extra i
n their lives, a man so happy to have been cast, he tried mostly not to be a bother. The girls hugged him limply, and Lacey May squeezed his hand. Any lives they had, they’d had because of Hank, whether the girls saw it that way or not. She would be eternally grateful.

  Within a few minutes, the commotion subsided, and the girls assumed their places: Noelle slumped into her usual chair in the corner; Margarita climbed onto the windowsill and tapped at her phone. Diane stayed beside Lacey May and fussed with the hospital bed, cranking it so she could sit upright.

  Lacey May wondered how to snap them into awareness of one another. They were all unmarried except for Noelle, who seemed unhusbanded. One day Lacey May would be gone, and they’d only have each other. How could she make them see?

  The doctors didn’t know yet whether she’d need radiation or chemo or surgery. They were holding off on promising treatments until they brought down the swelling in her brain. They had warned her she might feel confused, and there might be pain. The worst of it, so far, was the nausea, which reminded her of labor. She had thrown up with all her girls. She imagined dying would be something like childbirth. A splitting open. A transfiguration she couldn’t fully believe in, until she was in it, crossing over from one state of being into another, with no say in the matter at all.

  Lacey May cleared her throat. “The doctor came by this morning. He said the swelling isn’t coming down the way they want it to, but the good news is I haven’t had another seizure.”

  Noelle snapped to attention. “What do you mean seizure? I thought you fell off the porch and hit your head.”

  “Well, they think it was a seizure, and I can’t say any different cause I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe the way you described it led them to the wrong conclusion. You’ve always had a tendency to blow things out of proportion.”

  Margarita burst out laughing from the windowsill. “I ought to just record Noelle. Point my phone right at her. Her grudges are pure entertainment. Better than reality TV.”

  “If it’ll help your failing career, go right ahead.”

  “At least I work. What do you do? After all your big talk about getting out, it must kill you to be where you are.”

  “Where I am? What about you? You had to ask Papi for money. Who do you think is using more these days, you or him?”

  “My God!” Lacey May roared. “The way you girls talk! I didn’t raise you to talk like that.”

  “Sure you did,” said Noelle. “Has anybody even heard a prognosis? We’re all gathered here like they’ve given Mama a death sentence, and we don’t even know the facts.”

  “Mama’s sick,” said Diane.

  “I know she’s sick, but we can’t take her word about how serious it is.”

  “This girl thinks I made up my cancer!”

  “I’m not saying that—”

  “Don’t you all see this may be it?” Lacey May slammed her wired hands down on the bed. “This may be the last time we’re all together, and we’re wasting it. We’ve got to get a hold of your father. If we wait for him to turn up, it might be too late.”

  It had taken all her strength to shout at them, and the girls were stunned into silence.

  “Oh, Mama,” said Margarita. “Now you’re in the running for best performance in a drama.”

  “I’m serious. I need you girls to help me find your father.”

  “Margarita was the last one to hear from him, but that was days ago,” Diane said. “There’s nothing we can do. He’ll show up when he wants to, Mama.”

  Hank finally spoke up. “That’s your father. Never around when he’s needed. Only shows up when it’s convenient for him.”

  “If I were you, Hank, I wouldn’t be talking about convenience,” said Noelle.

  After that, Lacey May was on her, screaming and calling her ungrateful. Margarita egged her on, and Noelle snatched up her purse and left. Diane felt woozy and sank onto the bed. Maybe Alma was right, and she was only lying to herself, pretending she could keep the peace among them. She took her mother’s hand.

  “You can’t take it to heart, Mama. She’s just afraid.”

  “Something’s going on with her. I bet it’s Nelson.”

  “Mama, every time there’s something wrong with Noelle, you blame it on Nelson.”

  “And ninety-nine percent of the time I’m right.”

  Margarita sighed heavily and stood from the window. “If I had known we were all coming here for a conference about the state of Noelle, I’d have stayed in L.A.”

  “She’s your sister,” Lacey May said.

  “And the center of the universe. Go on and make your plans to save her from herself. You let me know what I can do for my beloved sister when I get back.”

  Margarita bowed her head beatifically, her hand on her heart, then turned and left, too.

  Lacey May could have wept at the ease with which her daughters left her. They had seen her, in her gown, the wires needled into her hands, and she had won no sympathy. She wanted to wail, What did I do? and Hank would put his arm around her. Diane would reassure her: Nothing, Mama, nothing. And she could say, You can’t control your kids—you can only love them, or, They turn out how they turn out. But these were lies. There was plenty she could have done differently. She could have stayed with Robbie; she could have never gotten involved in that campaign at the school; she could have loved and welcomed Nelson; she could have let her daughters be. But she couldn’t bring herself to wish she’d taken another course. She was their mother, and she’d tried to use her influence for good. If she had the chance to do it all over again, she would do it all exactly the same.

  When Diane returned to the camp, Alma was out front fiddling with the banner. It was sagging, and she cut and rewound the wire to string it back up.

  “Your dog is here,” she said. “The blue nose pit. I moved her in with the small dogs and she’s happier. So far, everybody’s behaving.”

  “I wish I could say that for the Venturas and the Gibbses.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  “I’ve got to find my father. The doctor finally gave us the rundown.”

  “Is she going to die?”

  “I don’t know. It was all numbers. Just because forty percent of patients live doesn’t mean you’ve got a forty percent shot. It’s either you die one hundred percent, or you live.”

  Alma dropped the pliers in her hand and reached for Diane. Diane buried her face in Alma’s neck, inhaled the tinny odor of her sweat, her floral hair gel, and her underarm funk. They pulled apart, and Diane could see Alma was near tears.

  “I know it’s not a good time to push all this. But it would break my heart if your mother never knew who I was, not really.”

  “I can’t talk about this now. It’s too much.”

  “Fine. Tonight then.”

  “I can’t sneak off and see you anymore. Margarita’s sleeping on the couch with me now, and she’ll notice if I disappear.”

  Alma released her and frowned. “Is there anyone you’re related to who isn’t on the list of people who can’t know about us?”

  “It isn’t a very long list.”

  Alma looked down at her high-tops, smeared with mud. When she looked back up at Diane, her face had changed. It was softer, but more closed, and Diane wondered whether this was the moment when she would begin to lose Alma, if in a little while, she’d give up and move on.

  Alma spoke gently, her face half in shadow, the rusted wire spooled around her wrist.

  “It’s only our life if we say so. Otherwise it belongs to them.”

  10

  September 2002

  The Piedmont, North Carolina

  The enrollment at Central was higher than anyone had expected. There had been talk that students wouldn’t rise to the challenge when they saw what it required of them: inconvenient bus routes, early mornings, the awkwardness of being new. But Central was at capacity with transfers—two hundred across the four grades—and Gee sensed them, the others, wh
en he wandered the halls, when he sat at lunch with kids he recognized from elementary school, and in PE, where the black boys scheduled for sixth period had drawn together into a little band. They changed together in the locker room, ran laps in sync, and separated only when the coach divided them into teams.

  There weren’t many new students in Mr. Riley’s English class, although Gee couldn’t be sure. He knew there were white kids, too, benefiting from the program, but they didn’t stick out nearly as much. Besides himself, he counted a Cambodian girl who sat in the last row, scribbling poems in her notebook, and a Salvadorian girl who arranged the long puff of her hair to cover her face whenever Mr. Riley asked for volunteers. Gee, too, hunched over in his chair, drew his hood around his face. All three of them were hiding.

  For homework Mr. Riley had assigned the first scene of the first act of a Shakespeare play. Gee had read and reread the lines but understood nothing. He knew he wasn’t alone because they’d spent nearly the whole class period rereading the packet aloud and then translating. Mr. Riley asked questions and answered them himself.

  Gee knew Mr. Riley would call on him before he did. The teacher had some kind of thing with him. He called him to the board to take notes more than anyone else; he asked him to read aloud, although Gee made a point of keeping his voice so low Mr. Riley wouldn’t ask again. When he had seen him onstage at the town hall, Gee had been curious about him, this black teacher who seemed so cool while all the other adults shouted at one another. He could see now that it wasn’t poise; Mr. Riley was fake. He smiled at the students even when they weren’t doing anything remarkable; he wore a tie, which few of the other teachers did; in between classes, he lint rolled his blazer and brushed out his waves. He was the kind of man who seemed to always be thinking about who was watching, while Gee liked to think mostly about how he could disappear.

  “Will you read for us?” he asked in front of everybody, as if Gee had a choice.

  He brought the pages close to his face so that no one could see and raced through the lines.