Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  As if to test the Latin theory, Vinicius Costa arrived at UNC-G Annie’s junior year. There were surely better-looking Brazilian boys (photos make him look like an oily white boy with a Jheri curl) but he made up for crooked teeth and lingering acne by such animation, such loud and expressively accented English that he had a cult female following in no time. He tried to get parts in the theater, where Annie got her first look at him, but the accent was too distracting (and no plays featuring accents were on the boards), so he often was used as eye candy, the hunky centurion standing beside Brutus in Julius Caesar, the guy-waiting-with-a-suitcase in Bus Stop, all parts with no lines. He was one of those young men who never as much as glanced at a piece of gym equipment or contemplated exercise but somehow retained, on a diet of espresso, cigarettes and what was available in the Brown Building vending machines, a body ready for the cover of Men’s Fitness.

  And he liked the big girls. First, he was smitten with Rolonda, a large black singer imported from NC A & T across town to play Effie in Dreamgirls, and then after a few other misfires (and plenty of underpublicized direct hits), he turned his liquid brown eyes on Annie. “How did you get so good in the dramatic arts, Annie Johnston?” All of Vinicius’s conversation starters seemed like lines from some teach-yourself-English series of cassette tapes that were fifty years of out sync with how people talked. But what did it matter? The zramateek artz … Uhnnie Jhohnz-tone … The Brazilian ability to insert a z or soft j sound into most words was aphrodisiacal.

  So she married him. Yep, married—as in justice of the peace, as in I now pronounce you. Marriage was a sham, a rube’s game, a dead end for women, some patriarchal antiquated holdover, right? But that meant, on the other hand, it was also so unimportant and trifling, that it hardly mattered if you married for a political purpose, i.e., to get Vinicius into the country. You could say it was cosmic payback for the forced-march debut she had just suffered. Let the catty Stepford Wives from Mecklenburg Country Day get a load of this! Vinicius wanted to stay in America (where even the Catholic girls would put out, unlike back home), where everyone made fortunes, where (given his vast theatrical experience) he would be a big star on telenovelas filmed in Miami, where he wouldn’t have to go back and work as a manager in his father’s small factory in Salvador that made those horizontal electric signs affixed to the front of buses that announce destinations and OUT OF SERVICE.

  Everything about this scandalous plan appealed: it would horrify both sets of parents, and it made her the emissary of radical shock and surprise, a business she had been out of for too long. And she was rescuing someone from the third world! Very soon, Annie learned that most third-world people in American universities paying out-of-country American tuition with plenty of disposable income tended to be ruling-class wealthy and not up from the favelas. Details, details—her international rescue mission was undeterred. Ha, how she relished the phone call to her mother.

  “You’ve done what now?” Jerene said, not sure if this was mere rhetoric from her daughter.

  “Yes, we made it official at Greensboro City Hall.”

  “Can he support you?”

  “Actually, I suspect he can.”

  “Good, because from here on out, your tuition will be your husband’s affair, and your rent, expenses. I wish you both every happiness. Your father will be very pleased that—what was his name again?”

  “Vinicius.” Vuh-neet-see-ooze … those delicious z sounds again.

  “Vinicius. We’ll expect you for Sunday dinner. We have to meet our new son-in-law.”

  Oh Jerene Johnston knew, knew somehow even during the phone call, that this was a folly, a marriage that wouldn’t count as a marriage, a mishap headed for annulment. Annie, throughout her later life, never had a sense of humor about this, never really would forgive her mother for her blithe performance, her smug foreknowledge of what would happen. A month into wedded bliss (during which Annie did not break the news to Vinicius that he would soon be picking up their mutual tab), Senhora Costa arrived in Greensboro. Mrs. Costa proved to be Brazil’s answer to Mrs. Johnston. A round, tanned face with her features (eyebrows, cheek rouge, lipstick) drawn on, her hennaed hair pulled back so severely that it may have constituted a kind of face-lift, a lime-green linen suit and a silk floral blouse which on anyone else might have seemed warm and summery but on Mrs. Costa was suggestive of Amazonian assault.

  Mrs. Costa greeted Annie, not impolitely, but then never looked at her again. She sat with her son, who began their discussion defiant, petulant, agitated, raising his voice, while she sat with the bottled water Annie offered her, calm, serious. Soon Vinicius was weakening. Annie couldn’t understand the Portuguese but she sensed in the senhora’s measured listing of … what? Incentives, bribes for him to come home? Reasons this marriage could not endure?… that he had seen the logic of it. Saw how his family money was cut off from him, saw how Annie would not be especially welcome back in Salvador (where the town’s most eligible young women still hoped he might yet alight on them), saw how his mother could fix it all, if only he would just accompany her to the courthouse.

  Mrs. Costa had only appeared, Annie pieced together in retrospect, once a lawyer had been contracted and the paperwork and court appointments were put in place. The Costas didn’t mess around—they had a top Raleigh divorce and annulment specialist sweep in and declare that “there was a want of understanding” on the part of Vinicius, who was too foreign and naïve to understand what Annie had roped him into. Well, it was either that or paying a doctor to say Vinicius was impotent, and that sure wasn’t the case. Had the Costas contacted her parents? Had Duke Johnston set up the Raleigh attorney, an old buddy from law school days, to argue the one (barely) defensible line before a judge who was also one of the North Carolina cabal of courthouse good old boys who all played golf and drank scotch together, who all knew each other from Duke and Carolina, who made stuff like this go away for good families? How vast was the conspiracy to undo what she had done? It was striking that she was never yelled at or told what trouble she had caused. Her mother and father proceeded as if this were a nuisance, as if there were some file in a drawer waiting for when she did something precisely like this, some set of phone numbers, instructions, directives. In her most paranoid fantasy, she imagined her mother and Vinicius’s mother meeting for a brief victory champagne, some balcony in Rio de Janeiro enshrouded by palms, her mother (through an interpreter) congratulating her partner on a job well done, some archsecret conclave worthy of divas on a prime-time soap as the champagne glasses clinked.

  Annie’s friends at UNC-G knew about the annulment and, a month beyond it, Annie herself felt foolish and ridiculous. She took twenty-three credits that spring so she could graduate and get out of town; no theater roles, no weekend partying, no sitting in the quad where friends and acquaintances could get at her, just hermitage and lying low. In this vulnerable, sullen time, Destin made his move.

  Now Destin Winchell was back to Annie’s former pre-Michael UNC-G template. He was totally passive in most things, and Annie reasserted herself in the bedroom, calling all the shots. Whereas Michael provided spectacular fireworks in bed but never seemed more distant than in those moments after, during cuddling, talking of his independence, Destin was pleasant enough in bed, though often hard to inspire, never initiating things on his own, happy to be led, and it was afterward, during the cuddling and talking that he made Annie feel secure.

  Upon graduation Destin took a lucrative job in graphic design at a firm in northern Virginia and they tried it long distance for a while. Annie, not liking or holding any of the part-time jobs she had acquired after graduation, sauntered back to her childhood bedroom in Charlotte for a “just temporary” transition at home to recharge and then she would be moving on to graduate school or an interim library job in no time. Instead, she deteriorated, stagnated, slept until noon, rented videos by the score and watched movies until dawn, pretended to send out resumes, pretended to go to interviews …

>   The old Balkan battle lines began to re-emerge: church, bourgeois values, Republican trickle-down economics, the shamefulness of pride in a Civil War ancestor, she heard herself mouthing the same arguments made when she was a teenager, not able to shut off the faucet. It may have seemed that Annie Johnston wished to do battle in all environments in all settings, but what really mattered to her was the white house high on the bend on Providence Road, her theater of war the dining room table, confronting her mother and father—who were so complacent and wrong, wrong about everything, in such need of her corrective instruction.

  The foolish marriage followed by this obvious depression had her parents worried about her general mental health, so they resisted pitching her to the curb. Her mother wondered why she shouldn’t stay on for graduate school in Greensboro. Don’t they have a master’s program in something, she encouraged, anything at all? It took a sharp comment from Alma to prompt her next move.

  Annie had invaded the laundry room (Alma’s highly regulated province) and strewn clothes to be folded and pressed or washed a second time, an explosion of clothes and bags. Having spread out her devastation, Annie then answered a phone call from Destin, lay on her bed and talked for an hour, then got distracted with something on television, only to return to find that Alma grouchily had cleaned, folded, organized the entire pile.

  “Oh. I was going to do that,” Annie said meekly.

  “You know, of all the children,” Alma said, frowning, “I woulda figured you would be the one to get the furthrest ’way from home, the way you go on. Figured you’d be off in Paris France or California, causing big trouble out there or someplace, but no ma’am…” Alma bent over with a creak to pick up a final piece of Annie’s underwear that had escaped the laundry basket. “Twenty-three years old, back living off your mama and daddy … Never gonna leave home looks like.”

  Since she’d returned to Charlotte, Annie had put on a great deal more weight, no longer walking all over a college campus. She understood that she was headed toward being one of those really big women, expanding past 250 pounds.

  So Destin, who had never ceased worshipping her, continually proposed their moving in together in northern Virginia. She held him off because she liked but didn’t love him, and then one day she said yes. Yes, because she missed affection but also because it would break up her slow sinking into oblivion. Annie started work as a research librarian and file clerk at a real estate office managed by Destin’s sister, who kept nudging and nagging, When you two lovebirds gonna tie the knot? The whole family must have gotten the memo; Destin must really have loved her, she figured, to coordinate such a propaganda effort.

  So she thought about it. His design company had great health care, lots of preventive stuff, they’d subsidize gym memberships, they’d pay for the weight loss clinic at Inova Fairfax. Well, you had to be a spouse of an employee to enjoy that benefit. So, Annie shrugged, let’s do Marriage Number Two. It wasn’t as if she’d changed her mind about the vestigial and empty institution that was husband-and-wife, but she couldn’t quite man the barricades as before given her Vinicius debacle, so why not?

  She lost forty pounds in the twelve-week program. Two years later, Destin started a thing with a heavyset girl at the graphic design studio. She drove by his office to get a look at her one time. If you marry for enrollment in a weight-loss program, she coldly lectured herself, this is what you can expect. Two years after that, there were divorce papers to sign and she hid out for a while in Greensboro, away from a family that must have decided she was doomed at matrimony, when they weren’t worried about her psychological state. Or her health. By the time of the divorce she had gained the forty pounds back and had added thirty more. She had high blood pressure and was pronounced pre-diabetic.

  * * *

  Segregation was created, planned, masterminded. Charlotte after the Civil War was a well-integrated city. There had always been black areas and white areas but Uptown was scrambled, black freedman next to white merchant next to just-emancipated black next to prosperous white a block away from a black shantytown. Black and white mingled on the streets and sidewalks, black and white shopped at the same stores and depots and markets, black and white went to the same churches as they had done in slave times (blacks in the balconies, the whites downstairs in the pews).

  Annie was mastering the lay of the land in Charlotte real estate, and she hoped to be a one-woman integration squad, happy to lecture family and friends about what she learned of the wickedly constructed segregation scheme. It took a slew of Jim Crow laws, a few rigged elections, many evictions, many falsely friendly “urban betterment” projects, and a whole lot of racism to get this city divided, blacks in one swath (west and north), whites on the other (south). It was the same in most Southern cities, too. The North had already perfected the ghetto, so they were no role model either.

  History major Annie Johnston forgot most of the Civil War battles and she let her future thesis of Johnston slave genealogies fade from her mind, but what she never forgot was Professor Hickman’s Southern Urban History, a course she’d only signed up for because it was at eleven-thirty and she had no intention of taking the more popular classes that asked for an earlier wake-up time. That course provided a stop-the-presses headline: the natural ally of Southern blacks, in voting and in social progress, back in the 1880s, were the rural white folk, the poor farmers. Annie, to believe it, had to read that chapter a second time—the farmers, the rural clodhoppers and shitkickers of North Carolina, were the leading progressive edge in politics?

  Yes, because Charlotte oligarchs made the small family farm impossible. A poor farmer could expect his cows or sheep to graze all over the community commons, but once the powerful whites got Fence Laws passed, the poorer farmers and their animals were confined to a small patch of often worthless earth. Farmers bought feed and fertilizer and farm equipment at exorbitant rates from Uptown Charlotte merchants (and their small town franchises) who, when the mounting debts were being paid too slowly, rammed through the Lien Law. Forty percent of family farmers lost their homes in North Carolina in the decades after the Civil War, many lost to Charlotte-based city merchants when they could not pay their bills, which amassed land in a very few hands. Poorer whites became sharecroppers, much like the freed blacks, on land they had owned for generations.

  So farmers, black and white, joined Grange societies that declared just what prices they would pay collectively and merchants, grumblingly, had to take it or leave it. At the same time, the poor millworkers on eighty cents a day also were speaking of collective bargaining, unions. And all these groups voted Republican, the party of Lincoln, to the Democrat Southern white power structure’s endless, fulminating, vitriolic chagrin. If the oligarchs were going to get around democracy, they were going to have to group the offending black voters into discrete voting districts. From 1890 to 1920, a high-watermark of neo-Confederate self-mythology and hyper-racism, most Southern cities rearranged themselves, ghettoizing the blacks, walling off the whites, and trying to keep those progressive union-loving, Grange-loving, civil rights–loving poor folk bunched up in their own underrepresented side of town.

  And even that didn’t fix things. Annie’s Exhibit A, anytime anyone floated the notion that North Carolina “wasn’t as bad” as the rest of the South, was Wilmington, North Carolina, and its election of 1898, in which the poor folk/black folk alliance put progressive Republicans in office … upon which result the whites rioted, burning down the black business district, and lynching African-Americans, a hundred dead, while the Democrats seized power in the only municipal coup d’état in American history. President McKinley said and did nothing about it—not even Republican partisanship could be appealed to. Encouraged by the ease of overthrowing local democracy, the Democrats in North Carolina embraced naked white supremacy, while all the major papers trumpeted imagined crimes against white ladies with the catchphrase “Negro Domination.” The bulk of the most onerous racist laws came in this time, along with
Governor Charles Aycock, who Annie noted had many things still named after him in the state, including a boulevard running through Greensboro and the big auditorium on UNC-G campus, despite his supremacist administration that openly ran and won on promises of “black disenfranchisement.”

  Well now. Annie Johnston was going to strike her blow for undoing centuries of white mischief by redirecting her real estate business to the needs of black folk, Mexican legal immigrants, poor white people. If she had her way, there wouldn’t be an unintegrated neighborhood left in Charlotte.

  Real estate had changed Annie’s trajectory. It was how she met Husband Number Three, Chuck. It was the only proper job she had ever had, working in Destin’s sister’s real estate office. Thanks to some night classes at Guilford Technical Community College, she got a real estate license and found herself, in 2001, struggling to move houses in the Greensboro market, working with Coldwell Banker. This office had a number of clients in foreclosure who had to unload their beach houses down on the Outer Banks. Typical of that drab office, none of the dullards she worked with wanted a free trip to the beach to assess four oceanfront cottages, meet a builder named Chuck Arbuthnot who would give them some estimates for upgrading the properties so they could re-sell quickly … so Annie volunteered, learning she could stay in any of the beach houses while all these assessments were being worked up.

  Chuck was already at work on some kitchen cabinets when she drove to the cluster of homes in Waves, N.C., a break of private houses and small stores in a gap of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. He got up from under a sink and stood there with his tool belt, plaid shirt, worn but tight jeans, and Annie felt a tingle. He was bald with a moustache, and there were men who were bald from becoming middle-aged in a softening desk job, and men who were bald early because of a surfeit of testosterone in their body and Annie knew in Chuck’s case it was the latter.