Fairy Tale Blues (6 page)

Dad broke into my thoughts. “That's quite a pup your neighbors got.” He scanned around the radio. “Didn't we used to own one of them wild-haired terriers when you were a kid?”

“Not wild-haired.
Wire-haired.
Yep. Smokey. Shank and Lucille's puppy is a mix though. Part Lhasa apso, part unknown. They said there was one more left in the litter. I should get it; I could use the company when you leave.”

“Sending me off already?”

“I just feel much better with you here, so I'm thinking ahead.”

“And thinking I can just as easily be replaced with a mutt,” he said, finding his station at last. He looked happy. Dad thrived on having a mission. Today's mission was setting me up with furniture.

He began to hum along with Peter Gabriel singing “Biko.” I smiled, knowing Dad didn't realize who Biko was, and that if he did know he was an African freedom fighter, he'd probably change the channel. I decided to keep the information to myself for now.

“Cats are better,” Dad interrupted his humming. “They keep the rats out of the palmettos. Or bring them in,” he added with a chuckle. “When we first moved down here, we had some bankers for dinner. Hoped to get a good loan for our first store. You probably don't remember this, but our cat Auggie dragged a big rat in the house through his cat door. The rat got loose, and Auggie chased that thing around our guests' feet. What a night. Never got that loan.” Dad slowed for another stoplight and turned up the radio to join in along with the final chorus, “ ‘Biko. Biko-oo-oo-oooo, Biko.' ”

My parents had sold the Cincinnati store as soon as I graduated from high school and left for college. They moved to Miami to open a ski shop. Right—I always had to repeat to friends—ski shop, Miami. Then I'd have to explain how my father had learned Miami had the largest ski club in the United States, but nowhere to buy gear for their trips. Now Teague Family Sports sold everything from skis to snorkels.

“I tell you,” my dad summed up when the song was over, “you think you've come to paradise, flying down here to Florida, but you've just come to a bunch of rats and dying people.” He wheeled into a U-turn, then pulled into the parking lot of Beds & More.

Dad loved Florida. He was just contrary. Sometimes when he talked, he canceled out much of what he said in the first half of his sentence with the last half. Also he was negative. My mother used to call him the “crepe hanger,” said he'd missed his calling and his century, that hanging the black crepe over the windows and mirrors when someone died could have been his perfect career.

I said, “Florida is great; you're just lonesome. You need to meet someone.” I got out of the car and waited for Dad to lock up. The Eldorado locked automatically, but Dad never trusted it and walked around the car testing all four doors each time. “The last few days I've seen women your age walking the beach that look wonderful with their bare feet and tanned legs.”

“Were they short? Guatemalans, probably.”

Jess

 

 

“M
orning,Jess.”Hadley turned to hang her jacket on a peg beside the office door. She glanced over her shoulder to me while stuffing her gloves in the pockets. “You look better today. Hear from Annie?” Of us all, Hadley dressed the best. While I often worked in my ski bibs, ready to shoot out the door for a couple runs, and Annie traipsed around in her socks, Hadley wore nice wool skirts, dress boots, sweaters and often a matching jacket or vest. Not even Jackson Hole bankers dressed that well. And the employee pool in this valley was a mess by city standards. Though every one of the kids was clean with shiny hair, that hair was rarely combed and they all looked like they'd slept on somebody's sofa in their clothes the night before. Which was probably true and the reason we had showers installed in our employee restrooms. The cost of living in this valley was exorbitant. Kids—again by Jackson Hole standards that meant anywhere from teens through late thirties—often lived out of a duffel bag and slept where they could. They worked only to spend money on ski gear and season passes.

“She phoned last night.” I grinned and stapled a packing slip to its matching invoice, slit open another envelope and unfolded the bill. “Her dad, Skip, is visiting her.”

Hadley, a bit older than me, maybe fifty-three or so, had worked with Annie and me almost since the beginning over twenty years ago. She knew the whole family, was witness to our marriage, watched the boys grow up, had met our visiting relatives. She kept her personal life to herself pretty much, but Annie and I, working here together with our boys around all the time, couldn't have hidden much even if we'd wanted to.

She said, “How is Skip?”

“I give AnnieLaurie two and a half weeks, three on the outside, before the guy drives her right over the Mississippi and back into my arms. Which is to say: the Skipper hasn't changed one bit.”

Hadley laughed. Some of that laughter I imagined was relief to see me in a good mood for a change.

My father-in-law was a great guy; he had a good heart despite his mouth, but don't make me spend two days in a row with him or even sit me next to him at dinner. Down the table some, I thought he was witty and smart, and when he picked up the tab for the whole family—our group and Daisy's—I thought he was damn generous.

But up close, if his foot wasn't in his mouth, it was bobbing enough to make the silverware jingle. His brain moved faster than anybody else's tongue, so he was way ahead of whoever had the conversational ball and invariably clipped off their story with a one-liner that made even the target of his joke—and there was always a target—laugh hard.

Though he was funny as hell sometimes, I just ended up feeling invisible after a while. I found I wanted to run out the restaurant door and jump into the Indian River in hopes that a shark had wandered through the Intercoastal Waterway and desperately needed sustenance just then.

“Things are nuts out there this morning,” Hadley said. “When it quiets down, I'm popping over to the Ski Corps offices and see if they have some job applicants they can spare. We need more help.” When she saw my face, she added, “Temporarily.” It was one thing to have Annie gone today; it was another to plan for her to be gone tomorrow. And the day after that.

Hadley left the office, shutting the door behind her. I stopped going through the mail and stared at Annie's desk. While I hoped the Skipper got on her nerves real quick, I liked that he had driven up to Hibiscus to visit her. She was crazy about him. Daisy, too. He was the big family patriarch right down the line. And I wondered sometimes how I had gotten into this line. But I loved the Skipper's daughter. I flipped through the recent packing slips and matched another to its invoice. The unpaid bill pile was growing.

The family's sports-gear business had grabbed me unexpectedly hard, too, just as it had the Skipper. “Hard by the nuts,” as he said. The aspect of business as play or play as business lured me in. AnnieLaurie could take it or leave it—same with Daisy and her husband. So I was the only guy the Skipper knew who got the big bang out of Teague Family Sports that he did. Hell, he never relented trying to get me to change my name to Teague.

“McFall, McFall. What kind of name is that, Jess? Sounds defeatist. McFall, McFailure. Hell, Jess, I'd change the name of the store in a heartbeat if you just had a decent name.”

Ha. He wouldn't change the name if a heartbeat depended on it.

I didn't care about that—just let me go to the store every day and have it be my job to test our new ski line in the snow during the winter and our new hiking gear on the trails during the summer. Most of our return customers were people I'd made friends with over the years. I was good with the customer end. Annie stayed here in the office; she was good with the business end. She often suggested that TFS, which was the shortened name we used for the Jackson Hole store, didn't need a social director as much as it needed someone who made the orders, kept up with inventory, dealt with the help and on and on—don't get her started. She liked to dismiss the importance of customer relations as well as my work with sales reps and preferred to think that we'd get our discounts whether I took them out heli-skiing or not. I didn't know how she thought I'd get to my work now that she had taken off and left the whole damn shebang for me to deal with.

The phone began ringing, two lines at once, and I figured I'd better grab them since Hadley said we were especially busy out front and short-handed to boot. Besides my having to pay the invoices, which was Annie's job, new catalogs were piling up unread, which was my job. I would page through them, circle the gear we should order, the T-shirt and cap designs; then Annie ordered the appropriate amounts of them. Give me a latte, my desk by the window loaded with a stack of catalogs and I'd call it a good morning's work. Then lunch, gear up and guide a rep or old customer down a ski trail and I'd call it a good afternoon's work. Now loaded down with Annie's stuff, who knew when I'd get to my own?

I wrangled phone calls for the next hour, intermittently slashing open mail, then got the bright idea of shifting the unpaid invoices cluttering my desk onto Hadley's desk. Since she was hiring someone for the floor out front, she'd have a little more time for office duty. Because enough was enough. I took a break, kicked back on my desk chair and watched the early-morning skiers tack downhill outside my window. The day was a dazzle of crisp light, blue sky with icy cloud shavings. It had snowed four inches overnight, but early this morning temperatures had spiraled down into the single digits below zero, too cold to snow.

I wouldn't get to mess around in the garage with my inventions, either. When Annie up and left, I was working on a kind of fleece ski hat—earflaps, visor—all with a goggle lens attached. This deal would revolutionize the industry.

My garage and our cars had no carnal knowledge of each other. From the beginning the space was mine alone to fool around in. I insulated it, heated it and put in a raised floor and good windows. I had an old treadle sewing machine in there and bolts of fleece, which were mostly in scraps on the floor right now. It was a two-car garage, so I could spread out. I had projects started all over the place. And none finished, Annie liked to point out when she came across a bill from Malden Mills for more fleece. But I planned to move in a big way on this hat-goggle deal. This one was going to travel the distance.

I watched a snowboarder careen downhill at top speed, wobble on a curve. I sat up straight, then leaped to my feet. The tumble was a fierce one, on and on downhill. I was afraid he'd never stop. And when he did, I was afraid he'd never live through the beating he'd gotten. I was too far away to help, of course, but my hand was already dialing ski patrol. I reached them, put in the report; and while I watched, they were on it. Patrollers zoomed over from the next slope in a snowmobile, a stretcher dragging behind it. I saw the boarder gesturing with his arms to the patrollers before they loaded him. A reassuring sign. I sat back in my chair and watched the rescue.

Annie said it was the solitude and creativity that counted with my time in the garage. Or she would say Creativity. Capital C. Lately, this seemed to be Annie's thing—the importance of creative energy. Which she claimed she had none of in her job running the store.

That was what started things changing with her. She began to mess up the dining room table with projects—yarn, fabrics, and then got into collages. But one day she just shoved them away and didn't seem too encouraged to go on with that work. It was a relief when she got that crap out of the dining room.

Creativity. She sure got creative with our marriage. Who the hell ever heard of taking a sabbatical from a marriage?

Nobody, that's who.

Annie

 

 

M
y dad helped in two important ways: he came to visit and he left. His departure allowed me to claim my new apartment as much as his arrival did. I was so relieved to have the place to myself once I waved him off, I walked up my outside steps with a new sense of belonging. Before opening the door I stood on the top landing and admired the glitter of ocean between the rooftops, the grassy backyard and the shaded side yard where my landlords, Shank and Lucille, stood holding hands outside their screened Florida room, heads tipped toward their puppy, laughing at her antics with a rag doll. Both of them were retired, in their seventies, and I imagined they enjoyed long days and evenings together, and I marveled at that. How come he didn't get on her nerves? I would have trouble hanging around the house all day with Jess, week after week. Although we enjoyed each other's company, had lively conversations, lots of fun and even worked companionably in the store, it often felt like too much by the weekend. My landlords seemed to manage just fine. Sunday afternoon and they were shoulder to shoulder, holding hands. They felt my eyes on them, looked up and waved. I waved back, thinking, Boy, do I have a lot of work to do on my marriage. I opened my door and went inside.

I had my dad to thank for furnishing the place, even though I hadn't succeeded at steering him away from the cheap and tacky items that so pleased him. I stood before my biggest failure: a boxy wood glider, upholstered in chartreuse.

“I'm telling you, this damn Florida sun fades everything,” Dad had said. “A couple hours sitting by a window and this outfit will be light as a grapefruit.”

I began to slide the glider directly toward the nearest window, then changed my mind and made an abrupt turn toward the guest room. Let Dad live with this monster when he visited.

The most draining thing since leaving Jess was my indecisive-ness. There seemed no real reason for doing one thing over another. Though I had been forced into making decisions about my marriage sabbatical, the process had been little more than just accepting what came my way.