DOLLY & MONA
Both had childhoods so painful that they would eagerly choose death rather than be forced to live through them again. Dolly spent the entirety of K through 12 at the absolute bottom of the food chain, getting stuffed in garbage cans and pushed down the stairs. He survived solely by virtue of having the desperation-inspired insight that he could fend off some attacks and deprive others of their savagery by willfully parading his abject status and becoming the “class clown”. Raised by a dipsomaniac mother driven towards abusive romantic entanglements, Mona was gawky, klutzy, painfully shy and had the self-respect of a gnat. Surviving only by retreating ever further into a fantasy world of her own making, by the time her mother died at the hands of one of her paramours, Mona was only just barely connected to reality.Upon graduating from high school, Dolly had no greater desire than to get out of town. The quickest and surest way out was that of taking a position as a travelling salesman and hoping that the skills of nervous chatter and small talk that he had honed during his years as class clown would serve him in this capacity. This turned out to be true, but, alas, not true enough; while he managed to survive, he never managed to get ahead, and found himself always just a little behind in the game.
Out on the road, on the job, Dolly met Mona at her home in Fairvale. Gave her the sales pitch, got more than he bargained for. The equivalence of their respective desperations was so perfect, their magnitudes so great, they instantaneously formed a bond so strong that nothing could tear it apart short of a nuclear chain-reaction. Dolly immediately quit his job and moved in with Mona. Casting about blindly, they took the first opportunity that came their way: hocking everything the two of them had to their names, they signed their lives away on the dotted line to take over one of Fairvale’s two gas stations. The owner of the competing station*, long established, better capitalized, and predatory by nature, sensed in Dolly and Mona easy prey and before the ink was dry on their contracts instigated a price war.
Dolly and Mona struggled fiercely to stay afloat. Then, Mona became pregnant. They were at their wits’ end. Wanting the baby more than anything but terrified that it would be their undoing Mona had an abortion. In a panic-fueled state of total anxiety, Mona was unwilling to leave Dolly and travel out of state as would have been necessary at that place and time to have a legal medical abortion; not to mention the fact of spending money they didn’t have. Once again they cast about blindly; this time for someone to perform the operation locally. Mona underwent the "back-alley" abortion, but the procedure resulted in an infection that put her in the hospital, Dolly as well as herself deep in debt, and finally and most horribly left her unable to conceive any further children.
This tragedy permanently and equally scarred the couple. They became dazed to the point of carrying out their day-to-day lives in a zombie like stupor in which life became a bad dream that they could only look forward to waking from. Even the event, that they eventually came to see as an act of God, that indirectly secured for them a more easeful existence, did little to lessen their feeling of loss, instead providing them with the consoling concept that their lives, along with everyone else's, are part of an unknowable divine plan in which each must play their part.
In a startling and cataclysmic convergence of the human embodiments of the forces that had driven Dolly and Mona to their state of despair, one year to the day after performing Mona’s abortion, the man whose identity they had never revealed and indeed whose very existence they had striven to deny passed out dead drunk at the wheel of his car with his foot pressed to the accelerator and guided by an unseen hand careened full throttle directly into a giant tanker truck that was transferring its contents into the underground storage tanks of the gas station whose owner had set in motion the fateful chain of events of such terrible consequence to Dolly and Mona. Miraculously no one was injured save the driver of the car and the owner of the gas station, both of whom were killed instantly. The owner was the only one at the station because it was first thing in the morning and the driver of the truck had gone down the street to get some breakfast while his truck dumped its fuel. The resulting conflagration was so frightful that no one in the town could find it within themselves to rebuild on that spot, and as there was no other appropriate spot immediately available, people gradually came to the general consensus that one gas station, Dolly and Mona’s, was enough for Fairvale, and that was that.
The years passed, but, despite the security they found in running the only gas station in town, the pain remained. During this period the couple spoke of adoption at every opportunity, always saying they would adopt as soon as they felt "ready". But that feeling never came, as neither of them were ever to fully escape the dark cloud of despair that hung over them. Gradually, they came to the conclusion that they were not "meant" to have even an adopted child.
Finally, first a stray dog and then a stray man entered their lives and formed the basis for the family that had been their deepest desire for so long.
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*see Rick (back)