Time Trials

by Lee, Terry

  Frannie somehow got the feeling her time to shine was in high school. Yeah, she’d been a senior class officer, and yeah, she’d been runner up for homecoming queen. She’d even been appointed Outstanding Business Student for her school her senior year, which seemed to bring more joy to her parents than her other accomplishments.

  “We’re so proud of you, Sugar!” Her dad had wrapped her in a bear hug that smashed her nose against his shirt. Her mother had stood nearby, close to tears.

  Really? she thought. She’d received a gold engraved Cross pen and pencil set, complete with a certificate bearing a gold seal, suitable for framing. In hindsight that probably all came about because her parents had insisted she take every secretarial class offered, which should have been a major a-ha moment. However, being clueless and having people-pleaser stamped across her forehead, she never questioned her parents’ motives.

  Frannie had been dating Denny since she was a high school freshman. Although a nice guy, she probably would have broken up with him that same year. He was okay, nice looking, not a bad person at all…she just wasn’t as in love with him as her parents were. They adored him.

  “Why don’t you invite Denny over for Sunday dinner?” her mom would ask. “I’ll make pot roast. How does that sound?”

  Ugh. “I think he’s doing something with his parents.”

  “Well, you can ask, can’t you?”

  Double ugh.

  And her friends weren’t much better.

  “But you two are so cute together,” Janie, one of her two best friends, had said more than once.

  “Janie, I don’t love him. Cute, perfect couples love each other, don’t they?” She had tried, she really tried, to love him, but nada. She cared for him a lot, didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, but that was about the extent of her side of the relationship. And without the “oh, I can’t live without you” scene some of her girlfriends were experiencing, well…there just wasn’t much there to hold her attention.

  She had all this, the perfect life…at least that’s what everyone saw on the outside. And yet, somehow, inside she didn’t feel perfect…she didn’t feel happy and she didn’t know why. Many hours were spent alone in her room listening to 45s on her record player. The sad songs appealed to her, soothed her actually. Especially the Beach Boys In My Room:

  “There's a world where I can go

  And tell my secrets to

  In my room…in my room.

  In this world I lock out

  All my worries and my fears

  In my room…in my room.”

  And she never said anything about this inner loneliness because…she was a people-pleaser. No one would understand anyway.

  Pulling a small frayed memo pad from her purse, Frannie jotted down a few notes. Reading Shakespeare or writing essay papers in high school were as difficult for her as stuffing an inflated life raft back into its 8 x 10 carrying case. However, putting her own thoughts on paper not only flowed freely, but brought her a respite from the outside world. She’d been journaling for years and found what she enjoyed the most, besides putting her inner thoughts down on paper, was chronicling funny events, especially on vacations. She’d learned she had a great sense of humor…on paper, that was. Her words sought no one’s approval and gave her a sense of freedom she treasured.

  Frannie had pretty much been taught what to believe and value. And the presumption that others knew better than her, especially her parents, or any adult for that matter, caused her to never question those beliefs. Republicans? Good. Democrats? Bad. Why? She didn’t know, except her parents had always been Republicans, though they had secretly liked JFK.

  What her dad didn’t like to eat, she never even had to try. For years she had no idea an avocado was anything other than a color. Casseroles? Didn’t know they existed until she stayed at Dena’s one night and experienced her first ever chicken and rice casserole. Pizza? Only cheese. Creamed beef on toast? Bad, although her mom would occasionally make it when her dad was away. With disgust engraved on every crevice of his face, he referred to creamed beef on toast as “shit on shingles,” obviously his least favorite meal from his army days. Heaven? Hell? She got the heaven part, but couldn’t quite grasp the concept of hell. And because she didn’t get it, she often felt this to be among one of her personal flaws.

  “Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die!”

  Another phrase Frannie had heard from her parents, especially her mother, her entire life, and thought it surely to be a bible verse. Just this past year, however, she had learned it was a famous line from Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade. Really? She should have “naïve” stamped next to the people pleaser-sign on her forehead.

  For several years she’d had no internal spunk or flame, but lately she’d been doing a lot of independent thinking and writing; although, of course, she kept all this to herself. Maybe there was more than this small protective bubble which had been her life. Maybe not everyone only liked cheese pizza or disliked “shit on shingles.” Maybe there were people, people her age, who actually challenged the thought process they had been taught. The idea scared and exhilarated her at the same time.

  “You okay, Sugar?” her dad asked. “You look a little distracted. Getting a little nervous?”

  “No, Dad, I’m fine, really.” Gazing out the window at the passing scenery, her eyes narrowed. The hell with being a people-pleaser. Maybe her parents could only afford for her to go to college one year, but damn it, something good could happen during that time. Something different. Totally different from the life she’d been living.

  Her fixed glare out the window turned into a smile, and for the first time in quite a while, she smiled on the inside too.

  “Uh, you know, I probably won’t be coming home every weekend.” The shift in her thinking suddenly opened up a plethora of ideas. “I mean, Dena will have her car, but unless she decides to come home, Janie and I are pretty much stuck in Huntsville.” There, she’d set the precedent.

  Her mother whirled her head around to the back seat. “But, what about Denny? Won’t he be expecting you home every weekend?” Of course her mom would bring him up. Denny had landed a partial football scholarship at the University of Houston, and although he’d be living in the athletic dorm, it was still in Houston.

  What about Denny? This is my time. “Uh, we decided to see other people.” Sorta, she thought.

  “What?” The expression on her mother’s face mirrored something far more catastrophic than learning her daughter and her boyfriend were seeing other people. “When did this happen? You didn’t say anything!”

  Besides her mother’s horrified expression, she caught her dad’s own puzzled look through the rearview mirror.

  “Really, you guys, it’s okay.” She mentally ripped off the people-pleaser sign on her forehead and felt a flutter in her chest, like a butterfly breaking loose from its cocoon and spreading its wings for the first time. Her lungs filled with much needed air. She was going to be okay.

  Chapter 5

  Regina Westmoreland - 1972

  “Can’t you drive any faster?”

  “I could, Mother, but the police are always out on this road.” Regina checked the speedometer of her mother’s Cutlass Supreme and kept her eyes open once they passed the Tyler city limits sign. “I could get a ticket for my speed now. And look….” She released her hands and pointed to the vibration of the steering wheel. “Isn’t that an alignment problem or something?”

  “What are you, Miss Auto Mechanic?” Patricia Westmoreland lit a cigarette and cracked the window a tad on the passenger side. “Besides, as soon as I get that GTO, this baby will be yours.”

  “Why do I get the Cutlass and you get the GTO?” She waved smoke out of her face, knowing she’d smell like a chimney by the time she got to Huntsville.

  “Because I’m the mom and I say so.”

  “Did I ever tell you how much I hate that line?” Regina gritted her teeth and wished fo
r the millionth time she had a normal parent. Her dad had taken off when raising a child interfered with his lifestyle, and her mother…well, her mother was too old to be a flower child, but by God she’d taken on the role anyway, wearing patched bell bottom jeans and fringed vests, complete with beads and a headband. Last week Regina had caught her mother leaving the house wearing a paisley mini dress and white patent knee boots to meet some guy at a bar.

  “Yeah, I know it sucks.” Patricia flicked her cigarette out the window, exhaled the last of the smoke that filled her lungs, and turned to her daughter. “But, what are ya gonna do, right? I heard it for years from my grandma…maybe it was my aunt.” She paused for a minute, as if she might honestly be trying to recall that time in her life, then snapped back to the present. “Now it’s your turn. C’mon, put the pedal to the medal.”

  “Pedal to the medal. How old are you?” Many times over the past couple of years, Regina had felt like the older of the two.

  “Old enough to know you’re poking along like there’s a driver’s training sign on top of this baby.”

  “What is your damn hurry, anyway?” Regina had flown past her level of mild annoyance several miles back.

  “Well, for one thing.” Patricia turned sideways in her seat to face Regina. “This just happens to be the most important day of your life…so far. You get your independence.” She poked Regina in the side, her smoke riddled giggle sounding like the wrinkled old hippy she was. “And so do I.”

  “I can tell we’re really going to have a tearful goodbye scene.” Regina glanced in the rearview mirror to check her makeup, a habit she’d developed the day she got her driver’s license. Before that, any old mirror would do. “I’ll be lucky if I get everything out of the car before you haul ass back to whoever you’re dying to hook up with.”

  “I don’t think you should be talking to your mother like that.” Patricia straightened herself in the seat and feigned indignation.

  “I wouldn’t if you acted like a mother.”

  Why are you doing this now? You know it will only lead…like nowhere.

  Regina’s alter ego often chimed in when a mental timeout was called for. She’d discovered her “other self” as a young child, one of the many times she was sent to her room while her parents held one of their frequent screaming matches. Like that was going to block out the noise. Yet, she liked having an imaginary friend. Being an only child sucked. Her alter ego said her name was Lucy. Even at a young age, Regina had rebelled against what she called an ordinary name.

  Lucy is not ordinary. It’s a great name.

  “Maybe so, but if we’re going to be friends, you need something better.”

  Like what?

  “Let’s see.” Regina had thumbed through some of her storybooks. “Snow White? You know, like and the Seven Dwarfs?”

  Snow White? I don’t think so.

  “The old lady in the shoe?”

  Okay, fine. But just Snow…no dwarfs.

  If it wasn’t for Snow, Regina’s childhood would have been worse than it had been. The fighting had continued between her parents, until one day her dad was just gone. Just like that. Gone. She’d been in seventh grade at the time and didn’t really miss him very much. They’d never been close, and Regina often wondered if he was her real dad.

  About that same time her body had decided to plunge into puberty. She gained fifteen pounds of pure chubbiness, which the mean girls at school had used to their advantage.

  Her mom had started her on a strict diet and exercise program. She would have loved to believe the action was pure motherly affection, but she knew about Patricia’s own balancing act between bulimia and anorexia. She didn’t have a name for those disorders then, but the way her mother tried to disguise the acts pretty much convinced her it wasn’t normal. Regina became way more knowledgeable about eating disorders than most any other kid her age.

  She’d beg her drill sergeant mother for leniency, but the most she got for her cries were doled out cubes of cheese when she felt faint. That was Regina’s first dysfunctional lesson on the issue of self-image. She lost not only the chubby fifteen pounds, but another ten just for good measure. Her mother rewarded her for losing the weight by dying her hair a platinum blonde, a color extremely out of place for a seventh grader, but one that matched Patricia’s perfectly. Regina had then proceeded to join the “mean girls’ club” and taunt the other overweight classmates.

  She had also been blessed with abundance around the chest area, and was further fortunate that these beauties had not shriveled when she lost her excessive pubescent pounds. Developing early had always been a plus. The flat chested females had envied her, and the males couldn’t pry their eyes away from her early blooming twin peaks. The more weight she lost, the bigger the girls got. She figured she’d done something right in her life to get such a nod from Mother Nature. However, after a while the mean girls ended up dropping her from their elitist group.

  “Flat-chested bitches,” she’d growled. “Who do they think they are, kicking me out?”

  They’re just jealous. Snow tried to be supportive.

  “I mean, look at me.” Regina had stood in front of the full length mirror in her room, an exercise she’d spent many hours doing while having this conversation with Snow. “How can they be mean to this? I’m thin, I’ve got boobs, and I’m beautiful. I’ve got it all,” she said too loud to her audience of no one besides her alter-ego.

  Snow had held her tongue on that remark. Thanks to Mama Patricia, Regina believed looks were everything, and found little pleasure or need in being kind. Snow realized, as Regina did not, that once all the compliments to herself had been doled out, there wasn’t much left to offer anyone else. Sad. Real sad.

  After spending her entire sophomore year in high school walking the halls with her nose in the air and a smug smile she hoped translated into “I know something you don’t,” Regina tired of being a princess without a country. She had no friends except Snow, who more times than not had switched from gentle supportive phrases to sarcasm. So she had decided to join the school’s dance team. All Tyler high school dance teams prepped their dancers to become one of the acclaimed Apache Belles, a prestigious accolade at Tyler Junior College.

  “They’ll have to like me,” she kept telling herself. Certainly there was a rule about that sort of thing.

  Sure enough, she started hanging around with a group of dancers and they treated her nice. So she was nice. Regina quickly gained the status of the highest kicker and the best at performing the splits during dance routines. She refrained from pointing out this accomplished skill to her new friends, which was not an easy task, considering unnecessary and sarcastic remarks were her first language. In her opinion, fitting into a group and being the most beautiful was way better than being beautiful all by herself.

  But somehow she’d been overlooked when positions were assigned for officers of the dance team. She was by far the best dancer, and had the prettiest smile. What else could they possibly want…a personality too? Not getting an office that year fractured something inside Regina more than anyone knew. She had continued to keep her nose in the snooty position, and wore a plastered-on smile—the kind beauty contestants had to wear for hours during the Miss America pageants. But deep inside, she knew she didn’t fit. The girls in the dance team were nice to her in school, but they never invited her to hang out, like for slumber parties. She had no real friends, only Snow.

  This alone helped push her toward Sam Houston instead of Tyler Junior College. She wanted something different. She didn’t need to be in competition with all those bitchy high-kickers at Tyler Junior College. She knew Sam Houston had drum majorettes that performed with the Bearkat Marching Band during football halftime performances. And the clincher? There were only a handful of majorettes. Way less competition, and way more visibility. She’d get one of those positions if she had to hogtie her competitors and lock them away somewhere. She was beautiful; she knew it, and felt an obligation t
o let everyone see her shine.

  Snow sighed. Oh God….

  Chapter 6

  Janie Patterson - 1972

  She’d always wanted to be thin. Weight had been a struggle her entire life. As a little girl, the nickname “chunky monkey” didn’t bother her. Even “plump” had sort of a cute connotation. Now, the mere mention of one of those “cute” little names produced a snarl loud enough to clear a room.

  Actually, during her teens she thought she’d handled the weight thing without too much drama until Twiggy, the twig-bitch model, hit the runway and everyone wanted to have the body shape of a pencil. Janie’s body had kinda been like a pencil, only more like one of the oversized stubby ones made especially for kindergarteners, not the regulation #2’s.

  “I can’t take it anymore!” She’d thrown herself on her bed and staged an emotionally-charged (and very dramatic) breakdown.

  Her antics must have worked because her mother flew into her room, arms flailing over her daughter’s more than healthy sized body. “What is it? What can I do?”

  “I don’t know!” Between sobs Janie peeked through her crossed arms to judge her mother’s level of distraught-ness. “All I want is Thin Mints or…you know, those little butter shortbreads, or the assorted sandwiches…maybe even the peanut butter ones.” She’d memorized the cookie varieties.