The Vanishing Half(60)

“There you go,” he said. He didn’t even look at her. But a week after Christmas, sitting around her sewing circle, she told Cath Johansen and Betsy Roberts that he made her uncomfortable.

“I don’t know,” she said, plucking at her misplaced stitch. “I just never liked the way he looked at me.”

Three days later, someone threw a brick through the Walkers’ living-room window, shattering that tiled vase Loretta had bought in Morocco. Tom Pearson and Dale Johansen both claimed credit, although it was neither of them—instead, Stella later discovered, it was beet-faced Percy White, who’d taken the new neighbors as a personal slight, as if they had only moved in to mar his presidential term. Some applauded him, although it made others uneasy.

“This is Brentwood, not Mississippi,” Blake said. Tossing bricks through windows seemed like something the gap-toothed trash did. But a week later, a different man, desperate to prove himself one, left a flaming sack of dog shit on the Walkers’ front steps. Days later, another brick sailed through the living-room window. According to the newspaper, the daughter was watching television at the time. The doctor had to remove glass shards from her leg.

By March, the Walkers left the Estates as suddenly as they’d arrived. The wife was miserable, Betsy Roberts told Stella, so they’d bought a new house in Baldwin Hills.

“I don’t know why they didn’t just do that from the start,” Betsy said. “They’ll be so much happier there.”

By then, Stella hadn’t spoken to Loretta since Christmas Day. But she still watched, through the blinds, as the yellow moving van pulled up, and a pack of young colored men slowly carried cardboard boxes out of the house. She imagined marching across the street to explain herself. Standing in Loretta’s cavernous living room, Loretta balanced on one moving box while taping another shut. Loretta wouldn’t look angry to see her—she wouldn’t look like anything at all, and her blank face would hurt even more. Stella would tell her that she’d only said those terrible things about Reg because she was desperate to hide.

“I’m not one of them,” she would say. “I’m like you.”

“You’re colored,” Loretta would say. Not a question, but a statement of blunt fact. Stella would tell her because the woman was leaving; in hours, she’d vanish from this part of the city and Stella’s life forever. She’d tell her because, in spite of everything, Loretta was her only friend in the world. Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.

She imagined Loretta pushing off the box and stepping toward her. Her face frozen in awe, as if she’d seen something beautiful and familiar.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she would say. “It’s your life.”

“But it’s not,” Stella would say. “None of it belongs to me.”

“Well, you chose it,” Loretta would tell her. “So that makes it yours.”





Part IV





THE STAGE DOOR


   (1982)





Ten


If you went to the Park’s Korean Barbecue on Normandie and Eighth, during the fall of 1982, you’d probably find Jude Winston wiping down one of the high tables, staring out the foggy window. Sometimes before her shift started, she sat in a back booth reading. The noise never distracted her, the other waiters didn’t understand it. She told Mr. Park on her first day that she’d practically grown up in a restaurant—a diner, really—even though she’d never waitressed before. She did not tell him that most of that time had been spent reading, not watching her mother run the place, but maybe as a father himself, he was sympathetic to restaurant kids. Maybe he respected her eagerness to find a job—barely a week after her college graduation, and she wasn’t lazing about on the beach like his own sons would have done. Or maybe he just remembered her from the past spring, always sitting at a high top studying a worn MCAT book she’d borrowed from a teammate. When he’d brought her pork belly and asked how she was doing, she always got a dazed look in her eyes, as if he’d asked in Korean. She was a smart girl, he could tell. Plenty dull boys wanted to go to medical school but only smart girls found the nerve to apply. He’d finished two years of medical school himself, back in Seoul, so he understood her anxiety and wished her luck. He was always wishing her luck now, even though she told him she wouldn’t hear back from any schools for months. Ah well, good luck, then.

“You don’t need luck,” Reese said. “You’re gonna get in.”

He stole a shrimp off her plate with his chopsticks. He visited sometimes during her dinner break, but Mr. Park never minded. He was a fair boss; she was lucky to work for someone like him. And still, she could only think about the letters that would arrive in the spring. Rejections mostly, but maybe one yes. You only needed one yes to be happy—medical school was like love in that regard. Some days her chances seemed promising, and other days she hated herself for clinging to this ridiculous dream. Hadn’t she muddled her way through chemistry? Struggled in biology? You needed more than a good GPA to get into medical school. You had to compete against students who’d grown up in rich families, attended private schools, hired personal tutors. People who had been dreaming since kindergarten of becoming doctors. Who had family photos of themselves in tiny white coats, holding plastic stethoscopes to teddy bear bellies. Not people who grew up in nowhere towns, where there was one doctor you saw only when you were puking sick. Not people who’d stumbled into the whole idea of medical school after dissecting a sheep’s heart in an anatomy class.