Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “Tell what?”

  “Who I am,” I said, fishing. “What you want. What Rick meant. He said I’m your first … first?”

  “Fuck first!” Milo said, his voice low, the words like sparks. “You’re not my first goddamn anything,” he said. “I’m the one who’s always the fucking first. First this. First that. I’m everybody’s goddamn first.”

  He got up and left.

  Out in the living room I could hear him. A smash. Cursing. The sound of keys. He was pacing. Another crash. The telephone picked up and hurled. This was the first time I saw his red temper. It was familiar, like home, this sudden anger. One fell swoop. I couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, that had set him off. The word first.

  Five minutes went by. Fifteen. The refrigerator door opened. I heard ice cubes. Milo came back to my room and sat on the bed with his back to me. He did not say he was sorry. He had a glass in his hand, and smelled of scotch.

  “I wasn’t asleep in the car when you were talking to Rick,” I said.

  “So, now you know,” Milo said quietly.

  “Not really,” I said. “I want to know. You know all about me, my checkered past.”

  “My past is not checkered,” he said. “It’s snowy. Basically, really snowy.”

  “Does that make you sad?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know,” he said. “It makes me nothing. It is what it is and I don’t think about it unless people try to think about it for me.”

  I put my hand lightly on his shoulder but he flung it away and moved off, the way people do when they are afraid that sympathy will make them weak. He sat on the windowsill and looked out. When he started talking again it was to tell me the story about Pearl, about the summer he turned fourteen.

  Pearl was a little girl he knew as a child in New Orleans where he was born. She was some kid he played with in the summer, when he went South visiting relatives. Milo loved Pearl at first sight, although at the time they were four years old. He never said he loved her. But he even remembered how she had her hair the first time he laid eyes on her: in soft twists, held at the ends with big white beads on rubber bands. He said, I thought you could eat the beads; I thought they were gumballs. When he heard her name was Pearl, he thought those were the pearls in her hair.

  The story he told me was about how Pearl wanted to see real snow and how he tried to get her some.

  In the middle of the winter, when he was nine years old, Milo took a plastic Tupperware container from his mother’s kitchen. He zipped it inside his parka and rode a chairlift to the top of Loon Mountain and filled it with snow. The way he told me I could see him doing it, see him putting the container back in his parka, bombing all the way down the expert black diamond trail, a little boy whooping and jumping spread eagles. He got home and stored the snow in the freezer and kept it there all winter, till school got out, despite his mother yelling “Get this thing out of my Frigidaire!” And he took it to Pearl all the way down in New Orleans, packed in a cooler.

  When Milo was telling me this he was smiling at himself. In his face you could see the excitement he felt at showing Pearl the snow. You could see the crestfall of his old disappointment when he opened the lid of the container and saw a small lump of gray ice, lingering dully in a puddle.

  “Pearl was laughing,” Milo said. “But I couldn’t stand it, I was so mad. I tried to tell her, with snow, you had to feel it, see it coming down on you, see the way the flakes are different, you know.” He wanted Pearl to know how it felt, speeding down a cold slope so the wind makes tears come out of your eyes. “But it was not something I could get her to understand,” he said. “Snow, New Hampshire, what it was like in the White Mountains. She just didn’t understand what it was like.”

  “What was it like?” I said.

  He lifted his eyebrows up and lowered them down as if the effort to explain was sheerly too much for him to bear. As if he had given up explaining. “All I did was ski, anyway.” He shrugged. “That was it for me, since I was five, six.”

  Where was Pearl now? I asked him. He shook his head and said he hadn’t seen Pearl since he was fourteen years old, the last summer he spent at home. New Orleans. He called it home.

  “You loved her,” I said.

  “I was a kid.” But he smiled. “Yeah, I had plans for her that year. I had bought her a little ring, a little silver ring with four bands in a puzzle.”

  “I remember those,” I told him. “I had one.”

  “I thought about her all winter long,” Milo said. “How pretty she was, buying the ring, keeping it secret in my desk, taking it apart, putting it together, taking it apart. Supposed to be doing my homework.”

  “So what happened,” I asked, “when summer came?”

  “Twenty-six hours of driving. Straight on after Louisville, Kentucky, where we always stopped the night. We never stopped after that because in those days you couldn’t stop in the South. Take your own gas can, food. Piss in the woods. Finally got there. Rushed right over to Pearl’s house, the minute we drove in, and she had some fellow on the porch with her, some big older dude. And he sits just staring at me, saying nothing, till I turn right around back to my grandmother’s.

  “Later Pearl comes over and she politely explains this guy told her not to go speaking to me. ‘Sorry, Milo,’ she says, ‘but I can’t come out with you this summer like we did before.’ And that was it.”

  He sat on the deep sill of the window looking out. I thought of walking over and pulling his head to my shoulder, to soothe him down. But there was no getting near him. He was stiff and charged with telling me, making me understand. What the snow was like.

  “I don’t care about the past, anyway,” I said, after enough time. “Just the present.”

  “The moment, you mean,” he said.

  “Yes, the moment,” I said. “This moment. The one after that.”

  “And then?”

  “Quite a few more moments following those.”

  “Which adds up to what? Tomorrow morning? Next week?”

  He was looking hard away from me now, playing with his watchband, jabbing the metal fastener into the different notches on the strap.

  I went over and leaned on him, ran my hand along his backbone, under his shirt. In the dark I could feel sweat on his body, feel his heart pounding with old anger. He stood up and I rested my head on his chest, listening to the banging in there, stroked the length of his arm till he calmed down. “Shh,” I said. I seduced him. Took off his clothes. Handled him and whispered things. I was wanton, just abandoned any concern over what might come out of my mouth. You know I never cared about anybody like this, just you, love you. I said that without thinking of whether it was true. Milo did not say it back. I saw his eyes close and he winced as if the words were hitting him somehow, maybe ecstatically, I couldn’t tell. He wrapped his arms around me so that the breath halted in my lungs.

  God, he said, but not that he loved me.

  I would make him. I love you, I said. I was relentless and savage. Debauched and reckless. I could make it all right for him, make it up to him, all that time in the White Mountains. He needed me. Me. I could save him. I warmed him up, nursed him, salved his wounds. Milo, don’t ever leave me. Got him worked up so much, that then—that was the night he said it. I love you, Charlotte. Do you hear me? Jesus! He said it in the dark like it made him so angry, to feel that way about me.

  13.

  Milo’s parents didn’t like me.

  We went to see them in October. It was Milo’s idea.

  “We’ll go for just a weekend,” he said.

  “And sleep there?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll be nervous,” I said. “I’ll be a wreck.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “They’ll hate me.”

  “If you think they’ll hate you, they’ll really hate you,” he said. And that was the end of the conversation until the Friday we left. I was packing at home and he called.

  “Ju
st pack some hiking boots or something like that.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Sweaters.”

  “Okay.”

  “And nothing—” He stopped. “You won’t need anything frilly.”

  “See?” I said. “You’re worried they won’t like me.”

  “Charlotte,” he said. “Don’t be nervous.”

  Well, he was the nervous one. Not that he would admit it. Driving up he was quiet, singing, sometimes, with the radio. After about an hour, he looked over at me and said, “So, you’re the first girl my parents ever met. That I’ve brought home.”

  So Rick was right! I thought to say, but didn’t.

  “No way,” I said. “How is that possible? You’re twenty-five years old.”

  “I’ve lived on my own since I was sixteen,” he said. “My parents never really met any of my dates.”

  “Well, are they ever in for a treat!” I said.

  “Like I say,” he said, “be yourself. Here, put your hair back up.”

  Be yourself. Put your hair back up. As if he had no confidence I could pass the test, sleep on a hundred mattresses and still feel the tiny hard pea under the feathers, prove I am worthy. His parents were the king and queen. They loved Milo and his sister, Bobbie, fiercely. They were like a sci-fi force field around their children, making them strong and protecting them. When Milo and Bobbie were little the parents did not hit them, ever, and later, never cut them off, no matter what they did. Not when Milo brought me home. Not later when Bobbie had a child and never married its father. But that didn’t mean they would like me, or what I was: a college dropout mannequin with a blond education. Just what a mother wants for her son, I thought. Not to mention the wrong race. It worried me, staring out the window at the landscape.

  “It’s pretty,” I said, after a long quiet.

  “Looks fake, right?” he said.

  He was right. Rugged Mountain was a town with quotation marks setting it off, down in a valley with the White Mountains looming all around, blazing with fire-colored leaves. The buildings were old and darling with gingerbread woodwork. Hand-painted signs hung over stores that were all charmingly named: A Bear’s Place, Drop O’Joe, The Ragged Sleeve, Pock Hollow Hardware. There were three churches on the main street. Grinning jack-o’-lantern leaf bags sat out by the driveways of white houses with wooden shutters, pumpkins and hay bales piled on every porch.

  “Pease Engineering,” Milo said as we passed a gleaming corporate campus on a hill. “Where my dad works.” I watched Milo’s face as he drove, washed with the feel of his town, narrating: That’s where we used to ride our bikes for sandwiches. That’s where we used to go for sodas after baseball practice. See that building? I painted that building, the whole thing one summer. We saw a sign saying Rugged Mountain Ski Area 3 miles. We’ll go up there maybe later, Milo said. I’ll show you around. We passed a coffee shop called Clark’s Route 4. That coffee shop? I worked there one summer. They put my picture in the window when I won. They have good pie.

  When I got out of the car Hattie came toward me smiling, her eyes full of kindness. She put out her hand and said, “Charlotte, how lovely to meet you. Do come in.” Formal and charming like her son. She was beautiful. Her dark hair was pulled up elegantly and had a dramatic white streak in it from the forehead back along the right side. She wore dangling brass earrings twisted with silver, a long skirt. Her eyes were wide and hazel in her pale brown face, like her son’s eyes, but hers with circles purpled under them. She stood very straight and she looked right at me when I talked, so sometimes I felt I had to look away. As if she could see things I didn’t want her to see.

  Mr. Robicheaux—even years later I could never call him Milton easily, it was not formal enough—was intimidating, tall and trim and dark as Milo with a straight back and salty trim beard. He peered down at me over his half-glasses when he shook my hand. “Miss Halsey. How was your journey?”

  “Just fine, Father,” Milo answered, like Beaver Cleaver.

  Then Mr. Robicheaux looked at my bag and looked at his son. “Milo?” he said, his eyes drilling holes at the luggage. Milo jumped, picked it up, and carried it in. He went right upstairs and left me alone with his mother.

  Hattie tried but she did not like me. I bustled around in the kitchen while she worked on dinner and attempted to help out. “Sit, sit, sit now,” she kept saying, as if I were an annoying young beagle. I didn’t want to sit. In my house everybody helped out in the kitchen, except the boys. I didn’t like what I thought she might be thinking, with me sitting. I’m not waiting on her. Just what does she think I am anyway? Next she’ll be wanting me to starch and iron her petticoats, make sausage curls in her hair.

  All that self-conscious second-guessing that I had stopped lately with Milo was happening again here in his old home, with his parents. I was not exactly anyone you would want in the kitchen fooling with the sauce, but I was raised to help out. To me it showed respect. I set the table but Hattie rearranged it. She thought I didn’t see her but I did. There were carrots to be peeled and I offered to peel them but she wouldn’t show me where to find the peeler. Sit, sit, I’ll do it.

  Milo was outside with his dad. I saw them through the window heading for a barn. I was all set to go join them till Hattie came to stand next to me, fondly watching them. “They pretend it’s work,” she said, “but in fact they love to cut wood, the two of them. Milton enjoys it.” Which I took to mean I ought not disturb their sacred manly chopping by the woodpile.

  She was always polite and warm to me. She embraced me when I arrived, when I left. But there was something deliberate about her manner, willed. I could see her lips press together whenever Milo would touch me. He did it more than usual, on purpose, I think, picked up my hand and held it there, on top of the family dinner table, smack in the middle of polite conversation about how he and I met a long time ago at Cabot College and ran into each other again in the city. I saw her skimming glances toward us and our hands, even as she smiled and asked politely, “And what did you take your degree in, at Cabot?”

  “I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t finish,” I told her. “I started working instead.”

  “Well,” said Hattie. “Milton and I both worked all through college.” She didn’t intend to sound critical, I know, but that’s how it came out.

  “Charlotte’s a fashion model,” Milo said.

  “How nice,” his mother said, as if it wasn’t.

  Milo rescued the conversation so we all talked gratefully about baseball and had a lovely dinner by candlelight with classical music playing. Guitar music. Segovia, Mr. Robicheaux said, when I asked him. I looked around their house and realized that it surprised me, black people listening to classical music. Black people with silver candlesticks, oil paintings on the walls, old leathery books on their shelves, sport vehicles in their long wooded driveway, a grand old staircase with carved banisters. The house was a hundred years old and had once been part of an inn. I had been to Milo’s apartment in the city and to his enormous place at the beach, but that was different. He had these trappings because he was Milo Robicheaux, the skier, the famous man on TV. Although he had told me about his family, I’d had only a vague idea of what to expect. You have to remember this time was way before you ever saw any ads or shows about black families where the parents were doctors and their children went to the country club. So for some reason I had imagined Milo’s parents having a small plain house with a picture of Jesus on the wall, or one of Dr. King.

  There were no pictures of either of them, but many old ones of dark-skinned people in starched collars and bustled skirts, the fashions and the sienna tinting making them look the same, to me, as the few pictures of my own family from that time. And then there was the pageboy hair of Milo’s young sweater-girl mother, flipped over her Peter Pan sorority collar, and the side-parted hair of his young bow-tied dad, from the fifties. They had met at college in New Orleans, the first in their families to go, and Hattie had worked as a posta
l clerk to put Milton through graduate school for his engineering degree. Then, when Bobbie was seven (ribbons and white gloves) and Milo just five (mini Boston Red Sox uniform), the Robicheaux family moved to New Hampshire. The walls and mantelpiece held many snapshots of all the darling ages of Milo and his sister. After dinner I lingered over one of them, a black-and-white theatrical portrait of teenage Bobbie wearing what looked like a toga, a crown of leaves on her head. She had her mother’s pale complexion, and her hair was unleashed around her head in the picture, lit from footlights. She was beautiful in the way goddesses are supposed to be, strong and serious.

  “That’s Bobbie when she played Antigone,” Hattie told me. “At Boston University. She directed and acted in an ensemble that performed the plays of Sophocles, the Oedipus trilogy, Electra, and those.” She pronounced it Eed-a-pus, and I had no doubt that was the proper way to say it, whoever Oedipus was. She took the picture from my hands and gazed at it. “Mercy me,” she said. “I’m no actress, but I still remember one line she taught me: ‘There is no happiness where there is no wisdom; Proud men in old age learn to be wise.’ ” She turned to me and smiled. “I’ve learned a great deal from my children.”

  “She’s very beautiful,” I said, not knowing what else to say, distracted by wondering if what she quoted was some coded message to me. “She’s stunning,” I added, for good measure.

  “She’s a brilliant girl,” Hattie said, as if correcting me. She had corrected me for real, earlier, when in conversation I said “Milo and me.” “Milo and I,” she said, her hand on my wrist. It took me a second to realize she was talking about my grammar.

  Milo came over to us then, to rescue me again. “Yeah, Bobbie’s the brains in the family,” Milo said. “I’m just the brawn.”

  “Oh you, stop,” his mother said affectionately. “You can do whatever you put your excellent mind to and you know that.”

  “Ha!” Milo said. “I got your goat.”

  “Now quit, Milo,” said Hattie, girlishly swatting him. “I just try to encourage you children.”