Chapter 5
Friday Night: The Tale of Sharon and Curtis
Sharon and Curtis, like most Greener Valley residents, had known each other their whole lives. They first hooked up as a couple in junior high during a spirited game of Seven Minutes in Heaven at Bobby Abbot’s bar mitzvah, in which Curtis drew blood on Sharon’s tongue. They broke up two days later (though it was never really explicitly stated that they were "going out"). They didn’t kiss again until their high school graduation night party, when a slightly drunk Curtis clumsily lost his virginity to Sharon on a dune, resulting in a sand rash on Curtis’s ass. Three hours after he told her he loved her, Curtis found Sharon making out with Bobby Abbot on the lifeguard stand, marking the first, but not last time, Sharon Weiss would sucker punch Curtis's heart.
Sharon eschewed the normal route of two years at the local Community College and went away to a party school in upstate New York, presumably to study art, but more likely to sow her wild, wild oats. She came home on holidays and some weekends with a succession of boyfriends, each of them announced to friends and family as “the real deal” or “the big one” and each of them subsequently dumped for the next guy to slip a hand under her shirt at a frat party. Sharon left the school in her junior year after a rather scandalous incident involving an assistant Dean, a male cheerleader and a four-foot tall bong.
She moved back to Greener Valley and took a job at Fred’s Antique Emporium on Main Street. Sharon mostly kept to herself working nights in the back room sticking price tags on the bottom of Precious Moment statues (Fred’s didn’t carry antiques so much as the discarded kitsch of Green Valley residents) and listening to Scratch and Skip.
It was just last year at one of the monthly Scratch and Skip fan club karaoke nights that Sharon decided she would like to settle down and have a family with Curtis Freeman. This decision did not come out of nowhere; she had been contemplating the ticking of her biological clock for a while and the fact that all of her old friends from high school were already married and settled into third generation Greener Valley houses with dormers and picket fences and grinning children chasing fireflies on the lawn kept her awake at night. It was about time she let go of her past and became more...normal, and normal in Greener Valley means following the predictable life path of wife, mother, hostess of dinner parties.
Sharon fantasized about this life as she slapped stickers on velvet Elvises and paint-by-number Last Suppers and arms-spread “I love you this much” figurines. She imagined herself the happy housewife, vacuum in one hand, dust rag in the other, baby cooing gently in the bassinet. Her husband would bound through the door at 5:15, smiling, ready with a kiss for her cheek and she’d magically pull a roast from the oven and they’d have Whiskey Sours while chatting about the latest appliance sale at Mack’s and did you see that the new dishwashers have six different cycles? For some reason, the man in her imagination always had Curtis’s angular face, Curtis’s green eyes, Curtis’s wavy brown hair and Curtis’s small yet solid physique. It wasn’t Curtis, per se, but it sure did look a lot like him. This bothered Sharon on many levels, so she gave her imaginary man the voice of Stu McLundy. Her daydreams therefore always ended with her pretend husband taking her hand after dinner and whisking her away to the bedroom where they would make love while “Heartbeat, it’s a Lovebeat” spun around and around on the turntable.
It dawned on her one night that if she was going to do the right thing and settle down the Greener Valley way, Curtis was her only option. He was the only male in town that fit the criteria for every item on her List of Things Sharon Wants In A Man:
same age
good job
owns own home
likes ‘70s music
will not want me to have a career
quiet
doesn’t like sports
looks good in a suit
looks good, period
not afraid to sing karaoke
makes enough money to keep me happy
good in bed
In order to have Curtis fit all the criteria, Sharon had to be a bit flexible, as he was not extraordinarily good looking, his suits tended to hang off of him a bit, and, speaking from experience, he was not very good in bed. Well, dunes, at least. But, he would do. He had to do. Unless she wanted to venture outside of Greener Valley (she didn’t), take out a Craigslist ad (she didn’t) or join one of those Internet dating sites (she didn’t), she would have to settle for Curtis. She could probably find a suitable man outside the town, but then he wouldn’t be the right kind of guy. He wouldn’t be a Greener Valley guy. He wouldn’t know what it means to stop what you’re doing at 6pm to listen to Stu McLundy’s opening or to decorate Main Street for Christmas or to anticipate the groundbreaking of the new library as if it were the arrival of Jesus Christ himself. People outside Greener Valley don’t understand the nuances of the town.
Curtis Freeman was the last available man her age. Slumpy shoulders or not, past transgressions be damned, she was going to make herself Curtis’s wife.
And so, at a Scratch and Skip meeting, during Hannah Werner’s karaoke rendition of “Right Back Where We Started From,” Sharon Weiss approached Curtis Freeman, whom she had not had a full conversation with since the fight at the beach on graduation night, and asked him to dance. Without waiting for an answer, Sharon pulled Curtis toward the dance floor and she started to shimmy and shake and implore Curtis to join along with her, even though he was holding a jelly donut.
They went together to Curtis’s house that night and for the first time ever, his bed had a woman in it and, not for the first time ever, he made love to Sharon Weiss. And there was no sand rash.
*****
One year to the date from that beautiful night, Curtis Freeman sits at his kitchen table, listening to Scratch and Skip. It’s 9:15 on Friday evening – Winter Festival Eve - and Stu has just put the needle down on Bobby Goldsboro's “Honey.”
And Honey I miss you and I'm being good
And I'd love to be with you if only I could.
Curtis sighs, the kind of sigh that only one who has tasted the bitter mixture of love and defeat can perform. He misses Sharon, but he's not sure why. She humiliated him, cheated on him, cut him down in front of all of Greener Valley and broke his heart into jagged little pieces of hate, yet he still misses her.
He strokes a few keys on his laptop, singing “Honey” out loud, sighing heavily and knowing full well that he should not be typing in what he is. But Curtis - a man who throws morose pity parties for himself daily - does what he knows he shouldn’t and by typing in shanashouseoflove.com, he issues himself an invitation to the Friday Night Pity Soiree.
He presses the enter key. The site loads up.
He stares at Shana Cummings, formerly known as Sharon Weiss, blowing a posed kissy face to him (and the 145 other current visitors) from his computer screen. He looks at her at her naked, slender waist, looks at the curve of her ass, looks at the way her crotch and thighs form into a heart when she poses like that and he’s almost lustful for her, almost yearning for her until he looks at her silicone tits, jutting out from the screen as if they were in 3D, the very tits bought for her by the man who came between them. Curtis’s pity for himself turns to disgust and self-loathing. And sigh, yes, there’s some yearning. There is no denying that. Even as the hatred and bitterness flow through his body, making his adrenaline pump and his muscles twitch and his hands shake, he feels that deep, deep yearning not for her body, not for what’s between her thighs, but for her, and the way it was before Bradley Perot lured Sharon away from the Greener Valley life.
A few hours later, as Curtis Freeman still sits at his kitchen table, crying, Stu McLundy contemplates life - and Greener Valley - without his radio show as he drinks Jack Daniels from Dixie cups. Grant Willis snores through a Vicodin/vodka coma.
And about 300 miles away, one Shana Cummings nee Sharon Weiss is packing for her first trip back to Greener Valley since she became famous for jiggling her silicone for horny men who type with one hand. She hasn’t let anyone know she’s coming down. She has envisioned in her mind a grand entrance into the Winter Festival as she steps out of her ride, all clad in fur and low-cut leather and fuck-me pumps, the young boys blushing an impure red under their hoodies and enough women turning green with envy to really enhance to the Christmas decor of the town center.
Sometimes situations and events come together in such a way as to tempt the natural order of the world. Not when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars way, but more...human. Fate surely plays a hand in this, and fate, as we all know, is not always cooperative with everyone’s personal agendas. These things - Stu, the Winter Festival, Grant, Curtis, Sharon - are being plotted out on Fate’s map and a course has been set for collision.