Whitegirl Read online

  My gorgeous mother, Barbara, sold Avon products, going door-to-door in her heels and her suit just like Jackie’s. Diana and I went with her once in a while, never the boys. She drove to a neighborhood and we listened in the backseat as she practiced her lines, her pitch. We waited in the car, and when she finished in one house and went to try the next one, she waved to us as if she was sitting on a float wearing white gloves up to her elbows. She carried this enormous, thrilling case that opened up into a display of cremes and shadows and glosses. The pots and samples looked like licks of candy, whipped frostings, and jellies. The eye shadow came in cakes. At our mother’s knee my sister and I contoured our cheeks and made our eyes look big as bodies of water. We pushed back our cuticles and applied coats of polish to our nails. She tucked soft puffs of cotton between our wet painted toes. We held still. We held our breaths, loving her, loving the polish smells and all the equipment and the touch of her light hands on our feet, our cheeks. She was girlish, clapping and cooing when we paraded around. Her eyes went bright with pleasure at the sight of us. She was the prettiest mother, the one whose dress was admired at church, the one with the longest nails, the smoothest skin. With her we studied the fashion tips and the makeover pictures like a catechism. The homily was: “Anything for beauty.” For gifts, we were given leg waxes at twelve, new blond hairs peeled up from their roots on our shins. We were in all the pageants, tap-dancing with pink tulle poufing out from our bony waists like a nightmare of cotton candy, ringlets bouncing. I was Little Miss Artichoke once, when I was eight. Then, at thirteen, I won Miss Junior Organic Produce. My mother jumped up and down, shrieking She Won She Won She Won like her horse had come in, like it was the rhinestones on her own head, the bouquet of hydroponically grown lettuces in her own arms.

  “Charlotte looks just like you,” said the head judge, when he met my mother.

  “Does she?” she asked. “Thank you.” Her eyes glittered when she smiled up at him, and she swallowed hard with some feeling I couldn’t recognize exactly. She had won pageants, too, in her day.

  “I’m so happy,” she said, driving home. “It makes me so happy when you win.”

  But that was the day, in the car, when I quietly told her I didn’t really want to be in any more contests, not beauty, not talent. I said I was shy. The contests made my stomach ache, made me throw up behind the reviewing stand.

  Oh, that made her mad. I was just being stupid. What was wrong with me!? I had won, for goodness sake. I tried not to cry when she said that, and when she saw my throat working up and down, my head turned to the window, she softened up a little. “Your beauty is a gift from God, angel,” she said, reaching across the front seat to push my hair off my face. “God wants us to use our gifts.”

  “You’re the one who wants me to use them,” I whispered.

  “What did you say?”

  I had to tell her. I couldn’t stand the pressure, the eyes of the judges, the way they all watched me, inspecting me for flaws. I had to say it. You’re the one who wants me to use them.

  She looked over at me, crushed and livid. She nearly drove the car off the road. “The choice is not yours,” she said. “I’ve paid the entry fee.”

  My father was my savior that time. “Fine,” he said, when my mother reported on me. “No more pageants.” He thought it was time for me to be in a Bible study group anyway. I started Kids for Christ that fall. I was fourteen. My mother focused on my sister’s pageants now, and while she still talked to both us girls about how we would grow up to be wives with husbands for our heads, For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church, quoting to us regularly from the little Bible Promise Book she kept in her purse, she seemed gradually more annoyed and distracted. Was it because I declined to compete for the county title? I don’t know. Probably it started then and went on from there.

  My wardrobe changed. My hair. My attitude. I refused to sleep in rollers. I had Flower Child hair; but not for politics, for fashion. Between me and my mother it was a problem of styles, at first, anyway. I wore pants to school, bell-bottoms with peasant blouses, and left my sweater sets at home. She got furious over this. I talked back. I argued. By fifteen and sixteen it got worse. I had questions about God. How could He really care whether I wore a halter top or not? How would the length of my skirts matter on the Last Day? The questions were what made my father furious. He sent me for a talk with Pastor Hanneman. I got caught calling him Hiney-man behind his back. Soon I was sent to him weekly.

  “A true Christian wears fashions that please the Lord,” the pastor said. “If you do not allow Him to guide you, we must ask: Are you, in fact, a true Christian?”

  I wanted to be a true Christian, but I didn’t see how I could and still be Charlotte—wearing what I wore and feeling what I felt. It was a test I was failing daily. In our house, all through high school, it was tense and getting tenser. “Turn that off,” my mother said, about my radio. “Shh,” my dad said, when I spoke. “Have respect! Sit up straight! Comb your hair! Right now! Clean up this mess! Charlotte! Charlotte! Charlotte!” I had to get out and I did. I got to college.

  “Hey, Charlotte.” “Hi, Charlotte.” “ ’Lo, how you doin’?” This was the routine of my fellow Cabot students passing me on the way to breakfast. “Hi!” I said. “Hi, Hi, Hi.” I prepared for the approach of each one I passed, looking down at my feet, then boom, right up into their eyes, smile like a dare: Do you like me? It was a sorry kind of game, hoping the sun behind me made my hair a halo. I watched how they looked at me, the handsome boys with Greek statuary faces glancing away as I came toward them, the snow squeaking under their thick boots, and then just before it was too late, there would be a hard little narrowing of their eyes, into a frank smile of … what? Something like lust, or appreciation, that made me grateful each time, but also gave me a scared feeling, like trumping somebody. Like they didn’t know what they were seeing. Who they were smiling at. Sometimes girls talked in pairs about me behind their cupped hands. Still, I saw their lips curl.

  My mother’s lessons played like tapes in my head. They’re just burning up with envy of you, she’d say. If you have a problem, you can be sure it’s jealousy, because they’re looking at you, your blue eyes and golden waterfall hair, Charlotte sweetie. You have what everybody wants, women to be you, men to have you. All your life, wherever you go, everyone will love you.

  But I did not expect anyone to love me, to be quite honest with you.

  That morning as I walked to breakfast I saw somebody across the big field coming toward me carrying skis. As he came closer I saw that it was a black man. Strange, to see a black man carrying skis, I thought. And then I was immediately arguing with myself: Well, why is it strange? Because when have you ever seen a black man ski? They don’t ski. Never seen a black person on skis. But why wouldn’t they ski? Everybody skis here, this is a college known for skiing. What do you mean, “they,” anyway?

  These thoughts were unsettling, so that my face was not properly arranged as he approached. I was staring outright at him, a tall, square-shouldered student with dark brown skin. His eyes were—green. I had never seen that, realized it was possible. Green eyes, my God, I thought, and couldn’t help my mind’s big leap backward two hundred years, willy-nilly, thinking of Thomas Jefferson and Sally something, his slave’s name was; picturing the smiling woman in the red head wrap on the Aunt Jemima pancake-mix box coupled with the pigtailed president on the nickel head, making a brown-skinned child with green eyes. And in that instant, when the guy with his skis passed me, I was squinting as if blinded by snow glare. I stepped off the path to let him go by. In the space of that brief second, there appeared to be a smirk on his face, or an exhale of disgust.

  Maybe he thinks I thought he was going to rape me, or take my money. But of course I wasn’t thinking that! Just because he’s a black man? Why would he assume that? That’s not the way I think. But perhaps he assumed nothing. Maybe he was passing me on the path and I was getting o
ut of the way of his skis. I was letting him pass as I would anyone carrying skis. Anyone.

  Now something about my morning was spoiled. I was rattled. He had smirked at me. As if I had done just what he thought I’d do. Isn’t that just like a white girl, he was thinking now. In my white town there was not much in the way of black people. We didn’t have any black kids in our school. Not even one. Some lived in the town of Napa, down 37 from us. But we only saw them in the street, in shops or a restaurant, once in a while. On TV there was Redd Foxx in a cap, and Flip Wilson in a waitress uniform. There was Martin Luther King, Jr., and pictures of German shepherds leaping at the throats of black girls in pastel dresses and white gloves. At home there was five-year-old me singing Catch a nigger by the toe, and Mom, furious, saying “Don’t you ever use that word! We are all God’s children. We are not racists!” There was my grandfather watching the news when Dr. King was killed, saying I don’t see what all the fuss is about. He was a troublemaker. In school we had standard assignments about being created equal, about George Washington Carver and the peanut.

  But when did you ever see a black man ski?

  Thinking about it made my head feel boiled. I went to the dining hall and drank saccharine coffee and studied the Bible. This was not for any reasons of faith, or an attempt to find meaning to what had just transpired on the pathways of my college or my life so far. It was for my Religion class. I was reading the Old Testament for credit, for my mom Barbara and my dad Arthur, to convince them I would not continue my spectacular fall from grace, and that here in the pure, sparkling whiteness of Vermont I was living a righteous life with God, still renouncing Satan with all my might.

  Of course, I had failed to do the assignment. I was frantically reading Deuteronomy at breakfast, guilt and hangover and caffeine perking in my veins in equal measure. Take heed lest you forget the LORD your God.…

  To me, God was real. Not real the way He was when I was little. Then He was my friend. In Sunday school we sang Jesus loves me, this I know. In church, Diana and I would be sobbing, sometimes, just sobbing. Because it felt like He loved us so much. He holds you in the palm of His hand, the congregation sang, and the pastor asked all the little ones to come up and receive His blessing. We closed our eyes and raised our arms and the pastor put his hands on us. The music was loud and emotional. He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn … I sobbed and Diana sobbed, up there by the pulpit in our smocked dresses and our hair ribbons. We were overcome. I loved it. I invited Jesus into my heart. The grown-ups looked at us with damp eyes and their hands raised, witnessing, little knowing that Charlotte Halsey was thinking of God as a kind of amusement park, hoping to get a ride, an eagle ride; imagining myself in His hand, as if He could scoop me up like Gulliver holding a Lilliputian. It sounded so cool. I loved God then. My friend, God.

  Now He was real in a different way. For example, He knew I had a hangover. I pictured Him watching me in the cafeteria, watching every moment, Him and Father Time and Santa Claus—basically the same guy: same basic beard. With one yank you could get it off, that beard, leaving a gray gum stain behind on the chin. I was always having these blasphemous thoughts about serious things—God, black men with skis—but I was good at tamping them down, finding the proper line to toe.

  Toe the line. That was my father’s expression. God was definitely real to my father. You could be talking about anything: school, what’s for dinner, a football game, and there was God being an expert on the subject.

  Me: Who’s winning?

  Dad: Not the 49ers. He just must be saving them for next season, I don’t know. Or He may wait for the fourth quarter. They must not have prayed hard enough about winning, Sunshine.

  Sunshine. Honey, Angel. He had sweet little names for me then, but later not so sweet: Heretic, damned, lost.

  My dad was gorgeous as a young man. Like James Dean, I’m not kidding. Not with the lip-hung cigarette, of course, but in certain pictures he has bedroom eyes, a sidelong glance, with his hair sculpted and also his cheekbones. He was called Art then, not Arthur. Art Halsey. I can see exactly what my mother saw in him. He was kind and gentle, my dad. He said I was God’s gift. He said we all were. Peter, Charlotte, Diana, Sean.

  The four of us. We were precious. He was affectionate. Big bear hugs and Hello, precious, how’s my Sunshine this morning? But there were problems. His temper. Don’t you dare! A confusing person. So friendly, Hey, how ya doin’? slap you on the back, kiss on the cheek, Don’t you look beautiful? one minute, the next, thundering and rampaging around like bad weather. Or withdrawn in the backyard hammock. Eyes closed but not asleep. Rubbing his temples. What did he think about? God, I guessed. But I didn’t know half the story then, what kid ever does?

  Are you okay, Daddy? When I was small—five or six—I used to go out there and climb into the hammock with him. He smelled of aftershave and the stomach acid tablets he chewed all the time. You okay?

  Sure. Just tired, just tired.

  But really he was melancholy. I wanted to cheer him up, make him happy.

  Which was what I was still trying to do, long-distance, reading Deuteronomy in the dining hall. It was boring, with all its silly food rules, what to eat, what not; and scary, with its warnings close to the bone for me, if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods, you shall surely perish.… I was trying hard not to think about the Last Day, or have the irreligious thought about God’s beard, or that Deuteronomy sounded like a medical procedure to remove something (have you heard? he’s just undergone a deuteronomy … or is that deuterectomy?) when I saw Jack Sutherland, with his tray full of breakfast, emerging from the cafeteria line and searching for somewhere to sit.

  You could see a shift of attention in the room. You could see girls sliding their eyes toward him, boys watching them notice him. Somebody said, “Oh, God. It’s him,” as if she meant Him, as if Jack were sent to Earth for a Holy purpose. Their attention influenced me. Everybody seemed to want him, so I would want him, too. I wanted him to sit with me. Then, I wanted him to be my boyfriend. I waited till he got about a table away from me, till he was within eyeshot, and then, just at the right moment, raised my gaze to his face, just hoping he would feel it.

  3.

  Jack was tall and fine as what you read about in fairy stories when you are young. You could use words like dashing about him. You could talk about him as if he were riding around on a steed, or a unicorn. He was a Californian, like me. He had the same devil-may-care personality of the dangerous boys I went to high school with. In the way he carried himself, the set of his eyes, narrowed down a little with his mouth torqued up on one side, you could see he had some private, possibly cruel amusement going on in his mind. He wore baseball caps backward on his head, and there was a fountain spout of yellow hair sticking up from under the plastic fastening in front. Veins like vine tendrils climbed up his lean muscly arms. I admired that. Also he was a champion ski racer, one of the best on the college circuit, which meant he was a kind of celebrity at Cabot.

  I think now that I had what Claire called the Magpie Syndrome, after the magpie, a bird that likes flash, goes after anything shiny. In a magpie’s nest you are likely to find lost earrings, scraps of foil, a car key, somebody’s glass eye, filaments of tinsel. None of which are all that comfortable to have in a nest, but they are the heart’s desire of the magpie, for whom glamour is all seven of the virtues.

  In the cafeteria, I looked up from my Bible at Jack as he walked with his tray and smiled just enough. He stopped at my table and swung his long denim leg up over the back of a chair to sit. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, Jack.”

  “Git your nose out of that book, kid,” he said. He put some twang in his voice that made him sound vaguely Texan. “You look all serious.”

  “Ja-ack. It’s the Bible.”

  “Sumimasen,” said Jack. “Charlotte-san sumimasen yo.” Jack was a Japanese studies major. He told me once he picked Japanese because he
knew he could make a lot of money in Japan. Yen were apparently all over the place, ready to be changed into dollars. People said Jack’s Japanese was nearly flawless, not that I would know, but it made me laugh, to hear this squeaky-mouse language coming out of his cowboy personality. It reminded me of a song my uncle Paul used to play on the piano that went: “Chinky chinky Chinaman, washed his face in a frying pan, combed his hair with a garden rake, saw his sweetheart in the lake.…” He used to sing it every Thanksgiving, clowning around with his upper teeth bucked out over his bottom lip, eyes squinting.

  “Ohayoo gozaimasu, Charlotte-san. Genki desu-ka?” Jack was asking me a question.

  “Speak English,” I said. He grinned at me. “How’s your team doing?” I said. “You guys winning?”

  “Fierce! Fierce, fierce, fierce. You been on the hill yet this week?”

  “Excellent,” I told him.

  “Supreme bumps, huh?” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But not like home.”

  In the California Sierras the snow was soft and feathery. The mountains had endless, wide trails. I learned to ski by going on church trips and getting invited on weekends with the families of my school friends. My style was not fancy. I could perform what was called wedeln. I managed to be graceful. But here in Vermont there were nasty little dark rocks coming up to eat the bottoms of your skis, yellow slicks of ice stuttering your edges. Sometimes I had to sideslip the whole way down. “There’s just no comparison,” I said.

  “Naw, you’re right, never good as home,” said Jack. “You goin’ back, Christmas?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Mom and Diana would get the Christmas tree out of its plastic bag in the attic and put it in the living room, dolled up with tiny white lights and white ribbons. On the lawn, Dad would put out the manger with the plaster Baby Jesus in it—the Baby Cheese, I used to think he was called, talking about the Son of God as if he were cheddar or Muenster.