Fairy Tale Blues (18 page)

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 would 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.

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.

Annie

 

 

D
uring 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.