Fairy Tale Blues (10 page)

Marcy said, “Oh, come on. I get better. It's just because we're all total strangers that I'm acting so bold.” None of us looked convinced. “You'll see, once I get to know you, I'll become meek and reticent.”

We just stared at her.

She added, “I promise.”

The waitress shifted her weight to the other hip, and Marcy said she'd have the special, a crab salad. Long pause, then one by one we mumbled agreement, we'd have the special, too. Marcy said she'd have a glass of white wine. We all agreed again—even me, who much prefers red—and it was as if we had just voted Marcy leader of the group by way of our lunch orders. After the waitress left we all turned to Marcy to tell us what was next.

Marcy said, “I need somebody besides my husband and kids to ignore everything I say. I'm seeking diversity.”

Perry said, “I'm not really leaving my husband.”

I said, “Me, either.”

“See?” Marcy said. “Already we've saved two marriages. We're going to be great together.”

We laughed. Then I explained my situation. They liked the idea of a marriage sabbatical.

“But why return? Leaving is the hard part.” Marcy took water glasses from the waitress and passed them around.

She got that right. Leaving was the hard part. But my heart squeezed a bit remembering Jess and how angry I'd felt around him lately and also how hard I laughed with him and enjoyed his company.

I said, “I'm returning because he's my favorite person in the world.” I thought a second and added, “Along with my sister. But I just can't live with Jess right now.” I sounded like our son Cam when he was five. He told my mother he had two friends in kindergarten, but one of them he didn't like. That had become a family joke over the years. I considered telling that story to my new friends, but Perry leaned over the table to speak.

“Leaving Alex is just a fantasy I indulge in once in a while, but I will never do it.” She lowered her eyes a moment, then looked up. “It would break his heart.”

“Listen to us,” Marcy said. “We let them rule our lives.”

Perry dipped two fingers into her water glass for ice chips and cracked them with her teeth. “You would have to meet Alex to understand.” On her left arm Perry wore gold bangles that moved from wrist to elbow as she gestured. Some had diamonds embedded in them. “I know.” Her arm shot up. “Come to our lawn party this Sunday. You'll meet Alex and his parents. His mother is the one who gives me these.” She shook her arm. “She's a dear. She also wears an armload of bangles, and when she becomes especially pleased with me, she wriggles out of one of them right on the spot, squishes my fingers together.” Perry demonstrated. “And twists the bangle onto my arm.” She looked at all of us with regret. “I'm talking too much. Somebody else take a turn.”

Wine arrived. Food arrived.We ate and talked and laughed and got directions to Perry's house.

Marcy said, “My God. You live in that beautiful pink-and-yellow gingerbread on the beach?”

“I live with my in-laws. It's their house.”

“Poor baby.” Marcy looked genuinely dismayed.

“No, it's okay. It's the only way . . . really. Just come. Meet everybody. I never have my own friends to invite to these affairs. Promise you'll all come.”

We promised. And I decided right there: if none of these women turned out to be kleptomaniacs or child abusers, I could handle the relationships and I could sure use the friendship.

It looked as if I were acquiring my friends in the same way I acquired my household furnishings: accepting whatever came my way and trusting it would fit together—Mexican vases, amateur seascapes, a truckload of vinyl and particle board from K-Mart. Marcy, Sara and Perry. The same way I set up my class load at the college; I took whatever was still open: textile design, introduction to basic art, contemporary crafts, psychology, English literary masterpieces.

When I left the Green Bottle Café and stepped into the bright Florida sunlight, I felt a strong desire to set up an aquarium. Though I knew what I really longed for as a pet was a puppy, like Mitzi. I decided to talk it over with Shank and Lucille. I also decided to talk to Jess and end the moratorium on phone calls. I felt established enough in my new life to open up to him, and I also wanted to tell him I would be down the coast at Daisy's until Sunday.

Jess

 

 

T
oday the sky was solid blue. A Western blue, not like in the East, where the thin haze of humidity watered down the color; this was a blue with no white in it, a blue almost purple. And the iced Tetons shimmered with silver against it. Possibly this ski trail was one of the best places on earth. A flat track began below the Taggart Lake piedmont and wove in and out of trees and meadows to the shores of Jenny Lake, and along the whole way the frilly, yet craggy, spires of the Tetons rose straight up beside me. On the return ski I veered off trail to evade a bull moose browsing along Cottonwood Creek. I drove home, watching the sunset drape gold along the silvery peaks.

I pulled into the driveway at last light, with the sun fallen behind the mountains, temperatures sinking toward twenty below for the night. I walked into the dark house and I was slammed by the sight of a note I'd left on the table by the door for Annie.

My God, I had done that out of habit. Just scribbled the note with one hand, grabbed my car keys with the other. I stood there, hand on the doorknob, starring at the note. The dogs sat watching me, a little miffed that they were left behind for the day, a little puzzled that I wasn't greeting them. I couldn't believe I had done that, written a note to her before I'd closed the door. And yet I could believe it, because I halfway expected to smell dinner cooking when I'd opened the door.

Right then the phone rang. I picked it up.

Annie said, “Hi.”

No greeting from me. I just said straight out, “I'm going to win you back.”

She didn't take a breath. “Then that would make you the winner, wouldn't it, Jess? And make me the loser.”

I said, “Damn it, Annie. I keep trying, but there's just no . . . winning with you.”

“Right,” she said. “No winning, no losing. This is a love affair not a political race.”

“Semantics. You know what I mean.”

“You always see us in competition, Jess. It's not a relationship of equals with you—it's one person winning over the other. A power game. You don't even mind losing once in a while, because to you losing once in a while is fair. And you try to be fair because
you're such a nice guy.
”

There was a sarcasm in her voice on those last words, but I said, “Thanks.”

She didn't acknowledge that and went right on ranting. “But you have to win most of the time, and in certain areas you have to win all the time. You know that isn't right in a marriage, but you just can't let go of the idea of a hierarchy, and you want me to hold that idea, too. But I don't hold it. You get that, Jess? I am not to be ‘won over.' ”

I said, “Hell, you don't have to get angry about it.”

She said, “But I do. Anger gets your attention. You don't budge unless the flames of my anger singe your pant legs. At first you think, ‘I'll just spit at this and she'll subside.' You dismiss me, saying that I'm exaggerating or that I'm too touchy. And then when the fire doesn't go out, you unzip your pants and pull out the big fire hose. . . .”

I said again, “Thanks.”

I figured she wouldn't acknowledge me this time either. But there was a silence. Then I heard the sound that—I swear—was the adhesive that held us together. Laughter.

We laughed harder than my stupid joke deserved. Ripples of pleasure came together in the phone lines.

I said, “Isn't phone sex great?” It felt like sex. When I reached into the center of Annie's feelings and tapped her funny bone and sent her into orgasms of laughter, then joined her with my own, it always felt like sex. No matter where she was, in my arms or, like now, three thousand miles away, no matter what she was thinking or feeling, even when she was angry with me, I could get into the center of her—the absolute core of AnnieLaurie—and trigger her pleasure. And every time she accepted me—even the weakest attempt on my part, the lamest joke.

She said, “Yeah, phone sex is great.” And she laughed again.

I filled with love for her and met her laughter with my own. Who said coming at the same time was rare?

I said, “Annie, I love you with my whole heart.” Tears came to my eyes and my voice cracked at the end. I had to love her to be whole. I didn't care suddenly whether or not she loved me. I just needed to love her.

“Oh,” I said out loud, getting what she meant about winning and losing and how that didn't belong in a marriage like ours.

“Oh, what?” she asked, her voice low and soft, almost a whisper.

“Oh . . . nothing.”

Annie

 

 

W
hen I reached Daisy's house, no one was home. She and Marcus never locked the doors, so with my new puppy, Bijou, in my arms, I walked in and looked for a note. The red light on the message machine winked from the desk. Thinking Daisy might have put a message on it for me—she had done that before—I headed there. Knowing Daisy, I assumed she probably couldn't find a pen or paper—I looked around—or a cleared surface to write a note on. No wonder Daisy trusted leaving her doors unlocked. A burglar would take one look at this mess and back right on out, figuring someone had already ransacked the place. Even I thrashed frantically around in my mind for an excuse to get a motel room, but I knew I was not allowed to do this and remain her sister.

I set Bijou on the floor and pushed the PLAY button. My own voice startled me—Daisy had insisted I call the very second I was leaving so she'd know when to worry. I sounded like Mia Farrow on antidepressants. The voice informed whoever listened that I would arrive about five o'clock. I remembered hoping this might suggest pushing toys off the guest bed or—ever optimistic—putting dinner on the stove. I looked at my watch; I was an hour early.

Really, Mia Farrow? I played the message again. Yep, same pauses and emphasis and same intensity of speech. As I listened, even I wondered if the person speaking had a very slight British accent.

“I say,” I said, punching the DELETE button on my message. “Bloody awful here.” Bijou stalked piles of clothing on the floor and pounced on them in viciously friendly attacks, tail wagging.

I walked into the kitchen. A child's dirty sock rested beside the sink, which was full of melon rinds and cereal bowls with Sugar Pops dried to the sides. I said, “Bloody awful here, too.”

I felt hungry and picked up a banana from the fruit bowl. A flock of tiny insects lifted into the air. I dropped the banana and opened the refrigerator. The butter dish was smeared with grape jelly and the stick of butter itself encrusted with toast crumbs. I always forgot this part. I felt so eager to see Daisy and Marcus and the girls that I could hardly get here fast enough and I always teared up when I left. Yet in between I could never find a place to sit in this ten-thousand-square-foot, six-bedroom house. Marcus' T-shirt was tossed on the nearest end of the leather sofa, probably sweaty from one of his ten-mile jogs, one of the twins' half-eaten sandwich lay on an upholstered chair, an uncapped tube of toothpaste on another; books and magazines were mounded into precarious heaps on seats around the kitchen table.

I gave up the idea of finding a snack and closed the refrigerator door. Like a narcoleptic, Bijou had fallen into one of her spontaneous naps: all but her tail and hind paws was burrowed beneath an abandoned towel on the floor of the family room. I lifted the towel to peek at her. She was so small and beautiful in her variegated black-and-white shagginess. She would grow about three times her size now, but would still be no bigger than any of my Wyoming dogs had been as puppies. Even so, her mother looked sporty rather than frilly, and I counted on Bijou holding her own in the Wild West later on. I loved her immeasurably. She was sister to Shank and Lucille's puppy, Mitzi, and they were happy that I was providing a playmate for their energetic pup.

I found a clean towel in the clothes dryer, left the bathroom door open so the puppy could find me when she woke and began to strip for a shower. Though this was one of the guest baths, the twins had five flavors of toothpaste in pump bottles lined around the faucet. I chose bubble gum. I held my towel under one arm and my clean clothes between my legs while I brushed my teeth, since I couldn't find a cleared space to set anything down. Soap and shampoo smears covered the counter. I returned to the dryer for another clean towel to spread out and lay my stuff on. Marcus teased Daisy that she treated the dryer as a combined linen and clothes cupboard; everybody knew to go there for their needs, apparently even me.

While irritated at the mess, I was also admiring of Daisy, because she hadn't caught our mother's tidy disease. Our mother didn't make a home for us—she kept a house. She wasn't so much a neat freak as devoid of a personal taste she felt comfortable displaying. A house of cleared surfaces. No knickknacks on shelves, no pillows on sofas, no canisters on kitchen counters. Everything was tucked away in closets or drawers or else given to the Salvation Army. She and my father had kept life stripped to the minimum when it came to belongings, and that included family photographs—there were none. If a friend or relative sent pictures of us or themselves, our parents admired the photos, then tossed them in the wastebasket as easily as yesterday's newspaper. When company came it was the height of embarrassment for our mother if any room displayed a trace of human presence. I took the middle way in my Wyoming home; I liked to think of my decorating as Zen spareness mixed with evidence of a full family life. Daisy just went with the full family life.