The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (14 page)

Gravestone told me through David Gall that they thought the album was perfect, except it needed a bitter love song. I said, “Cool, I’ll come up with something over the weekend.”

I even got out my notepad and sat down to write at my kitchen table on Friday afternoon and … nothing. I was stumped. I hadn’t been in a real relationship since The One and me broke up, but I could win her back if this album did well, so I couldn’t write about her.

I sat and sat at my kitchen table but the song wouldn’t come. Then my stomach started grumbling with hunger, so I had some coffee. Then I turned on the television and there was an episode of
Yo Gabba Gabba!
I would kill to be one of the many alternative acts that came through to perform on
Yo Gabba Gabba!
Kill. So I watched the children’s show with my grumbling stomach keeping time in the background, and I thought about making another pot of coffee or going outside to smoke another cigarette, but instead my eyes drift closed.

I dreamed of eating donuts with David Gall and The One. Her arms were draped around my neck as I talked business with my producer. In the background, the
Yo Gabba Gabba!
characters sang their hit song “Don’t
Stop, Don’t Give Up” as a soft, sincere ballad. And then I said something funny and we all laughed while I picked up another donut and took a huge bite.

When I woke up, DJ Lance Rock was throwing the magic confetti that made the characters freeze and become inanimate toys again at the end of the show and it was time to leave for Thursday’s birthday party.

SHARITA

I
t wasn’t a difficult day at work for me, but it was long, and not just because I had to stay at the office until after eight p.m. preparing for a consult with an actor who wanted to turn himself into a corporation so that he could launch a production company. The day also felt long because of the incident that happened with Marcus during my lunch hour—the incident that I was blaming on Thursday and Risa.

Two things had been niggling at me since the start of the new year. The first was that I still hadn’t found a way to correct Marcus’s assumption that I was some kind of backup receptionist as opposed to a senior accountant. The second thing was the no-going-out situation, which had become especially irksome after Thursday and Risa told me to dump him. So in an attempt to be slick, I decided to bring up the not-going-out problem to take some of the edge off my big-omission confession.

The plan had made sense on New Year’s Day right before he came over for dinner with two loads of dirty clothes in a laundry bag. I had tried to be as nice as possible about it, waiting until I had put the first load in to say, “Marcus, I love spending time with you, but I was thinking we should try to go out more.”

And he had seemed okay with it, nodding and promising to take me out soon. Then he’d kissed me in such a soul-shaking way that I forgot all about my accountant confession.

The next morning, he kissed me good-bye with his bag of clean and folded laundry slung over his shoulder, and afterward I just about floated to my church, whispering an especially joyful “Praise Jesus” after the pastor finished his sermon about new beginnings.

But then … nothing. No phone calls, no e-mails. It was like Marcus had fallen off the face of the earth. And the old familiar dread began to
creep in. It was happening again: the part where I messed up and then the guy stopped liking me.

And Thursday hadn’t been any help. “Good riddance,” she said, when I told her about Marcus’s disappearing act. “Davie Farrell says you should be grateful when a guy decides to take himself out of the running, because it leaves you clear for somebody who will appreciate you.”

“But he did appreciate me. We were getting along fine before I brought up not going out,” I said, wringing my hands.

“He wasn’t taking you anywhere, then he stopped calling when you asked him to correct his behavior. Yet another black man that doesn’t want to put any work into his relationships. That’s why your quote-unquote black love doesn’t work. Because black men expect black women to do all the work and then they bail the moment you stand up to them.”

I loved Thursday, but sometimes I wanted to slap her when she said things like this in that authoritative way of hers, like it was a fact as opposed to some wild theory she had come up with because she had out-of-control daddy issues. I had met Rick T a couple of times before Thursday’s mom died. And there had been no other word to describe him except wonderful. He was a huge rap star, but he had remembered my name and had even referred to me as Thursday’s stunning sister friend.

Growing up dark-skinned in St. Louis, no boy had ever called my “pretty,” much less “stunning.” Rick T made me feel like a princess and I still couldn’t understand why Thursday had turned on him like that. Yeah, maybe he had cheated on Thursday’s mom, but it had been Thursday’s mom who had decided to take her own life. That’s who Thursday really should have been blaming, in my opinion.

After Thursday had stopped accepting Rick T’s calls, he had started calling me every once in a while to check up on his daughter and make sure she was all right. The last call had been right before graduation, and he’d said, “I guess she’s really not going to invite me to this graduation, even though I paid for her education.” He was right. Thursday pretty much
invited everyone in her family except for Rick T. I couldn’t believe her audacity. My own mother couldn’t come out to graduation unless I paid for it myself and arranged all the travel details. Thursday didn’t know how good she had it, could have it if she wasn’t so hardheaded about not wanting to have anything to do with her father or any other black man.

I wanted black love for my own reasons, but finding a nice black brother and making a good life with him would come with the bonus of showing Thursday that there was such a thing as a happy black marriage. Until then, I just had to bite my tongue when Thursday said ludicrous things about black men, because if I tried to defend them, she’d run down the list of black men who had done me wrong, using my own dating history to make her case. So instead of arguing with her, I got off the phone, and took to praying that Marcus would come back into my life.

To my surprise, my prayers got answered on Thursday’s birthday. Having resolved at New Year’s to try to eat better, I had been munching on a homemade salad at my desk. I had just stuffed a huge bite of romaine into my mouth when someone in my open doorway said, “So when was you going to tell me you’re an accountant?”

I looked up and froze when I saw Marcus standing there, with a package in his hand. “Rhonda wasn’t at her desk again, and I saw it was for you. So I asked, and they sent me back here to your office.”

He stressed the word “office,” and I could see how this must look to him, as he surveyed my large workspace with its cherry wood furniture and its panoramic view of downtown Los Angeles.

But before I could defend myself, he thrust his brown box at me. “Anyway, sign here.”

I put my plastic fork down, feeling silly as I signed on the LED screen’s signature line, still chewing like a rabbit.

“You know, if you didn’t want to go out with somebody who made less than you, you could have just told me that from the get-go,” he said to me.

I swallowed and stood up. “I don’t care that you make less than me. I’m not like that. And you’re the one that didn’t call me, remember?”

“Yeah, because I thought you were different, and it turned out you were like every other sister in L.A. All like, ‘What can you do for me? You ain’t good enough for me.’”

I felt helpless and hurt when he accused me of this. Like I was on the school playground again, with all the other kids calling me “siddity” because I got As and “talked white.”

“I’m not like that,” I said. “I just wanted to go out for dinner every once in a while.”

Marcus started tapping something into the brown box. “Well, I’m a hardworking brother. I don’t have any kids, I don’t have any diseases, and I don’t have any time for sisters who think they’re too good to hang out with me.”

“I don’t think I’m …” I trailed off, knowing that it was useless to try to convince him that he was wrong about me when he obviously had made up his mind. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Marcus. I guess I’ll get back to work now.”

“Yeah, you do that. Gotta keep earning them dollars, right?”

He tucked his brown box under his arm and left. I was overtaken by guilt before he had even made it to the hallway. Marcus thought I was some kind of gold digger now. Things had been going really well, but like they had warned about in so many R&B songs, I went and listened to my girlfriends and messed up the good thing we had.

All afternoon I thought and thought about what I could have said to defend myself and change his mind about me, but I couldn’t come up with anything stronger than “I’m not a gold digger, and I didn’t mean to come off that way”—which wasn’t exactly an argument that would get me into law school.

I was so confused, but I didn’t call Thursday or Risa to talk about it after work. Thursday was messed up when it came to men and Risa didn’t even like them. I wouldn’t make the mistake of asking either of them for relationship advice ever again.

So I called my sister but got Nicole’s voicemail. Again. Which was a little irritating because I had been trying to get in touch with her for over a month
now and had gotten nothing but “I’m fine. So busy. Sorry! Sorry! Will call soon!” text messages when I left voicemails about being worried about her.

I had only been fourteen when I had gone to see
Waiting to Exhale
with my mother and Nicole on Christmas Day 1995. But I still remember being surprised that the four girlfriends in the movie seemed to talk on the phone more than they talked in real life. I had wondered if that was how it was when you became an adult. I eventually found out that the movie had understated the phone situation for adult women. Our New Year’s Eve lunch had marked only the fourth time that Thursday, Tammy, Risa, and I had all been in the same room that year.

Before
Sex and the City
went off the air, people had called it a fantasy because the four women wore designer clothes all the time and dated all these handsome, rich, and successful men. But in my opinion, the biggest illusion was that four working friends could find the time to meet for brunch once a week all the way into their forties. There was no such thing as a group of working women who could manage this, and I felt that this unprecedented level of friendship was the most unattainable fantasy of them all. In a way I blamed
SATC
for Thursday and Risa’s unreasonable expectations. They wanted me to happily show up at all of our events like I was Miranda, but in real life I wondered how Cynthia Nixon’s character hit all those glamorous parties at night and managed to make it into work at her law firm the next morning.

When I got home from work that night, I would have given anything to get out of going to Thursday’s birthday party. I was tired and wanted nothing more than to set myself up on the couch with a microwave dinner and watch
Supernatural
on the CW. But I had promised Thursday, so I shed my suit jacket and put on a gray silk blouse and vest over my trousers. I was just about to put on my high heels when the doorbell rang.

Wondering who it could be ringing my bell at this time of night, I went to the door and looked out through the peephole.

It was Marcus.

Something opened up in my heart and my wide feet sang a little song of praise and happiness. They would not be getting shoved into heels tonight, they would not have to pretend they weren’t in pain while making small talk with Thursday’s artist friends, who always wanted to talk about their projects but never asked me anything about my work. My feet wouldn’t have to endure at least an hour of standing around, pained and bored. They cheered, because even before I opened the door, they knew that I would not be attending Thursday’s birthday party.

I’m always shocked by how few dating books stress this, but for goodness sake, do not compromise your friendships for a man. Your friends are your wealth. Your friends are your insurance. Your friends chose to love you. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make in pursuing a mate is deciding to undervalue your friendships.

—
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell