by Brit Bennett
“Doin what?” Loretta said.
“You know what. I know this is your new life now—”
“Oh please—”
“But your girl’s gonna be miserable and we all know it. It’s not worth it, just to make a point.”
“It’s not about making a point,” Loretta said. “The school’s right down the street and Cindy’s just as smart as all those other kids—”
“We know, honey,” Belinda said. “It’s not about being right. You can be right til the cows come home. But this is your one child and this is her one life.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Loretta said. Her eyes flashed, and then, remembering herself, she laughed a little, stubbing out her cigarette. “Thank God all of us don’t think like you two.”
“Let’s ask your new friend,” Eunice said. “What do you make of all of this, Mrs. Sanders?”
Stella stared down at the card table, her neck already hot.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
“Surely you have some opinion.”
Eunice was giving Stella a smile that reminded her of a hunting dog with a rabbit in his teeth. The more you twitched away, the tighter those jaws fastened around you.
“I wouldn’t do it,” she finally said. “Those other parents will make her life hell, they’ll want to make an example out of her. You don’t know how they talk when you’re not around—”
“And I bet you jump right to her defense too,” Eunice said.
“That’s enough,” Loretta said softly, but she didn’t have to. By then, the mood had soured. Belinda and Eunice left before the game even finished. Stella washed the wineglasses while the girls cleaned up their toys upstairs. It was getting late, nearly four. Blake would almost be home. Beside her, Loretta silently dried the glasses with a plaid dishtowel.
“I’m sorry,” Stella said. For what exactly, she didn’t know. Sorry for coming over, for ruining the card game, for being exactly who Eunice Woods accused her of being. She didn’t defend Loretta, not even to silly Cath Johansen. She conscripted her own daughter to lie, afraid her husband would find out she socialized with the woman.
Loretta gave her a strange smile.
“You think I want your guilt?” she said. “Your guilt can’t do nothin for me, honey. You want to go feel good about feelin bad, you can go on and do it right across the street.”
Stella set the wet glass on the countertop, dried her hands on the towel. So this is what Loretta really thought about her—a white woman swarming around to assuage her guilt. And wasn’t it true? She did feel guilty, but if anything, spending time with Loretta only made her feel even worse. Her real life seemed even more fake by comparison. And yet, she didn’t want to stay away, not even now, not when Loretta was angry at her. Loretta reached for the wet glass and knocked it off the counter, the glass shattering at their feet. She stared up at the ceiling, suddenly exhausted. She was too young to look this tired, but she must be, fighting all the time. Stella never fought. She always gave in. She was a coward that way.
Loretta bent to pick up the glass, but not thinking, Stella jutted her arm out and said, “Don’t, baby, you’ll cut yourself.” Then she was kneeling on the tile, cleaning up the mess she’d made.
* * *
—
FIRST MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in Memphis, then Bobby Kennedy in downtown Los Angeles. Soon it felt like you couldn’t open a paper without seeing the bleeding body of an important man. Stella started switching off the news when her daughter came bounding into the kitchen for breakfast. Loretta said that, a couple months ago, Cindy asked her what assassination meant. She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point.
Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.
Sometimes she still had dreams that someone was breaking into her house. More than once, she’d prodded Blake out of bed to check. “I told you it’s a safe neighborhood,” he grumbled, climbing back under the covers. But hadn’t she felt safe once, years ago, hidden in a little white house surrounded by trees? Now she slept with a baseball bat behind the headboard. “What’re you gonna do with that, Slugger?” Blake said, squeezing her tiny bicep. But when he traveled for business, she could never fall asleep without touching the worn handle, just to remind herself that it was there.
* * *
—
“YOU NEVER TALK ABOUT your family,” Loretta said.
In her backyard, she stretched out on a lawn chair, her face half hidden behind sunglasses. She wore a purple bathing suit, her legs still speckled with water from the pool. Stella craned her neck, watching the girls splash around. In two weeks, school was starting again, Kennedy back at the Brentwood Academy, Cindy off to St. Francis in Santa Monica. A good school, only half an hour away, Loretta said, and Stella felt relieved. She wanted to tell Loretta that it was for the best—there was nothing wrong with putting your head down and trying to survive—but she would only have made Loretta feel even more like she’d given in. Now Loretta was complaining about her in-laws flying in from Chicago—they planned to stay ten whole days, and Reg, of course, said yes, because he could never tell them no, and because, of course, she would have to do most of the entertaining while he was off to set.
“What about you?” Loretta said. “Does your husband get along with your parents?”
The pointed question caught Stella off guard; she was distracted, already wondering what she would do with the ten days when she wouldn’t see Loretta at all.
“My folks are long gone,” she said. “They’re . . .”
She trailed off, unable to finish. Loretta’s face fell.
“Oh honey, I’m sorry,” she said. “Look at me, bringin up bad memories—”
“It’s all right,” Stella said. “It happened so long ago.”
“You were young, were you?”
“Young enough,” she said. “It was an accident. Nobody’s fault.” Bad things happen, they just do.
“What about brothers or sisters?” Loretta said.
“No brothers.” Stella paused, then said, “I had a twin sister. You remind me of her a little.”
She hadn’t planned to say this, and as soon as she did, she regretted it. But Loretta only laughed.
“How so?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Little ways. She was funny. Bold. Nothing like me, really.” She felt herself tearing up, hurried to dab her eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m going on like this—”
“Don’t be sorry,” Loretta said. “You lost your whole family! If anything’s worth boo-hooing about, it’s that. And a sister too. Have mercy.”
“I still think about her,” Stella said. “I didn’t know I would still think about her like this—”
“Of course you do,” Loretta said. “Losing a twin. Must be like losing half of yourself.”
Sometimes she imagined picking up the phone and calling Desiree, just to hear her voice. But she didn’t know how to reach her and besides, what would she even say? Too many years had passed. What good would looking back do? She was tired of justifying a choice she’d already made. She didn’t want to be pulled back into a life that was no longer hers.
“Twins,” Loretta said, as if the word itself contained magic. “You know what my mama used to say? She could always tell if a woman will have twins, right from her palm.”
Now Stella laughed. “What?”
“Oh yeah, you never had your palm read? Look, I’ll show you.” Loretta reached, suddenly, for Stella’s h
and. “See this line right here? That’s your child line. If it forks out, it means you’ll have twins. But you got just the one. And this here, this is your love line. See how it goes deep and straight? That means you’ll be married a long time. And this one’s your life line. Look how it splits.”
“And what’s that mean?”
“It means your life’s been interrupted.”
Loretta smiled, and again, Stella wondered if she knew. Maybe the whole time, Loretta had just been playing along. The thought was humiliating but strangely liberating. Maybe Stella could tell her the whole story now and maybe Loretta would understand. That she hadn’t meant to betray anyone but she’d just needed to be new. It was her life, why couldn’t she decide if she wanted a new one? But Loretta laughed. She was only joking. You couldn’t read a person’s life off her hand, let alone a life as complicated as Stella’s. Still, she liked sitting here, Loretta tracing a fingernail along her palm.
“Okay,” Stella said. “What else does it say?”
Nine
In New Orleans, Stella split in two.
She didn’t notice it at first because she’d been two people her whole life: she was herself and she was Desiree. The twins, beautiful and rare, were never called the girls, only the twins, as if it were a formal title. She’d always thought of herself as part of this pair, but in New Orleans, she splintered into a new woman altogether after she got fired from Dixie Laundry. She’d been daydreaming during her shift, thinking, again, about the morning she’d visited the museum as a white girl. Being white wasn’t the most exciting part. Being anyone else was the thrill. To transform into a different person in plain sight, nobody around her even able to tell. She’d never felt so free. But she was so distracted by her own remembering, she almost caught her hand in the mangle. The near accident was dangerous enough for Mae to fire her. Any workplace injury would be bad, but an accident involving a girl illegally hired was too much of a risk.
“You lucky you just fired,” Mae told her. Lucky because she’d only lost a job, not a hand, or lucky because she’d only been let go, Desiree offered a stern warning? Either way, she needed a new job. For weeks, she reported to the temp agency and spent all afternoon in crowded waiting rooms, leaving with the promise that she could try again in the morning. She dreaded facing Desiree each evening she returned home to find their money jar dwindling. Then, the Sunday before rent was due, she spotted a job listing in the paper. Maison Blanche was looking for young ladies with fine handwriting and proficient typing skills to fill an opening in the marketing department, no office experience necessary. She’d always gotten good marks for her typing, but a department store would never hire a colored girl to do more than put away shoes or spray perfume at the counters. Still, Desiree told her she had to apply.
“This’ll pay way more than Dixie Laundry,” she said. “You have to go down there and see.”
She almost said no. Told Desiree, forget it. So what if she could type? Why subject herself to the humiliation of some prim white secretary telling her that colored girls need not apply? Still, she woke up the next morning, put on her nice dress, and rode the streetcar to Canal Street. It was her fault that they were running out of money in the first place; she had to at least try. The elevator carried her to the sixth floor, where she stepped into a waiting room filled with white girls. She halted in the doorway, wondering if she should just turn back. But the blonde secretary waved her over.
“I need your typing sample, dear,” she said.
Stella could have left. Instead, she carefully filled out the application and typed up the sample paragraph. Her hands trembled as she pressed the keys. She was terrified of being discovered, but almost more afraid that she wouldn’t be. And then what? This wasn’t the same as sneaking into the art museum. If she was hired, she would have to be white every day, and if she couldn’t sit in this waiting room without her hands shaking, how could she ever manage that? When the secretary announced that the position was filled, she felt relieved. She’d applied; at least, she could tell Desiree that she’d done her best. She quickly gathered her coat and her pocketbook, heading toward the elevator when the secretary asked if Miss Vignes could start tomorrow.
* * *
—
AT MAISON BLANCHE, Stella addressed envelopes for Mr. Sanders. He was the youngest associate in the marketing department and movie-star handsome, so all the other girls in the building envied her. Carol Warren, a busty blonde from Lafayette, told Stella she didn’t know how lucky she was. Carol worked for Mr. Reed, who was nice enough, she supposed, even though she couldn’t stop staring at the gray hairs sprouting out his ears when he dictated messages. But what it must be like to work for Mr. Sanders! Carol chewed her salad eagerly, waiting for Stella to share some delicious detail about him, but she didn’t know what to say. She hardly spoke to the man at all, except in the mornings when he dropped his coat and hat on her desk, and when he returned from lunch and she passed on his messages. “Thanks dear,” he always said, reading the scraps of paper as he started back into his office. She didn’t think he even knew her name.
“A real dish, isn’t he?” Carol whispered once after she’d caught Stella staring.
She flushed, shaking her head quickly. The last thing she needed was to get caught up in the office gossip. She kept to herself, arrived on time, left when she was supposed to. She ate lunch at her desk and spoke as little as possible, certain that she’d say the wrong thing and make somebody wonder about her. She certainly tried not to speak around Mr. Sanders, only offering a soft hello when he greeted her. One morning, he paused in front of her desk, his briefcase swinging at his side.
“You don’t talk much,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, but she still felt compelled to answer.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I’ve always been quiet.”
“I’ll say.” He started toward his office, then suddenly turned. “Let me take you out to lunch today. I like to get to know the girls who work for me.” Then he patted the desk as if she’d said yes, to show that it had been decided.
All morning, she was so rattled, she kept misaddressing her envelopes. By lunchtime, she hoped that Mr. Sanders would forget about his offer. But he emerged from his office and beckoned her to follow him, so off they went. In Antoine’s, Blake ordered oysters and, when she stared silently at the menu, an alligator soup for both of them.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, sir,” she said. “I was born . . . well, it’s a little town north of here.”
“Nothing wrong with little towns. I like little towns.”
He smiled at her, lifting the spoon to his mouth, and she tried to smile back. Later that evening, when Desiree demanded details from her, Stella wouldn’t remember the emerald green wallpaper, the framed photographs of famous New Orleanians, the taste of the soup. Nothing but that smile Mr. Sanders had given her. No white man had ever smiled at her so kindly.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Anything you want to know about the city—anything at all—you ask me. Don’t feel silly about it. I know how strange a new city can be.”
She paused. “How do you eat those?” she asked, pointing to the oysters.
He laughed. “You’ve never had oysters? I thought all you Louisiana people love them.”
“We never had much money. I always wondered.”
“I didn’t mean to poke fun,” he said. “I’ll show you. It’s very simple.” He reached for the fork, glancing up at her. “You belong here, Stella. Don’t ever think you don’t.”
At work, Stella became Miss Vignes or, as Desiree called her, White Stella. Desiree always giggled after, as if she found the very idea preposterous, which irritated Stella. She wanted Desiree to see how convincingly she played her role, but she was living a performance where there could be no audience. Only a person who kn
ew her real identity would appreciate her acting, and nobody at work could ever know. At the same time, Desiree could never meet Miss Vignes. Stella could only be her when Desiree was not around. In the morning, during her ride to Maison Blanche, she closed her eyes and slowly became her. She imagined another life, another past. No footsteps thundering up the porch steps, no ruddy white man grabbing her father, no Mr. Dupont pressing against her in the pantry. No Mama, no Desiree. She let her mind go blank, her whole life vanishing, until she became new and clean as a baby.
Soon she no longer felt nervous as the elevator glided skyward and she stepped into the office. You belong here, Blake had told her. Soon she thought of him as Blake, not Mr. Sanders, and she began to notice how he lingered at her desk now when he said good morning, how he invited her to lunch more often, how he began walking her to the streetcar after work.
“It’s not safe out here,” he said once, pausing at the crosswalk, “a pretty girl like you walking alone.”
When she was with Blake, no one bothered her. The leering white men who’d tried to flirt with her at her stop now fell suddenly silent; the colored men sitting in the back didn’t even look in her direction. At Maison Blanche, she once overheard another associate refer to her as “Blake’s girl,” and she felt as if that distinction covered her even beyond the office building. As if just by venturing into the world as Blake’s girl, she had been changed somehow.
