Caroline

“All other girls are in a serious relationship while you are losing your time with an underachiever who is hardly the sort of a boy friend a young lady should associate with. Believe your mama, Frannie and let him go! Once past her teens a girl ceases to be marketable and loses her chances on a good life. Look around you and come to your senses: Olina is going steady with a young man in his third year of the rocket science, Magda carries on with a medicine student, and Ilona’s boyfriend studies economics! What future has your long-haired literature student? Of course, that’s hardly his fault. What else could one expect from a boy growing in such a derelict family, his father a stage manager, his mother an actress, and both of them are failures, not the falling down but the staying down moving from one off-scene to another and all they have ever touched was a flop! How can you be such a fool, Frannie?” Frannie watches her mother’s pretty face distorted by her only daughter’s pending disaster.

Caroline is clueless. Hasn’t she always been a perfect example demonstrating Frannie the advantages of having a husband with a well-paid job thus never being obliged to worry where the next money comes from, and having a domestic help which enables her to care about her looks, never being constrained by the lack of financial means to miss her facials, massages and fitness classes that keep her figure trim, her face smooth and her morale high. Caroline was smart enough not to lose her virginity to her first boyfriend, the football prodigy, all the girls were crazy about but who had eyes only for her. She knew where to stop; petting yes, lowering her knickers never! Look at him now: selling goods over the counter in a drug store, hardly providing for his four kids and his roly-poly wife, a former Miss Cheer-leader he knocked out still at high school and married on her daddy’s gun point! No wonder that he goes from work straight to pub to drink himself dumb with his buddies. Just imagining this could have been her destiny makes her shudder. By God she won’t allow this to happen to Frannie!

Caroline takes a long sip of her cappuccino and stops her hand reaching after another glazed doughnut. Her bathroom scales accused her this morning of taking on a pound too much! She heaves a sigh. Life is no fun and games! High time to take her nit-wit daughter into her own hands! She’ll ask the culprit for an interview and explain to him in graphic details what a ball and chain the down-to-earth Frannie would be for an aspiring poet, how simple it is to get her pregnant and then what? Marry her and be an underpaid school-teacher, as this is the only end his studies lead to - in case he finishes them at all! She must make it clear to him he can’t count on the financial support of their families, his own being constantly broke and Frannie’s father would sooner shoot the vile seducer of his darling daughter dead than let him live off him.

Caroline licks the last drop of coffee from her lips and stands up. Acting fast is vital and this is the right moment to use her designer garb for a higher cause than charming Ed’s superiors out of their wits at some next business event! A luscious shiver runs along her body readying to hunt Frannie’s boyfriend down! Destiny plays the ball with her: Ed is away on a business trip and she can sacrifice all her time and energy to save her only child’s future!

Without losing another minute she enters her daughter’s room. Frannie’s life is an open book displayed in a pink diary on her writing desk. She dials her boyfriend’s number, sets up a date and gets ready for the rescue operation. There are no hopeless situations, just those that haven’t been yet addressed.