Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “You did not give me the time.”

  “You never asked the time.”

  “Had you ever melted the freezer burn off that pretty little shoulder I would have asked the time, the date, the place, and so on. You were cold.”

  “You were skiing. That’s all you did. You skied, and then you left. You skied and went away to be famous.”

  “If I was famous then you bet you’d have jumped my bones.”

  “Don’t go down that road.”

  He claims he does not remember dancing with me. He does not remember anything about the Red Hat except drinking there. He remembers hating Jack. He remembers looking for Angela.

  Angela was a black woman, a student at Cabot. When Milo told me about her we were lying in the dark. My head was on his shoulder and I said, “Do you remember the night you practically broke down my door? Before we met?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “You were looking for Angela.”

  “I was looking.”

  “Who was Angela?”

  “She was sharp.” There was a long minute while Milo let all the air out of his lungs. I jump-started him in the ribs with my elbow.

  “Angela was like a knife in your heart to look at her,” Milo said, and I didn’t mind then, that he was talking about some other woman, because this was a conversation we had when we were first together. It wasn’t complicated yet. “She was beautiful,” he said, and I didn’t dare speak, because as he told me, something else was happening. The air in the room became delicate as porcelain, that might break with the wrong words. I knew, by the way his voice was tight in his lungs, that he was telling something he had never told.

  “You have to understand you don’t see women like that where I grew up in New Hampshire. Not in the White Mountains, that’s for sure. Aptly named. Except for my sister. Angela looked like Bobbie—small and lean with big muscles in her legs. She was a runner. She was from Chicago. She had wide eyes like a deer’s eyes, you know? Big. Scared, you think, when you see her sitting alone? In the library? But no, turns out not scared, mad. Pissed. A mouth from Chicago that was nothing but lip. I was running after her that night.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “She wouldn’t go out with me. Told me I was nothing but a white boy.”

  “Why would she say that?” I said, and picked up his hand in the dark.

  “Because I am a white boy, Charlotte, don’t you know that?”

  When he said it I could feel him smile in the dark. Next to my scalp where his jawbone rested, the flesh of his cheeks went back up toward his ears.

  “Really?” I said, and wondered, why would he say a thing like that? I asked him, but he never explained, not in so many words.

  The glass in my hand was getting warm and the beer in it was flat. “I’m going to the girls’ room,” I whispered in Jack’s ear, but he pulled my head onto his lap. He didn’t like it when I left. He liked me there, where he could have his hand under the back of my sweater, or holding the back of my neck, like a glass. Down on his lap where he’d pulled me I could see the pills of cotton on the red plaid of his shirt.

  When I sat up a little, there was Milo across the room talking to freckly Katrina. She laughed at whatever he was saying to her, with her lips pulled back off her teeth like a horse’s.

  “Bathroom,” I said again to Jack, and got up, sidestepped my way out from behind the table and leaned over a little bit so the opening of my shirt lined up in front of Jack’s face, just for him to see. He reached in the open neck and grabbed me on the breast.

  “Jack!” There was a split minute there where I nearly sobbed. I had bent over him on purpose, privately, because I was interested in being wild, or seeming wild, and what he did made me feel caught, cheap. Not wild at all.

  “Be right back,” I said, trying not to mind. I even winked at him. I saw Andy leering after me, digging an elbow in Jack’s ribs. Jack grabbed him by the hair. “Don’t scam my girlfriend, asshole,” he said. I turned and walked across the room with a backside sway for their benefit. ’Cause it’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas; they watched me, head-bopping to the Stones on the jukebox. If I wished for some other kind of admiration, I didn’t know what it was, and it’s true I liked them looking at me. If they didn’t look at me I’d have felt like a loser. A dog. A hogan. That’s what they called ugly girls. She’s a real hogan. Who knows where they got the word.

  The bathroom at the Red Hat was down a narrow, dim staircase. The stalls were gross with soggy paper and cigarette butts and grim sex graffiti on the walls, about skiers and their poles, and there by the door handle was some small writing on the pale pink paint that I read because how can you not read something? and it said: big black dick. Jesus. It made me wince. I left without even washing my hands.

  Coming up the stairs the jukebox was stopped and I heard voices. A guy was saying “Why not?”

  A girl said: “Oh … it’s no offense, you know …”

  When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw a couple talking in a dark alcove near the fire exit. The guy had his back to me but I could tell it was Milo. The girl was Katrina. “Uh-huh,” said Milo. “I get it.” He turned away from Katrina and I saw he had seen me, he had the look of somebody caught. I went to the bar to get another pitcher of beer.

  Is Katrina Milo’s girlfriend? I wondered. Big black—Once you read something like that you cannot unread it, you can’t keep your brain from coming up with these things, little loose wires. I didn’t want to think it, but there it was. I tamped it down, banished it. Katrina and Milo. I couldn’t imagine it. Katrina with her freckles, kissing Milo with her perky lips. Milo seemed too, I don’t know, intense for Katrina, who liked to write her name with a little smiley face dotting the i.

  It’s not like I paid a great deal of attention to Milo then. Just idly sometimes. I tried to imagine Milo with the various women who hung around the skiers, and I couldn’t. Some of them were incredible ski racers themselves, and some didn’t ski at all. There were the beautiful ones, with the blush of apples in their snowy cheeks. Their hair was long, restrained by plain velvet bands, and was often some shade of blond. They wore no makeup, or makeup that looked like none. Their earrings were tiny and gold. The ones who were not beautiful made up for it in spunk and adorableness. They were muscular, with button noses, and treated the men, even their boyfriends, like brothers, punching and backslapping and tussling. Probably they would have said I was different. I felt different. I had clothing that showed my skin, earrings that hung down, heels that were probably too high for snow. I was from California, is how they would have explained it. They were from New England, most of them. Milo, too, from New Hampshire.

  “Who’s Milo with?” I asked Jack once.

  “Oh, he’s active,” said Jack. “Don’t worry about Smilo. He’s getting it all the time.”

  “Ja-ack,” I said, “don’t be crude.”

  “Why fo’ you wanna know?” he said. “Milo gets hisself plenty a trim.”

  That whole time in college, I never saw Milo Robicheaux really with a woman, although he was always flirting, always had a girl to dance with, somebody different hanging on his arm, always somebody white.

  I brought the beer to the table. Katrina was back sitting there and Milo now, too. But not next to each other. Maybe all his girlfriends were black, I thought. Perhaps he had a whole other, private black life that I knew nothing about and couldn’t possibly imagine, one that was beyond the limits of a white person to fathom. But I never saw him with the other black students on campus, who mostly sat apart, mostly didn’t mingle with the whites much, and apparently not with Milo, either. This was not something I thought about, as in: why, or if anyone cared. It was the way things were. So maybe, probably, Milo did go out with white girls. And why not? Who would have a problem with that? The fact he was with us, made us all feel … what? Noble. We were hip or full of brotherly love and we didn’t have a problem because Milo was with us. He was our friend.
/>   “That Milo guy seems white,” Claire said once. “It’s like he’s a white guy. I never even notice that he’s black.”

  Right, he was just Milo, one of the guys on the team. How could Claire not notice? Was I the only one who noticed? Was that wrong?

  “Snacks!” Milo said cheerfully, when he saw the beer I brought. “Heeeyyy Charlotte, man! Be so kind as to give us some of that refreshment.”

  I put the pitcher down and Milo reached across for it, pouring beer for me and around the table. “Beasts!” he shouted, that winning smile on his face. “Beasts on the hill and beasts off!”

  Jack started to force-feed me sips of beer. “I don’t want any more,” I said, and pushed the glass away. “I’m tired.” He kissed me but there was beer in his mouth, which he let go and made me swallow.

  “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he said.

  Milo and one of the other guys got up to dance, pulling women off bar stools. I pulled Jack. “Dance,” I said.

  “Fuck dancing,” he said, kissing me and pushing me back against the red vinyl of the banquette where we sat, so the table moved backwards as his hips came up and he tipped me sideways. We were capsized down now, lying on the bench. I was giggling. I was going “Jack! Jack!” and laughing, and I was kissing him back. It was normal then, at that hour, at our age, in places like that, for people to be making out. Claire was, with Scott. They were over at a different table, had been for an hour, and you could see his hand under her sweater. Nobody really looked but everybody knew. And Jack’s was under mine, but not the back now, the front. So, since I was pretty drunk, and the room was rocking pleasantly, as if buoyed up by water, I had this distant feeling of watching from afar, watching myself lying down there on the bar’s back bench, eyes shut and Jack’s hair hanging into my face. Kissing.

  But then I heard somebody rummaging under the table by my head, crawling around on the floor near where Jack had me pinned on the bench. Somebody said, “Goddammit.” I started to push Jack off, but he pressed me back down and put his hands up by my eyes so I wouldn’t stray away from him. And then he heard, too. Some guy was under the table searching for something. We both opened our eyes, me and Jack, and saw that it was Milo.

  “What the fuck you lookin’ at?” said Jack, and he got up so fast I was suddenly cold. “What’re you lookin’ at, asshole?”

  “Lost my wallet,” said Milo, standing up. “Can’t find my goddamn wallet.”

  “Keep your eyeballs in your head, pal? Okay? Is that clear?” Jack said. He had his finger pointed up near Milo’s chin. He was taller than Milo, stringier. They were staring at each other so you could just about see fur raised up on the backs of their necks.

  “Calm down,” said Milo.

  “Keep your eyeballs in your head, okay?” Jack glanced over at me where I was sitting up, dazed and blinking. I was straightening out my sweater when I realized it was open from Jack’s adventures with the buttons and that my breast—one pale one—hung out like a bare bulb in the dark bar. “Button up, Charlotte,” Jack said. “Milo’s never seen it.”

  Now. Now it’ll happen.

  Milo just moved his nostrils. He tensed toward Jack but pulled back in time and stayed still, staring Jack down, and I could see he hated Jack so much. Hated him. Narrow eyes, tight lips whitening. He turned, practically military, on his heel, and slammed his hand against the wall, hard.

  “You’re an asshole, Sutherland,” he said. “Ya prick.”

  Big white prick.

  “Milo,” I said, “I’m sorry—”

  “Shut up, Charlotte,” said Jack.

  And I did. I shut up.

  5.

  Everything went back to status quo status after that. They were very har-har-har, pat your back, hey man how’ ya doin’ kind of guys together. Jack, Milo, the other racers, all got along fine. Skiing was not a group-effort sport so it was easy for them to have team spirit, even though what really mattered was: Every man for himself.

  And for Jack it was him for himself and me for himself. Every crumb and scrap of me for him, no leftovers. After a month or two, I was beginning to feel this. He wanted me to live in his dorm room, put my clothes in his closet, my books on his shelves, myself in his bed. He liked to wrestle me. He liked to get me pinned with my arms twisted behind. He could do pretzels with his legs. Mostly this was horsing around. But then when I said Mercy, sometimes he kept on, sitting so my lungs were half crushed, rib bones nearly touching front to back. “Jack! Jack! Stop it!” struggling words out. He’d maneuver around, holding me down, looking straight at me, with this flirting smile. “Make me,” he’d say. “Say you’ll do whatever I want.” He enjoyed this. “Say it.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” I said, gasping.

  “Say you’re mine.”

  “You’re mine,” I said, and smiled at him. I said it because it still seemed like a wish that could come true. And his beauty was like a spell. It mattered. I won’t say it didn’t. I fell for his face every time. Girls looked at me, asked, Oh my God, what was it like to be so lucky as to have Jack Sutherland to sleep with, gorgeous all night and in the morning? “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “That’s a good girl. There’s my Kitten.”

  Kitten was this name he gave me in the Burlington Airport before I flew home for Christmas. We had been together since early November. We were sitting on the floor of the airline terminal because the hard metal arms of the chairs dug into our ribs when we held on to each other.

  “Three weeks apart,” he said. Jack was staying in Vermont, training at Stowe, and then going to Canada for a Nor-Am race. It was a big deal for him.

  “There’s always the phone,” I said.

  “I’ll forget what you look like.”

  “I look like this,” I told him, and made a gargoyle face.

  “That’s funny,” said Jack. “Like, weird funny, not funny ha ha ha.”

  He said, “Here’s your assignment: You have to think about me every day, all day.” He demonstrated. “Like: breathe in, Jack, breathe out, Jack, breathe in, Jack, breathe out, Jack, et cetera. Okay?”

  “I do that anyway,” I said, fibbing.

  “Do it more, then, when we’re apart.” He got a package out of his backpack. “I want you to sleep with this,” he said. The package was wrapped in pink paper with a white ribbon. “This reminded me of you.”

  Inside the package was a stuffed kitten. White fluffy fur. Pink bow, a bell around the neck. Blue glass eyes. I hated it. I couldn’t think why, I just hated it. But Jack, he got tears in his eyes, watching me open it.

  “So cuu-ute,” I said, rubbed its stuffed animal fur on my cheek.

  “Merry Christmas.” He thought I loved it. He tried to say something, got choked up, tried again. “I’m not a sentimental guy, Charlotte,” he said. “But when I think of you, in my mind? I call you Kitten. You’re my kitten,” he said. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Me, too.” I wanted to miss him. Hoped. Kittens are born with their eyes closed. People drown them, tie cans to their tails, I thought, and wanted to tell him to see if he would laugh, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he would laugh at.

  “Secretly I was expecting you’d give me a little something,” he said, moping. “A memento.”

  “I was going to get you something from home,” I told him, but he looked disappointed. “Wait. Here.” I reached up to the crown of my head, where the longest hairs grew, and gave a sharp tug so several came out in my fingers, long cellophane threads. “Keep these,” I said, as if it were something dramatically meaningful you would do if you really loved someone.

  “Your hair.” He stretched the strands taut. “Charlotte’s Web,” he said. “Some gift.”

  “I don’t have anything else handy right now.”

  “I’ll lose these.”

  “You could eat one.” As a joke.

  “Charlotte.” Jack looked at me.

  “No, I mean it.” Suddenly I did mean it, and waited to see what he would
do, as if I were conducting some perverse sort of test. “You have to eat one.”

  “No way,” he said.

  “Yes way.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  “Crazy about you,” I said. The words went with the movie in my head, with the scene about the parting of lovers.

  “Really, you have to,” I said. “Eat.” And he did. I must say I was surprised. I gave him sips of soda to wash it down.

  “Good,” I said, laughing. Which was cruel of me but I didn’t care. He was crowding me. He was going too fast.

  “What was that for?”

  “It was romantic.”

  “Oh.” He thought about it. “You mean, so now I’ll have a little bit of you with me always.” His face was troubled. “Forever, right?”

  “Right.” I felt guilty then so I said it. “Aww, Jack. You know I love you.” That was the first time. He was so happy he kissed me all the way to the gate. I love you, too, Charlotte, till all the passengers were loaded onto the plane. I pulled away then, backing down the loading tube. Jack stayed behind with his hands jammed down into his pockets, velvet ropes keeping him back.

  Home in California, my sister Diana demanded a picture of Jack. “Ow,” she said, looking at one of him on the mountain, his eyes little chips of the blue sky behind him. “Mr. Right.”

  I shrugged.

  “How can you not be in love? Jesus, Charlotte!”

  “I am, I guess.”

  “You guess?” Diana shouted. We were in our bedroom, lying around.

  “Don’t shout, Di,” I said. “Mom.”

  “Mom would love this.”

  “Probably.”

  Diana was sixteen. She had kept on with the pageants till last year but quit because she had not done well. She was very tall, nearly six feet, and pretty, I always thought, more than me, because of her lips, which were full and what they call bee-stung. Plus there was something vulnerable in her face, despite the fact she was constantly smiling. But it would take awhile for her to handle all that height. She was clumsy, tripping on her own feet. Still, Mom was loyal to her, drove her around to dance lessons, took her to the preliminaries for Miss Napa County. Diana didn’t get past County. She had kept up with Kids for Christ but she didn’t care about it. “Bunch of dips,” she said. “They’re not normal kids. They’re brainwashed.” She went because of our parents, because Mom and Dad had been so disappointed in me. She didn’t want to be another Charlotte in their eyes. She had one more year left in high school. She wanted a boyfriend but she didn’t have one, although she did have a prom dress already, my dear little sister.