But when I curl up on the couch and think of Ebony and how fine she would look in Henry’s apartment, how her dark skin would blaze shadows on to these too-white walls, I smile.
Good night, Ebony, wherever you are. I’ll write about you tomorrow.
Promise.
3
I wake up several hours later in complete darkness, sweat dripping down my back. I can’t be sleeping! I have two novels to write, and Henry wants his sassy-ass novel as soon as possible.
I scratch the sleep out of my eyes and boot up the laptop, searching old files for five years of the fits and starts of Desiree’s other novels. There are a lot of starts, but few fits for what Henry wants. But after a few hits of brown-sugared Earl Grey tea, Stevie Wonder turned up as loud as the laptop’s little speakers can handle, I start to click the keys…
…as a black woman.
A WHITER SHADE OF PALE by Desiree Holland
Prologue
I’m looking for The One on a search for the Holy Male.
I know it’s supposed to be the Holy Grail, but a man sure as hell isn’t a communion cup, although sometimes a whole bunch of whine is involved.
I’m on a quest to find my soul mate before he finds me. I mean, what kind of a romance would it be if the hero rides in on his sweaty yet majestic white horse—and it has to be a white horse, because those fantasy stories are always racist—to save me, the damsel in distress, whose hair is micro-braided and beaded and looking beyond fo-ine, only I have already kicked the dragon’s ass, sliced and diced his scaly green guts, stuffed banquet-sized dragon morsels into medieval freezer bags, and have been waiting for our hero for twenty goddamn minutes? I would not be amused by his tardiness, and I would probably be tapping the sand on my wrist-hourglass and yawning when I see our hero limping in from his death-defying battle with an arthritic squirrel.
“It’s about time you showed up, Sir Stankalot,” I would say. “Now wipe that dragon shit off my sword, put these groceries on your Caucasian horse, and let’s get us back to Camelot. You know there’ll be a party waiting for us, because that’s all those crazy white knights do. That Merlin is a wiz in the kitchen with dragon spleen, isn’t he? I hope he separates out the membrane this time, though. Cleaning dragon spleen is a lost art. And that King Arthur, he’s such a trip at parties. I hope Lancelot has the sense to keep his hands off Guenevere’s ass this time…”
A quest just wouldn’t be any fun if he found me first.
I sit back in my chair and smile. Ebony loved those old medieval romances, but I was never quite the right knight.
I see the skies getting rosier, the darkness rolling the stars away from the surface of the bay. “Now, for a little back story.” I finish my tea, the last gulp ninety percent brown sugar.
Chapter 1
I’m nobody’s damsel in distress, mainly because I shop at Wal-Mart. I’m no fashion queen, and Wal-Mart always has my size, even if I sometimes have to sneak into the plus-size section to get a blouse.
They sell a little bit of everything at Wal-Mart, but they don’t sell dragon-slicing knives. I doubt any of those malls sell them, either. I don’t like shopping at those malls, no sir. I get claustrophobic even on the escalators at malls. And on elevators, I’m the crazy lady who sweats, whistles, and stands with her hands on the crack of the doors. I’ve never ridden a horse and wouldn’t know how to swing a sword to save my life. I can barely shave my legs with an electric razor without getting a nasty burn.
I feel my own scraggly growth. I don’t intend to shave until I’m through with these novels. Call it superstition. Edie hated my attempts at growing a beard, but Ebony liked my little moustache, that first soft growth I had when I was thirteen. Most of it sprouted out of a mole under my nose, but Ebony said that it made me look “so much older.”
And all those parties at Camelot aren’t for me either. I would rather discover, search, and hang with myself or with only one other person. I’m my own best friend.
I sometimes take long walks just to browse in old bookstores. “What are you looking for?” they sometimes ask. “Everything in particular,” I tell them. “I’m looking for a diamond in the rough.”
Then they smile and say, “I’ll check the computer for that title.”
When they bring me a book or say they’ll have to order one or more of the nine romance novels (and one illustrated history of Arizona) titled A Diamond in the Rough or Diamond in the Rough, I shake my head. “I’m sure you have the particular diamond in the rough I’m searching for,” I tell them. “I’ll keep looking.”
They generally leave me alone after that, but they always shadow me, sometimes with a security guard, which doesn’t upset me a bit. You can never be too careful browsing bookstores these days. I mean, you might innocently brush up against a Salman Rushdie book and become a target of someone’s jihad.
Browsing. That’s all Ebony and I ever did, it seems. We’d browse every store in Huntington Bay Village, trying on clothes our parents would never buy, reading magazines and comic books our parents would never allow in the house.
I make another cup of Earl Grey and try to think of what Ebony would be looking for in a soul mate. I used to know, because I was supposed to be her soul mate.
I should have never left Long Island.
Returning to my laptop, I let a little of my own character into Ebony’s character:
So what exactly am I looking for? If I knew that, I’d have found his ass already. I just don’t know.
I once saw a woman on TV who was sitting in the charred wreckage of her house after a fire. A rude reporter shoved a microphone in her face, asking, “What are you doing?” I would have said, “What’s it look like, you asshole?” but the woman on the TV never spoke. She just kept sifting through the gunk on the floor until she found one of those old Polaroid pictures, the kind you had to pull out of the camera and time for a minute. She held that picture to her chest and smiled, sooty tears running down her face.
And that’s what romance is to me: It’s like looking for that one unburnt picture in the ashes. There’s nothing to it but to do it. I just have to search high and low and in between and in between that until…I find The One who has survived the fire.
And I’ve only been searching for—give or take—thirty years.
I want a man, but not just any man. He has to meet certain criteria. Or rather, he has to accept certain things about me and not dog me out about every damn thing that I do or don’t do.
He can’t mind if I do most if not all of the cooking. I can cook, and if you ever saw me, you’d say, “She has a gland problem or she still lives at home and eats her mama’s cooking.” I don’t have a gland problem that I know of, and I haven’t lived at home for fifteen years. I’m not out-and-out flabby, but I do have a roll or two on my tummy from my made-from-scratch dinner rolls. I doubt I’d fit into any of those height-weight charts at the doctor’s office, but I haven’t met many black people who actually do. Bet there wasn’t a black doctor on that panel when they made those charts.
When I cook, I don’t use recipes or instructions. I kind of go with the flow…and whatever happens to be in the pantry or fridge. I have an extensive spice collection that even includes
…includes what? Edie did all the cooking for us, most of it unpronounceable and generally inedible, and I had the “honor” of being her dishwasher afterward. The only herbs I know come from that “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme” song by Simon and Garfunkel. I stretch my back after standing and check out Henry’s pantry.
I blink at a couple hundred