***The Girl Can’t Help It- With the Rolling Stones’ Factory Girl In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Nobody could figure it out, nobody could figure what he saw in her (or for that matter when it came right down to it what she saw in him except an easier life, a pretty good lay, and a way out, a very big way out of her low-rent working-class growing up cocoon over in the Acre section of Clintondale, that’s in Maine). Hell, he, Rick Sudbury he, couldn’t figure it out half the time either, and he was knee deep in the thing. He had known the she in question, Sheila Barnes, in high school, Clintondale High School, Class of 1966, a school small enough so that everybody would know everybody else at least to wave or give the “nod” to (the nod a classic guy thing to other guys which recognized when given that the other guy was in the universe, nothing more. The nod, and let’s be clear about this was not, I repeat not, given to any girl, any girl that might then, or in the future, be an object of desire if only theoretically and so was not given to a girl as far back as anybody remembered.) He had waved at her a couple of times, perfunctory waves, meaning no more than that he acknowledged her existence, that she was a girl, a pretty good looking girl even if from the wrong side of the tracks and that under certain circumstances she might fill his needs. Meaning she was a thought but that was about it. Other than that they passed like two ships in the night.

A few years later, after Rick had finished college, Colby, and had gone to work in his uncle’s textile factory, The MacAdams Mills, about thirty miles away from Clintondale over in Olde Saco, he had run into her coming out of Millie’s Dinner on Main Street (really U.S. Route One but everybody, or somebody way back when, in a fit of pique, called it Main Street and it stuck). And it was the main street in town, and the avenue of escape for those who needed to escape it. That though was neither Rick not Sheila. Rick because he intended to move up in the textile business after a suitable apprenticeship, maybe become a manager. Shelia, as he learned after they had talked a few moments, actually worked in the mill as a machine operator who due to her then current life’s circumstances needed the steady income from that job to support an ailing mother and two younger sisters back in Clintondale. Her father had passed away a couple of years before leaving some debts and no insurance.

So they talked on the street, talked for a while, enough of a while for Rick to get the bright idea that they should get together some time and cut up torches about the old days at Clintondale High. Frankly, as he was just being home town friendly, he didn’t think that would take more than a couple of hours so he suggested they meet at Millie’s for a little dinner. He suggested that locale partially because everybody met in Millie’s since she had the best coffee in town, and prepared a couple of decent dishes, especially the Yankee Pot Roast, and partially because except for a few men’s bars there was no other place to meet that would not be considered a date place and just then he did not want their encounter to be seen as a date. And so they met a couple of Fridays later at Millie’s and talked until Millie threw them out ( a third generation Millie owner who had taken over the day to day operation of the place several years before from her mother and grandmother).

Naturally they talked about the fate of this or that classmate since graduation, and then this or that strange event that had happened at school back in the day but after a short while that ran out of gas and so they started comparing notes on what had gone on in their own lives since then. Rick’s was the usual college rat race party crazy antics thing. A lot of hot air really he thought trying to find something to talk about so they could continue talking. Until he got to his dreams for the future, pretty conventional stuff, mainly to make some money, get married, have kids and get a nice house. Pretty conventional given all the craziness going on around them in that topsy-turvy generation night but she expressed genuine interest in his dreams. Up in places like Maine or the Dakotas or over in the prairies of Kansas the great anti-war, drug, music flare-up didn’t always grab the young like in the big college towns, and the great cities and their inner suburbs. Neither Rick’s dreams nor Sheila’s seemed touched by that great awakening.

Sheila’s life, and her dreams, while more mundane had at least the virtue of having been driven by a struggle. She had left home after graduation, had gone to Portland to “see the world,” had lived there a couple of years working as a waitress in a café and later in a night club fending off the pinching customers and then her father died. She went back home to live and after a short while she heard about this factory job paying good wages for a young woman with no particular skills. Her dreams centered on getting out from under the family debt and out from under being the primary provider for her family. So that was that, and both appreciated that they had had a nice long talk when then Millie threw them out so she could close up. And that should have been that, and it was for a few weeks until they ran into each other again at Doc’s Drugstore where Sheila was sitting at the soda foundation listening to the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devilon the jukebox when Rick came in. He spied her and as he approached he told her that he too liked that song, although further conversation brought out that they were both not exactly sure what they various allusions in the lyrics were to. And on that slender reed, that very slender reed the affair between one Rick Sudbury and Sheila Barnes started.

Nobody claimed, least of all them, that this was a match made in heaven. Far from it. Sheila always had a wad of chewing gum churning through her mouth which drove Rick crazy. Moreover her idea of a good time (except that between the sheets good time, which both she and Rick agreed was indeed a good time, okay) was to go bowling, and not even Rick’s painful expression every time she mentioned the damn word would dissuade her from dragging Rick to Eddie’s Bowling World on the outskirts of town. Rick considered himself fortunate that he was not back in Clintondale where every guy, even guys who he just gave the nod to, would mock him to eternity if they knew he was squiring a candlepin addict. And it didn’t end there. She had a decent shape but she would destroy her basic good looks by wearing stuff like square patterned dresses, or odd-ball colors like lime green, that did nothing for her and made her, well, made her look like a hick, like she had never seen a fashion magazine in her life. Then too she was always saying stuff that made him blush, not sexual stuff, although she knew how to say the “f” word” almost as a mantra, but stuff like wouldn’t it be nice to go play skee at the Olde Saco amusement park. Yah, low-rent stuff like that.

Yah, nobody could see what he saw in her, and he couldn’t himself half the time. But that other half of the time he couldn’t wait until she got off her shift…