Authors: Elyse Douglas
Dusty was five feet away. He leveled the gun at Rita’s head. His thick arm was steady, his hand still, his pool-blue eyes serene. Rita lost her voice. The sight of her lifeless daughter sent a knifing pain that washed her face to whiteness. Death eclipsed the fire in her eyes. Her screams fell into a near silent anguish, a low, terrifying moan.
Dusty was motionless. He did not seem to see. His eyes seemed to see nothing at all. Rita shut her wet eyes tightly, waiting for the slam and shock of the bullet’s impact. Welcoming it. Praying for it. When she heard the shot, she screamed and kept screaming until she lost her voice. Until the next door neighbor rushed over.
Rita’s eyes opened. Through tears and a stabbing shock, she saw Dusty sprawled on the floor. He’d blown the back of his head off.
Chapter Two
I entered Jack’s Diner. It seemed smaller and grimier than I had remembered, and it was immediately obvious that it had long lost its novelty and shine. The yellow plastic upholstered booths were sagging and patched with black masking tape, looking deflated and wounded. The almond tiled floors had worn, shiny gray patches around the cashier station and at the sloping entrances to the bathrooms. Faded yellow walls held old high school football, baseball and basketball team photos, where players stood or crouched in poses of strength, staring with the bold, proud eyes of conquerors. There was also the random oil painting of old trains, steaming through canyons and tunnels and across towering trestles, probably an art class project from many years ago.
Memories flooded back to me. The smell of coffee, bacon and eggs reminded me of early mornings, and that low dragging energy I felt after an unsuccessful night hunting for elusive excitement—or any girl who would stoop to talk to me. And for a brief moment, I had the gift of time travel to the past. I heard the toasts, the cheers and the shouting matches, the recaps after the games. I saw the proud glossy faces of old classmates roaming the booths, girlfriends in tow, slapping shoulders and smoking cigarettes, while Bon Jovi sang
Livin’ On A Prayer
from the scratchy overhead speakers. I saw adults with bright eyes, straight backs and open grins, enjoying the show, remembering their day and believing that the cycle would go on like this forever.
That morning, Jack’s wasn’t busy. Four booths were vacant, as were two swivel chairs at the counter. There was no music from the speakers, and other than the occasional rattle of dishes and the dull ring of the order-up bell, there was an eerie pall, like a museum past closing time. Chins rested in hands over coffee, and sleepy eyes stared indifferently, avoiding the windows and the persistent rain, weakly acknowledging the plates of food when delivered. I plunged my dripping umbrella into the bucket along with others, stuffed my hands into my back jean pockets and lowered my head.
Waitresses in blue nylon dresses, with white ruffles at the hems, covered the floor in a lazy shuffle. I quickly examined their faces. I did not see Rita and I was grateful. I wanted to get settled first. Then it occurred to me that I may have seen her but didn’t recognize her. After all, she could have changed, drastically.
I advanced to the counter, eyes down, shoulders up. I swung into the swivel chair, folded my hands on the sandy Formica countertop and waited, uneasily, feeling like that nerdy kid again, feeling my face tightening in defense and superiority. Did Rita know I was coming? Had her mother told her? Perhaps Rita had seen me and slipped away. Perhaps she hadn’t come into work at all.
During one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s fiery stream of consciousness moments on the phone, she’d mentioned that Rita was writing again. “Real nice stories. Pretty stories.” According to her mother, this was Rita’s therapy now—a technique that had been suggested by her therapist to help point her mind away from the past, toward releasing pain creatively. After the tragedy, Rita had slipped away into a debilitating depression and had attempted suicide, by swallowing sleeping pills. Her mother had quietly and swiftly admitted her to a hospital near Philadelphia.
A waitress approached. I straightened, noticing mostly crooked teeth, short dyed red hair and the blank eyes of the bored. She wasn’t familiar. She was older than I by about five or six years.
“Coffee?”
“Yes, thank you,” I said.
She splashed it in. “Do you know what you want or do you need a menu?” she asked, with a powerful indifference.
“Oatmeal and a banana.”
“Bowl? Cup?”
“Bowl.”
Without acknowledgment, she slouched away.
I sipped carefully. The coffee tasted good. The men next to me spoke in a low monotone. Something about the Pittsburg Pirates. The pitching was a problem. They spoke about the rain. More this year than last. I looked over. They wore ball caps and denim jackets, and weren’t familiar.
I suddenly became aware that I was hot and perspiring. Blood had rushed to my face. I slipped out of my jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. The drumming pulse in my neck was the further sign and symptom of “Rita Unease”, or so I used to call it. The Rita Fever. The Rita Syndrome. I’d had many names for it. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I’d just turned 33.
I fixed my gaze on the dull yellow ceiling for a time, then followed the lazy turn of the ceiling fan, until my eyes traveled down the walls to a far away place outside the rain spotted windows. Rita had always done this to me. She scared the hell out of me with all her beauty and wild spontaneity. She knocked me so far off balance that it often had taken me a full day and night to recover. Whenever she left me, I was in a perfect storm of instability and obsession and needed a compass to know where the hell I was and how to find my way home.
She unlocked and unfolded me, exposing burlesque emotions, astonishing potential and a terror so acute that it set my heart and mind reeling, like a biplane spinning out of control. But I was a kid then: a nerdy kid, skilled in the evasive arts of hiding behind books, severe eye narrowing, and a starched expression.
“I’m never playing poker with you, Alan James,” Rita had once said. “I’d never win. I never know what’s going on behind those dark gray eyes of yours. You’re like a big reptile on a rock in the sun, Alan James. Staring without movement, awareness or ambition, and yet seeing everything and everybody. Then I can just imagine the tip of your sharp tongue flicking out at me, like a jet flame, darting its long pink mass into the deep portions of my cavernous mouth. Taking me in like a poor old helpless thing.”
“You’re reading too much Tennessee Williams,” I shot back. “You sound like you’re imitating Maggie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.”
She went into her lazy southern accent. “And what if I am? I’m gonna play that role some day, Alan James.” Then she playfully kicked one foot back and upward. “Ba-Boom!” she’d added, grinning.
I called it our first date, but in reality it was a simple meeting of Rita and me in Jack’s, nervously exchanging our short stories over a soda, a hamburger and a large order of fries. Of course, I knew why she’d agreed to this little “date.” I’d calculated it down to the exact minute, location and homework assignment. I had discovered Rita’s weakness and I used it to my swift advantage.
I was unquestioningly the brightest kid in school and there was no doubt, whatsoever, that I would be valedictorian. It was my one bit of notoriety. Without it, I would have been just another unknown slob at Hartsfield High. But I had my distinction, and I owned it and guarded it like a miser guards his gold. I would be valedictorian, that was a given. I had been working on my speech for months, writing it on my Apple Power Mac computer. I excelled in academics the way Dusty excelled in sports, and everyone knew it.
Rita was intelligent—I knew that—but I also knew, from careful scrutiny, that she lacked a certain confidence in herself academically. It was the way she gently coughed before answering a question—stammering out the first few words before hitting her stride of logic. If she had a question, she’d raise her hand, not fully, and then she’d flash a quick coquettish smile that held more secrets than assurance. But it fertilized the barren atmosphere of the room, as well as the egghead of any adoring male teacher, producing effusive and desirous communication.
I’d delighted in studying every detail of her long regal neck, how it flushed red whenever she’d been given a break, an obvious favoritism, when, for instance, after a Herculean struggle with a calculus problem, Mr. Burkett, our math teacher, had offered her a possible solution which, of course,
was
the solution. Rita consistently lowered her head in defeat, eyes dull with disappointment in herself, even though Burkett always made it seem that she had answered correctly, and regularly praised her.
Despite a towering command and influence over all things male, over all people of authority and influence, male and female, I had observed, with sweet relish, that Rita Fitzgerald did not believe in herself. What a happy day that was! What a stupendous observation! What a brilliant and fortunate opportunity! Rita did not believe she was intelligent. For all of her astounding beauty and above-average intelligence, she had an inferiority complex. I skipped through the woods in delight and soared with geese that were flying south for the winter. I was ecstatic! This would be my doorway to paradise—the golden doorway that would lead me to the heart of Rita Fitzgerald!
I caught up with Rita in the hallway, after English class one Tuesday. I’d pumped myself up with repetitive thoughts and images of power and courage. I stared into the mirror and told myself that I could do this because I was the best student in the entire school, and Rita surely knew it and respected me for it. So I approached her, with my chest out, head up. I knew I couldn’t look directly at her or I’d fail the mission. Her soft, glowing blue eyes would strike me like lasers and kill my courage. I’d blur my words, and my beady eyes would become an icy glare of defense and she’d hurry away in fear and loathing, like other girls had done. So, I fixed my gaze on a little dark speck on the wall, just over her right shoulder. I fixed it there and kept it there.
“Hey, Rita,” I said, with many hours of practiced indifference. “If you’ll read my story and give me some constructive criticism, I’ll read yours.” My speech gained speed and force. “We could do it at Jack’s, if you want. No big thing. I feel pretty good about mine, anyway. Ms. Lyendecker thinks students should work together so I thought we should just maybe, if you want to, work together.”
Once the words were released, my heart ached in pounding hope. We were standing by a long row of faded green lockers, outside Mr. Burkett’s math class. It seemed to me that Rita waited an entire hour before answering. “I’m surprised, Alan.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, barely squeezing the words from my clenched teeth, feeling an astounding weakness in my legs.
“You always study alone. You never show your stuff to anybody. You don’t really seem to like anybody.”
I kept my bulging eyes glued to that speck. I shrugged and swallowed away a massive lump. A hot coal of fright. What if she said no? I knew I’d faint dead away and my valedictorian speech would lose all of its potency and impact, because the entire senior class would be snickering through every clever turn of phrase, philosophical concept and inspiring idea. I could just hear them.
“Alan Lincoln is such a weak little jerk-off,” they’d say. “Passed out in the hallway like an idiot.”
“Smart, but a skinny fart with no heart,” the girls would say, and often did.
“I bet he said something to Rita—something really, like dirty, and she punched his ass out,” Barry Barker would say.
“It’s the quiet little shits you have to watch,” Ellen Tucker would undoubtedly say.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher.
Rita’s alto voice rose an octave. “I’d love it, Alan! A great idea! Let’s do it. Let’s meet after school. Today!”
“Today!?” I said, stunned, needing some time to recover.
“Sure. Why wait. I’ll meet you after school. My story’s not that good, but I’d love to read yours. I mean, you’re so smart.”
I stared in wonder at her flowering opulence and swallowed hard.
And so we met at Jack’s, on a sparkling autumn afternoon, seated in one of those gleaming yellow booths, two of only five people in the entire place—a rarity at Jack’s and a good omen, I’d thought. I wanted to slap myself to see if I was asleep and dreaming. I, Alan Lincoln, was sitting alone with Rita Fitzgerald on a little deserted island in Jack’s sea of booths!
Outside, the leaves were a blast of colors, falling, sailing and spinning in the cool wind and sharp Pennsylvania sunlight. The world, for the first time that I could remember, looked like a wonderland and I was a hero.
Rita wore a pink V-neck woolen sweater and designer jeans; I wore my usual loose jeans and black shirt. We said little at first, and I struggled to decipher her mood, to probe behind the quiet blue eyes to see what lay hidden, but all I sensed was a low anxiety. Then she presented me her story, with some hesitation, and asked for mine. We exchanged them, warily, like ransomed goods.
While Rita read, I settled into the soft cushion and took her in, like a first long breath of life. I drifted into hypnotic daydreams of idyllic future days of lovemaking, marriage and family. I unlocked the cages of the irrational, flung wide the gates, and released my wild shimmering dreams. Rita and I passed through the entire cycle of life, from courtship, marriage and children, to retirement on a high white bluff overlooking the emerald Florida sea. We were madly in love from the very beginning—from the time she’d read my short story in Jack’s Diner entitled
Left To Live
. We’d tell the story about that meeting—this very meeting—until the day we died.