Even their fun was tiresome. Saturday nights were reserved for Mission: Impossible and big bowls of popcorn made on the stove top and smothered in a cube of melted butter. Sharon, many assumed, had bought into that kind of existence. She smiled with the happy and consoled the sad as the popcorn bowl emptied. But in reality, as the commercials rolled and as conversations with guests waned in the evening, she silently weighed the options of her life.
At 23, Sharon was young and beautiful; and, in time, she began to use those assets. Men’s eyes were riveted to her breasts and backside as she came and went from a room. Whether they were members of the church or good-looking passersby on the street, Sharon could feel their eyes as if they were fingers, touching, poking, stroking.
The attention felt good. Sharon was intoxicated by it and wanted more. She wanted to feel the physical embodiment of the rush that lust brought to her each time she smiled at a man who eyed her. She wanted to know how an orgasm felt when excitement and hunger for a man caused it, instead of the mechanical rubbing of her husband.
Sharon was employed as a secretary at a Cleveland printing business typing letters and answering the phone when she gave in to her impulses for the first time. In the beginning, she had not seen herself as a career woman, liberated with bras burning in the fireplace at home. She was earning extra money out in the world and trying to see exactly where she fit in.
Not long after she started at the printer, Sharon began sleeping with one of her bosses, a man of fifty who was old enough to be her father. Even worse, even more taboo, he was married and had two children. The affair went on for months. Sex and companionship were a combination that she craved. It was good and it was safe. While her husband preached, his wife put out. The weeks zipped by without anyone the wiser. But by late 1968, a complication irrevocably altered the balance. Despite a reliance on birth-control pills, Sharon became pregnant by her lover. By then she had marked her twenty-fourth birthday. She lied to Mike and told him that he was going to be a father.
Guilt, shame, and hurt, Sharon would later say, nearly got the best of her.
One night after friends arrived at the Fullers’ tidy duplex to watch television, a tired Sharon curled up and drifted asleep on the couch. Around 1 A.M. she woke up to overhear her husband telling their friend that he did not love her. Never had. The words bit like a taunted scorpion, leaving a welting sting that time would never erase. As long as Sharon would live, she knew the truth would haunt her. From both sides, the marriage had been a terrible mistake.
“I’ve never loved her. She’s like a millstone around my neck.”
No one paid much attention to the woman near the concrete steps leading down to the smelly beach that traced the edges of Lake Erie. She was in the last stage of pregnancy, her body gravid beyond belief. So much so doctors had agreed to set a date to induce labor. Even so, the woman had neither the radiant glow nor the Madonna smile most associate with the blessed state. Arched by perfectly plucked brows, her eyes were cold, flat. She made her way quickly and purposefully to the chilly, black water. One step, then another. In no time, she was breast deep.
The woman was Sharon Fuller. She would never forget that moment, and over the years, she would tell others of her despair.
“I was just going to do away with me and the kid. That was the only time in my life I have been that ready to just end it. I remember standing in the water, the feel of it. I remember seeing the sunset. If it [the water] had been warmer, I might have kept on walking, but it was cold. It was really cold.”
Her desperation turned to anger.
“I wouldn’t let Mike do this to me,” she recalled many years later. “I wouldn’t let Mike put me to a point where I was ready to end it.”
Sharon turned around and went back up the steps, the lights of the city of Cleveland looming before her, a trail of water following her. Her clothes clung to swelling thighs and a stomach stretched so tight her belly button had all but vanished. The modified flip that was her hairdo was limp. Her shoes sloshed with each step.
Mixed with the lake water were tears.
Sharon would never forget the night she first wanted to tell Mike about her affair and how the baby she was carrying was not his, but a secret lover’s. Two nights after she had considered suicide in the waters of Lake Erie, Sharon and Mike sat on the front steps of their duplex. It was the end of May, 1969. The night air was warm and scented with the heady smell of lilacs. Sharon once again stated she was not happy, that she never could be happy as a minister’s wife… his wife. She had been living a lie.
“I want you to find me an apartment,” she finally said. “I want out.”