An American Marriage(27)



Let me start again. Celestial and I grew up on the same narrow street in Southwest Atlanta. The street was Lynn Valley, off of Lynn Drive, which branched off of Lynhurst. The dead end was considered a plus because we could play in the road without getting run over. Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn’t have to do anything but stay alive and have fun. We ran loose straight through the seventies, but we got stopped short when a serial killer terrorized the city. We tied a yellow ribbon around Old Hickey in memory of the twenty-nine missing and murdered. It was a rough couple of years, but the threat passed; the yellow ribbons frayed and fell like leaves and were burned like leaves. Celestial and I continued to live, love, learn, and grow.

When I was seven, my parents tangled in a nasty divorce back when nice families didn’t split up. Once Carlos moved out—a grand performance involving his three brothers, an off-duty cop, and a U-Haul—Celestial volunteered her own father. I’ll never forget her pulling me by the hand down to the basement lab. Mr. Davenport wore a white coat, like a doctor; his goggles burrowed in his asymmetric afro. “Daddy,” she said. “Andre’s daddy ran off, so I said you could be his daddy, too, sometimes.” Mr. Davenport fired up a Bunsen burner, pulled down his goggles, and said, “I’m amenable to the proposition.” To this day, this remains the greatest gift that anyone has ever extended to me. Mr. Davenport and I never became like father and son; the chemistry wasn’t quite right. Still with that gesture of generosity, she lifted the covers, I crawled under, and we became a family.

To lay it all on the table, we were not quite like brother and sister. We were more like kissing cousins. Our senior year in high school, we went to the Valentine’s Ball together, for lack of other options. She had her eye on a bass drummer, and I had my eye on this one majorette. As luck would have it, they had their sights on each other. I wasn’t surprised to be dateless. In a world that prized tall, dark, and handsome, I was little, light, and cute. After the prom, we kissed each other in the back of the limo from Witherspoon’s. Then, back at her house, we snuck down to the basement and made out on the little sofa her father crashed on when he needed a break from his work. The room smelled like rubbing alcohol, and the sofa cushions smelled like weed. Celestial glided over to a shiny file cabinet and produced a flask filled with something that might have been gin. We passed it back and forth until the courage kicked in.

Then I was such a mama’s boy that I confessed everything to Evie. The next morning. She had two things to say: (a) it was inevitable and (b) it was my duty to go next door, ring the bell, and ask Celestial to be my girlfriend. Like her daddy had said all those years ago, I was “amenable to the proposition,” but Celestial was not. “Dre, can we pretend like we didn’t do that? Can we just watch TV?” She was asking me a real question, wanting to know if it were possible for us to reverse the clock. Could we shift away from the memory of the night before, grow toward some other sun. I finally said that we could try. She broke my heart that afternoon, like how Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a glass with a song.

I’m not telling this to say that I planted my flag way back in high school. All I want to get across is that there is real history between us, not just an accident of time and place.

After high school, we went our separate ways, seeking our fortunes like the three little pigs. My seeking only took me seven miles up the road, to Morehouse College. I was a third-generation legacy, and this was enough for Carlos to pony up the tuition even though he hadn’t paid Evie half of what she asked for in child support. My first-choice school was Xavier University in New Orleans, but I had to go where Carlos was willing to send a check. I’m not complaining. Morehouse was a good fit, teaching me that there were dozens of ways to be a black man. I only had to choose which one was right for me.

Celestial picked Howard University, although her mother voted for Smith in Massachusetts and her dad endorsed Spelman. But whatever Celestial wanted, Celestial got, so they bought her a gray Toyota Corolla she named Lucille, and she set out for the nation’s capital. I halfheartedly tried to meet up with her when Morehouse played Howard for homecoming. My girlfriend at the time wasn’t keen on meeting Celestial; even she could tell from the way I pronounced her name that my feelings were more than friendly.

About three weeks after I didn’t see her in DC, she came back home, shattered. Her family kept her essentially sequestered for nearly six months. I visited twice and I would have come by every week, but her aunt Sylvia sent me away. Something shadowy and female happened between them, as mysterious and primal as witches’ brew.

Come September, Celestial was ready to live again, but she didn’t go back to DC. Strings were pulled and she enrolled at Spelman College after all. Evie told me to keep an eye on her, and I did. Celestial was the same girl I had always known but with a little bit of risk about her, like she might cut you. Her sense of humor was ratcheted up a few notches, and she stood even taller.

All that was a long time ago, when things were different. I know that nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but I can’t help recalling those days when we were underage and broke; she would sometimes come stay with me in my dorm room and we feasted upon wing-on-wheat, a chicken-and-bread combination that cost only two dollars and some change. After we ate, I would mess with her, asking why she never brought around any of her friends to meet me.

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