The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt

impression, at the age of seven, that the world consisted of two parallel and more or less identical sets of people—one dark, one light—just as the dolls on the toy store shelves always came in two versions, one dark, one light. Only the black dolls were hers, she knew. And yet there were more of the white ones, and they were prettier. Black dolls, she would tell Eliot years afterwards, provided her introduction to the politics of race.
    Jerene knew she was adopted, but from an early age she was instructed to keep this fact a secret within the family. "Just be glad you've got all the things you've got," her mother would tell her, when Jerene asked about her origins. "You would've grown up mighty differently if we hadn't come along." Defeated, she would return to her room, her refugee's good fortune choking her. She could not get over the accidental nature of her blessed life; it made everything else wrong. With frantic exuberance Margaret dressed Jerene up in pink, lacy blouses, curled her hair and tied it with ribbons, sometimes painted her tiny but perfect nails bright red, until she resembled the black dolls that sat on her bedroom shelf—Black Barbie, Black Baby Talks-a-lot, Black Baby Alive—all identical to the originals, but dark, darkened, wrong, just as she was wrong, just as her parents were wrong and their friends were wrong, clinking their glasses in the Parkses' living room. They were alone in Westport. Across the street was a house with a F OR S ALE sign that no one bought for a year, and Jerene understood, from conversations she heard between her parents, that somehow they were responsible not only for one family's leaving but for another family deciding at the last minute not to buy. Coming home from shopping with her mother, Jerene would see notes slipped under the door, notes her mother would snatch up and ball in her fist, unopened. Racism was genteel in Westport, she would later tell Eliot; it always came in an envelope.
    Once she was roused early in the morning, put in the car, driven through familiar streets of green lawns and houses, then down a long, grass-lined highway into a region of small, lopsided buildings where children her own age played in earnest among garbage cans and cars. They parked beside a glass door shot through with cracks, above which a sign announced B RITEVIEW L AUNDRY , and went inside, into that hot room full of steam and the sweet smell of fabric softener that Jerene would never forget. Her grandfather wore a T-shirt browned with sweat and tobacco juice; she did not want to touch him. But her grandmother, a bandanna twisted around her head, glowed and shone like something newly polished as she hoisted huge dripping sheets from washing machines. She turned, smiled, knew not to embrace Sam and Margaret in their suits. And then, as they all left together, Jerene's grandfather pulled the heavy metal grating down over the steamy glass windows of the laundromat, and they got into the back seat of the big car with Jerene. "It's a treat, riding," Jerene's grandmother Nellie said. She held Jerene on her lap, whispering nonsense in her ear as Sam drove them to the tiny apartment of his childhood, with its cracked, impossibly narrow halls, and there they sat for an hour on stiff-backed chairs in the little sitting room, eating cookies and drinking lemonade. Jerene always remembered the hand-shaped splotch on the kitchen wall, which she thought was a part of somebody's shadow; on the way home she would wonder who it was, the poor person whose shadow was missing a hand.
    Sam was enraged on the rides home from his parents' house. "Why won't they do something?" he said to Margaret. "They could retire to Florida. I'd give them the money." But they wouldn't take Sam's money because of pride. Jerene had trouble figuring out what pride was. In her schoolbooks, the proud boy was haughty and looked down on his friends, but that sounded more like her parents than her grandparents. To Margaret,