The Vanishing Half(50)

“Would you like a drink, Mrs. Sanders?” Loretta asked.

“It’s Stella,” she said. “And I couldn’t, I just wanted to stop by and—well, welcome you all to the neighborhood. And also, about what happened—”

She hoped that Loretta might meet her halfway, spare her the shame of repeating the incident. Instead, the woman raised an eyebrow, reaching for an empty wineglass.

“You sure you don’t want a drink?” she said.

“I just wanted to apologize,” Stella said. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally like that.”

“Like what?”

Loretta knew exactly what she meant, but she was having too much fun toying with her. Stella blushed again.

“I mean, I don’t normally—” She paused. “This is all new to me, you see.”

Loretta eyed her for a second, then took a sip of wine.

“You think I wanted to move here?” she said. “But Reg got his mind set on it and by then . . .”

She trailed off, but Stella could fill in the rest. When she’d first passed over, it seemed so easy that she couldn’t believe she’d never done it before. She felt almost angry at her parents for denying it to her. If they’d passed over, if they’d raised her white, everything would have been different. No white men dragging her daddy from the porch. No laundry baskets filling the living room. She could have finished school, graduated top of her class. Maybe she would have ended up at a school like Yale, met Blake there proper. Maybe she could have been the type of girl his mother wanted him to marry. She could have had everything in her life now, but her father and mother and Desiree too.

At first, passing seemed so simple, she couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t done it. But she was young then. She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

“Maybe the girls can play some time,” Stella said. “There’s a nice little park one street over.”

“Yes, maybe.” Loretta’s smile lingered a second too long, as if there were more she wanted to say. For a second, Stella wondered if she’d realized her secret. She almost wished Loretta had. It scared her, how badly she wanted to belong to somebody.

“It’s funny,” Loretta finally said.

“What is?”

“I didn’t know what to expect when we moved here,” Loretta said. “But I never imagined no white woman showing up in my kitchen with the most lopsided cake I ever seen.”



* * *



—

LORETTA WALKER DID NOT KNOW how she’d ended up in Los Angeles. That’s how she said it, too, with an exhausted sigh, taking another drag of her cigarette. She sat on the park bench, watching the girls play on the swings. Early summer still, but the morning was already so warm, Stella dabbed at her damp forehead with a handkerchief. She’d been pushing Kennedy on the swings when the little colored girl came running into the park, Loretta trailing behind. The girl eyed Stella warily, reaching for her mother’s hand, and for a moment, Stella thought about leaving. Instead, she took a deep breath and stayed.

Now Loretta gazed up moodily at the cloudless sky.

“All this sun,” she said. “Unnatural. Like being in a picture show all the time.”

She was born in St. Louis, but she’d met Reg at Howard. He was a theater major, obsessed with August Wilson and Tennessee Williams; she studied history, hoped to become a professor someday. Neither had imagined that Reg would become famous for playing a boring police officer. When he’d practiced long soliloquies, impressing Loretta with his elocution, he hadn’t expected that years later, his most well-known line would be “File that form!”

“How’d you like it?” Stella asked. “Howard. It’s a colored school, isn’t it?” As if she hadn’t saved all the college pamphlets Mrs. Belton had given her, cracking the Howard one open so often it fell apart down the center. All those colored students lounging on the lawn, flipping through books. It seemed like a dream to her then.

“Yes,” Loretta said. “I liked it fine.”

“I always wanted to go to college,” Stella said.

“You still could.”

Stella laughed, gesturing around the neighborhood. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Because you want to?”

Loretta made it sound so simple, but Blake would laugh. A waste of time and money, he’d tell her. Besides, she’d never even finished high school.

“It’s too late for all that,” she finally said.

“Well, what’s it you like to study?”

“I used to like math.”

Now Loretta laughed. “Well, you must be some big brain,” she said. “Don’t nobody just like math for fun.”

But she loved the simplicity of math, a number growing or shrinking depending on which function you performed. No surprises, just one logical step leading to another. Loretta leaned forward, watching the girls play. She didn’t seem at all like the uppity wife everyone gossiped about, the one who wanted to force her way into the Brentwood Academy. She didn’t even seem like she wanted to live in Los Angeles at all. After college, she’d planned to return to Missouri, maybe earn her master’s. Then she’d fallen for Reg and gotten swept up in his dreams.