The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

In our collective overdose of all things Pandemic, all of us awash in the flotsam of overcrowded hospitals, plague cruise boats, mass masking on airline jets, protestors with assault rifles in state capitol buildings, kids at home zooming today’s lessons, body counts on the news, we sometimes lose sight of the victims whose names won’t appear in any newspaper accounts, on television interviews or radio reports. I’m talking, of course, about the millions of sequestered lovers whose affairs with married folks have been placed on permanent hiatus.

I was on the phone the other day with Wanda Milkowski, my old bus driver friend from our early days here on the then unpopulated South End. Wanda was married when she drove bus with me for the Stanwoodopolis school district, but she split the sheets with Teddy after she discovered he was shacked up with Lisa, a neighbor she was, or so she thought, pretty good friends with most days she was driving her afternoon route. These things happen with some frequency during the monsoonal winters of our island, the stuff of daytime soaps and underactive imaginations, nothing we aren’t accustomed to … until of course it happens to you. Wanda was a mess for a few months and during that time we became crying towels for one another.

Wanda, oddly enough, never remarried, can’t imagine why. Trust issues, I suppose or just deep scars that never quite heal. I’m no psychiatrist, just an empathic listener, and no, in case you’re wondering if this is another daytime soap opera, Wanda and I were platonic as neutered swans. She didn’t remarry but holy libido, Batman, the girl could fall in love at the drop of a hat. Not mine, mind you, but half the layabouts on the South End shared a mattress with Wanda. She was one of those rare women you wouldn’t call a beauty, but my god, every man jack of us boys commented on that something, that unnameable something that sparked wanton lust in us. Pheromones maybe, hormones crashing against our primitive brainpans. I couldn’t say, but I certainly wasn’t immune either. None of us could understand Teddy’s wandering eye, that’s for sure, and we spent many an hour over a flood of beers pondering it down at the Pilot Lounge.

Wanda might have broken up more marriages than alcohol down here on the lonely South End, which is saying a lot. But with this Pandemic in full rage and the men in her life quarantined with their wives, she’s become isolated and depressed. “I should have asked John to leave his wife,” she lamented on the phone. “He said he wanted a divorce and I should have pushed him.” She was referring to John Watkins, the vet at the animal clinic, an occasional poker player at our monthly card game, the kind of gambler who never bets a hunch, just a careful mathematician, no taste for a bluff.

“Wanda,” I said, “you would have been miserable with John around all the time.”

“I’m miserable now!” she howled. “You sure you wouldn’t care to drop by and visit, Skeeter?”

“Wanda, you said you were miserable, not desperate.” After a long silence, I said, “I’ll call you again tomorrow, I promise.” I have to confess, I haven’t called back. Yet. I guess I’m hedging my own bet.

Hits: 43

Tags: Love Affairs on Hold, Plague Victims, Stay at Home Lovers

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2020 at 1:59 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.