In real life, Monkey Night is what the other kids in kindergarten called me. Mississippi may have had some of the lowest standardized test scores in the nation, but I’ll tell you this right now: The kids at my school excelled in creative cruelty. They nicknamed me Monkey Night within three weeks of making my acquaintance, because I was “ugly like a monkey and black as night.”
I was going to reset the needle on Cora’s record player for an encore, but Gloria stirred in my hand. “No,” she said, her falsetto voice shrill with anger. “Not unless you stop calling her Monkey Night! Her name is Davidia!”
The imaginary faces of the kids in the audience filled with remorse.
Perry Pointer, who was always putting gum on my seat and kicking me real hard in the shins, was the first to speak. “I’m sorry, Davidia,” he said. “Please be my friend.”
He brought a candy bar out of his pocket. “I’ll give you a PayDay if you be my friend.”
“No,” Gloria said for me. “She don’t want to be your friend, Perry Pointer. You don’t deserve no friends.”
Perry started to cry, but Gloria ignored him and said to the other kindergartners, “The rest of you can be Davidia’s friend, if you stop calling her names and talking about her. If you do that, she’ll be your friend and sing you more songs.”
Everybody cheered, including Tanisha Harris, who was the most popular girl in kindergarten because she always wore cool beads at the ends of her cornrows, which her mama changed out every day to match her dresses.
That night, she was wearing blue beads and a blue sequined dress. I always took the time to plot out exactly what Tanisha would wear in these imaginary scenarios, because she was usually the one that led the crowd in chanting my name.
“Davidia! Davidia!” she shouted. And the rest of the kids joined her, getting louder and louder until I put back on the Tina Turner record and started singing and dancing to “Proud Mary”—my encore song.
“Big River keep on rolling . . . Proud Mary keep on—”
“What the fuck you doing?” came Cora’s voice from behind me.
I was worried even before I saw her face, because I didn’t smell the alcohol on her. Cora’s general hatred for everyone and everything only seemed to burn hotter when she hadn’t had a taste of something. But I was a little braver back then, so I did turn around.
My eyes searched for and found the reason for her return. There was a green and white packet of cigarettes in her hand. Only Cora would come all the way back from the bar to get her cigarettes, the particular Virginia Slims she liked, because of their ad campaign slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby!”
How she managed to figure these liberated ads had anything to do with her, I do not know. But she was faithful to them, would even drive back from the edge of town to make sure she had them, since no self-respecting Glass man would ever smoke Virginia Slims, and no self-respecting Glass woman would ever talk to her, much less allow her to bum a cigarette.
“What the fuck you doing?” She took a step toward me. Loomed. “What the fuck you doing?”
“I’m Tina Turner,” I said, before my mouth could catch up to my good sense.
She backhanded me, sending my Tina Turner hair flying off my head. Then she beat me. Beat me until both of us were exhausted and I lay on the floor burning all over and naked except for the red high heels. There were tears coming out of my eyes. I knew, because I could feel them on my hot face. But they didn’t feel like they were coming from me exactly. They felt like my body’s physical reaction to the situation, like sweating in the summer. I knew the tears weren’t coming out of my heart, because all I felt was anger at myself.
I stared at my Tina Turner dress crumpled on the floor. Away from the magic of my body, it had morphed back into a towel. If only I were bigger, if only I were faster—
“I better stop before I break something,” Cora said. I had no idea whether she meant break some part of herself or me. She snatched the shoes off my feet. “Don’t let me catch you in my shoes again, you hear me, heifer?”
I heard her.