Sharon Langdon was a very bright high school student, and even though her grades did not reflect her true abilities, she understood that, for her, life after high school was not going to be as easy as that of her wealthy best friends’. They had lots of money; she had only beauty, and beauty in Southern California was an abundant commodity. All through her teen years she felt defenceless against the casual Orange County high school wealthy ways of skating through the undemanding American way of life. Her middle class parents were struggling to keep pace with their upper middle class surroundings: her father had lost all ambition and would forever be a pharmacist, and her mother felt fulfilled as a junior college counsellor.
Most of her girlfriend schoolmates had few doubts that good things awaited them after high school, especially the anticipation of college, and the far from home freedom with all its handsome love affairs that would inevitably lead to rich choices of husbands. For Sharon also, the sheer intellectual promises of being challenged out of the doldrums of her high school mental stagnation presented college life as a beautiful dream. Unhappily for her, fears stemming from memories of a dysfunctional childhood discouraged her from openly embracing the excitement of going to college, of being free and away from home. A home life full of hostility did not make for wholehearted support from her unhinged parents who were too involved in their own bitterness. Feebly, her mother tried to show some enthusiasm about college, but was loudly drowned out by Anton’s violin. Unable to organize her thoughts, even as high school was coming to an end, she diffidently avoided any thoughts of college fearful that socially she couldn’t make it anyway. As much as she wanted to be like her friends and rejoice about their fabulous parents, it was always difficult for her to let go and fully trust her parents; they had messed up their own lives and it wasn’t so apparent that they had learned anything from their own shattered experiences; they hardly spoke to each other and there was no advice to be had from the home team.
Bright and pretty as she was, Sharon found little reason to believe that suddenly the sun would shine bright just because one day she would be a high school graduate. Angry repressions of lost childhood happiness clouded any promises of sunshine days, or of college romances, and even less of high social achievement, or of a brilliant and enviable career, because during her high school years, Sharon hated her parents for not being happy and rich.
In the mental harshness that dominated her life, more than her parents, she hated the smell of her high school boy friend who at every chance he got fucked her just for the fuck of it, though admittedly with all her neurotic permission. She had become indifferent to his assaults, and every chance he got, he manhandled her, and she dumbly never protested. All through high school, overanxious Sharon had an apathetic complex, and mindlessly she was preparing herself for the darker side of an inconsequential life. Quietly she settled for the easy adoration of mediocrity, and stupidly she pissed her high school years away.
*
Hank drove his Honda Civic and picked up Sharon waiting for him in front of her house. She got in and shyly and kissed him on the lips, a ritual she impulsively hated, but one that Hank casually expected.
“Hi, babe,” he said in his manly guttural star quarterback voice.
“Hi,” she said and feebly smiled his way.
“You wanna go to the golf course?” he said.
“If you want to,” said Sharon well aware of what Hank had in mind. It would have been ridiculous to have refused him because they had been there before.
“I heard you had a funny thing in history class today,” he said.
“Oh, it was nothing important,” she said. “He asked me how the US had supported the Allies during World War I and I said, ‘money, materials, and manpower.’”
“That’s so fucking great, Sharon,” laughed Hank with his manly approval, and Sharon felt good that she brought pleasure to Hank.
They drove to the public golf course as the sun was setting. They walked to the man-made pond and on its banks they made out, as they always had done, until dusk set in. Hank then fucked Sharon for the umpteenth time like all the other times on the golf course. She got up off the ground and dusted her skirt off. She felt like a lump of meat when she pulled up her panties; a pretty lump of meat, but a lump of meat nonetheless. Still, she had to admit that like all the other times, fucking Hank was pretty good.
There wasn’t much else to do or say as she watched Hank skip flat pebbles across the pond’s surface. When she finished straightening out he drove her straight home without saying a word. She smiled goodbye in front of her house and he took off to meet his buddies.
Sharon walked into her house scared, that her parents knew. She felt huge gulps of guilt as she walked past her dumb parents who looked at her but never said a word. She went to her room and read her Bible.
*
Years later, whenever she thought of her high school years, she wanted to hide. Most other people have fond memories of their teens but not Sharon in spite of her many God given blessed gifts that made her the envy of less gifted girls. Well into her marriage, thoughts of her school retarded memories, which invariably included her husband and his long time high school beer-drinking buddies, released strong hatred that manifested as dry, sticky saliva into her mouth and throat. Even before she married Hank, her husband’s friends were loudmouth oafs without the tiniest hint of humanity in any of their brains. From their carefree high school days, she thought them freaks but bit her tongue least she offend her star quarterback boyfriend Hank. The clothes they wore then and now hung loose, too low and too loose, in imitation of janitorial society, and strangely fashionable, for Sharon’s eyes. They didn’t care about the quality of their character, and she couldn’t take them; they showed little concern about her feelings of embarrassment whenever they were in her presence. They were unbearable in their bad manners, and she had violent thoughts about them; they were all things vile about their caste. Her temper would explode when complaining to her husband about his idiot friends, but Hank would still not say or do anything to control his friends’ vulgarity.
One day Sharon finally noticed that cool Hank’s pants also hung too loose and low on him. And it was because of her husband’s and his friends’ insulting manners in looks and dress, and above all in their nauseating vocabulary, that she began to intensely hate her husband as much as his friends, for they all rode their pathetic misfortune in tandem to her disgust. They were like stray dogs abandoned in the back alleys, cowardly sniffing each other’s ass in search of a bitch; and Hank was definitely the overcrowding alpha male, the leader of the pack. For the first few years she put up with her husband’s pack behaviors until she realized that he was still married more to them then to her. When she complained that it was unnatural for his friends to hang out at their house so much, Hank gave a confused story about the meaning of friendship, and what good friends his buddies were, and that they liked Sharon as much as they liked him.
“They’re crass and have a mouth that’s filthier than a sewer,” she would protest.
“You don’t have a fucking clue of what true friendship is, do you Sharon,” he would try soft persuasion on his gentle wife. “It’s all about team; that’s all there is in life.”
“If at least one of them was married and could bring his wife with him for me to keep company while you assholes drank all night long …” she didn’t know what else to say.
They were all prodigious beer drinkers who pissed all over, in and out of her toilets.
“They’re rotting the toilet floor with their beer piss,” she would say. “Next time you clean that fucking floor.”
“It’s just beer, dear,” he would laugh at the pretended rhyme.
It was as if she were the queen in heat and they were all spraying their stinking scent all for her; they licked Hank’s ass to get a glimpse and perhaps a chance at her. Someday Hank might lose it and one of his close buddies would be there to fill the vacuum; for what are friends for? Sharing has been known to happen among caring friends. Intellectually, the friends were not very swift, but then, they didn’t want to be. There was no piercing glory to being an intellectual on the high school varsity football team. Being smart was for sissies; it was a huge contradiction to being beer drinking alpha males.
Choose me, my once and always lovely queen, they all biologically screamed. Even when they were merely staring, Sharon could feel their filthy hands all over her. The rushing roar was everywhere, and made cornered Sharon a frightened prey, scared to some inevitability, and hate her husband more and more, as his buddies’ drooling looks repulsed her deeper into fear. Choose one of us at last, the smelly desires charged all around, as if her already choice of husband, Hank Merker, hadn’t ever counted, was not there. And her husband, former high school star quarterback, now successful restaurateur, accepted the atrocious behaviour without a word to his high school menacing stupid buddies.
Their layabout presence in her home cast dark memories of her wasted four years of Horace Mann high school education when Hank was a jock and she was terrified that she might be lacking in the high school graces that were so essential for all the school’s beautiful people to nicely fit into the ever happy, smiley, in-crowd which invariably, as in all high school in-crowds, when graduating into the real world time, turn out to be the out-crowds, forever stuck in the empty memories of nowhere to be found again adolescence. The need to fit in with the right crowd has forever been a powerful addiction to a myriad fantasies of millions of high school students all over the US; and as beautiful and intelligent as Sharon was, she too had become part of the crippled herd that found ill-comfort in the pack.
*
As she had expected, Sharon discovered that there were no easy choices after graduation, and the tearful make-believe farewells quickly wilted into loneliness. The many tenuous friendships that had once passed for best friends forever in the classroom quickly diminished into the scary world of unending hard to get used to pain in the ass menial work, the freshness and vitality of youth withering into crass everyday existence. Being a stranger to any kind of humble work, Sharon found comfort to always look back and recall the emptiness of the days of her once teen innocence and shudder at the thought of honest work. In her perverse recollections she found comfort in the fondling probationary lovers streaking through the crowded empty halls of her mixed up mind. Alone in her kitchen, she remembered the days of the dimly lit library book stacks where goosing girls was a favorite pastime for boys goosing girls, and girls giggling, and how she partook, indifferent to the goose, but to be part of it, as well. Every time she looked back, sadly, she got most of her goosing from Hank Merker, for what boy would dare to put his hands on where Hank’s hands had been? Nor was she the only one, she knew, that Hank goosed, for he was every girl’s dream to be goosed by the starting varsity quarterback, typically near the boys’ gym where Hank was lord of the realm and where some of the girls made it a point to hang out.
Hank was a powerful gooser, as she now recalled, the memory hurting now as it did then. More than goosing, he loved fondling her breasts pretty much everywhere whenever they were alone on school property and no one was around, and she did timidly allow. He was weird in his perseverance of sexually assaulting her; he couldn’t get enough. But high school years were weird times of discovery and Sharon kowtowed to the unwholesome deeds only because Hank was the star quarterback and he could’ve fucked any girl he wanted; and all her friends knew how lucky she was that he chose her to relieve himself, a quarterback full of testosterone. It wasn’t love but it was the accepted thing to do with a star quarterback. She wasn’t sure what she was doing; she knew that other girls in the school did envy her and that included her best friends, especially Myrna and Kitty, who were often goosed by Hank, and who always wanted to know “Are you having sex with him?”
As if they didn’t know.
Nor could she remember any of her high school teachers as having had the least relevance in her life. Kitty use to say, “He’s nice,” or “She’s nice” about their history teachers, or their physics teachers, or their geometry teachers, but that was Sharon’s teacher recalled maximum contribution to the formation of her character.
*
She had long ago forgotten, if she ever knew, what, in the first maddening place, had made her like, let alone fall in love with, her pockmarked faced Hank. Cynically, she now contemptuously recalled her husband’s pockmarks which in their high school days showed up as glitter in her brains.
“It must have been that unblemished complexion of the star quarterback that attracted me to handsome Hank,” she fanned herself to laughter.
“And I’m feeling good,” she would sarcastically chastise herself.
If she could do it over again, like every other now grown-up disenchanted housewife, she would have been less eager to be air-head popular. If she could go back, she would make friends with the few boys who, in spite of their worthless teachers, were good in math and science and who actually understood poetry. Boys who grew up and now appear on Sunday morning news programs, and on late night discussions of current affairs and politics. Successful men who are now Senators and Congressmen and Wall Street executives; and rich rock stars.
The thought of stars would bring to mind sad images of her father Anton and she absolutely knew that she didn’t want any more ‘stars’ like husband Hank and daddy Anton in her unhappy life. The disconcerted thoughts of her empty high school days, with Daddy and Hank in the background, rattled her mind on a daily basis now in her stupid married life.
“You die when your heroes die, and they die awfully young,” out of nowhere, one day, the brash thought interrupted her usual nonsensical preoccupation and frightened her.
She had conditioned herself to suffer her dreaded insecurities in the privacy of her home, alone. Alone was preferable than being with her friends who did love her, but continued to think of her as being so lucky to have landed Hank, as if he were a pizza.
“I don’t want to die young,” the thought occurred to her in the pain of her loneliness. She wasn’t sure which was worse: to die young or to live alone.
But then, she herself could have been one of the stars, one of the silent valedictorian people. She too was good in math and science, and everything else as well, but had stupidly held back in favour of being part of the insipid in-crowd. If nothing else, if she hung out with the serious, nerdy types who wore glasses because they read a lot, she could have developed a more interesting mode of conversation, like beautiful celebrities on TV, for there was no denying Sharon’s beauty. Instead, she had felt the school pressure to hang out with fucking jocks who even then, she knew, definitely did not make for lively conversation. Not to be too unfair, but still fair, let’s face it, rare was the high school jock who had any imagination beyond some reefer coach infected childhood expectations of ridiculous big time glory and a herd of beautiful women.
Pathetic little fuckers, Sharon thought.
“Jesus help me; you make one fucking mistake and it haunts you for the rest of your life,” she protested trying to exonerate herself from disorders.
“What might it be like,” she now wondered, “to be married to an intelligent person, a non-jock, a college graduate, perhaps a PhD, a gentle man who would whisper dreamy words into my ears in the wakening minutes of our pillow-talk.”
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,
Its loveliness increases …” she recalled from a poem she liked.
It didn’t do any good to cry because time had passed her by; she was grown up now.
*
She went into her kitchen and got a Lady Godiva dark chocolate bar, slowly returned to her bedroom and lovingly licked it for a long time as she quietly lay on her bed.
It was delicious though not sweet.
She thought of a drink but decided to stick with licking the chocolate.
“What would it be like to be married to a person who does not continuously slurp cans of beer? To a man who could go for days without the mention of inane sports stats, but find pleasure in sharing pretty thoughts?” she heard herself say.
She stretched her lovely body on her soft bed. The dark chocolate was getting to her, making her hot, so she undressed, a nude queen with melted chocolate on her fingers.
In the vicious magic of her mind she saw her husband Hank as an old man, dour, dumb, and nude of any grace, staring at her, lying next to her on their bed. His eyes were slowly bleeding out the evil of fear and failure that had been contaminating every pock-mark of his fading face. If he had had any dreams he had managed to detract from them their youthful simplicity and beauty. Fate that fed his high school silly dreams of glory, his young man’s honourable ambition that he could’ve been someone important in football, had long ago crushed the man and his dreams. In the cruelty that Fate often plays ugly tricks on people, Hank’s prize was Sharon instead of a stellar football career.
Not fair, she thought, thinking of herself only as some common prize.
She had sacrificed everything to be in the right crowd.
“I was afraid, then, that I might have been thought of as an undesirable geek. I didn’t want the world not to like me. I now wish I was ugly.”
Her recollections were all tasteless bluster.
Frantically she tried to keep her feelings and emotions under control.
She pushed her lovely hair back.
She dry-cried at how pathetically average she and her friends had thoughtlessly been moulded into brainless popular clichés of endless excuses.
Depressed boys and girls, who grew up to be depressed men and women, where the good was bad and the bad was good; still scared to utter a single intelligent word and risk being thought of as a fool, or worse, a geek.
“I didn’t want to be passed by, and be married to the wrong man, like my mother has been,” she stupidly thought, for that was exactly what she had done.
And all too often, the fucking thought haunted her that she was still traveling the same trip, now husbanded into a living emptiness, with the same in-crowd losers of her not so long ago high school days.
She got up to take her morning shower because the very thought of those people from her past, now and forever, again as ever before, made her feel hopelessly lost in a quagmire of immense insignificance and boredom that had become her present life.