by Tina Welling
I wasn’t getting out on the mountain as much as I was used to. With Annie gone, I was stuck in the store more. Besides that, this long subzero stretch took the fun out. So damn cold I had to leave the shower door open in the bathroom at home or the drain froze. At our house even the inside knob on the front door was white with frost. At the top of the tram yesterday, the temperature with wind chill was minus eighty degrees—instant frostbite on any exposed skin.
That didn’t keep the Jackson Hole Air Force home. Those guys skied anything, anytime. They got their name from jumping couloirs that made my heart shrivel to look at—steep, skinny, nearly vertical gullies, strewn with boulders, heaped with snow.
I pulled into the village parking lot, and the dogs tumbled out to begin their day, greeting customers at TFS. The sun was shining over Sleeping Indian Mountain and flashed on the windowed storefront with displays of our ski clothing lines—lime ski jackets, strawberry knit hats, skis, boots, poles.
Before unlocking the store, I stood a moment looking at the place, thinking about yet another day of working there without AnnieLaurie.
Suddenly I got so damn mad I could have exhaled soot. Who the hell did she think she was, walking off and leaving me with this place?
Then I decided on the spot to call that therapist Lola and see who she thought was the bad guy now.
Twenty-one
Annie
During lunch Tuesday at the Green Bottle Café, I poked around my food, my mind on last night’s phone call with Jess. He had ended it with an old joke from a Florida vacation a few years back. We had watched a sixty-year-old surfer, long gray braid stuck with a gull feather, grab his board off the top of his rusted Volkswagen camper and trot off toward the surf. He’d hollered over his shoulder to his lady, waiting on the beach for him, “Kawabunga, babe.” It had been our sign-off ever since.
Marcy looked over at me. “You eat like a bug.”
I told her and Sara and Perry about Wolf No. 9, first filling in her unique story as a contributor to Yellowstone’s wolf restoration. “And now she’s been kicked out of the pack.”
“I know why,” Marcy said. “She gained weight.”
The women joked, and I stared out the window through the green-tinted bottles to Bougainvillea Street, where the town went about its business of banking and browsing and shuffling through the table of dollar hardbacks outside My Ex-Husbands’ Bookstore across the street. Like Wolf No. 9, I missed my pack.
Jess missed me, too, I knew. Yet he often set up barriers between us. I remembered a morning several years back when I woke to find Jess staring at me. He’d said, “I don’t know who you are anymore.” And I’d felt heartened over his realizing that. I agreed that he didn’t, and he cut off the moment, swinging himself out of bed and saying, “I’m taking a shower.”
I was staring out through the green bottles again and finally got the joke on the bookstore’s sign.
“Oh,” I said to my friends. “I just noticed where the owner, Talia, put the apostrophe in her store’s name. Buying that place apparently took alimony from more than one ex-husband.”
Marcy said, “That’s called ali-money.”
After lunch I went home and picked up Bijou for a walk on the beach. The day had turned gray and sultry, the sky a flat tin lid, capping the town in stillness. No breezes, until Bijou and I dropped down off the dune steps; then warm, heavy air blew along the shore. I clipped off the leash from Bijou’s collar and shucked out of my sandals. I felt such longing in my throat today—a lump like bread dough, warm, malleable, about to swell. Was it the image of Wolf No. 9 walking alone in the snow? Or of myself walking alone on the sand?
I’d been carrying a vision of fulfilling my sense of selfhood while also creating a magic kingdom within my marriage, yet somehow, while heading for those two goals, neither seemed in sight. At times here in Hibiscus, I felt that I was after something tangible: independence, selfhood, marriage rules, college classes. Then other times, like now, none of that mattered, and all I felt was a sense of estrangement from myself and those I loved most.
Considering my choices during the past twentysome years, I wondered: did I hold enough personal power to meet my goals? When I first left on my marriage sabbatical, I was empowered by anger, but that was a short-lived source of strength, and now I needed an authentic sense of authority to accomplish the goals I had set for myself.
In the beginning of our marriage, I had contributed my time and effort to helping Jess. I had thought that giving to him was the same as giving to myself, having willingly relinquished my individuality for the sake of our togetherness. Or at most I had considered my offering as an investment, something that would be reciprocated when it came to be my turn. Yet, if that time came, I never recognized it or knew any longer how to fulfill my sense of selfhood, after having once merged it so completely with my husband’s.
I walked along the hard sand near the water’s edge, with an eye out for blue jelly fish. If the poisonous Portuguese man-of-war was in the area, a notice was usually posted at the steps that led down to the beach. Still, I was watchful on Bijou’s behalf. The wind had come up stronger now, and the waves were frothing, slapping the shore and leaving behind pearly bubbles. I stopped and faced the sky and water, my feet catching the ebbing waves. The bubbles broke against my skin and tickled my toes. I gathered my hair into a ponytail to keep it from whipping my face. A black cloud sat on the horizon like a massive tea bag about to dip into the ocean, suggesting a storm was steeping in this muggy air. I had walked about a mile down the shore, but now turned toward home.
I recalled a story I used to read to the boys when they were little about a tree that gave and gave of itself, without regard to its own well-being, until it was a stump and could give no more. Seemed for me, if I hadn’t taken this time out in Hibiscus, I was in danger of becoming a stump myself.
By the time I climbed the dune steps, rain was slashing against my bare arms, and all about me, the dark air was dense with wind and water. Yet inside, I felt something had lightened, been washed clean. Missing my family had clouded the value of my marriage sabbatical. Understanding that, I felt renewed in my determination to find the path that included a sense of personal selfhood along with a loving intimacy with my husband.
I realized two things. I needed to send for my sons and I had discovered another rule.
Marriage Rule #3: Claim Personal Power.
Perhaps the centerpiece of my rules was this third one. Marriage Rule #1, Establish Independent Money, referred to separate money, which represented in the outer world what personal power did in the inner. Money was a physical form of power. Marriage Rule #2, Enjoy Personal Friends, was also the outworking of a claim for retaining a sense of self and individual perspective. I’d have to see what more I learned during my marriage sabbatical, but to claim personal power seemed the keystone holding up the whole structure.
Certainly Wolf No. 9 had no hope of surviving this winter unless she had gathered enough personal power to pull her through.
Once Bijou and I got home and dried off, I called Jess. I held the phone in one hand. With the other I mopped up from the sills and floor rainwater that had blown in the opened windows.
“I need to see Cam and Saddler.”
Jess was quiet a moment. “It’ll cost like hell at this late date,” Jess said, “but next Monday is Martin Luther King Day, no classes. It would give you a three-day weekend.”
“Perfect.” I paused with the wet towel in my hand and felt awash with relief and filled with gratitude to Jess. “You’re wonderful for understanding this.”
“Of course, I understand. You call the guys and I’ll get on the tickets.”
This was Jess at his best. I felt very loved.
I was excited about seeing my sons. A bit uneasy, as well. Recently Jess had driven to Laramie to attend a weekend basketball game with the boys. After he’d returned, I’d asked him during a phone call, “Are the guys worried about us?”
He
said, “I don’t know. They never talked about it.”
I said, “Well, what did you tell them?”
“Nothing. Just that you needed to get away, get some sun.”
Sure, an old family pattern: parent flees cross-country without notice, suitcase, or destination in mind.
The annoying thing was that the boys typically let Jess get away with ducking uncomfortable talk, but I couldn’t expect that from them. I would have to explain my actions to my sons and didn’t have a clue how to do that.
The guys were due in at ten Friday night. I drove to Orlando in the afternoon to check out the yarn shops. I walked with Bijou around a small lake in a pretty city park, and sat beneath a huge shade tree and read and knitted while she played near me in the grass. For dinner, I found a nice outdoor bistro, then caught a movie before heading to the airport in time to meet their flight.
Now, past eleven o’clock at night, Cam and Saddler and I drove through sparse traffic until we reached the stretch of dark inland swampland on the way to Hibiscus. Along this part of the route traffic was practically nonexistent.
Saddler, sitting in the front seat next to me, said, “I can’t believe how black the night is around here.” My older son took after Jess with his tall, dark-haired good looks. Yet he had a head for business that I liked to claim.
It was so dark that I had dimmed the dashboard lights, because they glared and bothered our eyes.
Cam agreed from the backseat, sitting behind his brother with Bijou on his lap. “I thought Wyoming was the darkest place in the country at night with cities almost a hundred miles apart, but here it’s like these swamps suck up starlight.” My younger son carried golden tones in his hair and skin and this extended to his personality. He glowed with goodwill.
“Weren’t you scared driving all alone on this road late at night when you first got here?” Saddler asked.
So I didn’t have to wait as long as I had feared for this tender topic to open. With relief, in the comfort of the dark car, on this narrow road, crowded on both sides with walls of solid growth, I said, “I was too surprised by my actions to be scared.”
Yet the whole truth was that I was too miserable. I remembered how the outside bleakness of dark and lonely road mirrored my inner hopelessness. I didn’t say so out loud, but that night some part of me had invited disaster. That feeling had scared me. Inwardly, I had beckoned a horrible accident to occur, as if that would explain or match the mangled way I felt inside.
“I love your father. I loved him the night I left. But I had become unhappy with my life and my relationship with him. In order to save my marriage, I temporarily left it. When two people fill their lives with the love and care of their children and those children move on, as they should, into their own lives, it takes an adjustment. The old rules no longer apply. Instead of thinking what was best for the family as a whole, I had to consider what was best for me. I had lost the knack. Your father adjusted better than I did.”
From the backseat Cam said, “That’s because he’d been practicing all along.”
“What?” My whole body became an ear in the darkness. I felt myself tense with the need for absorbing those words.
Cam repeated them and added, “Dad knew you were taking care of everything, so he could pretty much do what he wanted.”
Saddler said, “It’s a male thing from your generation.”
“It is?” I felt like a child, as if my sons and I had exchanged places in this disembodied blackness.
“Yeah,” Saddler said. “Men from your generation learned how to take over from watching their own fathers, but they don’t get how to share being in charge.”
Cam said, “It’s like you two tried to be less traditional in your marriage than Grandma and Grandpa were, where he went to work and she stayed home. With you and Dad, nobody was in charge either place. So you took over both places and Dad just helped . . . when he wanted to.”
Saddler said, “We’re not on anybody’s side or anything; we just noticed this stuff.”
“I want a marriage just like you guys have,” Cam said. “But I want both of us to have fun.”
Saddler said, “You should have more fun, Mom.”
My throat swelled and ached; I kept swallowing. The top of my nose stung, and my eyesight blurred with the tears that lined my lower lids. I blinked, hoping to absorb them, but more tears gathered and they slid down my cheeks anyway. I felt safe in hiding my wet face in the density of the swampy night. No faraway town lights, no moonlight visible through the narrow slit of sky directly above the road. Then the headlights of a rare oncoming car gave me away.
“Aw, Mom, don’t cry. You made her cry, Cam.” Saddler rooted around in the glove department for tissues, and I sniffed and wiped the back of my hand across my face. Saddler was as uncomfortable as Jess with negative emotions, and often assigned blame.
Cam found my purse in the backseat, handed me a tissue from inside it and said, “Pull over. I’ll drive.” The sensitive son.
My chest felt crowded and my breath was ragged in my attempt not to sob out loud and alarm my boys. I pulled over, and we all got out for the shift in seating—Saddler was going to sit in Cam’s seat in the back so I could sit up front. Outside, on the edge of the road with the car motor off, the air sang with the watery sounds of frogs and the rasp of insects. Cam handed me another tissue and I blew my nose loudly. The noise of that created an abrupt alert to the swamp creatures. Utter silence descended.
In the dark, it felt as if all my senses were cut off. Then my sense of smell was alerted by a powerful sweetness that perfumed the silky night. I inhaled deeply.
With wonder lacing my voice, I said, “Blossoms.” And I stuffed the tissues in my pocket, tipped my head back to take in the heavenly fragrance. Cam and Saddler did the same and we stood together silently. Bit by bit the sounds of swamp life returned. First a single night bird chirped; then frogs croaked in unison, and a soft insect buzz stitched in the background. My eyes were adjusting to the night and I caught both guys watching me. I grinned at them, pleased to have them with me, proud that they had become such good, caring company.
Cam reached over and hugged me. After a moment, I pulled Saddler in with us. We stood together for another moment, arms around one another with our heads tossed back, inhaling the perfume and listening to the noisy night. It seemed as if the wildlife was celebrating something wonderful with us.
When we got back in the car, I considered Saddler’s hesitancy in hugging me just now and earlier at the airport. Over the years I’d found this to be a sure signal. When the guys had girlfriends, it was harder for them to sort out their demonstrations of affection, and I was rightfully the woman set aside. Greetings and goodbyes turned briefly into stilted affairs, until the girlfriend became more familiar or the relationship moved on. I always honored that insight into their private lives.
I turned sideways toward the backseat. I said, “Saddler, do you have someone special in your life now?”
“I don’t know.”
Cam glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “Tell her, Sadd.”
“We weren’t finished talking about Mom’s stuff. We should finish that.”
I said, “Well, to sum it up: it’s entirely possible that you’re both right, and much of my misery over my life and marriage could be healed by having more fun.” Such a simple idea. Yet it struck a note of pure truth with me. “I’ll begin having more fun this very weekend with you two. Now tell me about your girlfriend.”
“Her name is Ella.” And from the darkness of the backseat while Saddler held the sleeping Bijou on his lap, I learned—more from what Saddler didn’t say than from what he said—that my elder son was in love. I had thought at the airport as he approached me that he looked so much like Jess when I’d first fallen in love with him. Dark, wavy hair; tall, athletic body that could as easily climb rock walls as contort itself into a kayak and somersault down fast water. Ella, I learned, was a junior along with Saddler. They planned
to live together this summer, probably in Telluride, Colorado, where Ella’s family had a vacation cabin, but that was still pending on what jobs became available. They were both acquiring degrees in hotel management and would look for experience in their field. Saddler had loved Ella from afar last year while she was still involved with a boyfriend from home.
“Finally she wised up,” Saddler said, and laughed.
“She’s a looker,” Cam said. “And really nice.” He added, “I’m glad I haven’t found anybody special yet.”
“Me, too. You’re too young.” Though at the moment, I was feeling Saddler was too young, as well—a mother’s perennial perspective, I guessed. He was two years older than me when I decided to marry Jess. But they weren’t talking about marriage, I reminded myself.
We drove several miles in silence.
Then Saddler said, “I just don’t know why it doesn’t work sometimes. I mean, when you love somebody, why doesn’t it last, like you think it will?”
The question at the crux of separation. The ripples that disrupt more than just your own life when a marriage doesn’t work. Cam and Saddler were in the process of building their understanding about long-term love, and I had slipped out some key supports when I left their father, even though temporarily. I owed Saddler and his brother an answer that lent strength to their understanding. I considered what I wanted to say. That old fairy-tale ending of happily ever after would never pass muster with this generation of kids, whose parents had a divorce rate that exceeded by far any before them.
