Fairy Tale Blues

by Tina Welling

  The slopes were filled with a lot of unattractive women. Or so it seemed today. Other days all the women looked beautiful to me and reminded me of Annie in one way or another, as if the ski slopes were filled with her sisters taunting me out here.

  The line was long, so I tucked my poles under one arm, pulled out my cell and called Annie. I hadn’t decided yet whether to tell her about my session with Lola. The fact was, I didn’t like thinking about it.

  “Hi. It’s me. I miss you.”

  “Hi, Jess. I miss you, too.”

  “Yeah, but I really miss you. I’m skiing this morning, and all I can think about is how much I wish you were skiing with me.” I glided my skis up the line as it moved, trying to keep my poles from poking someone’s eyes out behind me.

  “But I hardly ever skied with you. I was usually in the office working.”

  “I just miss you a lot, Annie, and I’m anxious for us to be together again.” I didn’t call to bring up how much she worked and I played.

  “Well, I’m getting a little annoyed with that line, Jess.” She took a big breath and let it out. “Mushy talk about missing me and how much you want me home is your avoidance scheme. You’re beginning to sound like a broken record.”

  “That’s the love of my heart, insulting me when I say nice things.” I looked around to see who might be listening and smiled at the strangers surrounding me. The tricky part of getting into the chairlift with poles in one hand, phone in the other was approaching. Should have thought this out. “Just a second, Annie.” I decided I better give this up, especially if the conversation was going to get difficult. I maneuvered under the rope that kept the lift line in place, held the phone up to my ear again. “I’m back.” Without using my poles, I slid down the gentle slope toward a bench in the sunlight. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. ‘Broken record.’ ”

  She said, “More like a broken record that thinks it’s endearing in that condition.”

  I rested my poles against the bench. “Shit, Annie.” I guessed this was going to take a while, so I worked out of my skis in order to sit comfortably.

  “You’re in denial, Jess. And grasping for the innocent position—missing me, telling me you love me. Staying firmly in the same spot that you’ve always clung to—blind, blameless, refusing to see reality.”

  I sighed audibly into the phone. Leave it to Annie to turn a genuine sentiment of mine into a fault I should feel guilty about.

  “Move it along, Jess. We’re having problems. Let’s work on them.”

  Maybe this was the time to tell her about seeing Lola. But then this conversation would really get uncomfortable. I changed the subject with her instead, said, “Okay . . . so what’s up with school?”

  She allowed a long pause, then gave in and answered me. “I love school, Jess. I want to go for a degree, do something with this education I’m getting.”

  Her voice sounded as if her face were all aglow, eyes lit, cheeks lifted in a soft smile—the way she used to sound and look while talking about us. “A degree in what?” Here it comes.

  “Creativity.”

  Again I sighed into the phone. But I kept quiet, let her talk. I leaned against the back of the bench and stretched out my legs. From here the entire mountain range spread out before me, and it made my heart buzz to see the peaks all lined up, glimmering in the bright morning light against the sky. The drainages were folded in between the slopes and crowded with the spires of dark pines. The sun felt great. I’d missed some of what Annie was saying. I tuned back in.

  “I just think people must honor one another’s creativity,” Annie said.

  “Not if it’s crap, we don’t.”

  “Jess, you’re such a severe critic.”

  A woman coming off Apres Vous skied into my line of vision, and stopped to wipe the fog off her goggles before getting in the lift line again. I checked how the frost had decorated this woman’s face and she had a long, icy chin hair. I bet she would have died if she knew that hair was even growing on her face. And here it was frosted, catching sunbeams and flashing them over the mountain like SOS signals. I didn’t respond to Annie, so she went on.

  “You’re harshly judgmental toward other people’s creative pursuits and the reason may be because you’re not creating much yourself.”

  I still didn’t respond.

  “Maybe if you’d completed any of your projects or stood ready to back them up as the best that you could do—”

  I interrupted, “Then I’d miraculously have low enough standards and crummy enough taste to applaud everybody else’s efforts. Great theory.”

  “I’m just saying, Jess, that you’re as severe with yourself as you are with others. It’s as if you’re privately sneering yourself into immobility in the creativity department.”

  “I hate that damn word ‘creativity.’ ” I stood up and took a few steps in a small circle before the bench. “I have a degree in design. I know good work when I see it. And I don’t see it often.” I sat back down. People settled for junk these days. They were too lazy to hold out for good work, either making it or buying it.

  She said, “We don’t go around judging the quality of people’s prayers, and so we shouldn’t be doing that to creative efforts. Just as with prayer, we should stand reverent in the face of it, whatever it is.”

  She was on a soapbox now. I leaned up, propped my arms on my knees and held my head in my hand.

  “Art, no matter how it’s judged by the contemporary world,” she continued, “is the reach toward the sacred, that which is larger than ourselves.” She paused. “Being creative is a way to experience the divine.”

  Oh, geez. Good art is good art. Not much of it in the world and no use trying to squirm around the fact. I won’t hurrah someone just because they got their crayons out and tried to draw a barn.

  I said, “Write it for your term paper.” I meant, And spare me. But that just encouraged her.

  “I’m finding out for myself that it’s a path to self-knowledge, a kind of education that enlarges my awareness. This is important to me, Jess. Creative energy feels like medicine to me, a way to heal myself, and I want to learn to offer that to others.”

  That was it. I got mad. I stood up, turned my back to the skiers going past and tried to keep my voice low.

  “Annie, you are no goddamn good at drawing a fig tree, you can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with a bunch of off-key five-year-olds and you dance with the rhythm of a wombat. You’re just looking for an excuse to elevate these facts into something else. Stick with the ledgers.”

  Long silence.

  “Thanks for the support, Jess.” Her voice cracked. “Maybe I’ll follow your suggestion. Come back home to the ledgers . . . and release you to the ski slopes. That what you had in mind?”

  “Oh, shit, Annie. I’m sorry.” I don’t know what sets me off when art gets into the picture. I hear this passion in her voice . . . I see my mother on the road, her painting tools lying in blood. I said, “I got to go.”

  I pocketed my cell, snapped back into my bindings and poled off to stand in the lift line. I’d have to apologize again for all those insults—not that they weren’t the naked-ass truth, except for the wombat part. Even Annie once admitted she couldn’t draw a happy face. “But,” Annie had followed, “that isn’t what matters.” And, of course, we knew what mattered. All together now: “It’s the big C.”

  I slid onto the chair, a double that I was sharing with a woman I didn’t know. Not interested in chitchat, so I just said, “Nice day,” and turned my head away to admire the slopes laid out in the sunlight below to my left.

  The chair reached the top of Teewinot, and the woman and I slid off, skied across each other’s path. She skied toward the left to go down the short slope and I skied toward the right to stand in line for the Apres Vous lift that went to the top.

  The snow was hard high up, too cold to have softened, but it felt great to be out. When I was outdoors skiing and hiking, I didn’t think about a thing
other than the beauty of being in the mountains and working my body. There was nothing in the world better than that, unless it was at the end of a day full of outdoor activity when that great sense of well-being nested in my chest. Let’s hear it for endorphins.

  I skied fast, hit the bottom, got in line again. After I warmed up on Apres Vous, I rode the tram to see how things looked on Rendezvous. With the inversion, it was warmer.

  I’d kept my head down that morning to avoid eye contact, but Annie and I had lived here too long for me not to have run into a dozen people I knew in the first hour of skiing. Hey, Jess. Hi, Jess. How ya doin’, Jess? I responded and moved right along. Not in the mood, sorry.

  Annie went so far once as to call creativity a psychic orgasm. I mean, that girl left no area untouched by this philosophy.

  When our sons were little, they used to plead, “Draw us a bunny, Momma” and Annie was stumped. Big circle, small circle, add ears. That was all the little guys wanted.

  I’d say, “Ask for a snake, boys.” Just joking, but Annie would shoot daggers at me, because—who’d believe it—she didn’t know how to draw a snake. I’d do a wavy line in the air with my finger. She’d get a purposeful look on her face and carefully draw a squiggle. “Put a cat by it,” Saddler would say and Annie was stumped again. Now wasn’t this the perfect person to make a big to-do about the creative urge and be dismissive about its outcome?

  After lunch at Casper Bowl, I decided to ski down to base and call her back. Apologize again for all my insults. The phone rang four times. Maybe she was thinking about whether to answer or not.

  “Hello,” she said formally.

  “I said some nasty things. It’s not true about your dancing like a wombat; I love dancing with you.”

  “Hmm,” she said. And I supposed she was going to press for the “sorry” word. I was just getting ready to pull it out when she said, “I love dancing with you, too.” She paused. “Though I might go ahead anyway and look for a new husband here in Florida.”

  I said, “Well, don’t give me as a reference.”

  She started laughing quietly and ended up laughing hard. I could picture her head tipped back, hair falling between her shoulders. She’d probably gotten some sun streaks in her hair by now, and those shoulders were probably tanned.

  Just to be a decent guy, I said, “I’m glad you like school. What kind of degree does a person get in . . . creativity?”

  Annie said, “Art therapy.” Musical notes rang out from her two words. She was hooked on something big. “I’d like to work with patients in hospitals.”

  I said again, “Well, don’t use me as a reference.”

  No laughter this time.

  I decided not to tell her about seeing Lola. I probably wouldn’t go back. Lola already warned me that she’d want to talk about my story more. Sure. That would fix everything.

  Twenty-five

  Annie

  As the sun set, the sky outside my screened porch duplicated the coals in my grill, gray with fiery coral on the edges. Behind me in the apartment, CNN evening news tacked me to the rest of humanity and the flow of earthly life. I spread the coals out from the pyramid I had piled them in and came inside to season the chicken. Bijou chewed on a pressed rawhide bone, and Kia flew to my shoulder, where she liked to tap her beak against my blue topaz ear studs.

  The word “Miami” caught my attention on the news, and I paused to watch a story about a nursing home filled with pets. Birdcages housed singing canaries and clowning parakeets. Fish tanks sparkled with neon tetras, cats sat on windowsills and grey-hounds laid their muzzles on frail laps in wheelchairs.

  According to the reporter, statistics showed that around animals people lived longer, heart rates slowed, immune systems perked. And scientists had proven that bones knitted faster if you interacted with animals while you healed. They didn’t mention hearts, but I was convinced. My pets had created a home for me and speeded my healing.

  One Thanksgiving weekend a few years back, my dogs were the only creatures in the house that befriended me. The urge was strong to seek distraction from this memory. But it had been nipping at my heels long enough now, demanding acknowledgment of its presence. I turned off the TV, set Kia back in her cage, poured a glass of wine and took it to the porch to watch the final colors drain from the sky and the stars brighten.

  That phone call with Jess. Even though it had occurred a couple days ago now, his dismissal of the enthusiasm I had expressed for my studies in creative energy provoked a range of emotions and the remembrance of one miserable night in particular.

  That evening the dishes were cleared from our Thanksgiving dinner, and I worked on the dining room table, cutting pictures out of old National Geographic magazines for a collage I was putting together on card stock. Suddenly I looked up to see Jess, Cam and Saddler standing around the table like a posse, waiting for me to break my concentration and notice them.

  I laughed out loud at how engrossed I’d been. Saddler was home on holiday from his second year in college and Cam, a senior in high school, was also on break for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Our store was closed until the beginning of ski season in December, so we’d all hung around the house that day, while snow accumulated outside the windows.

  I stopped laughing when no one joined me. I waited, feeling puzzled, for someone to speak.

  I remembered how all three of the dogs circled around my feet as Jess, Cam and Saddler pulled out chairs and sat at the dining table, facing me. They had turned off the television.

  Jess spoke first. “We’ve been talking, and we’ve decided to tell you that we’re having some trouble with you.” Then all three of them talked on top of one another, volleying accusations at me. I spent too much time with my projects. Dad was trying to get along, but I was being selfish. Why did I go on weekend trips alone; why didn’t I watch TV with everybody; why didn’t I change back to how I used to be?

  I didn’t even hear all their words. I was overcome with the shock of their approach, the surprise of their attack. I was outnumbered and overwhelmed, and my first response was one of feeling I had transgressed somehow. That was followed within seconds by an avalanche of shame over my complete ignorance about how I was failing everyone.

  I began crying. I lurched up from the table and went to our bedroom, wounded and confused. I asked myself if their accusations were true. Was I being selfish? Was I ignoring the family when I chose not to watch TV with them, but to read, knit, sew, work with paints and paste images, instead? Why were guilt and shame my first responses? Why was it anyone’s first response when they were ganged up on? True, I wasn’t following the conventional path anymore of going along with whatever the family wanted to do whether I wanted to or not, but rather trying to blaze a new one for myself. Alone I attended gallery openings, craft classes and lectures. Did that make me selfish? Or did it make me finally mature, a full person in my own right?

  All that work, all that searching and pondering for the last couple of years, in the effort to make my marriage work. And the long search for meaning in my life, as I yearned to make my days satisfying, while I also stayed within the family framework and continued in the business. My struggle to maintain balance—be a loving wife, a good mother, while trying to keep alive an essential part of myself.

  Was all of it a failure? Was I way off track?

  I had to take seriously that the three people closest to me suggested I was abnormal and should “fix” it.

  That Thanksgiving night I paced my bedroom while the TV droned downstairs with old holiday movie repeats. I curled into a ball on the carpet and held myself. I wept and whispered to myself. Hours later I heard my sons come upstairs to their bedrooms.

  The house quieted.

  Jess didn’t come up.

  That Thanksgiving night a couple hours before dawn, I sat against pillows on my bed, lamplight casting a yellow circle around me, and the word “intervention” occurred to me. The label helped me sort out my bewilderment. An inte
rvention was what you did when all else failed, when each person involved had attempted on three different occasions to introduce a private discussion with the one in denial of their problem—an addiction, usually. And when the attempts failed to advance the situation toward a solution, an intervention was arranged: the family gathered and confronted the troubled person.

  Not one person—not my husband nor either son—had approached me even one time. In fact, Jess had turned away my attempts to discuss our relationship, sometimes with a joke, sometimes with impatience or anger. I realized then that Jess had used our sons’ normal parental gripes—and perhaps their fears of their parents’ growing detachment—to bolster his personal trouble with me.

  That night I walked downstairs and woke Jess with bright lamplight in his face as he slept on the sofa.

  “You are married to me. You dignify that from now on with the privacy and the honor that deserves. When you have problems with me, you talk to me directly. Never again bring our children into our marriage.”

  Jess apologized in today’s politically correct way. He said, “If I did anything to hurt you, I’m sorry.”

  An apology weakened by the fact that I had to challenge him for it. He didn’t come to me. He slept. I came to him. A pattern I was finally recognizing.

  Going to a marriage counselor didn’t come from him, either, but he agreed to accompany me. Maybe the sleep deprivation and bright light in the eyes played a part.

  I used the same tactic on our sons. Went to each of their bedrooms, turned on the overhead light and announced the rules for an intervention: three private attempts before a group encounter. See me after breakfast.

  Both boys showed sleepy but sincere contrition.

  I became full of clarity and strength that dawn. I realized that I had never been so happy as I had during the past couple years of directing some of my energy and attention to myself. The search for a sense of personal identity was expressed by my craft projects. They connected me to an essential part of myself and gave me great pleasure. Yet my sons’ father was having one hell of a hard time with that.