Authors: Elyse Douglas
Wanting Rita
WANTING RITA
A Novel by
Elyse Douglas
COPYRIGHT
Wanting Rita
Copyright 2012 by Elyse Douglas
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The copying, reproduction and distribution of this e-book via any means, without permission of the author, is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and refuse to participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s intellectual property rights is greatly appreciated.
ISBN: 978-1-936539-87-1
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
—
Rainer Maria Rilke
Table of Contents
Part One
Now and Then
Chapter One
“She’ll be there, Alan,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, in a quiet, hopeful voice. “She’ll be at Jack’s Diner. She’s been working there for a month now. It…well, it would just be a good thing…a nice thing if you could…” Her voice trailed off, then grew weak and brittle. “You’re the only person she’s asked about. But… you must be so busy. I mean, I know doctors are always busy. Of course, you’re busy, but… Well, if you could just go and see her…”
Then there was desperation. “I’m sorry to call you at your office, but I just thought…well, if she saw some old friends. She needs to…get out and…”
I’d heard that voice frequently working in the ER during my residency. A voice stripped of pride by a mounting panic.
“She’ll be so glad to see you again, Alan. I just know it. She was always so fond of you, you know.”
Just as I was about to end the conversation, she broke down, repeating the story of Rita’s tragedy in deep sighs and choking sobs. I waited, impatiently. She rambled and paused, hoping for a response. I didn’t offer any, so she continued on with a weepy intensity, with anger, remorse, and an occasional hacking cough. I listened coolly, aloof, frequently checking my watch. I was already behind. Patients were complaining to reception. I had mountains of paperwork to do and I hadn’t eaten lunch.
Mrs. Fitzgerald persisted, with surging emotion. Her pace became a desperate sprint to the finish line, jumping from self-pity to scorn, to cursing, to rage. She trampled on all my efforts to cut her off. So I waited for the end of emotion; for the end of her confessions; for the shattered voice that finally fell into a withering and feeble “Oh, God… please go see Rita... Please...”
I wasn’t moved in that hollow silence. My heart contracted with an icy chill—with the rush of unwanted memories. I wasn’t even moved when she timidly called my name to see if I was still there.
“Yes… I’m here, Mrs. Fitzgerald, but I have to go now. Thank you for calling.”
I hung up, abruptly, without another word. I wanted to erase her—erase the entire population of Hartsfield, Pennsylvania—from my mind.
I’d already heard the story. My sister, Judy, had called eight months before, stunned, teary and grateful to share. Two hours later, an old friend from high school, whom I hadn’t heard from in six years, called me stammering, shocked, and depressed. Then my father had called, using cold, sharp words. “They were trash. Didn’t you date that girl a couple of times? What was her name... Rita?”
It had briefly hit the national news, I was told, although I didn’t see it because I was in Barbados on vacation when it happened. Of course it upset me. It would upset anyone, but I had never been particularly fond of Mrs. Fitzgerald when I was a kid. And when I was a kid living in Hartsfield, she’d never been particularly fond of me. But then, with few exceptions, nobody was. Except Rita. Rita, at least for a fleeting miraculous time, had been fond of me. Perhaps, she had even loved me. And I, without a doubt—any doubt—had loved her.
Mrs. Fitzgerald’s phone call had surprised me. I hadn’t seen her in five or six years, since spending the Christmas holidays with my parents in Hartsfield. We had passed in the drugstore. As she approached, her eyes had flickered down and away, hoping to avoid me. But I didn’t let her. I was in medical school and an imposter of maturity.
“Merry Christmas,” I’d said, friskily.
She scarcely paused, her eyes still not meeting mine. “Home to see the folks?” she’d asked, meekly.
“Yep.”
“Nice.”
“How’s Rita?”
She struggled for a bright tone. “Good. Still living in Oklahoma.”
“Good.”
“Still in school?” she asked.
“Yeah… still at it. Takes a long time to be a doctor.”
She hurried away; then, after a quick backward glance of sorrow, she exited the store.
I hadn’t thought of her since. But I had thought of Rita. Rita was hard to forget. She was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to me growing up in Hartsfield. Rita Fitzgerald, “The Blond Blaze of Hartsfield, P.A.,” the local paper had once described her. Rita Fitzgerald, who had gone from ugly duckling in elementary and junior high schools, to a dazzling beauty in high school. Rita Fitzgerald, who had won the local beauty pageant two years in a row, and had sky-rocketed to local stardom. In her senior year, Rita was 18 when most of us were still 17. Because of illness, she’d lost most of a year and had had to repeat a grade. Rita Fitzgerald was my first love.
On Saturday morning, two days after Mrs. Fitzgerald’s phone call, I drove the 212 miles from Manhattan to Hartsfield. The night before, I told my wife, Nicole, that I had to do something with that damned house.
“If it wasn’t so far away, we could rent it out during the year and use it as a summer home,” she said.
I cringed at the thought. “No way. The quicker it’s gone, the better.”
I entered the town limits, seeing it with familiar eyes and old memories, hands sweaty on the steering wheel from humidity and a touch of nerves. I did want to see Rita again, and I had a tabloid curiosity about the tragedy’s aftermath and the town’s current psychological reaction to it. And my ego had purred when Mrs. Fitzgerald mentioned that Rita had asked about me, although secretly I’d doubted it. I certainly didn’t want to return to Hartsfield. I was not, nor had I ever been, particularly comfortable growing up there. But I had been putting off a trip. Six months before, my father had suffered a stroke, and Judy and I had moved him to Florida to live with her and her family. Judy was also managing some real estate that Dad had purchased in Florida in the mid 1990’s, so it was agreed that it was my duty to sell the Hartsfield Queen Anne Victorian house, with its 10 acres, and most of its contents.
After seeking advice and doing some of my own research, I’d decided to have an estate auction. My father vehemently opposed it. “That house has been in the family for generations,” he protested, in his now trembling voice.
But I didn’t want to live in Hartsfield, and Judy’s life was with her husband and their children in Florida. Mom had died two years before of cancer, and none of her family wanted the house. Dad’s family had moved away years before, expressing no interest in returning to or purchasing the house.
The physical and fiscal responsibility of maintaining the place, from over 200 miles away, was not practical and, frankly, I just wanted to be free of it.
So it was May, and I was returning to Hartsfield for what I thought would be one of my final pilgrimages. After the house sold, I had no intention of returning and every intention of trying to erase even the faintest memories of the place.
But I did want to see Rita; if only from a distance; if only for a few minutes.
Hartsfield had been a factory town, producing thermal underwear, t-shirts, pajamas and other apparel. The wages were modest, but most workers lived within their means and considered the simple way of life a good one. Nearly everyone worked for a factory or in some vigorous support of them. The factories had been the temples of commerce, employment and ambition. They nurtured gossip, friendship and the occasional stirring romance.
The long red brick factories helped to define the culture, the attitudes and the political debate. They supported community pride and ethical works. They were the throb and pulse of Hartsfield. They were the hearts.
After graduating from high school, people went to work for the factories, expecting to reap an equitable retirement. It was a good and decent middle-class life. Up through the 1960s, workers could expect a yearly raise, lessening the gap between rich and poor. The great equalizer was the sense of purpose: the gift of having a job that enriched the worker, the family, the community and the world.
The roads to and from the factories carried workers past sweeping hills, arching trees and scattered lakes, to modest neighborhood homes, churches, schools, shops and cozy bars. They passed the baseball diamond and the once new mall, tattered now, a silent testament to hard times. The main road continued across a covered bridge, dipped and meandered out to the peaceful hills and quiescent groves, where deferential oaks and elms stirred lazily over graveyards. Here, generations of Hartsfield’s best and worst lay side by side; their joys and sufferings, their ambitions and family failures proudly remembered and shared by the living.
But everything had changed several years ago. One by one, the factories closed. The hearts stopped. The companies moved away or outsourced to Honduras and China. The factory buildings, with smokeless chimneys, became cold shells, empty of consciousness, where restless birds darted from shattered windows, and newspapers sailed the parking lots with old frantic headlines shouting out for attention; shouting out for relief from pain.
How Can We Compete with 55 Cents an Hour
!? they asked.
I’d read about it in the
New York Times
and, before his stroke, my father had kept me informed, not that he was ever impacted in any way. He’d been a financial advisor and owned an accounting business, with wealthy clients as far away as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago. He’d never lacked for work. We were considered rich, although I’d never really thought of it that way. I had believed that no one who was truly wealthy would ever live in Hartsfield.
The young were moving away. The old were being retrained to work elsewhere or nowhere, but it gave them something to do. It gave their minds something to cogitate on. Middle-aged men, with low chins and sloping shoulders, now padded the empty streets, bracing themselves with memories of the days when they worked 60 or 70 hours a week, on weekends and holidays—whenever they were needed. Now, they wandered like old dogs, sniffing about, looking for distraction, pushing down anger and depression, realizing that Hartsfield would soon be a ghost town.