Ordinary Happiness

Janet moved to Podunk, PA from New York City in the tenth grade....and she cried when her parents drove her down the Main St. of our little town.  "This is IT!?" She did a re-enactment for me later, first inkling of her dramatic soul.  "What's an Orrs?" a department store known for selling blouses featuring Peter Pan collars and "What are these things?  Circle pins?!"  They were.  Plaid skirts.  She restyled me--junior leaguer wannabee into NY sophisticate/hippie.  She didn't like anybody but she liked me because I was open to the idea that there was life beyond the smokey walls of our town.  Correction:  I was hungering for life outside our town.  Her obit said she died in a rehab facility down the road and lists two Latino men with the same last name as her survivors. I stayed one year in Podunk for college--because an influential teacher got me a free year--then left because charity runs out, but Janet stayed. I assumed she left after graduation to edit Paris Vogue--she was great with languages and had the look--but I had already traveled to Israel, Europe and came back to join the army as finishing school--travel, education, cut biceps--and saw her once more when I was home on leave--in the Tally Ho where she was drunk and forced me to sing a duet with her of the Neil Sedaka song that was playing on the juke box. The neighbors said they saw the man throw a microwave at her in the yard, then a butcher knife.  They both missed. "Drunk and fighters," the judge said in the paper.  "You people deserve each other." She asked me how I liked her date, Danny, and I proclaimed him ordinary then left for overseas.  The orbit said she was adopted.  She never told me that.  Her father shut himself in the den every night and finished off a lot of whisky or bourbon or something and her mother, shaped like a beach ball with the tiniest feet I've ever seen would hover around asking Janet if she wanted a steak or fries or a milk shake and Janet with teenage disdain dismissed her and lavished her affection on her neurotic dog Max-- a jumping 130 pounds of muscle and two different colored eyes and two different giant breeds in his DNA. "I used to be a size 2," her mother would say, and Janet and I would laugh hysterically at that and her mother would sulk away with her skinny memories.  "Please don't take him away from me," Janet pleaded with the judge, but he did, proclaiming her a homicide waiting to happen and gave her lover 2 years in the slammer.  They were engaged for 20 years, waiting for "some legal matters" to get resolved before they married.  I assume they never did.  There was only one entry in the on-line Memory Book for Janet and it was from Danny.  He recalled some fun times they had and wished her peace.  Hungrily I googled him...it seemed he had a nice wife and a couple of grown kids.  He was a logistics manager/type guy or something.  Why hadn't she just married Danny and had a lot of babies for god's sake?!  A mutual friend of Janet and mine who had finished college with her, said Janet was always waiting for some unspecific glamorous thing to whisk her away from Podunk. She wanted to live with a nihilist in a Paris flat, or dance naked on the Ponce de Leon bridge--the end of a series of fun events that would take too long to explain between the hilarity of recalling it. She was still living in her parents house when she died. "She didn't want ordinary happiness," the friend tells me.   "Why didn't she just marry Danny?" I scream.  "This wouldn't have happened!"  And our mutual friend says, "Why didn't you?  Why didn't any of us?"