What's Mine and Yours(90)

“You’re a city girl at heart.”

“I’m not sure anymore. I love it here.”

“How could you not?” Ruth waved her hand over the view, the glittering water.

“It’s good for right now. But it’s very white.”

“You’re very white, honey. I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now.”

“Maybe,” Noelle said. “But my child won’t be.”

“You still saving up for that adoption? You should set up a website. Crowdfunding. That’s how Bailey got his farm.”

Ruth had been visiting Bailey at his farm, about ninety miles northwest. When Ruth told Noelle she’d be so close, Noelle had invited her down to lunch. The coast was in the opposite direction of home, and she’d have a longer journey back, but Ruth said she didn’t mind. Now they had these hours together. Noelle was grateful.

When the food arrived, Ruth inquired about the theater, and Noelle filled her in eagerly. She was the manager of the company, which meant more here than it had in her last job because the operation was smaller, the budget infinitesimal. All the staff was part-time except for her. She designed all the flyers for the productions herself, wrote the press releases that went to the local papers. Sometimes, she polished the windows, supervised and made the sets, called the roster of donors. Even before they’d pulled off their first production with Noelle at the helm, she was convinced she’d been right to move out here by herself, to let an apartment above a farmhouse several miles outside downtown. She spent her days in the theater, her nights drinking beers at home from a growler she filled every few days at one of the breweries in town. She fried fish and made chowder, started pickling the vegetables she bought each week at the farmers’ market. She didn’t want to spend money on a car, so she rode her bicycle everywhere. Her legs had grown wider, stronger, her arms freckled and tan. It was routine, and it was solitary, but it was different from the drudgery of Golden Brook. She wasn’t waiting on anyone, not a husband, or a future, or a better version of herself. Her life was little, complete. And when the child came, she would fold him into the life she had already built. She could raise him in her flat, affix a little trailer to her bicycle, bring him with her to the theater, take him kayaking at the beach.

“You can do it on your own,” Ruth said, although Noelle hadn’t asked for the reassurance. “It’s not as bad as people say. It isn’t easy, but hard and bad aren’t the same thing. You know Bailey is the love of my life.”

Noelle nodded, although it hurt her to hear it. She had wanted Ruth to say that she was, too, but she knew she had no right to a wish like that.

“Seeing much of my mother these days?”

“I ran into her and Hank at the mall the other day. I was getting my hair done”—Ruth gestured to her new incandescent blond—“and there she was, shopping for a present for Alma and Diane. They just adopted a dog, she told me, and Lacey was shopping for a collar, a rhinestone collar for her. They named the dog Princess. Can you believe it? Your mother sure has come a long way.”

“Maybe. I can never tell with her.”

Since her surgery, Lacey May had taken to wearing a beautiful auburn wig around town. They were waiting to see if the tumor would grow back, and in the meantime, she had quit working at the store, declaring life was too short to spend it restocking shelves. She sometimes helped Diane at the camp, said she liked being with the dogs because they reminded her of Jenkins. Now, Alma came along to dinners at the house; Lacey May served them coffee and dessert.

“We all learn from our mistakes, Noelle. She won’t do to Alma what she did to Nelson. Honestly, I’m impressed! Alma isn’t just a woman—she’s a different race, too.”

“Sure, but it’s not quite the same.”

Ruth furrowed her eyebrows in confusion, and Noelle decided to push a little more. “It’s not the same as being black.”

Ruth smiled, disbelieving, and shook her head, as if what Noelle had said was absurd, but it wasn’t worth arguing. She was willing to indulge her, her foolish notions. She tucked back into her crab cakes. Noelle figured this was bound to be her life if she stayed tethered to the people she had known since she was a girl. They’d be decent in some ways; they’d astonish her with how they seemed to keep up with the news, the shifting language around identity and race. Once, she’d even overheard Lacey May refer to Alma as a person of color. But they’d be incensed, too, by the encroachments they saw on their world—the stars cast in movie franchises they had formerly adored, the people who had the nerve to go to marches and complain and vote in elections. They would guard everything they had, however little, as if their lives were prizes they’d rightly won that others had no right to claim. They’d never admit how willingly they’d played their parts.

For all the years that Ruth had loved her, and called from time to time, and sent Christmas cards, she hadn’t asked after Nelson much, requested he be put on the line so she could say hello. It was too easy for people to see their interests and disinterests as pure, functions of their desires and personalities. They just didn’t like Nelson much; they just preferred that other candidate for mayor; something about that doctor just didn’t sit right with them. She might not have believed it herself, if not for Nelson. Maybe that was proof she really was white—she had to love him in order to see.