Fairy Tale Blues (23 page)

“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.

Annie

 

 

A
s 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 intervention 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.

Even then, I recognized that the boys' concern was with their parents' relationship, not their personal trouble with me. Saddler was in college; Cam would soon follow. They joined Jess in his ambush on me because they were afraid for him, for what would happen when they were both gone from home. The boys were so busy with their own lives, they didn't notice their parents' lives, and that was exactly the way they wanted it: parents happy in the background; themselves happy in the foreground. Jess' trouble threatened that peace.

Yet for the sake of giving the marriage counseling my best shot, I cleaned my projects off the dining room table that next morning, put them away. The mistake I made was not getting them out again.

 

I rose from my chair and stirred the coals. Jess' continuing lack of support for my interest in creative work had showed its shadowed face once again during our last phone call. This time I wouldn't back down, wouldn't pack up my craft projects and try to renew my interest in the store. Finding work that gave me joy and knowing I could make my way toward it had lifted me these weeks in Florida. I had wanted to share this with Jess, but he hadn't wanted to hear it.

I brought the chicken breasts out to lay on the grill and returned to the kitchen to make a salad. I believed in art therapy; I was experiencing its success in my own life as I filled my lap with beautiful yarns and my worktable with card-making supplies, images, markers and paints. My marriage was going to be stronger because of it. This was work I loved; I could imagine succeeding at leading others toward the same happiness and satisfactions I was discovering. But Jess dismissed my interests and ridiculed my past creative attempts. What I tried to help him understand was that it didn't take an artist to enjoy creative energy or to awaken it in others. Just as it didn't take a mechanic to enjoy driving or to teach driving to others.

But what I had to understand myself was that my creative energy was my responsibility, and I must protect it.

Turning a chicken breast on the grill, I recalled my dream the night after my phone call with Jess. I dreamed that I carried a small pile of wood that held fire. I took this fire around with me, trying to keep it burning. I was looking for a place that was safe to set it. A place where the flame would continue to flare.

This love I held for creating wasn't about producing craft projects; it was about connecting to my inner life, about self-knowing and self-realization. It was about paying attention and coming awake to my own experience of living.

I spread a basil-and-pine nut pesto along the length of each chicken breast, let it heat through, then removed one breast to my plate for dinner and took the other in the kitchen to cool for another meal tomorrow. I brought out the salad I'd prepared along with sliced melon and freshly rinsed grapes.

As I sat out in the dark porch to eat with only a candle and the dim glow of the coals offering light, I realized that part of my need to distance myself from Jess was to protect something fiercely essential to my well-being. His disdain could be a powerful force to me, because I had always looked up to his opinions. I had buckled under his disapproval a dangerous number of times.

Oddly, I accused Jess of sheltering in innocence, of hiding in a state of not knowing, but my marital amnesia had served me in a similar way: I protected myself by forgetting the hard parts, the pieces of our love that sat jaggedly apart from the smooth, throbbing heart center. I must learn to stand by my own opinions and experiences. And I must kindle the flame of my dream and keep it safe.

I poured a half glass of wine and toasted that thought, just to mark it in my mind.

Jess

 

 

M
y favorite memory happened at the Teagues' house one Easter when Annie and I were college students and going steady. The Skipper dragged out the family's old home movies of Annie and her sister, Daisy. In the movie I remembered best, the Teagues were hosting a small reunion for the Skipper's side of the family at a breakfast cookout on Hutchinson Island. Huge Australian pines shaded the picnic tables and sea grape wrapped the sand dunes. Annie was ten years old with a serious overbite and ears bigger than palmettos sticking through her thin hair, but she was so full of life she dimmed the sun.

I envied her clear sense of place in life. She looked so awake inside her skin that the people around her—her parents and aunts and uncles, the other little cousins—seemed to move like lizards in the cold. She showed off in front of the camera, dancing to some tune in her head, crowding the camera lens, grinning up close to her future husband. I remembered I had laughed and gotten teary in the gray movie light of the Teagues' fancy living room.

Later that night I sneaked out of the guest house, darted through the shadows cast by the lighted pool and slipped into the main house. Scents of Easter ham and sweet potato, laced with lemony coconut cake, still floated in the stairwell as I climbed to the second floor. My heart paddled double time like oars in a canoe race, flicking drops of sweat on my forehead when I walked past the bedroom where the Skipper and his wife slept. He rarely slept a full five hours, and that was often accomplished in shifts during the night. But the shock on Annie's face when I appeared in her bedroom was worth the gamble of being thrown out of the house for life. To her that night, I was the bravest male on earth. I would call it stupidity now, but I was happy to confuse it with courage then. I pushed the scene by crawling into bed with her.