On Wednesdays, some people wear pink. Others gather around a table at a semi-dilapidated community center in Tomales to recall glory days of the past. Glory days related, more than anything, to the “peak” of one’s physical appearance. You know, that period somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-eight where everything just starts to really “click.” That is, if you’re actually a “hot person.” The women in question who gathered to discuss this former glory every Wednesday at the community center were Erica, Francine, Melinda and Nora. Four friends who were bound by going to the same high school together almost fifty-five years ago now. Granted, there is only one high school in Tomales. Established in 1912, the quartet was part of the fifty-third freshman class to enter the then still-newish educational institution. Shit, they were around when the school teams had only recently undergone the change from being “Wolves” to “Braves” (a modification that happened circa 1950).

With each of them presently in their early seventies, it left more and more time to reminisce about the days when they thought they had their entire lives ahead of them. When everything felt possible. And for a while, it was. Each of them had gone their own separate ways for a few years in their early twenties, with three of the four scattering to other parts of California during their college years (Francine was the only one who said “fuck it” and just went to a nearby community college) before getting boomeranged right back to Tomales for one reason or another.

After all, with such a small population, there’s a certain responsibility to stay there if you’re from there. To “reproduce” the Tomales breed, as it were. All four women eventually did just that, with three of the four women’s husbands dying in their late sixties and one of their husbands abandoning them just ten years into the marriage for another, younger (of course) model. It was Nora who suffered from that bout of bad luck (even if men being shitty wasn’t a matter of luck so much as “principle”). Though she found a small window in the early years of their marriage to have two children, during a brief blip when Darrell still found her interesting…on a sexual level anyway.

After she had their second daughter (no sons! The horror!), however, he pretty much never really touched her again. It led Nora to start seeking other outlets (unfortunately, none of them orgasm-related) as time wore on and she realized that the constant companionship she thought she would get out of her marriage had ceased to exist (if it ever really did at all).

This was when she started to call upon some of her old friends from high school, going down the shortlist (and at Tomales High, it was a very short list indeed) until she got a hold of Francine, who had just moved back about six months ago when her father had fallen ill with cancer. It was her husband, David, who suggested that they move back up to Tomales. He also suggested that he would simply spend his workweek in San Francisco and commute up to Tomales on weekends, staying from Friday afternoon through Sunday night. Obviously, it set the effortless conditions for him to have an affair. And many. Francine, like most women of the period with limited options, chose to look the other way. What else could she do? She had her father to worry about, and had honestly started to lose interest in David with this saturation of melancholia permeating her very veins. Let him stick his dick in other women, she guessed. Because she had other things to worry about.

Nora knew that, deep down, however, Francine was hurting just as much about the infidelity as she was about her father being on the verge of death. It was her father’s imminent demise that served as a distraction from that sting. Once he was gone, however, Nora knew that Francine wouldn’t be able to ignore her pain any longer. She wanted to be there for her when that time came, hence the two starting the tradition of meeting at least once a week while in their twenties long before Erica and Melinda entered into the picture. Granted, they didn’t start out at the community center…

In their younger years, they would often meet at William Tell House, which happened to be among the few options for “tying one on” in town. When Erica and Melinda joined in on this tradition of Nora and Francine’s after having found themselves no better off in the “real” world than they were in Tomales, the quartet gained something of a reputation in town. For being “troublemakers,” “up to no good,” etc. They were deemed especially scandalous because they were married women with children who had the “audacity” to go out and enjoy themselves without also bringing along the weight of those entities. And it made certain men assume that, because they were willing to “abandon” their “responsibilities” at home, they must be “loose” women.

Erica, who was the most pugilistic out of all of them, was sure to quickly set the record straight about that theory whenever one of the men at the William Tell got too handsy. In effect, there were a lot of men who left the bar slightly more bruised than when they walked in on the nights during which the infamous quartet would show up.

As is the case with a majority of the female gender, Erica, Francine, Melinda and Nora weren’t aware in the moment of how beautiful they were, “traffic-stopping,” as it was once more commonly said. Nor did they seem to be aware of the greater potential that their beauty might have unlocked. For, especially at that time, attractiveness was a woman’s greatest “tool” for getting ahead in life through a man. But there was only so brief a window to wield that beauty like a weapon in the war called life. More to the point, living a life that was “comfortable,” which was also supposed to be every woman’s goal. Alas, at the peaks of their beauty, Erica, Francine, Melinda and Nora were all at their least comfortable after having already settled for the first men that expressed an interest in a long-term commitment—which was just as hard to secure then as it is now, perhaps even harder because people were expected to actually stay together for their whole lives. Seen more a prison sentence to men than anything resembling a romantic notion. Nora was only too aware of that after Darrell left her and she was forced to fend for herself. Financially.

That’s how she ended up eventually managing the community center. For she had already been a volunteer there for a few years. The stars just happened to align when the only paid position opened up soon after Darrell absconded and left her with nothing but two kids who she felt resembled him more than her. Between that and picking up some shifts at the William Tell here and there, it was enough. Even though Erica, Francine and Melinda all would have offered her any amount of money she needed if Nora hadn’t been too proud to ask.

As the years went on, their children left and, on an emotional level, so did their husbands. The only constant they could count on was each other. And the community center was the place where they consistently cemented that bond. Realizing, decades too late, that they should have done something different during their quadruple peaks. Should have used that beauty to parlay themselves into a more exotic, adventurous existence. But then, what would have happened to them when their beauty faded? What if they had been caught out in the proverbial wilderness in the midst of turning “ugly”? They would have been jettisoned or stuck, with no way back to some comfortable life that was necessary to endure the agonies of old age.

This is what they told themselves after each “session” of reminiscing about, among other memories, their physical peaks. That, in the end, you can’t count on beauty to get you far—it all boils down to the mind. Though they each admitted that they had probably lost theirs long ago, right around the instant they decided it was a fine idea to get married and sign what was left of their youth away. But then that always led to the additional stock consolation and accompanying shrug, “It was a different time.”

This form of “solace” would subsequently lead each of them to silently wonder how future generations of women would be able to tell themselves the same thing…now that so much had “changed” and there was no longer an excuse to live as previous generations of women were forced to.