Fairy Tale Blues

by Tina Welling

  “I told you, dear, that I’d bring you some,” she said, once she caught her breath. Lucille, who was seventy-six and had spent the past four decades teaching history—American, Florida State and European—at the college, had just this year retired. She was plainly delighted with her free time. She and Shank had met at the school. He had worked in janitorial services and had also just retired recently. They’d never had children and Mitzi was their first pet.

  I hoped to keep suspicion clear from my expression, but I was expected to ask: “So . . . how do tomatoes turn into raspberries and zucchini turn into strawberries?” I held open the door for Lucille, inviting her in.

  “Well, dear, here’s the secret: Jell-O. I use flavored Jell-O and you don’t even know that you’re not eating what the name of it says.”

  Though that sounded like many items on a fast-food menu, I felt compelled to express my surprise at the ingenuity of her cooking. “I have toast for breakfast most mornings; I’ll try some right away.”

  “If you like it, I’ll bring you some pineapple jam made from yellow tomatoes.”

  I thought, Here’s a no-win situation, but I said, “Yum.” I took the small jars and we stepped into my kitchen. She and Shank had been stern about allowing me my privacy and hadn’t been inside my apartment since I’d moved in. I, on the other hand, had visited downstairs several times—for lemonade in the late afternoons after I’d taken Mitzi along with Bijou for extended romps on the beach and a couple weeks ago with the boys for Sunday morning tea and muffins. Lucille’s muffins were spectacular; I hated to think what this jam was going to do to them.

  Lucille and I shared the recently found pleasure of pursuing personal goals. When I told her about the joyous frenzy in which I had gathered my household decor and showed her the variety of items on my worktable where I was putting together a collage for my textile class, she understood completely. I dragged out my knitting projects, holding back on the surprise I was working on for her pup, a collar Caridad had helped design with lacy petals. Mitzi could wear it for Shank and Lucille’s Sunday teas.

  I showed Lucille around, introduced her to Kia; then we sat on my screened porch with glasses of iced tea. “I’ve been experimenting a bit myself,” I said. “I’ve mixed herbal iced tea with raspberry juice.” And used not a single tomato or zucchini, I added to myself. Mixing juice with iced tea wasn’t originally my idea; I had borrowed it from the Green Bottle Café.

  I liked imagining Lucille’s love affair with Shank. The elegant, heavy-chested Lucille always dressed in either all white or all black, with a colorful silk scarf. I pictured her in the classroom—graduate degrees and faculty position with tenure—punctuating her lectures with petitions sent downstairs to the Department of Maintenance for help with jammed windows or hanging posters. And then I liked to picture the strong, hefty Shank grabbing those requests to do first.

  I started my inquiry into the romance by saying, “So you and Shank met at the college.”

  “Shank saved my life. Of course, that’s not why I fell in love with him. That happened first.”

  “Then he saved your life.” No questions. I didn’t know her well enough, and she carried a strong sense of personal dignity about her—a shield I supposed she needed to erect, living in the public realm of teaching in a small community.

  “I was a secret drinker, dear. Fooled everybody but the one who loved me.”

  “Oh, gosh . . . that’s a hard one, drinking.”

  “Harder on the people who care about you. Not so hard on the drinker. As long as you keep on drinking, that is.”

  “I once heard about a woman who was an alcoholic and learned she was dying of cancer. She decided to quit drinking because she didn’t want to die drunk.” I heard awe in my voice.

  “Well, I quit because I didn’t want to be loved drunk.”

  I didn’t quite follow that remark and tipped my head, puzzled.

  Lucille said, “I loved Shank and I could see he loved me. However, he had grown up with an alcoholic mother, so, Annie dear, I felt like home to him. He knew just how to love a drinking woman. I wanted him to love me for my true self. I began my drinking about ten years or so before Shank came to the college. It was my first teaching job; I was the only black instructor there and one of only three women.”

  I thought about conditions for black women forty years ago in the Southern states and marveled at Lucille’s courage.

  “I was so scared,” Lucille continued, “that my voice shook even greeting students in the hallway. I had intestinal problems throughout the day, most especially dramatic in the middle of my lectures. In the classroom there was so much I wanted to tell my students, yet I could barely glance at them.”

  She took a long look at the triangle of ocean between the rooftops.

  “I don’t think they intended to let me stay past that first semester. I discovered that if I had a bit of vodka with my orange juice at breakfast, I was steadier. You know how that goes—more vodka, more steady. Me, orange juice and vodka created a fine career for the following decade. I was commended with teaching awards and was popular with the students. I have always loved my students.”

  Lucille sipped her tea. “One day Shank showed up to repair my desk chair. We recognized each other, like you often do when real love happens by. But I wouldn’t marry him until I had been drink-free for one full year. By then, though I hadn’t realized it, I didn’t need to drink any longer to conduct a classroom. I needed it for itself.”

  “Well, congratulations. I admire your taking on the struggle.”

  “I loved Shank and I had always wanted to be married, though by my midforties I had given up on the idea.”

  “A fairy-tale ending,” I said.

  “Marriage, dear. No fairy tales involved.”

  I told Lucille something of what I was doing living on a six-month lease above her garage. No fairy tale there, either.

  “You know, some of us learn the most about life and ourselves through relationship. That was what I wanted when I took my vows with Shank.” She raised her eyebrows and took on a Southern black accent. “And class ain’t over yet.”

  We laughed.

  Lucille said, “Shank struggled with being married to someone in a higher position on campus and making more money. I offered wide berth for that and excused his need to be in control. Yet time passed and I soon realized that his upbringing had instilled in him a need to keep an upper hand, as he had been in charge of the home life as the oldest child for his first thirty years or so.

  “Shank needed to learn some survival tools living with his alcoholic mother and no father on the premises, and he learned to survive well. Trouble with our marriage is that he can’t move on now, give up those tools he no longer needs to survive. He is still living in an imagined household of a drunken mother and eight children he must get ready for school. And I live in it with him.”

  Jess, too, I realized, had brought to our marriage old survival skills from his childhood that he no longer needed, particularly an insulating emotional position. And they impeded his relationship in marriage in a different way from Shank’s, though just as forcefully.

  “How do you manage?” I asked Lucille, imagining Shank overwhelming her on a daily basis with his need for wielding power from big things—finances—to small things—where to place the sofa. “You’ve been together . . . what? Thirty years?”

  “Spaces in that togetherness, that’s how I manage. We have a wonderful home life and we enjoy each other, but we are not together all the time. I cannot change him or anyone else; I learned that in the twelve-step program. So I have adjusted my idea of marriage. We are together—even now during our retirement—only in the evenings and one day or so on the weekend. The rest of the time I go my way, he goes his. We have lovely dinner conversations, telling each other what we did during our time apart.”

  “So he agreed to this?” I tried imagining setting up such an arrangement with Jess, because I recognized that our marriage
held a lot of togetherness and could also benefit from time apart.

  “No.” Lucille smiled. “I quietly took action on it, bit by bit creating a nice life for myself. And I’ve since learned, talking to other women, that this routine isn’t all that rare.”

  I refilled our tea and refreshed our ice cubes, using the pause to absorb my surprise over how wrong I’d been to assume my neighbors’ marriage was as conventional as cooked corn. Before I sat back down again, I wondered if my few lone getaways the past couple years had been my attempts at creating breaks in togetherness.

  Lucille took a sip and replaced the glass smack in the original circle of sweat left on the table. “Where we got the idea that just because we are married we have to do everything together is beyond me. I met a married woman the other day who has her own house.”

  “Really?” That sounded rather nice.

  “They have a little cottage out back of their main house, and one day she slept out there because her husband was snoring. She liked it so much, she moved in. She enjoyed her own company during the day and came in the main house to have dinner and spend evenings with her husband.”

  “That takes money.”

  “Maybe your own cottage, but not creating your own life. I have my good friends, events we attend together, and times I just prefer my solitude and spend the morning at the library and the afternoon in my sewing room. Every week I discover something new I enjoy doing. Like this jam. Why, I had a big day making that.”

  Lucille had also been gardening, so we walked downstairs together to admire her work. Along the side I had always considered their private yard, beside their screened Florida room, Lucille had created an area with flagstones, ground cover and accent plants. Fountain grass spouted along a short stone wall, dracaena plants sat in pots and flame vine climbed the porch pillars. It was lovely, cool and colorful. We said goodbye after that, and Bijou and I headed for our daily walk on the beach.

  I strolled four blocks through our neighborhood of older Florida homes, originally small houses with added bedrooms, extended living rooms, newly built screened porches and decks.

  Everything that had made life good for me during the past few weeks had risen in a pure, energetic way, as if there were a luminous cord that spun up my spine, holding my body straight and sizzling my mind with new vitality. But along with this I worried about Jess, as if the farther I traveled into my own life, the farther away I traveled from him. It wasn’t because of the three thousand miles between us, but because of this personal place I had created within myself. We had both become used to me carrying him and his life in my consciousness—remembering where he’d tossed his wallet, keeping him current with friends and family, scheduling his store meetings with product reps. Where he once resided, now my own life took up residence and this created a sense of distance from Jess that I wasn’t used to feeling.

  As I reached across that distance, my fear arose. I became afraid Jess would do something to harm himself. Not deliberately—he did very little deliberately—but rather act rashly and without paying attention. I worried about his going backcountry skiing alone. If he packed his survival gear as carelessly as he placed his car keys, I’d never see him again.

  On the beach, I snapped off Bijou’s leash and she began her romp toward the water’s edge. She got distracted by a sand crab and chased it until it disappeared mysteriously on her. I watched her turn circles trying to surprise it with a pounce.

  This separation anxiety was all in my mind, of course, not so different from the mental space that opened for me when the boys first attended grade school. I worried about them even as I learned to let them go. Now I had to let Jess go. In part, that was what Lucille was talking about. Letting go, moving on myself.

  My heart cramped suddenly and I was overcome with a bleak realization: I was helpless to create the fully engaged relationship with Jess that I longed for. I couldn’t accomplish it alone. And Jess didn’t share my dreams of love and closeness. Maybe he never would. It was as much a fairy tale as a wedding at Cinderella’s castle.

  I sat on the sand in despair. I wrapped my arms around my knees and buried my face them. My greatest fear since leaving for my marriage sabbatical was that I would discover I could not return. Was that the truth I needed to face now?

  I lifted my head. But maybe I didn’t have to leave Jess.

  Wasn’t that what Lucille was telling me, too? Change yourself, not the other. I sniffed and let the wind blow my tears into my hair.

  After a bit, I got up and began walking again. I watched a sail-boat far out in the deep navy blue water, where the setting sun illuminated the triangle of white sail. Bijou darted after terns that rose as a single body and flew low over the waves, two dozen striped wing bodies all perfectly spaced. Then as one, they flipped their angle and the image turned to flying white breasts flashing against a blue sky.

  My heart swelled at the sight and somehow I felt reassured that whatever force orchestrated that rhythm and beauty was available to lend rhythm and beauty to my life, too.

  I had been trying so hard to produce something I’d imagined, molding myself and my mate into some fairy-tale image, resisting anything that didn’t fit it. When all along, like the terns moving in response to the moment, I had needed to live in tune with reality. My confusion over my marriage came from the reality not matching the firm grip I held on the fairy tale.

  Bijou discovered where crabs hid and began digging just above the waterline, yet lost confidence when she didn’t find one. Her underbelly was caked with wet sand.

  Then the good news hit me: I didn’t have to leave Jess, just leave him alone.

  Give him room to do and be whatever he chose, give myself room to do the same.

  I took in a big, shaky breath. A smile spread across my face.

  Thanks to Lucille, I had found MARRIAGE RULE #4: Allow Space.

  Thirty

  Jess

  I slapped my hand on the newspaper spread out beside my breakfast and dug in my pocket for my phone. AnnieLaurie had to hear about this. When she answered, I said, “Annie, remember when I told you about Wolf No. 9? That she wasn’t expected to live much longer now that she was driven out of her pack?”

  “Jess, did she die?”

  “Well, you’re not going to believe this.” I laughed and folded the newspaper.

  “What? Tell me,” Annie pleaded.

  “No. 9 . . .”

  “She’s alive?”

  “She’s alive. She’s been spotted and is doing well. Really well.”

  “Oh my gosh, that’s so good to hear.”

  “There’s more. She’s found a new pack and . . . are you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “She is alpha!”

  “No! This is great.”

  “No. 9 and the male are the pack’s dominant pair. One of the females from her old Rose Creek pack joined her.”

  “I could cry, I’m so happy to hear that.”

  “Isn’t she something? The Jackson Hole News & Guide said that out of the one hundred and nine wolves born in Yellowstone since the reintroduction, seventy-nine of the pups are descended from her, children and grandchildren. No other wolf comes close to her contribution.”

  “To think that earlier this winter they were expecting her to die alone in the snow. She is amazing.”

  “They’ve named her new pack the Valentine pack.”

  Annie sighed happily.

  “So happy Valentine’s Day, Annie.”

  “I just opened your gift. Jess, it’s so beautiful. I’m wearing the pendant right now. Looks wonderful with my earrings. Same intense blue topaz. Did you know that I pierced my ears with another set of holes, so I could wear both pairs of blue topaz ear studs you gave me?”

  “Oh, God, you’re going to make me look at those the rest of my life, aren’t you?”

  “Did you receive my gift?”

  “And eaten some. Stuck two Honeybells in my pocket before I went snowshoeing with the dogs earl
y this morning, and ate them while sitting on a snowbank.”

  “They were late this season. Still, that’s it for the Honeybells.”

  “I love you, AnnieLaurie.”

  “I love you, too, Jess.”

  I flipped the phone closed and grabbed my gear.

  Valentine’s Day was the first day of the year that the sun shined fully on Snow King Mountain, often referred to as the Town Hill and—my favorite part—called the “steepest little son of a bitch in the West.” A north-facing mountain, it was cold and in shadow all day during the first half of the season, so I usually waited until mid-February to ski it.

  Couldn’t let a season go by without runs down the face of Snow King Mountain. On a clear day like today, the chairlift offered views all the way across the valley to Yellowstone, fifty miles away. I craned my neck around to admire the Grand Tetons and to imagine Wolf No. 9 and her new pack moving together across the snowfields farther north. I basked in the memory of this morning’s phone call to Annie. When I’d read about No. 9 in the Jackson Hole News & Guide with my breakfast, I could hardly wait to tell her. I didn’t mention that I was taking the day off from the store to ski.

  This mountain, like the rest of Jackson Hole, had become busier over the twenty-five years since Annie and I first moved here. In fact, even a decade ago it was so quiet on this mountain that many days I was the only person on the chairlift until later in the day when school let out. Once in late March the only other rider was a robin who rode up the mountain perched on the chair ahead of me.

  Our boys learned to ski as toddlers, but by the time Annie and I learned, we were in our twenties, our bodies rigid with the fear of falling. Annie still didn’t ski fast enough to get her ears cold, but over the years I’d become fairly decent. I remembered, though, that first attempt.

  Just to advertise our stupidity we drove to the mountain with our rented ski boots already locked into the bindings and the whole business—boots and skis—strapped to the top of our car. We looked ludicrous and arrived at the resort to find our boots had filled with snow. We skied that day with cold, wet feet.