Noele gasped. “He said that?”
“No, but that’s when he told me he ‘needed space.’” The backlash had hurt her feelings, but she didn’t need to act. Aaron did—for his ego and his bank account. To continue to be seen in the right crowds, with the right people, he needed to remain neutral. Elise had since wondered if this need impacted his attraction to his current costar, Maya Langston, who was mixed with a little bit of everything. She had five flags in her Instagram bio.
“Also, everyone in his family is light-skinned. It’s like passing the paper bag test was a marriage requirement.”
Her sisters thought it was funny, but it bothered Elise, who had been harmed by this perception. Though both were classified as light-skinned, fair, high yellow, or redbone by other Black people, and assumed to be mixed by White people, neither Elise nor Aaron had a non-Black parent. Elise was lighter than her parents, sisters, and most of her extended family due to the common sprinkles of Whiteness on the family trees of many Black Americans, resulting in unexpected characteristics that sometimes just cropped up. These reminders appeared in every generation, causing tremors, triggering the spaces of the blended race.
Often people seemed disappointed or puzzled to discover Elise was just Black and not biracial. Her explanation always began with “somewhere down the line,” and every time she veered down that path, the inquirer’s eyes would glaze over. They wanted her to validate the banana-pudding hue of her skin, her light eyes, and her hair that grew like a weed down her back, as if these qualities weren’t possible within the Black race. Slavery and its attendant sexual violence wasn’t what they wanted to be reminded of.
The industry wasn’t even polite about it. They wanted Elise’s hair straight and her body stick thin. Publicly, they praised her Blackness, to show their commitment to diversity. Still, they pushed her into roles in which her race was never established, where it didn’t exist, hoping no one would notice. And she had let them, for years. But the joke would maybe be on them now. After #oscarssowhite, her winning an Academy Award could be perceived as a handout—and worse, one that might not even be celebrated by the Black community. She wasn’t exactly qualified to be a “win” against the system; money and skin tone aside, her nepotistic ties to the industry screamed extreme privilege.
“Start choosing different roles,” Giovanni said. “Or diversify, like me.”
“I don’t know what I’d rather do.” Elise felt stuck in acting. People relied on her to feed their families, and the obligation was suffocating. “Maybe nothing for a while after the Oscars—I need a break.”
“Talking about Kitty could help things now.”
“I agree with Gio. We should make a joint statement.”
“We’re not going to say anything about Kitty. We can’t even talk about it as a family,” Elise reminded them.
Discretion functioned like a religion in the St. John home. The spawn of a billionaire entertainment couple, the sisters were famous before they knew the meaning of the word, and their inherited celebrity came with rules. They were never to make personal admissions on a public stage—not ever, even when their art did it for them. They weren’t to answer questions about lifestyle, politics, or their personal lives. It was safer that way. Celebrity was an image, an ideal model. It was a title that wore you, heavy like a crown, except your skin became the costume; your face, the mask. Any distraction from the fantasy detracted from the art—and, if they weren’t careful, the legacy.
Elise feared the damage had already been done. All Vogue wanted to talk about were rumors. Funny enough, they explicitly did not want to address those Instagram posts.
“So, what then? We’re just going to continue to let them hypothesize and harass us?”
“It will pass.”
“It’s barely November,” Giovanni reminded her. “Kitty will come up at every awards show, every interview.”
“We aren’t to speak about Kitty.” Her sisters grumbled audibly in protest but deferred to Elise’s authority. “Besides, all anyone wants to know is why she gave us the money.”
“So do we!” Giovanni exclaimed.
“Have you asked Mom?”
“I haven’t.”
“That’s ’cause you know she never has a worthwhile thing to say about Kitty.”
“That’s not true.” Giovanni was defensive, as if she’d been waiting for this. Elise wondered what their mother had said behind her back to prompt her sisters’ stance. “Imagine how she feels—the guilt.”
“She was right next door the whole time. That’s on her. Everything is on her,” Elise shot back.
“She’s dealing with Kitty’s death in her own way.” As her physical twin, Giovanni idolized their mother and romanticized her narcissism. She was the only one convinced her long disappearances for work were rooted in her need to provide, as if another film would make the difference between their lifestyle and homelessness.
“And how’s that?”
Giovanni crossed her arms. “I talk to her twice a day,” she protested. “She’s been staying busy. I support that.”
“I hear her lying to you from the bed,” Elise said. Sarah slept so much, Elise had usually felt compelled to check on her, after leaving Kitty’s, before going home. “She’s running from something.”
“People deal with grief in different ways,” Giovanni tried again. “We should show her some sensitivity.”
“Trust me, I have.” Unexpected tears began to flow. Giovanni put her arm around Elise’s shoulder, and Noele joined them.
Sarah claimed to be busy handling Kitty’s affairs, but Elise hadn’t believed her then.
Kitty had scolded her for saying it. She’ll come when she’s ready. But Elise didn’t say this aloud to her sisters. Instead Elise lamented how, for a woman who was once so beautiful, death had pulled on Kitty from the inside. Her eye sockets darkened; her cheekbones hollowed. The fat drained from her face, and her nose collapsed inward. “Still, she requested her lipstick every day.” This garnered a sad chuckle from Giovanni.
Trying to distract Kitty from her pain, Elise had bribed her with foot rubs in exchange for a story. “She pretended like she didn’t want to, but once she started talking, she didn’t stop.”
Elise had asked to record her—it had been years since Kitty had told her a story. Kitty talked for two hours that first day, her eyes closed the whole time, as if she was watching herself and her friends run all over Los Angeles. The next day, she was ready with another tale. Not long after, Kitty started hearing knocks late at night on her walls and front door, as if someone was trying to get in. “She told me it was death, and that she wasn’t afraid to die.”
Elise had wondered if she would hear the knocking when it was Kitty’s time. But she didn’t. Death took Kitty in the middle of the night, so silent, so quick that Elise slept through it, cocooned in the covers on the floor. With Kitty went Elise’s ability to rest.
* * *
Elise climbed out onto the Perch after her sisters went to bed. Over the hedges on her right, Kitty’s house looked dilapidated, as if it knew she wasn’t coming back. The floodlights highlighted the peeling flamingo-pink paint on its exterior and the weeds that had overtaken the grass. There were a few cracked, although not broken, windows on the second floor.