• 1

 

Dear Johnny - A Gen-Ex Love Story, by Nazareth Bergeron

 

 

 

 

I open my eyes, as prepared as anyone I guess, to start my day, and my first thought is "I’m dead.”

 

I leap to this conclusion because my eyes take in no light and my nose and mouth take in no breath. It’s a fine thing that my second thought is to push my sleeping cat, Mr. Kitty, off my face. He objects, but is soon distracted by the gang of sparrows gathered in the ancient mountain ash outside the window of my trailer, my very much immobile, mobile home.

 

The sunlight streams in on my once white, now taupe, cotton comforter. I squint my eyes until everything gets soft, and blurry, and looks like heaven; Maybe comforters in heaven look like that.

I’m feeling good, in a not-fully-awake, no-grasp-on-reality kind of way.

 

I think everyone wakes up like that. No matter what has been taken from you, or hurt, or damaged, there is a moment when you first wake up, that you are perfect; As when God first thought you up, perfect.

 

I feel my bed move on the room side of me, which I have my back to. As I turn, to see what has caused this inexplicable shift in my positioning, I am struck above my left eye by an elbow, with such force that I see stars.

 

Ok. Obviously, I wasn’t actually thinking when I thought I was dead just because Mr. Kitty sat on my face. I don’t think that could be called thinking, in the strictest sense of the word. No, this, coming up, is my first thought...

 

“Oh shit, I’m married.”

 

This thought occurs to me, in much the same way a nuclear explosion “occurs”. My brain has become my enemy, if it is indeed true that “I think, therefore I am...” Married.

 

The thought is akin, physiologically, to “Oh shit, I just witnessed a really bad car accident,” or, “Oh shit, a guy just jumped off the building across the street.”

 

I scramble out of bed, like Jackie Kennedy over the trunk of a convertible, and run until my back can be placed against a wall. I start counting, an unbelievably stupid thing I do when adrenaline threatens to cave-in my skull. It seems to work because I never have to go past ten, at which point the number of syllables would screw up my rhythm (about 10 megahertz). I stand, wild-eyed, naked, skimmed in sweat, bosom heaving. The guy I married pushes himself up on my fluffy cloud of a bed. Leaning on one elbow, he smiles and says “Hey Babes, what’s for breakfast?”.

 

My knees crumple under me; I fall to the green shag carpet and start fingering it, noticing my short, always unpainted, fingernails. The guy I married, Ken, gets up from the bed with a guy noise that suggests it’s with a great effort, and moves toward me with his hand out.

 

I won’t look up. I think maybe the plan is to never look up, and I wonder if I should be feeling this way, the day after my nuptials. If everybody feels this way you would think they would be glad when the honeymoon is over.

 

“You ok?” says Ken.

 

I think perhaps I’m not ok, and could have proof of that fact anywhere I cared to look, but say, “Yeah, I’m ok.” I look into his soft and hard brown eyes, and can think of nothing else to do, so I lie some more.

 

“Low blood sugar.”

 

I hold my hand up toward his, and am helped up, and over, into reality.

 

 

 

• 2

Ken is beautiful. His body is naturally muscular. His shoulders taper down his back, to a nice, round, little bum. He has scant body hair, and his skin has a slight cafe au lait color to it. I can’t imagine ever tiring of watching his stomach muscles contract, as he lifts himself out of my bed. His thighs rub together softly as he pulls his Levi’s up toward his knees. His dark brown skater-cut hair doesn’t care how many times he runs his fingers up and over it; it falls into one of his eyes. I knew the first time I looked at him, when green eyes met brown, that I wanted his hands all over me. I knew that he would be good, like pussy willows, to my touch, and I wanted my hands all over him.

 

I had imagined, many times over the last many years, while walking, (which is what I do twice every week, walk and imagine), what Ken’s body, kisses, and thrusts would be like. I imagined it while driving too, regardless that it would have been safer to ingest a half bottle of cough suppressant and operate heavy machinery than to drive while imagining Ken. But with the most recent of his many letters sitting on the passenger seat of the white Toyota Pickup truck my handy father keeps running for me, I read at stoplights:

 

Tell me stories of your life.

Hold me close to your heart.

Do you ever imagine, when

you’re reading Readers Digest,

that you’re reading it with

10,000 nice senior citizens?

I do.

 

My smile would be involuntary. It would just happen, and I would like it. In my mind, I would wrap my legs around him: my head lolling back on its center of gravity, my eyes rolling up, and my eyelids laying down slowly. As the pages of Ken’s letter fall to the floor of my truck, my hand might push down my thigh... until a blast from the horn of the car behind me, makes me blush. This is how dangerous driving has been for the last couple of years. I shouldn’t drink of Ken and drive.

 

 

• 3

Ken’s letters have always made me smile. We have been writing to each other for over eighteen years.

When I was eight years old, my grade three teacher offered our class a list of children she had compiled for pen pal purposes. She had just returned from Africa. She felt the need to expand the world for us, and all children entrusted to her progressive care. The list is impressively eclectic and considerate. Ms. Kramer, the first ‘Ms.’ I ever knew, beamed at us as she read, through huge black-rimmed glasses the names and mysterious addresses; Botswana, Netherlandish places, some shires in England.

 

The class rushed to line up beside Ms. Kramer’s desk. The list was first-come-first-choose. The flurry of excitement made me nervous, as did everything else on earth when I was eight years old, and I was still sitting in my little desk when Ms. Kramer had straightened the line of excitement, and turned quietly toward me.

 

“Frank?” This was Ms. Kramer talking here, “don’t you want a pen pal?”

 

Twenty-two little heads turned to the right in unison; It was audible. Then they began to giggle at the sound of my name, which was really Francesca, but everyone calls me Franky. It was simply a foiled attempt at formality on Ms. Kramer’s part; not a very big deal when you break it all down. Pen pals are not really a big deal either, when I think about it now. But I never was one for breaking things down; Tedious people break things down. I had, over the school years to come, built the thing up to a grand scale, a well-orchestrated cabal that was, in my mind, designed to ruin my life. Indeed, this paranoid delusion was to return on this day of my twenty-sixth year of life, in the shower, at 10:02 am. Yes, that ‘little girl’ of a day, had been a fateful one.

 

I took my place at the back of the lineup to my fateful grade three teacher’s desk. The walk there, around my row of desks, and three rows over, took about an hour, with all, beady, little eyes on me.

 

“Hi Frank.” singsonged the person in front of me. I didn’t look up.

 

I took the last name and address from Ms. Kramer, grimaced my thank you, and turned to walk back to my seat. I swooned in front of the sea of classmates looking back at me, and should have learned, right then and there, the lesson I never have: The more you try not to get noticed, the more noticeable you become.

 

Ken Latimer didn’t live in any-shire, nor the slums of Mozambique. He lived in Tuscaloosa, just fifty miles from Birmingham, or so the Stampeders say (many hit songs in the seventies, including Sweet City Woman and Oh My Lady).

 

“Oh well, at least I have someone to write to.” I thought, amazingly calm, really, when you think that this was my first knowledge of my future husband.

 

Ms. Kramer suggested that our first letter be about what we did on our summer vacation. Puke. Like we went to Africa, or something.

 

At recess I sat on the coldish stone steps of my elementary school and really tried to write about my summer vacation. My goal was to appear interesting but, above all, normal. (In much the same way that, now, I would like to pretend that my sort of life story is complex, tragic, and metropolitan; but I think in reality its more like tragically foot-hill-ish.) These concepts whirled around In my head like stones. I hadn’t been paying enough attention, the last eight years, to know what was interesting or normal.

 

My recess-time introspection was jarred from me by a girl with thick, wiry, black ponytails, tied at the bottom with blue ribbons, to match her two-toned blue dress, which was trimmed with lace, to match the lace lining the straps on her black patent leather shoes. Naomi Penner — a girl who I now recognize for what she really was: Genetic evil... in little blue stockings.

 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that all the kids in town were beating down my parents’ front door, asking to be my friend, during the two years of grade school, and two nothing filled summer vacations, it took these geniuses to figure out Franky could be shortened to Frank. No, but no one exactly not wanted to be my friend, until Naomi Penner lead the entire playground in a spittle filled rendition of ‘Frank, Frank, really stank’.

 

I tore my eyes from the happy, singing, faces. No doubt most of them were relieved that they hadn’t been chosen to be the one whom nobody would play with next recess, or the recess after that, or the recess after that, ad infinitum.

 

It’s funny how something like that can have consequences at your high school prom; where I stood in front of happy, singing faces once again. Many of the faces were the same, except Naomi Penner, whose parents had moved to Seattle in my seventh grade, taking Naomi with them. Too little, too late. I stood on the edge of the dance floor, little squares of light moving across the taffeta gown my mother had sewn for me. I smiled, and blushed; this being the defense mechanism I had learned to employ in these situations. For I wish I could say the last time, I was saluted with Fripp and Eno’s collaboration ‘Blank Frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction.’

 

 

 

I played hopscotch all

summer. It was fun.

I had an interesting summer.

Sincerely

Franky Lane

 

 

And there it was, the best that Blank Frank could do with no information as to how these things should really happen. But Ken knew how these things should really happen. He was a year older than I, but a year later I found out that fact alone wasn’t an explanation for the letter I received in return.

 

He told me, in enticing detail, what he did on his summer vacation. How he would fling clumps of mud at his mother, with a trowel, while they tended their garden, which I understand is extensive. He sent me flowers from said garden, which he had pressed between the pages of Webster’s hugest dictionary. He told me about riding his red ten speed bike down to a creek, which ran near his home. And that he could see his reflection in the water where it pooled, where he went swimming. He told me this in such a way that I knew he went there more to see his reflection in the water, than to swim in it.

 

I was captivated. I wanted to smell the lilac bushes that grew beside his front porch. I wanted to sit on his porch swing. I suppose, now, that I fell in love with Ken with that first letter. His home seemed nicer, somehow, than my home, and his body seemed a better place to be.

 

Yes, Ken always had an opinion on how things should happen, and I knew, the first time that I saw his face, which was yesterday, that I would marry him, which was exactly what he asked me to do.