Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

“I suppose so,” her mother said.

Kennedy should’ve dropped it there. But she was angry, her mother so focused on that damn cake, as if it were the important thing, as if talking to her daughter was the dreaded chore. She wanted her mother to stop what she was doing, to notice her.

“Where did she die?” she said.

Now her mother turned around. She was wearing a peach apron, her hands speckled with vanilla frosting, and she was frowning. Not angry, exactly, but confused.

“What type of question is that?” she said.

“I’m just asking! You never tell me anything—”

“In Opelousas, Kennedy!” she said. “The same place I grew up. She never left and never went anywhere. Now don’t you have something else you could be doing right now?”

Kennedy almost cried. She cried easily and often back then, embarrassing her mother, who only cried during the occasional sad movie, always laughing at herself after, apologizing as she swept tears from the corners of her eyes. Kennedy cried on the supermarket floor if she wanted a pink bouncy ball that her mother, dragging her down the aisle, refused to buy. On the playground when she lost at tetherball. At night, when she woke from nightmares she couldn’t remember. And she blinked back tears then, even as her mother said something that she knew was wrong.

“That’s not where you’re from,” she said.

“What’re you talking about? Of course it is.”

“No, it’s not. You told me you were from a little town. It starts with an M . M-something. You told me when I was little.”

Her mother was quiet for so long that Kennedy started to feel crazy, like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz . And you were there, and you were there too! But the story about the town was real, she just couldn’t remember all the particulars, except that she’d been in the bathtub, her mother leaning over her. But now, her mother only laughed.

“And when was I supposed to have told you this?” she said. “You’re little now.”

“I don’t know—”

“You must have remembered wrong. You were still a baby.” Her mother stepped forward, the cake behind her smoothed on the top and edges. “Come here, honey. Want to lick the spoon?”

This was the first time Kennedy realized that her mother was a liar.

—

THE TOWN CLUNG.

She couldn’t shake it, even though she didn’t remember its name. Because she didn’t remember its name, even. For years, she never mentioned it to her mother again. But one night in college, a little high, she’d pulled an encyclopedia off her boyfriend’s shelf. “What’re you doing?” he asked halfheartedly, more interested in the joint he was rolling, so she ignored him, flipping until she landed on Louisiana. Down, down the page to the list of cities and towns in alphabetical order. Mansfield, Marion, Marksville.

“Hey,” he said, “put that shit down, you’re not supposed to be fucking studying right now.”

Mer Rouge, Milton, Monroe.

“Come on, man, that book can’t be more interesting than me.”

Moonshine, Moss Bluff, Mount Lebanon. She would know its name when she saw it, she was sure. But she scanned the whole list and not one of them seemed familiar. She slid the book back on the shelf.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

After that night, she never tried to search for the town again. It would be something that she would always know she was right about but could never prove, like people who swore they’d seen Elvis wandering around the grocery store, knocking on the melons. Unlike those loons, she wouldn’t tell anyone. A private crazy—she was okay with that. Until she met Jude Winston. That night, at the cast party, Jude spoke the word Mallard and it sounded like a song Kennedy hadn’t heard in years. Ah, that’s how it goes.

—

IN 1985, nearly three years after The Midnight Marauders closed, she saw Jude again in New York.

She was still new to the city then, half surviving her first winter. All her life, she’d never imagined living outside of Los Angeles, but the city had started to feel smaller by the second. She hadn’t seen Jude since the cast party, but she imagined bumping into her whenever she turned a corner. She saw her sitting in the windows of restaurants. Once, she’d flubbed her lines in Fiddler on the Roof because she’d spotted Jude in the front row. The woman looked just like her—dark, leggy, a little insecure, a little self-possessed—but by the time she realized her mistake, she’d ruined the whole scene. The director ordered the stagehands to remove her things from the dressing room before curtain. She blamed Jude. She blamed her for it all.

“I don’t understand it,” her mother said, when she announced that she was moving to New York. “Why’re you going all the way out there? You can become an actor right here.”

But she wanted some space from her mother too. At first, her mother refused to engage with Jude’s claims. Then she tried reason. Do I look like a Negro? Do you? Does it make any sense that we could be related to her? No, it didn’t, but little about her mother’s life made sense. Where had she come from? What was her life like before she’d gotten married? Who had she been, who had she loved, what had she wanted? The gaps. When she looked at her mother now, she only saw the gaps. And Jude, at least, had offered her a bridge, a way to understand. Of course she couldn’t stop thinking about her.

“I really wish you’d stop worrying about that,” her mother told her. “You’ll drive yourself crazy. In fact, I’m sure that’s why she said all those things to you. She’s jealous and wants to get in your head.”

She’d answered Kennedy’s questions, irritated but never angry. Then again, her mother was normally calm and rational. If she were to lie to her, she would do so as calmly and rationally as she did anything else.

In New York, Kennedy lived in a basement apartment in Crown Heights with her boyfriend, Frantz, who taught physics at Columbia. He was born in Port-de-Paix but raised in Bed-Stuy in one of those red-brown project buildings she passed by on the bus. He liked to tell her horror stories about growing up—rats gnawing on his toes, cockroaches gathered in a corner of the closet, the dope boys who lingered in the building lobby, waiting to steal his sneakers. He wanted her to understand him, she’d thought at first, but later she realized that he just liked having a dramatic backstory that contrasted with the man he’d grown up to be: careful, studious, always cleaning his horn-rimmed glasses.

He wasn’t cool. She liked that. He wasn’t one of the black boys she’d admired from afar, smooth boys slouched in beat-up cars or gathered in front of the movie theater, whistling at girls walking by. She and her friends pretended to be annoyed but secretly delighted in the attention from these boys they could never kiss, boys who could never call home. Oh, the little crushes she had on these boys. Safe ones, the way Jim Kelly sent a thrill through her. She’d perch on the arm of her father’s chair during Lakers games just for a glimpse of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in those goggles. Harmless crushes, really, but she knew better than to tell anybody about them. Frantz was her first black lover. She was his fourth white one.

“Fourth?” she said. “Really? What were the other three like?”

He laughed. They were standing in his faculty adviser’s kitchen during a department party, drinking ginger beers. They’d just started dating then and she was overdressed—she’d worn a long skirt and heels, imagining herself in some glamorous 1960s movie, hanging on the arm of her bespectacled professor husband in a smoke-filled living room. Instead, she was crowded with a bunch of grungy thirtysomethings in a third-floor walk-up, listening to Fleetwood Mac.