Fairy Tale Blues (7 page)

Once, this state of indecision described my daily life. I used to check in with Jess about every little thing. But that changed about five years ago. I leaned up from pushing the glider and stared out the guest room window.

It began when I came across an old box of broken Crayolas from when the boys were little. I was about to toss them out, but instead found paper, sat down right there beside a window on the dusty subflooring of the storage room and drew abstract shapes and filled them in. I discovered the sweet oblivion that occurred when doing something you enjoyed for no reason other than the pleasure of it. The colors, all that light, I felt as if I had fallen in love with the sun.

Early-summer heat had accumulated in the uninsulated storage room built above our attached garage, so I opened the window. A wasp flew searchingly up and down the outside of the screen. I had always thought them unattractive, but I saw then that the wasp's body glistened with vitality. The hum of its wings seemed to be the sound of the cosmos. All that I saw from the second-story window hummed along with the wasp—the pines on Snow King Mountain, the aspens below in my yard, the chittering white-crowned sparrows bathing in dust beneath the black current bush, the lupine blossoms, my salad garden. And I was included; I hummed. My senses sharpened; I smelled the warmed metal screening, felt the afternoon air nuzzle my face and heard the distinctive call of a red-tailed hawk.

I had been writing in my journal for a few months by then, bit by bit opening to an awareness of myself and my experience outside of my roles as employer, wife, mother. In that moment I felt part of nature's exchange—the breathing in, the breathing out, the taking and the giving of the earth—what we called life.

I was filled with a sense of well-being, purpose and celebration. As if I were suddenly in on it all. As if every musician, entrepreneur, artist, inventor, dancer, actor and adventurer was related to me, was someone I understood and who would accept me as one of them. I was a magician, one minute cleaning out an old toy chest, the next producing luminosity.

I looked at the box of crayons in my hand, and I felt as though I held the secret of the universe: create. Create anything and be part of the great gushing fountain that waters aliveness.

That afternoon I began to want something for myself, just for myself, when all of my married life and motherhood I had only wanted things for others—Jess and our sons. And after coloring another sheet of paper, I decided that what I wanted was time and materials to work with and a place undisturbed in which to do it.

I sat there on the floor before the open window and realized I didn't have artistic talent; I couldn't draw, never could, not even bunnies for our children when they used to ask. How could I be creative, work around that lack of skill? I didn't want to involve Jess, the acknowledged artist in the family, with this question. I wanted to figure it out on my own, already sensing that I needed to keep this tender new passion close to myself. Since it was color I loved, I decided perhaps I could sew a patchwork coverlet and embroider colorful designs on it like one I had stored in a trunk that my great-grandmother had created. I found the coverlet and studied it.

That night after dinner, I followed through on my plan and covered the dining room table with my first project. In the storage room I'd found a pair of torn velvet pants of mine, several outdated silk neckties and old brocade draperies. I cut odd shapes out of the fabrics and began to sew them together, practically getting high on the color combinations. A late-evening dash to K-Mart for embroidery threads, and I was off.

“What's up?” Jess asked, passing through the dining room from watching TV with the boys.

“I'm making a crazy quilt.”

“Good name—it looks pretty crazy to me.”

The next morning I couldn't bear to leave my project and toted it to the shop to work on in free moments, which that day I began to create in my busy schedule. Doing something pleasurable just for me cleared the way for the real me to just pop right out and assert itself all over the place. In less than a year, this discovery of independent pleasure turned into a growing confidence that spread into all the areas of my life. I swear, I walked differently, I talked differently; everything I did was done with intention and wakefulness. It felt as if a dark veil, muting sights and sounds, feelings and thoughts, had lifted from me. I was alive, living through my own awareness, rather than the eyes of my family, and I was enjoying it. This new sense of self flowed into my work at the store, and while my resentment built over how much time Jess took off to ski and hike, I welcomed taking on more responsibility and began consulting Jess less. In the evenings and on weekends, I sat at the dining room table and created useful items for the house, gifts for friends when my projects turned out well, and donations to the secondhand store when they failed. It didn't matter where my projects ended up; I just wanted to create them, pass them on, create more.

And then I stopped. I created nothing else. I cleaned off the dining room table. I tried not to let myself miss it. I thought things would get better between Jess and me if I let it go. He was the creative one. I had known that from the beginning. The store was just to hold us until he got either famous or rich, or both. And here I was, bit by bit, borrowing his school art supplies, stashed away in his workroom these past decades, and using them myself. At first he had helped me, but then he began to take offense at my pastime, starting with complaints, ending with a full-out confrontation for which he'd dragged in our sons.

I returned Jess' art supplies to storage.

Yet it was too late for me to change back into the indecisive, dependent woman I once was. The confidence stayed; the wakefulness became a restlessness that I directed toward the store. And an uncomfortable severity edged my usually soft nature. I took charge of the store, the house, our social life, whatever crossed my path. And Jess backed off, more and more.

 

I left the chartreuse upholstered glider in the guest room and went into my bedroom and hung up clothes I'd bought this weekend. Dad had pestered me impatiently to hurry up, while slowing the process by pulling out his glasses and checking the price tags on items I'd selected, complaining about the markup. “They don't keystone clothing, you know. Hell, the profit on this stuff must be quadruple the cost, maybe more.” He was such a nuisance that I only grabbed a couple changes of clothing. “This rag isn't worth sixty bucks. There was perfectly good stuff at K-Mart for you to wear.”

I hung a blue cotton skirt in my closet beside a couple of matching tees and went into the front room to find a container to hold my underwear, since I had no dresser drawers. I rummaged around in my findings and discovered a big straw shoulder bag that I'd imagined holding a plant on the screened porch. I cleaned it out and hung it from the hook on the closet door and stuffed my panties and bras inside.

I put some lunch together now and took it out to the porch. I brought along a short stack of the secondhand books that I had bought at the flea market before Dad arrived—two old Somerset Maugham novels I thought I'd reread and a couple of Florida history books. But instead I ignored them and while I ate watched the blue-gray triangle of ocean against the pale sky.

 

In the beginning, when we were first married, I let Jess be in charge of our life together. He was older, more experienced and so good at reading me that I was barely aware he made all the decisions.

We said our wedding vows in a Cincinnati church full of my family's old friends, and after we'd said them, we looked at each other there before the altar and laughed right out loud with the joy and audacity of it.

That night Jess and I sat in the hotel lounge before going to the honeymoon suite he had reserved for us.

I said to him, “Love doesn't exist until it's put into action. Until then, the emotion is mere sentimentalism.” Twenty years old. I felt wise, with a jump start on life. I said, “Really, Jess, let's not ever forget that.” I lifted my glass of 7-Up for a sip. I wasn't old enough to order alcohol in Ohio, unless you counted 3.2 beer.

Jess, at twenty-four, clinked my glass with his bottle of six-percent beer. “Drink up and let's go put love into action right now.” He kissed me on the neck to soften his wedding-night bawdiness, and I laughed.

This memory reminded me of what I had stuck in my purse to help celebrate our anniversary. A small leather-bound notebook. I took my empty plate into the kitchen and went to my bedroom to find my beaded bag.

 

Once locked into our honeymoon suite, Jess pulled his tie out of his pocket where he'd stuck it shortly after we'd raced through rice to our getaway car. I expected him to toss the tie on the coffee table, setting between the sofa and marble fireplace, and I slipped out of my heels, wiggling my toes into the lush jewel-patterned carpet. Jess surprised me by tucking his tie under his collar and knotting it with careful deliberation, checking that the ends lay flat against his shirt. He adjusted his collar, gave his neck the customary stretch, then bent his knees to watch his reflection in the darkened hotel window while he smoothed back his brown, almost black hair with his pocket comb. He pulled the drapes closed across the window, then turned to me.

“You,” he said.

“Me?” I asked, as if chosen out of a lineup and about to produce an alibi. I had stood mesmerized by his preparations, wondering wildly if he were heading out on a date with someone else.

“You.” He offered me his hand and guided me into the bedroom. He flung the double-sheeted duvet back, exposing a white expanse, like a blank canvas for us to paint ourselves across. Jess set me down, lifted my legs onto the bed, and stretched me out on the sheet.

From the inside breast pocket of his new going-away suit, Jess removed a pen and a small leather-bound notebook and laid them both—notebook open, pen uncapped—on the hotel's bedside table.

I began to laugh nervously, as if Jess were focusing a camera on me for porno shots. I felt pink with pleasure though. “What are you . . . ?”

“Shh,”
he whispered. Picked up his notebook and wrote while reading his words out loud. “Surprises excite her.”

“Jess,” I laughed.

He set down his notebook and lifted my foot, running his forefinger up the center sole. Then he reported that action in the notebook and added my response, “Toes curl, lips part.”

Jess filled pages of the small notebook. He had already intuited me as a person who needed to be reached through my mind. Once given entrance, mixing science and sensuousness, he tunneled straight to my heart. When, hours later, Jess and I lay exhausted with sensation, he wrote his final entries, closed the book and handed it to me along with the pen—a Mont Blanc, as sleek and beautiful as a Rolls-Royce—his wedding gifts to me.

 

I opened the notebook now and read.

I had easily become caught up in this game. One we had never played before or since, though we cherished the book and read it together on anniversaries. Always our language was locked into that quick jotting style. Jess could whisper to me, “Wet kisses on nostrils: tongue touches bottom teeth,” and I was a goner.

I turned to his final jottings.

I smiled, eyes watering. No one on this earth knew me the way Jess did. No one ever would. Jess knew me the way a gardener knew a plant raised from seed, witnessing the first emerging tendril, the unfolding of each waxy leaf. Jess watched me as I grew from a college sophomore into a woman, then his wife and the mother of our sons. He had loved me well. Beneath his recent preoccupation I knew that he still did.

I used to tease Jess that now all I needed to do was hand the book to any guy for a fun night. But there was never any guy other than Jess, not before we'd met or since. Women who have had sex with only one man all their lives are throwbacks, anachronisms, as rare as witches.

I sighed deeply and, feeling restless, stepped outside on my landing to check the sky. Shank and Lucille's puppy whimpered up at me from the bottom step. “Come on up, Mitzi.” I patted my thighs. “You can visit.” But she got altitude sickness on the third step, so I went down, sat on the bottom step and lifted her onto my lap. At home my dogs rarely left my side. A black Lab and two golden retrievers. They even lay outside the bathroom door, with one paw slid beneath the door so I'd not be lonesome. I ached now, I was so lonesome.

All three were named after mountains Jess and I had hiked in Jackson Hole: Leidy, Bannon and Ranger. The three dogs leaped into the car with Jess or me and spent their day at our store, gathering ear rubs. They rode to the bank with us, where every drive-in teller in our valley passed out Milk-Bones; and they accompanied us to dinner parties at friends' homes, where the three of them rested with the other guests' dogs around the dining table.

In Wyoming everybody owned a dog, usually a big one. Down here I'd spotted seagulls bigger than most Florida dogs. Tiny teacup poodles, Yorkies and frilly shih tzus that would serve as mere canapes for the coyotes back home.

Now I buried my face in Mitzi's soft puppy fur and wished she were my dog so I had the right to drop tears onto her sweet neck. She squirmed off my lap and I walked back upstairs.

 

I replaced the notebook in my beaded bag and tucked both away. Jess had dedicated our entire wedding night to knowing me intimately. I had dedicated the next two and a half decades to knowing Jess intimately. And though I wallowed in his attentions the night of our wedding and felt comforted by his gathered knowledge of me, Jess always felt uneasy by my gathered knowledge of him, as if I were stealing something I'd use as leverage against him in the future.