Bethany: Part Eight

Unlike the denizens of Archie comics, we at Pitt Prep didn’t have a Pop’s Chocklit Shop to go to. What we did have was Friendly’s, just another cookie cutter chain restaurant with laminated menus and other people’s cracker crumbs and straw wrappers littering the edges of the wet trail of an indifferently pushed rag to greet us when we slid into a booth. But in spite of the generic setting, it was conveniently located right up Fox Chapel Road, and many break ups, hook ups, blazing rows and tender reconciliations had occurred on the premises, all under the disapproving gaze of the senior citizens who filled the rest of the seats.

Since it was the conventional hang out, my crowd had never patronized Friendly’s, much preferring that weird little Mexican restaurant in Etna or that sinister Chinese cafeteria in Aspinwall, but after almost four years of dedicated non-conformity it was almost bolder of me to go ahead and do what the most kids did. I thought Bethany would be more comfortable in a familiar setting, and arranged to pick her up after her softball practice at school and take her here, to be seated amidst clumps of curious peers by an indifferent "hostess" who looked about thirteen. I’m sure it was no accident that Bethany’s friends Bets and Pam were there too, acknowledging Bethany with sham surprise, then returning to their giggles and surreptitious glances.

A table bursting with jocks was across from us, noisily engaged in blowing spitballs through straws, giving noogies, and otherwise showing their undying Spartan love for one another. Another jock and jockette faced us, going through the motions of a date much more glumly, sucking on their milkshakes and fingering their fries, occasionally shrugging to each other’s monosyllabic utterances. Even after practice Bethany was typically pulled together, immaculate but casual, without any of the baroque excesses some of her friends brought to the prep style. Her best feature, her long blond hair, was still wet under her headband, but managed to look good anyway, like the tousled mane of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model fresh from the surf.

That was where the similarity ended, however. Unlike, say, Bets, Bethany’s plain face was of a piece with the rest of her, her body being, even now in her teen years, distinctly lackluster, neither especially svelte nor generously endowed, healthy enough, but lacking the elasticity, the apparent ripeness that puts the bloom on the emerging rose, a situation that largely explained the fact that even though she was quite popular she had very few dates.

But part of my recent "enlightenment" was my understanding that I had to get beyond all that, to transcend the sterile beauty of Virginia and the indiscriminate sensuality of Heather to seek within a girl for her soul, her nobility of spirit, the very quality Bethany seemed to embody. I didn’t see her as my ultimate goal any more than she saw me as her own, but I knew that to reach the woman I aspired to I had to learn to appreciate the kind of inner beauty that I was lucky enough to have sitting in front of me, and set out trying to do so.