The Vanishing Half

It soon becomes public knowledge that the new neighbors are Reginald and Loretta Walker and their young daughter. Everyone in Stella’s neighborhood knows who Reginald Walker is, since he’s famous for his role as Sergeant Tommy Taylor, a police officer on a well-known television show. Blake enjoys living near a celebrity, yelling out Sergeant Tommy Taylor’s famous catchphrase (“File that form!”) whenever he sees Reginald across the street—something that Reginald takes in stride, though Stella can tell he finds it annoying. As for the other neighbors, Stella’s circle of wealthy white friends are still suspicious of the new family, insisting that Loretta is “uppity” because she wants to enroll her daughter in the same school that all of the neighborhood’s white children attend.

Stella looks out the window one morning and sees Kennedy playing with the girl across the street. Without thinking, she runs outside and grabs her daughter by the arm, pulling her inside. When Kennedy asks why she can’t play with the Walker girl, Stella repeats what her own mother once told her—namely, that she can’t play with Black people (Stella uses the n-word when she says this). The next day, Loretta Walker rings the doorbell and shoves a doll that Kennedy left behind into Stella’s arms.

Stella avoids Loretta for the next few weeks. She hears from a neighborhood friend that Loretta plans to sue the school system for not letting her daughter attend. Stella’s friend finds this absurd, insisting that Loretta must love drama for the sake of drama. When Stella notes that Loretta doesn’t seem like someone who wants to create problems, her friend asks how she would know. Immediately, Stella changes her tone, saying that her friend is probably right about Loretta.

Soon enough, Stella’s guilt takes over and drives her to bring Loretta a cake. On the day she brings it over, she sees that Loretta has friends over and thinks it’s probably a good thing, since it’ll make it easier to give Loretta the cake, say sorry, and quickly leave. But when she arrives, Loretta invites her inside. Her friends are polite, but they subtly shame Stella by saying that they’ve heard a lot about her. When Stella finally tries to apologize, she pauses, hoping that Loretta will jump in and dismiss the matter altogether. But Loretta lets her continue. Finally, Loretta says that she didn’t even want to move to the neighborhood in the first place—something Stella empathizes with. After all, she knows what it’s like to live “in a world not meant for you.”

Before leaving Loretta’s house, Stella suggests that their daughters should play together sometime at a nearby park. Loretta takes her up on this proposal several days later. As their daughters play, the two mothers sit on a park bench and talk about what brought them to the neighborhood. Loretta came to Los Angeles not because she wanted to live in the city, but because Reginald had big dreams of becoming a famous actor. Stella privately reflects on the fact that although she doesn’t particularly love Los Angeles, everything in her life since she started passing as white has been a very deliberate choice. She had to completely create her own identity, and though she followed Blake from New Orleans to Boston to Los Angeles, even that feels to her like a choice.

Stella asks Loretta why she chose to live in a white neighborhood when she could easily have found a friendlier place to live—a place where neighbors aren’t so hostile toward Black people. Loretta’s answer is simple: people are going to hate her anyway, so she might as well live in a big house in a rich neighborhood. After this conversation, Stella and Loretta start seeing each other on a regular basis. All summer, Stella looks forward to her time with Loretta. But she never tells Blake about their friendship. She even asks Kennedy not to mention it, urging her daughter to keep quiet about the frequent playdates she has with Loretta’s daughter.

Stella goes to Loretta’s house one day to play cards with her friends. At one point, Loretta’s friends start trying to dissuade Loretta from sending her daughter to the white school, saying it will only do the little girl harm. When they ask Stella what she thinks, she doesn’t know what to say. After a moment, she agrees that it’d be better for Loretta’s daughter if she didn’t go to the all-white school. Plus, she adds, everyone in the neighborhood already speaks so poorly of Loretta, and sending her daughter to the school would only make things worse. One of Loretta’s friends points out that Stella probably doesn’t defend Loretta when other people say bad things about her—a comment that ruins the entire afternoon.

After Loretta’s friends leave, Stella helps with the dishes. She apologizes for the conversation they had earlier about school, but Loretta doesn’t want to hear about Stella’s guilt. When Loretta reaches for a wet wine glass, she knocks it to the floor. Before she can kneel to clean it up, Stella stops her, saying, “Don’t, baby, you’ll cut yourself,” and cleans it up herself. Several days later, Loretta asks her about her family while they’re lying by Stella’s pool. Stella says her family died in an accident, but she also mentions that she used to have a twin. It’s the first time in years that she has talked about Desiree, and she doesn’t know what to say. But Loretta is supportive, empathetically saying that losing a twin must be like losing half of oneself.