Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “Home,” I said to Jack. “Sure am. Are you?”

  “Nope,” Jack said. “The whole ski team’s staying here for training up at Stowe. Got a race Christmas Day. Hardcore, right?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and drained a glass of juice and grinned at me. He was giving me looks, winks and smiles.

  “So how’s the team doing so far?” I asked. Always ask the man questions, Charlotte. Be a good listener. My mother’s voice again.

  “Best in the West, Beast of the East,” said Jack. “As usual. Division One champs again, for sure.”

  “Downhill? Or slalom?” Be knowledgeable about the things that interest men, sweetheart.

  “Who, me? I’m a slalom man,” he said. “I like to ski gates. Gates! It’s technique, not just balls, you know?” He was tapping his temples. “I gotta have my thinking cap on at all times! Downhill is pure balls. But slalom gates—that’s a brain trip.”

  “Are you the best?” I asked him, tilting my face up at him. “I bet you’re the best.”

  “Could be.” He winked.

  “So who’s your competition? Don’t tell me you have competition!”

  “Smilo,” he said.

  “Smilo?”

  “Smilin’ Milo Robicheaux,” said Jack. “New guy. Freshman. Like you.”

  “Milo Robicheaux?” I said, surprised. “I think I met him, last night.” Call me Mortified. I thought of the midnight pounding on the door, the voice coming through the crack, the eloquent apology. “He didn’t sound like a ski-team star,” I said. “He sounded like … a butler. Well, first he sounded like a gangster, and then he sounded like a butler.”

  “Charlotte!” Jack said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “What?”

  “A butler? A gangster?” Jack was shaking his head.

  “Why?”

  “Well, he could get offended, you know?”

  “I don’t even know him. He speaks very properly, is all.”

  Jack snorted. “You’re too much, Charlotte-girl.” He leaned in and smiled, tousled my hair the way you do a child’s. He stood up and stretched so the tails of his shirt came untucked, and I could see a dark cyclone of hair around his navel.

  “Yup, Smilo is Top Dog,” said Jack. “Top Doggie, presidential material, Rhodes Scholaresque, all-round genius, athlete, mother-pleaser kind of man.” There was a jokey edge to the way Jack said that, “A real mother-pleaser kind of man.”

  I remembered this later. Not my mother, I thought then.

  That night there was another party. Jack told me he was going and maybe he’d see me there. Parties were happening all the time at the college: little ones in rooms in the dorms, big ones in the fraternity houses and in the basement of the student union and in the dining halls. I liked all of them, especially the big loud crowded ones that were light on conversation and heavy on dancing. I liked to feint my way through the ogling press of people to get to the beer keg or the punch bowl. I liked the drinking games and especially the language that went with them: juicehounds chugging and funneling, doing shots, getting hammered, shitfaced, wasted, toasted, barfing and booting. All of it seemed wicked, beyond adult rules, beyond the worst fears of my mother and father, and also somehow hilarious and ridiculous. The air of those parties was always moist with longing and possibility. The boys’ arms would come snaking around my shoulders. They’d get my neck in the crooks of their elbows and say “Ooooooh, Charlotte, gimme a kiss.” And often I would, if I felt like it, or if I was drunk enough.

  This particular party I went to with Claire. She was a waify girl from New York City: pale and skinny, with a dark chic cap of hair. She had big long-lash eyes that got bigger when she was drinking. And she usually was, starting at about four o’clock in the afternoon, with a beer from the window ledge, where she kept it cooling. Lately it froze, and sometimes fell in six-packs down three stories into a leafless clump of lilac bushes. Claire would have to go dig for it then, fishing it out of the snow and holding it aloft so her friends in the room above—me included—could cheer. We liked beer, too, but we nursed ours.

  Claire had to drink. She told me why one evening the first week of school, tossing it out as the answer to some normal question as if she were throwing a grenade. “My mother is dead,” she said, “I found her. I was twelve. She hung herself in the barn at our summerhouse.” And then the subject was closed. “Don’t go talking about it.” Right after she told me, she put a record on, with the volume knob turned all the way to the right. Dancing around our room with a rum and Coke. “The lunatic is on the grass.”

  Claire tried everything to pretend it didn’t matter, to remember it wasn’t her fault. So, besides the substances she abused, she used mean jokes and curses, followed by hugs or the touch of her hand, as protection. When she found out I was her roommate she said, “Shit, I had to get a fucking California fucking beauty queen.” And then she gave me the finger. “Just kidding,” she said, and hugged me. She hugged everyone all the time. She tried whenever possible not to sleep by herself, because nightmares followed her like ducklings. Sometimes when she wasn’t sleeping elsewhere, I woke up in the dark and saw her sitting up in bed, the red ash point on her cigarette flaring. “Hey, stupid,” I always said to her. “Go to sleep. I’m right here.” She told me this helped her. She told me she didn’t know what she would do without me. I loved Claire.

  Around nine o’clock that night, she came over to my desk, sucking the top of a brown glass bottle, and said, “Are you coming with me tonight, or not?” I was. I always did.

  We glossed our lips and pulled on big Frye boots the color of golden retrievers. We wrapped ourselves in puffy down parkas. We left behind all the serious students, sitting at desks in their little quiet pools of light, studying. We went rowdily out into the dark campus, along the road to the Delta Upsilon house.

  “Will Scott be there?” Scott was also on the ski team, a guy with thick, bowl-cut hair. He played his guitar in coffeehouses. His body was thin and wiry from skiing around slalom gates but his hands on the guitar strings were red and meaty. He sang huskily and slept with girls who came up and murmured compliments. Including Claire, last weekend.

  “Ummm,” said Claire. “Don’t care.”

  “You said you thought you probably might like him.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  “You better not.” Claire curled her lip at me.

  “I never would, Claire, you know that,” I said.

  “Ahhhh, yes, but everyone wants Charlotte,” Claire said, meanly. “Scott included. Including Scott, et cetera, et cetera.”

  I punched her shoulder. Claire got this way with me when she was nervous. “Besides,” I said, “you know what I want.”

  She started to sing Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a gas, gas, gas. Of course I had told her about Jack, about the way he touched my head, winked at me.

  “You’ll get him, too,” she said. “If anyone could, you could.”

  We got near the frat house with its gingerbread-trimmed porch and could feel the shake of the party even as we walked up the sloping path, over the muddy snowpack. Every time the door opened, a phrase of music escaped toward us. We could feel our hearts’ staccato and the color rising in our cheeks as we bounced up the steps where a big-shouldered guy greeted us by saying “Laaaaay-deeeez! Yes!” and stamped our hands with ink in the shape of a naked woman.

  “Aw,” said Claire, disgusted.

  “Grow up,” I said.

  We threw our coats on a pile upstairs and went right down to the beer. Claire filled her cup and started talking to a guy in a hat with flaps that hung down like dog’s ears. They disappeared to the bathroom and did God knows how much stuff up their noses. I waited, sipping beer and looking around at the jammed pack of people, swigging at their cups. The girls in sweaters and jeans raked at their shiny hair with their fingers. The boys squared their bodies in flannel woodcutter
shirts, darting their eyes around the room like snakes’ tongues. I could feel a sifting of men coming toward me, Dan Hirsch, Ted somebody. I didn’t want to talk to them, backed my way away from them, looked around without appearing to look at all. Jack said he would show up. I was only interested in Jack.

  Just then somebody came up behind me and roped me in by the neck, pulling me to his itchy sweater so my cheek was stashed up somewhere next to his armpit. Jack. It was him. “Whooooooo!” he whooped and laughed and beamed his blue headlight eyes down at me. He smelled like smoke and scotch. “Charlotte!” he said. “Dance with me.”

  We started dancing right there in the front vestibule, fast and happy; three, four songs in a row, so that other people started dancing, too, and a space cleared around us. Somebody turned the hall light out. The music slowed down. It was dark but you could still see. Jack was smiling out of one side of his mouth. His eyes were half closed. Earth, Wind and Fire started up, singing “Heart’s Afire,” rhymes with desire. Jack loomed in all of a sudden, with his hands on my shoulder blades and his face right there in front of mine. He planted his lips on my lips and left them lingering.

  I had meant for it to happen. But not like that. Everybody was watching. Even I was watching, kissing him and imagining what we looked like, wondering what did he want, really? Jack’s lips were dry and friendly, tasted of whiskey. Soon he had me packaged in his woolly arms there in the Delta Upsilon entryway, our mouths turning against each other like doorknobs. When I pushed away for air and opened my eyes I saw everyone trying not to notice us, and I had the brief thought that the others were all standing around holding little urine specimens in their clear plastic cups, and not beer.

  “Jackie,” I said, and fell against him laughing. He turned me around, dancing with my back to his chest, walking me through the crowd that way, to the beer keg. Broken shards of plastic cups crunched underfoot in a gray sherbet of old snow and cigarette ash and spilled beer.

  He had one arm around the front of me, the friendly announcement grip: my girl, see? Or maybe not. Maybe he was just trying not to fall. “Whoa, Charlotte!” he said, laughing and laughing. His nose was against my ear. His breath there felt nice. It made the hairs stand up on my forearms, on the back of my neck.

  “Dance with me again,” I said. “C’mon, Jack.”

  I pulled him along after me, to the room where the music was. Somebody had rigged up a dark light with an orange paper shade that made us look like people in photograph negatives, big white eyes and ashy skin. The Talking Heads were singing “Psycho Killer,” and as we danced we shouted the words, smiling as if we were all in on a private joke, punching our fists in the air. “Better run run run run away.…” Then the music heated up and I started to move around all over the place. I liked dancing. Loved dancing. I was having a good time. When they watched me the women on the sides of the dance floor leaned together to speak behind their hands. Somebody said, “Look at her.” The men looked over their beer cups at each other, eyebrows up quick, then down. Jack noticed this, he liked it, I could see.

  Back in the alcohol room, a black guy wearing a cap grabbed Jack’s arm. “Sutherland!” the guy said.

  Jack stopped and hugged him and clapped him on the back and said, “Smilo!”

  That’s the same guy with the skis from this morning, I thought, but when I looked again he had his back to us, moving away. The same guy. He had glanced my way, had seen my double take. “Who was that?” I asked Jack.

  “Smilin’ Milo Robicheaux,” he said, and he started talking in this Gone With the Wind Butterfly McQueen voice: “Dass Mi-lo dat I’s mention to you dis mo-nin’,” he said. “Dassa ace collegiate downhill champeen of de en-tiyuh U-nited States.” He leaned in toward me and whispered: “He’s, uh, black.” He raised his eyebrows, as if repeating a piece of sexual gossip. Winked.

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Well, you’re the one who said he sounded like a butler,” Jack said. “Right?”

  The night before. That had been Milo speaking through my door. I hadn’t seen him. It was the British flavor in his voice that made me choose the word butler, nothing else. “He didn’t sound black,” I said. “I mean, you know what I mean.”

  “Yo, whas’ happenin’ sistah? Damn you dance bad, girl,” Jack said. He was shucking and jiving and holding his hands with the wrists bent downward, one of them resting by his crotch. “Wish I had me a watermelon.”

  “Jack, stop.” But he was funny. He was a riot, popping his blue eyes and rolling his walk and sticking his lips out. I was giggling. I couldn’t help it, snickering and looking around to see if anybody was watching. “Ja-ack.” I laughed. I knew that he wasn’t supposed to be funny but he was. So I kept giggling at him, saying, “Stop! Ja-ack, you’re terrible.”

  “What I don’t get,” he said, “is how come when, like, one of them gets up and imitates a white guy on TV or something, everybody thinks that’s great, that’s hilarious. And the white guy they imitate is always some prig faggot kind of a guy with no personality or anything, like if you’re white you’re, like, dead, and we have to sit there and take it, laugh, ha-ha. But if we do it, right? if we imitate one of them? it’s racist. Am I right?”

  “You’re being racist right now!” I said.

  “Das right, sistuh Charlotte,” said Jack.

  I giggled again. I was uneasy. “Shhhhh!” I held one hand over his mouth and covered the other one over my own mouth. I couldn’t help laughing. He popped his eyes. He licked my hand. He grabbed it where I held it by his lips and he licked it.

  “Oh, spare me,” he said. “Spare me, spare me, spare me.” He got down on his knees and put his face against my waist. “Spare me a dance, Miz Charlotte, you know I’s in love with you. And I have been ever since the day I saw you.”

  “Stop, Jack,” I said, but I was flattered. I pulled him up and jitterbugged him around. He got twisted up and missed the connections to my hands.

  “You’re leading,” he said.

  He got me from the back on the next pass, wrapped his arms around me, moved them up to my face with his hands over my eyes in a blindfold. “Don’t lead,” he said, and kept my eyes covered. Leaks of reddish light came through the spaces between the weaving of his fingers. I felt the callus on his palms and the hard metal of a thick ring he wore. My head was pulled backwards awkwardly on his shoulder. It made me panicky. I pawed at his arms, trying to pull away. He was laughing. “She was trying to lead me,” he said to someone I didn’t see. “She has to learn not to lead.”

  “The blond leading the blond,” the person said.

  Jack took his hands away. “Peekaboo!” he said.

  I blinked back into focus, rubbed the back of my neck. A guy was standing there: green eyes, brown skin. “Or is it the bland leading the bland?” he was saying pleasantly. His shirt was white, tucked into his khakis, which were tucked into the leather tops of the duck-hunting boots that all the students wore, as if Cabot were some swamp.

  “This is Milo Robicheaux,” Jack said. “The skiing phenomenon? Milo, this is Charlotte Halsey.”

  We nodded at each other.

  “Hey, Smilo?” Jack said, unwinding me from his arm. “Talk to Charlotte a sec, willya? ’Cause I gotta go take a leak.” He kissed me on the cheek with a cartoon pucker of the lips and winked at Milo. Then Jack went off outside to the cold bushes behind the fraternity, where guys pissed in the clean snow in fancy patterns or wrote the initials of their girlfriends in yellow letters.

  “Milo Robicheaux,” said Milo. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Again, you mean,” I said. We had to lean in near each other to hear. I shook his hand, which was delicate and dry, with long fingers, the hand of a pianist. “Don’t you mean it’s nice to meet me again?”

  He made his eyebrows go up in a question mark, and I said, “You introduced yourself once already, through the door.”

  “Oh,” he grinned at me. “That must’ve been my evil twin.”

  “Yo
u have an evil twin?” I said. “Is he a champion skier, too?”

  “Now what makes you think I would have a twin who’s a champion skier?” he asked back.

  “Aren’t you?” I said. “Aren’t you some kind of ace downhill racer?”

  “Me and Robert Redford,” said Milo.

  “That wasn’t really Redford skiing in that movie,” I told him. “That was a stuntman.”

  “Are you suggesting it’s not really me on the downhill course?” he said. “Are you suggesting I’m an imposter?”

  “No, I am not.” He was getting me flustered, he was smiling in ways that seemed to carry other meanings, private jokes and references. Perhaps he remembered that morning on the path, somehow knew what I’d been thinking. Black man with skis. But what was wrong with thinking that? Surely nothing. I didn’t know anybody black. My head hurt. There was Milo Robicheaux smiling at me pleasantly. He was attractive. Was he teasing me? He fingered his lips, just absently. He was very handsome. The party was swirling around us in the dark beery room. The music ratcheted up, faster and louder.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?” I said. I am not good at banter. He was wrong about me. I was not what he thought, whatever that was. I would show him by dancing with him in front of everybody. “C’mon,” I said.

  “What makes you think I can dance?” he said, and another stutter of time passed while I considered whether he was mocking me or he thought I was mocking him, or whether I was. Was I?

  He pulled me out into the dancing. The DJ spun a new record, and the Average White Band funked a thick bass line through speakers the size of steamer trunks. Milo could dance. (Of course he can dance, they’re good dancers was the thought that just popped into my head, but I ignored it, tamped it down.) His moves were spare, he was fluid, the way athletes are. I suddenly felt that my arms were flailing too wildly, that I was leaping and hopping like a jackrabbit.