ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 186: The Two Faces of Love
I go to Ernie’s memoir and re-read the chapter titled The Two Faces of Love, Ernie’s story of his first love.
He’s twelve, and Jo Anne is a few years older. She lives most of the year with her grandmother in the mountains of Blackey, Kentucky, but spends summers in the city with her mother, who’s a nurse. Jo Anne and young Ernie meet, and he invites her to their neighborhood drug store for cherry Cokes.
While we were sipping our cherry Cokes at the soda fountain, I happened to look into the mirror behind the counter, and my eyes met Jo Anne’s. A feeling unlike any other I’d ever felt swept through me. My soul sang. My body tingled. I felt as light as a butterfly. I wanted only one thing: to be alone with her. She looked so intensely and so sweetly into my eyes that I just knew she was feeling something equally monumental. I was so elated I couldn’t finish my cherry Coke.
After we said our good nights, I went home and only picked at my supper. When I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. My head danced with images of Jo Anne. I had the worst kind of love fever. The next day I skipped breakfast and took off early on my bike. I kept circling the apartment building where Jo Anne was staying. I had to see her again.
At last, deliverance came when late in the morning she emerged from the building. She was wearing a sun dress and sandals, and her black hair glistened. My heart was thumping so loud I knew she could hear it, too, as I parked my bike and started toward her.
That summer, young Ernie and Jo Anne are, in his words, “practically inseparable.”
We liked the same foods, mainly grilled cheese sandwiches and hot dogs and orange Kool-Aid. We went roller-skating, we saw movies, and we had a wiener roast and marshmallow roast in the back yard of her apartment building. We took a streetcar to Fontaine Ferry Park, where we rode the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel and laughed at the distorted images of ourselves in the curved mirrors of the Funhouse. On our third date, I kissed her squarely on the mouth. After a few weeks I grew bolder, touching her breasts, but that angered her, and I never did it again.
The summer over, Jo Anne goes back to Blackey, and Ernie writes her. She writes him back . . . until she writes him for the last time to tell him she’s met an “older man”, and they plan to marry.
Later, I realized I’d seen the two faces of love: the fiery consuming one that takes away all common sense and lifts you into the clouds, and the other face, which, when it dies, leaves a hole in your heart deeper and darker than any other.
Is it any wonder that soon after his heart is broken, Ernie is diagnosed — falsely — with a heart ailment and put to bed for a year?
Ernie looked for a woman all his life who would look intensely and sweetly into his eyes, know him, love him, and not leave him.
He never found her.
