BF4Ever Page 4

  After returning to the States she found it difficult to make the adjustment to the American way of life she had known. She would find herself mentally alone, silently protesting a life not to her liking, though she knew that for her there was no other. She developed a way of not looking at people straight in the eye, an expression that was misinterpreted even by her friends as an unfriendly gesture. In time, her voice became masculine rough and when she spoke everyone stopped talking, an effect that she didn’t like because she didn’t want to be the cause of it. She disliked herself and found peace of mind only when she was with her best friends who had the soothing effect of making her voice revert to her femininity softness. Without wanting to, somewhere in time, probably in the course of her Peace Corps years, she had become the cynic she didn’t want to be. Poetry, her one-time love affair, had become a confused story in her uninspired mind, thoughts of beauty exhausting her. Mentally devoid of any medical explanation as to her lethargic post PC behavior, it was nonetheless very nice that her bed of thorns was handsomely transformed into lovely roses by her Daddy’s millions.

  Nice as it was, still, there was perplexing anguish in that luxuriant bed made by Daddy. That angst, that anguish that tormented Robin was a huge libidinous secret that just wouldn’t go away. Since her sophomore year in Magnolia High School, Robin had been in love with star quarterback Hank Merker, best friend Sharon’s then boyfriend and now husband. The lustful chronic desire to fuck Hank, even after all the years since high school, twisted physical and emotional pain in her fantasy face. And when in the real presence of Hank, now days somewhat rare, her feelings for him produced behavioural distortions generating frustrations and anxieties in her relationship with other people around her, but especially with her best friends Sharon, and later with husband Dave, every time she made unintended comparisons between the two current males in her life. And as the years went by, baffling feelings for high school Hank increased instead of fading away. The pain of not possessing him became more acute for her, and in the process of her greed for Hank, the love and friendship she had for Sharon became disconcerting, confusing her love for Sharon with the dark secret desire for Hank who had become the golden trophy she couldn’t have. When she tried desperately to repress her feelings for Hank, the more powerfully they would bounce back and invade her mind. Huge lumps of Hank would fire from her unconscious, and without wanting to, thinking of him, her best friend’s husband, immense guilt would invade her soul. Fighting to hide her emotions, over the years she became arrogantly anti-social and at times hostile to her friends, unnerving them and everyone else present. When still in high school, during high heats for Hank, she consciously diverted her attention away from boys who showed interest, and later on, unconsciously, away from interesting men whose contact she feared would make her tongue stammer away and maybe reveal her secret to the world.

  For years through high school and college her repressions were acted out in sublimated idealistic rebellions against unjust society. Romantic notions of righteousness were projected in school essays in support of the poor and underprivileged, particularly outcries against the injustices perpetrated against African-Americans. But not until she joined the Peace Corps did she for a moment forget handsome high school Hank, the love of her adolescent life. It was in Ethiopia, far away from Magnolia High School, when she discovered grownup love, that Robin momentarily forgot the triteness of an unrequited puppy love that she had been nurturing for Hank. Repressed by the crunching of a white, blond world, and though far, far away from home, Robin still didn’t have the willpower to live a life of instinctual, sexual love, full of the intuition that nature meant for her.

  “What were some of your interests in high school,” innocently asked David one night as they lay in separate beds.

  “You mean like boys?”

  “I was asking more about intellectual or artistic interests,” he said trying to make talk. “But if you want to talk about boys I’d like to hear about that too.”

  “Well, I did have a crush on Hank,” her tormented soul finally stammered out the pitiful curse of her deep-seated neurosis.

  David grinned a silly smile like he couldn’t have cared less; it would have been perfectly natural that a young girl have a crush on a boy, though her stammering many years later did betray something less than a typical teenage crush on the star quarterback.

  “Did you ever fuck him?” asked Dave.

  Without a second thought Robin slapped her husband hard.

  He was dumbfounded by her reaction. It was not unusual for couples to talk about their previous escapades, love affairs, and daylight fantasies. Robin’s reaction to an innocent question on the part of a typically curious husband was a bit of an overreaction, David thought.

  “That’s ok, Robin. You can fuck Hank as often as you wish,” he said laughing, obviously unhurt from the slap. “You can fuck him as much as you want. I don’t care. You fuck everybody else so why not him?”

  Robin’s reaction was simply to pretend hurtful and to overlook his words. She decided that her secret was still safe because her husband was too much of an egoist to have understood what she had just confessed, the punishing secret of her life. In her mind, it was preposterously unlikely that her dumb husband would publically admit that his wife had pent-up sexual feelings for her best friend’s husband.

  “I hate you,” she said. “I wish you were dead.”

  It was easy for Robin to painfully pretend that David was not putting her out of her mind, or simply out of his mind, like go to hell, who cares.

  “Maybe we should seek professional counselling,” she said after a few minutes of unbearable silence.

  “I don’t give a shit what you think we should do. As far as I’m concerned you could just get the hell out of my life and go fuck Merker or anyone else you want any time you want to. I’m staying with you just for daddy,” he said most wickedly.

  “I’m now going to get a beer,” he said.

  The man did not mince his words in articulating her position in his life. Crushed like a cockroach being stepped on, she thought that maybe someday she could be forgiving towards her husband, though she knew that she could not ever come to love him. She smiled in her bed because instinctively she knew that her marriage was empty of love and if she wanted happiness she had to play games away from home in places of strange sensations.

  And many nights, before she fell asleep, she would imagine what a wonderful couple she and Hank would make.

  Sharon and David would also make a lovely couple, she would think, and then fall into a sound sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Myrna Lambert rinsed the last glass of the morning’s breakfast and haphazardly shoved it somewhere on the upper tray of her dishwasher. She then clicked the dishwasher door shut and pressed the third button of the picture-coded panel depicting the ‘wash/rinse’ cycle, the number 145˚ F for water temperature, and sequentially the smiling sun for ‘hot dry’. Such conveniences, she thought; such a happy way of doing the breakfast dishes. If only life were so straight forward, so comprehensibly uncomplicated. Though the dishes were a chore, and honestly there weren’t that many other chores in her present life – what, she and her two daughters only - she could’ve easily done the dishes by hand, but the modern, high tech dishwasher made her feel that she was part of a bigger, more current world. She was part of the world of the rich, and she could’ve had two dishwashers if she wanted. She wondered if there were still people in America who did dishes by hand anymore. She shuddered at the thought of being common and she had her first thought of a cigarette. Her father had been a real estate man, uncommon in his instincts, a salt of the earth American.

  She looked at the clock on her microwave oven and it read 8:37 am. She had already been up for more than two hours and rightly felt tired. Her legs had started to swell, as usual, even this early in the day, and she wasn’t even forty, yet. The only thing she wan
ted to do was to get off of them, sit down with her feet up on the next chair, and have a leisurely cup of coffee, or two. As she lit the first of her day’s many cigarettes, she had no clue as to what she was going to do to fill her day, a daily dilemma that she hadn’t been able to resolve since her husband had left her, actually abandoned her with two permanently hungry teen-age daughters.

  Fuck him, she thought.

  Daylight hours baffled her and she had meant to start a diary just to keep track of her thoughts, and not just of him.

  My two women in the making, she proudly thought of her two beautiful daughters whose good looks probably came from their father, the weasel, she conceded. It’s a well-known fact that daughters get their looks from their fathers, she hated to admit, because she hated the bastard. There was no denying their playful sisterly antics; they were clone feminine copies of her soft husband’s frolicking shit.

  The loneliness of her divorce, invariably generated feelings of personal rejection, of feelings of inadequacies. After almost twenty years, dropped like a one night stand stranger, a trashy jilted woman, walked out on by an indifferent pig, as if she were some wrinkled woman though barely over thirty.

  Women like me don’t come every day, and if there was a bad apple in the bushel it was him and not me, she couldn’t get her mind off the shit.

  Thoughts like these led to exhausting days filled with a defiant state of aggression against everyone and life in general. Wearingly she passed her days in frustrating monotony wishing she were dead, but not seriously. It all led to further frustration and sleepless night time anxieties. Her monologue existence was slowly draining the little energy she had left as a single mother without a husband. Other women had been divorced and had moved on in their life without the remorse and deep in the hole dark caverns of their obsessions. But Myrna’s common enough divorcee status had loudly invaded her life, insidiously tormenting her thoughts with girly loneliness that her mind twisted sick as a dog, indicative of early death, she would sometimes say to herself. Other days, when the sun shone brightly, she thought that her life had come full circle and that she might be in some ridiculous loop unworthy of obsession. Still, as much as she tried to dismiss her husband’s absence, there remained a fascination that she couldn’t overcome. The bastard Phil was everywhere around her; he just wouldn’t keep away. So she suppressed her solitude into an emptiness of being a proud divorcee which was a lie because she cared too much about what her friends were probably saying behind her back - that poor Myrna couldn’t keep a husband.

  “I could keep ten husbands if it weren’t for the gossip,” she blew out the smoke, swaggering in defiance to their gossip-mongering.

  “I never want to become some puny hysterical little bitch in heat,” she said to herself, and Myrna knew she had to overcome the stinking thoughts; forget the jerk who had been her husband, who had left her without good cause, behavior not normal for an American family. Other women had suffered the indignity of a divorce and survived, and so would she, she told herself trying to regain some sense of ego-respect

  Her mind persisted with false arguments as she tried to overcome her disturbing predicament of a beautiful woman without a husband complicated by the presence of two teen age daughters. She might not have a husband in her current life, but Myrna was grateful that she at least had her two daughters, proof without debate that one could be a complete woman even without a husband. She had put on a little weight, but her daughters’ presence, a wall to shut away the rumourmongers, did away with any thoughts of depression and loneliness. Her daughters’ company, in her otherwise seemingly purposeless divorced life, had the sustaining satisfaction for her to face the world with pride, knowing that her two girls were magnificent beautiful creatures. The girls neutralized her neurotic thoughts that sometimes struck panic in her lonely heart: thank God for her lovely daughters.

  There was a bitterness to being a divorcee that just wouldn’t go away, though she was convincing herself that she was much happier without her hanging-around-her-apron ex-husband, weasel Phil. The unpardonable, lamentable, Phillip Lambert, a champion ass hole!

  But as much as she loved her lovely daughters, there were moments when perhaps unfairly, she thought that they, in a way, might have been responsible for both her loneliness and Phil’s exit from her life. They did test her patience, and probably his, with their teenage shenanigans, but she loved them for the pleasing moments they literally screamed into her life. At times, she would admonish herself for loving them too much, as if that were possible for a mother to love her children too much. But then no mom is perfect.

  The loneliness she felt was most obvious during the hours of the day when the girls were in school, or when otherwise away from her. Fear and uneasiness about her darling daughters’ future trailed her every thought, and without wanting it, less than pretty pictures about Justine and Meredith crossed her weary mother’s mind. The girls were growing up spectacularly independent of her; lively daughters of the Southern California outdoors who seemed to care more about their long glistening in the sun legs and silken golden hair than their mother. And when they ran their quarrelling antics through the house in their innocent but indecent half-naked ways, Myrna’s fears and frustration at the naked sight would scream stronger than the day before because, it seemed to her, there was no way of subduing her daughters’ vigour, or muffling their filthy slang, and that she, alone by herself, was incapable of providing any direction for them.

  Other than shopping and cooking, there isn’t much else that I can do for them, she would think. And to her dismay, they didn’t seem to care what might be bugging their concerned lonesome mother.

  “I’m gonna tell mother what you do with Wally Austin in school every day,” smilingly Meredith would threaten her older sister.

  “You do that and I’ll tell her what you do with Andrew Cotter, and he’s eighteen,” Justine would fire back, and in the distance, Myrna would pray that neither of them tell her anything, because having been there, at their age, she knew what every mother knows.

  They were healthy girls, full-bodied and strong, and their fast approaching separation from their loving mother had already cast its crushing inevitability. Even now, they didn’t ask anything more of her than a comfortable house and tasty food. It frightened Myrna to think that her daughters found more involvement outside their home, that they came home only to eat and sleep, and she wondered how long even that would last. She wanted to do more for them, but they never asked for more; they didn’t have to; it was always handed to them before they asked; they weren’t as needy of her, as she would have liked for them to be. Even without their father she continued to spoil them; and they deviously expected it.

  She was curious and had misgivings about her fast developing daughters who seemed awfully liberated these days, and her curiosity would get fumbled in the fascination of the changing features of her pubescent daughters, but her mind would always retract to the safety of “what else could I do?” and she meant it; as a single mom she had her hands full just dressing and feeding her always manipulative carefree beautiful daughters. She didn’t know what to do in this modern age of child rearing and she didn’t want to stifle her beautiful daughters.

  Difficult as it was for her to think about it, she had concluded that if Justine, her older daughter of sixteen, was sexually active, and presumably it was okay, because, well, it had to happen sometime. Myrna was sure Justine was becoming seductively irresistible to her high school boyfriends, just as she herself had been years earlier when she was in school. There was no denying Justine’s beauty with her long legs, blond hair straight and soft, shining even in the dark with her incomparable sweet smile from the time she was a baby. And there simply was no denying her stunning breasts - always a focal point for masturbating mama’s boys hanging out and sniffing around her beautiful daughter. She had seen Justine recently naked and she had feared her good looks because she knew that Jus
tine’s innocence wouldn’t stop some oversexed older teen bastard from fucking her.

  Like a good mother, she wondered about her daughters’ possible involvement in drinking and other addictions like drugs and sex. She didn’t know which of these thinks was the worst, thought she felt that sexual addiction was the least offensive, as long as safety precautions were taken.

  Justine was definitely developing into a hot young woman and Myrna couldn’t help but compare her to her beautiful friend Sharon. Like Sharon’s, Justine’s young face was a flawless symmetry of faultless features. Crudely, in Myrna’s motherly estimate, Justine had already become a stunning piece of ass. Sexuality radiated all around her freshly coloured lips, always perfectly outlined. They echoed a smile that was a young girl’s vanity for approval of her devastating good looks. There probably was too much stimulation all around her, and it would have been most natural for her to want to fuck. It would have taken superhuman effort for Justine to resist the temptation. She had it all, and what an unforgivable sin it would have been if no one stooped to sniff. And Myrna ached that it be no more than a sniff, for at least a little while longer, though she knew from experience that sooner or later someone was going to invade her beautiful daughter, without regrets all around. Blame it on DNA or what, the girl simply exuded sex as she moved through her teen space. What a flirt, she’s too much, thought poor Myrna, but what was a mother to do?