by Kate Manning
I shrank down into my bones to become shorter, quieter. “Thank you for coming all this way,” I said.
“I had to,” she said. “Baby brother’s getting married.” And now she broke into a smile just like Milo’s. “This is a golden opportunity.”
“Bob-bie,” Milo said, like warning a toddler.
“I’m going to tell Charlotte the truth about you,” she said, “Milton.”
“Oh, God,” said Milo.
I liked her already. She put me at ease, on purpose. It was possibly a ruse, so my guard would be down. She was in control, no question. What she actually thought about me I couldn’t tell, but she was giving me a chance. I could imagine what Hattie had told her about me. A woman like that. She sat down in the kitchen. Milo poured wine. Bobbie said: “So, you probably want to know all about Milton, here.”
“Quit it now,” Milo said.
Bobbie stuck her tongue out at Milo. He was helpless.
“If you let her tell me,” I said, and reached across the table to him, “I promise never to call you, uhh, Milton.” I patted his arm. The big diamond on my finger seemed garish, a traffic light flashing against Milo’s arm. I saw Bobbie looking at it and pulled my hand into my lap, like hiding a sore.
“I’ll just tell Charlotte about Lydia,” Bobbie said.
“Go ahead!” Milo said. “Tell her everything!” He got up from the table and rummaged in the cupboard for some chips. He found some, ripped the bag open so it spilled on the floor. “Goddammit!” The chips crunched and stuck to his shoes.
“Who is Lydia?” I asked, imagining some kind of ex-wife.
“Should we help?” Bobbie asked.
“No!” Milo snapped. “Leave me! Begone the both of you harpies.”
“Lydia,” Bobbie said, “is the name we gave to Milo when I used to dress him up in one of my nightgowns and pretend he was my baby sister.”
“I’ll kill you, Bobbie,” Milo said. “Slowly and painfully.” But he was laughing.
“He was only about five,” she said. “With hair bows.”
“Lydia,” I said, wishing I had a picture of him as her. “Aw.”
“Lydia would like a stiff drink,” Milo said, and poured again.
Bobbie and I had a frivolous conversation about the dress, Bobbie’s bridesmaid fitting, the flowers, the menu, the kind of champagne. I was sure the whole topic only confirmed what Bobbie already thought: See the silly bimbo my brother is marrying, Miss Diamond Teardrop Solitaire with her baby’s breath and her bubbly Dom Perignon and her train of lace.
“So,” I said, “who are you counseling these days?”
“Oh, God,” Bobbie said, “Tanisha. Accchh. Too depressing.” She waved her hand as if directing traffic away from this Tanisha. “Tell me again?” she asked. “You think pale green dresses?”
It was obvious she couldn’t stand me. Wouldn’t tell me anything about herself, or counseling Tanisha, didn’t trust me not to dress her in something sallow.
“So,” Bobbie said to Milo, “are you two gonna jump the broom?”
“Jump what?” Milo asked.
“Lord,” Bobbie said in dismay. “You don’t know?”
You could see how it was with them: big sister, little brother. Milo was prickly around her. She was bossy.
“Even if I did know,” he said, “I’m sure you’d be telling me over again, anyway, Schoolmarm.”
“It’s an old African wedding custom,” she said.
“Oh, here we go now,” Milo said, exasperated.
Jumping the broom, she explained anyway, meant: Sweep out the old and sweep in the new. You got a broom, swept around yourself in a circle, then jumped over it, a symbol of starting a new life.
“Then what?” said Milo. “We all start cleaning up? Couldn’t we do it with vacuum cleaners, just to be modern?”
“Milo,” said Bobbie, “you’re still a flaming asshole.”
“You two quit,” I said. “I’ll tell your mom.”
They smiled at me.
“No brooms,” Milo said to me. “My sister’s always got some radical preposterous ridiculous idea.”
“All the girls are doing it now,” Bobbie said. “It’s popular.”
“Don’t notice you doing it,” said Milo.
“Marcus and I are not the marrying kind.”
Milo raised his eyebrows at that. “You mean Marcus isn’t the marrying kind.”
“Maybe I’m the one who’s not,” Bobbie said.
“Really?” Milo asked her, surprised. “Why not?”
“Questions,” she said.
“About?”
“Patriarchy,” she said ominously.
“Whoa, whoa, never mind, never mind,” Milo said quickly. “Don’t talk about that stuff. Jesus.”
“Relax, Milie,” Bobbie said. “All I said was I had questions.”
She was scaring me. She clearly had all kinds of ideas like broom jumping and words like patriarchy up her sleeve, ready to pull out whenever she needed them. No wonder Milo was prickly.
“I just can’t believe you’re going to let Mom down,” he said, trying to make a joke out of it.
“Not nearly as much as you are, buddy boy,” said Bobbie, laughing, arching her eyebrows, arching them right over the subject of me as Milo’s bride. “Sorry, Charlotte,” she said, as if she suddenly remembered I was there. “That was rude.”
“Don’t mention it,” I said.
“No, but we have to mention it,” she said, “don’t we? Because you know everybody else will mention it.”
“Fuck ’em,” Milo said.
“Well, you know they may just fuck you first,” Bobbie said. “In the mind.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve talked about it,” Milo said.
“Have you?” she said, real worry in her eyes. “I hope so. I really hope so.” She came over and put her arms around her brother and kissed the top of his head. Her face as she smiled at me was rueful.
We went out. Richie Havens was at Sweetwater’s. I have always liked Sweetwater’s, the mix of Afro-Carib-Latino-Japanese-Euro jazzheads with their dreadlocks and black berets and Woodstock looks. But this night something was off. We arrived, and even though I was by Milo’s side, the white hostess thought Milo was just with Bobbie. “Two?” she said, and smiled at them but not me.
“Three,” said Milo, and pulled me in front, linking his arms around my waist.
“Oh, boy,” said Bobbie. “This is your life.”
“Charlotte handles it,” said Milo—proudly. “She can deal.”
What I could not handle was the remarks of a woman, a rather loud woman, and her friend, who were sitting behind us. We were eating dinner. Bobbie had excused herself to the ladies’ room. I put my hand on Milo’s. “I like your sister,” I said.
He smiled, then leaned over and kissed me. “She likes you, too.”
“That’s right, kiss the mistress,” somebody said, which made Milo pull back, look around. Over his shoulder I could see two black women, younger than us, staring. One was shaking her head in disgust so her big earrings bounced.
Milo turned back to me and said, “Pay no mind.”
“Don’t take the bait, don’t take the bait,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
Now the one with earrings was getting up from her table and coming around toward ours. She glared at me but her beef was with Milo. She passed by, hissing “Some people don’t remember who their mother was.”
“Some people were raised by wolves,” he said back to her calmly.
The woman huffed away but you could feel the rising hackles of Milo’s discomfort, as she returned to her seat with her drinks and joked around with her friend. I was afraid to touch him, pulled my hand away. I wanted to leave. They kept it up. I snuck looks and saw the women were not more than twenty, both of them dressed up, probably hoping some guys would come and sit with them, I thought. You could see they had a bone to pick.
“The darker the berry, the swee
ter the juice,” said the one with the earrings, talking in our direction. The friend was laughing.
“Shit,” Milo said, looking behind us. The louder woman had gotten out of her seat again and was talking to Bobbie, had accosted her on the way back from the rest rooms. Bobbie listened, then shrugged and smiled, gently touched the woman’s shoulder as she left and came back to sit with us.
“God,” she said to us. “Heaven help you.”
Which is what my own sister said, too.
“What did she say to you?” Milo said.
“You can guess,” Bobbie told him.
“I just wanted to go out and have a good time,” Milo said.
“Me, too,” she said, smiling. “Welcome to the party, Charlotte.”
“Some party,” said Milo. He was agitated, drumming on the table and jigging his leg. “In France I never got that. Germany maybe yeah, but not from—” Milo paused and shook his head as if his feelings were hurt.
Not from black people, I thought, is what he meant to say.
“I just thought that, you know: New York!” Milo said. “Honestly, all my life, I thought: New York is where I would finally find—”
He stopped.
“What?” Bobbie said.
“A place that could get it. That got it.”
“The beloved community,” Bobbie said patiently, as if she was talking to children. “Ha!”
“What?” Milo looked baffled. “You always said, ‘Oh, you’re missing so much, Milo.’ So, I thought, New York was where I would find what I was missing, whatever that was. Where you could just be who you are, and not—”
“What?”
“Have to deal with this crap.”
“Well good luck,” she said.
Behind us, the two women started laughing hard. They had tears running down their faces. They hooted loudly and drank from their rum and cokes. They were really having a good time now, watching us.
“Let’s get out of here,” Bobbie said. She was fed up but it was hard to tell if it was with her brother or with the women or with me, the fact of me. There was pain in her face. We paid the bill while the women watched us, smirking.
“Could you believe them?” Milo said, when we got outside.
“It’s not like they have no reasons to feel the way they feel,” Bobbie said.
Milo turned sideways in the wind to look at her.
“That could’ve been me,” she said. “I’d never say it, but I’d think it, if I saw you two. You’ve got to understand that.”
“Is that what you do think?” Milo asked.
“No,” she said sadly. “It goes way past thinking.”
“Obviously,” he said.
“It’s a feeling you can’t help,” she said. “It just is.”
“What is?” Milo said.
And Bobbie started muttering a list under her breath, which I couldn’t properly hear, over the street noise:… unemployment and prisons, drugs and history; the statistics, the ratios of something to something, emasculation and the heartbreak of the beauty standard, all these words blowing out of her mouth in a frost and evaporating in the loud windy street.
“Why do you have to make everything be about politics?” Milo said, cutting her off finally.
“When it is,” she snapped, “it is. You should know that by now.”
We walked fast in the cold. There were no taxis. Milo had his hands in his pockets and did not touch me. Bobbie was storming along, her bangles rattling and her heels clacking on the sidewalk. Nobody spoke. The wind whipped our scarves and our hair, ripped tears out of my eyes. It was terrible. I was miserable and sorry for myself. I had made them fight.
Bobbie looked over at me and said: “Hey, Charlotte, lighten up.”
That surprised me. She said it again. “Lighten up, okay?”
“That would be kind of difficult,” I said. “I mean, I’m already so light you can hardly see me.”
She laughed at that, and Milo did, too. We all did. As if a huge calcified deposit of Serious Problems had scraped off us. “Let’s go get drunk,” Bobbie said. “Forget this mess.” She waved her hand in the air again the way she had before, as if clearing it. She took a deep breath and socked her brother on the arm so he smiled. She reached around him and grabbed my hand and said, “Come on, Charlotte, let’s get Milo bombed.” There were still no taxis so we got on the subway and went to a club, way downtown, with Brazilian music and rum.
Bobbie watched me that night, pretending she wasn’t. She was just like her brother, I thought. That gaze. She was watching Milo, too, with his hand on mine, his smiles at me. She started enjoying herself, drinking dark rum and tonics. She wanted to stay out late! she said. Everybody was feeling better now. Milo got Bobbie out dancing, and I stayed back and watched. They were old partners, with old moves they had practiced to records in their living room all through junior high school. He was laughing. She was vamping around. When Milo took a break, Bobbie got me by the hands and took me out to the middle of the dance floor and we danced, too. I pretended to be some kind of debutante. I pretended to waltz with her. Not that I knew how to waltz. I picked her up and swung her around. People were staring at us. She laughed so hard we practically tipped over. We had a good time.
The next morning when Bobbie came into the kitchen, Milo was still asleep. I poured her coffee. “How did you sleep?” I asked.
“Better than usual,” she said, “due to the fact that Marcus the Boyfriend is one of those men who sleeps by rolling around in the bed.”
“Milo too. He drifts onto my side.”
“I hate that,” she said. “I like a night off. Chance to be by myself.”
“Not me,” I said. “I get lonely.”
“Milo’s good company,” she said.
“He is for me,” I said, shyly.
She smiled at that, and I could see her thinking about her brother keeping me company, precisely how I might get lonely for him.
“I was hoping you’d bring Marcus with you,” I said, to change the subject. “I’d like to meet him.”
She got a look on her face. “He has his doubts,” Bobbie said bluntly, “about this match. I left him home with his doubts. He thinks black men should be with black women.”
“And you?”
“I don’t care,” Bobbie said. “I just hope you know what you’re in for.”
“I’d rather not know,” I said, “if it’s bad.”
“You’re just like Milo,” she said. “He’d rather not know, either.”
I laughed because I knew that about him.
“We’ve had at least one white person in our family before, you know,” she said suddenly, as if she’d been waiting to say it. “Our mother’s great-grandfather was a white man.”
“Oh,” I said carefully. I waited to see what she would say next but she was quiet, so I said: “My mother’s great-grandfather was a white man, too.”
Bobbie laughed and looked at me like I’d surprised her. “He never told you that? He never told you where he got those eyes?”
“I never asked,” I said.
“Jeez. No wonder he loves you,” she said.
“He doesn’t like questions.”
“He certainly does not.”
Bobbie told me how, when Milo was a child, people were always asking him: Where’d ya get those green eyes? And he always said just what his parents told him to say: I got them from God. But one day he asked his mother, Where did they come from, really? and she said, My mother’s grandmother, who had the same eyes, always said her father was a white man. Not that he was a member of the family.
“Nighttime integration,” Bobbie said, “was one name for it …” letting me supply the other name in my head.
People still asked Milo about his eyes. Sometimes they said, “Those are contacts?” Usually he didn’t answer. Where’d you get those eyes? If he did answer he said, Same place you got yours, pal.
“Milo would just rather not bring any of that up,” Bobbie said
.
“I know,” I said. “But that’s okay with me. It’s easier that way.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Is it?”
“If it’s easier for him, then it is,” I said.
Bobbie smiled at me. “You’re okay” she said.
“He worships you,” I told her. “He always talks about you.”
“Does he? I’ve always believed he thinks I’m a big pain in the ass.”
“No,” I said, “he doesn’t. He wants you to respect him.”
“I do,” she said. “Believe me.”
Now we were quiet, looking out the window, steam coming off the tops of our coffee cups into the kitchen.
“Well, you’ll be all right, then, the two of you,” she said. “I think so.”
18.
It was lovely. Nothing could change that. I was beaming all day, April 10, 1982. I got there early and stood smiling at the plain old church of St. Luke in the Field on Hudson Street, where Milo would marry me. Inside, the air was stained with colored light streaming through arched windows. It smelled of lilacs and dampness. I closed my eyes, alone at the end of the aisle, where soon I would march: Dear God, please. My lips moved when I prayed, standing there. A prayer for luck, hedging bets, praying out of superstition like throwing salt over the shoulder, picking up pins, wearing lucky socks, anything to ward off doubts: What if they’re right? I prayed while waiting to promise such extreme promises. Happily ever after, forever and ever, amen, throwing the Brothers Grimm in there with the Lord’s Prayer and whatever else I could think of.
My dress was white. My shoulders were bare. The back was cut down in a scoop almost to the small. Kevin did my hair the way I wanted it, twined with baby’s breath. Claire, Diana, and Bobbie were the bridesmaids, wearing silk sheaths in shades of green: celery, leaf, jade.