Excerpt from "Where Lovers Dream"

For years I was saying to myself — Just so you will act when you meet him. Just so you will stand. So will you look on him. These words you will say to him.

I wanted to show him that what he had done to me could not down me; that his leaving me the way he left me, that his breaking my heart the way he broke it, didn’t crush me; that his grand life and my pinched-in life, his having learning and my not having learning — that the difference didn’t count so much like it seemed; that on the bottom I was the same like him. 

But he came upon me so sudden, all my plannings for years smashed to the wall. The sight of him was like an earthquake shaking me to pieces.

I can’t yet see nothing in front of me and can’t get my head together to anything, so torn up I am from the shock.

It was at Yetta Solomon’s wedding I met him again. She was after me for weeks I should only come.

“How can I come to such a swell hall?” I told her. “You know I ain’t got nothing decent to wear.”

“Like you are without no dressing-up, I want you to come. You are the kind what people look in your eyes and not on what you got on. Ain’t you yourself the one what helped me with my love troubles? And now, when everything is turning out happy, you mean to tell me that you ain’t going to be there?”

She gave me a grab over and kissed me in a way that I couldn’t say “No” to her.

So I shined myself up in the best I had and went to the wedding.

I was in the middle from giving my congratulations to Yetta and her new husband, when — Gott! Gott im Himmel! The sky is falling to the earth! I see him — him, and his wife leaning on his arm, coming over.

I gave a fall back, like something sharp hit me. My head got dizzy, and my eyes got blind.

I wanted to run away from him, but, ach! everything in me rushed to him.

I was feeling like struck deaf, dumb, and blind all in one. 

He must have said something to me, and I must have answered back something to him, but how? What? I only remember like in a dream my getting to the cloakroom. Such a tearing, grinding pain was dragging me down to the floor that I had to hold on to the wall not to fall.

All of a sudden I feel a pull on my arm. It was the janitor with the broom in his hand.

“Lady, are you sick? The wedding people is all gone, and I swept up already.”

But I couldn’t wake up from myself.

“Lady, the lights is going out,” he says, looking on me queer.

“I think I ain’t well,” I said. And I went out.