The Vanishing Half: A Novel (18 page)

“Y
OU 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 hand. “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?”

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.

A
T
M
AISON
B
LANCHE
, 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 knew 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.

Soon she began to look forward to stepping through the glass doors, ambling slowly down the sidewalk with Blake. Soon she noticed how when he blinked, his eyelashes were dark and full like a
baby doll. How on days when he had a big presentation, he wore bulldog cuff links, which he admitted, almost bashfully, were a gift from his ex-fiancée. The relationship had failed but he still considered them lucky.

“You’re observant, Stella,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me about these before.”

She noticed everything about him, but she didn’t tell this to anyone, especially not Desiree. This life wasn’t real. If Blake knew who she truly was, he would send her out of the office before she could even pack her things. But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was.

Each evening, she went through the process in reverse. Miss Vignes climbed onto the streetcar where she became, again, Stella. At home, Stella never liked to talk about work, even when Desiree asked. She didn’t like to think about Miss Vignes when she wasn’t her, although, sometimes, the other girl appeared suddenly, the way you might think about an old friend. An evening lying about the apartment, and she might think, I wonder what Miss Vignes would be doing right now. Then there she was, Miss Vignes lounging in her lush home, a fur rug peeking between her toes, not this cramped studio she shared with a sister who always smelled like starch. Or one night, when they’d stood outside a restaurant waiting to be served at the colored window, she thought, Miss Vignes would not receive her food out an alley window like a street dog. She couldn’t tell if she was offended, or if Miss Vignes was on her behalf.

Sometimes she wondered if Miss Vignes was a separate person altogether. Maybe she wasn’t a mask that Stella put on. Maybe Miss Vignes was already a part of her, as if she had been split in half. She
could become whichever woman she decided, whichever side of her face she tilted to the light.

N
O ONE IN THE
E
STATES
knew what to make of it: Stella Sanders crossing the street to visit with that colored woman. Marge Hawthorne swore she saw her venture over months ago, Stella ducking her head as she carried a cake in her arms. “Welcoming that woman here, can you believe it?” Marge asked, and nobody did believe her, not at first. Marge was always imagining things; she’d sworn twice that she had seen Warren Beatty at the car wash. But then Cath Johansen spotted Stella and Loretta at the park, sitting side by side on a bench. Their shoulders rounded, casual and easy. Loretta said something that made Stella laugh, and Stella actually reached for Loretta’s cigarette and took a drag. Put that colored woman’s cigarette in her own mouth! This detail—specific and odd—made the story stick, not to mention the fact that Cath was telling it. She’d always been a little enamored with Stella, orbiting around her like a satellite planet happy to be washed in her light.

But when she told the other ladies about Stella and Loretta, Cath said that she’d never known Stella well, not really, and besides, there was always something a little strange about that woman. Betsy Roberts interrupted to tell the group that just that Monday, she’d seen Stella walking across the street with her daughter.

“That’s the shame of it,” she said. “To bring that little girl into all of this.”

But what all of this meant was anybody’s guess. No one said a word to Blake Sanders, who’d noticed Stella’s strangeness but had already accepted that his wife was the type of woman who fell into moods he could not decipher. His mother had warned him about her,
said she wouldn’t be worth the trouble. He’d just started dating Stella then, but she’d been his secretary for two years already; he spoke to her more than to anyone else in his life. He could sense by the shape of her shoulders if she was in a bad mood; he could read in the slant of her handwriting when she was hurried. But dating Stella felt like unfolding an entirely new mystery. He never met anyone else in her life. No family, no friends, no former lovers. Back then, her distantness seemed dreamy. Romantic, even. But his mother said that Stella was hiding something.

“I don’t know what,” she’d said, “but I’ll tell you this—her family’s still alive.”

“Then why would she say they aren’t?”

“Because,” his mother said, “she probably comes from some backwoods Louisiana trash and she doesn’t want you to find out about it. Well, you’ll find out soon enough.”

His mother had wanted him to marry a different girl, one who came from a certain pedigree. In college, he’d escorted that type of girl to dozens of formals—society girls who bored him to tears. Maybe that’s why he was drawn to the pretty secretary who came from nowhere and had nobody. He didn’t mind her secrets. He would learn them in good time. But years had passed and she was as inscrutable as ever. He came home early from work one afternoon, calling her name, and found the house empty. When his wife and daughter finally returned, an hour later, Stella, surprised to see him, bent to give him a kiss.

“Sorry, darling,” she said. “We were at Cath’s and I lost track of time.”

Another time, he’d beaten her home because she’d stayed too late at Betsy Roberts’s house.

“What were you two talking about?” he asked later.

She was sitting in front of her vanity mirror, brushing her hair.
One hundred strokes each night before bed; she’d read it in
Glamour
once. The red brush blurred, mesmerizing him.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “The girls. Little things like that.”