The Vanishing Half(44)

He stooped to kiss her cheek, and in the mirror, she watched his fair head bend over her dark one. Did she look as nervous as she felt? Would anybody be able to tell? A colored family in the neighborhood. Blake was right, it would never happen. The association would put a stop to it. They had lawyers on hand for such a thing, didn’t they? What was the purpose of having an association if not to stop undesirables from moving in, if not to ensure the neighborhood exists precisely as the neighbors wished? She tried to steady that flutter in her stomach but she couldn’t. She’d been caught before. Only once, the second time she’d ever pretended to be white. During her last summer in Mallard, weeks after venturing into the charm shop, she’d gone to the South Louisiana Museum of Art on an ordinary Saturday morning, not Negro Day, and walked right up to the main entrance, not the side door where Negroes lined up in the alley. Nobody stopped her, and again, she’d felt stupid for not trying this sooner. There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.

In the museum, she’d glided slowly through the rooms, studying the fuzzy Impressionists. She was listening distractedly as an elderly docent intoned to a circle of listless children, when she noticed a Negro security guard in the corner of the room staring. Then he’d winked, and, horrified, she rushed past him, head down, barely breathing until she stepped back into the bright morning. She rode the bus back to Mallard, her face burning. Of course passing wasn’t that easy. Of course that colored guard recognized her. We always know our own, her mother said.

And now a colored family moving across the street. Would they see her for what she was? Or rather, what she wasn’t? Blake kissed the back of her neck, slipping his hand inside her robe.

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” he said. “The association will never allow it.”



* * *



—

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, her daughter woke up screaming, and Stella stumbled into the girl’s room to find her in the throes of another nightmare. She crawled into the tiny bed, gently shaking her awake. “I know, I know,” she said, dabbing at her tears. Her own heart was still pounding, although by now, she should have been used to scrambling out of bed, following her daughter’s screams, always fearing the worst, only to find Kennedy twisted in her covers, clenching the sheets. The pediatrician said that nothing was physically wrong; the sleep specialist said that children with overactive imaginations were prone to vivid dreams. It probably just meant that she was an artist, he’d said with a chuckle. The child psychologist examined her drawings and asked what she dreamt about. But Kennedy, only seven, never remembered, and Blake dismissed the doctors as a waste of money.

“She must get it from your side,” he told Stella. “A good Sanders girl would be out like a light.”

She told him that she used to have nightmares when she was young, too, and she never remembered them either. But that last part wasn’t true. Her nightmares were always the same, white men grabbing her ankles and dragging her screaming out of the bed. She’d never told Desiree. Each time she’d snapped awake, Desiree snoring beside her, she felt stupid for being afraid. Hadn’t Desiree watched from that closet too? Hadn’t she seen what those white men had done? Then why wasn’t she waking up in the middle of the night, her heart pounding?

They never talked about their father. Whenever Stella tried, Desiree’s eyes glazed over.

“What you want me to say?” she said. “I know just as much as you do.”

“I just wish I knew why,” Stella said.

“Nobody knows why,” Desiree said. “Bad things happen. They just do.”

Now Stella gently brushed back the silken blonde hair from her daughter’s forehead.

“It’s all right, darling,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

She held her daughter closer, pulling the covers over the both of them. She hadn’t wanted to be a mother at first. The idea of pregnancy terrified her; she imagined pushing out a baby that grew darker and darker, Blake recoiling in horror. She almost preferred him thinking that she’d had an affair with a Negro. That lie seemed kinder than the truth, momentary unfaithfulness a gentler deception than her ongoing fraud. But after she’d given birth, she felt overwhelmed with relief. The newborn in her arms was perfect: milky skin, wavy blonde hair, and eyes so blue they looked violet. Still, sometimes, Kennedy felt like a daughter who belonged to someone else, a child Stella was borrowing while she loaned a life that never should have been hers.

“Where are you from, Mommy?” Kennedy asked her once during bath time. She was nearly four then and inquisitive. Stella, kneeling beside the tub, gently wiped her daughter’s shoulders with a washcloth and glanced into those violet eyes, unsettling and beautiful, so unlike the eyes of anyone else she’d ever known.

“A little town down south,” Stella said. “You won’t have heard of it.” She always spoke to Kennedy like this, as if she were another adult. All the baby books recommended it, said it helped with developing language skills. But really, she just felt silly babbling like Blake.

“But where?” Kennedy asked.

Stella poured warm water over her, the bubbles dissolving. “It’s just a little place called Mallard, darling,” she said. “It’s nothing like Los Angeles.”