The Vanishing Half(62)
“I can’t believe I was so stupid,” she said.
He pulled her into a hug.
“Aw, it’s all right,” he said. “You’ll find another job.”
“But I wanted to help you. I thought if we both put money away—”
He groaned. “That’s why you were workin so crazy?”
“I just thought if the both of us—”
“But I didn’t ask you to do that,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I just wanted to. Don’t be mad, baby. I just wanted to help.”
She wrapped her arms around him and after a moment, he held her back.
“I’m not mad,” he said. “I just don’t like feelin like some charity case.”
“You know I don’t think of you like that.”
“You gotta tell me things,” he said. “You’re so hidden away sometimes.”
Maybe that was what drew them together. Maybe this was the only way they knew how to love, drawing near, then ducking away. He touched her cheek and she tried to smile.
“Okay,” she said. “No more hiding.”
* * *
—
FOR YEARS, Stella drifted through her dreams. Stella draped in mink, Stella perched on a ledge, Stella shrugging, smiling, slipping in and out of doors. Always Stella, never her mother, as if, even asleep, she could tell the difference. She always awoke shaken. She was tired all the time. She found a new job dishwashing in a campus cafeteria for two dollars an hour, where she spent her shift alone, steaming piles of cruddy plates clean. Each evening, she came home with pruned fingers, her shoulders stooped. At one point, she was three weeks behind on a history paper and her GPA was teetering so dangerously, her track coach called her into his office.
“You’re smarter than this,” he said, and she nodded, chastened, springing from the claustrophobic office as soon as he dismissed her. Yes, yes, she would work harder, apply herself more. Of course she took school seriously, of course she wanted to compete in the spring. Of course she couldn’t lose her scholarship. She was just a little distracted at the moment, nothing too serious. She would shake out of it. But she didn’t, because every time she tried to study, she only imagined Stella.
“Do you still think about her?” she asked her mother one afternoon.
“Who?”
Jude paused, wrapping her finger around the telephone cord. “Your sister,” she finally said.
She couldn’t bring herself to say Stella’s name, like it would conjure her again. Stella strolling by on the sidewalk outside, Stella appearing in the fogged window.
“Now why you askin about all that?” her mother said.
“I don’t know, I’m just wondering. Can’t I wonder?”
“No use in wonderin,” her mother said. “I stopped wonderin long ago. I don’t think she’s even here anymore.”
“Living?” Jude said. “But what if she is? I mean, what if she’s just out there somewhere?”
“I would feel her,” her mother said quietly, and Jude began to think of Stella as a current running under her mother’s skin. Under her own skin, dormant until that party when she’d locked eyes with Stella across the room. Then a leap, a spark, her arm jolting from her side. Now she was trying to forget that charge. She thought, once or twice, about telling her mother about the woman at the party, but what good would that do? It was Stella, it wasn’t, she was dead, she was alive, she was in Omaha, Lawrence, Honolulu. When Jude stepped outside, she imagined bumping into her. Stella pausing on the sidewalk, admiring a purse through a shop window. Stella on the bus, hanging on to the vinyl strap—no, Stella in a smooth black limousine, hiding behind the tinted glass. Stella everywhere, always, and nowhere at the same time.
* * *
—
IN NOVEMBER 1982, a musical comedy called The Midnight Marauders opened in a nearly abandoned theater in downtown Los Angeles. The playwright, a thirty-year-old still living at home in Encino, was determined to make it in a city where, he claimed to friends, no one valued theater. He’d written The Midnight Marauders as a joke, and of course, the joke always being on him, it was his only success. The play ran at the Stardust Theater for four weekends, was nominated for a local award, and earned tepid praise in the Herald-Examiner. But Jude would have never heard about it if Barry hadn’t landed a spot in the chorus line. For weeks leading up to the audition, he was a nervous wreck, bouncing on his heels as he practiced “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He had never sung in front of anyone before dressed only as himself.
“I felt naked out there,” he told her after the audition. “I was sweatin like a hog on Easter Sunday.”
She was happy for him when he earned his spot in the company. He sent her tickets for opening night, but she told Reese that she had to work.
“Ask for the night off,” he said. “We gotta support him. And we never go out anymore. We should have a little fun.”
The previous month, his car engine had died and he’d emptied his savings to fix it. All those crumpled bills in his sock drawer, gone. He’d started working the door at Mirage to make extra cash on the weekends. The muscle, technically, although he was mostly just a handsome face greeting the customers. So far, he’d only broken up one drunk fight and earned a cut on that handsome face as gratitude. In the bathroom, he’d winced as Jude dabbed the cut with alcohol, missing those weekends they used to spend chasing sunlight across the marina in search of the perfect shot. Reese biting his lip as the shutter clicked. Now on Friday and Saturday nights, he left in a black T-shirt and black jeans and came home at dawn, his hands flecked with glitter from helping the go-go dancers onto the stage. Then off to the Kodak store, or helping Mr. Song. Some days, she barely saw him at all, only feeling him drop into bed beside her.