Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  He stirred and blinked and looked at the ceiling. “Hmm?” he said, fighting out of sleep. “What?”

  I told him again.

  He blinked and I could see what I had said sinking in, dawning on him just as the morning was coming around the edges of the window blinds. “Oh,” he said, raising himself up on his elbow. His eyes were baffled and then shining a little bit. Filling in. He put his head down again on his arm. I couldn’t see more than that, just that welling up of something. Disappointment, was it? Or relief.

  “Aw,” he whispered, “Charlotte.”

  “Mm,” I said.

  “We’ll get married anyway though,” he said. His voice was soft and groggy, as if he was dreaming. It was barely light in the room.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good,” he said.

  Talking in his sleep, I thought. I still didn’t expect he meant it.

  Later, when I went to a doctor and described to her what had happened, she told me it was nothing to worry about, that I had had what was called a chemical pregnancy. Pregnant just long enough for hormones to show up in the system, to change my chemistry, turn the stick pink. I asked her about the blood, the first early spot of it. Oh, she said, that was probably what we call implantation bleeding, where a pregnancy attaches to the wall of the womb. In your case, she said, it was not sustained.

  But it seemed to me something was sustained, that some chemistry was altered. Ours. Something did attach, plant itself in my head and Milo’s, an idea or a feeling.

  “I saw how you wanted that baby,” Milo said later. “I never believed you would. Not you. Forget it.” But it changed him and decided something, when he saw how much I wanted it. I wonder sometimes if we would ever have gone ahead and married, if it hadn’t been for that phantom baby, showing us something about ourselves. We’d have broken up. We’d have gone on as children ourselves.

  Who knows.

  Another thing I wonder now: Is that near baby another ghost that haunts us? Does Milo believe with regret and hindsight that I tricked him? Made up the part about the test, the evidence? Does he sit there in jail now and trace his troubles to that first small stain of blood, one that was only a rumor to him? Does he think the whole thing—vials and droppers, crying in his arms—was merely the first time he was wrongfully accused? I don’t know, maybe he does.

  17.

  The ring Milo gave me, at Christmas, was beautiful. It had powers, I swear. When I had it on I felt I was not just some girl but somebody’s true love. Milo’s. My ring. It had a diamond in a teardrop shape, offset with small chips. I am looking at it now, sparkling on my hand. I have always loved it, since he put it on my finger, and I have never taken it off, nor the wedding band, either, not even now.

  Milo told me, It won’t be easy.

  So? I said. It would be the same as any marriage and as different as any marriage.

  Oh really, he said, with sarcastic eyebrows.

  “Don’t think about crashing,” I said, quoting his own words. “Or you’ll crash.” I did a lot of the cavalier talking about this subject, which worries me. “It will be okay” I said. “You’ll see. We’ll be happy. We’re happy now, aren’t we?”

  He smiled and said, “Yes. Yes we are.”

  He wanted to believe me. I wanted to believe myself. We got seduced by the idea of ourselves. We got filled up with We Shall Overcomeism. We thought we were our own personal melting pot, deserving congratulations and gratitude, if not the Nobel Peace Prize: two public figures united in a living, breathing example of how Love was The Answer. If anybody had a problem with us, well, it was their problem, right? Not ours. We were our own little world, unto ourselves, hands cupped around each other’s faces to block out everything but our wide bright eyes.

  I love you, Milo.

  I love you, Charlotte.

  We were really darling. You have no idea.

  Also, we were terrified. What the hell were we doing, marrying each other? We were out of our minds. Oh God, the thought of our families.

  I called my sister Diana first, for practice.

  “Heaven help you,” she said, when I told her the news.

  “Don’t you ever swear?” I asked her, annoyed.

  “You are just going to kill Dad. Just kill him.”

  “Dad will be fine.”

  “You don’t know that. You have no idea.”

  “Aren’t you going to say congratulations, or anything?” I said.

  “Oh honey, I’m sorry, oh Charlotte, yes,” Diana said. “That’s nice you’re getting married, that’s great.”

  She went on for a while about what kind of dress, and sure, she’d love to be the bridesmaid, but soon she was right back to how I was going to kill our parents. Especially Dad. This is the phone conversation when she told me the Family Secret. The story of Dad and the Bottle, the story of The Accident. She made it clear that my phone calls had the power to throw Dad right off the wagon into Johnnie Walker’s arms.

  All of this was nothing more than a covert argument as to why I shouldn’t marry Milo. Good practice, I told myself, for calling Barbara and Arthur.

  “Are you sitting down?” I said into the phone. It was just after Christmas.

  Mom knew right away what I was going to say.

  “You’re engaged!” she said.

  “Yes! How did you know?” Already relief was escaping into my voice: She sounded excited. I could hear her planning the wedding just in those words, You’re engaged. She loved a wedding.

  “And who is your intended?” she asked.

  “Milo Robicheaux,” I said quietly. Of course they knew of him. I hadn’t mentioned anyone else for six months. “Milo.”

  “Well,” said my dad, after a long time.

  “Oh, Charlotte,” my mother said, tears starting, “I think you’re making a mistake. A terrible mistake.”

  My mouth tasted like metal. If you have ever accidentally chewed a piece of foil, that is the feeling I had, listening to my parents. I wanted them to say Oh, how wonderful, darling. Congratulations, you have our blessings. My little girl.

  We are not prejudiced, my father said.

  We believe all men are created equal, my mother said.

  But society, my father said.

  God loves all His children, my mother said.

  What about the children?

  You cannot do that to a child.

  “Do what?” I asked finally.

  “We admire your idealism.”

  “It’s just you have no idea what you are doing,” my father said.

  “Your career will suffer,” said my mother.

  “I’m getting married,” I said, through the metal taste.

  I hung up the phone, sitting on the side of my bed for the longest time. I hated them. Diana said it would kill them, and I half hoped it would. They could stew in their own juice. I would disinvite them. It was touch and go, with Mom especially. Even six weeks after I told her, she was grasping at straws. She called up and said, “What about that nice young man?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The skier, the other skier, the good-looking one. From college.”

  “Jack Sutherland?” I said.

  “Yes, him,” she said. “He’s called here, you know, looking for you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Yes, he did, he’s called you,” she said. “But at first we didn’t know where you were, either, back then when you were … lost to us.”

  Oh, she means way back then, after college.

  “And then he, this time I just thought—Well, he—”

  You just thought maybe I said I was getting married but it doesn’t matter to whom, so you can go dragging out fossils of old boyfriends from six thousand years ago.

  “Listen, Charlotte, he—”

  “Mom, I don’t want to hear anything about Jack Sutherland,” I interrupted her. “Ever again. That was a long time ago.”

  “But he called you. He was in town, in San Francisco, last week
, he said, and he thought he’d come up to Conestoga for a visit.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I had to. Tell him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I felt so badly for him. He sounded very disappointed when I told him. I must say I think he still carries a torch for you.”

  “Well, he can just light himself on fire with it, for all I care,” I said.

  “Charlotte Halsey,” she said, “I am ashamed of you.”

  She quoted me Isaiah: And if thou comfort the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity. I could picture her, eyes closed, preaching into the phone. “Jack’s mother recently died,” she said, “and he is quite alone in the world. He was genuinely concerned about you.”

  Jack’s mother was dead, so I should marry him?

  “I don’t ever want to hear or think about that guy again.”

  I stopped her. I got off the phone. All I really heard was her saying Don’t marry that black one, marry the white one, any old white one. I didn’t listen to what she was saying, about Jack calling—more than once, was it?—and coming for a visit, carrying a torch. But lately I’ve wondered: If I had let her keep talking, maybe only my feelings would be hurt now, and not my throat, my voice, my family.

  All my mother accomplished was to make me not care what anyone thought. I just wanted Milo more. Only Milo. His was the one opinion I cared about now. Oh, and his parents. I cared deeply what they thought.

  Milo drove up to see Milton and Hattie without me. “If you’re with me they will just be polite and not honest,” he said. So he went for a weekend and they were just—dumbfounded is the word he used. “Your liaison” is what they called our engagement, as in “your liaison with this woman.” A liaison was one thing, according to them, which they could abide, but marriage was another. Here’s how the conversation went, according to Milo, who played all the parts and did all the voices of his mother and father talking to their son around the family table:

  “My mom says, ‘Oh, Milo honey, you don’t have to marry her.’ And my dad says, ‘You don’t know that, Hattie, maybe he’s got the young lady in some trouble.’ ‘Milton!’ my mom says. So he asks me, ‘Have you gotten her in trouble?’ and I say ‘No sir, not so far as I know, sir,’ and they can’t really think of another reason why to get married, so I ask them why did they get married, and they say: love. And I say: ‘Right.’ Just like that, waiting so they see what I mean.”

  Then Milo’s father said, “There are practical considerations. Would she be a good mother?” And his mom said: “Yes, what about the children?” and she explained how it was very very difficult for children of mixed-parentage to feel that they belong to one community or another.

  “What did you say then?” I asked him.

  “I said”—and Milo seemed especially proud of this part—“I said, ‘And what do you think it’s been like community-wise here in the woods of New Hampshire?’ ”

  I smiled at him. “Poor Milo,” I said. “No community.”

  “Don’t start that,” he said. “We won’t be teaching them any of your poor-me shit.”

  Them. He meant our kids. It thrilled me, to hear him say that. Little Boy and Little Girl. Tiny sneakers with Velcro, I thought. I had seen a pair on a child, now that I was looking at things like that.

  Milo thought his parents would come around. And they did. It didn’t even take them a day to recover. The phone rang the evening after Milo got back and Milo answered. “Charlotte, it’s for you,” he said. The look on his face was half a smile with a twist of lemon around the mouth, as if he weren’t sure what was going on.

  “Hello?” I said into the phone.

  “Charlotte?” said Hattie, on the other end. “Congratulations to you and Milo. We just couldn’t wait to say how happy we are for you.”

  “We’re sure you’re going to be very happy together,” Milo’s father said formally. They kept saying “happy” like a wish that could come true. “We’re very happy for you both.” Even though of course they weren’t, exactly. It was so moving to me, how their faith in Milo was the strongest I had ever seen, despite all the time I’d spent among the faithful. It made me jealous. Thou shalt not covet, but I did. I wanted that sort of faith for myself, the substance of things hoped for, the Bible says somewhere. Evidence of things not seen.

  It was Bobbie who worried me most. The sister. She appeared in my dreams before I ever met her, wearing that toga and crown of leaves from the picture in her parents’ living room, her muscles rippling, beams of X-ray vision coming from her eyes. Milo talked about Bobbie as if she had wings.

  “Of course, well, you know, Bobbie is a teacher. Bobbie has advanced degrees in child psychology. Bobbie runs a youth program. Bobbie counsels pregnant teenagers. Bobbie was on the front lines during the Boston Busing Crisis of 1976,” about which I was too ashamed to admit I had no idea. Brilliant Bobbie lived in Roxbury, Mass., with Marcus, her boyfriend, a counselor in the Boston prison system. Beautiful Bobbie read everything, in three languages, standing on her head. She did not suffer fools.

  Surely she would hate me.

  Milo had told me how New Hampshire had been a rocky state for his sister. How she sat alone at lunchtime many days of her school life, was hardly invited home with any of the little girls, oh, it made him so mad, how she was never asked on a date, his gorgeous sister, only asked, maybe once in a while, to baby-sit the neighbor’s child. Three years older than Milo, quieter, she could not be rescued by a pair of skis. She hated skiing, hated the people who skied. She left home at sixteen, moved to Boston to board with family friends, attended school there, and Boston College. Bobbie used to want Milo to come live with her. She said, Oh Milo, you’re just missing so much by staying in that white state. But when he asked her if he should give up a shot at the Olympic Team, at the World Cup, she always said, You’re right, Milo. You’ll be okay. “Bobbie has faith in me,” Milo said. “Except she thinks I live too much in the fast lane.”

  Bobbie was going to be traveling with us in that fast lane for the weekend. She was coming to New York. We were going to take her out, show her the town.

  I became preoccupied with all the bad things I had: the blueness of my eyes, for example, and the disaster of my hair, which would never be forgiven by her. I knew it. She would be thinking of plasticky Barbie dolls, and Miss Flyaway Clairol, Dum-dum Doris Day and especially Rapunzel whose suitor is blinded. Plus my skin-deep profession would not impress Her Loftiness. She would be aghast at all the makeup and hair products she would find in her brother’s guest bathroom, which I had appropriated prenuptially along with the closet, now full of my shoes, stilettoed and stacked and strapped. She would open the louvered doors to hang up her simple yet classic clothing and she would gag at the sheer amount of my frivolous stuff.

  I told all this to Claire.

  “Charlotte,” Claire said, “you haven’t even met her. You are not giving her the benefit of any doubt. You are projecting, plus condescending.”

  “Condescending how?” I demanded.

  “You assume that Bobbie Robicheaux is programmed by her appearance to judge you on your appearance. You assume that what you look like and what you do is the preoccupation of every woman. When: it’s not.”

  “Right! Everything I do is condescending!” I said. “I’m a big snob, right? Looking down on everything, including you! That’s what you think.”

  Claire delicately scratched her nose with her middle finger and then left that finger up in the air pointed in my direction. “Why don’t you go play on the thruway with the other trucks?” she said sweetly.

  “I hate you,” I told her.

  “I’ve heard that a little too often lately,” she said, and suddenly her face was stretched out, the jaw pulling down and widening her eyes, lashes batting against tears.

  “Oh, Claire,” I said, “I don’t hate you. I love you.”

  Claire had broken up with Carl. She has a terrible, fatal knack for timing
and finding things she isn’t looking for and doesn’t want to find. She had come home unexpectedly from a canceled class and discovered Carl fooling around with some Amanda. She told him to get out and never call her again. This had happened just after Christmas.

  Now, six weeks later, Claire was jumpy and blue but brave and taking antidepressants. She had been getting better but I had just now made her worse. I was always worried that the sadness that ran through Claire’s system would suck her down so far she would think she had no other choice but her mother’s.

  “Don’t you think,” I asked, “that it’s actually lucky you found out about Carl now instead of—”

  “Really lucky,” she said. “I’m a lucky duck!”

  “Quack,” I said.

  “Quack yourself,” she said. “It’s like saying to somebody ‘Oh, aren’t you lucky you were stabbed in the back and not in the vital organs.’ You are not lucky! You’re stabbed.”

  “I’m sorry, Claire,” I said.

  “Yeah, Charlotte, you’re always sorry,” she said, sadly. “Thanks, though.” She hugged me. It was a bad time between us, since her wedding plans were a shredded confetti in the wastebasket and mine were piling up in brochures on my bedside table, notes by the phone, samples on the kitchen counter.

  Bobbie was arriving. I was nervous, waiting for Milo to bring her home from the airport. When I heard the elevator coming up, my hands got cold. “Bobbie!?” I said, opening the door with a big hostess smile. She was slim and small, standing in the doorway next to her brother. She looked like their mother, with the same white stripe of hair running from the left side of her brow to the crown of her head, which was braided in serious rows close to the scalp, with more plaits hanging down her back. She had style. A gold cut-velvet scarf around her neck, dark bangles up her arms, dangling pendants made of cowrie shells on her ears. She had a strong handshake, spoke slowly and calmly, exactly as she did in my dreams. She did not smile unless she felt like it, I could see. “Charlotte,” she said, “it’s nice to meet you.” So far she had not felt like it.