by Tina Welling
“Alex has a big heart. He knows how different he is, and even though he is frustrated and sometimes even angered by his situation, he makes sure other people are at ease.” Perry’s nose reddened and her eyes watered. “So, anyway, after a year of working with Alex and sharing lunchbreaks, his mother invited me over. She said I was all Alex talked about and she wanted to meet me. Next, they took me to Disney World with them for Alex’s thirtieth birthday. As you can tell, Alex loves Disney World.”
Perry laughed. “Our joke is that I was his second choice for a wife; his first choice was Minnie Mouse.”
We all laughed with her.
“Anyway it went on like that for another year or so. Then I realized that I had never felt so loved in my life as I did by Alex and that I loved him. I let the relationship become sexual.” She paused. “We told his family about that and they supported this turn of events. And, though they are dear and honest people, I suppose they saw benefits in my becoming attached to Alex. He is their only child, and they worry about what will happen when they are gone.”
I felt each of us registering her story in the silence that followed and could practically hear the unmatched pieces of Perry’s life we had witnessed at the party snap into place.
“I should tell you,” Perry said, “I wasn’t any prize. Sixty pounds overweight, had no education, didn’t even shampoo my hair all that regularly. Back home we did that—like the old joke goes—on Saturday nights. I had very little self-esteem. Barely enough to escape my husband. I still feel amazed that I stepped on that bus one afternoon. Got off here because I needed to go to the bathroom and the bus left without me.” She laughed. “Meant to go to Miami; it was the only city in Florida I’d ever heard of back then.”
I could hardly swallow my food, imagining young Perry lost and alone in a strange place. I tried to transform the stylish, confident woman before me into that ungroomed, frightened girl she described. Perry seemed born to her gold bangles and blond bob.
“Anyway, I divorced my first husband, and Alex and I married.” She laughed again. “If we get right down to it, it’s both he and his parents that I married; it was certainly his parents who proposed.”
We all laughed along with Perry, without actually realizing what was funny about that. Her story was too different from our own lives for us to see the humor.
“So although Alex didn’t fully grasp the concept of marriage, he did fully grasp the concept of us sleeping together every night and playing together every day. And he was pretty excited about having a wedding at Disney World.”
Perry bent over for a bite of her salad, and while she chewed, the rest of us remembered our own food. For a few moments there was the rustle of potato chip bags, the scrape of plastic forks against Styrofoam. Then Perry went on.
“A wedding at Disney World worked perfectly for our two families. If there is any place on the planet that Alex’s family and mine could spend time together, it was there. My family went nuts with all that glitter, and there was Alex, leading the way through it, their own personal Disney guide.”
A pair of sandhill cranes flew overhead, calling, and we all looked up and watched them land in tall weeds on the other side of the pond.
“Ralph and Anna treat me like a beloved and treasured daughter. At home, I was barely tolerated as were the rest of the seven kids. Daddy drank a lot, still does; Mama was angry and tired all the time, still is. I’m the only kid that left.
“Down here I became Perry instead of the misspelled Perris—P-E-R-R-I-S—named after . . . you guessed it: Paris, France. Nobody where I lived ever caught the misspelling. But I changed over legally when we got the marriage license.”
We had all forgotten our food now, swept up in Perry’s story.
“When I first met Alex I couldn’t afford a car, so I bought a used bike to get to work. Alex has always had so much energy, he’d take me on twenty-mile rides on the weekends, stopping often for me to gasp and wipe sweat. In little more than a year I had lost weight, cut my waist-length hair, become blond and . . . after meeting Alex’s parents, I began to jangle.” She shook her arm and laughed. “Like my mother-in-law.”
Marcy said, “She’s quite lovely.”
Sara said, “And very nice to your friends.”
Perry said, “Anna and Ralph are truly wonderful people, and I’m lucky they’re my family now.”
“My God,” Marcy said, sounding breathless, “what a life.”
Perry’s eyes softened as she said, “There may not be a human on earth who is as loving and sweet as Alex. So patient and caring. Which makes him a wonderful lover, believe it or not.” She smiled shyly. “We share some other things: tennis, golf, swimming, and, of course, bicycling. And he picks out all my clothes. Don’t know where he gets his eye for things, but when we were dating, it was Alex who took me to get my hair cut and out to buy clothes . . . size eighteen at the time. Down to eights now. All that playing he’s gotten me to do.”
It was hard not to stare at Perry. I wanted to study the eyes that had seen so much. I suspected Sara and Marcy felt the same way, because when Perry began to eat again, we all turned our heads away from her, toward the water, where not even a dragonfly stirred in the still afternoon air. Then we all darted glances back to her at the same time.
Perry caught that and laughed. And we all followed. It provided the release we needed.
“I’m never going to leave Alex. I just get bound up in how static things are and always will be, rant a while, then realize that it’s up to me to change things and eventually I do.” Perry looked sad, and I remembered how tightly wound and frustrated she had seemed at our first meeting at the Green Bottle Café.
“I’m going to school now,” she said. “And later I’ll begin a career that I like. I realize since we all met”—she circled her palm around to each of us—“that I have needed my own friends. Living with Alex means I have many family friends, but no personal friends. This is what is going to save my marriage.”
I nodded, recognizing my own lack of personal friends and seeing how they helped one’s perspective and sense of independence. On the drive to the savannah from the café, I had talked about my realization that what I wanted most from my husband was intimacy, and in striving for that, I had lost sight of myself. Sara added her thoughts on how strained intimacy became as the marriage matured with children, mortgages and careers. Marcy also joined the conversation, but Perry had been quiet on the subject.
She said now, “I don’t share this intimacy you all talk about in my marriage, but where I come from, we don’t know much about that, anyway. Who has time for intimacy in the hills of Kentucky? Starting in the early teens, women have baby after baby and men work job after job. Kids, work, church. Weddings, births, deaths. No intimacy.”
“Then you’ve never expected it,” Sara said.
“That’s the key to my whole marriage: I don’t expect anything.” Perry shook her head. “Because if I’ve painted a picture of rosy riches and handsome husband, I need to tell you the hard parts. Living with Alex is like living with an eleven-year-old boy. He is self-involved, doesn’t notice whatever mess he is making, repeats the same mistakes over and over and will never learn from them. There is no progress and there never will be. He is stuck right where he is and I am stuck right there loving him.”
“Sounds hard,” Marcy said.
Perry said, “Tedious.”
Sara said, “I don’t mean to diminish the difficulty of what you’ve told us, but I’m struck by how much of your description of Alex’s behavior resembles my own husband.” She spoke seriously.
Sara said, “Steve runs a corporation but he can’t seem to remember to turn a stove burner off.”
Marcy said, “You’re lucky. Mine can’t remember how to turn one on.”
I found that Perry’s wisdom in not expecting anything was something I should take on myself. I said, “My expectations keep me in a righteous position with Jess.”
Perry said, “Well,
perhaps you have good reasons for your expectations, but maybe, like me, they end up making you dissatisfied.”
We gathered up our picnic remains and headed back to town and our separate cars. While we drove, Perry told us Alex’s situation wasn’t hard for only her, that Alex himself often felt worthless and depressed over his limitations. “He is fully aware of who he is and how he measures up with others. I love him too much to ever add to his low self-esteem. I understand it so well myself.”
I kept thinking about Perry’s words while we drove back to town. I held high expectations for Jess, which just set him up for failure and me for disappointment. If I stopped holding out hope for certain changes and worked instead on acceptance, how much of a difference would that make? It was an experiment I wanted to try. The truth was coming clear: there were many ways to conduct a marriage. Thanks to Perry telling her story and creating a fast bond among the four of us, I was discovering the value of women friends for sharing thoughts and opening new perspectives on how others conducted their lives and relationships.
Once home, I realized I had acquired MARRIAGE RULE #2: Enjoy Personal Friends.
Twenty
Jess
“ Hi, Annie,” I said, then checked my watch quickly. Kept forgetting it was two hours later in Florida. “In bed yet?”
“It’s nine thirty. Night’s young. I’m getting ready for a date . . . with my psychology textbook, that is.”
“Is there a chapter written about me in there?”
Annie said, “That’s advanced psychology.”
“Good. Don’t want you down there trying to figure me out.”
“I’ll figure you out, then write the advanced book myself.”
I wasn’t sure if she was teasing me or insulting me. I decided to skip it. “Got bad news.”
“Oh, gosh, what’s wrong?”
“Wolf No. 9 was kicked out of the pack.”
“No! How can that be? She’s the leader of the Rose Creek pack.”
“I know. Her daughter’s alpha now. Nobody has spotted No. 9 anywhere.”
“That just kills me. She is so special. She’s the movie star of the whole wolf-restoration program in Yellowstone.”
“The worst part is the weather.” Early February in Yellowstone. Subzero temperatures day and night. Shelters snowed over, food scarce.
“How is she going to make it? She’s seven years old now. That’s old for a wolf.”
“The naturalists are saying she can’t last long. Can’t take down an elk on her own. And, of course, the pack is chasing her off of their kills, won’t share with her anymore.” I paused and let Annie groan. “They figure she’ll only last a couple weeks at the most.”
“I could cry for her.”
Annie sounded as though she identified with No. 9, as if she, Annie, had been kicked out of her pack and left to fend for herself. I considered reminding her that she’d left on her own. Anger with her stirred beneath the surface of my words, but I missed her and resisted indulging in it. I needed a friendly phone call tonight.
I said, “You’re not the only one upset over this. She made the headlines once again. The Jackson Hole News & Guide said she is everybody’s favorite wolf.” They had a stock photo of No. 9. Her large, black-furred body was posed against the frozen surface of the Yellowstone snowfields, alert to the photographer hidden somewhere above her on a hill. If she was still alive, she’d be keeping in constant motion, checking all sides and behind her, as she made her way miles and miles over the rugged winter landscape.
Annie said, “She has such an amazing spirit—no wonder she’s everybody’s favorite.”
“Think back,” I said, “to when we heard about her coming to Wyoming and how exciting it was to have wolves back in Yellowstone.” I remembered that right off her mate was shot by a poacher. No. 9 and her eight pups had to go into an enclosure pen and be fed so they’d all survive.
Annie said, “My favorite part of her story is how the male from the Crystal Creek pack sat outside the pen waiting for her release.”
I said, “I’d do that for you.”
“I know you would.” Annie’s voice sounded soft and warm.
I said, “You’re welcome back to my pack anytime.”
Annie said, “I’ll be back.”
“Kawabunga, babe.”
This morning I scraped ice off the driver’s side of the windshield. Muffled explosions from across the valley pounced on the quiet like Annie’s fists punching a pillow into shape. In the village, the ski patrol was shooting into the snowpack on the slopes, trying to provoke avalanches—a morning ritual performed before the slopes were opened to skiers.
Sometimes it had seemed Annie’s morning ritual to shoot insults at me, trying to provoke a response. She might have hoped for an avalanche of some kind from me, but instead, I’d freeze her out. When we were seeing a therapist together, the woman had said Annie was just trying to get me to participate in the marriage. I said she should find a better way, but when Lola asked for my suggestions, I didn’t have any.
“So, Jess, perhaps you just want to be left alone,” Lola said.
I said I didn’t know. So then Lola accused me of not participating in the counseling.
I walked to the passenger side, leaned over and scraped the windshield. The dogs romped in the yard. The idea was for them to do their business before getting in the car and riding to the store, but if they kept up this playing, their feet were going to start to hurt in the snow, and they’d be lifting a paw and pleading with mournful eyes to be carried out of it. Each of them was as big as a small pony, so that wasn’t going to happen. Took only a minute or two for them to feel pain when it was this cold—twenty-three below this morning. The weatherman on the radio announced that we were heading into a temporary thaw; often happened about the third week of deep cold, when all the valley residents, worn down by weeks of severe temperatures, were beginning to eye their luggage.
The weatherman reported that today we’d be “warming up to freezing.” Where else but in Jackson Hole would somebody have the nerve to say such a thing?
Gladdened my heart, though. By that afternoon we should get a fifty-degree climb into the low thirties. It would feel like a heat wave, and I’d be driving home from work with my car window down and elbow sticking out. By tomorrow or the next day, it would pass and winter as usual would return, yet without the deep subzero drops.
“Leidy, Bannon, Ranger. Load up.” I stood with the car door open and twelve legs scrambled into the backseat and stomped around for the best spot. I had forgotten to notice whether they—as Annie insisted on saying—“pottied.” She had the dogs trained to that word—they’d practically go on command for her—but I refused to use it. “Potty,” I said scornfully, slipping behind the wheel in the front seat. Then, looking in the rearview mirror at three perplexed faces, I said, “No, no. Not now, girls.”
I felt irritable, wasn’t being kind with the dogs, the customers or anybody, really. Last night before I’d called Annie, someone had knocked on the front door of the house and I’d answered to two Seventh-Day Adventists wanting to pass out literature and talk to me about God. I said, “You know, I can’t imagine why someone goes door to door trying to discuss religion, or sex, or any other intimate topic with complete strangers.” I paused. “This seems like a matter for the police.” I was probably a little harsh.
The road to Teton Village this morning was freshly plowed, no ice. I was coming to my favorite part of the drive, where the road cleared Gros Ventre Butte and I got a sudden grand sweep of the Tetons. Ba-he-du-wuh-nu-d. Shoshone. Meant “Hoary-headed fathers.” They were hoary-headed today, all right. We were lucky to end up with as simple a name as Tetons. The French won out there, though as far as the Shoshones were concerned, the French won out everywhere. “Teton” meant breast. According to the legend around here, the French fur trappers named the mountains for a female body part they hadn’t seen for some time. This was a man’s valley in many ways. Annie w
ould say: you mean boy’s, don’t you? She would be referring to the large number of guys who lived here only to play in the mountains—skiing, climbing, bouldering.
I looked in the rearview mirror again at the three beautiful, attentive faces of my dogs, looking out the window, watching the Herefords in the pasture beside us follow the hay wagon that spread their breakfast in the snow. The dogs didn’t miss a thing. If I were to drive off onto the rough shoulder, one of them would nudge my neck with her nose to alert me. It’d happened before. When it came to God, emotions and all those other topics Annie accused me of avoiding, I was kind of like my dogs: I knew plenty, just didn’t say anything.
Since Annie had left, I felt like I was in “time-out,” our usual punishment for the boys when they were little. We sent them off to think about their behavior. Except in this case, I was left alone while Annie went off. I guess, to think about my behavior.
Kind of like the God topic, I didn’t know how to think about my behavior, either. I just did what came along, didn’t do what didn’t come along. I told that to our therapist, Lola, back when Annie and I were seeing her, and she said, “You know, Jess, you are something of a cuddly”—she searched for the proper word—“predator.”
I said, “Hey, I just leave everybody alone.”
She said, “That’s the cuddly part.”
From there I tuned out. Or tried to. Annie grabbed my arm, said, “That’s how it feels, Jess. As if you’re a . . . a passive sort of terrorist. You go around not allowing yourself to know the swath of damage you leave in passing through life. All the while not meaning to cause harm, but not meaning to cause . . . anything. Anything. You refuse to be present . . . or aware.” She ended by saying, “It’s terrorism by omission, if that makes sense.”
It didn’t to me.
Then she started to use the term “nice guy,” as if she were talking about a pathological killer. What was so wrong about being a nice guy?
If Annie was having trouble with that, she would have loved me yesterday at the store. I was no nice guy then. I told a customer, an older guy who reminded me of the Skipper, that our beanie hat with the propeller on top—a hit with the young locals—was what the Olympic ski jumpers were using to successfully gain air. The newspaper that morning had headlined a story about some European teams training on the mountain. The customer said conspiratorially, “Is that right?” as if I had let him in on a ski-industry secret. Hadley shooed me back to the office then and took over up front. Good thing, too, because he was one of those men who were creepy about their money. Instead of handing over his twenty-dollar bill, he balanced it on edge lengthwise on the counter, the theory being that if more than one was accidently stuck together they would fall apart and you’d catch the error. I’d had men stand rubbing their fingers over a twenty-dollar bill for a full thirty seconds before handing it to me, just to be certain they were giving me only one. I had no patience with such crap.
