In fact, I thought, maybe you, Davidia Jones, might one day have the same kind of ending. A Molly Ringwald Ending. Maybe that will happen for you in high school, just like it happened for Molly Ringwald. Yes, maybe a boy, a boy just like Jake Ryan, will come along and transform you from Monkey Night into the luckiest girl in school, because he sees you for what you really are. Special in a good way.
I floated home on long dirt roads and found the house dark when I got to our cement front steps. Elmer’s car was parked outside, so I supposed that he and Cora had already had their gift conversation and moved into her bedroom.
But I was wrong. Elmer was still in the house, sitting hunched over in the easy chair when I walked in.
He looked up at me, his eyes red like mine from crying. “Your mama gone to the bar.”
My eyes went to the jewelry box that was now in his hand and not on Cora’s vanity, as I had expected. At the time, I thought it strange that Cora would turn down jewelry. It would take me years of mainstream movies before I realized that the velvet box had actually housed an engagement ring, the one kind of diamond that Cora’s nature prevented her from accepting.
“She don’t love me. She don’t care if you got a daddy or not,” he said. “She don’t think about nobody but herself.”
More shocking than finding him sitting alone in the dark living room was the realization that this was actually news to him. I was glad that I had already decided to stop talking by then, because I did not have any words for somebody that blind.
But I also didn’t have anything else to do, so I sat down on the couch and waited with him. About an hour later, he got up and left, silent as a ghost. And I never saw him again.
I’m still not sure why that scene wasn’t enough to kill my newfound sense of romance. I thought about it often during my first year in Los Angeles, and I wondered why it didn’t occur to me then that if I kept on down this road of impossible hope, one day that would be me walking out of Cora’s house a shell of a human being. Just like Elmer.
TWO
The first time I saw him, I loved him. Just like I loved Sixteen Candles from day one. I spotted him across the street, and I loved him. As he walked toward me, skin the color of sunshine, smile whiter than snow, I loved him.
It was 1991, I was fifteen, and I didn’t know his name.
But I knew my mama had lied.
Two years beforehand, she had sneered into her brandy-laced morning coffee and said, “All them people on TV and in the movies falling in love. Now these movies got women in real life losing they mind, talking about, ‘I want me some big love.’
“But there ain’t no such thing. Believe me, I done slept with too many mens talking about, ‘I loves my wife. I loves that girl I go around town with. I got BIG love for them.’ Fuck them bitches, I’m telling you, there ain’t no such thing.”
However, I didn’t believe a word of it as I watched this boy walk toward me. Gooseflesh appeared on my dark arms and every nerve in my body rose up like antennas finding their station. And even as my brain turned to static, I recognized these things for what they were. Big Love.
He was tall: six-one, maybe six-two. He had brown eyes that were soft enough to be appealing and a buttery face that was hard enough not to be too pretty. He was wiry with muscle, but not the regular, descended-from-slaves, black boy muscle. He had the kind of body that comes from machines and weights, from actually working out.
That’s not what made me love him in an instant, though. I loved him because I could see all the beauty that he carried inside of him. It was practically pouring out of him and spilling onto the sidewalk as he came up to me, awesomely turned out in jeans and a short-sleeved polo.
“Excuse me, do you know where Greeley’s Mini-Mart is?”
He had a Southern accent, but he wasn’t from around here. I knew this because I had laid eyes on everyone in Glass, and I had never seen him before. I also knew this because his accent was smooth, polished, like he ran all his words under the faucet for a couple of seconds before letting them fall out of his mouth.