by Tina Welling
“But it would be too hard to separate money out,” Daisy said. “Besides, most men make more money than women do and . . .” She glanced off toward the girls. “There’re just too many problems with that idea.”
“I think there are too many problems without some separation.” I thought for a moment. “It can be worked out. Different-sized paychecks like you and Marcus have can be dealt with through percentages. You know, twenty-five percent of each of your paychecks goes for housing . . . like that. Adults should have their own money. Period.”
Like most couples, Jess and I endured hours of argument and resentment over money. I accused him of rash spending and he accused me of penny-pinching. The truth was: we each deserved to have our own styles of spending. If I could clear away this issue for the bulk of our expenses, it would reenergize us both.
I had reminded Daisy about the husbands and wives who came into our stores—mine back home, hers there in Stuart—expressing guilt over what they were purchasing, because their partners would complain.
“Sometimes it’s as small as”—I searched my mind—“as this book you want.” I took her book, said I’d buy it for her and stated again that this idea of mine was a good one.
I ended up buying three books for Daisy so she didn’t have to deal with Marcus about them. His view on book buying was founded on his position as board member and financial supporter of the Martin County Library: Daisy could buy a book if the library didn’t carry it. Sounded like a transaction a parent might make. You can have a cupcake if you finish your green beans.
I told Daisy, “Marcus gets to have his view; he just doesn’t get to inflict it on you.” I assured Daisy she wasn’t undermining her husband by buying a book she wanted to read. Having stirred up enough trouble, I bought Nell’s and Libby’s books, too.
During the two-hour drive home from Stuart Sunday morning, I thought about this idea of separating money. It could be harder for Jess and me to separate financially because we ran a business together, pulled a joint paycheck. But if I could figure it out for us, then any couple could do it. For a partner who stayed home to keep house and care for children, an hourly wage for their many duties would take the place of a paycheck. For starters, Jess and I should be given the same benefit we had given our sons as they grew up: personal money to spend. When we cashed our paycheck each month, we could budget for separate discretionary money for each of us.
I considered the money issues Jess and I argued about most. We had an envelope of grocery money set on the kitchen shelf each month, and each month I became annoyed that Jess used it to buy food he let spoil or grabbed all the cash, stuffed it in his pocket on his way to the store and never returned the remainder. I accused him of carelessness; he accused me of being a Nazi banker. What if we separated that out, too? He got half the monthly grocery money; I got the other half. If we spent it unwisely, we had to dig into our discretionary money.
He used debit cards without recording the transactions and credit cards to order things I never saw, so couldn’t budget for. Okay then, separate debit cards and credit cards to be paid from separate checking accounts, in which we deposited our personal money. His and hers. But what about house payments, the boys’ college fund, vet bills for the dogs?
Sixty-five miles of driving had passed in a mindless blur when I said right out loud, “Everything can be separate.” In a flash I saw it, clear and clean. Jess and I would receive separate paychecks and each make payments into a family checking account for the mortgage, insurance, household bills and repairs. From our separate accounts, we’d each be responsible for all personal spending—our own clothes and our own share of the groceries. Even our own car and its gasoline and repairs could be included. If any of that didn’t work for some reason, we could put the expense back into the family account. I yelped right out loud with glee over my liberation.
Marriage Rule #1: Establish Independent Money.
The marriage sabbatical was working.
Sixteen
Jess
Sometimes I was so convinced Annie was on her way back to me, so sure she’d realized how dumb this marriage sabbatical was, that I’d reach for the phone and dial her number. If voice mail picked up, she’d packed and was on the airplane. It was all I could do to keep from driving to the airport to surprise her when she landed. Fortunately, I just kept dialing, and unfortunately, she eventually answered. Except for today. Five in the evening, almost dark, and she hadn’t answered yet. I knew for a fact that Delta’s scheduled flights between here and Orlando allowed her to arrive home by now. I didn’t go so far as to show up at the airport, but I bought five red tulips on the way home after work.
I pulled into the driveway with all the anticipation of a birthday kid suspecting his surprise party. I got out of the car, tulips sheltered under my jacket so the freeze wouldn’t kill them and Annie didn’t see them, held the car door open while the dogs tumbled into the yard, and walked toward the house. Then I noticed. No footprints in the snow. And another thing—why did it take me so long to see something so obvious? There wasn’t a single light on in the house. I opened the front door anyway with a limp scrap of hope.
Nobody jumped out, shouting, “Surprise.”
It was possible that I was going crazy, and the idea sounded good to me.
First I had left a note for Annie a few days ago without thinking; now this ridiculous and overwhelming certainty that she was waiting for me in our home. I found a vase for the tulips, filled it with water, and carried out my plan to set it before the dining room window: red tulips with the backdrop of white snow and dark gray sky. This was the kind of thing Annie never thought to do, but she loved it when I did.
If I did go crazy, I wouldn’t have to spend evenings alone in this chilled and empty living room. Eventually someone would come and put me in an institution; there would be company there, someone to eat dinner with. Acceptance meant I’d have to go on like this for months, because AnnieLaurie wasn’t coming home soon.
She had started college classes. Most of them involved Creativity—capital C, of course. She couldn’t just lie on the beach and do nothing. She actually sounded interested in getting a degree down there in Florida so she could be a legitimate champion of bad art.
I called the dogs, got in the car once more and drove downtown to eat at the pub. It started snowing again. Dark had descended for good . . . or bad. What the hell did it matter?
On the drive home from the restaurant, the streets were completely white from the fresh snow, no dirt in the tire tracks. Where else in the world do you drive down a busy highway, the busiest in the state of Wyoming in fact, and see total whiteness on the road? And Annie was missing this. Even if she was here, she’d need me to point out these things.
I thought about how much Annie lived in her head and how since she was gone I’d started doing the same thing. Because I missed her I seemed to take on some of her characteristics. I’d noticed the same thing when my dad died. He had this habit of lightly knocking his chin with the first knuckle of his fist, a kind of John Wayne tough-guy mannerism. Since I’d grown up watching him do that, I never consciously took notice of it. Then he died and I found I was doing it myself. Still do. So here I am thinking about stuff every time it gets quiet, just like Annie does.
Annie reminded me once that the largest erogenous zone in the body is the brain. I said, “Only if your dick is stubby.” She laughed. She laughed at all my jokes. She was generous that way. Still, who could imagine living with someone who was always thinking? Even in bed? Even making love? That was when she said that about the brain. Hell, I tried to make her laugh in self-defense; if I didn’t, I’d be on my elbows, above her, midpump, listening to her philosophize.
I pulled into the driveway.
Before going into the house, the dogs and I walked around the neighborhood to give us all a little exercise and them some sniffing time. I got a kick out of the way they buried their noses deep into a snowbank and just stayed there a while savoring the cold. No
traffic at this hour, everybody home on the sofa after dinner, so I walked down the center of the street on the snowpack and the dogs wandered along the high banks of plowed snow on both sides of me. The snowfall had stopped. Above us the clouds were thinning in the black sky and stars popped through, looking like snowflakes caught in gauze netting, as if not all the snowflakes had fallen, but some stayed put to sparkle.
I didn’t analyze myself or my life, the way Annie did. Or I didn’t put it to words. I just found myself going in some direction. Like my dogs, I wandered over to the food dish before I acknowledged my hunger in any words in my head. Annie always knew by looking at me what was going on. She’d say, “Why don’t you take an aspirin?” And I’d wonder why the hell I should, and she’d say, “Your face is all screwed up. You hurt somewhere, right?”
Well, I hurt somewhere now. I thought how I’d sat there staring at the staircase that night Annie left—the same way our dogs stared up the street whenever I took my fishing rod to the creek without them. They never moved, just faced the direction in which I’d left and waited, primed to greet my return. In my mind, I sat primed to greet Annie’s return.
Yellow lamplight warmed the fronts of houses I passed. About a quarter of them still had their Christmas lights up. Even the town square sparkled with holiday decorations a month after the holiday was over and, like other years, it would probably stay that way until spring. Never saw a community so reluctant to give up its colored lights. Maybe the six-month-long winter had something to do with that.
Once I said to her, “Take it easy, Annie. Go with the flow. You don’t have to do everything the hard way.”
“The hard way,” she repeated, stretching her eyebrows into high arches. I should have recognized the trap. “Versus the easy way of leaving it for someone else to do . . . like, say, your way.”
She did a lot—I’d grant that. But she didn’t think about stuff like red tulips against a snowy background. Why didn’t that count in my favor?
Our walk circled back home, and I rounded up the pups on the porch and brushed snow off their underbellies the best I could before we all went inside. Last week the dogs and I moved out of the bedroom and into the guest space; I slept better in the loft, a large open room with curved windows on each end. The view to the south overlooked Snow King Mountain; the view to the north held a wedge of Tetons looming over the saddle of a butte. I sat up here in Annie’s rocker before these floor-to-ceiling windows and rocked and thought until I eventually stretched out onto one of the guest beds for the night. Annie always did accuse me of getting sleepy when I tried to think.
Tonight the rockers on the chair bumped on the ridges of the old wool braided rug lying before the windows. The jagged peaks of the Tetons had snagged all the clouds in the sky now and lay bundled in them for the night. Bannon, Leidy and Ranger lay beside me and plucked ice balls off their paws and lower legs and crunched them in their teeth. It was almost as noisy up here as at the pub during dinner.
The first years we were together, my love for Annie used to consume me in its totality. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was my friend, my sister; the next thing I knew I was undressing her, wild with lust and confusion. That girl burrowed deeply into my insides. She weaseled out my secrets, secrets I never knew I owned and dreams I didn’t know I carried until they were unearthed by her, formed into words and set out before me.
Then, of course, once she knew my secrets, my story, she was armed with weapons to use against me. More than once she’d said, “If you’d face up to your background, Jess, instead of trying to forget, it would help our relationship.” Like stuff from twenty years before we even met had anything to do with our marriage.
I had two choices with Annie. I could freeze her out, just turn on the TV and not take much notice of the household events. Or I could melt into her, turn into a shapeless blob like a gingerbread man baked with too much butter—or whatever it was Annie did wrong one Christmas. Spread all the hell over the cookie sheet, no definition to him.
Now I rocked with one hand rubbing Leidy’s head where she’d set it on my thigh. Plainly, I was in foreign country when I fell for Annie. I felt envy now for the guys who talked about the wife, because those guys never felt like they were blobs without any edges to their skin when they made love to their life mates. No mix-up there, by God. She was the wife. He was Head of the House. Leave Daddy alone—he’s tired. Could I have some money, honey?
These were not words heard in our house. And it wasn’t that I wanted them said. It was just that I’d like that to be the understood standard, and that it was recognized that I gave AnnieLaurie the gift of our relationship being more. I wouldn’t mind a thank-you once in a while. I wouldn’t mind a little credit for being a decent guy who didn’t lord it over the family, like our store manager’s husband. Hadley married this guy who’d told me once that he jacked the heat up to eighty-three degrees but had the thermostat read sixty-eight degrees. Just liked to keep Hadley off center. I wouldn’t go that far, but sometimes I knew how the guy felt.
I tugged my boots off and stretched out on the bed.
She’d been gone half a month now, yet I still heard Annie’s voice in my head as if she were in the twin bed next to mine up here, whispering in the dark, “Yes, but, Jess, that is just your desire to be in control. Two equal partners cannot play power games.”
It was no goddamn game. I wanted the power, no playing around about it. It’d been that way for centuries—men held the power. Yet I was willing to go with the change (Annie would say, when I felt like it). I cared for the babies, cooked, cleaned house. Maybe inconsistently, as she claimed, but those were her jobs; I was just helping out. Didn’t I get any credit for that?
Maybe she had just meant to rock the boat when she left, but she’d tipped the whole goddamn thing over.
Seventeen
Annie
I climbed the stairs to my apartment, leaving my suitcase in the car, because I had Bijou’s dishes and food in one arm, a birdcage in the other. I couldn’t resist the bird when I spotted her at the pet store while getting chew toys for Bijou. After staying at Daisy’s I feared there wasn’t enough company at my place with only a puppy and refrigerator mold.
Kia was a beautiful, tiny Fischer lovebird. Only four and half inches high with feathers of exotic greens, reds and yellows. White eye rings pounced out of her face above a brilliant beak that looked as if she were wearing shiny red lipstick—my mom’s old favorite Cherries in the Snow by Revlon. The tiniest parrot in the world and I took to her immediately. Already she ate out of my hand.
“Don’t you, pretty bird?” Kia scrambled over to the side of the cage nearest my voice. I set her cage on the kitchen counter, reached into my pocket for a sunflower seed and held it out to her with my fingers between the bars of the cage. She tipped her head sideways and took it, showing her tiny tongue. I had confessed to Jess about acquiring my second new pet while he was still feeling regretful over his “no dating” phone call to me. Then I turned my phone off; I needed a break.
Talking to Daisy over the weekend gave me confidence in my decision to take a marriage sabbatical. I’d seen too many divorces among friends in which the good parts of the marriage were discarded with the bad. I intended to save the good parts. Yet marriage as a completely shared life—from bed to business—needed loosening. MARRIAGE RULE #1, Establish Independent Money, pried open new avenues of thought. I couldn’t tell yet where that would lead.
From the car I gathered an armload of shopping bags, my tote and suitcase. Lucille opened the back door as I closed the gate.
“Welcome home.”
“Good to be back.”
Mitzi barreled out to give Bijou a frenzied greeting. The puppies collided and locked into a black-and-white furry knot that tumbled in the grass.
Upstairs I opened Kia’s cage door and she immediately flew to my shoulder. She accompanied me as I moved from room to room, opening all the windows in my stifling apartment. I checked on
the puppies, then gathered ingredients to put together a salad for lunch. Kia nibbled on a lettuce leaf I held up to her, perched on my shoulder. Then she flew down into the sink to play in the drizzle of faucet water. I laughed as I watched her flutter her feathers and begin a little dance accompanied by quiet murmurs and clucks. She lifted one wing, tucked her head, lifted the other wing, tucked her head, turned in a circle.
Two hours until Perry’s party. Plenty of time to unpack, settle back into my new home and get showered and dressed. I should have asked Perry how formally to dress for a dinner party on the beach. When a dressy event was held outdoors in Jackson Hole, invitations read “Mountain Cocktail Attire.” As far I could tell no one had figured out what that meant—clothing ranged from Levi’s to lace. I hoped the same loose criteria reigned for a lawn party in Florida. My new orange cotton dress with the flared skirt and crazy assortment of white buttons down the front, dressy sandals and sunglasses might do.
My friends greeted me in the wide circular drive as soon as I handed my car keys to an attendant. Then Perry took us all to meet our hosts, her parents-in-law, Ralph and Anna. Next, with chilled glasses of white wine in hand, we sauntered across the bouncy Florida grass to the tennis courts where Perry’s husband, Alex, was playing. Lobbed balls stunned the silence. I took in Alex’s startling good looks, blond, slightly curling hair and tanned, muscled body. He grinned at his two opponents with bright, playful eyes as he crouched in anticipation of a ball served from the far corner of the court. We watched Alex beat the heck out of his two guests, teenagers who worked hard to keep up with this forty-year-old. Alex leaped over the net and shook hands with the losers.
Marcy said it for all of us: “So . . . rich and married to a movie god.”
“And on top of that, she’s blond and beautiful,” Sara added.
