CHAPTER 01: SALSA
Ella Bishop was a self-made woman. Where she lacked the experience and seasoning of an adult life most eighteen year olds suffer, she compensated by adopting traits from the past. She did so with a passion and this gave her a unique standing in Canyon Ridge. Ella was a stand alone classic amidst a sea of moderns, never quite fitting in with the modern trend yet always memorable. That was how she preferred it. Ella's provocative quasi-Greaser look was inspired by her love of old movies while her direct attitude inspired by her mother, Anabella Bishop. They were more alike than either cared to admit. They even shared the same name, with Ella adopting the last four letters of the namesake as Ana had already claimed the first three. Ana saw it as a tradition of passing of namesake from mother to daughter while Ella refused to be anyone's junior.
Both women possessed a no-nonsense practicality that I found incredibly attractive. I didn't have to guess about meaning or subtext when it came to either of them. That was part what made my relationship with Ella so simple, and part of what got me in trouble with both her and Ana later on. Ana Bishop was just as easy to be friends with as her daughter Ella was, and as I had known since I first became sexually aware, equally as easy to be attracted to.
You see, as deep as I was in with Ella, I was in deeper with Ana. I'd never said anything to let on that was the case, but if Ella Bishop was the metric by which I measured other women, then her mother Ana was the gold standard of unobtainable femininity that no one could ever hope to meet. Looking back, I think that was part of my infatuation with Ana; she was unobtainable and as long as I was pining for the unobtainable then there was very little chance I would get caught up in a relationship that required much more than for me to just be there. No commitments or emotional entanglements. How could there be? Ana Bishop was the standard, the requirements a woman would have to meet in order to get inside my heart. Outside of Ana Bishop, I preferred the ease of casual sex and the limits of semi-relationships that went nowhere save for a bedroom or comfortable back seat. Ana didn't know it, but she was the safe guard that kept my heart from being broken.
It didn't hurt that Ana was married.
I don't remember things ever being what one might call 'good' between Ana and Todd Bishop. Not that I was remotely qualified to judge such things as a child, or even as an eighteen year old. All I had for comparison was my own mother and father, and they were light years removed from the always brewing turmoil in the Bishop residence. Seeing the discord between Ana and Todd made me question the negatives of relationships as much as my own mother and father reinforced the positives.
Even at an early age, I can recall their marriage being a rocky affair filled with continuous arguments that paused just long enough for a remorseful respite and then it was back to business. The arguments were quiet as far as marital arguments go, but the majority of those fights amounted to venom spat under heated breaths and subtle attacks that always wounded in between the lines. Todd's proclivity for subtext is, I'm sure, what led to both Ana and Ella being as direct in their communication as they both ultimately were.
Todd Bishop was the town electrician and general repairman. He owned a small storefront on main drag of Canyon Ridge that was sandwiched in between the Five-N-Dime Store and Janelle's Beauty Salon. It was no secret that Todd preferred spending his off-the-clock hours at Goose's Tavern, the local pub a few blocks down from his shop, over spending time with his family. To make matters worse, rumors about his infidelities had become so commonplace that most of the locals had accepted Todd's alleged misbehavior the same way they accepted the annual snow fall that blanketed Canyon Ridge from November to March the following year.
According to my mother, their troubled relationship was par for the course. Mom and Ana had gone to school together, both had ended up married and pregnant young. For my mother, it was a post-graduation event that she gladly chose. For Ana, who found herself pregnant with Ella when she was sixteen, it had been an unwelcome and ultimately forced consequence. I knew from being Ella's confidant and from basic observation that Ana Bishop, formerly Ana Villalobos, had essentially become trapped before she even graduated from high school. Whereas my mother was able to make her own choices, Ana was given no such consideration. Dreams of owning a charter boat operation on the coast of Northern California were replaced by the reality becoming a real estate agent in the mountains of Northern California. This unfortunate set of events ultimately led to her marrying Todd Bishop for all the wrong reasons.
There's nothing wrong with being a real estate agent, mind you. It's just that when you've dreamed of the freedom of the open sea and a boat to call your own, anything else seems like a letdown. As the daughter of a staunch, first generation Mexican Catholic immigrant father, Ana discovered that getting knocked up at the tender age of sixteen presented complications to her plans for the future. The fact that Todd Bishop hailed from a second generation Irish Catholic immigrant family didn't help matters any. So a wedding was, in no uncertain terms, in their immediate future.
To her credit, Ana made the best of it.
Todd made good money, but it was common knowledge that Ana was the primary reason why the Bishop family lived in the north end of town. Such a thing was, in the end, inconsequential to most people. My parents certainly never made an issue of it. It was, however, an issue among many issues for Todd. On top of not wanting to be in the marriage anymore than Ana did, Todd was afflicted with a terminal case of pride. Divorce wasn't all that uncommon in those days, and I think if he had been a little more at peace with himself, Todd would have done just that. Being married to one of the most attractive and successful women in town wasn't enough to compensate for the fact that Todd Bishop absolutely refused to be seen as wrong at any time, for any reason. A divorce would have implied to at least a few people, a few too many for his comfort, that he had been in the wrong somehow. For that reason, coupled with pressure from both sides of their respective families, Todd and Ana Bishop had remained unhappily married.
The worst part of the whole mess was that for as much as Todd wanted out, he was extremely possessive of Ana and at times unreasonably jealous. Ella being a younger clone of Ana didn't help Todd's already unstable state of mind, and so his overbearing manner extended to Ella as well. If Ella were the exotic, thorny flower of Canyon Ridge, then her mother Ana was the plant from which the blossom grew. Like Ella, Ana was something of a local legend. She was the woman that every man in town fantasized about at least once during sex with his wife or girlfriend, whether he ever admitted it or not. Subsequently, she was that mom every hormone-cursed adolescent spent at least one private-time session time rubbing one out over.
To be honest, I'd had more than my fair share of breathtaking masturbatory sessions over Ana Bishop. Though she was only thirty-six years old, she barely looked a day over twenty-six. Ana was blessed with naturally tan skin, thick luxurious black hair that cascaded around her shoulders in pronounced curls and classically beautiful exotic features that all highlighted her curvy hour glass build. Like her daughter, Ana was a desert rose stuck in the evergreen mountains of Northern California.
When Ella and I finally arrived at the birthday party a half hour late, we found an event that was already in full swing. Ella had told me her mother was planning a birthday party for me and at the time I hadn't thought much of it. At most, I figured maybe a few friends would show up and we'd all be treated to Ana's famous cooking and poolside antics. This was not the case. There had to be at least thirty people present, mostly former classmates and a few that were on their way to becoming seniors in the fall. The music was loud, the conversation peppered with laughter and carefree ease.
The Bishop's house was one of the newer structures that had been built in 1980 when the city started developing the land at the north end of the canyon, a grouping of small neighborhoods collectively known as Rich Town. Only families that made more than enough money bought property there, and between what Todd and Ana both made, their home was a mansion compared to the majority of the rest of town. As it was at that point in time, there were several houses under construction in the cul de sac where Ella lived, but the Bishop house was the only complete and occupied home. Thus, there would be no noise complaints tonight no matter how loud the music got.
As we entered the side gate, the aroma of heated citronella oil and authentic Mexican food filled the hot, dusky air. The large backyard was filled with bodies in motion, all in one form of swimsuit or another, some splashing around in the pool while others mingled on the expansive covered patio. Music was blaring from the radio near the sliding glass doors of the back porch. Among the small crowd, I saw Maggie Secord chatting with Catherine Smith, not too far from where the town stud Andrew Tate was surreptitiously adding a small quantity of alcoholic flavor into the punch bowl.
My eyes lingered on Maggie for a second or two, watching her as she and Catherine laughed at a joke. A quick pang of regret pulled at me when I looked at Maggie. I hadn't been lying when I told Ella that I wasn't broken up over her. What I didn't tell Ella was that Maggie had me reconsidering my rule about not getting into serious relationships. Of course, I was still hot for Maggie. I wanted her in the worst way, even then as Ella and I strolled up to the back porch. The orange and blue bathing suit she was wearing didn't help matters any. We might not have consummated our dating relationship before it abruptly ended, but we did laugh. The smoldering memories of what did together in the back seat of my Delta 88 wouldn't burn quite as brightly as the way she made me laugh. Maggie could perfectly imitate Katherine Hepburn, and usually did so when telling the crudest, lewdest jokes mankind had ever devised. Laughter had a way of breaking down barriers, and Maggie had definitely started chipping away at mine.
I wasn't broken up over her, but I was more than a little unsettled that she made me wonder if it would be worth it to risk being so.
