Even her name bespoke of a girl most guys would normally ignore: Ellen Goldfarb. It was a plain Jane's name at best, a hag's at worst. Ellen Goldfarb was no hag, but nobody would ever call her pretty, either. Instead, she got called names like zit queen, thunder thighs, four eyes. Actually, Ellen wasn't as bad looking as the class bullies made her out to be. No, she'd never be asked to shill for Noxzema skin care products or Alberto Vo5. Nor would she ever sashay down some catwalk like those quasi-anorexics modeling the latest fashions. She was a big girl. Not fat but big. She stood around five-ten, with legs a bruising linebacker would be proud of. Her hair, dirty blond and disheveled, usually looked like it hadn't been brushed in weeks. And why she didn't wear contacts was anyone's guess, because those glasses she wore, the ones with the thick blue frames weren't doing her appearance any favors. She was the stereotypical ugly duckling, the girl nobody called for dates or asked to dance at school sock hops, standing in back of the school gym, wishing she were elsewhere. She only attended those dances—and thank God there were only two per year—because the school made attendance mandatory, and you didn't break the rules without suffering potentially embarrassing consequences.
In 1965, that's the way it was at Damascus High, a small school in a small suburban East Coast town that had yet to embrace the great wave of social/cultural change sweeping the country. In the fall, on Friday nights, much of the town turned out to cheer on the Stallions, the school's football team, as pretty, baton-swinging cheerleaders danced on the sidelines. On Saturday nights, students with hot cars cruised up and down Main Street, strutting their wheels, their Mustangs and GTOs, their Vets and SS Chevelles.
Conformity was still the name of the game, your passport to popularity. And there wasn't any guy more popular in Damascus High than eighteen year old Cole Reynolds. He drove a GTO; he quarterbacked the football team and he was ruggedly handsome, a "dreamboat" in 1950s vernacular, a word among other moldy words that, like the town's American heartland conservatism, still lingered like old clothing kept out of sentiment. On the surface, the strapping, brown hair, olive skinned six-footer appeared like some comic book hero, all flash and color with little below the surface—shallow, in other words. He smiled a lot as he swaggered down the school corridors, shaking hands and basking in the kudos and back slaps he got from students and teachers alike after a winning game. Adversity wasn't in his vocabulary. Sure, he knew what it meant. But the closest he came to it was getting sacked behind the line of scrimmage.
His image, however, belied an intellectual curiosity and sensitivity that he revealed to only the chosen few. His family knew but not his jock buddies. Kayla, his blond, blue-eyed cheerleader girlfriend knew, knew that Cole could be compassionate and caring, knew he had other interests besides sports, knew he dug Tchaikovsky and Beethoven as well as the Beatles and Rolling Stones.
Ellen had no idea. But then how could she? They shared the same homeroom, yet he might have been a continent away for all she felt they had in common: Ellen, the dateless, zit faced wallflower; Cole, the Big Man on Campus with the Barbie Doll girlfriend. Ellen wasn't immune to his charms, his all-American, masculine presence. He was very good looking, sure, but all form and little substance as far as she was concerned. Sometimes she wondered if her opinion was a classic case of sour grapes. No guy like Cole would ever give her a second look, much less ask her out. They had shared the same senior homeroom since September. Here it was three months into their senior year and she couldn't recall speaking to him for more than a few minutes. She assumed that would be the case for the remainder of the school year, until graduation.
Then came an incident in the cafeteria that neither one of them could have predicted.
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Cole Reynolds thought about Ellen Goldfarb more than she knew, more than anybody knew. He admired her strength, her steely stoicism, the way she seemed to brush off the insults some cruel classmates threw her way. Thunder thighs. Zit queen. Four eyes. It was enough to make most girls either cry or lash out. Not Ellen. She took it, sat there at her desk and took it, smiling at her tormentors, not saying a word. Glen Dawkins and Steve Harris were the prime offenders, her main antagonists. What gratification these punks got out of tormenting Ellen, Cole couldn't fathom, though he suspected it stemmed from an inferiority complex born of insecurity over their own less than stellar looks. Steve looked like the proverbial ninety-seven pound weakling that got sand kicked in his face, while Glen, red haired and freckled, looked like a cross between Alfred E. Neuman and Don Knotts. Whatever their problem, their bullying disturbed Cole, pissed him off at times. And up until that day, he had felt a bit ashamed of himself for not intervening, for not telling them to leave her alone. Doing that, he feared, might subject him to being teased himself for coming to the aid of someone that many (not just Glen and Steve) considered a pariah. His jock friends, he reckoned, would make snide remarks about him being sweet on Ellen. It would damage his image, an image he worked hard to cultivate.
That day in the cafeteria, Cole was laughing and joking with his jock friends, sitting at one of the long wooden tables, one of many that filled the room, row upon row. Ellen sat at the next table over, eating her lunch, alone as usual, when Glen and Steve approached her. Glen planted his hands on the table's edge, smirking. "Does she or doesn't she," he said. Steve followed with "only her dermatologist knows for sure," a parody of the famous Clairol ad.
Ellen slowly shook her head, then did something totally out of character: She bolted up from her chair and got in their faces. "Don't you idiots have something better to do?" she snapped.
Surprised at her comeback, it took them a few seconds to respond. "Well, well, Miss America here is getting frustrated," Steve said.
"Either that or she's on the rag," Glen said.
Ellen stood her ground, glaring at them, arms at her sides, slightly bent as if she was about to throw a punch. "You two have ten seconds to leave my area," she warned.
Steve glanced at his watch. "Yeah? And then what, beautiful?"
Kids in proximity stopped talking and eating and turned their heads toward the commotion, Cole included. Concerns about his image collapsed in a spasm of rage. "Back off, ass holes," he ordered, bounding up from his chair. "Go pick on someone else."
Suddenly Cole became the center of attention. All eyes were on him, standing there in his blue, V-neck sweater and chinos, arms folded across his chest, his jaw clenched. "Do I make myself clear?" he said, his dark brown eyes boring into Ellen's antagonists. "Leave her the hell alone."
The duo shuffled their feet and bowed their heads, appearing to scrounge for a face saving gesture, something to say or do that would extricate them without appearing to back down. "Sure, no problem, my man," Steve said, an exaggerated smile stretched across his pudgy face. "We wouldn't want to insult a chick in front of her boyfriend."
"Oooooooo," Travis Callahan, a stocky, powerfully built jock friend of Cole's crowed in mock horror. "You gonna take that from him, Coley?"
Uneasy laughter rippled through the audience. Steve and Glen backed away toward their seats, warily keeping their eyes on Cole, as if expecting him to retaliate. Cole looked over at Ellen, gave her a faint smile. She didn't smile back. She held her head in her hands as if she was about to scream. Then she grabbed her tray, stacked it where it belonged and left the room.
Cole sat back down. "All's well that ends well," he said before forking into his spaghetti.
"I'd punch his lights out if I were you, Coley," Travis said, "for even suggesting I had anything to do with Ellen Goldfarb."
Cole shrugged, finished chewing, then slid a napkin across his mouth. "Why, what's so bad about Ellen Goldfarb? Seems like a nice girl to me."
