Plain Jane: A Love Story

Jonathan Farlow

It’s a proven fact that Jane is the plainest of all names. I don't know what name it would be for men-John, James whatever-but I'm not telling a story about a man, but a woman named Jane. This particular Jane that I am speaking of is the perfect bearer for that name because she is plain herself. As plain a person as you've ever seen. That is if you see her at all. Our county manager, Wade Burgess, had Jane on his mind the other night about a quarter past Letterman when he stepped out onto his back stoop to smoke a cigarette. While he was out there, he marveled at the warm spring night that had settled around him while he had been inside watching television. The temperature was near perfect. The sky was clear and the moon and stars were so bright that he almost believed he could reach up and take hold of them. To top it all off, there was a warm breeze blowing that hit him right in the face, bringing with it the sweet smell of flowers through the halo of tobacco smoke that circled his head. It was all that-that sweet smelling wind, the stars, the moon, the perfect temperature, the realization of just how perfect an evening could be-that made him act. He had been wrestling with something for a good week. A decision, a hard decision for someone like Wade but that perfect spring night made his decision for him. He went inside long enough to turn everything off, grab his wallet and his car keys and lock up. In a matter of minutes he was standing among the azaleas outside the Grace Avenue Apartments counting over from the right to make sure that the window that he was standing under, the one that he was about to throw a pebble at, was hers.

I guess the first domino had fallen almost a month earlier when this one armed man hit Wade in the head with a wrench. If you know Wade, you’re probably not too surprised; if you don't then, you probably could stand to be brought up to speed. I’ll say it the nice way, like my Granny always told me: Wade is not the most agreeable sort. If I were saying it the ugly way, then I would tell you that he’s probably the most hateful jackass that the good Lord ever stretched skin over and that's still not the worse thing that I've heard said about him, not even close. He's a big fellow. Not fat, although he's gotten a slight case of Dunlap's Disease, but tall, broad shouldered and barrel-chested and Wade loves nothing better than throwing that weight around. To Wade, talking isn't a way to communicate; it's combat and he's happiest when he's chest to chest, or chest to face as is usually the case, and locked in a good frothy-mouthed tirade.

On this day that I’m speaking of Wade's hissy concerned an odor in the men's room. Now it wasn't the usual olfactory crisis that you would normally run across in the can. It concerned the scent that housekeeping had loaded into the air fresheners. Wade always ordered, and he was pretty adamant, that the fresheners use only Tropical Mist. On this day when he darted into the John just before he left for the day, the smell was not the delicate, oh so subtle fragrance of coconuts and ocean spray. It was a stomach-turning, nose-hair-burning stench that smelled a lot like a very large cow had taken a very large dump in a medicine cabinet. Well, Wade wouldn't tolerate that. He didn't even stay in the head long enough to do his business. He headed down to the maintenance building, which also housed housekeeping, pushed through the metal doors and announced his presence in the usual Wade Burgess fashion.

"I want the person who refilled the air fresheners in the third floor bathrooms front and center!" No one presented themselves "front and center." No one answered Wade's bellows because almost everyone had gone home. He shouted again and then again and each time the only answer was his own voice echoing off the building's tin roof.

Ray Fine was the only person who heard Wade, but he didn't answer. He wasn't the person who refilled the air fresheners in the third floor restrooms, so he saw no reason to say anything. Ray remembered Wade from high school where Wade, a grade ahead of Ray, was just as big of a jerk than he was as county manager. Ray was younger than Wade in years alone. A long time of hard living, four years in Vietnam where he had lost his left arm, had taken its toll, leaving Ray with a face the color and consistency of a dried apple and a thin wispy pony tail the color of polished steel. Such a life had also given Mr. Fine, while an agreeable sort, a big chip on his shoulder.

Wade wouldn't have even known that Ray was there if Ray hadn't have dropped one of the sockets that he was using while he was trying to fix one of the county’s weed eaters.

"Well, are you deaf or stupid?" Wade shouted as he stomped into the garage area where Ray was working. "Didn't you hear me calling?"

"You wasn't talking to me." Ray said very calmly turning his back on Wade to replace the ratchet that he dropped and get another off the work bench.

"I was talking to you and you're best advised not to turn your back on me!" Ray turned back around to face Wade but it appeared that he was paying more attention to the wrench as he slipped the socket into place. "Now I need someone to march up to the third floor of the administration building and do something about the horrible smell in the men's room."

"It ain't my job." It was the man's tone, calm, defiant, unafraid that made Wade mad more than his insubordination.

"Your job is what I tell you!" Wade screamed even louder. His voice, which rose in pitch as well as volume, was far from intimidating. "Now get some Tropical Mist air freshener, get to the administration building and fix that problem!" As the vein on Wade's forehead pulsated and his face glowed like a stop light, Ray turned his back on him again and told him specifically where he could put his Tropical Mist air freshener and suggested that he do so because it would greatly improve the smell. Such a truculent statement cut through Wade like a freight train through cream cheese and the frustration erupted out of him in a similar fashion, not in words, but in a savage shove against Ray's chest. The floor was slick with oil, grease and other such substances, and not having two arms to right himself, Ray fell flat on his back. Wade, having gotten some sort of control of himself at that point, could only step back and begin a mental list of prospective attorneys to represent him when the man, who was slowly getting to his feet, hauled him into court. This list which had begun to include character witnesses, was obliterated by an explosion of bright colors and shining stars as a socket wrench smacked him between the eyes.

What all that accomplished was to make Wade late leaving work. He had to get up, stop the flow of blood that was gushing from his nose, call in Ray's supervisor, get Ray fired, chew out the both of them, and on top of that, find an adequately smelling bathroom to finish his initial business. That put him leaving the building at 6:22 rather that his customary 5:14, which, in turn, put him stepping off the curb and heading across Phaegan Avenue at 6:25 instead of 5:17. You see, we here in Ashewood Falls are such creatures of habit that if you step into the same street at the same time of day, 9 times out of 10 someone won't be coming, provided nobody was coming the last time, but remember, Wade was over an hour late and that put him stepping off the curb right in front of a truck hauling watermelons.

The truck was owned and driven by Ray's brother Horace who picked Ray up every day at 6:00. On this day they were a little late leaving because they both had stayed to argue with Ray's boss over his dismissal. Then, after his supervisor filled out the paperwork, Ray had to sign it. They argued some more and then left. As Horace swerved to miss Wade, Ray stared out through the dirty and cracked windshield and told his brother that he should have hit him. Unbeknownst to Ray, a very large watermelon that had been teetering on the very top of the pile became dislodged. It rolled down the back, hit the top of the tail gate and flew out the back of the truck at the perfect trajectory to hit Wade Burgess in the side of the head, engulfing him like a sticky wet helmet.

At the same time that Wade was fighting the watermelon, Jane Smith was fighting a horsefly that had gotten into her car. To Jane this was a dire crisis because she was allergic. Not to horseflies, but to bees and that's what she thought she had in her car-a bee, not a horsefly. It had crawled on the inside of her glasses and she was able to flip them off, sending them into the space between the seat and driver's side door. The bee flew into the window which she was able to get open and let the air suck him outside where he belonged. She had turned back toward the road and begun driving with one hand and fishing for her glasses with the other. When she glanced out through the windshield, she could barely make out the shape of a man bent over in the middle of the road.

Wade had almost gotten the watermelon off his head when the bumper of a dark blue Mustang kissed his rear end. I say kissed because Jane just about got the car stopped before it bumped him. It did have enough momentum, however, to knock him flat onto his face, which did break the watermelon loose, but also slid his sore nose across the asphalt a good twelve inches.

The man was already walking toward her when Jane got her car door open and, forgetting her glasses, ran to him to see what she could do. As she got closer, her stomach turned. A cry crept up in her throat bringing with it a strong taste of bile at the sight of several piles of bloody flesh where the man had been lying. Without thinking she went to him and put her hands on the lapels of his coat. They were wet to the touch and she had to choke back a gag as she begged him to lie down on the curb and let her call for help.

Fury alone got Wade to his feet and moved him toward the blue car that had just hit him. There was going to be no worry, no concern over lawsuits this time; he was going to stomp this person stupid and worry about the consequences later. As he reached the car’s front bumper, he was seeing red between the blood and the chunks of watermelon sliding down off his forehead. He wiped it out of his eyes as the car door opened, clenched his fists and waded into what he thought would be his first knock-down-drag-out since college. His fists relaxed, however, his mood improved, the pain in his face vanished and he no longer noticed the blood and the watermelon. In fact his entire condition made a remarked recovery at the sight of shoulder length brown hair, big brown eyes, and a pug nose dotted with freckles. He even forced a grin when this petite little thing ran up and started fawning over him.

I’m sure that to have a pretty girl making over him, wiping his face and wanting him to lie down beside her and let her cradle his head while she called the ambulance healed Wade’s ego more than anything. This sort of thing didn’t happen to Wade that often, and there was something about this young lady-her appearance, her demeanor, the earnest way that she tried to help this total stranger. Yes, the accident was her fault, but Wade could tell that she actually cared. She wasn’t scared that she was going to be sued, and Wade could honestly say that the thought never crossed his mind. She was scared that he was hurt and she actually started crying there on the side of the street. Wade was able to get her calmed down and convinced her that he was not seriously hurt. After learning the circumstances as to how she had come to hit him, Wade helped Jane find her glasses and showed her that the red lumps all over his clothes, head and littering the asphalt were pieces of watermelon and not chucks of Wade. That calmed Jane down and, when she started offering Wade her insurance information, he, in a rare moment of charm, said that he was a mess and that he was running late and wanted to get home and cleaned up. He suggested that she meet him for lunch the next day at the Jade Panda Chinese Restaurant and that they would talk about it there. She accepted and Wade made his way to his car, still bloody and covered in watermelon, a spring in his step and the words to Mellow Yellow lilting out from between his lips. He was looking forward to lunch the next day and he was already planning his wardrobe as he pulled out of the parking lot.

Wade’s rare moment of charm lasted a great deal longer than his lapses in curmudgeonness normally did. In fact, it greatly surpassed the last one in length and in degree as he was not unbearable to everyone who he had contact with the next day. For those who knew Wade, this attack of civility brought about doubts as to his sanity. For Jane there were no doubt what so ever; she didn’t know Wade, that he was absolutely divine. He met her in the parking lot and held her car door open for her. She felt a lot better about everything at seeing him when he was not covered in blood and watermelon. He was so sweet about everything and he wouldn’t hear of talking about anything concerning the accident. He only wanted to know about her and he listened to her while she blathered on and on. She felt so comfortable around this man, more so than with any person that she had met since she had moved to Welbourne County. He put her on cloud nine and by the time that their lunch was over her heart was pounding in her chest and she was short of breath. It jumped into her throat and she actually had to take a drink of water and breathe deeply for a minute or two before she said that she would meet him again, this time on an actual date. It was all so overwhelming. She would have been satisfied if he would have noticed her at all.

Jane had moved with her mother to Welbourne County when she was seven driving down from the rather unassuming little town of Phelps, NY whose only claim to fame was being designated, at one time or another, as the sauerkraut capital of the world. Jane’s mother, Brenda, a very plain woman just like her daughter had just separated from a man who, sometime in their eight year marriage had seemingly forgotten that his wife and daughter were alive and started spending the majority of his time in the company of other women. Brenda had long severed contact with her parents as they had shrugged her off as well so having nothing to keep her in Phelps she had loaded her daughter and what belongings she had into an old Rambler and headed south, picking a direction mostly at random.

The Rambler died with a groan and a puff just this side of the county line in the little community of Nickels. Nobody saw them arrive other than the young man who worked on the car and the old woman who rented them an apartment and those people forgot them within minutes.

Over the years Jane and her mother existed in Welbourne County without anyone really knowing that they were there. They were so plain and so unassuming that they were able to pass among us without anyone taking any notice what so ever. Brenda took jobs that she could do at home because no one would notice whether she even showed up at a normal job. She soon learned, however, that anyone whom she was able to reach on the phone had to notice her and she was able to eke out a living for herself and her daughter typing and doing clerical work from their apartment.

For Jane this all exuding plainness started out as a blessing. As a child she could pretty much get away with anything as she, like her mother, on most occasions passed unnoticed. In school she was able to get up and leave class, walking into another and moving about the school because none of the students, teachers or administrators knew she was there. So a very bright, intelligent girl simply existed in one school or another for twelve years, passing beneath the notice of those who were supposed to be teaching her.

By a remarkable stroke of luck Jane was able to graduate by the skin of her teeth and soon found that she could only exist like her mother: she typed medical transcriptions, term papers and the like at home, but Jane never learned to just accept things like they were, however, and go with the flow like her mother. Her gift had become more like a curse, a fact that her mother had long before found true. She never had any sort of social life; well, no life at all actually. No one ever came over to see her, no one called, no one stopped her on the street or in the grocery store. No one said hello, or asked her out. No one ever robbed her or cussed her out in traffic. As her mother got on in years even she seemed to ignore Jane before she went on to her final reward. The night her mother died Jane had to run out into the street and was going to stand in front of the speeding ambulance to make sure that it didn’t miss the address, as it had before, but a man actually saw her and helped her flag it down so she didn’t have fling herself under the wheels to get it to stop. The loneliness was overwhelming on a good day. On a bad day all she could do was stay in bed and cry. Not that anyone ever noticed.

One day in King’s Department store Jane discovered something that proved to be somewhat of a release, although far from a cure. She was looking at a stereo. Music, any kind of music had been therapy for her and she kept it playing at all times. It calmed her, it made her feel like she belonged and sometimes, when a love song was playing, she pretended that the singer was singing to her. Sometime she became so engrossed in such a song that, when it was over and the other song started her crash back to reality was so hard and so fierce that she would cry buckets as she frantically tried to rewind the tape or move the needle.

Jane was crying as she walked up and down the aisles in King’s, but no one noticed. The night before, her beloved stereo that her mother had bought her stopped working. An evening of silence was more than Jane could stand and the next morning she went to King’s knowing that she didn’t have enough money to buy a stick of gum much less a stereo. She got an idea as she called to a sales clerk. She was going to ask him about layaway, financing, anything but, of course, he ignored her and having had enough she picked the big box up into her arms and walked out with it. No one offered to stop her. She even put the box down and stopped to wave at one of the girls behind the counter before picking it up again and heading for her car. Again no one said a word.

She did it again in King’s the following week, this time taking a television. A month later she tried it at a grocery store with much the same results. A month later she was so brazen as to go to an empty aisle and bag her groceries before wheeling them out to her car. She did this is in every store in the county whenever the need presented itself or whenever the mood just suited her. When she got tired of her old clunker which her mother had owned, when she had been alive she went to Wiley Ford/Lincoln Mercury. She had to bull dog and hog tie a sales man to even get some help and asked to take a brand new Mustang on a test drive. Then she just didn’t bring it back.

She had been planning her most daring move yet when the fly had gotten into her car. Two weeks earlier she was coming out of Cato’s with arms full of free clothes when she saw a Loomis armored car parked in front of the bank. Two guards stood watch while two more carried bags of money into the building. She wondered if anyone would notice if she just walked right up to the truck, reached in and grabbed a bag for herself and she debated doing so right there. There was always a slight hope that, when she stole something, she would get caught and for this reason she grew more and more bold as she went along. For her to rot her life away in jail would mean that someone had actually noticed her. Her courage failed her that day, however, and she just went home with her clothes but she just couldn’t get the idea out of her head of actually robbing a bank. She would just walk in and grab enough money to move, to get out of Welbourne County and find some place where someone would pay attention to her, where she could be a normal person, where she could actually interact with people. Find a real job. Find some friends. Talk to people and find a special person who would care about her and love her like in the songs that she so loved listening to.

The day that Jane ran into Wade, literally, the bank was what she was thinking of. She had already started to pack and had been into the bank every day that week to case the joint. As she was speeding down Phaegan she was going over her mental list of how she would try and pull it off. The only money that she ever saw was in the teller’s drawers and she wouldn’t dream of simply walking behind the counter and reaching around a teller into their drawer. She probably could get into the vault, which was in clear view, but she wondered how much cash was actually kept there and, once she got in if she get to it. Also she wondered where she would go if and when she got the money? She ruled out big cities like New York, L.A. or Chicago. Even in Charlotte or Winston-Salem normal people got ignored and forgotten so she had pretty well decided to stay in a small town; she just didn’t know which direction to head in and didn’t want to do it randomly like her mother had done. She could head south but she’d always heard that upstate New York and New England were nice. There was the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio or maybe even Nebraska or Iowa. Everybody there was plain anyway so maybe she would fit in. Then the horsefly/bee got in her car; then Wade got in her way and it all started to unravel from there.

Jane first noticed that Wade was outside her window when she found a small rock in a glass of ice tea that she was drinking. As she started to fish it out, another rock bounced off her coffee table and rolled underneath the T.V. She got up and rushed to the window just in time to get caught in the chin with a slightly larger rock. She wasn’t hurt but it did sting and she cussed out loud as she looked down onto Wade, who covered his mouth and looked back up at her. Anger wasn’t possible as she looked down onto the loveable goofball. He waved sheepishly and mouthed: “Can I come up?” She couldn’t see his face in the dim light but she knew what he was saying and she motioned him in. As she went to close the window, she heard a call and looked to her neighbor’s window. He was leaning about halfway out and, putting a finger to his lips, said: “Could you hold it down? We finally got our little girl down for the night?” After being struck dumb for a few seconds, she agreed and said good night. She had seen that man in the hall and she had played her stereo a lot louder than she and Wade had been talking, but he had never taken any notice before.

So there you have it: The story of how a conk up side the head by a one-armed man and an errant watermelon brought together the two people who needed somebody probably more than anyone else in the county. For Wade the courtship, engagement and ensuing marriage calmed him down a bit and made him a little more bearable. I’m not saying that he’s in danger of winning Citizen of the Year or anything. He’s still a miserable jackass, but not quite as miserable as he used to be.

For Jane she got a lot more. She found herself finally a part of the community. People noticed her. People said hello on the street, people waited on her in stores and restaurants, she had friends and she had a husband who filled in the pieces that had been missing for as long as she could remember. As Jane, soon to be Jane Burgess, grew happier and more content, Plain Jane, master thief faded into obscurity. She could be seen and she was noticed everywhere she went, so she was powerless.

With her life of crime over, Jane only asked for two things that she couldn’t get through hard work, and the job opportunities did present themselves. She asked her new husband to help her give the car back. Being an associate of George Wiley, owner of Wiley Ford/Lincoln Mercury, Wade called him up one day and asked him to come pick up a Mustang that someone had abandoned in the parking lot of the county office building. Having long since written the car off and there being no tag or registration, where the car had been remains a mystery except for we privileged few who are privy to all the details.

Jane also spoke to Wade on behalf of the man who had helped her flag down the ambulance on the night that her mother died. She had run into the man after she had been dating Wade for awhile and he had told her that he was recently unemployed. She took his name and number and asked Wade if there were any openings within the county. Recognizing the name on the paper Wade bit his lip and, unable to say no to those big brown eyes, locked himself in his office one morning and called Ray Fine. He told him that everything would be forgotten if he would just come back to work. Upon Ray’s hesitance to commit, Wade actually apologized and asked Ray to come back to work with the agreement that he not tell a soul as to the circumstances of his being rehired. So with a swing of his wrench a one-armed grouch got his boss, whom he didn’t even like, the best possible person for him to spend the rest of his life with. He got a very troubled woman a brand new start. For himself he got respect from his boss and he even got a raise. The good Lord does move in mysterious ways, doesn’t he?

Copyright © 2002 Jonathan M. Farlow