Wanting Rita (2 page)

Many women had graduated from high school and marched to the factories in triumph. They raised families. They missed little league games, bake sales and picnics, but that was fine because the factories needed them, and the factories were the hearts. They were the trust; the saving grace. They were the promise and security in old age.

But globalization called. It was business. The global people were calling. Eager, strong hands demanded work. A higher profit for factory and shareholders beckoned; a better life for foreign workers. The workers there worked for less—but over there, less was good. There, the factories were becoming temples of commerce; the trust; the saving grace. There, Hartsfields were being born.

I didn’t think about it so much then. I didn’t think about the people and their monumental struggles. That would come later. After I saw Rita again.

It was raining. Slanting steel-gray arrows pocked the streets and the maroon Saab, sounding like little pebbles. I drove through a quieter town than I had recalled, passing red-brick Victorian store fronts, cast-iron street lamps, and weathered row houses with their missing shingles; they reminded me of the old and the toothless.

City streets had buckled under the punishing winter, unrepaired, a clear indication that money and spirits were low. Sidewalks were broken and warped in sections, twisting and rising like the unexpected track of a rollercoaster. I swerved to miss chug holes and damned up pools around blocked drains.

I turned left on Poplar Street and drove past the tall oaks, maples and elms which skirted the road. They were nearly fully leaved and moving in bursts of wind. I was suddenly lifted by their abundance, because I’d forgotten that. I’d forgotten how beautiful the trees were. I slowed down and took in their sturdy trunks, remembering that Rita and I had roamed them once, hand in hand. She’d stopped, abruptly, and thrown her head back, skyward, raking strands of golden hair from her eyes. The quick autumn wind had tossed it in luminous waves and I’d wanted to grab handfuls of it. I wanted to tackle her, wrestle her and love her. But I didn’t. I stood planted, like an oak, looking as bleak as a winter day, because that was my style.

She’d shaded her eyes with the flat of her elegant hand and shouted, “Hello trees! I bet you’re even smarter than Alan James!” Then she bowed to them, like a princess at court, while I looked on, perplexed and rigid.

“You are SOoooo damn stiff, Alan James,” she’d said. “Bow to the trees. They’re always bowing to you.”

But I was obstinate. I didn’t bow. I was a certified nerd, with black framed glasses, short, stiff black hair and a wiry build. I was a rebel. Most of the other guys had long hair and, if they needed them, wore wire rimmed glasses or contacts. Not me.

“Why do you keep calling me Alan James, Rita? My name’s Alan.” Then after a temperamental pause, I said, “Nobody calls me Alan James.”

She grinned, mischievously, and tossed her blond hair from her eyes. “Yes, Alan James, but we know why I call you Alan James, don’t we?”

I drove on, nosing forward, peering into the gray haze at the ghostly red glow of neon lights looming ahead. JACK’S DINER. It was still there. The old hangout. Rita was in there, working. I felt the need to take a breath. My forehead was damp.

The parking lot wasn’t full and that surprised me. This was the breakfast rush after all. Years ago, it would have been bloated with cars, with a line of restless customers waiting at the door. I found a parking space, shut down the engine and eased back, listening to the pecks and pings of rain, staring as the water washed and blurred the world, impressionistic.

Jack’s Diner was a facade of two old converted Baltimore & Ohio dining cars, expanded and enhanced with old red brick, wrought-iron railings and a little red caboose. The diner had veins of red and yellow neon lights running along the edge of the roof and down the sides, which lit it up like a giant juke box. In the old days, you could smell hamburgers grilling for at least a quarter mile away, and when the music was high and driving, the place seemed to pulse with it.

Jack’s had once been
the
place for private parties or win-or-lose late night football or basketball celebrations. It was a date stop before or after a movie. It was a cool-down stop after making out under the quiet pines and elms by the dirt road that threaded Crystal Lake. It had been there for at least 30 years, and it was something of a landmark. Rita and I had finished our third and final date there, I being sullen and seething, she, flirting with Dusty Palmer, the man she eventually married.

In the last two years of high school, Rita had blazed with a beauty and magnetism that burned through a crowd like wildfire. She possessed a kind of languid rapture and soft exotic glow that I compared to the starlets of the 1940’s and 50’s; that mysterious mixture of fire and ice that arrested the eyes and heart in a breathless expectation. She was art, with her refined aristocratic nose, long chiseled neck, and voice like pure unraveling silk. Her lips were red, full, and often parted, as if in want of a kiss, though there was no pretension in this. At least, I never thought so.

She was full-figured and statuesque, with honey blond hair that fell in waves over thin ivory shoulders, in a longing, really—in a natural invitation to touch and caress. And she moved in an easy rhythm, as if hearing distant pagan music, with a gentle sway of her hips that sent ripples of fervent pleasure through any gathering of guys, and a humid jealousy through any crowd of gals.

Rita had been the town treasure. The prom queen. The beauty queen. The trophy. Men with cigars on the Courthouse steps jerked nods of agreement that Hartsfield could produce more than just thermal underwear. They produced Rita Fitzgerald: beauty, talent and personality. She’d go somewhere, New York, LA, and become somebody, and they’d be the proud town fathers who had supported her, nurtured her and helped her along. She could sing and dance, and she wrote poems and short stories that were published in the local paper. She was even going to write a novel about Hartsfield. For weeks after this fact was published in the Sunday paper, I observed that teachers, neighbors and town folk all had broader smiles, softer dispositions and kind words, where few had been offered before.

Whenever she had shined her large sea-blue eyes on me, I saw tenderness, wonder and intelligence; and when she took me into them, fully, and held me for a time, I felt primitive and exalted. During those rare moments when Rita and I had been close and I felt her soft breath on my cheek or in my ear, and whenever she leaned into me and I smelled the spring scent of her and looked into her blue eyes, wide with magic, I saw them break into prisms of fire so magnificent that I often went dumb and silent with desire for her. She thought it was a morbid seriousness. That’s what she’d called it.

“Alan James! You are always so serious. I wrote about it in my last short story. I described the character as having a morbid seriousness.”

That had been our connection: Ms. Lyendecker’s English class. We both wrote short stories, then exchanged and critiqued them. Ms. Lyendecker encouraged us and challenged us. Once when I said that I liked non-fiction better than fiction, because it was true and not a pack of lies, Ms. Lyendecker said, “If fiction is true, then it is non-fiction from the first word.”

Ms. Lyendecker went to Columbia University, and taught at a college in Massachusetts for many years, returning to Hartsfield when her mother became terminally ill. Upon her mother’s death, Ms. Lyendecker stayed in town, teaching English at Hartsfield High.

Technically, Rita and I only dated three times. But there were moments in the past fifteen years, when I could still feel and taste that “authentic” Rita kiss; and if I closed my eyes, I could transcend the hectic moment, the boredom of a meeting or the aching loneliness of a sleepless night and feel something like peace and fulfillment, as if the long search for home had finally come to an end.

But not everyone in town had been enamored with Rita—“taken in” were the words used by a small feverish group of teachers, parents and church brethren. These were the more pious and ethical folk, who were disturbed by Rita’s dangerous femininity and meteoric rise to small town fame, as well as the potentially bad example she provided to the young and impressionable. They were also shaken in some profound way—driven to a blistering criticism of her and the entire youth culture of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Rita stirred the loins and prurient imaginations, as well as the hearts of Hartsfield. She was a living testimony to enlightenment or to perdition, depending on your particular lens on the world. Rita Fitzgerald was an old, old story that was continuously being revised in raptures of anxiety, pleasure and desire.

Four months after graduation, Rita married Dusty Palmer, the Viking Quarterback who looked like a Viking—the guy who had blazed right along side of Rita the last six months of high school. The guy who never missed a mirror, glass or reflection. The guy who had always smiled at me—and it had seemed genuine—but I’d never smiled back. An easy, likeable guy, whom everyone seemed to have a good word for, including my father. When the Hartsfield Vikings football team won the division championship he’d said, “Dusty Palmer’s got talent. No doubt about it.” That really upset me. Dusty definitely wasn’t a nerd. He’d even volunteered at the hospital as an orderly, the act of a sucker, I’d thought: working for nothing. I was certain he was only doing it for show, barnstorming his charitable works for Rita’s delight and the nodding approval of the town.

Together, Rita and Dusty had celebrity wattage and star power. They turned heads and seized attention. They fired up old withered hearts in Hartsfield, and beyond, when they announced they were going to go to Hollywood to be in the movies. Surely if anyone could make it on TV or in the movies, they could.

But they never made it to Hollywood. Dusty went to Penn State on a football scholarship, but blew his knee out his freshman year. Dispirited, and a poor student, he’d dropped out and moved back to Hartsfield to work at the factory. Rita enrolled at the community college at Riverton to get a teaching degree. After a year or so, Dusty got restless, so he and Rita left Hartsfield, probably to save face, as my mother said. They moved to Oklahoma, where Dusty went to work with his father in the family construction business.

When Rita’s and Dusty’s daughter was born, Dad sent me a clipping from the local Hartsfield paper.

Darla Hayworth Palmer has the fortunate beauty and blond hair of her mother and the gentle spirit of her father, it was reported by a family friend. ‘She’s just the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ Rita’s mother, Betty Fitzgerald, was quoted as saying.

I sighed, angling a look at Jack’s, reconsidering my decision to go inside, pondering whether I should skip breakfast altogether and just drive to the house. I had plenty to do. I had an appointment to meet the real estate agent and auctioneer that afternoon. Dad had waited much too long to sell the place. The real estate market had been bludgeoned and I was sure the house would bring much less than it was worth a few years earlier, despite the added baths, antiques, extensions to the bedrooms, and remodeled kitchen. But the auctioneer had been upbeat and positive, of course.

For a man with an inborn practicality and gift for numbers, Dad also had a great fear of change. He’d become sentimental and melancholy at the thought of vacating his family home, because of a vow he’d made to his father many years ago, and because he simply liked living in Hartsfield.

“I’d be like a damned retreating general,” he once said. “No sir. I will not retreat. This is where I’ll die. This house was built in 1870 and, God willing, it will be here until 2870.” He said this only a month before the stroke buckled him to his knees, causing him to spill his coffee and drop his hardback copy of
The Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin
.

Dad had had to retreat after all, and during my last visit, I saw the disgrace of his retreat written on his gaunt, narrow face, as he sat on Judy’s living room couch, diminutive and shaky.

As I stared vacantly ahead at the garish neon lights of Jack’s Diner, I felt the rise of apprehension and dread. Surely Rita had changed. Had the tragedy blunted her beauty and zest for life? Did I really want to see her defeated and small, working as a waitress at Jack’s Diner? Did she really want to see me?

I reached for my umbrella, zipped up my brown leather jacket and hesitated once more before pushing out. Retreat suddenly sounded good.

But I wanted to know, first hand, and not from gossip, newspapers or TV, why Dusty Palmer, the guy with that easy smile and gentle nature, entered their living room on that chilly September Sunday morning with a .45 caliber colt handgun.

In the past few days, I’d reread several accounts of the incident and had produced a movie in my head about the terrible sequence of events.

From the living room, Dusty walked deliberately into the kitchen, where he found his daughter, Darla, and his wife, Rita. His full head of hair had rapidly thinned and he was nearly bald. The Viking body had morphed into a chubby softness.

Darla, 12-years old, blond and glowing with grace, was seated at the kitchen table eating breakfast. As she turned toward him to say, “Good morning, Daddy,” as she often did, he raised the gun and fired twice into her head. She died instantly.

The shots jolted Rita with a savage horror, but her brain locked up and froze her rigid. It took minutes, it seemed, before the yellow plate of pancakes slipped from her grasp and shattered on the floor. With its impact, her heart seemed to explode. She burst into a wild, agonizing scream.