We met the first week of graduate school. We were both working as dormitory supervisors while we took graduate classes. She was 25, two ears older than I and had already been married and divorced. She had traveled throughout Europe the previous summer and had slides to impress the undergraduates. I considered her very urbane and sophisticated. She was one of the smartest people I've ever met.
Bev met someone that first year of graduate school, our age but still an undergraduate since he had been in the Navy. He wanted to go to medical school. He got in, they married and she left graduate school to work as a teacher and support him. He hated children but somehow they had three. Two girls and then a boy who ended up in and out of jail. But I get ahead of myself.
Bev's husband went on to become a gynecologist. She said, how bizarre. He hates women.
We stayed in touch periodically. Bev was part of a group of four friends from graduate school days.
Bev visited us once and bragged about the enormous home they had built in her husband's home state. He had joined a multi-physician practice. It was unlike her to gloat and rather premature. Her husband soon had an affair with one of the physicians in his practice and divorced Bev.
Bev didn't seem to get a good settlement. Her husband had to pay for her to finish the graduate degree she started years earlier. That seemed to be it. She somehow lost the house. Fortunately she was an only child and received a good inheritance.
She moved to Alabama (I'm not sure why) and bought a small horse farm in a rural area. She always rode, did dressage and taught it when she was married.
All of us "girls" would still get together almost every year, usually at one friend's beach condo on the Outer Banks of NC
Then....Surprise!! Bev met a man on line, much older and a "writer". They married quickly. She took him to my husband's 60th birthday party. He was dressed in a black Zorro cowboy outfit. After the party, several people, male and female told me he tried to molest them. Almost worse, he told them about his sex life with Bev :" She has the body of a 25 year old and all parts work"
That she had sunk so low,
Fortunately, Zorro-husband wanted her to sell the farm, she wouldn't and they divorced.
Time passed.
Then Bev said, I'd love you all to come to my farm this year. She called it Hobby Horse Farm and had that logo on her Christmas cards.
We went. Flew down and rented a car. Drove through rural Alabama on an ancient road that needed repairs. Past Churches, cheaply built and sad looking. Past tattoo parlors. Past porn viewing places. Past liquor stores with fading signs. Then we found it. A rutted road that led through underbrush. In the middle of no where.
Hobby Horse Farm.
She greeted us warmly but it was obvious she had done a quick clean up. Everything was unbelievably shabby and cheap. She had just had a fight with the jail bird son asking him to take his heavy metal instruments out of the living room. Seems he moved in and took over. No one else in his small family wanted anything to do with him.
We stayed for dinner. I forget what we ate. Bev was nervous. Dinner was not her typical elegant New England aristocrat event. Jail bird son was working but might come home early. Obvious he was on drugs. He had a low level job watching security cameras in a building.
Oh yes, there was a white pit bull wandering around the house. One friend was so anxious about it that Bev finally crated it.
When we left everything was pitch dark. There was a feeling of Get Out!!! We backed out of the rutted driveway, through underbrush hitting the wind shield, Back to our safe motel.
I don't think I ever saw Bev again.
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