Fairy Tale Blues

by Tina Welling

  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.

  Three dogs with tennis balls in their mouths, icy with frozen saliva and snow, pranced at my knees ready for another toss. One by one I let the balls drop into my open palm and gave them hearty throws. Then walked on. The creek was piled with frozen blocks of ice, great shelves reached out from both shores, and now, standing on the pathway bridge, I saw icy blades grow upward from the creek floor, appearing like stalagmites.

  The trouble started back when our older son, Saddler, left for college two and a half years ago, and intensified a year later when his brother followed him. It threw me back to my own college years and felt almost as if that was the last time I’d had a chance to look up and direct my life. I had to stop and think what choices I’d made since then. Marrying Annie was the best one. After that, I don’t remember making any choices; one thing just triggered another—business, house, kids. But I loved my life, every damn thing about it, except that I had meant to get ahead on my design ideas. No, the trouble started earlier, five years back when Annie began to veer off, doing stuff on her own. I had always worried about what that would lead to, and now I guess I knew.

  I kept looking for some distraction from this loneliness. Memories worked like drugs; while I was under the influence of them, I was happy, but once they passed I felt worse, hungover, heart heavy. Still, they beckoned to me all day long.

  Shortly after that morning in bed when I told AnnieLaurie that I didn’t know who she was anymore, the whole family went down to Florida. AnnieLaurie, me, the boys. End of ski season, which coincided with our sons’ spring break from high school, so we closed the store and took off. Instead of staying at Daisy’s litter box or their folks’ page out of House Beautiful, I rented a place of our own out on Hutchinson Island. We spent the days just lying on the sand, except for Annie, who kept her cell phone in her beach bag and confirmed store orders for the summer season coming up.

  The boys and I played ball, swam out far enough to scare Annie, lost interest in that and lay around reading. Cam, our younger son, was into odd stuff, New-Aging it up with some book about astral projections and auras—had us concentrating on clouds to make them disappear. They disappeared, too. Somehow. But it was boring work, and once Cam wandered off with Saddler, I picked up his book, fanned the pages and spotted the name Anwar Sadat. Started reading. Turned out this author claimed Sadat was a “walk-in.” A what? I had to read backward to discover this meant advanced spirits who have moved into the bodies of people already on earth. You recognized them by sudden, inexplicable changes in personality. Of course, you had to rule out schizophrenia first.

  Some mean guy, Anwar Sadat, until one day he woke up on the dirty floor of an Egyptian prison . . . and became a peacemaker.

  I checked on AnnieLaurie. She was talking to Ouray Sports about our summer tees and sweats, making decisions right and left, not looking at me for a clue to what she should buy. When did this happen? Once she couldn’t decide between white and off-white without covering the mouthpiece on the phone and begging me to choose.

  Maybe AnnieLaurie was a walk-in.

  I sat up, dangled the book between my sunburned knees and looked out over the ocean. The sun was still low enough to backlight the larger waves; I saw fish swimming in the swells. So many things were different about her lately. She used to be uneasy alone. Now she loved her solitude. Once we did everything together; she wanted that, even though sometimes I just dragged along behind her, like when we were attending buying shows for the store.

  When did she begin taking little trips alone? Yellowstone for four days this past winter, stayed in the Snow Lodge, skied around Old Faithful, ate all her meals by herself, even candlelit dinners.

  I was sure she was alone. Annie was the kind of woman who confessed erotic dreams. She would never sneak behind my back.

  That settled it then, I joked to myself—she was a walk-in.

  I volunteered to jog toward Stuart Beach to pick up our halibut submarines and bring them back for lunch. Time to think.

  Stuck some money in my pocket and went down close to the surf on the hard sand and jogged up toward the lighthouse at the House of Refuge. Used to be Annie would bounce off some idea for a trip, and when I’d squelch it, she dropped it. Now it was almost as if she hoped to go alone and asked just to be polite. And all this time I thought I had control of when and where we traveled. That was my job: planned trips, got reservations, laid maps all over the countertops at the store and asked our customers for advice. When we arrived someplace strange, I knew where to go for the best food and wine, the most interesting sights and the best museums and shopping.

  Last fall I said to her, “I told the Quinns we’d go to Santa Fe for a long weekend next month.”

  This kind of tactic used to start a tirade about how I never tell her stuff. But she shrugged off one of my biggest crimes: making promises to other people on her behalf without checking in with her. All she said was, “First I heard of that. Maybe another time.” What the hell was happening if I couldn’t make her angry anymore?

  Making her angry was my leverage. She got so wrapped up in trying to get me to understand how serious my transgression was that we never got around to actually addressing the transgression itself. In fact, it never seemed to occur to her that she could refuse doing whatever I’d set up. Once, that woman could not say no—period.

  Now she could say no to me, and she could say no to the Quinns. Old friends, the Quinns. Annie and Gina were especially tight. I stopped to pick up a piece of beach glass, green, probably once an old Coke
bottle. Since recycling I rarely found beach glass. Now I just found globs of oil from tanker spills. I put the glass in my pocket and took off at a trot; I’d make it a present to Annie.

  Annie and I always talked about how hard it was to find a couple with both a man and a woman we liked. Usually one of them was a jerk; usually it was the man. But the Quinns were both great. They weren’t mad about the Santa Fe deal falling through. We had enough history together to help us forgive one another most anything rough that came up.

  I was thinking especially about the year Gina and Jim gave us a puppy for Christmas; then Jim ran over it backing out of the driveway that same evening. Annie and I didn’t know which to hold a grudge over: surprising us with a puppy we didn’t want or killing it right when we started to warm up to the little tyke. So we just said, Hell, let’s forget the whole deal.

  That Santa Fe trip never happened. Neither did the expected tirade. And Annie didn’t seem one bit worried about what the Quinns thought. She never asked a thing about it. Like that was a problem I’d created and I could fix. She had drawn some line in the sandbox, clear only to her, that defined her territory from mine, where once there was only our territory.

  When I got to Stuart Beach, I ordered the halibut subs at the snack hut, then waited for them at a picnic table on the deck. Squirrels popped in and out of the garbage cans, gathering French fries and bread crusts. I watched, fascinated by their tiny, adept paws as they sat eating on top of the picnic table next to me. And while I watched, one of the little stinkers squatted and peed right on the table. As Jim Quinn would say, Note to self: never eat on the snack hut picnic tables. I removed my elbows from the tabletop. The cook called my number. I picked up the family’s lunch and started back down the beach.

  Anyway, thinking about it, I saw that held the first clues that if Annie was a walk-in, some advanced being from out of this world, I could be in trouble.

  Then again, I thought, I could be in worse trouble if Annie wasn’t a walk-in. She might just lose patience one of these days and . . . be a walk-out.

  But I hadn’t really believed that at the time.

  Seven

  Annie

  Yesterday I found an apartment above a retired couple’s garage only four and a half blocks from the beach. Pretty fast work, considering that was my third day in Hibiscus. Spent the first day benumbed on the hotel balcony, the next one walking the beach and on the third day I found this place and wired the bank for rent money. That action was the result of deciding a few things. One, that I was definitely going to carry through on my plan to take a sabbatical from my marriage. Two, that I wanted to settle here in Hibiscus, near my family but not with them. And three, that I needed to set myself up here before driving down to see Daisy.

  This morning I hit the flea market and secondhand stores to furnish my new place. I planned to pack it with stuff, just stuff, as if having things to organize and dust would root me here. A place to be, with things to do. Already, piles of old, chipped pots and vases, splintery birdhouses and amateur paintings of bougainvillea and sea grape on gesso board lined the edges of the bare floors and covered the kitchen counters.

  I was lowering an incomplete set of blue-and-white dishes into sudsy dishwater when I heard voices at the bottom of my outside staircase. I didn’t know the neighborhood sounds yet and all morning kept running to my windows to check out why my landlord’s puppy barked or which passing neighbor called a greeting to some other neighbor gardening. These particular voices were climbing right up my steps.

  I toweled my hands dry as I walked out to my screened porch.

  My landlord, Shank, nodded a greeting to me. “Here she is,” he called over his shoulder. He set a suitcase down on the landing.

  From the yard below his wife, Lucille, urged someone up the steps.

  The top of a head appeared first, covered by a Teague Family Sports cap. The only clue I needed.

  “Daddy.”

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  I tucked the paper towel in my pocket and unlatched the screen door. “What are you doing here?”

  “Thanks,” he called to Shank, who was on his way back down the stairs. Dad turned to me. “Should I have tipped that colored fellow?”

  “Of course not. He owns the place.” Leave it to my father to assume anyone dark-skinned doing him a favor was a bellhop. I stepped to the railing and waved to Lucille down below, while checking to be sure Shank had not been in earshot of my father’s remark. Then I hugged Dad.

  “I’m surprised to see you.” Dad felt firm in my arms, still muscular and lean at seventy-five. He had always loved athletics, been good at almost all sports throughout his life, but these days he kept mostly to golf.

  “You didn’t sound so good on the phone. Thought I’d come up for the weekend.”

  I’d phoned to give him my new address. This time Dad had related a newspaper article about a man arrested for having three wives. “I know I cried again, but, Dad, you tell the most depressing stories.”

  “You cried pretty darn hard. You think Jess has some extra wives?”

  “Of course not. Is that why you’re here?”

  “No, no. I came to help you find some furniture.”

  “I just felt sorry for that man’s wives.” It choked me up again to think of the three of them, each blaming herself for her husband’s lack of attention—which was what I had done for the past few years—while all along the husband was committing polygamy. Sometime back, while waiting in the dentist’s office, I checked out a woman’s magazine quiz titled “Is He Having an Affair?” Though I knew Jess was faithful and always had been, he flunked the test, exhibiting all the symptoms of detachment from the relationship.

  I reached my arms around my father again. “Oh, Dad, it’s wonderful of you to come like this.” I got a bit teary, but held myself in.

  Dad thumped me on the back, as if trying to dislodge something caught in my throat. His kind of affection you needed all your strength to endure. The few times I fell sick as a child, I had to brace myself to receive his sympathy. Thump, thump. “You know your mother and I love you,” he would say.

  Bruised shoulder blades will forever stir my emotions.

  Dad pointed. “Looky there, you can see a bit of ocean. See that sparkle between the rooftops?”

  “I know. I’m looking forward to seeing the sunrise over there.” I’d just moved out of the hotel today, and even though I didn’t have a bed yet, I planned to spend the night camping on the floor. That may have to change now; camping was not one of Dad’s activities; he only considered it a sport if it involved pursuing a ball, which Daisy had told him years ago was a Labrador retriever’s perspective and not a good approach to business.

  I lifted Dad’s suitcase to carry it into the screened porch. Bottles clinked. I paused at the sound, wondering if he’d become a secret drinker. Since Mom’s death, Dad seemed at a loss about how to conduct life on his own.

  “Careful, careful.” He reached urgently to grab his leather bag from me. “You better give me that.”

  “What’s in there?”

  Dad unzipped a side pocket, and three cobalt bottles of Milk of Magnesia tipped out.

  “Three? For just a weekend?”

  “That’s because I knew you’d be knocking them around in there. This way at least one bottle might survive.”

  “Are you sick?” Then I remembered. My dad was overly involved with his regularity, his own and any pet’s of his. Once we had a black standard poodle named Clem, who had learned to squat if he wanted praise or attention from my dad. I hoped to avoid an intestinal update, so directed Dad into my new apartment and told him, “I don’t have any beds yet.”

  “You said on the phone that there are two bedrooms; getting beds in them is the easy part.” He stuck the bottles in three different pockets of his pants, lifted the suitcase himself and followed me into the apartment.

  “Where the hell did all this junk come from? It’s not that colored gal’s, is it?�
� My father held tight to his suitcase, waiting for my answer.

  “It’s my stuff.” I wanted to reprimand both his use of “colored” and “gal” in referring to a black woman easily as mature in years as he was, but Dad didn’t take censure well.

  “Thought you up and left without a stick.” He set his suitcase beside the door and picked up a Mexican pot, its once gaudy colors now faded.

  “I found some garage sales and a flea market. Florida is full of secondhand stuff.”

  “That’s because everybody dies in Florida.” He set the pot back down and started for the sink to wash his hands. “Stick around long, you’ll start dying like the rest of us.” He dried his hands on a paper towel I handed him. “This isn’t too hygienic, you know, bringing in stuff from a bunch of dead people. We got homosexuals down here. They die and infect things.”

  “Dad, gay men don’t infect things, even if they do have AIDS.” I advised myself to back off. My dad had been known to stop speaking to people for similar retorts. Even family. As teenagers Daisy and I got the silent treatment for offering opinions absorbed from the world beyond his realm. I needed my father just now. I picked up his suitcase and carried it to the smaller bedroom behind the kitchen, as if I could secure his company by holding hostage to his belongings. “I know you’re just worried about me, Dad.”

  “Actually, I’m more worried about myself. Getting old, you know. I could pick up something from all this garbage that’d hurry things along.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” I said under my breath, suddenly quite annoyed with him while at the same time relieved not to be alone for a while.

  Dad followed me into the bedroom.

  “By golly, this looks nice.” He peeked out the window. “I’ll be comfortable here.”

  The room was bare as a blown egg. Perhaps he was also advising himself to back off, also relieved not to be alone for a while.

  I said, “We’ll have to get mattresses delivered today and pick up some pillows and sheets.”