by Brit Bennett
That night, driving home from the party, she’d found herself thinking about Loretta Walker. Stella was wearing the mink coat Blake had surprised her with that Christmas and maybe the luxurious fur brushing against her calves reminded her. Or maybe because that morning, when she’d told Blake that she would be late to the party, they’d fought again about the job that she only had because of Loretta. For months after the Walkers left, she’d fallen into a depression that was deep even by her own standards. She was grieving for reasons that she could never explain. Like she’d lost Desiree all over again. Blake suggested she take a class, which he later regretted because she brought it up each time he complained about her working.
“You said it yourself,” she said, during their last argument. “I was going crazy in that house.”
“Yes, but—” He paused. “I thought you’d, I don’t know, take a flower-arranging class or something.”
But she’d always felt ashamed of being a high school dropout. She felt stupid when someone used a term she didn’t understand. She hated asking for directions even when she was lost. She dreaded the day when her daughter would know more than her, when she would stare at Kennedy’s homework, unable to help. So she’d told Blake that she wanted to take a GED class.
“I think that’s great, Stel,” he’d said. He was pacifying her, of course, but she signed up for classes anyway. Two nights in a row, she sat in the parking lot outside the public library, afraid to venture inside. She would feel stupid, staring blankly at the chalkboard. When was the last time she’d done any math more complicated than balancing her checkbook? But when she finally went inside, the teacher began to explain an algebra problem and slowly, she felt sixteen again, acing Mrs. Belton’s tests. This was what she loved about math: it was the same now as it had been then, and there was always a correct answer, whether she knew it or not. She found that comforting.
Blake seemed happy for her when she finally received her diploma in the mail. But he was less thrilled when she announced that she wanted to take classes at Santa Monica College to earn her associate’s degree, or when she transferred to Loyola Marymount for her bachelor’s, or when, last year, Santa Monica College hired her as an adjunct for an Introduction to Statistics class. The job paid next to nothing, but she felt invigorated during her sections, standing at the chalkboard in front of a dozen undergraduates. Her faculty mentor, Peg Davis, was encouraging her to enroll in a master’s program next, even to start thinking about her PhD. She could become a full professor, earn tenure someday. Dr. Stella Sanders had a nice ring, didn’t it?
“It’s that women’s libber,” he complained, whenever Stella worked late on campus. “She’s the one putting all those ideas into your head.”
“Surprisingly, I have thoughts of my own,” she said.
“Oh, that’s not what I meant—”
“It’s exactly what you meant!”
“She’s not like you,” he said. “You have family. Obligations. She just has her politics.”
But when had Stella based her decisions on an obligation to family? That was heart space. And maybe it had always been her head guiding her. She had become white because it was practical, so practical that, at the time, her decision seemed laughably obvious. Why wouldn’t you be white if you could be? Remaining what you were or becoming something new, it was all a choice, any way you looked at it. She had just made the rational decision.
“I’ve told you already, you don’t have to do this,” Blake always said, gesturing to the stacks of tests under her arm. “I’ve always provided for this family.”
But she hadn’t accepted the job because she was worried about money. She’d just chosen her brain over her heart, and maybe that was what Loretta had seen, tracing that long line down her palm.
“You missed my toast,” Blake said when they’d returned from the Hardisons. He was tugging off his tie in the doorway to their closet.
“I told you I had to enter grades,” she said.
“And I told you tonight was important.”
“What do you want me to say? I tried my best.”
He sighed, staring out the darkened window.
“Well, it was a nice toast,” he said. “A nice party.”
“Yes,” she said. “The party was lovely.”
* * *
—
“I KNOW WHY YOU’RE HERE,” Kennedy said.
In the half-crowded restaurant, one week after The Midnight Marauders opened, she smiled at Stella across the table, playing with the white tablecloth. She always showed all of her teeth when she smiled, which unnerved Stella. Imagine, revealing so much of yourself. One table over, an Asian woman was grading term papers in between spoonfuls of split pea soup. Two young white men were arguing quietly about John Stuart Mill. Stella said that she had chosen a restaurant near USC’s campus because it was convenient, although that wasn’t, of course, true. She’d hoped the university crowd might prompt her daughter to rethink her own choices, or, at the very least, to feel embarrassed about them.
Stella unfurled her napkin, spreading it across her lap.
“Of course you do,” Stella said. “I’m here to have lunch with you.”
Kennedy laughed. “Sure, Mother. I’m certain that’s the only reason you drove all across the city—”
“I don’t know why you have to turn everything into some big conspiracy. I can’t go to lunch with my daughter?”
She hadn’t driven near campus in years, and even then she’d visited just a handful of times: the college tour, where she’d trailed behind her daughter, gazing skeptically at the trellises climbing the red brick, wondering how a girl with her grades would ever get in; move-in day, since lackluster test scores were nothing that family donations could not fix; a few shameful weeks later, to plead with the freshman dean after the resident assistant caught Kennedy smoking pot in her room. The drugs bothered Stella less than the indiscretion. Only a lazy girl would get caught, and her daughter was clever but lazy, blissfully unaware of how hard her mother worked to maintain the lie that was her life.
Now Kennedy smirked, slowly stirring her soup.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll just save your lecture for dessert.”
There would be no lecture, Stella had promised Blake. She would only nudge Kennedy to do what was right. The girl knew that she needed to go back to school. She’d only missed a semester so far—she could go to the registrar’s office, explain that she’d had a mental lapse, and beg her way back in. She would be one term behind her peers—maybe she could graduate after summer school. Stella worked out various scenarios in her head, each time unable to land anywhere besides her own anger. Quitting school to become an actor! The idea was so idiotic, she could barely restrain herself from saying so as soon as she reached for the menu.
The most shocking part? She’d thought Kennedy had already been through her hell years. High school teachers calling because she cut class again, the awful report cards, the nights Stella heard the door creaking open at some ungodly hour and reached for her baseball bat before realizing that it was only her drunk daughter sneaking home. The mangy boys always hanging out of cars in front of the house, honking their horns.
“She’s my wild child,” Blake said once, chuckling, as if it were something to be proud of.
But her wildness only scared Stella, disrupting the careful life she’d built. In the mornings, she’d stared across the breakfast table at a child she no longer recognized. Gone was her sweet-faced girl, and in her place, a tawny, long-limbed woman who changed her mind daily about the person she wanted to be. One morning, a faded Ramones T-shirt hung off her gaunt shoulders, the next, a plaid miniskirt inched up her thighs, and the next, a long dress flowed to her ankles. She’d dyed her hair pink, twice.
“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.
“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter
shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it. Maybe something in the girl was unsettled, a small part of her realizing that her life wasn’t right. As if she’d gotten older and started touching the trees, only to find that they were all cardboard sets.
“There’s no lecture,” Stella said. “I just want to make sure we’re thinking about next semester—”
“There it is.”
“You didn’t miss much time, sweetie. I know you’re excited about that play—”
“It’s a musical.”
“Whatever you call it—”
“Well, you’d know if you actually came to opening night.”
“How about this?” Stella said. “I’ll come to your play if you go down to the registrar—”
“Emotional blackmail,” she said. “That’s a new one for you.”
“Blackmail!” Stella leaned into the table, then dropped her voice. “Wanting what’s best for you is blackmail? Wanting you to get an education, to better yourself—”
“Your best isn’t necessarily mine,” her daughter said.
But what was Kennedy’s best, then? Stella had been shocked, and a little embarrassed, to learn that her daughter had spent the last semester on academic probation. “She’s young, she’ll figure it out,” Blake said, but Stella balked. She was some poor colored girl from nowhere Louisiana and even she’d managed a better showing than two C-minuses, two Ds, and a lone B-minus coming from a drama class. Drama wasn’t even a class—it was a hobby! A hobby that, months after that dismal semester, her daughter decided she was leaving school to pursue full time. What was the point, then, of giving a child everything? Buying books for her, enrolling her in the finest schools, hiring tutors, pleading her way into college—what was the point of any of it, if the result was only this, one bored girl gazing around a restaurant filled with some of the nation’s finest minds and playing idly with her soup?
“College isn’t for everyone, you know,” Kennedy said.
“Well, it is for you.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because. You’re a smart girl. I know you are. You just don’t try. We don’t even know what you’re capable of when you try your hardest—”
“Maybe this is it! I’m not some big brain like you.”
“Well, I don’t believe that’s your best.”
“And how would you know?”
“Because I gave up too much for you to flunk out of school!”
Kennedy laughed, throwing up her hands. “Here we go again. It’s not my fault you grew up poor, Mother. You can’t blame me for shit that happened before I was born.”
A young black waiter leaned in to refill her water glass and Stella fell silent. She had chosen her own life, years ago; Kennedy had only cemented her into it. Recognizing this wasn’t the same as blaming her. She’d sacrificed for a daughter who could never learn what she’d lost. The time for honesty between the two of them had passed long ago. Stella dabbed her mouth with the white napkin, folding it back onto her lap.
“Lower your voice,” she said. “And don’t swear.”
* * *
—
“IT’S NOT THE end of the world,” Peg Davis said. “Lots of students take time off.”
Stella sighed. She was sitting across the desk in Peg’s cluttered office, which was always so messy that Stella had to slide books off the chair or spend ten minutes searching for Peg’s reading glasses, which were tucked under a pile of midterms. Peg could hire someone to help her organize. Stella had even volunteered to help. The office reminded her of living with Desiree, who’d spent far more time searching for lost things than she would have spent keeping her side of the room neat, but whenever Stella told her this, Desiree had rolled her eyes and said to stop mothering her. Peg was just as dismissive.
“Oh, they’re around here somewhere,” she said, each time she misplaced her keys, and like that, another meeting turned into a scavenger hunt.
You could be a bit of a wreck when you were a genius. Peg taught number theory, a field of mathematics that seemed so complicated, it might as well have been magic. Theoretical mathematics shared little in common with mathematical statistics, but Peg had offered to advise Stella anyway. She was the only tenured female professor in the math department, so she took on all the female students. Their first advising meeting, Peg had leaned back in her chair, studying her. The professor had long, graying blonde hair and wore round eyeglasses that covered half her face.
“So tell me,” she’d said. “What’s your story?”
Stella had never been caught so squarely in the gaze of such a brilliant woman before. She fidgeted, twisting her wedding ring around her finger.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you mean? I don’t have a story. I mean, nothing that interesting.”
She was lying, of course, but she was startled when Peg laughed.
“Like hell,” she said. “It’s not every day a housewife suddenly decides she wants to take up math. You don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”
“Call me what?”
“A housewife.”
“No,” Stella said. “It’s what I am, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
Conversations with Peg always went like this: twisting and turning, questions sounding like answers, answers seeming like questions. Stella always felt like Peg was testing her, which only made her want to prove herself. The professor gave her books—Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Evelyn Reed—and she read them all, even though Blake rolled his eyes when he glanced at the covers. He didn’t see what any of that had to do with mathematics. Peg invited her to protests and even though Stella was always too nervous to stand in a crowd of shouting people, she always read about them afterward in the paper.
“What are Peggy’s girls up to this time?” Blake would ask, peeking over her shoulder at the local section. There they were, protesting the Miss America pageant, a sexist advertisement inside Los Angeles Magazine, the opening of a new slasher movie that glorified violence against women. Peggy’s girls were all white, and when Stella asked once if there were any Negro women in the group, Peg prickled.
“They have their own concerns, you know,” she said. “But they’re welcome to join us in the fight.”
Who was Stella to judge? At least Peg stood for something, fought for something. She went to war with the university over everything: paid maternity leave, sexist faculty hiring, and exploitation of adjunct labor. She argued about these things even though she had no children and had already secured tenure—she argued even though her advocating wouldn’t benefit her at all. It baffled Stella, protesting out of a sense of duty, or maybe even amusement.
Now, sitting in Peg’s office, she reached for a volume on prime numbers and said, “It’s only time off if you eventually go back.”
“Well, maybe she will,” Peg said. “On her own. You did.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “I had to leave school. When I was her age, the only thing I wanted was to go to college. And she just throws it away.”
“Well, she isn’t you,” Peg said. “It’s unfair for you to expect her to be.”
It wasn’t that either, or at least, it wasn’t only that. Her daughter felt like a stranger, and maybe, if she was still in Mallard, she would be amused by all the ways that they were different. By all the ways her daughter reminded her of Desiree, even—she might laugh with her sister about it. Are you sure she’s not yours? But h
ere in this world, her daughter felt like a stranger and it terrified her. If her daughter didn’t feel like she was really hers, then nothing about her life was real.
“Maybe you’re actually upset at yourself,” Peg said.
“Myself? Why?”
“All those years you’ve been talking about graduate school. Then nothing.”
“Yes, but—” Stella stopped. That was a different matter altogether. Each time she talked to Blake about applying to a master’s program, he reacted as childishly as she expected. More school? Christ, Stella, how much more school do you need? He accused her of abandoning the family, she accused him of abandoning her, both fell asleep angry.
“I mean, of course that husband thinks he can still push you around,” Peg said. “You frighten him. A woman with a brain. Nothing scares them more.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Stella said. Blake was still her husband; she didn’t like hearing anyone talk about his faults.
“I just mean it’s all about power,” Peg said. “He wants it, and he doesn’t want you to have it. Why else do you think men fuck their secretaries?”
Again, she regretted telling Peg how she and Blake met. Their story, romantic at the time, only became crasser over the years. She was so young, her daughter’s age; she’d never met a man like Blake before. Of course she hadn’t been able to resist his pull. Their first time in bed, she was only nineteen, along with Blake on a work trip to Philadelphia. By then, she’d learned that being a secretary was a little like being a wife; she memorized his schedule, hung his hat and coat, poured him a Scotch. She brought him lunch, managed his moods, listened to him complain about his father, remembered to send his mother flowers for her birthday. This was why he’d invited her to Philadelphia, she’d thought, until the final night of the trip when he leaned in at the hotel bar and kissed her.
