by Tina Welling
Right then the phone rang. I picked it up.
Annie said, “Hi.”
No greeting from me. I just said straight out, “I’m going to win you back.”
She didn’t take a breath. “Then that would make you the winner, wouldn’t it, Jess? And make me the loser.”
I said, “Damn it, Annie. I keep trying, but there’s just no . . . winning with you.”
“Right,” she said. “No winning, no losing. This is a love affair not a political race.”
“Semantics. You know what I mean.”
“You always see us in competition, Jess. It’s not a relationship of equals with you—it’s one person winning over the other. A power game. You don’t even mind losing once in a while, because to you losing once in a while is fair. And you try to be fair because you’re such a nice guy.”
There was a sarcasm in her voice on those last words, but I said, “Thanks.”
She didn’t acknowledge that and went right on ranting. “But you have to win most of the time, and in certain areas you have to win all the time. You know that isn’t right in a marriage, but you just can’t let go of the idea of a hierarchy, and you want me to hold that idea, too. But I don’t hold it. You get that, Jess? I am not to be ‘won over.’ ”
I said, “Hell, you don’t have to get angry about it.”
She said, “But I do. Anger gets your attention. You don’t budge unless the flames of my anger singe your pant legs. At first you think, ‘I’ll just spit at this and she’ll subside.’ You dismiss me, saying that I’m exaggerating or that I’m too touchy. And then when the fire doesn’t go out, you unzip your pants and pull out the big fire hose. . . .”
I said again, “Thanks.”
I figured she wouldn’t acknowledge me this time either. But there was a silence. Then I heard the sound that—I swear—was the adhesive that held us together. Laughter.
We laughed harder than my stupid joke deserved. Ripples of pleasure came together in the phone lines.
I said, “Isn’t phone sex great?” It felt like sex. When I reached into the center of Annie’s feelings and tapped her funny bone and sent her into orgasms of laughter, then joined her with my own, it always felt like sex. No matter where she was, in my arms or, like now, three thousand miles away, no matter what she was thinking or feeling, even when she was angry with me, I could get into the center of her—the absolute core of AnnieLaurie—and trigger her pleasure. And every time she accepted me—even the weakest attempt on my part, the lamest joke.
She said, “Yeah, phone sex is great.” And she laughed again.
I filled with love for her and met her laughter with my own. Who said coming at the same time was rare?
I said, “Annie, I love you with my whole heart.” Tears came to my eyes and my voice cracked at the end. I had to love her to be whole. I didn’t care suddenly whether or not she loved me. I just needed to love her.
“Oh,” I said out loud, getting what she meant about winning and losing and how that didn’t belong in a marriage like ours.
“Oh, what?” she asked, her voice low and soft, almost a whisper.
“Oh . . . nothing.”
Thirteen
Annie
When I reached Daisy’s house, no one was home. She and Marcus never locked the doors, so with my new puppy, Bijou, in my arms, I walked in and looked for a note. The red light on the message machine winked from the desk. Thinking Daisy might have put a message on it for me—she had done that before—I headed there. Knowing Daisy, I assumed she probably couldn’t find a pen or paper—I looked around—or a cleared surface to write a note on. No wonder Daisy trusted leaving her doors unlocked. A burglar would take one look at this mess and back right on out, figuring someone had already ransacked the place. Even I thrashed frantically around in my mind for an excuse to get a motel room, but I knew I was not allowed to do this and remain her sister.
I set Bijou on the floor and pushed the PLAY button. My own voice startled me—Daisy had insisted I call the very second I was leaving so she’d know when to worry. I sounded like Mia Farrow on antidepressants. The voice informed whoever listened that I would arrive about five o’clock. I remembered hoping this might suggest pushing toys off the guest bed or—ever optimistic—putting dinner on the stove. I looked at my watch; I was an hour early.
Really, Mia Farrow? I played the message again. Yep, same pauses and emphasis and same intensity of speech. As I listened, even I wondered if the person speaking had a very slight British accent.
“I say,” I said, punching the DELETE button on my message. “Bloody awful here.” Bijou stalked piles of clothing on the floor and pounced on them in viciously friendly attacks, tail wagging.
I walked into the kitchen. A child’s dirty sock rested beside the sink, which was full of melon rinds and cereal bowls with Sugar Pops dried to the sides. I said, “Bloody awful here, too.”
I felt hungry and picked up a banana from the fruit bowl. A flock of tiny insects lifted into the air. I dropped the banana and opened the refrigerator. The butter dish was smeared with grape jelly and the stick of butter itself encrusted with toast crumbs. I always forgot this part. I felt so eager to see Daisy and Marcus and the girls that I could hardly get here fast enough and I always teared up when I left. Yet in between I could never find a place to sit in this ten-thousand-square-foot, six-bedroom house. Marcus’ T-shirt was tossed on the nearest end of the leather sofa, probably sweaty from one of his ten-mile jogs, one of the twins’ half-eaten sandwich lay on an upholstered chair, an uncapped tube of toothpaste on another; books and magazines were mounded into precarious heaps on seats around the kitchen table.
I gave up the idea of finding a snack and closed the refrigerator door. Like a narcoleptic, Bijou had fallen into one of her spontaneous naps: all but her tail and hind paws was burrowed beneath an abandoned towel on the floor of the family room. I lifted the towel to peek at her. She was so small and beautiful in her variegated black-and-white shagginess. She would grow about three times her size now, but would still be no bigger than any of my Wyoming dogs had been as puppies. Even so, her mother looked sporty rather than frilly, and I counted on Bijou holding her own in the Wild West later on. I loved her immeasurably. She was sister to Shank and Lucille’s puppy, Mitzi, and they were happy that I was providing a playmate for their energetic pup.
I found a clean towel in the clothes dryer, left the bathroom door open so the puppy could find me when she woke and began to strip for a shower. Though this was one of the guest baths, the twins had five flavors of toothpaste in pump bottles lined around the faucet. I chose bubble gum. I held my towel under one arm and my clean clothes between my legs while I brushed my teeth, since I couldn’t find a cleared space to set anything down. Soap and shampoo smears covered the counter. I returned to the dryer for another clean towel to spread out and lay my stuff on. Marcus teased Daisy that she treated the dryer as a combined linen and clothes cupboard; everybody knew to go there for their needs, apparently even me.
While irritated at the mess, I was also admiring of Daisy, because she hadn’t caught our mother’s tidy disease. Our mother didn’t make a home for us—she kept a house. She wasn’t so much a neat freak as devoid of a personal taste she felt comfortable displaying. A house of cleared surfaces. No knickknacks on shelves, no pillows on sofas, no canisters on kitchen counters. Everything was tucked away in closets or drawers or else given to the Salvation Army. She and my father had kept life stripped to the minimum when it came to belongings, and that included family photographs—there were none. If a friend or relative sent pictures of us or themselves, our parents admired the photos, then tossed them in the wastebasket as easily as yesterday’s newspaper. When company came it was the height of embarrassment for our mother if any room displayed a trace of human presence. I took the middle way in my Wyoming home; I liked to think of my decorating as Zen spareness mixed with evidence of a full family life. Daisy just went with the full family life.
&n
bsp; I let cool water drum onto my head, shampooed and rinsed. Once my ears were freed of the spray of water, I heard rustling sounds and, thinking it was Bijou, I peeked out the shower door. Nell and Libby, dressed in ruffled sun dresses and jelly sandals, were preparing to surprise me outside the open bathroom door. Their whispered plan was to jump out at me as soon as I appeared. So busy plotting, they didn’t see my face above them. I ducked back into the shower and began humming “Oh, Susannah.” I heard them giggle. I reached for my towel, slung over the shower door, wrapped it around me and stepped into their trap. The girls leaped into the doorway with gleeful shouts, arms raised and waving; I pretended to nearly faint and they broke into hysterics. I burst into teary laughter and knelt down and swooped them into my arms.
This morning on the phone, Daisy had said Marcus planned to stay overnight on the boat he docked in Palm Beach an hour down the coast, where his office was located, in order to give Daisy and me some private time. When Marcus was gone, his presence resided in the status symbols he surrounded himself with, and sometimes that was true even when he was home. Whenever I asked him, “What’s new?” he answered by telling me what he had purchased lately. Though in Marcus’ favor, he was generous and enjoyed setting up good times for his friends and family. His latest plan was a Conestoga trip for him, Daisy and the girls through Yellowstone this coming summer.
Daisy first dated Marcus when he worked with her in Dad’s Palm Beach store; then suddenly he received a huge commission as a part-time real estate agent selling a cattle ranch outside Ocala and turned to real estate full-time. A year and a half later, he and Daisy married. I knew Daisy truly loved her husband, yet it was also true that a person needed leverage around Dad, and Marcus had so much money and so many powerful friends that his leverage was without question in the vicinity of our father. Jess even joked that Marcus was impressive enough that he could have been a black Jewish transvestite and our bigoted father still would have approved of him as a son-in-law.
My leverage with Dad, Daisy claimed, was that Jess had been artistic and poor and comfortable with that, plus Jess and I ensured ourselves of a certain autonomy with distance. Three thousand miles was good leverage. Mostly though, Daisy’s theory was that I chose the opposite values of our father, whereas she chose similar values intensified.
I stopped to think, while I toweled dry and the girls waited outside the door, what Daisy’s leverage might be with Marcus. I buttoned up my skirt, pulled on a tank top and slid into sandals. Her indifference to the status symbols he surrounded them with, I decided, as I sauntered through the family room again with its giant stereo system, large-screen TV, pool table with a load of laundered sheets lumped atop it. Nell and Libby skipped ahead, leading the way to their mother.
We found Daisy waiting for us outside, near the pool.
She jumped up from her lounge chair, held her arms out wide, and I stepped into them. Daisy hugged me tightly, then held me for a long moment against her and smoothed the back of my hair. When she stretched her arms to look at me, she said, “I was banished out here so the girls could surprise you.”
I got teary again at the soft, caring look in her eyes and the relief I felt to be with someone I knew would understand all of me. This time the teariness swelled into chest-heaving sobs and I was back in my sister’s arms. Daisy told Nell and Libby to find some treats in the kitchen for us and held me and patted me until I subsided into wet whimpers.
The trouble with my marriage and the hopelessness that had brought me here to Florida rose to the surface and swamped me all at once. Filled with confusion and misery, I dumped our age-old manner of speaking about our husbands anonymously and blurted, “I love Jess, but I am drained. Just depleted by his stuff, his unfinished, unacknowledged, repetitious stuff.” I sniffled, accepted a tissue and blew my nose; sobs threatened to take hold again.
“I know.”
“We can be getting along fine, feeling especially close. Then bam, Jess hits some invisible wall.”
“I know.”
“Like last night on the phone. I talked to him about his urge to win all our encounters, when it isn’t a contest, and I know he finally got what I meant. But could he say so? No. He maintains the upper hand, a certain distance and control when it comes to intimacy with me. He drops out, acts indifferent. And I am left hanging there, wondering what happened, where he disappeared to.” What was I ranting about? Why couldn’t I stop? Since Daisy kept saying she knew, why couldn’t she tell me?
“And you take this personally,” Daisy said. “But it has to do with his limits, even if it feels like he’s deliberately withholding from you.”
“How can I separate from him enough to live my own life while staying connected with what I value about us together?” My voice sounded desperate. “I have to figure this out.”
“You will.”
Daisy had set a small table in between two lounge chairs here on the shaded patio. Two glasses and an opened bottle of cabernet sat on the table beside a box of Kleenex. I mopped my face, and she poured a glass of wine for me and another for herself, and we sat knees to knees on the ends of our lounges. “I have to find rules,” I said.
“Good luck. If you succeed in finding rules, you’ll make a lot of women happy.”
“This is my job down here. I need to rest and recuperate and find rules. Something I can remember when I go home again. In the past, every time I felt I’d figured something out, I lost it in the chaos of gunfire during the problem at home. This move down here is an effort to get clarity and some concrete perspective.”
“What is it exactly that’s so hard with Jess?”
I blew my nose a final time, trying to clean up before the twins returned. “I knew somebody was going to want that laid out sooner or later. I don’t know. . . . I can never organize it in my head. It’s like the bruises fade the moment I try to describe them. Emotional bruises, I mean. I just know I feel knocked around.”
Nell and Libby walked toward us, slowly and on wobbly legs, each balancing a plate. Nell’s plate had Oreo cookies smeared with peanut butter.
“Oh, Nell,” I said, “this looks fabulous.”
“Libby’s is fablis, too,” Nell said.
“Indeed it is,” I agreed, taking the plate from Libby to set on the table.
“Indeed it is,” Libby repeated and giggled, bent at the waist with her hands wrapped tightly into her skirt and stuck between her knees. Daisy and I exchanged looks.
“What do you have here?” Daisy asked Libby, her voice admirably serene.
Nell explained. “This way you don’t have to put the cheese on top of the crackers and get the knives dirty.”
It became clear then that the mess we were viewing was Boursin cheese with crackers broken up and smashed into it. The hands that created this ingenious dish were not entirely cleaned of the peanut butter that had been used on the first delicious canapé.
We had to eat one of each while the twins stared at us. They offered to find some more treats, but Daisy dissuaded them. To play my usual role of loving aunt and troublemaker, I said, “Oh, please? Some more?” Then I remembered my new pet and sent the girls on a mission to find Bijou and potty her in the yard. I felt guilty that she’d probably done that in the house already, but knew I wouldn’t have to confess anything since it wouldn’t be discovered for years.
Later, after the sun set, laying wavy stripes of reflective pastels across Daisy’s pool, she and I went inside. I called Dad to tell him I’d arrived. He filled me in on his latest intestinal developments.
“So, Dad, what do you think caused this?”
“I don’t know. I been eating good things.”
“Like what?”
“Muskmelon.”
“That’s good for you,” I said, relieved it wasn’t a sack of peanuts for dinner three nights in a row like once before.
“That’s what the dietitian said. She said, ‘A little melon is good.’ So I figured a lot would be great. And then I get diarrhea.
That gal doesn’t know her stuff.”
I took a big breath. “Like how much is a lot?”
“Just one.”
“One piece?” This sounded too normal. I suddenly caught on. “One whole melon? You ate the whole melon? At one time?”
“In a meal or two yesterday.”
“Well, no wonder.”
“Oh, you’re a doctor now.”
“Well, I know not to eat a whole melon.”
“That’s what you have to do when you live alone. You want a little melon, you have to buy a whole melon. Then you have to eat it before it goes bad and then you get sick.”
“I’ll get a melon before I leave, and we’ll share it,” I said.
“No. I don’t eat melon anymore. It’s not good for me.”
I just wanted out of this conversation. I said, “Isn’t the news on soon?”
“Oh, you’re right, honey. I’ll talk to you later.”
We made plans to see each other and hung up. I pictured Dad sitting before the television gathering more material to depress me with when we met for breakfast.
When I got off the phone, I told Daisy, “He needs a woman in his life.”
Daisy said, “He’s got one. Me.” And she filled me in on how Dad was transferring more and more of his business at the store to her and called her on the weekends to accompany him socially. We decided he was way too young to be giving up like this and that she had to harden and refuse to accept his assignments. But I knew in the short time I’d been in Florida that I wanted to fill all Dad’s needs myself and found I was thinking often of how I could entertain him or solve his complaints.
Daisy and I talked while we started dinner. She’d been at the grocery store when I’d arrived, and only put away the foods that needed refrigeration, so first we unloaded grocery bags into the cupboards. I was little help. I just stood in front of the crammed cupboards with packages of pasta in my hands and shook my head.
