SOMEDAY, MY PRINCE
By Barbara Bradshaw
 

All little girls are born dreamers.

I know I was.  I even remember the first dream that almost came true for me.

He was gorgeous, brown-eyed, with a shock of bright blonde hair and a smile to die for.  He was also six years old and possessed of a slight stutter, but I didn’t care.  First grade was heaven because of him, and you never saw a child so eager to hit the bus stop at seven o’clock in the morning.  The only problem was that he didn’t even know I existed.  Despite the stutter, he was the most popular kid at Unity Falls Elementary, due in part to those good looks.  Thanks to a sturdy pair of Medicaid glasses, extreme shyness, and freckles so close together that I looked like I spent summers in Tahiti, I was somewhat out of the social loop, even though I was lucky enough to be seated directly behind him in class.  Still and all, I managed to find a quiet joy in staring at the back of his head, planning a full scale fantasy wedding in my mind, a special talent all women possess even from girlhood.

And then one day, he spoke to me.

It was recess and the playground was full, but I was alone, sitting in melancholy silence on the rusted merry-go-round, twisting it slightly back and forth with my feet in the dust.  A shadow crossed over me, I looked up, and there he was.  All I saw was two dimples and a halo of golden hair, but I knew it was him.  

Then he spoke the three most magical words in the world.

“You wanna p…play?”

Shyness swept aside, I stood with queenly grace, gave him my best gap-toothed grin, and said yes.

So, together we stepped up onto the merry-go-round and stood across from one another.  Putting one foot down on the ground, we pushed in unison until we were spinning joyfully out of control and holding on for dear life.  A moment captured for me forever in time, his merry brown eyes twinkling as he laughed with me, and those two lovely dimples sparkling like diamonds in the sun.  My joy increased to near bursting as he leaned toward me on that small merry-go-round, and the sudden look of seriousness on his face as the world flew past took my breath away as I eagerly awaited the declaration of love that I just knew was forthcoming.  Further toward me he leaned, lifting his right hand out to mine, and as I stared adoringly into his eyes and raised my own hand to meet his, I got what was coming to me.

He threw up.

All over me, my carrot-topped head, and my favorite pink dress I always wore just for him.

And that, my friends, was my first introduction to love.

*   *   *

As I said, all little girls are born dreamers.  I loved that boy for another two years, but every time our eyes met, he blushed and ran in the opposite direction.  Needless to say, there wasn’t much of a foundation to build a relationship on.  Then again, romance was never a lucky area of life for the women in my family.  Seems we inherit more than the physical from our relatives.

Mama was a proud woman, and it never seemed to bother her that everyone in our tiny Carolina town knew my daddy was in prison for armed robbery, or that we were a source of great humor due to the manner in which he was caught.  She ignored the whispers and snickers aimed our way, held her head high, and squeezed my little hand harder whenever we left the house.

I had no contact at all with daddy, nor his side of the family, and owing to the fact that he and mama met, married, and got a quickie Mexican divorce over a period of six weeks, there weren’t any pictures of him around except for the courthouse wedding photos.  Those no longer exist.  Mama found a book of matches, stoked up the fireplace, and in a fit of anger burned up the pictures, her hippie wedding dress, and granny’s living room carpet.  So, I had to rely on my family for a description of my father, which varied according to who you asked.

My great-uncle Red said daddy was the ‘ugliest sum’bitch’ he ever saw, with greasy hair, skinny as granny’s willow switch, and ‘injun’ skin so sallow it made him look like a dead carp.  Said he smelled like one too, but that was suspect, since Uncle Red (who was ninety if he was a day) always smelled like a bottle of formaldahyde.

Grandpa Ray said that daddy helped make me, that was the only good thing he ever done, and then went back to smoking his pipe and rocking on the porch.

And Granny?  Well, no one knew what she thought about anything.  She refused to speak out on any subject of controversy, instead declaring that the world would be a whole lot better off if people kept their mouths shut and their opinions to themselves.  When prodded on her own personal affairs, she would promptly advise the busybody to mind their own damn business.

Uncle Red, released just prior to my birth from a twenty year stint in the state pen for his own armed robbery, said it was a disgrace to the profession the way ‘that fool injun got hisself caught’, and he was awful glad daddy was no blood kin.  A dignified shoot-out, now that was the way to go.  After all, he was fond of saying (after a few drinks) a man had to defend his family from the communists that take a man’s money in taxes to help fund a top secret government conspiracy to keep the poor man down.  According to Uncle Red, that conspiracy trickled all the way down to the local Pantry convenience store where he had tried to take his money back some twenty-five years before.  Of course, he didn’t tell that to the parole board.  That, and a few other cautionary tales about revenuers and beaurecrats he kept to himself till he was free and clear.

Mama finally decided it was time to answer a few of her curious little girl’s questions, especially seeing as how I was due to start kindergarten in a few days, and children can have a special penchant for cruelty when it comes to talking of daddies and mommies.  So she sat me down on granny’s porch swing, on a nice summer day, and bluntly told me probably a little more than a five year old needed to know.

According to mama, after daddy robbed the convenience store ( the same one as Uncle Red, further shaming him ), he was caught just a mile from the crime scene in an abandoned parking lot.  A cop pulled in to check out what looked to be an abandoned camaro.  As he walked up to the car, he shined his flashlight in first the front, then the back seat, and suddenly our family was fodder for tales the whole town over.  

There was my daddy, bare-naked as the day he was born, lying in a pile of stolen money with another naked someone who was not my mother.  Someone who was also not of the female persuasion.  What’s more, Daddy had never actually shown the gun to the cashier he robbed, instead choosing to point it through his jacket.  So down on the floorboard lay another great find. The concealed deadly weapon used in the robbery.

A Chiquita banana.

When she finished the story, mama sighed, patted me on the head, and left an open-mouthed little girl to consider what I had just learned.  Unspoken went the words women everywhere tell their daughters sooner or later.

Baby, you gotta do better than me. 

*   *   *

Mama wasn’t the only one with a bad track record, however.  Granny had 3 marriages behind her, two long dead, and Grandpa Ray, who hadn’t shared a bed with her for more than 10 years.  Once I made the mistake of misunderstanding one of Granny’s pet names for him, and called him Grandpa Bastard.  Granny thought it was hilarious, but

Grandpa got his revenge by leaving his glass eye on the table for me to find, and granny had to cope with a hysterical, traumatized child with wet britches for hours.

But despite all the pain and frustration that comes from a love gone bad, we just keep trying, and every time another love match goes kaput for me, I just shrug my shoulders and chalk it up to a family curse.  But sometimes, I actually do learn from my mistakes.

I don’t do blondes, and I’ve never stepped foot on another merry-go-round.
 

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BARBARA BRADSHAW is a resident of North Carolina. This is her first published work.