Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  I copied him. He was smiling at me. The music slowed down. The orange light was warm and dim. We drifted toward each other and his arms came up to circle my hips. I’m not sure whose idea it was, to keep dancing through the slow song, but there I was, with my head on Milo’s shoulder and my pale arms around his neck. His dark brown neck.

  I have never touched a black person before, I thought. Not even to shake hands. There was the safe rub of his white cotton T-shirt under my cheek, the laundry smell of it mixed with sweat and smoky air; there was the warm weight of his jawbone resting on the crest of my sideturned head. I have never. Holding my breath. Down along the length of my jeans were his tan trousers, the buckle of his belt above mine. I felt his arms solid around me, the skin of his fingers damp and light on my back. We danced in an ambling circle, like tired people resting. His knees touched my knees. My arms were around him. He was just enough taller than me. It was nice. There was none of that cheap pressing-together of the hips or any wandering of the hands up and down the spine. There was just me, without meaning to, lifting my head and pulling back to look at him, and smiling right at him. And him smiling back, down at me. We stayed like that, dancing and smiling, our faces close but apart. And then, as if we had determined something, I dropped my head to his shoulder again, with my face now toward his neck, so I could feel the temperature of his skin on my cheek, my ear pressed close to his collarbone. I could see the dark dots of his sparse beard whiskers shaved down close to his jaw.

  I had thought to ask him, chattering Who is Angela? Why were you looking for her that night? Why were you kicking the doors? But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything.

  After a minute, the music got fast again, and Milo lingered his arms around me till the beat was nearly too fast for touch. Just then Jack came back from taking his leak.

  “I can’t leave you alone with a woman for five seconds, Smilo,” Jack said, and pulled me.

  “Hey,” I said, pulling back.

  “Waahht?” Slack-jawed Jack.

  “I was dancing with him.”

  “Oh. Well. Excuse me.” Jack stepped back elaborately.

  Milo raised his two hands, flat of the palm down for peace. “Nice to meet you, Charlotte,” he said. “Later, Jack.” He winked at us and moved off into the crowd of people.

  We left the party, Jack maneuvering me through the crowd. On the way out the door I saw Claire, back against a corner. The guy in the flap-hat was still talking to her. He had his hands on the wall above her shoulders so she was in a kind of arm-trap. She was trying to open her eyes. She kept pushing the guy away, but then he would have to catch her because she was falling. “Claire!” I said.

  She focused briefly, saw me and rolled her eyes. “Oh God,” she said, and I started over to her, but Jack pulled me outside and down the steps.

  “What a slamhound,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “That Claire. She’d do a tree.”

  “She’s my friend.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” he said. “She did Scott, you know?” Jack took my hand and reeled me out away from him. He watched me as we walked, our breath cold puffs. “You’re so fucking lovely, Charlotte,” he said to me. “God.”

  4.

  He did not take his jeans off or his boots or his shirt. He lay me flat on the bed. He pushed me down on the mattress, kissing. I had my eyes open, waiting for him to say my name or touch my cheek. He didn’t; didn’t see I was watching him. Shadows fell on his face in stark stripes when he moved into the light. He kissed away, with his lips turning opposite to mine, left, right, left again. His hands spelunked around my body. I waited, hoping to feel love, hoping Jack would open his eyes and see I was there. He just screwed on ahead, unbuttoning buttons so his shirt fell open, pulling mine off me, greedily unzipping me and then himself and that was that. As it was happening, when he called my name as I lay there, eyes open, I was thinking: Yes. He’s calling out for me. I felt I had won some prize. I was safe. He was calling my name, he needed me. But I was surprised by how, immediately after, when he was quiet, my throat clotted up with sadness.

  I felt him by my shoulder, breathing through his nose, could feel the fast pump of his heart through the rib cage, my own heart knocking against his, and was sad. He had called out, “Charlotte!” which made me think he was vulnerable to some truth about me, that he knew me somehow. I moved aside to look up at him, still waiting, thinking Now he will say something. Now I will know if this is it. But instead I looked away when he rolled and pushed up on his elbows to see me.

  “God, Charlotte,” he said. “It’s disgusting how beautiful you are, everyone says so.” As if he hated me. He fell back and fell asleep.

  His hair was long around his face, soft. Mixed in with my hair on the pillow it was hard to tell whose was whose. The lids over his eyes had a sheen of sweat, the bones of his face lay under the skin in clean lines, a blue worm of vein at the temple. Jack was beautiful himself, as a postcard. His long elegant body stretched the length of the bed, muscles under the flesh like ridges of sand shaped by waves.

  You lie there next to somebody like that, you think maybe you’ll find out some private truth, examining him up close without his knowledge. You research the face for information: Who is this, lying there? What has just happened? What does he think of me? I was eighteen years old and I was wistful for love. Just what that meant, I was not sure. All you need is love. God is Love. Hunk a hunk a burnin’ love, John Lennon and the Gospel of John mixed up with Elvis. Love was due to arrive soon, I hoped, perhaps announcing itself in full bloom, in the shape of someone I kissed, some look flowering in the cold Vermont night.

  Watching Jack, I checked to see if it was going to be him, wished. But I couldn’t tell, even now, our skins touching.

  His bed had a smell of wool and gym clothes. I sat up and pulled my T-shirt down, got my jeans back on. Jack rolled up on his side, didn’t wake when I stood up.

  Big posters of ski racers papered the walls of his room: Billy Kidd with his scrags of hair jutting out under his hat, Jean-Claude Killy blurred in midair. Golden ski trophies were lined up on a shelf next to a collection of beer glasses, steins, and pilsner flutes and mugs: Mad River House, Oktoberfest, Squaw Valley.

  A picture was taped up over the desk. It was a Japanese erotic print, of a man and a woman, their long black hair pulled back and held up with chopsticks. They were lying on pillows in painted kimonos, little white socks on their feet with a space sewn for the big toe. The man had his leg up and the woman held her skirts high, showing exaggerated genitals yearning toward each other, like pets on leashes. But their faces were formal, revealing no sign of bliss.

  Jack woke then and saw me looking. “Hey,” he said. “Yeah. Japs doing it.”

  “Tch. Jack.”

  “Come here.”

  I went and sat on the edge of the mattress. Jack’s shirt was pushed up to his ribs and his jeans bunched down, hanging off one foot. He didn’t reach to pull them up. He was smiling at me, naked and frank.

  “I should go now.”

  He propped himself up on his elbows and tried to sit. “Whoa,” he said, “I’m still partially wasted.” He rolled his eyes and swung his feet over the edge, holding his head. “Okay, so, I’m experiencing technical difficulties,” he said. “Give me a kiss before you go, huh?”

  I kissed him, lips to his cheek.

  He held up his hands in the shape of a camera. “Click,” he said, winking, pressing his finger down as if releasing a shutter. “Click, click.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Snapping your picture.” He was grinning, charming.

  “Why?”

  “Proof,” he said. “Evidence. I mean, I wish I could, you know? Snap, snap. Photo evidence. Else no one would believe it: I got Halsey. In my bed. Shit.”

  Jack stood up. He pulled his jeans back on, buckled the belt, and wrapped his arms around me. “Charlotte Halsey,” he said.

  When he said my name, hope flared up a
nd burned me again. Now he will really look at me, he’ll see. Because if Jack really looked he would see my nervous stomach, my troubled sleep. He would see Charlotte who was not certain about much except that Christ was not her Personal Savior. Who was? I wondered. Jack?

  “Charlotte,” he said again, but his eyes missed somehow, they closed before they got to mine.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”

  “You’re my Charlotte.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I said, for safety. I smiled and winked, since winking seemed to have important meanings for him. “See ya, Jack,” I said, and let myself out.

  Walking back to my room, with the bleak sun just leaking over the tops of the mountains, I pulled my arms up inside my parka and wrapped them around my shoulders. My legs were spongy and my lips hurt from kissing. He said You’re my Charlotte, yet I did not feel possessed, or swept away, not smitten or lovesick, more like: flawed. Perhaps I was incapable of tidal-wave emotions or was just mistaken about what love would be like. Everybody wanted to win Jack Sutherland, so what was wrong with me?

  Back in my room, I fell onto the bed.

  Claire stirred and rolled over. “Where you been?” she asked.

  “Jack Sutherland.”

  “Oh God, he’s a god,” said Claire thickly. “My God.”

  We got whispers after that, all around Cabot: Look who’s with who. Catch that. Check out Mr. Ski Team, I heard them say. She’s taken. Yeah, and look who’s got her. What, are you surprised?

  Jack sat with me now, at breakfast and dinner, stood with his arms around my waist while we waited in the cafeteria line, walked to classes holding my hand. It wasn’t my idea anymore. But I didn’t stop it. Of course she’d be with him, somebody said, overheard by Claire in the girls’ room. The envy surrounding us—because that’s what I believed it was—played on me so that I began to like it. They’re just jealous of you, Charlotte, sweetie. You have what everyone wants.

  “Shit, Charlotte, you got him, you got him,” Claire said. After a week or so of this, I guessed I had got him, and came around to the belief that being with Jack was fate happening, love falling. “You’re so fucking lucky,” said Claire.

  “He’s really fabulous,” I told her. I was on the bandwagon then. We became an item. Jack and Charlotte. It seemed we moved in our own pool of light, matched as siblings: hair, height, eyes, the West Coast in our voices. We kissed at parties, danced till late, fell drunk into bed, grappled at clothing. This was our great love: not much talking, not much that happened in daylight, just the receipt of gossip and glances, just drinking, loud laughing, bed: a carousel of parties.

  Jack only ever told me the bare bones about his life: He was a Squaw Valley kid, a mountain rat, he called himself, raised by his mom the ski instructor. “We had, like, skis on our feet when we came out of her,” he said. “Me and my brother Karl have been skiing since Day One,” he said. “Karl is into freestyle,” which is how he explained that his brother lived in a van, traveling wherever the snow took him, working just enough to pay for lift tickets and beer. “My mom is into freestyle, too,” he said, explaining: “Not ski-wise, but you know, kind of free. Follows the snow.” The only way Jack could talk about anything was in terms of how it related to skiing. He once mentioned how his dad left, for example: “One day he just goes and moves out and leaves, because he was more into Alpine skiing, and he thought it would be better if he just went back to Switzerland, because that was where Alpine was happening.” As if skiing was the reason. The dad was a wealthy Swiss guy and now he owned some chemical company there. Big Swiss Cheese was how I thought of him. “I call him whenever I win,” Jack said. “He doesn’t like to hear from me if I lose. Used to pound the crap outta me if I didn’t place.” He said the last part under his breath and didn’t elaborate. It was the one time I heard any sadness, under the bravado in his voice. But Jack hardly ever lost. That year, his junior year, he was winning all the slalom races on the college circuit. He was competing in the national races, too, on the weekends, whenever he could. “I knew I’d get you,” he said to me once. “I’m used to winning.”

  About a month after I started up with Jack we went to a bar in town called the Red Hat. It was one of those places like a packed cave. All the tables and chairs there were rutted with the carved initials of Cabot College students going back to the 1940s. The floorboards were damp from a marinade of spilled beer. The walls were covered with framed pictures of skiers who had won fame for the school, big white Cs on their navy-blue sweaters.

  Jack pulled me past the bar into the back, where lamps hung down over pool and foosball tables, making cones of smoky light above each one. A group of ski racers was sitting in the corner, and when they saw Jack, they started snorting like warthogs: “Owgh, owgh, owgh.”

  Cabot skiers were known as party animals, a term that made me think of pets wearing conical hats with elastic bands under their furry muzzles. “We’re party beasts,” Jack liked to say. “Not animals. Beasts.”

  “Owgh, owgh, owgh,” the guys at the table snorted. “Jack-ee, heeeeyyyy, Jack. Hee-eeeyy, Charlo.” Jack sat down, pulled me onto his lap. Parker, a ski jumper with a hairless babyface and legs like telephone poles, handed us mugs, foam up to the rim.

  Jack raised his glass and shouted: “Beasts on the hill, beasts off!” and we all had to smash our glasses together and snort like warthogs some more.

  I enjoyed this, I loved it. All those evenings made me feel like part of something, a happy warm litter of skiers with our private jokes and snorting toasts. None of this behavior would have been allowed in our house, where first of all, there was no drinking. Alcohol touched no Halsey lips. Until mine, that is, starting in about the ninth grade, behind the rows of bleachers and in the backseats of cars, in the basement dens and woodsy tree forts of my friends. We did not get drunk, not really, but we drank. A beer lasted all night between us. It was thrilling and wicked if unoriginal. My parents would have worn out the knees of their pants in prayer, or the seat of my pants in punishment, had they known. Which they did not, not until the Dave incident. “Charlotte?” my daddy would have said. “She’s a pink lemonade kinda girl.”

  Most of the ski team saved the bestial sort of partying for Saturday nights like this one, except for Jack. He was known for winning no matter how much he drank the night before. He could hold it, they said. It had no effect on him. The only other racer who came close to Jack’s caliber of party beast was Milo Robicheaux.

  Milo had the reputation of being a straight-arrow wildman. Meaning he never lost control, no matter what extreme thing he was doing: dancing on the roof; skiing behind a car at 45 miles an hour; walking a second-story window ledge from dorm room to dorm room. Everybody liked Milo. “Heeyyyy, man, how are ya?” Milo called everybody “man,” even me. “Hey, man, Charlotte, see ya later.” But all the guys on the team talked that way. Everything they did, Milo did, too, just with more fuel. He skied tucked into a shape like an egg, at speeds that would crack and break him if he fell. Milo was a downhiller, which meant he had to fly without wings, sixty miles an hour. To miss a turn meant a date with rocks, with trees, with massive internal injuries or paralysis or coma.

  He had fallen that day at practice. A bad one. Everybody had seen it. The whole team. And now they were ranking him about it. He had slid down the whole mountain, got up and skied away.

  “You took a digger, man.” This was Scott.

  “A grave digger,” said Andy.

  “It wasn’t any digger,” Milo said scornfully. “I was upright. I was upright at the end. Admit it.”

  “You were upright,” said Scott.

  “A digger is when you don’t get up, okay?” Milo said. “It’s when you leave a dent in the hill. Technically, that is the definition of digger. Am I right?”

  “But you were tumbling,” said Jack. “You were wiped out.”

  “You were the Agony of Defeat,” said Andy. “You did the course facedown.”

  “I got
my weight back too far,” said Milo, “coming over that bump. I got my wings flapping? Whoaaaa, baby! I nearly pulled it out. But, fuck. No recovery.”

  “I was watching you, man,” said Jack. “You were a tumbling dice.” Milo laughed. He was liking the stories about himself. He was backflapping with his arms like wings, showing how he had tried to recover.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “When you slid the slide, on your belly? I was sure your whole face’d rub off, and there’d be, like, a black trail streaked behind you in the snow, you know?”

  Everybody laughed. Rub off black in the snow, they said, that’s funny.

  I looked at Milo to see if he thought this was funny.

  Yes, he was laughing. It was okay. You could see his teeth. He whacked Jack on the back, ha ha ha. “Yeah,” he said, winking. “Well, don’t you know, the day you fall like that, my pal, Jackie boy, it’ll be a red trail streaking out down behind you. It’ll be blood.” He smiled, just charming, and everybody laughed. He had Jack in a neck-collar hug. He was giving him a scrub on the head with his knuckles.

  “High five, bro,” said Jack. And Milo high-fived him. He was such a good guy. He was everybody’s favorite on the team, like a mascot. “You are one bad-ass dog, Milo, dude,” said Jack.

  “Ruff-ruff,” said Milo, and growled with his lip curled.

  I laughed when he did it. Just quietly. Milo saw that I laughed. The way he noticed made me turn my eyes away. It was a look that said You know he’s an asshole, don’t you? I sipped my beer and nuzzled around in Jack’s neck, played my finger around the collar of his shirt. Milo got up and left after a while and Jack told more stories. I think now that whenever Milo was around I stuck closer to Jack, touched him more, smiled at him, like I had something to show, or hide, or prove.

  What Milo remembered about those times is that I was cold. “Frosty queen,” he called me to himself.

  We had conversations about it like this:

  “I was not cold. I had a boyfriend.”