Fairy Tale Blues (3 page)

I got up from the bed, blew my nose again, tightened my towel across my chest, walked outside and sat on the end of a chaise longue, which barely fit on the small balcony. I pressed my face between the twisted wrought-iron posts of the railing like a toddler peering through crib bars. My skin felt numb; my thoughts refused to follow my eyes' gaze outward. I tried to appreciate the softness of the morning air, the lulling expanse of rocking water.

My good spirits had always burbled naturally like a spring out of the ground, for no good reason other than the pleasure of its own flow. In Wyoming ranchers ran their trucks over and over such spontaneous springs to flatten them out. That was how I felt now, flattened out. I wanted to blame Jess, but I was the one who had laid myself out on that path. My mantra for our years together: if Jess and the boys are happy, then so am I. I waited for a hint of what any of them wanted, then worked to get it for them. Jess wanted a happy marriage, healthy kids, a successful ski shop, a comfortable home, friends over for candlelit dinners. I wanted those things, too, and we loved each other. That should make for a good lifetime partnership, shouldn't it?

Yet I had allowed him to float behind me, his hand weighing down my shoulder as I pumped upstream, swimming toward those goals we had both agreed on—that happy marriage, those healthy kids, the successful ski shop, the comfortable home, the friends. I felt mad that he had allowed me to do all the work, and resented his passive innocence when I complained and he responded that no one asked me to do it all.

“So take a day off, Annie. I'll cover the store.”

I took him up on that once and Jess slept in the following morning, hadn't even set his alarm clock after making his noble offer.

But what was the use of recalling all these bits and pieces? It was the big picture I needed. A process involving time and distance.

Jess

 

 

W
hat did she want from me? I didn't know what she wanted. She wanted too much, for one thing. Talk, talk, talk. Second sentence and my eyes began to drift about the room, my mind followed, and next I was leafing through an L. L. Bean catalog. And AnnieLaurie was furious.

“You don't listen to me.”

Well, no.

Once, she was predictable. I didn't need to listen. Once, she just needed to vent anger or rant out a decision. I'd know she was finished when she'd say, “Oh, that's what I'll do.” I could even get away with saying, “What will you do?” and, I'm not kidding, she never accused me of not listening, even though I'd followed the whole plot of a
Hill Street Blues
rerun. She just welcomed the chance to repeat it.

Now, if I didn't listen to her the first time—pounce.

As if any human could change an old habit overnight.

In a way, AnnieLaurie changed overnight.

One morning about five years ago, I woke up first, leaned on my elbow and watched her sleep. Slowly her eyelids lifted and she caught me. She recognized right away it wasn't a sexual invitation.

She said, “What?”

I said, “I don't know who you are anymore.”

She said, “You're right; you don't.”

Well, I didn't want to talk about it. I got up and showered.

Annie

 

 

S
till wrapped in a towel, sitting on the cramped balcony, I realized I had no appropriate clothing to wear in order to leave this place. Heavy velvet skirt and cowboy boots might startle people in the tropics. Before solving that problem, I wanted to get the hard phone calls over.

First, my dad. My sons, both cranking up for their spring semesters at the University of Wyoming, could wait until I felt steadier; they weren't likely to hear anything from Jess. If either of them phoned home, Jess would downplay my leaving or fail to mention it at all. Later he'd reach into his grab bag for a story about his omission—he forgot, misunderstood, intended to do it later. Jess didn't like being connected to bad news. I was reminded again that I had been in this marriage alone much of the time, and the thought raised fresh tears.

I tamped my grief, left the balcony and dialed Dad's number.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Annie L, hi. What's up, sweetheart?” Never one to talk on the phone, he was probably watching the morning news on TV and anxious to get back to it. I worried for a moment about alarming Dad with my own news, but not much alarmed my father. He had kept himself at arm's length from emotions—his or anyone else's—since Mom's illness and death four years ago, and prior to that, he had let Mom do the emotions for both of them. So I stated the facts: I had left Jess and was now in Florida, just up the coast a hundred miles.

“Left Jess where?”

“In Wyoming.”

Dad took a moment before answering; I felt him gathering his thoughts or pulling himself away from the TV. “Well, honey, there's always somebody worse off than you. They found a Cuban gal all alone on a raft bumping off the edge of Bathtub Reef last night.”

I began to cry. “Is she all right?”

“She'll live.”

“That poor woman.” I hiccuped on a jagged draw of breath. “She made that whole long trip all by herself.” I sniffed. “She probably had to leave everything she loved . . . her home, her friends, her . . . ” I couldn't finish. I was struck by the sudden realization that I'd also left my dogs.

“Well, Judas Priest, I was just telling you. Don't get so damn sloppy over things.”

After promising I would feel better soon, I hung up the phone and sought out tissues in the bathroom. I had emptied the bedside box, and I now plucked the final wad from the bathroom box and would soon be resorting to toilet paper.

Before calling my sister, Daisy, I donned my long velvet skirt and, hoping to be the first and only customer, slipped down the back stairs to the hotel lobby shop. There I quickly grabbed a pair of pale linen Bermuda shorts size ten, the matching jacket, two tank tops from a shelf of tropical bird colors, all embroidered “left chest,” as we called it in the resort business, with HIBISCUS ON THE BEACH, and a pair of flimsy sandals with a striped cloth thong. Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant. No underwear in sight, and I wasn't going to ask the woman who had flipped the CLOSED sign to OPEN, then set out the morning newspapers and was now filling her register drawer with money from a bank bag. I'd washed out my panties last night but they hadn't completely dried in this humid air; the waistband was a damp ring around my hips.

The saleswoman pinned on her name tag, CARA. She smiled at me, then glanced briefly at my long velvet skirt, then pretended that she hadn't and smiled even more kindly, which was generous of her. Either that or I didn't strike her as attractive enough to be someone's overnight date or hotel call girl. Or if I was, my pinkish eyes suggested it hadn't been a good experience for me.

“See the great blue heron on the beach? Been out there for about an hour now.” She gestured toward the opened glass doors, toward the same beach I had been staring at since six a.m. Never saw a thing. But I saw the heron now. The light shimmered off her blue-gray feathers as she picked her dainty way into the shallow waves. The saleswoman, perhaps in her midsixties, with eyes that suggested she'd lived through some difficult nights herself, tallied up my purchases and said, “She's fishing for breakfast.”

“She's beautiful.” I had flown to the ocean last night as an injured child to its mother, then refused her balm these past few hours. All at once my ears opened to the sound of waves and my nose received the salty scent of the beach. I felt anxious to get out of these wintery clothes and feel the soft air on my skin.

I dipped into my evening bag for a credit card, noting the inappropriate glitter of the purse's black beads in the morning sunshine. Wouldn't take an FBI agent to guess I was on the lam for one reason or another. I lifted my eyes in dismay to the gentle lady behind the cash register.

“How about a tote to match those sandals?” she asked.

“I'll look like a tourist.”

She said, “That would be good, wouldn't it?”

 

Making progress. I now wore shorts and sandals, had ordered room-service breakfast, blotches on my face had spread from a concentration around my eyes to a fade across my cheeks. So I looked less like a sobbing woman whose lover had left some money on the hotel dresser with wishes for a nice life and more like a tourist who had sat in the sun too long. This process could reverse when I called Daisy.

I loved my sister. Right along with Jess and our sons, Cam and Saddler, came Daisy. Do not take these people away from me—except for this temporary respite from Jess, please. Prayers over, I dialed.

“Daisy.”

“I already heard,” she said. “I'll come get you. Dad called but didn't know where you were, the idiot.”

I stalled. Said I needed to hang out a couple days in the hotel; then I would drive right down. Said I could hardly wait to see her. Which was true, though I knew I could not afford to fall completely apart right now, which I feared I would do once I felt her arms around me. It was as if I struggled to keep from drowning in a steep-sided cauldron, rapidly filling with tears. Better swim around in it first, until I grew strong enough to pull myself over its edge and out into the world. Then I could use Daisy's solid good spirits, her relaxed, unconcerned approach to life, to motherhood, business, marriage and, God knows, housekeeping.

She excused herself to speak to her daughters. “I don't need to boil water for your instant oatmeal right now. Just turn the faucet on and let me talk to Aunt Annie.”

“They're barely four and they're fixing their own breakfast?”

“They're as particular as their father. He won't even
try
instant oatmeal. The twins want me to make theirs with
boiling
water.”

“But that's what the directions say.”

“Oh, that's where they got the idea. Haven't started school yet, but the little squirts are reading everything. Drives me nuts.”

When ventilating the woes of our marriages, Daisy and I talked in general terms, as if we shouldn't betray our mates by discussing them in a personal way. We said things like “When a husband talks to me in an irritable voice in public, I think the disrespect is tripled,” as if we each married a harem of husbands and didn't wish to actually identify which one of them was guilty of misbehavior.

So Daisy said now, “This guy you left just went one step too far, didn't he?”

“He did. Of course, what he thinks right now is that I am taking it one step too far.”

Daisy excused herself again to speak to her daughters. “You two shouldn't eat breakfast wearing Sunday-school gloves. Oh well, never mind.” She said quietly to me, “You should see this. Libby lost one of her ‘glubs,' as she calls them, and has substituted a white sock on one hand.”

I surprised myself with the sound of laughter. It felt good.

Jess

 

 

T
o latch on to a little thing like a duplicate gift, Annie had to be
looking
for an excuse to get on a plane out of here. Maybe she didn't need me anymore. Our sons were grown-up; she could run a business on her own and had claimed often that that was what she was doing anyway. She might stay in Florida, take over one of her dad's stores down there, not come back.

For three days now my head had spun around these thoughts until I couldn't stand my own company anymore. I shoved my feet into Sorel Pacs, grabbed a heavy jacket, gloves, pulled a wool knit hat onto my head and traipsed through snow on our unshoveled walkway to the street, our three dogs romping behind me. Supposedly this was my day off; at least our store manager, Hadley, convinced me to stay home. But rattling around the house by myself was worse than being pestered by customers all day long. I headed for the bike path that trailed Flat Creek. The day was gray with heavy, snow-filled clouds that kept the temperature from dropping too low, which by Jackson Hole standards meant below zero. Still, who wouldn't want to be in Florida instead of Wyoming in early January? Not the valley's best time.

The dogs and I walked to the end of the street, climbed over a five-foot snowbank the plows had created and stepped onto the pathway, groomed on one side for cross-country skiers, groomed on the other for walkers and skate skiers. Before leaving the house, I'd stashed a few tennis balls in my pockets for the dogs to chase and dig out of snowdrifts. I pulled the balls out of my pocket and gave them each a long throw.

I didn't know why I'd bought those stupid earrings a second time. Just wandering around the goldsmith's, and one of the saleswomen suggested something with a birthstone, and next thing I knew she had wrapped the package and I was off to snowshoe 25-Short on a nice winter day, duty done.

That was no way to buy Annie a special gift, and I should have just said right away on the phone that I was sorry. Really sorry and please come home. But I argued with her first. I don't know why I did that. Too damn mad, for one thing.

Nothing felt right with her gone. Like it wasn't real, but a play I was acting in, saying my lines without meaning. Even my body felt removed, as if I was wearing metal armor a couple sizes too big, and I didn't know how to work it. If I bruised myself rounding the corner of my desk at the store once more I was taking an ax to it. Meals were lonesome and sleep felt rowdy with pointless dreams.

I didn't know how to start my days or end them. The middle was easy. I wandered around the store, taking care of customers on autopilot. Anything more complex than matching a pair of skis to the proper bindings, I shoved off onto Hadley. She took care of the employees and their endless problems, smiled at the customers when I failed to, pointed me to the office and closed the door behind me when I stood comatose before the cash register, trying to recall what to do with the money in my hand.