Wanting Rita Read Free

been the town treasure. The prom queen. The beauty queen. The trophy. Men with cigars on the Courthouse steps jerked nods of agreement that Hartsfield could produce more than just thermal underwear. They produced Rita Fitzgerald: beauty, talent and personality. She’d go somewhere, New York, LA, and become somebody, and they’d be the proud town fathers who had supported her, nurtured her and helped her along. She could sing and dance, and she wrote poems and short stories that were published in the local paper. She was even going to write a novel about Hartsfield. For weeks after this fact was published in the Sunday paper, I observed that teachers, neighbors and town folk all had broader smiles, softer dispositions and kind words, where few had been offered before.
    Whenever she had shined her large sea-blue eyes on me, I saw tenderness, wonder and intelligence; and when she took me into them, fully, and held me for a time, I felt primitive and exalted. During those rare moments when Rita and I had been close and I felt her soft breath on my cheek or in my ear, and whenever she leaned into me and I smelled the spring scent of her and looked into her blue eyes, wide with magic, I saw them break into prisms of fire so magnificent that I often went dumb and silent with desire for her. She thought it was a morbid seriousness. That’s what she’d called it.
    “Alan James! You are always so serious. I wrote about it in my last short story. I described the character as having a morbid seriousness.”
    That had been our connection: Ms. Lyendecker’s English class. We both wrote short stories, then exchanged and critiqued them. Ms. Lyendecker encouraged us and challenged us. Once when I said that I liked non-fiction better than fiction, because it was true and not a pack of lies, Ms. Lyendecker said, “If fiction is true, then it is non-fiction from the first word.”
    Ms. Lyendecker went to Columbia University, and taught at a college in Massachusetts for many years, returning to Hartsfield when her mother became terminally ill. Upon her mother’s death, Ms. Lyendecker stayed in town, teaching English at Hartsfield High.
    Technically, Rita and I only dated three times. But there were moments in the past fifteen years, when I could still feel and taste that “authentic” Rita kiss; and if I closed my eyes, I could transcend the hectic moment, the boredom of a meeting or the aching loneliness of a sleepless night and feel something like peace and fulfillment, as if the long search for home had finally come to an end.
    But not everyone in town had been enamored with Rita—“taken in” were the words used by a small feverish group of teachers, parents and church brethren. These were the more pious and ethical folk, who were disturbed by Rita’s dangerous femininity and meteoric rise to small town fame, as well as the potentially bad example she provided to the young and impressionable. They were also shaken in some profound way—driven to a blistering criticism of her and the entire youth culture of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Rita stirred the loins and prurient imaginations, as well as the hearts of Hartsfield. She was a living testimony to enlightenment or to perdition, depending on your particular lens on the world. Rita Fitzgerald was an old, old story that was continuously being revised in raptures of anxiety, pleasure and desire.
     
    Four months after graduation, Rita married Dusty Palmer, the Viking Quarterback who looked like a Viking—the guy who had blazed right along side of Rita the last six months of high school. The guy who never missed a mirror, glass or reflection. The guy who had always smiled at me—and it had seemed genuine—but I’d never smiled back. An easy, likeable guy, whom everyone seemed to have a good word for, including my father. When the Hartsfield Vikings football team won the division championship he’d said, “Dusty Palmer’s got talent. No doubt about it.” That really upset