Fairy Tale Blues

by Tina Welling

I yanked the ribbon Annie had placed around my shoulders, wadded it up and tossed it across the table beside the torn wrapping paper from the gift I’d given her.

  As it turned out Davy, who worked in our store years ago, now managed the bar upstairs. He offered to drive me home in half an hour. While I waited, I finished the bottle of champagne. Figured I’d go home and face the music with a bit of a buzz. I pictured Annie sitting on the sofa with her well-ordered grievance laid like a snare, waiting for me to place one word in the noose. It’d be a full hour before I could get Annie giggling over the problem and carry her off to bed.

  While Davy drove and described his day of skiing—“I’m not kidding, Jess, powder to the armpits.”—I worked up a good anger about the wasted ninety-five-dollar bottle of champagne. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Annie’s probable response bubbled to the surface: That the money wasn’t as wasted as I was. Hell, I’d be better off apologizing right away, I decided. But all the while I knew this night was not usual. Neither of us was the dramatic type. We didn’t slam doors or yell or throw pots of oatmeal at the walls. And we never just up and left the other guy.

  Davy dropped me off in the driveway. My heart beat so fast I detoxed on the doorstep. Sober as the sun, I opened the door and found an empty house.

  When Annie didn’t turn up by midnight, I called my friend Judge Eddy and urged him to discreetly ask questions at the police station about any road accidents, avalanches, a woman hurt.

  I finished throwing up the champagne about three in the morning. At five she phoned.

  Three

  Annie

  He picked up the phone on the first ring. “Jess,” I said. “Annie Laurie. God, are you okay? Where are you?” “Florida.” “Florida.” He said it like a foreign word, as if trying to wring meaning out of incomprehensible sounds. He even pronounced it Flor-da, leaving out a syllable.

  I didn’t know how to explain myself, so I jumped in with the obvious. “I’m going to spend the day here.”

  “The day?”

  “Well, maybe longer. You know, take some time.”

  “No, I don’t know. What the hell are you doing?”

  I had no idea what I was doing. Leaving like this was the most impulsive act of my life. Then the perfect answer came to me. Last year, at the store, we’d hired a professor from an East Coast university who was taking the winter off in Jackson Hole to rest and do research.

  I said, “I’m taking a sabbatical.”

  “A teaching sabbatical?” Jess sounded completely puzzled.

  “A marriage sabbatical.”

  “Shit, what does that mean?”

  “A semester or two off. You know . . . some time.”

  “Annie, why?” Anger crept into his voice; he sounded defensive already. “What the hell? Didn’t you like the earrings?”

  Jess thought he was making a joke. “Nice as the ones you gave me last Valentine’s Day.”

  Silence.

  “Really? Oh. Annie, gee,” he said boyishly. I heard him sigh; then he gathered momentum. “But look, it’s not like I got my girlfriends mixed up. I got my earrings mixed up. We can solve this. You don’t just walk out on me in a restaurant while I wait and wait and the champagne goes flat and people stare.”

  How embarrassing. I hadn’t thought of that. Then I came to myself. This was often how our arguments turned. I slipped easily out of my own feelings and sank deeply into his.

  “Well, AnnieLaurie?”

  I held my silence.

  “Please come home, Annie. We’ll talk.”

  My favorite thing—talk—and he knew it. However, it really meant: I talked, and Jess sat with his jaw muscles clenched, his eyes staring into the distance.

  The image settled something for me. I could not take that look one more time without doing something a lot more drastic than going on a temporary leave of absence. If I didn’t deal with the feelings I’d been experiencing in my marriage now, my miseries would continue to mount.

  “I’m not coming home. Maybe in a few months.” Suddenly I felt as though there was much catching up to do, as if I had missed a lot of classes and needed to hand in makeup work. I had been accusing Jess of not dealing with our problems, but now I suspected that was true of me. I had pushed my dissatisfactions aside while doing my work and Jess’ at the store, wearing myself down to ensure that I would be too tired to do anything more than numb out each evening on the sofa, too weary even to fight for control of the TV remote.

  I would take a sabbatical, rest and do research.

  “No more talk, Jess.”

  “Look, I’ll fly down. We’ll work this out. I love you. I’m sorry about the earrings. I just . . . forgot.”

  “You didn’t forget, Jess. I’ve worn those earrings for almost a year. Every day, all day. You don’t look at me anymore.”

  “Oh, now it’s that I don’t look at you. Usually it’s that I don’t listen to you. What next, Annie, I don’t smell you?”

  “I need a rest from being your wife, Jess. Don’t come down; give me the time I need. Maybe a few months will do it. I’ll be fine. My family is close.”

  “A few months is too long. Besides, even your sister, Daisy, would notice your presence among her piles of crap after that long and wonder why you’re still around.”

  “I’m not at Daisy’s.” Leave it to Jess to get smart-alecky when he lost the reins. “I’m in a hotel. I’ll let you know when I want to see you. And I will want to, Jess.” My voice had begun to shake. I hung up.

  I looked around the hotel room, then sat on the edge of the bed on bunched-up sheets, where I’d tried to rest those couple hours before dawn. I opened my mouth to inhale a big breath, and a wail rose from my chest that sounded so alien I nearly checked behind me to find the source. A sob wrenched my body, doubling me in half. I curled onto the bed and muffled my face in the pillow. I bawled loud and hoarse, sounding like a bison calf lost in the sagebrush. I bawled until my throat ached and my stomach muscles were sore from the heaving.

  I sat up and reached for tissues on the bedside table. Blew my nose and saw that the early-morning sky was brightening. The rosy carpet almost matched the line of clouds lifting the sun into place. Crying made me more miserable, as if the baptism of tears gave confirmation to my sorrow. Even so, I lay down on the bed again and let the pillow absorb more whimpers.

  I must have dozed off a bit. When I opened my eyes, my palms immediately pressed against my chest, and I wondered what awful injury I’d sustained. Undigested grief, as if a bonfire, smoldered there. More like a “bonefire,” as it was called centuries back, a fire of bones burned inside me.

  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 ha
d 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.

  Four

  Jess

  What 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.

  Five

  Annie

  Still 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 t
o 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.

  Six

  Jess

  To 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.