Protecting Zelda

Protecting Zelda

fiction
edward w pritchard

At a restaurant recently I saw a young twenty something girl exhibiting her style and uniqueness by wearing a black floppy Hat, thick black framed glasses and black lipstick. At such times I always remember Zelda Sayre and my attempts to protect her as she changed from being around F Scott Fitzgerald  the writer who was a bit of a bore and a humbug. True to my premonitions the girl's boyfriend seemed more interested in the food of the mediocre restaurant than the vivacious young lady that fate had matched him with there at the restaurant yesterday where I played the silent voyeur.

Zelda was always interesting as a young socialite vying for attention back in Montgomery, Ala.
and a bit spoil-ed as the youngest child but it wasn't until Fitzgerald began promoting her to sell books as the world's first flapper that she began to lose herself. I always thought that pretty boy Scott Fitzgerald caused Zelda to develop the Schizophrenia that destroyed her.

The  last time I saw my secret Zelda she gave me that coy smile oh so briefly. A few years later I heard she was killed in a fire while a patient in a sanitarium. Too sad for satire. Fitzgerald drank himself to death a few years earlier. I never forgave Fitzgerald and although I never could finish his first autobiographical novel"this side of paradise" I had to admit the"Gatsby" was well written. After Zelda and Fitzgerald died I hated the Nazi's after WW2 to appease my guilt at not being able to protect the young Zelda Sayre.