by Tina Welling
Jess resided within my body. I resided within his.
Jess was a different man today from the thirty-year-old of two decades back, dressed in layers of rugged outdoor wear, coddling an infant in the crook of one arm, while promoting the merits of a Rossingnal ski held in the other. Or later when he put our toddler sons in adult-sized ski boots at the store to keep them from walking too far, too fast. Or later yet, when the four of us together skied the slopes of every mountain that circled Jackson Hole. I loved Jess then; I loved Jess now.
I pulled into my driveway, exhausted from the five-day drive across the country and exhilarated to finally be home. I sat for a moment filling my eyes with the sight of my house, its old log porch with the uneven chinking, the hundred-year-old Engelmann spruce rising beside it. I knew that any moment Jess would burst through the front door, and my heart beat fast in anticipation of seeing his face. I opened my car door and slammed it loudly. Still no Jess.
Suddenly our three dogs rounded the corner of the house, spotted me and seemed to sprout wings as they flew toward me. I bent down and held all three in my arms.
“Oh, girls, I missed you.”
Tails flung themselves side to side and noses pushed into my neck, while soft, almost human sounds rumbled in their throats.
I said, “Take me to Jess.”
Off they trotted, swinging their heads behind them to be sure I followed, around the side of the house where they’d come from, all the way to the small cabin in the backyard, where Jess stored his snowmobile, kayaks, fishing rods and other gear.
The cabin door hung wide-open and I stepped in.
I stood there stunned at the transformation.
Once, this cabin was piled nearly to the log rafters with Jess’ junk. The floor, in the few places it had been visible, was covered with patchy old linoleum; cobwebs had draped the windows and the logs had been dull with dust. Now it was cleared of gear and boxes, carpeted, filled with sunlight, and the logs shined and smelled of Murphy’s Oil Soap. The windows had been replaced, the old stove reblacked and a beautiful stone pad sat beneath it. The walls were lined with new carpentry work. Below a counter that stretched along one wall, a pair of familiar denim-clad legs protruded.
The dogs each gave a sharp bark.
Startled, Jess jerked upright and whacked his head on the ledge.
“Shit.”
“Jess!”
“Annie!”
He flung aside a screwdriver he’d been holding, scrambled up and wrapped his arms around me. It felt so good to be home and held by Jess. I breathed in the fragrance of laundry soap from his shirt, cupped his warm neck in the palms of my hands and felt the length of my whole body melt into his.
“Hey,” he said, pulling his face back to look at me. “How do you like your new studio?” He stepped aside, keeping one arm around my shoulder so that I could get the whole view.
“Really? For me?” My smile spread wider and wider as I took it all in—the long expanse of countertop, the shelves and cupboards. I moved around the cabin, my hands touching the smooth, clean wood. “Oh,” I breathed. “My very own work space.”
“I put in lighting, baseboard heat, insulated windows, and I’m just screwing the plates on the electrical outlets to finish it off.”
I looked at my husband. Was this the same guy who had given me the gift of blue topaz ear studs twice in a row?
I said, “This is the best gift I have ever received.”
Once, I had thought love would transform me. To me, love had that power. I had the romantic notions of a naive girl, yet I hadn’t been proven entirely wrong. I looked at Jess now through different eyes from those of the girl who married him, eyes surely transformed.
So it didn’t happen the way I imagined it: love through its ecstacy soaring me into magical kingdoms, inflating my world. It happened like this instead: love through its unrelenting demands pushed me farther and farther into new territory that enlarged me.
Finally I had grown from the woman who abandoned herself for the sake of others into a woman who loved herself enough to include all others.
That was how it began and now I stood on my log porch, once again watching the tulips scoop wind and the aspens sway on the slopes of Snow King Mountain, newly sprouted into pale green gauze that barely hid their limbs, reminding me as it did every year of flirtatious women wearing see-through dresses.
And beside me, Jess.
Tina Welling lives and writes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with her husband, John, and four-legged family members Zoë and Miko. You can reach her at www.tinawelling.com
A CONVERSATION WITH TINA WELLING
Q. What gave you the idea to write about a marriage sabbatical?
A. Marriage can be absorbing and isolating. There are just the two of you tussling over a range of issues from the most intimate to the most mundane. Marriage partners can lose perspective after many years of closeness. Privacy within the relationship can become insulating and we can get locked into certain views.
I’ve been invited to attend writers’ residencies that have taken me away from my everyday life for extended periods. The solitude and the absence of responsibilities that defined me at home offered new perspectives.
That’s when I thought: what if a woman decided to leave temporarily to deepen a relationship with herself? In my case, there was a legitimate work reason for leaving home, but I wondered what it would take for a woman to go against the cultural grain and spend time on her own away from her marriage.
Q. You suggest in the novel that marriage is currently evolving as each generation finds new ways to address its rewards and limitations. Do you think we’ll ever get it right?
A. I think we’ve always got it right. My grandmother Margaret’s marriage was perfect for her and her times, so was my mother, Alice’s, and so is mine and my children’s. Marriage presents challenges that are mirrors of our society. Yet typically each generation evolves the concept of partnering to a new level.
I like watching how emotional and physical intimacy that once was considered the wife’s domain has also become the responsibility of the husband. Don’t you love seeing those men with diaper bags over their shoulders? And I love how a strong sense of self, which was once the husband’s domain—remember dens, those special rooms designed for a man to get away from the family and pursue his own interests?—is now also an honored pursuit of a wife.
I’ve witnessed among my friends the imbalances that can occur with such growth, and one of them is men holding back on the provider end, as I suggest Jess does in the sports business that he and Annie share, and the women taking charge of everything inside the home and out, as Annie did. Confusion can slip in when we share life and authority. There are few guides for evolving partnerships.
So there is no right way or wrong way. Many of us come into our marriages hoping to acquire all the love and acceptance and understanding we felt we didn’t receive from our parents—plus the sizzle of sex and romance. It’s a setup for all kinds of challenges.
Q. In the conversation guide of your previous novel, Crybaby Ranch, you describe how that novel grew out of the exciting intersection of your own experience and your creative imagination. Was that true for Fairy Tale Blues as well?
A. Definitely. For me, that’s how the creative process works. The two—reality and imagination (which is to say the range of possibility I can conjure)—join and produce stories. Yet the end result is always fiction. There is nothing of the memoir in my novels. For example, the longtime love my husband and I share opens my vision to the many possibilities partnering can take and aids me in expressing the experience of deep intimacy and caring, but the result on the page does not in any way resemble my personal actions or those of anyone I know.
It’s a creative process that is a microcosm of the natural world of birthing—how could it be otherwise?—in that male and female mate and the result is a whole new being. Not one or the other, but an original creation unto itself. So it is with story.
Reality and imagination (or possibility) mate and the result is a unique story.
Q. Many writers say that their final work never quite lives up to their intention, never quite says all that they meant to say. What did you want to say in Fairy Tale Blues that might not have gotten said?
A. I wanted to say so much that I had difficulty in choosing my issues. Many issues I touched on, but wished to say more about. For example, I wanted to say, “Look what else you can do besides divorce.” There are a dozen steps of separation that couples can take in response to unresolved issues, while saving the valuable parts of the relationship. I wanted to say, “Create your own form of partnering.”
Q. How did the experience of writing this novel differ from your experience writing Crybaby Ranch?
A. I wrote Crybaby Ranch over a long period of time while I also owned a resort business in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It’s hard to write seriously while working in the business world, and I have a lot of sympathy for those who face this struggle. I’ve since let go of my shop. With Fairy Tale Blues I was able to write full-time, which was wonderful. It seemed an entirely different process. More concentrated. I loved it. The lifestyle that writing a novel demands matches me perfectly. It’s easy for me to be self-disciplined. In fact, I don’t even call it that. It feels more like freedom—oh good, I get to wake up and write all day again tomorrow.
Q. Do you continue to read avidly, even when you’re deeply engaged in writing? Are there writers you’ve particularly enjoyed who have influenced your work?
A. I love to read and wouldn’t stop for anything. Some writers say they can’t read while writing because they find themselves aping another writer’s style. I don’t have that experience. Yet, in another way, everything I read influences or inspires my work. I especially love beautiful language. I become entranced by it and find that even though I am reading in bed with only the pleasure of the story in mind, I am still studying where the author placed the commas, pondering the sentence structure and word choices. I admire Barbara Kingsolver very much, her wisdom and humor. I don’t know that I am particularly influenced by her, but I aspire to her vision and her skill in relating that to her readers. I am especially interested in reading poets who write novels, because of the careful language and the deep awareness for which poets are noted.
I read both fiction and nonfiction. And though I will have several nonfiction books going at once, I will usually read only one novel at a time.
Q. What do you hope to accomplish during the rest of your writing life? Do you have a long view with several projects in mind, or do you take it project by project?
A. What I love best about reading a novel is when the characters’ realizations within the story clarify personal issues for me. To have a writer put words to a troublesome concern of mine is a wonderful experience that grounds me and allows me to move forward. A similar thing occurs when a writer finds the language to express beauty and insight. I glow with the celebration of it. I hope to give that to readers myself.
So perhaps I aspire to a little of both: a long view of continuing to write and offer readers the gifts I love to receive, yet the subjects are still to be discovered.
Q. You came to writing novels later in life, having accumulated much experience from which to draw inspiration. How crucial was that timing in contributing to your success? And what advice would you give other writers, both older and younger?
A. Timing is mysterious. For years I felt that my true self was a writer, yet few people acknowledged me as one, so I felt as though I lived a secret life. Perhaps the most comforting aspect about being published is that my inner and outer lives have been united.
Yet I know that if my work had been published earlier I would have given it more weight in my life than would have been well balanced for me. By the time my first novel was published, my work had been rejected by publishers for many years. I had to learn not to take that personally, or I wouldn’t have been strong enough to continue to write and to fully experience the immense joy I receive from it.
Now I don’t take my current success personally either. I enjoy it very much. I love the opportunities that are available to me now and the wider acquaintanceship of people with whom I interact. But being published doesn’t have much to do with how I see myself, just as I had learned not to let being unpublished affect my self-image.
I think writing is like every other creative pursuit: we must do it for itself and not for any result we imagine it may bring us. Writing is our concern; what happens to it after it leaves our hands is no longer our business. For me writing is an act of unconditional love. I do it for reasons that have nothing to do with what it may bring—money, acceptance, self-esteem. As soon as I stepped onto that path of thought, something was released in me. I continued to send my work out, but I wasn’t attached to it as I had been before.
I would give the advice to writers that the poet William Stafford offers in his book Crossing Unmarked Snow (University of Michigan, 1998): “Make writing a way of life, a practice that can lead to self-realization, to a fuller involvement in one’s own experience.” What could be better?
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Annie realizes she has had expectations about marriage that weren’t realistic. Are there fairy tales about marriage that you’ve believed? Has that changed over the years? How does your experience compare to Annie’s?
2. Tina Welling provides snapshots of several other marriages besides Annie and Jess’. Did anything about them particularly surprise you? Appeal to you? Appall you?
3. Annie is energized and inspired by the creative projects she undertakes, but Jess disdains the high value she places on Creativity with a capital C, distinguishing between “art” and “crap.” Where does your opinion fall in this age-old argument?
4. Jess is described as a “cuddly predator.” Have you known any cuddly predators, male or female?
5. Annie is drawn to Daniel, a reformed drug smuggler. What is he able to provide for her that Jess can’t, or won’t?
6. What is the Skipper’s role in the novel? How does he compare to the senior citizens you know?
7. Annie’s sons help her see her marriage from a new perspective, and suggest that their own experience of marriage will be different from hers. How are the young marriages you know different from older ones? Do you see those differences as healthy and encouraging, or not?
8. Describe the role of the natural world in the lives of Annie and Jess. How important is the natural world in your life?
9. In your opinion, does Annie do the right thing in leaving Jess? Does she do the right thing at the end? What kind of future do you see for them?
10. Has there been a time in your life when you sought solitude in order to make a major decision or achieve a new understanding? What was that experience like for you, and what changes occurred as a result?
11. Annie comments at one point that many people come to know themselves through their relationships with other people. Are you that kind of person?
12. If you left your spouse temporarily, where would you go? What would you do?
