Time of Her Life

by Beverly Tjerngren

It was a quiet weekend for Rachael. It was Marc's weekend to have the girls and the house felt big and empty without them at home. Rachael usually spent these days feeling at loose ends, so she was thankful today to have a customer's party dress to alter and get finished. With two days free, she expected to be able to have the dress ready to deliver on Monday, even taking into the account the possibility of unforeseen complications (assuming, of course, that "complications" didn't come in the form of a last-minute design change).

After putting in a solid four hours working on the dress--carefully taking off the old skirt, then making a pattern for and cutting out the new skirt--Rachael gave herself what she figured was a well-deserved break. She went to the kitchen and made a grilled cheese sandwich, putting it on a plate with a handful of potato chips for her afternoon snack. She ate the sandwich while standing at the kitchen counter and, between bites, put together a pot of tea. When she finished her snack, she put the teapot on a tray--along with her favorite mug, the sugar bowl and a spoon--and carried it into the living room where she sat it on the coffee table before sitting down on the couch and flipping the TV on with the remote control.

She usually avoided watching TV on the weekends because there seemed never to be anything on that she was even remotely interested in watching, but today one of the cable channels was running an "'80s Teen Romance Marathon," and she couldn't resist tuning in. Checking the TV listings, she saw that Dirty Dancing was due to start showing in fifteen minutes. Silly and indulgent though it might be, Rachael thought that watching it sounded like the perfect way to spend a couple of hours on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

It wasn't a movie she would want her girls to see--though she had been not much older than Amanda was now when she'd seen it for the first time--but she couldn't deny that she never got tired of watching it herself. She couldn't explain it, but all women her age seemed to have the same feelings about the movie. They could all sing the entire soundtrack (always pointing out when "She's Like the Wind" cued up in the movie, "You know, it's Patrick Swayze singing this"), and they all felt a little frisson of pleasure when Johnny teaches Baby how to dance and his hand grazes her breast as he slides it down her body (especially that last time, when she doesn't giggle and pull away but finally feels it). "Hungry Eyes," indeed.

For the next while Rachael turned herself over to the story and let herself be lost in it. She had often wondered what she might have missed in not ever having had a wild, intense summer romance like Baby and Johnny's (Rachael wasn't one of the ones who kidded themselves--she knew that there was no way Baby and Johnny stayed together once Baby's family left the resort, despite his finally taking her out of the corner). She'd been a serious student, Rachael had, never dating much and not ever having a real boyfriend until Marc came on the scene. She'd even gone a virgin to her marital bed, not out of any sense of religious obligation but hopelessly taken with the romantic aspect of "saving herself." Marc, bless his heart, hadn't pressured her, but she couldn't help but wonder later if her insistence on waiting hadn't been a large part of his rushing her to the altar.

Much as she didn't want to, Rachael regretted now having waited. What had once felt romantic and precious had turned into something laughable and faintly embarrassing. She was humiliated (if only in front of herself, as this wasn't the kind of information she shared with friends, no matter how close) by having been to bed with only one man. She longed, in a way that made her feel like a hormone-crazed teenager, to share the experience with someone else. With more than one someone else, but that was an impossibility. She was a thirty-five-year-old mother of four and embarking upon a series of one-night stands now was obviously out of the question, for many reasons.

The jolt of a loud commercial break brought her out of her reverie and she shook her head and laughed at herself. Maybe watching these movies wasn't such a good idea after all, if this was the frame of mind they put her in. She didn't want to be the sort of divorcée who lived in the past, buried under the weight of a mountain of "woulda, coulda, shoulda." She wanted to look forward, to move ahead with her life, to choose growth instead of stagnation. Sometimes she thought, however, that her life had been in stasis for far too long for her ever to be able to break free. Rachael leaned her head back against the couch cushions and gave herself over to the tears.