Scamming Scarlett - Chapter 1 by Rebecca Bibbs

Kicking off my bejeweled Jimmy Choos, I tossed the gold-beaded evening bag onto the sofa. Too tired to remove the long brown brocade jacket that coordinated perfectly with the gold brocade knee-length shift, I plopped myself next to the clutch, nearly crushing its contents. My knees knocked together like that annoying contraption with the silver balls that clacked against one another on Alain’s Laffineur’s desk at Landrum Pharmaceuticals.
That was one waste of a fabulous outfit, I thought, reflecting on the third date I’d had that week. I’d fought hard to wrest the last size 12 – I was still slender at 5 feet, 10 inches -- from that woman in the black suit edged with fox fur in the haute couture salon at Saks. At least I could wear it again sometime with another, hopefully more worthy, prospect.
I sighed. Each date had been a bust in its own way. Maybe I ought to go back to Dietrich, I pondered for a moment as I admired the layer of L’Oreal Ragin’ Cajun I’d quickly spread over the chipping lacquer on my nails shortly before I left. Then I cackled at my foolishness.
“Skat Steinmeier, what are you thinking?” I chided myself.
There were plenty of reasons why I’d left my husband of 12 years four months earlier -- not the least of which was the mistress he kept in Singapore, the woman who was able to bear for him the son I couldn’t. Frankly, that was 11 years later than I should have left him. And she could have him, as far as I was concerned.
Aschenputtel, my calico cat, rubbed her body against my legs before jumping onto the sofa. The black swatches against the orange and white of her fur reminded me of the ashes on Cinderella’s clothing, prompting me to give her the German version of the fairy tale character’s name. Dietrich never was partial to pets because his clean-freak mother considered them dirty and never allowed them, so I’d gotten custody of the patchwork puss in the break-up. Like an anxious suitor, she tried to make eye contact with me, wanting my attention.
“Did you miss me tonight?” I crooned at her in German as I scratched between her ears. She held up her white-gloved paw in appreciation. Once she curled up on my lap, I stroked absently at the purring feline’s fur.
The day I met Dietrich Steinmeier I still believed in fairy tales. He usually sat behind me in the international competitive strategy class we’d each enrolled in through the MBA program at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. The two other women twittered when the 6-foot-tall Teutonic god entered the room on the first day of class.
“My undergrad majors were Chinese, German and international relations. Took me only five years,” I overheard him brag to a guy next to him. “I’m doing this dual JD/MBA program.”
The other women twittered some more. I’ll bet they were thinking this man would make great husband material. I snorted. He was so pedantic, wanting everyone to overhear his conversation.
A few days later, he leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder.
“So what’s your story?” he asked.
“What’s it to you?” I answered, oblivious that he was just making an excuse to talk to me.
“Just wanting to know. From the class discussions, you really seem to know your stuff.”
“That’s because I read the assignments.”
“Were you a business major undergrad?” he pressed.
“No. Germanic languages. I majored in German and minored in Dutch and Danish.”
“Impressive,” he said, nodding his head with approval.
“So you speak German, well?” he asked, switching to German to test me.
“Natürlich,” I answered, further explaining in German that even without the degree, I would have been fluent since my mother spoke her native tongue at home with my brother Erich and me. Our bond was solidified.
Dietrich and I each were born and raised in Indianapolis, but we grew up worlds apart. He came from old money, growing up in one of the Tudoresque mansions that lined Meridian Street. His lifestyle was paid for by Steinmeier’s, the gourmet grocery store started by his great-grandfather.
Though Dietrich’s great-grandparents came over on the boat, their male descendants reinfused the bloodline with Aryan blood each generation by marrying women directly from their hometown of Heidelberg. These mostly simple women, none of whom spoke English when she first arrived, were the ultimate housewives with a special knack for pounding schnitzel, dusting the kitschy cuckoo clocks, and raising geniuses. Like my mine, Dietrich’s mother spoke her native language at home with her three sons and daughter.
As befitted a brilliant child, Dietrich was sent to the elite Park Tudor School. His less than stellar grades, however, kept out of reach his father’s alma mater, the Wharton School of Business at Princeton. So he ended up at the University of Southern California instead.
The interracial family into which I was born couldn’t have been more different than that of my husband. We settled on the Eastside, living first on the Army post at Fort Benjamin Harrison and later in a home my parents bought nearby when my father left the service. Since my father was from Tennessee and my mother from Germany, we had no extended family in Indiana. Instead, my parents established kinship with some of the many other interracial Army families, which came in a variety of racial combinations.
Unlike the men in Dietrich’s family, my father didn’t have the benefit of a business legacy. Raised by a single parent with only an eighth-grade education and seven children by five men, he had to pull himself up by the boot straps, eventually landing a job on the production line at Landrum, the city’s largest and most sought-after employer. When he had time, he used his G.I. Bill to work his way through school, eventually becoming a pharmacist, a quest that actually took most of my childhood.
My mother, too, wasn’t a Hausfrau like the German mothers in Dietrich’s family. She was a northern German from Hamburg -- an urbane, sophisticated college-educated woman, who spoke English. She kept a clean home, but it was best to put away the white gloves lest she missed a spot. Most of our meals were the meat, potatoes and root vegetables common in her native land, but she wasn’t above experimenting with the cuisine of her husband’s people, occasionally throwing a slab of ribs on the grill and cutting up a fatty piece of pork to season a pot of greens. The one thing her people and my father’s people shared was a love of pork. And though she thought it was cute to dress my older brother Rhett in lederhosen, the traditional German leather shorts, and me in a dirndl, the traditional German dress and apron, my mother wouldn’t have been caught dead owning lace café curtains, beer steins or other trappings of what she considered low German culture.
As different as their backgrounds were, my parents agreed on one thing: my brother and I needed the best education that the government could provide. What they couldn’t agree on was the role that race would play. In an era of court-ordered desegregation, they were either blessed or cursed, depending on your point of view, with deciding whether to check the “white” box and have their children sent to the nearest school or the “black” box and have them bused to a school in the far reaches of the county. They each agreed that the distant school likely would provide the better education, but Mutti was reluctant to check the “Black” box.
“I’m not Black, so my children can’t be Black,” she asserted.
“We’re in America, and one drop of Black blood makes you Black,” Dad countered. I know my father thought he spoke from experience. After all, Rhett and I were hardly the first mixed-race children in his family. His mother had two children by the white men whose homes she cleaned. But that was a different time and a different place.
“Why can’t we just check both?” I chimed in. Suddenly, the arguing stopped as my parents looked gravely at one another.
“Well, there’s really nothing that stops us from doing that,” Dad said reluctantly. “I suppose we could check both and leave it to the school district to sort out what it means.”
Though we’d found a compromise on that particular issue of race, there were plenty of others that at times divided the household. For instance, my parents had named me Scarlett. Or rather, my mother named me, and my father went along with it. I’d known since I was young that my mother named me after the heroine of the Margaret Mitchell classic Gone With the Wind, a book that haunted her since she was a teenager. On my 15th birthday, she presented me with that book. But when I read it, I was horrified.
“How could you have named me, your mixed-race child, after a woman who owned slaves?” I demanded. Shock and confusion crossed my mother’s face.
“Well, Schatzie,” she said, invoking her German term of endearment to calm me, “I never thought of it that way. I just thought it was a pretty name.” She smiled.
“Besides, she was the daughter of a slave owner. I don’t think she owned them herself. But she did employ them after the war.”
“That’s no excuse,” I insisted. “She was in an unearned position of power over the souls of these mistreated people.”
“At least I didn’t name you Pitty Pat,” Mutti said, hoping the steer the conversation to a lighter direction.
“Or Prissy,” my father quipped as he walked into the kitchen where I confronted my mother. I was not amused.
“Besides, your brother didn’t mind that we named him Rhett,” Dad continued, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
“And how queer is that?” I demanded. “Naming a brother and sister after lovers? What were you guys thinking?”
I told my parents that day they were never again to refer to me as Scarlett, that I now would be known as Skat. This contraction of the name I found so offensive also reminded me of the nonsense words and syllables riffed by jazz singers. Because jazz was a uniquely Black American art form, I felt this solution balanced out the grave mistake made by my parents at my birth.
“Time for me to get dressed for bed,” I told Aschenputtel, giving her a couple of last strokes for good measure. She meowed in dismay as I shoved her off my lap.