Jeanette

The Greyhound idled to a stop in front of the Hamelin Travel-Inn. Its doors whooshed open and a lone passenger stepped down. The engine vibrated and the vehicle rumbled away into the night. As if in defiance, its horn shattered the silence.

Jeanette Wilson stood watching the bus move away, the tail lights a beacon in the darkness. A part of her longed to run after it. For hours, the bus had been a secure womb conveying her to the place of her childhood. Now it was gone, and she was afraid.

She looked toward the center of town. Even the streetlights did nothing to dispel the shadows. She shivered. This was not her town. The town she remembered was alive and filled with people, even at this hour. Squinting through the darkness, she tried to see her watch. Nine p.m. She looked up the deserted main street, searching for Arnie Helm's cab. Not finding it, she sighed, picked up her suitcase and walked toward the flickering lights.

The service was mercifully short. Just a few comforting words and Bonnie Dell Jenson was laid to rest forever. Jeanette tried to find comfort in that, but it wasn't her mother lying there. It was only a husk of the woman who had been such an important part of her life--who had been her last link to Hamelin. She remembered automatically thanking the preacher, and the old friends who had attended the service. She remembered patting the hands of the old Seymore twins and assuring Emmy Perry and Nora Hill that all was as God intended. The hard part now was convincing herself.

Jeanette remembered her old fears. As a child, she would sit for hours in her treehouse, her doll clutched tightly against her. She projected into the future, of the inevitability of her parents dying, leaving her behind. Because she could not cope with the immensity of such an event, she longed to be an orphan. If one was an orphan, one would never know the agony of losing someone dear to them. But she had never been an orphan until now. Her worst fear was a reality.

Jeanette wandered aimlessly down Main Street, peering into store windows. Hollister's hadn't changed. She could have sworn the tired old mannequins in the window wore the same old dresses they worn when she left. Watson's, four doors down, had fared only a little better. Isaac stood outside the store hawking customers inside. Mitchell's across the street was thriving, due to the influx of more recent fashions. It didn't seem possible that this was Saturday. Only a few people milled along the street. When she was a child, the streets had been crowded, hectic. The drawings for merchandise and prizes had brought people in from the farms, and the street evangelists kept them. Perched atop wooden boxes, they preached hell-fire and damnation and the righteous stayed to listen, while the sinners fled.

She paused as a burst of raucous laughter issued from the open doorway of Hamelin-Raleigh Drug. Not wanting to run the gauntlet of suggestive remarks by Cliff Jr. and his friends, Jeanette crossed the street. She lingered before the Palace Theatre, where a discolored poster in the cracked display window for Coming Attractions announced Beach Blanket Bingo. Had the theater really been closed so long? She had spent many hours there, growing up.

She wanted to turn back the clock–-back to happy times, when it was just Daddy and Mama and herself, before Roy Gene and the children. Before death. A knot of pain gripped her throat with an iron grip. Oh, Mama, she screamed in her mind. I want to be a child again. I want to laugh and be happy. I want to run home from school and find you and Daddy waiting for me. I want to giggle with Carly and see all the Gordon McCrae and Doris Day movies again. Let me go back, Mama, I promise I'll never, never leave again. A nasal voice brought her out of her reverie.

"Hey there, Jeanette. Was sure sorry t'hear ‘bout your ma. She was one fine lady."

"Thanks, Mr. Turner. That she was. A fine lady. I'll miss her." Jeanette studied the stocky figure of the old lawyer. Time hadn't been kind to J.D. His faded old sign rattled in the breeze that had risen and beat dispiritedly against the front of the office. Like the sign his shiny old suit and scuffed brown boots had seen better days.

"I ain't seen you in a long time, Jeanette. In fact, I ain't seen you since you, well, you, uh...."

"It's been a long time, Mr. Turner," Jeanette mumbled politely. (What's the matter, J.D.? Can't you say it? You haven't seen me since I came home to bury Daddy, and I came home alone that time, too. And I came alone ‘cause my husband wouldn't come with me. Wouldn't even give me bus fare home. Mama had to send it to me. Do you remember the Wilson boy I married? He's totally strange, possessive and a world-class asshole, and do you offer a discount on divorces to hometown girls?)

"Well, Jeanette, you ain't changed that much! Still as pretty as ever."

"We all change, Mr. Turner. Some for better, some for worse." Jeanette sighed, looking backward to yesterday. (I've changed, Mama. I can't do it any more. Once you told me I had to accept the things I couldn't change, and I must always accept my husband's words as gospel. Now, I don't want to believe that any more, but I'm afraid. Where can I go if I don't believe?)

"Uh, Jeanette," J.D. Turner began, hesitant.

Jeanette waited, knowing where the old man was headed.

"Uh," the old man fidgeted nervously. "Your ma–-did she leave any business for you to tend to? You know I'll be willing to take care of any loose ends."

"Everything's fine, Mr. Turner. Mama left everything in order--didn't want to put a hardship on me."

"That's great. More people should think like that."

"I know." Jeanette sighed and looked away. It was obvious that the greedy old hypocrite was hoping he could chase down some business from the death of her mother. God only knows, she thought, how many times he has profited from the deaths of others.

"Will in order?"

"Will in order."

"Well, don't be a stranger now, y'hear?" J.D. turned to go.

"Thanks, J.D. I won't be. A stranger, that is," Jeanette lied, knowing full well she'd never return, even to visit her parents graves.

The old merry-go-round in the school yard groaned rustily as Jeanette sat down on one of the splintered boards. She pushed with her foot and the ancient metal whined. She looked up at the old school, surprised at how small it seemed. Once it had seemed immense.

Rising, she walked to the doors and tried them tentatively, hoping they would be locked. They weren't. She tugged them open and entered, her heels tapping noisily. Funny, she'd always imagined the corridor as nearly endless. She listened, expecting to hear the sound of the bell calling children to class.

She opened the door to the book room. Broken desks and a shamble of old school papers greeted her. Copies of Dick and Jane lay moldering beneath the leaves that had drifted inside through a broken window. Her throat knotted with pain as she knelt and selected one of the crumpled papers, faded by the elements over the years. "Wastes time. Talks unnecessarily." John Alton–-dead these many years, vanished in the grinding crash of a motorcycle. What did it matter now if he had wasted time? Was talk unnecessary when his voice was soon to be stilled forever?

Jeanette saw her own name, watery and indistinct. Kneeling, she picked it up. "Daydreams..." the paper began...She turned and ran. Daydreams, she thought frantically, was the word Roy Gene used so often in reference to herself. ‘You live in a world of daydreams,' he would say. ‘You can't go back,' he would tell her, when she would buy the old 45's, the songs of the good old days. She wept when she played them, because she knew he was right.

She had tried to deny this, but she now knew it had all been true. She had lived in a world of dreams. She had never grown up. Papa didn't die, and the town would never change. She only vaguely remembered her children when they were small, but the memory of her own childhood was vivid. Now, the dreams were gone. Papa was gone; the town was changed. Now, Mama was gone, too. The circle was complete and she was back at the beginning. And, a circle goes nowhere.

Shadows deepened along the corridor and Jeanette became uneasy. Running toward the double doors, she pulled them open and stumbled outside. Trembling, she leaned her head upon her folded hands.

She heard them before she saw them–-the voices soft, then more strident. Then, she saw the children, scampering merrily down the hall, laughing and jostling one another. One child stopped, turned and looked back at her. She clutched a Margaret O'Brien hat in her hand. Everyone knew that Mrs. Risley didn't allow hats in the corridor. The child stared for a long time, then shrugged, impatient to join her friends. She flipped her golden brown French braids aside, turned and skipped away. Jeanette watched the ghost of the child that had been herself vanish down the long, dark corridor.

Jeanette glanced at her watch. The bus should be coming soon. She was anxious to leave, though she had no idea of what awaited her at home. Would she, again, take up the yoke of tyranny? She didn't think so. She felt freed from the past. In order for her to find herself, she'd had to lose Mama. Now that she stood alone, her life could take a new direction. There was no one to tell her what she must do, what she must endure to fulfill the accepted role of a "good" wife. There would be no more embarrassed explanations to neighbors about her clumsiness that resulted in black eyes and bruises.

She knew it wouldn't be easy to begin again, on her own this time, but she would face whatever lay ahead. She would stop dwelling on her lost childhood and enjoy her children. It wasn't too late to give them a childhood of their own to remember.

The bus honked, shattering her thoughts. The door whooshed open, then closed her safely inside. She settled into a seat, not looking behind as a lonely cab cruised Main Street, and alternate streetlights, to conserve energy, flickered.

And a deserted theater waited patiently for Beach Blanket Bingo.

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