by Brit Bennett
“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.
* * *
—
THE 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.
* * *
—
IN 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 fro
nt 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.
“They were different,” he said.
“Different how?”
“Different from you,” he said. “All people are different, white girls too.”
He was different from anyone she’d ever known. His native language was Creole, his English inflected by his accent. He had a nearly photographic memory, so when he helped her run lines, he always learned them before she did. They’d met at 8 Ball, the dive bar where she worked. Somehow, past the burly bikers crowded around high tops, past the tattooed girls feeding the jukebox quarters to play Joan Jett, past her own attempts to blend in, they’d noticed each other. She was still trying to find her first acting gig then, and nobody understood why she’d left Los Angeles to do so. But she liked the stage. In Los Angeles, every actor she knew was obsessed with breaking into Hollywood, because anyone with sense knew that Hollywood was where the money was. But that whole process seemed like a drag. Waking up at dawn, standing in front of a camera for hours, repeating the same lines until some asshole director was satisfied. The stage was something else altogether—new every time, which terrified and thrilled her. Each show was different, each audience unique, each night crackling with possibility. The fact that there was no money in what she was doing was just a bonus. She was only twenty-four then, still romanced by the idea of her own suffering.
“I know that,” she told Frantz. “That’s why I’m asking what they were like.”
Soon she regretted asking when they began to run into his ex-girlfriends around the city. Sage the poet, who published long rambling essays about the female body that she still sent to Frantz for notes. Hannah the engineer, studying how to improve sanitation in poor countries. Kennedy had imagined a frumpy girl wading through sewage, not this perky blonde on the subway, perfectly balanced in her five-inch boots. Christina played the clarinet for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. At dinner, Kennedy stirred her creamed spinach while Christina and Frantz discussed Brahms. He was right, they were all different. She felt stupid for being surprised. Part of her had imagined that his other white girlfriends were altered versions of herself—her if she had, say, grown up in Jersey or decided, on a whim, to dye her hair red. But his taste in white girls was varied and she couldn’t decide what was worse, to be the latest iteration in a series of similar lovers or to be radically different from the ones who’d come before her. Belonging to a pattern was safe, at least; to be singular was a risk. What was it, exactly, that Frantz liked about her? How could she ever hope to keep him interested?
“What if I told you,” she said, “that I’m not white?”
She didn’t plan to say this, it just came out. Frantz smiled, his beer raised to his lips.
“What are you, then?” he said.
“Well, not full white,” she said. “I’m part black too.”
She’d never said this out loud before. She’d wondered if saying it might make it feel more real, as if something innate would awaken inside her at the sound of those words. But the admission felt phony, like she was reciting lines. She couldn’t even convince herself. Frantz squinted at her a moment.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I see it now.”
“You do?”
“Sure,” he said. “I know plenty of Negroes with hair as kinky as yours.”
He was teasing. He thought she was kidding, and over time, it became a joke between them. If she was running late, he’d say that she was on colored people time. If she snapped at him, he’d say, “Easy there, sista.” Soon it became a joke to her too. Jude, her mother’s secret, all of it. She would know, she decided. You couldn’t go through your whole life not knowing something so fundamental about yourself. She would feel it somehow. She would see it in the faces of other blacks, some sort of connection. But she felt nothing. She glanced at them across the subway car with the vague disinterest of a stranger. Even Frantz was, essentially, foreign to her. Not because he was black, although that, perhaps, underscored it. But his life, his language, even his interests were apart from her. Sometimes she stepped inside the little closet he’d converted into an office and watched him scribble equations that she’d never understand. There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.
* * *
—
HER MOTHER HATED FRANTZ. She called him uppity.
“And not for the reason you think,” she said. They were sitting in the window of a café, watching all the people walk by. Her mother had flown out to visit her during her Thanksgiving break. Kennedy had insisted she couldn’t take time away from work and auditions to visit home, but really, she just wanted her mother to see her New York life. She took a perverse delight in it, like she was a child dragging her over to see the drawing she’d scribbled on the wall. Look at the mess I’ve made! Her mother had tried her best not to react. She’d kept her lips drawn tight during the grand tour of the basement apartment. Nodded quietly as Kennedy took her by 8 Ball. But Frantz was the last straw, the one part of her unacceptable life that her mother could not ignore.
“And what reason is that?” Kennedy said.
“You know.” There were two black women next to them eating croissants. Her mother would never say it aloud. “It’s not that. I just don’t like anybody who acts like him—”
“Like what?”
“Like his you-know-what don’t stink.”
She must have had the only mother in all of Brooklyn who was too polite to say the word shit in public.
“I don’t know why you don’t like him,” Kennedy said. “He was perfectly nice to you.”
“I never said he wasn’t. But he walks around like he’s the smartest person in the room.”
“Well, he is! He has a PhD from Dartmouth, for God’s sake. I always feel like a dummy around him.”
“I just don’t understand it. You never liked anyone like him before.”
In high school, she’d dated boys in studded leather jackets who wore their hair long and greasy like the Ramones. Her first boyfriend could barely see without swiping long strands out of his eyes. She’d thought it was darling but it drove her father crazy. He imagined her dating, as all fathers do, boys who reminded him of his younger self, hair shorn, sharply dressed, career focused. Not these slouchy boys she brought home, always a little baked, shy of total irreverence but near it. She dated boys in bands that played music so terribly, she could not have endured listening if not for love. She’d dated a wrestler in college and watched him run around for hours draped in garbage bags, trying to drop weight. She could never love a man who cared that much about anything, she told herself later, but here she was, living with one who jotted equations on the bathroom mirror before he could forget them.
“Well, it was time for a change,” she said.
Her bad-boy phase had ended. Her mother should have been relieved, but she only looked troubled.
“It’s not because of that gir
l, is it?” she said.
They hadn’t spoken about Jude in two years. But she hadn’t left them. Kennedy knew, right away, who her mother meant.
“What’re you talking about?” she said.
“Well, you never liked anyone like this before. Then that silly girl got into your head. I just hope you’re not trying to prove anything.”
She seemed so flustered, fingering the handle of her coffee cup, that Kennedy looked away. If dating Frantz had been some type of experiment, then it had failed terribly. Loving a black man only made her feel whiter than before.
“I’m not,” she said. “Come on, let’s go to the museum.”
* * *
—
THE WINTER SHE SAW Jude Winston again, Kennedy starred in an off-off-Broadway musical called Silent River. She played Cora, the sheriff’s rebellious daughter who longs to run away with a rugged farmhand. For months, she obsessed, more than normal, about getting sick. She drank so much hot tea with lemon that by February she could barely stand the smell of it and pinched her nose, gagging it down. She swallowed chalky zinc pills and triple-wrapped her neck in a scarf before stepping outside. She scrubbed her hands furiously after she climbed off the subway. She wasn’t built for a New York winter under ordinary circumstances; landing her biggest role since she’d moved to the city certainly fit the bill of extraordinary. The night she got the call, Frantz took her out to dinner. She was giddy. He was relieved.
“I was starting to think,” he said, but didn’t finish. He was five years older than her, and age aside, he was a serious man who believed in serious pursuits. It was becoming increasingly apparent that her acting career didn’t make the cut. At first, he’d seemed charmed. My California dreamer, he called her. He ran lines with her in the living room and met outside of auditions for recaps on the subway. But now, as he smiled plaintively across the table, she could see that he was less happy and more surprised, like a parent discovering that Santa Claus was actually real. He’d answered the letters and eaten the cookies and left the presents under the tree, but he’d never expected a fat man to come sliding down the chimney.