Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  And there he was: Milo Robicheaux, breathing hard and smiling, talking soundlessly to a sports reporter with that big ice-cream-cone microphone under his face.

  I jumped up and turned the sound back on. But the picture cut away from Milo. There was a guy in a booth talking now.

  “Just an amazing run by twenty-year-old Milo Robicheaux, the American,” he said. “A stunning upset of the Austrian Franz Klammer, making this, I believe it would be, if the time stands, the first gold ever by an American in the downhill and the first gold for a black American in the Winter Games. This could be history in the making, folks.”

  “Hey, Claire,” I called. “Come in here.”

  She came in from her studying with her glasses down on her nose and we watched, sitting on the bed.

  They showed Milo again. He was looking at the time clock. His name was up on the board. Robicheaux, Klammer, Heine.

  “Holy shit,” Claire said.

  “He looks good,” I said to Claire.

  “He looks the same,” she said.

  But on TV Milo seemed huge to me now, suddenly, even though his image on the set was small enough to fit in my hand. He was smiling in the crowd, looking up at the race times with his eyes excited and nervous, joking to his teammates.

  “He always was such a handsome guy,” I said.

  “Oh,” Claire said, pouncing, “now you think he looks good.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Now he’s famous you think he’s cute, eh?”

  “Claire,” I said. “Fuck off, Claire.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I love you. I take it back.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Sorry.”

  Milo had his skis off now. He was holding them and talking to somebody, another racer with a stubby blond ponytail and freckly skin. Milo put his arm around this guy. We watched them confer and nod while the announcers went on about him.

  “Hey, Carl,” Claire called. “Come here and see this.”

  Now Carl was in my room, too, his neat corduroy pants crinkling at the knees where he perched on the windowsill, safely away from the bed. He didn’t approve of me, I knew. “Claire gets so silly with you,” he said. Which usually just made us worse, putting napkins on our heads in restaurants. It made him uncomfortable. “Calm down, girls,” he was always saying. “Down, girls, down!” He made me want to bark loudly or slobber on his coat, just to bother him.

  “What’s this?” he said now.

  “Someone we knew from Vermont,” Claire told him. I liked how she called us “we.” “Look at him, Charlotte!” she said. “Milo Robicheaux! I mean, we used to party with this man. Just a year ago we were at the Red Hat with that guy! We were throwing snowballs at him in the parking lot!”

  We watched while they replayed the footage from Milo’s run. There he was, crouched in the starting gate, his legs coiled to spring. The picture was black and white, the camera tight on his face. I couldn’t recognize him as Milo, not with the helmet and the goggles.

  He dug and skated hard out of the start.

  “There he goes,” said the announcer. “Milo Robicheaux. Nobody thought he had a shot at a medal here today.”

  Milo was tucked right away. He stayed shaped like a bullet, bent low, with his ski poles snapped under his arms and his head down.

  “Here he comes up to the Mausefalle,” the announcer said, explaining that Mausefalle was German for Mousetrap. “This is where three others lost control today, one badly injured.” The announcer explained that no other downhill course had a jump with a pitch that steep. He named some very damaged racer who was being choppered right that moment to the hospital with a broken neck.

  “Oh, God,” said Claire.

  Milo hit the edge of the Mousetrap and hung in the air, still tucked but sailing, a stick-man on my cheap television. He’s traveling at about sixty miles an hour, they said, forty feet off the ground. Look at him, he’s in control.

  He was a dark speck surrounded by white sky. They slowed it down so he hovered, took forever to land. It was not exactly beautiful, given the long spiky skis on his feet, the speary poles behind him; he looked spidery, but for some reason it seemed poignant. Look at him, I thought. He can fly.

  His knees soaked up shock as he landed, and he hurtled on, careening around curves like a car on two wheels. Then he was streaking through the finish and piling into the big foam pads at the end of the course and falling. They showed him being helped up by the crowds, dusted off by his teammates. His chest was heaving. He was gasping for breath, leaning over with his hands on his knees. Finally he stood up, pulling off his helmet and goggles.

  “Oh, my God, are you telling me that was a black man?” Carl said.

  We looked at him.

  “It is!” he said. “Holy shit!”

  “That’s who everybody was talking about,” Claire said. “What did you think?”

  “I thought it was the other guy. I thought it was the blond ponytail guy you were talking about. I thought this one was, like, the caddy, or something.”

  We glanced his way silently so he got nervous. “Well, he was holding the skis!” Carl said, palms up and shrugging. “And, I mean, list me the Negroes you have met while skiing.”

  “Shh,” Claire said. “Quiet, Carl. Listen.” She loved Carl but he was embarrassing her.

  Milo’s time stood. He won.

  “Whoooeeee!” said Carl. “I never would have believed it. Just amazing. They’re getting into everything, you notice that? What with whatshis-name, Ashe? in the tennis? and now this with skiing? It’s really …”

  “Really what?” Claire said. “Really …?”

  “You know,” said Carl, “unbelievable. I mean, it’s great. And you gals know this guy?”

  “Yeah,” said Claire. “We do. We used to hang out with him.”

  On TV Milo’s teammates picked him up and put him on their shoulders. He was grinning. Beaming. It was wonderful to watch. Wherever he was, said Claire, Jack would be green. She was right, but who cared? Milo deserved it. He was amazing. It was a Historic Moment. We were all quiet. Milo was radiant. There was sweat on his face in shiny beads which I remember surprised me; you don’t think, somehow, of snow and sweat mixing. Or perhaps it was something else, how the picture was both familiar and stunning, too. In the close-up, white specks of snow showed in the black field of Milo’s hair. He was looking at the time clock with his chest still heaving, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Not many blacks in the sport of skiing, Billy, am I right?”

  “You’re right, Jim. In fact, there are no other black racers on any of the teams that ski the World Cup. It’s been a bastion of white athletes much like golf.” It was Billy Kidd, the former champion, talking.

  “This is really a breakthrough for young Robicheaux.”

  “I believe this makes him the first black man to win a Winter Olympic medal,” Billy Kidd said. “Am I right?”

  Claire was nodding just slightly as she watched. It was apparently okay with her for the sports guys to say it but not for Carl.

  They cut to a news conference.

  “How did a young man like you learn to ski?” somebody asked Milo.

  “From my mom and dad,” said Milo, “Milton and Hattie Robicheaux of Rugged Mountain, New Hampshire.” He gave the thumbs-up sign, right at the camera, probably right at his watching parents. He was winking.

  “How are you feeling about the fact you’re the first black man to win Winter Olympic Gold?”

  “It feels good to win,” Milo said, not exactly answering the question. He looked happy.

  “What do you think this means for black people in the United States today?”

  “One would hope it means barriers are falling.” Milo was pleasant and smiling. “One would hope it means progress. It’s great to bring home a Gold.”

  “He even talks like a white guy,” Carl said, watching him. “He seems white.”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely,” Claire sa
id, “I mean, even I am blacker than Milo Robicheaux.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Carl said.

  “I remember he didn’t even know—I had to tell him,” she said, “who Malcolm X was.”

  I didn’t know who that was, either.

  “I always thought that, actually,” Claire said. “That he seemed white, Charlotte, right?”

  “You did say that,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “He doesn’t even look black,” Carl said, squinting at Milo in his USA team sweater with the blue field of white stars and the red stripes on the sleeves.

  “Are you blind or something?” I said to him. “Maybe I just have a hangover, but you are not making sense.”

  “What I mean,” said Carl, “is look how he sits.”

  Milo was just sitting there, relaxed and confident, answering questions. Was there a white way of sitting and a black one?

  “Down South, you know what they call a guy like him, don’t you?” Carl said. “We call a guy like that an Oreo.”

  Claire said, “Ca-arl.”

  “It’s not a pejorative, Claire, it’s an adjective.”

  “That would be a noun,” she said. “A pejorative noun.”

  “You both,” I said, “quit fighting.”

  “I don’t see race,” Claire said. “I just see the person.” Carl did see it, she explained, because he was from the South, where, according to Claire, they’re not color-blind like in New York.

  She seemed so sure it was wrong to notice. I wondered: Could you become color-blind once you were fully grown-up? Or, if you had been raised to see differences, could you unsee them?

  Oh, a kid’ll eat the middle of an Oreo cookie and save the chocolate crunchy outside for last…

  Carl whistled the tune of that song—the commercial jingle for Oreos—as he hung around the apartment that day. I didn’t even know I knew the words, but when I heard Carl whistling, I couldn’t shake them. The tune stuck in my head, so that later, when I would read something about Milo, or see him on TV, the Oreo cookies’ song popped into my mind. Thanks to Carl. In the supermarket, even now, when Hallie wants to buy them, I won’t. I just hate the word, Oreo, the idea of somebody’s dry chocolate body, like cardboard; their creamy white insides, sticky white heart.

  After that, I followed Milo in the news. Not like some kind of groupie, or a dumb fan. It’s not like I didn’t have all kinds of things happening to me in those years, preoccupations and boyfriends and big nerve-wracking shoots and trunk shows and traveling all over Europe. This is the time—I was twenty, twenty-one—during which I began to use sedatives. Just Valium, once in a while, for sleep or nervousness in flight. I didn’t have any habits or addictions, just a cheerful readiness to partake of whatever pharmacopoeia was available and whatever party was happening. This is the time when my weight was managed down to about 109.5 pounds, which at five foot eleven made me thinner than I had been since the tenth grade.

  But what I am trying to explain is how Milo dawned on me, how it happened with us. I read about him. I became a Wide World of Sports viewer. From that time, from 1976, Milo won four Olympic Gold Medals. He cleaned up in ’76 and in ’80, both. Between Olympics he won three World Cup ski championships. No one could beat Milo Robicheaux. He was a phenomenon. It wasn’t skiing. Who cared about skiing? It was a back-page, footnote sport. Milo, though, was front page. He was racking up endorsements and press and money. You could see him in ads for cars and sportswear and shaving cream. In the shaving cream one, you saw what you thought was a snow-covered mountain with a graceful skier tracking down the slope. But it turned out to be Milo’s face, covered with foam, a razor making fresh tracks in his beard.

  People all over the world knew him. He was on the level of fame between household word and insider information.

  The first time I ever claimed to know him was late in ’76. I was getting made up for an Estée ad, and the girl next to me, under a beehive dryer, was reading Esquire and there was Milo, on the cover. “He’s gorgeous,” she said. It was Milo without his shirt on, sitting on the seat of a chairlift with his medals around his neck. This photograph later became part of an Olympics calendar and a best-selling poster.

  “Oh, I know him,” I told her.

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s nice.” I always said that. “A nice guy.” I’d see somebody reading about Milo, or hear somebody mention him, and I’d say, “Oh, I know him, he’s nice.”

  I knew things now about Milo that everyone knew, the way everyone knows how many husbands Elizabeth Taylor has had, about her little hair-ribboned lapdogs and her jewels. I knew, for example, about his cars, more than ten, all of them red; how many car accidents he’d had (seven) speeding in the Rockies or the Alps, wrecking the cars but somehow never getting hurt. I knew what Milo looked like when he was a little boy with a rascal grin on his face, missing teeth, bow-tied and blue-blazered in the yearbook, center front in the ski team picture. They never needed to describe where he was in the team pictures, or put one of those little circles around his head. He was always a lone brown face surrounded by white ones.

  One magazine had a picture of him on his first pair of skis. He was four years old and standing indoors by a Christmas tree, with his stripy pajama legs spindling up out of new ski boots, beaming and hamming it up for the camera, already in a downhill position, knees bent, chest resting on thighs, ski poles up under his arms.

  We have that picture on our refrigerator now.

  From interviews and profiles and gossip columns, I knew the Milo Robicheaux story. It was about a young black child growing up in a small New England town, Rugged Mountain, New Hampshire, where his parents had settled after coming north from Louisiana with young Milo and his sister. About how from an early age the boy showed great athletic promise, and when he was given his first pair of skis, there was nothing, nothing! that could keep him from the slopes. His mother, shaking her head, fondly recalls the time her darling devilment of an angel son strapped on his skis and went straight down a hill in back of their house through the woods! and how he came to a perilous deathly rocky overhang! and jumped it! and just missed a giant balsam fir with a massive trunk! only to fall and crack his head open and require fifteen stitches on the crown of his cute seven-year-old head. How in school, despite his being the only black child among whites, Milo was popular and well loved, an industrious kid with a paper route and a lemonade stand and a house-painting business; everybody’s pal and a good student who won spelling bees and accolades as well as national ranking as a junior skier, and finally a full scholarship to the prestigious Vermont Ski Academy, proving ground of racers. This is where his mentor, the German, Hans Licht—who died in a tragic auto accident when Milo the young champion was just seventeen—groomed him to become a world-class skier. And of course a paragraph or two about Milo’s remarkable parents, Milton and Hattie Robicheaux, who insisted on their son trying Cabot College for at least one year and were concerned when he dropped out for an Olympic career because they had worked so hard on his behalf. The story told of his dad working as an industrial engineer and his mom driving Milo to ski races and practices in her wood-paneled station wagon, how she preferred to wait outside, reading in the car with the heater running in the cold parking lots of ski resorts, because she was tired of being mistaken for a lost person or for kitchen help when she went indoors to the lodge.

  The story was about cold days on mountains, hours of practice, up and down slopes, training to ski straight down, without pausing, a downhill racer.

  The story was about Milo, how fiercely, fiercely determined he was. Everybody said it. The magazine writers and sports producers got neighbors and kindergarten teachers to say it: Noticed it right away, even as a little boy, how much, how badly Milo Robicheaux wanted to win, to be the best, how hard he worked, how he did not rest, how he trained and worked at it till he got it right.

  Many versions had the tale of how little Milton Robicheaux Jr. had woken from a sound s
leep one night at the age of five and gone to his parents’ room to tell them he no longer wished to be called Milton. Thinking to indulge her son in what she thought was a passing whim, his mother had looked in a name book the next morning and said: How about Milo for a nickname? The book said that Milo was the name of an ancient Greek wrestler, a six-time Olympian. From that morning on, Milton Jr. determined to be Milo, and got it into his head to become an Olympian.

  Every Milo story also included anecdotes of his escapades with his ski team guys. Milo could get laid in any town anywhere in Europe, said his teammate Rick VonDrehle. Milo would just be driving along and women would lift up their sweaters and show him their naked breasts. He was linked to a French actress named Clivia. I saw their picture in Paris Match. She had pouty French lips and dark brown hair that fell over one of her eyes and Milo’s arm around her shoulders. Underneath it said Clivia Nobili arrive au Maxim’s avec son fiancé champion du ski Milo Robicheaux. You didn’t need to speak French to understand that they were engaged. But then it turned out they weren’t. She wasn’t mentioned again. He was linked to this one and that one. It was all very vague, not many details, no interviews with former girlfriends, just that Robicheaux does not deny he is popular with the ladies.

  Oh, there are lots of stories. The one about the U.S. assistant coach who had to resign because he joked that Milo ran on watermelon fuel and fried chicken grease. The one about the Austrian skier who painted the word niger on Milo’s race bib and got suspended from the circuit. And how the French named a race course after him—le cours Robicheaux. They loved his name, Robicheaux, and liked to pretend he was really French.

  But here in the U.S. he was the biggest. He was an American success. He met the president, Ronald Reagan, and was held up as an example to youth and everybody else, that everything was okay here in America because a black man could be on the U.S. Ski Team and be a world champion and be invited to the White House and could shake the hand of the most important White Man in the world.