Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  I looked at him, and part of me, the trained seal part, wanted to say Thank you so much, and the other part wanted to say Just get out of here. Of course I said nothing at all. Darryl got up, came over to me, and charmed me completely, saying “Nothin’ personal, Pink, you know that, right?” holding his arms to display me like a game show hostess. “Right? You are more than beautiful! You’re fabulous! Plus, you’re SuperMom! SuperMom!” Darryl sang it to the Superman theme song. It would have been embarrassing, him flying around the room, singing, with his jacket flapping out like a cape, if it hadn’t been so funny. He was fired up with a new idea. He roused Milo out of bed, sat us down at our kitchen table, and told us all about it: the Cade Action Figure, the Cade Game and possible Cade cartoon series.

  When Beyond Fury opened at Christmastime, Darryl explained, spin-offs of the movie were going to make us multimillionaires. He showed Milo an agreement he would have to sign with a toy company. “Definite options for other products,” Darryl said. “Underwear! Toothpaste! Candy bars!” Darryl was so excited. He’d been negotiating for months. “It’s worth three point six million dollars, up front, and much more down the track.”

  “Shee-it,” Milo said. “That’s a pile of dough.”

  “All for you and your loved ones,” Darryl said.

  “I don’t need all that money,” Milo said. “I don’t even know if I want it.”

  “You do too need it,” Darryl told him. “You know you want it.”

  “Actually, Milo really has been thinking,” I said.

  “Right, that’s right, Charlotte, you’re right,” Milo said.

  “Right about what?” Darryl wanted to know.

  “Time to do unto others,” Milo said.

  “We get all this mail,” I explained.

  “All these desperate people,” Milo said.

  “He would like to do something,” I said.

  “Really?” Darryl looked interested.

  “Maybe a scholarship fund,” Milo said. “Something like that.”

  Darryl got really excited then. He jumped up from his chair. “That’s a great idea,” he kept saying. You could see him thinking. “Look,” he said, “we’ll call it the Robicheaux Foundation for Black Youth.”

  “Okay,” said Milo.

  “See,” Darryl said, “what you’re gonna do now is you’re gonna give loans. No, grants. Wait wait wait—” He went and got the sack of mail he’d brought from his office. “Look here, look here: to people like this.” He fished around in the pile, found a letter and tossed it to Milo. “A promising black kid like that, like maybe I was, long time ago, nobody to help me out, or like this one here, or this—”

  He tossed letters to me and Milo. In my pile was one from a dancer who wanted to become the first black prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet and needed tuition money for dance classes while helping to pay the rent on her infirm mother’s apartment.

  Dear Mr. Robicheaux,

  I know you will understand when I say that in 1987 nobody thinks a black woman can be a prima ballerina. Just as nobody thought black people were skiers, until you, that is. So, apart from the fact that you may recall meeting me several years ago, I thought I might ask you for a tuition loan, due to the fact that I would like to break down certain stereotypes and barriers just like you.

  The name Geneva Johnson was vaguely familiar, and after we read through piles of letters for an hour, talking, and when I reminded Milo of the benefit we’d gone to, Where we met Darryl! Remember? we all agreed, with great excitement, that this young dancer should be the first recipient of a grant from the Robicheaux Foundation for Youth, which was born that very morning.

  “This is a dream you’re giving,” Darryl said solemnly. “And this gift of a dream will roll like water in a dry riverbed, lifting the boats of others on the swells of hope! It’s a dream like the dream you had!” His voice was an intense whisper. “Like I had.”

  It was so quiet you could hear the ice in the automatic ice maker fall into the tray. He pointed to the famous snapshot, on the refrigerator door, of Milo in his striped pajamas and his ski boots on Christmas morning, 1961.

  “Remember?” Darryl whispered. “When you were that little boy? How you wanted to be great? Your parents had means, but still you had to fight!” Darryl was so eloquent, holding the back of a chair like a pulpit. “Didn’t they say no black man could be an Olympic skier? Didn’t they laugh at you? So many today have needs! while so many with means turn a blind eye! We know the real definition of the word ‘color-blind,’ which is: if it’s colored, then they are blind, and cannot see it. This Robicheaux Foundation will open eyes, open minds.”

  At the moment it was Milo’s mouth that was open, impressed at Darryl’s heroic version of his life. Milo’s own version was mostly about a little kid who just wanted to ski, so he was rapt, caught up in it. Me, too. Holding Hallie in my lap, I felt warm in the heart, as if the future was indeed a brighter day, and we could make it so.

  Beyond Fury opened and there were Cade action figures in all the toy stores. Milo traveled around doing appearances and promotions, and started work on the script for Cade 3, Truth to Power. And in the spring of ’87, he presented a check to Geneva Johnson at a press conference held by Darryl in New York. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t just up and fly all over the place, dragging a two-year-old along, every time Milo went away for a night. I stayed in L.A. with Hallie. But in the photo opportunity picture I saw the young dancer—was she eighteen?—dressed in her Sunday best, with the lace collar, cross of gold now at the throat, hand clasped in a shake with Milo’s across a replica of the ten-thousand-dollar check, blown up—now that I think of it—to the size of a queen-size bed. When he got home he said, “She’s a very nice kid.” She reminded him of himself, when he was her age, ambitious and determined.

  It didn’t happen then.

  Milo swears. He said it happened later, after I opened my mouth and all that dynamite and rubble rained down on us, and we got lost in the fallout of what I said.

  That time … no, he said. It was nothing but formalities.

  I remember he missed me. He called home from Mercer Street. “It’s empty here,” he said. “Hallie’s jacket is here and it smells like her.”

  “Come home,” I said.

  There was nothing in his voice but missing me. Nothing that I remember like guilt. I didn’t think, Oh, you know, but he’s a natural-born actor. I thought, He misses me. I still think he did then. Does now. No matter what.

  27.

  Now that I need to speak, I can’t.

  Back when I should have been quiet, when I knew nothing, that’s when I did all my talking. If only I had kept my mouth shut, zippered up my lipstick lips, politely declined to answer the question, maybe I’d be talking to you now, actually making sound leave my throat.

  Please excuse me but I am reticent about my private life.

  That’s what I should have said.

  What the fuck was I doing? What was I thinking?

  Apparently there was precious little thinking going on at all.

  How the trouble began was with a telephone call. It was only Kevin. Not Satan, not some mustachioed swindler or polyester used-car salesman. Just good old Kevin, calling to talk about my next Edge assignment. A shoot in April.

  “This time I want to juxtapose violence and fun,” Kevin explained, excited. It was for an issue called Bombshells. Even after two years of Edge, Kevin was still coming up with extreme ideas. “I want it to have the look of urban ruin,” he said. “I want burned-out building shells and desolation.” He was scouting locations in the South Bronx and New Jersey; he was after “the look and feel of a war zone,” but American. “I want to show the American idea that the party continues, no matter what. That creepy eighties Zeitgeist. You know what I mean, right?”

  “Whatever you say,” I said, happy to keep working exclusively on Edge, to be in an issue called Bombshells. The title reminded me of a caption someone had once written: “C
harlotte Halsey, a bombshell on nonstop legs.” But it turns out Charlotte Halsey was actually a bomb, a time bomb that finally exploded, wrecking everything, spreading shrapnel all over the place.

  That day of the shoot, the April sun came pouring in the kitchen window of our Mercer Street loft and the swatch of sky over the rooftops was Popsicle blue. Hallie cruised around my feet while I made coffee. Pick me up, pick me up. She said this all day long, sometimes singing it: Carry me, carry me. I got her on one of my hips where she fit like a clamp, and let her put the scoops of coffee in the machine. Never let them do this. Three-year-olds have their own ideas about scooping.

  Coffee went raining and crunching all over the floor.

  “Hallie!”

  “Yippee,” she said with determination, as if it were a statement.

  I laughed, because she enjoyed so much the way the whole mountain of grounds looked, toppled out of the can onto the counter. We had to brush it into a pile, and then we had to track some around the kitchen and get the miniature vacuum to suck up all the coffee bits so Marcy wouldn’t have to, and then we had to do it again and push the “on” button twenty-six times. Finally I got to drink some, spooning a taste into Hallie’s mouth, too. She was a baby bird now. “Cheep, cheep,” I said. “Eat up these tasty worms.” We flapped our wings and flew into the bedroom where Milo was sleeping, still on Pacific Coast time.

  “I have to get to work,” I said. “Tell Daddy time to wake up.”

  “Daddy,” Hallie piped. “Hello in there!” She was gently trying to pick up his eyelids, as if they were flaps on one of her lift-the-flap books. “Get up, ya darn lazyhead,” she whispered.

  “C’mon, birdie,” Milo said sleepily. He raised his arm like a wing, holding up the covers. Hallie scrambled under, cheeping. He made a nest for her with pillows and groped around for her small box of cereal Os on the bedside table. She ate them right out of his hand, the way she did every morning, so that half the time the bed was full of crumbs. “Cheep, cheep,” Milo said. “Here, birdie.”

  When I got out of the shower and was dressed, I kissed Hallie’s hand, leaving a big lipstick print on the back of it. “There’s a kiss for you all day,” I said. She examined it, smiling happily up into my eyes, in love with me. “Oh, Mommy,” she said. “Mommy, you stay.” Lately Hallie ordered everyone around like a dog obedience trainer. No. Stay. Give it. Read it. Get it. “Stay,” she said, pulling my jacket plaintively. Her seal eyes glassed over with tears. “Stay!”

  If only I had listened to her. “I can’t, trinket,” I said. I gave her another lipstick kiss, found Milo’s hand, gave him a kiss, too, a red-lip shape right on the palm. “There’s one for you, too, sailor,” I said in a Mae West voice, folding his fingers around it while he laughed.

  Outside, a waxy black limousine was waiting. Kevin was in it, and Lucy, the editor of Edge. “Charlotte,” she said, “how lovely to finally meet you.” She was a pale Englishwoman in her fifties, with blunt-cut brown hair and shoulder pads. She studied me. “So absolutely blond!” she said. “Just dazzling! I hadn’t realized!” Re-ah-lyzed.

  “Charlotte’s practically an albino,” Kevin said, and Lucy laughed.

  We stopped at a hotel on Fifty-seventh Street where Kevin said there was a surprise for me. He went in the lobby and came back with a light-brown-skinned woman with sunglasses and an angular haircut who turned out to be Glenda. We shrieked when we saw each other, the two of us going off like car alarms, hugging.

  “Look at you,” she said. “I thought you had a baby! I thought you quit!”

  I showed her pictures of Hallie and asked, “What about you?”

  “Oh, I could never have a baby,” she said, and shuddered. She joked that Etienne the boyfriend was her baby, anyway. “A big Belgian child.”

  We stopped again and picked up a girl named Honey, younger than us. She was lanky and Asian-American, with a cropped bowl of black hair and an agitated manner. “I’m so nervous,” she said, biting her nails. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “That’s okay,” said Kevin. “We need that fabulous new nail-bitten look! It goes with our bombshell war-zone party theme.”

  I was a little nervous, too. Kevin had explained that we’d be shooting in New Jersey. “Newark!” he said. “The perfect ruin.” It seemed the city government was demolishing a bunch of empty buildings, housing projects. Kevin had scouted the location and was thrilled at the possibilities. We were going to model stuff amid the rubble. What scared me was that we were also planning to use an actual explosion! that very day! as a backdrop.

  “It will be spectacular,” Lucy said, in her English accent. “Have you ever seen it done? Demolition?” No one had.

  “I’ve never been to Newark,” I said. “Except for the airport.”

  “You don’t want to go there,” Kevin said. “It’s a wasteland. Trust me.”

  Lucy knew all about it. She had been a stringer for a British tabloid in the late ’60s, she said, when there were riots and looting, and the whole city burned. Now it was desolate. Today’s demolition was part of a big urban renewal project. “Things are looking up!” she said brightly.

  By the time the limo turned off the turnpike onto a big road circling the city, we were all keyed up, talking. Silvery office buildings pierced up into the blue sky. The glass and the chrome sparkled like money. We left these behind though, came around a bend, and saw hulking apartments made of dark brick. They were so close to the elevated road you could see in the windows as you passed, glimpses of plants and faces, the blue light from televisions in living rooms.

  “That’s where we’re going.” Lucy pointed. “They’re blowing up that one, over there, see? They move everyone out to a new home, and then: Boom!” She was full of pep. “Look! There’s the one they already took down.”

  “Why again, exactly?” I asked.

  “They were full of drug dealers and addicts and criminals,” Lucy said.

  “Oh,” I said, as if she had explained. They were called the Hughes Homes, according to a sign we passed. Named, I thought, after a writer?

  “Langston, right?” Lucy asked. “I don’t know the American poets, do you?”

  “Raisin in the Sun,” Kevin said. “Something like that.”

  Most of the buildings were abandoned, we saw, standing gloomily in the bright morning light. The road took us through the long shadows they cast, then past an enormous pile of cement and twisted metal. BUILDING FOUR said a sign, with an arrow pointing to its remains.

  “That’s the one that’s already been demolished,” said Lucy. “Brilliant! I’ve never seen anything like it. Just brilliant. Look at that wreckage!”

  “We’ll be shooting there first,” Kevin said. “That’s the bombshell!”

  We drove by the rubble for the length of a city block and pulled into the Hughes Homes parking lot where we could see our dressing room trailer, a few cars, and a bunch of police cruisers. Crabgrass pushed up between the cracks in the pavement. The wind floated a plastic bag languidly through the air. The few wisps of trees had bags just like it twisted in their branches. The Hughes Homes themselves were arranged around an enormous dirt courtyard. Only one building still had people living in it. Music piped around curtains billowing from its windows; women hung over sills, calling down to kids playing in the dirt; men were coming and going, sitting on steps, leaning on a broken railing. Just about all of the people were black people.

  “I’m not getting out,” said Honey.

  “You’ll be fine,” Lucy said, scolding. “They’re going to love this! And so will you!”

  Glenda flexed her eyebrows skeptically, shook her head.

  “This is just like a show for these folks!” Lucy said. “And look at all the cops.”

  The idea of cops was never exactly comforting to me anymore, and I knew this was not a show, for the residents. This is the kind of place Bobbie finds her teenage clients, I thought sadly, but then banished that thought, tried to keep my mind on my professional respon
sibilities. Far across the courtyard I saw a fence of blue sawhorses festooned with yellow tape, police officers posted around it, circling the doomed, about-to-be-blown-up Building Three, whose twenty stories of windows were empty holes. Oddly, in the middle of the courtyard, a wooden platform stood draped with red, white, and blue bunting. The mayor was coming, Lucy explained, and the older woman senator, and possibly the governor. They would announce all the new housing that would replace these apartments. Townhouses, supposedly, going up in some other part of town. The platform and the fluttering police tape looked festive, like a Fourth of July bandstand, with chairs facing a microphone.

  As we piled out of the car, a van from a television station pulled in beside us and three guys climbed out with equipment. “Hey-ey-ey-ey, models!” one of them said. The one in the safari jacket was the reporter. His hair looked wet. He ran his fingers through it and winked when we smiled at him.

  Lucy was excited to see the TV crew. “Hello there,” she said as the rest of us crossed the parking lot toward our trailer. She stayed behind to talk to Safari Jacket, a guy named Marv. “He’s going to do a feature about Edge,” she announced happily when she stepped into the trailer. “He’s already calling it the cutting edge of Edge.” Hair and Makeup got to work on us, while Lucy and Kevin and the rep from the designer talked us through how they would be styling the Bombshell shoot.

  “It should look,” Kevin said, “as if you are socialites who got lost in a war, a concrete nightmare.”

  “You mean hookers,” I said. “I know you, that’s what you’re after.”

  “Charlotte,” Kevin said, smirking at me, “this is about party animals. A creature you ought to know well.”

  I spritzed him with water from the stylist’s bottle. I was starting to relax. Being in the trailer with someone brushing my hair always felt safe to me; the soft sable bristles, the sharp pain of the tweezers, the asphyxiating smell of the hair spray and the nail polish were comforting somehow. I felt at home and unguarded.

  By the time we stepped out of our trailer, with white robes over our extreme clothes, our hair ratted up dramatically and makeup raccooned around our eyes, a little crowd had gathered to watch us. We were all pumped up. Vendors were selling hot dogs and little pies from carts, and the ice cream truck was playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” We got back in our limo, waving, for the quick ride around to the heap of Building Four rubble, where a photographer named Michael and two of his assistants were messing with lights. Kevin got us to stand on some cement steps that led to a broken door with nothing behind it but sky. Don’t you love this? he said to me. Stairs to nowhere.