The Vanishing Half(26)

“How come I don’t look like you?” she asked her mother that night. She was sitting on the worn rug in front of the couch while her mother braided her hair so she couldn’t see her face but felt her hands still.

“I don’t know,” her mother finally said.

“You look like Maman.”

“It just work that way sometimes, baby.”

“When are we going home?” she asked.

“What’d I tell you?” her mother said. “We got to be here a little while. Now stop wigglin around and let me finish.”

She was beginning to realize what she would soon know for sure: there was no plan to go back home or to go anywhere else, even, and her mother was lying each time she pretended that there was. The next day, she was sitting alone during lunch when Louisa cornered her, flanked by three beige girls.

“We don’t believe you,” Louisa said. “About that bein your mama. She too pretty to be your mama.”

“She’s not,” Jude said. “My real mama’s somewhere else.”

“Where at?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I haven’t found her yet.”

She was thinking, somehow, of Stella—a woman who resembled her just as little but would be a better version of her mother. Stella wouldn’t make Daddy so angry that he beat on her. She wouldn’t wake Jude in the middle of the night and force her onto a train to a little town where other children taunted her. She would keep her word. Stella wouldn’t promise that they would leave Mallard again and again, only to stay.

“You gotta watch your mama,” her father had warned her once. “She still like those folks.”

“What folks?” She was lying on the rug beside him, watching him catch jacks, his large hands blurring in front of her eyes.

“The folks she come from,” he said. “Your mama still got some of that in her. She still think she better than us.”

She didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.



* * *



—

BY HIGH SCHOOL, the names no longer shocked her but the loneliness did. You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it. She sat by herself at lunch, flipping through cheap paperbacks. She never received visits on the weekends, or invitations to Lou’s for lunch, or phone calls just to see how she was doing. After school, she went running alone. She was the fastest girl on the track team, and on another team in another town, she might have been captain. But on this team in this town, she stretched alone before practice and sat by herself on the team bus, and after she won the gold medal at the state championship, no one congratulated her but Coach Weaver.

Still, she ran. She ran because she loved it, because she wanted to be good at something, because her father had run himself at Ohio State, and when she laced up her cleats, she thought about him. Sometimes, when she circled behind the baseball dugout, she felt Lonnie Goudeau staring. She ran with a hitch in her gait—ungraceful and uneven, a bad habit Coach tried and failed to correct. Lonnie probably thought she ran funny or maybe he just liked laughing at her, that white top and white shorts against all that black skin. She never felt darker than when she was running, and at the same time, she never felt less black, less anything.

She ran in a pair of gold running shoes she’d begged Early for one Christmas. Her mother had sighed.

“Wouldn’t you like a nice dress?” she asked. “Or new earrings?” Each year, she shoved the box across the rug as if she could barely stand to touch it. “Gym shoes again,” she said glumly, as Jude pulled out the tissue paper. “I swear I’ll never understand how one girl could want so many pairs of gym shoes.”

When she was eleven, Early had bought her first pair of running shoes, white New Balance sneakers he’d found in Chicago. The next year, he was off working a job in Kansas, so he didn’t come for Christmas at all, then the next, he was back as if he’d never left, bearing a new pair, and by then she’d long gotten used to his coming and going, which felt as regular as the seasons.

“That man sniffin around again,” her grandmother always said. She never called Early by his name—always “that man” or sometimes just “him.” She didn’t approve of her daughter shacking up with a man, even though Early was never around long enough for his visits to constitute shacking up, which either made it better or worse. Still, each Early season, as Jude began to think of it, her mother started to change. First, the house transformed, her mother balancing on chairs, ripping down the curtains, beating dust out of the rugs, washing the windows. Then her clothes: her mother springing for a new pair of nylons, finishing the dress she’d started sewing months ago, shining her shoes until they gleamed. The final, and most embarrassing part: her mother preening in the mirror like a vain schoolgirl, flipping her long hair onto one shoulder, then the other, trying a new shampoo that smelled like strawberries. Early loved her hair, so she always paid it special attention. Once, Jude had seen him ease up behind her mother and bury his face in a handful of her hair. She didn’t know who she wanted to be in that moment—Early or her mother, beautiful or beholding—and she’d felt so sick with longing that she turned away.