by Brit Bennett
* * *
—
BY THE EARLY 1990S, her acting jobs began to dry up for good. No director had much use for a blonde in her thirties who hadn’t yet proven to be a star. She played a few older sisters on a handful of network shows, then a teacher or two, and then her agent stopped calling her at all. She felt too young to be washed up, but then again, she had ridden an improbable string of luck. Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune—she had been given whiteness. Blonde hair, a pretty face, a nice figure, a rich father. She’d sobbed out of speeding tickets, flirted her way to endless second chances. Her whole life, a bounty of gifts she hadn’t deserved.
She became a spin instructor for two years, the studio placing photos of Charity Harris on the flyer to attract customers. But she grew tired of sweating all the time, her legs twitching and cramping, and so, in 1996, she finally decided to go back to school. Not real school, she told everyone, laughing at the thought, but realty school. She’d sold ads for shitty products on daytime television for years, why couldn’t she sell a house? On her first day, she sat awkwardly at the tiny desk, staring at the handout the teacher was passing down each row.
What Clients Value in a Real Estate Agent:
Honesty
Knowledge of the housing market
Negotiation skills
She could learn most of this, she told herself, except for the first bullet point. She had been acting her entire life, which meant that she was the best liar that she knew. Well, second best.
* * *
—
IN HER FIRST YEAR at San Fernando Valley Real Estate, Kennedy sold seven houses. Her boss Robert told her that she had the Midas touch, but she privately called it the Charity Harris effect. She had the type of face that people vaguely remembered, even those who had never watched Pacific Cove. Everyone thought they knew her. And of course, the Pacific Cove fans always showed up to her open houses, long after the show had ended.
“I never thought it was right what happened to you,” one woman whispered to her once in a Tarzana model home. She’d smiled politely, guiding the woman through the hallway. She could be Charity if they needed her to be. She could be anyone, really.
Before each open house, she felt like she was back onstage again, waiting for the curtain to rise. She tweaked the decorations, swapping out framed photographs of stock families. A black family became a white one, a soccer beanbag chair became a basketball, a horn of plenty tucked inside a cabinet in exchange for a menorah. A model home was nothing but a set, if you thought about it, the open house a grand performance directed by her. Each time, she stood behind the door, bowing her head, as jittery as the first time she had ever taken the stage, knowing that her mother would be out there in the audience watching. Then she put on a big Charity Harris smile, opening the door. She would disappear inside herself, inside these empty homes where nobody actually lived. As the room filled with strangers, she always found her mark, guiding a couple through the kitchen, pointing out the light fixtures, backsplash, high ceilings.
“Imagine your life here,” she said. “Imagine who you could be.”
Part VI
PLACES
(1986)
Sixteen
By 1981, Mallard no longer existed, or at least, it was no longer called Mallard.
The town had never actually been a town at all. State officials considered it a village but the United States Geological Survey referred to it only as a populated place. And although the residents may have created their own boundaries, a place has no legal borders. So after the 1980 Census, the parish redrew town lines and the residents of Mallard woke up one morning to learn that they had been allocated to Palmetto. By 1986, Mallard had been scrubbed off every transit map in the area. For most folks, the name change didn’t mean much. Mallard had always been more of an idea than a place, and an idea couldn’t be redefined by geographical terms. But the name change confused Stella Vignes, who stood in the Opelousas train station, staring at the map for ten minutes before she finally waved over a young black porter and asked the best way to get to Mallard. He laughed.
“Oh, you must be from them old days,” he said. “Ain’t called that no more.”
She flushed. “What’s it called, then?”
“Oh, lots of things, lots of things. Lebeau, Port Barre. Supposed to be Palmetto but some folks still call it Mallard. Folks stubborn like that.”
“I see,” she said. “I haven’t been back in a while.”
He smiled at her and she glanced away. She’d traveled as plainly as she could, afraid to draw attention to herself. One simple bag, her wedding ring tucked inside. Wore her cheapest slacks, pinned her hair back like she used to, although now it was beginning to streak with gray. So she’d touched it up with a rinse before leaving, embarrassed by her own vanity. But what if Desiree dyed hers? She couldn’t be the old twin. The thought terrified her, looking into Desiree’s face and not seeing her own.
Like leaving, the hardest part of returning was deciding to. For months, she’d tried to imagine any other way, but she was desperate. She hadn’t heard from her daughter since she’d visited from New York City with a photograph, and Stella found herself staring directly at her past. She didn’t remember taking a picture at her daddy’s funeral, but then again, she didn’t remember much of that day. That itchy black lace scraping against her legs. A pinch of pound cake, spongy and sweet. A closed casket. Desiree pressed into her side. Her sister, somehow knowing what she wanted to say even if she couldn’t.
In the backyard, staring down at that photograph, she fell just as silent. She knew, before she even opened her mouth, that she would lie, the way she’d always lied, but this time her daughter wouldn’t believe her.
“It’s like you’re incapable of telling the truth,” Kennedy said. “You don’t know how to do anything but lie.”
For months, she’d refused Stella’s phone calls. Stella left messages on the answering machine, humiliated by the thought of smug Frantz listening to her beg. She had even spoken to him once or twice; he always promised to pass along her messages, but she couldn’t tell if he was just pacifying her to free up the line. Then six months ago, Frantz told Stella that her daughter had moved out. “She’s gone,” he said, “and I don’t know where. She just left one morning. Didn’t even leave a forwarding address. There’s still boxes of her things and she won’t even tell me where to send them.” He seemed more inconvenienced by the junk he was storing than the fact that Kennedy had abandoned him. Stella panicked, naturally, but weeks later, Blake received a postcard from Rome, written in their daughter’s hasty scrawl.
Went to find myself, she wrote. I’m safe. Don’t worry about me.
The language bothered Stella most of all. You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be. And wasn’t her daughter already doing that? Stella blamed the dark girl, who’d stalked her daughter around Los Angeles, who’d tracked her, somehow, all the way across the country. The girl was determined to prove the truth to Kennedy and she would never give up. Unless. In her office, Stella stopped pacing, slumping against the door.
She knew what she had to do: tell Desiree to call her girl off. She had to go back to Mallard.
So when Blake left for business to Boston, she booked a flight to New Orleans. As the airplane descended, she wrung her hands, staring out the window at the brown flatness. She could always go back. Turn around, buy a ticket to Los Angeles, forget this whole foolish idea. But then she imagined that dark girl appearing, again and again, and she clutched the armrest as the plane rattled gently onto the runway. Now, in the train station, the lanky porter smiling at her, knowing somehow, she was sure of it, that she had returned from a place she had never imagined that she could leave. He pointed at a bus stop.
“Puts you down right outside Mallard,” he said. “Ha
ve to walk from there, I’m afraid.”
She hadn’t ridden a bus in years. He nodded toward a pay phone.
“You could call your people,” he said. “Have someone come get you.”
But she wasn’t sure if she had people anymore. Instead she said, “It’ll be good to stretch my legs.”
* * *
—
ONCE MALLARD WAS NO LONGER MALLARD, some joked that the name of the diner ought to change also to the name people had long been calling it: Desiree’s. “Y’all goin by Desiree’s” became so common a refrain that by the 1980s, there were children born who had never remembered a time when the diner had been called anything else. The town ignored the faded coffee cup on the roof still bearing Lou’s name, which he didn’t appreciate, but he was old now. He leaned on Desiree for everything; she was head waitress and manager, she hired and fired cooks, she changed the menu when she felt like it. She was the face of the establishment, framed, for years, within its black-and-white windows. Lou would leave the diner to her when he died, he’d always said, although Desiree said that she didn’t want it.
“I got a life outside Lou’s,” she said. “I don’t wanna be stuck in here forever.”
But what was that life, exactly? Sometimes she didn’t even know herself. Early, still coming and going. Her mother’s unraveling memory. Her daughter, living across the country. She’d visited her in Minneapolis in the winter of 1985. The two had walked arm in arm down the slushy sidewalks, bracing themselves against the unexpected ice. She hadn’t seen snow like this, real snow, in almost thirty years; on one corner, she closed her eyes, fat flakes falling onto her lashes. She was thinking of her own first winter in D.C., Sam taking her ice-skating downtown, laughing at her wobbling. The whole rink filled with young colored people like them, holding hands, the flashier skaters twirling and slicing across the ice. Even the Santa Claus swinging his bell on the curb was colored. She had never seen a Negro Santa before and stared so hard, she nearly lost her balance.
“It’s supposed to snow all week,” her daughter said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
“What you sorry for? You can’t control the weather.”
“I know, but—I wanted it to be nice for you.”
She brushed ice out of Jude’s hair. “It is nice,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”
Inside the grocery store, the lights glowed brightly and her daughter trailed behind, slowly pushing the cart. Desiree grabbed a bundle of celery. She’d offered to cook—insisted on it, really, having seen the sad state of her girl’s cupboards. Nothing but cold cereal and canned food.
“I should’ve taught you how to cook,” she said.
“I cook.”
“Too many smart girls don’t know how to keep a house anymore.”
“Well, I do, and Reese cooks too.”
“Oh, that’s right. Y’all are—what’s it you call it?”
“Modern.”
“Modern,” she repeated. “He’s a nice boy.”
“But?”
“But nothin. He seems sweet. I just don’t understand why he won’t marry you. What’s he waitin for, the Grim Reaper?”
“Well, what about you?” Jude said.
“What about me?”
“And Early.”
Desiree reached for a bell pepper, startled by the sudden seize of tenderness she felt just hearing his name. She missed him. Imagine that, grown as she was, still missing him. She’d called him after she’d landed in Minnesota. She’d never been on an airplane before, felt as brave as if she’d leapt across the face of the moon. She wished he was with her but he’d offered to stay at home with her mother. Desiree was beginning to realize that it could be dangerous leaving her alone.
“Oh, that’s different,” she said.
“How?”
“Y’all are young. Don’t you wanna start a life together? Hand me that onion.”
“We have a life together,” Jude said. “We don’t have to be married for that.”
“I know, I just—” She paused. “I don’t want you to be gun-shy. Because of what happened to me.”
Desiree studied a bruised tomato, unwilling to look at her daughter. She didn’t like to think about the fights her daughter might have seen, that brutal education in love. Jude wrapped her arms around her.
“I’m not,” she said. “I promise.”
* * *
—
FOR DINNER, Desiree cooked shrimp creole and rice in their tiny kitchen. She stirred the saucepan, gazing around the apartment at the mismatched dining chairs, the orange loveseat, Reese’s photographs framed on the wall. He’d started freelancing for the Minnesota Daily Star. Small assignments, usually, like Little League games or business openings. On slow days, he worked bar mitzvahs and weddings and proms. Sometimes he wandered around for hours until his fingertips turned red, shooting the tentacles of ice freezing across a lake, or a homeless man huddled in a doorway, or a worn red mitten wedged in a bank of slush. He said that he hated the cold but he’d never been so productive. He’d sold one photograph for two hundred dollars. He wanted to save up to buy a house.
“I just want you to know I’m serious,” he told her. “About your daughter.”
And he did look serious, perched on the edge of the couch, wringing his hands, so serious that she could have laughed at his earnestness. Instead, she squeezed his arm.
“I know, baby,” she said.
When she’d first moved back to Mallard, she never imagined herself here, sitting on a used couch in Minnesota across from a man who loved her daughter. All week, she went with Jude to campus, staring out at the students trudging past, bundled to their eyes, and couldn’t believe, still, that her daughter was one of them. Her girl had gone out into the world, like Desiree had done when she was young. A part of her still hoped that she had time left to do it again.
“It’s foolish,” she’d told Early when she’d called. “I don’t have no business startin over. But I don’t know. I wonder sometimes. What else is out there.”
“Ain’t foolish at all,” he said. “What you wanna do?”
She didn’t know, but she was embarrassed to admit that when she imagined leaving Mallard, she only saw the two of them in his car, driving a long road to nowhere. Just a fantasy, of course. She would never leave Lou’s, not now, not while her mother still needed her.
Her last night in Minneapolis, snow thundered on the roof and Desiree cracked the blinds open, peeking outside. She was holding a coffee mug that Reese topped off with whiskey while Jude cleared the dishes. His photographs spread across the table, snapshots from their life in Los Angeles. Jude rested her hand on the back of his neck as he leaned forward, pointing out the different parts of the city he’d shot. The pier at Manhattan Beach, the Capitol Records building shaped like a spindle of records itself, a humpback whale they’d seen in Santa Barbara. The people they’d known, the friends left behind, shots of crowded rooms during parties. It was strange, seeing a city she had only watched on television, through her daughter’s eyes.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
She was pointing at one photo in particular, shot in a crowded bar. She wouldn’t have noticed it at all if not for the blonde girl in the background, grinning over her shoulder, as if she’d just overheard a joke. Her daughter shuffled the picture back into the pile.
“Nobody,” she said. “Just some girl we knew.”
Later that night, falling asleep in bed beside her daughter, the boyfriend gallantly offering to sleep on the lumpy couch, a little embarrassed as he carried over his pillow and blanket—as if Desiree didn’t know what went on between the two of them when she wasn’t under their roof, as if she didn’t know what would probably go on the moment she left, between two people who were young and in love and so relieved to be freed of that old lady who kept asking when they would get married—she kep
t thinking about the blonde girl in the photograph. She didn’t know why she was so struck by her. The girl just looked like California, or what she imagined it to be: slender and tan and blonde and happy. She thought about calling Early if it wasn’t so late, if she wasn’t going to see him one day later, if she wouldn’t have been so embarrassed by the fact that she still wanted to call him in spite of all of that. And did you know Jude does things like this, she would’ve asked him, befriends white girls? It’s a new world, ain’t it? Did you know the world is so new?
* * *
—
BY 1986, Big Ceel was dead, a fact that Early Jones only discovered reading the paper in Dr. Brenner’s office. He was waiting with his mother-in-law, or, rather, a woman he had begun to think of as such, when he saw a photo of the man, pages deep into the Times-Picayune, below the headline LOAN SHARK FOUND DEAD. Stabbed, it turned out, over a card game gone wrong. Seemed fitting, in a way, that Ceel, a man who’d built a life on lending and collecting, would meet his end over money. At the same time, it seemed disgraceful, dying over such a small sum. Forty dollars, the paper said. Forty dollars, shit. Of course by then, Early knew well enough how little men were willing to die or kill for. He’d seen worse, more risked for less. Still, it stunned him to learn about Ceel’s demise in such dispassionate black print, almost as much as it shocked him to discover that Ceel’s government name was Clifton Lewis.