The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

  “Did you know that Walker woman sent a letter to the school?” Cath asked her one Sunday, squeezing next to her on the pew.

  “A letter?” Stella said. She felt too exhausted to keep up with Cath’s breathless innuendo. Even here, at church, she couldn’t avoid Loretta Walker.

  “A legal letter,” Cath said. “From some big lawyer, saying that if they don’t let her girl come here in the fall, she’ll sue. Can you imagine that? A whole lawsuit over that one little girl? I swear, some people just love the attention—”

  “She doesn’t seem that way to me,” Stella said.

  “And how would you know?” Cath said. She folded her arms across her chest. Stella raised her hands, surrendering.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  —

  IN JUNE, she baked her guilt into a lemon cake with vanilla frosting. The idea arrived suddenly—before she could second-guess, she was tugging a bag of flour out of the cupboard, hunting through the refrigerator for eggs. She would go crazy skulking around her own home, glancing out the window each time she wanted to venture outside. She was tired of her stomach clenching when she imagined the Walker girl abandoned on the sidewalk by the strewn dolls, staring back at her with those big eyes. She had to apologize. She wouldn’t feel better until she did. She’d bake a cake to bring over as a housewarming gift. At least then she could be cordial to the woman. Decent. Hospitality wasn’t the same as friendliness, and if anyone asked, she would say that she’d been raised to be hospitable. Nothing more, nothing less. One lemon cake for her peace of mind felt like an easy trade.

  In the afternoon, she let out a deep breath before starting across the street, the cake balanced on a glass platter. The tan Buick was parked in the Walkers’ driveway. Good, Loretta was entertaining. All the easier to bring the cake, apologize, and go.

  Loretta answered the door in a shimmery green dress, a golden scarf draped around her neck. Already, Stella felt embarrassed in her ordinary blue dress, holding her slumping cake.

  “Hi there, Mrs. Sanders,” Loretta said. She was leaning against the doorway, holding a glass of white wine.

  “Hello,” Stella said. “I just wanted to—”

  “Why don’t you come in?”

  Stella paused, not expecting this. A peal of laughter escaped the living room, and she felt a sharp pang. When was the last time she’d sat around, laughing with girlfriends?

  “Oh no, I couldn’t,” she said. “You have company—”

  “Nonsense,” Loretta said. “No reason for us to be talkin out here on the porch.”

  Stella paused in the entrance, startled by the palatial decor: the living room floor adorned with a white fur rug, a floor lamp topped by a gilded shade, the tiled vase on the mantel. Her own home was simple, a marker of good taste. Only the low class lived like this, furniture covered in gold, knickknacks crowded everywhere. On the long leather couch, three colored women sat drinking wine and listening to Aretha Franklin.

  “Ladies, this is Mrs. Sanders,” Loretta said. “She lives across the street.”

  “Mrs. Sanders,” one of the women said. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

  Stella flushed, knowing, from the women’s smiles exactly what they’d heard. Why had she agreed to come inside? No, why had she brought the cake over in the first place? Why couldn’t she just be like the rest of the neighbors and keep her distance? But it was too late now. Loretta steered her toward the kitchen, where Stella set the cake on the counter.

  “Would you like a drink, Mrs. Sanders?” Loretta asked.

  “It’s Stella,” she said. “And I couldn’t, I just wanted to stop by and—well, welcome you all to the neighborhood. And also, about what happened—”

  She hoped that Loretta might meet her halfway, spare her the shame of repeating the incident. Instead, the woman raised an eyebrow, reaching for an empty wineglass.

  “You sure you don’t want a drink?” she said.

  “I just wanted to apologize,” Stella said. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally like that.”

  “Like what?”

  Loretta knew exactly what she meant, but she was having too much fun toying with her. Stella blushed again.

  “I mean, I don’t normally—” She paused. “This is all new to me, you see.”

  Loretta eyed her for a second, then took a sip of wine.

  “You think I wanted to move here?” she said. “But Reg got his mind set on it and by then . . .”

  She trailed off, but Stella could fill in the rest. When she’d first passed over, it seemed so easy that she couldn’t believe she’d never done it before. She felt almost angry at her parents for denying it to her. If they’d passed over, if they’d raised her white, everything would have been different. No white men dragging her daddy from the porch. No laundry baskets filling the living room. She could have finished school, graduated top of her class. Maybe she would have ended up at a school like Yale, met Blake there proper. Maybe she could have been the type of girl his mother wanted him to marry. She could have had everything in her life now, but her father and mother and Desiree too.

  At first, passing seemed so simple, she couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t done it. But she was young then. She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

  “Maybe the girls can play some time,” Stella said. “There’s a nice little park one street over.”

  “Yes, maybe.” Loretta’s smile lingered a second too long, as if there were more she wanted to say. For a second, Stella wondered if she’d realized her secret. She almost wished Loretta had. It scared her, how badly she wanted to belong to somebody.

  “It’s funny,” Loretta finally said.

  “What is?”

  “I didn’t know what to expect when we moved here,” Loretta said. “But I never imagined no white woman showing up in my kitchen with the most lopsided cake I ever seen.”

  * * *

  —

  LORETTA WALKER DID NOT KNOW how she’d ended up in Los Angeles. That’s how she said it, too, with an exhausted sigh, taking another drag of her cigarette. She sat on the park bench, watching the girls play on the swings. Early summer still, but the morning was already so warm, Stella dabbed at her damp forehead with a handkerchief. She’d been pushing Kennedy on the swings when the little colored girl came running into the park, Loretta trailing behind. The girl eyed Stella warily, reaching for her mother’s hand, and for a moment, Stella thought about leaving. Instead, she took a deep breath and stayed.

  Now Loretta gazed up moodily at the cloudless sky.

  “All this sun,” she said. “Unnatural. Like being in a picture show all the time.”

  She was born in St. Louis, but she’d met Reg at Howard. He was a theater major, obsessed with August Wilson and Tennessee Williams; she studied history, hoped to become a professor someday. Neither had imagined that Reg would become famous for playing a boring police officer. When he’d practiced long soliloquies, impressing Loretta with his elocution, he hadn’t expected that years later, his most well-known line would be “File that form!”

  “How’d you like it?” Stella asked. “Howard. It’s a colored school, isn’t it?” As if she hadn’t saved all the college pamphlets Mrs. Belton had given her, cracking the Howard one open so often it fell apart down the center. All those colored students lounging on the lawn, flipping through books. It seemed like a dream to her then.

  “Yes,” Loretta said. “I liked it fine.”

  “I always wanted to go to college,” Stella said.

  “You still could.”

  Stella laughed, gesturing around the neighborhood. “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. Because you want to?”

  Loretta made it sound
so simple, but Blake would laugh. A waste of time and money, he’d tell her. Besides, she’d never even finished high school.

  “It’s too late for all that,” she finally said.

  “Well, what’s it you like to study?”

  “I used to like math.”

  Now Loretta laughed. “Well, you must be some big brain,” she said. “Don’t nobody just like math for fun.”

  But she loved the simplicity of math, a number growing or shrinking depending on which function you performed. No surprises, just one logical step leading to another. Loretta leaned forward, watching the girls play. She didn’t seem at all like the uppity wife everyone gossiped about, the one who wanted to force her way into the Brentwood Academy. She didn’t even seem like she wanted to live in Los Angeles at all. After college, she’d planned to return to Missouri, maybe earn her master’s. Then she’d fallen for Reg and gotten swept up in his dreams.

  “So why did you move here?” Stella asked. “The Estates, I mean.”

  Loretta raised an eyebrow. “Why did you?”

  “Well, the schools. It’s a nice neighborhood, don’t you think? Clean. Safe.”

  She gave the answers she ought to, although she wasn’t so sure. She’d moved to Los Angeles for Blake’s job and sometimes she felt like she’d had no say in the matter. Other times, she remembered how thrilling the possibility of Los Angeles had seemed, all those miles between there and her old life. Foolish to pretend that she hadn’t chosen this city. She wasn’t some little tugboat, drifting along with the tide. She had created herself. Since the morning she’d walked out of the Maison Blanche building a white girl, she had decided everything.

  “Then don’t you think I’d want those same things too?” Loretta said.

  “Yes, but don’t you—I mean, it’s got to be easier, isn’t it, if you—”

  “Stuck to my own kind?” Loretta lit another cigarette, her face shining like bronze.

  “Why, yes,” Stella said. “I just don’t know why anyone would want to do it. I mean, there are plenty of fine colored neighborhoods and folks can be so hateful.”

  “They’re gonna hate me anyway,” Loretta said. “Might as well hate me in my big house with all of my nice things.”

  She smiled, taking another drag of her cigarette, and that sly smile reminded Stella of Desiree. She felt like a girl again, sneaking a smoke on the porch while their mother slept. She reached for Loretta’s cigarette, leaning into the glow.

  * * *

  —

  YOU HAD THE JOHANSENS, of course, on Magnolia Way—Dale worked downtown in finance, Cath served as secretary of the Brentwood Academy PTA, even though she hardly took minutes at all during the meetings, you couldn’t guess how many times Stella had glanced at her notepad and found it blank. Then the Whites over on Juniper—Percy worked in accounting at one of the studios, she couldn’t remember which, Blake would know. He was also association president, but he’d only run because his wife kept pushing him to be more ambitious. Lynn was from Oklahoma, an oil family, and God only knew how she’d found herself saddled with Percy White. You’d understand if you took a look at him, but let’s just say he wasn’t what she had in mind when she’d dreamt of marrying a man who worked in Hollywood. Then the Hawthornes on Maple—Bob had about the whitest teeth she’d ever seen in her life.

  “I think I’ve seen him,” Loretta said. “Big ones too? Kind of like Mister Ed?”

  Stella laughed, nearly dropping the ball of blue yarn. Across the leather couch, Loretta smirked the way she always did when she knew she’d said something funny. Which was often, now that they were on their second glass of wine.

  “You’ll see them all soon,” Stella said. “They’re all nice enough people.”

  “To you,” Loretta said. “You know you’re the only one who’s darkened my door.”

  Stella did know, but she tried not to dwell on that fact. She watched the yarn slip out in front of her, Loretta’s crochet hook winding through the air. When she’d called Loretta earlier and asked if the girls might want to play again, she figured they would meet up at the park. She did not expect Loretta to invite her over or for herself to accept. Now the girls were playing in the Walkers’ backyard—you could hear their yelps through the screen door—and she was tipsy from the wine, listening to Loretta talk about witnessing Reg’s acting career finally take off. How even though he found Frisk stultifying, he was grateful to play a cop for once, not another street hood snatching some lady’s purse in the opening credits. Loretta went to set with him from time to time, but found the whole business so dreadfully boring, she usually ended up in a corner somewhere, crocheting. It amazed Stella, how deeply unimpressed Loretta seemed by every fantastic aspect of her life. Whenever Loretta asked her a question, Stella grew embarrassed, aware of how little she had to offer.

  “I told you,” she said. “I’m really not that interesting.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that for a second,” Loretta said. “I bet there’s all sorts of fascinating things swirling around inside that head of yours.”

  “I assure you, there isn’t,” she said. “I’m as plain as they come.”

  She’d done one interesting thing in her whole life, but she would spend the rest of her days hiding it. When Loretta asked about her childhood, she always hedged. She couldn’t share any memory of her youth without also conjuring Desiree; all of her memories were cleaved in half, her sister excised right out of them, and how lonely they seemed now, Stella swimming by herself at the river, wandering through sugarcane fields, running breathlessly from a goose chasing her down the road. A lonely past, a lonely present. Until now. Somehow, Loretta Walker had become the only person she could talk to.

  All summer, she waited for Loretta’s phone calls. She might be watching her daughter paint watercolors in the backyard when the kitchen phone rang, and just like that, she’d pack up the paint set, glancing carefully down the street before ushering Kennedy across. Or she might be on her way to the public library for storytime when Loretta phoned, and suddenly the overdue books were no longer as important as venturing across the cul-de-sac. When they returned home, she told her daughter not to mention the playdate to Blake.

  “Why?” Kennedy asked. Stella knelt in front of her, untying her shoes.

  “Because,” she said, “Daddy likes us to be at home. But if you don’t say anything, we can keep going across the street. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Her daughter put her hands on her shoulders, as if she were giving her a stern talking-to, but she was only balancing herself as she stepped out of her tennis shoes.

  “Okay,” she said, so simply it stung.

  Like anything, lying to her daughter became easier over time. She was raising Kennedy to lie too, although the girl would never know it. She was white; she would never think of herself as anything else. If she ever learned the truth, she would hate her mother for deceiving her. The thought flashed through her head each time Loretta called. But each time, she steeled her nerve, took her daughter by the hand, and stepped across the street.

  * * *

  —

  ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOONS, the tan Buick pulled into the Walkers’ driveway just past lunchtime, and Cath Johansen called Stella to gossip. “I knew there wouldn’t be just one,” she said. She was convinced the colored women were there to scout out the neighborhood to plan their own eventual arrival. Stella clamped the phone against her cheek, peering through the kitchen blinds as Loretta’s girlfriends climbed out. The tall one was Belinda Cooper—her husband composed movie scores for Warner Bros. Mary Butler in the cat-eyed glasses was married to a pediatrician. She was sorority sisters with Eunice Woods, whose husband had just sold a screenplay to MGM. Stella knew basic things about the ladies that Loretta had told her, but she’d never expected to meet any of the women until one Wednesday when Loretta called to tell her that Mary was sick. Would she l
ike to be their fourth hand?

  “I’m not much of a bid whist player,” Stella said. She was terrible at cards, at any game that relied on chance.

  “Honey, that’s all right,” Loretta said. “Sometimes we don’t even take out the cards.”

  Playing bid whist, she learned, was mostly a guise for what the women really wanted to do, which was drink wine and gossip. Belinda Cooper, halfway through her second glass of Riesling, kept going on about a movie actor having a sloppy affair with one of the secretaries at Warner, a pretty young thing but bold as you know what, taking messages from his wife, then slipping down to his trailer to deliver much more than a missed call.

  “These girls are gettin bolder today,” Loretta said. She took another drag of her cigarette, not even touching her cards. “You know me and Reg went out to Carl’s the other day and ran into Mary-Anne—”

  “How is she?”

  “Pregnant. Again.”

  “Lawd!”

  “And you know what she had to say? Euny, it’s your hand, baby.”

  “Mary-Anne never liked me,” Eunice said. “You remember that time at Thelma’s wedding?”

  All of their conversations went like this, around and around in loops that Stella couldn’t follow. She wasn’t meant to understand their shorthand or glean complicated backstories from the cast of characters they introduced. To be there at all, really. But she was happy to sit quietly, fiddling with her cards, listening. If Belinda and Eunice had a problem with her being there, they didn’t say. But they spoke around her, never directly to her, as if to tell Loretta, this is your responsibility. Still, the afternoon passed pleasantly enough, until the girls rushed in for snacks. It always struck Stella how natural Loretta seemed around Cindy. The girl clambered to her side, rubbing against her like a cat, and Loretta, without even breaking the conversation, reached for her. She seemed to know what Cindy wanted before she even asked for it. When the girls ran back upstairs, Eunice took a drag of her cigarette and said, “I still don’t know why you so set on doin it.”