The Vanishing Half: A Novel (22 page)

“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.”

“I
T
’
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 here 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.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that,” he said. “Since Antoine’s. You looked so sweet and so lost. I knew I was in trouble then. I told them, find me a girl with the nicest handwriting, it doesn’t matter if she isn’t much to look at. I hoped you wouldn’t be. I didn’t need the distraction. I’m not that sort of man, you see. But of course, the prettiest handwriting belonged to the prettiest girl. And you’ve been torturing me ever since.”

He laughed a little but he was gazing at her so seriously, she felt her neck flush.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “Torture you, I mean.”

“Do you hate me for telling you all of this?” he said.

His nervousness settled her. She’d gone on a few dates with white men before but never made it past kissing in their cars. She was always afraid that they might be able to read her lie, somehow, on her naked body. Maybe against white sheets, her skin would look darker, or maybe she would just feel different once he was inside of her. If nakedness would not reveal who you were, then what would?

In the hotel room, Blake slowly undressed her. He unzipped her skirt, unclipped her bra, bent to unfurl her nylons. He was straining against his white briefs and she felt embarrassed for him, embarrassed for all men, really, forced to wear their desire so openly. She could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted.

She couldn’t have said no to him, she’d since realized, but she
didn’t want to. And maybe that was the difference, or maybe, the difference was in thinking that there was one at all.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Peg said.

“Like what?”

“Like your cat just died.” Peg leaned across the desk. “I just hate to see you make yourself small for him. Just because he’ll never see you the way you see yourself.”

Stella glanced away.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “When I think about who I was before him. It’s like being a whole other person.”

“So who were you then?” Peg said.

Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself. That person existed for everyone, probably, an alternative self that lived only in the mind. But hers was real. Stella rolled over in bed each morning and looked into her eyes. Other times it felt like living with a foreigner. Why are you not more like me? she’d think, glancing over at Desiree. How did I become me and you become you? Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other lacked. Like how at their father’s funeral, Stella barely spoke, and when someone asked her a question, Desiree answered instead. At first it unnerved Stella, a person speaking to her and Desiree responding. Like throwing her own voice. But soon she felt comfortable disappearing. You could say nothing and, in your nothingness, feel free.

She stared out the window at students biking past, then back to the professor.

“I can’t even remember,” she said.

By the end of Jude’s first two weeks as the newest usher at the Stardust Theater, she’d already learned two main things about Kennedy Sanders: she wanted to be a Broadway star, and she carried herself like every aggrieved actress, a little prideful, a little wounded. The pride was impossible to miss; she delighted in making others wait for her, sauntering through every held door. She argued with the director over the delivery of lines, often, it seemed, for fun. She parked her red sports car on the far side of the garage because, she claimed, it had once been keyed by a jealous understudy. She liked to invent stories about her life, as if the reality were too dull to repeat. Sometimes she revised herself in the middle of a conversation, like when she told Jude that her car had been a high school graduation gift.

“No, more like a ‘we can’t believe you graduated’ gift,” she said. “I was a little shit in high school. But weren’t we all? I mean, maybe not. You don’t look like a little shit to me.”

“I wasn’t,” Jude said.

“I know you weren’t. See, I can always tell. Who ate their broccoli and listened to daddy and who was a fucking hell-raiser. Hey, be a doll and throw this away, will you?”

In her dressing room, she dropped crumpled candy wrappers into Jude’s waiting hands. For the past two weekends, Jude had ridden the bus downtown to the decrepit theater, where she swept popcorn off the floors, scrubbed the bathroom sinks, and cleaned out the dressing rooms. In time, her supervisor promised, she would work her way up to ticket taking and seat directing. Little did he know, she was exactly where she wanted to be. But of course she didn’t tell him that. She’d only given him the simple story: that she was a recent college graduate looking to earn extra money on the weekends. She could work Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons.
The
Midnight Marauders
shifts. He told her to come back for the Sunday matinee dressed in all black.

“I don’t like it,” Reese said. He leaned against the kitchen countertop, Mr. Song’s worn tool belt still around his waist, looking so worried, she wished she hadn’t said anything in the first place.

“It’s just a little side job,” she said lightly. “We could use the money.”

“It’s not and you know it.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Just go on pretending she ain’t Stella’s daughter? I can’t do that. I have to know her. I have to meet Stella.”

“And how you plan on doin that?”

But she had no plan beyond the Stardust Theater. Before each show, she met Kennedy in her dressing room and helped lift the big dress over her head. She did other little favors for her too: brought her hot water with lemon, fetched her sandwiches from a nearby diner, ran for Cokes from the lobby vending machine. She always felt foolish, standing outside the dressing room holding a steaming mug of tea, until Kennedy whisked in, breathless and unapologetic.

“You’re a lifesaver,” she’d say, or, “I owe you one.” Never just, thank you.

During the first act, before preparing the concession stand for
intermission, Jude slipped into the wing to watch a play that became sillier the more times she saw it. A western musical about a spunky girl who arrives in a ghost town to find it occupied by actual ghosts.

“I think it’s very clever,” Kennedy said. “Sort of like
Hamlet
when you think about it.” The play was nothing like
Hamlet
, but she said it with such conviction that you almost believed her. It was the first starring role she’d landed since dropping out of school two months ago, she told Jude one evening after a show. They were sitting together at a diner across the street, Kennedy dipping fries into a puddle of ranch.

“My mother still hasn’t been to a show,” she said. “She’s so pissed at me for leaving school. She thinks I’m gambling away my future. And maybe I am. Hardly anyone makes it, right?”

For the first time, she dropped the bravado, looking so genuinely unsure of herself that Jude almost squeezed her hand. The sudden rush of empathy startled her. Was that what it was like to be this girl? An unwise choice earning you sympathy, not scorn, a single moment of doubt forcing a practical stranger to affirm that you were, in fact, special?

“No one gets into med school either,” Jude said.

“Oh, it’s not the same. My mother would love if I were going to be a doctor, trust me. I suppose most mothers would. They all want us to live better lives than they did, right?”

“What was hers like?”

“Rough. You know, real white trash,
Grapes of Wrath
. Walked ten miles each day just to get to school, all that.”

“She come from a big family?”

“Oh no. Just her. But her mother and father died years ago. She’s the only one left.”

Sometimes you could understand why Stella passed over. Who didn’t dream of leaving herself behind and starting over as someone new? But how could she kill the people who’d loved her? How
could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back? That was the part that Jude could never understand.

“I don’t know how you put up with her,” Barry said. “That girl never stops talking! I’d shove that bonnet in her mouth.”

Like the rest of the cast, he found Kennedy insufferable. But Jude needed to hear her talk. She was searching all of her stories for Stella. So she lifted that dress over her head, listening to Kennedy go on about how she wanted to visit India over the summer, but she was worried, you know. You can’t even drink the water in a place like that, and she had a friend—well, not really a friend, a childhood neighbor, Tammy Roberts—who went on a mission trip there and came back sick from eating fruit. Can you imagine it, fruit? She’d rather die with a needle jabbed in her arm than let a mango kill her. Another time, Kennedy told her that an old fling would be in the audience, a married surfer who lived in her apartment building. She’d slept with him once after he brought a bottle of absinthe back from France.

“We saw some trippy shit,” she said, stretching out barefoot on the lumpy couch.

Curtain was in fifteen, and she still wasn’t even dressed yet. She was never focused, never prepared. When Jude arrived to help her dress, she always answered the door a little surprised, as if she hadn’t been the one to ask Jude in the first place. She always mentioned her mother suddenly, like when she told Jude before a show that she had first started acting when she was eleven. Her mother had placed her in all of these different activities because that’s what parents do in Brentwood, cast their children out like a fishing net and hope that they catch a talent. So she’d taken tennis lessons and ballet classes and clarinet and piano—enough instruments to start her own symphony, really. But nothing stuck. She was horribly mediocre. Her mother was embarrassed.

“She never said as much but I could tell,” Kennedy said. “She really wanted me to be special.”

So on a whim, she’d auditioned for a school play about the gold rush and earned a small role as a Chinese railroad worker. Only seven lines, but her mother helped her memorize them, holding the script in one hand, stirring pasta sauce with the other. Kennedy dragging her invisible pick across the kitchen floor.

“I mean, it was completely ridiculous,” she said. “Here I am, playing some coolie in one of those straw hats. You couldn’t even see my face. But my mother told me I did a good job. She was . . . I don’t know, she seemed excited for once.”

She spoke about her mother wistfully, the way everyone talked about Stella. That was the only part that felt real.

F
OR THE REST OF
N
OVEMBER
, Jude Winston worked
The
Midnight Marauders
shift. She refilled the popcorn machines, passed out
Playbill
s at the door, helped old ladies to their seats. At night, she fell asleep, still hearing the overture. She closed her eyes and saw Kennedy at center stage, glowing in light. They couldn’t be cousins. Each time the blonde swept into the theater, her face hidden behind sunglasses, the idea seemed even more preposterous. A long-lost relative—you’d have something in common, wouldn’t you? Maybe you couldn’t spot it at first, but in time, you’d feel, somehow, your shared blood. But the longer she spent around Kennedy, the more foreign the girl seemed.

One Friday night, the cast went out for a nightcap. Barry tugged Jude’s arm to convince her to stay, but before she could tell him that she was exhausted, Kennedy jogged out beside her. So of course she’d stayed. She never told her no. She felt desperate around her. The play was nearly over and she’d barely learned anything about Stella. In the
dim bar, the pianist found a dusty upright in the back and started picking around chords. Slowly the cast migrated over, a little tipsy and still eager to perform. But Kennedy sat with Jude at the worn end of the table, their knees touching.

“You don’t have many friends like me, do you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

White people, probably, although Kennedy surprised her by saying, “Girlfriends. You were with a whole bunch of boys when I saw you.”

“No,” Jude said. “I don’t have any girlfriends, really.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I never really had any growing up. It’s the place I come from. They don’t like people like me.”

“Blacks, you mean.”

“Dark ones,” she said. “The light ones are fine.”

Kennedy laughed. “Well, that’s silly.”

They both found each other’s lives inscrutable, and wasn’t that the only way it could be? Didn’t Jude wonder what it would be like to care so little about your education, to know that even if the worst happened, you would be all right? Didn’t she hate the loud punk rock screeching out the speakers when Kennedy peeled into the parking garage? Yes, and she rolled her eyes each time Kennedy arrived late. She resented when Kennedy demanded lemon tea. She felt defensive when Barry called her a spoiled brat even though she was one, of course she was. The girl was maddening sometimes, but maybe this was who Jude would have been if her mother hadn’t married a dark man. In this other life, the twins passed over together. Her mother married a white man and now she slipped out of mink coats at fancy parties, not waited tables in a country diner. In this reality, Jude was fair and beautiful, driving a red Camaro around Brentwood, her hand trailing out the window. Each night, she strutted onstage, beaming, tossing back her golden hair while the world applauded.

The boy on the piano started banging out “Don’t Stop Me Now,” and Kennedy shrieked, grabbing Jude by the hand. Jude never sang in front of anybody. But somehow, she found herself singing along with the giddy group, annoying the other patrons, until the bartender kicked them out. She climbed into bed that night after three, her head buzzing, still feeling Kennedy’s arm around her shoulders. They weren’t real family, and they weren’t real friends, but they were something. Weren’t they?

“Where’d you go?” Reese asked. They were kissing in bed but she was distracted, her head still swimming with music.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just thinking.”

“About that white girl?” He sighed. “Baby, you gotta stop. You’re playin a dangerous game.”

“It’s not a game,” she said. “It’s my family.”

“Those people ain’t your family. They don’t wanna be and you can’t make them.”

“I’m not trying to—”

“Then why are you sniffin around that girl? You can’t make nobody be what they don’t wanna be. And if your aunt wants to be a white woman, it’s her life.”

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“You’re right,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I don’t understand you at all—”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said, but wasn’t it? He hadn’t watched her mother spend years pining after Stella, or Early driving thousands of miles searching for her. He didn’t see the mornings Jude had spent digging through the crates in the back of the closet, sifting through Stella’s things. Junk, mostly, a few old toys or an earring or a sock. She couldn’t tell if her grandmother chose to keep these mementos or if she’d forgotten the boxes were even there. But she’d sort through them, trying to discover what made Stella different. How
had she found a way to leave Mallard when her mother only knew how to stay?

All November, she reported to Kennedy Sanders’s dressing room to help lift the big dress over her head. Then each evening, she stood in the wing of the theater, searching the audience for Stella. She did not see her once. Still, she looked for her as the overture faded and Kennedy finally took the stage. Somehow, as soon as the show started, she lost that smart-alecky tone that made the crew roll their eyes. When the lights hit, she was no longer the sarcastic girl chain-smoking in the alley. She became Dolly, the sweet, carefree nobody lost in an abandoned town.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve just always loved the stage. Everyone watching you. Sort of thrilling, isn’t it?”

After a Saturday night show, she’d offered to drive Jude home. She glanced across the car, smiling at her, and Jude, fidgeting, stared out the window. She hated how directly Kennedy looked at her, as if she were daring her to look away.

“No,” Jude said. “I’d hate everyone staring at me like that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It makes me feel . . . exposed, I guess.”

Kennedy laughed.

“Yes, but acting is different,” she said. “You only show people what you want to.”