by Tina Welling
I opened the notebook now and read.
Tongue on back of knees: breath catches.
Inside thighs: eyelids lower slowly, stay closed.
I had easily become caught up in this game. One we had never played before or since, though we cherished the book and read it together on anniversaries. Always our language was locked into that quick jotting style. Jess could whisper to me, “Wet kisses on nostrils: tongue touches bottom teeth,” and I was a goner.
I turned to his final jottings.
Inside labia darkens to rose.
Tongue on clitoris: turns hard as a pebble.
Breast: stay away from nipples till orgasm.
I smiled, eyes watering. No one on this earth knew me the way Jess did. No one ever would. Jess knew me the way a gardener knew a plant raised from seed, witnessing the first emerging tendril, the unfolding of each waxy leaf. Jess watched me as I grew from a college sophomore into a woman, then his wife and the mother of our sons. He had loved me well. Beneath his recent preoccupation I knew that he still did.
I used to tease Jess that now all I needed to do was hand the book to any guy for a fun night. But there was never any guy other than Jess, not before we’d met or since. Women who have had sex with only one man all their lives are throwbacks, anachronisms, as rare as witches.
I sighed deeply and, feeling restless, stepped outside on my landing to check the sky. Shank and Lucille’s puppy whimpered up at me from the bottom step. “Come on up, Mitzi.” I patted my thighs. “You can visit.” But she got altitude sickness on the third step, so I went down, sat on the bottom step and lifted her onto my lap. At home my dogs rarely left my side. A black Lab and two golden retrievers. They even lay outside the bathroom door, with one paw slid beneath the door so I’d not be lonesome. I ached now, I was so lonesome.
All three were named after mountains Jess and I had hiked in Jackson Hole: Leidy, Bannon and Ranger. The three dogs leaped into the car with Jess or me and spent their day at our store, gathering ear rubs. They rode to the bank with us, where every drive-in teller in our valley passed out Milk-Bones; and they accompanied us to dinner parties at friends’ homes, where the three of them rested with the other guests’ dogs around the dining table.
In Wyoming everybody owned a dog, usually a big one. Down here I’d spotted seagulls bigger than most Florida dogs. Tiny teacup poodles, Yorkies and frilly shih tzus that would serve as mere canapes for the coyotes back home.
Now I buried my face in Mitzi’s soft puppy fur and wished she were my dog so I had the right to drop tears onto her sweet neck. She squirmed off my lap and I walked back upstairs.
I replaced the notebook in my beaded bag and tucked both away. Jess had dedicated our entire wedding night to knowing me intimately. I had dedicated the next two and a half decades to knowing Jess intimately. And though I wallowed in his attentions the night of our wedding and felt comforted by his gathered knowledge of me, Jess always felt uneasy by my gathered knowledge of him, as if I were stealing something I’d use as leverage against him in the future.
Most particularly he guarded the story of his mother’s death. I knew many of the details, had heard them from his family members after our engagement, but never heard the story from Jess himself, who claimed he didn’t remember it and was too young for the loss of his mother to carry much meaning. This protective characteristic of his threaded its way throughout our relationship, emerging in the most inconsequential aspects of the two of us getting to know each other. Always I had to tactfully press through his humorous diversions with my questions.
The next morning of our honeymoon we showered and got dressed together in the hotel room.
“Jess, you put your underwear on inside out.”
“I always do.”
“You do?”
After a few minutes of dodging my question with jokes, pretending he misunderstood or didn’t hear me, he finally disclosed, “It’s got to do with the angle of the dangle.” He loosened up and made up a tune to go with that catchy phrase and swirled me around the hotel room, both of us in our underpants, singing.
“Our song,” I said, “ ‘The Angle of the Dangle.’ ”
Eventually, I got the explanation that his penis naturally lay to the right when flaccid and it fell into the opening of the fly on Jockeys—unless he turned them inside out.
“Of course, guys with small penises don’t have that problem.”
“A little propaganda for the new bride?”
By then, of course, I’d been charmed out of analyzing his odd furtiveness—a pattern that continued on both his end and mine. Over the years I was a willing accomplice to his hiding behind humor, content to be entertained while he succeeded in avoiding topics that probed his inner life. I had assumed his reluctance to acknowledge emotional events from the past or address those of the present would lessen in time. Instead, unresolved issues mounted.
Still, love and humor graced the beginning of our life together and never abandoned us. But as if Jess knew his quality of deep attention would be an uncommon event in our life together, he’d produced an artifact to document the occasion: the leather notebook.
As I passed the guest room after putting the notebook away, the ugly glider hulked like a grumpy intruder, reminding me of Dad during his more negative moods, so I closed the door on it. Then back in the living room I was stopped by how Dad had pushed all the K-Mart furniture against the walls like in a doctor’s waiting room—a doctor not doing too well. He had even fanned out his sports magazines on the glass-covered coffee table. “There, Annie L. Didn’t know your pa was a decorator, did you?”
I nudged the black tubular framed love seat four feet out from the wall behind it; I let the matching coffee table stay in front of it, scooped up Dad’s magazines, moved the lamp table to sit beside the “Full-Swivel Looks-like-Leather Chair with Ottoman.” I removed the sign that belted out in bold print SAVE $60 RED-TAG SALE, which Dad couldn’t bear to toss out, as it documented his best bargain. I angled the chair away from the wall, adjacent to the sofa. Stood back to look. Bookcases behind sofa, potted palms beside them, lamps lit and I’d call it home.
I dusted my used books and placed them on my new shelves, stacked a few beneath a small lamp on the snack counter, leaned some on a windowsill, set those I wanted to read right away on the floor in a tall pile beside the sofa. I hung two gaudy flower paintings, unframed, beside the TV—Dad’s gift to himself, couldn’t miss golf tournaments. Nailed three roughly built birdhouses on the other side of the TV. All garish attempts at beginning creativity, which was what excited me about them: that push within the soul that insisted we create something, however crude.
Dad had argued for a dining set that would have topped his savings on the swivel chair—he was clearly in a contest with himself over that—but I held out for a long worktable instead. I would eat at the snack counter that separated the cooking area or, like I did for lunch, out on the porch where we’d set up a grill and outdoor dining set. I had no real notion of what kind of projects I’d be doing on this worktable, but it was time to resume that discarded part of my life. No more cleaning my projects up every night, like I once did at home.
From my garage-sale loot I found a mug inscribed EVERGLADES beneath a picture of an ibis standing in weedy water. I set that on my new worktable and stuck a pen in it that I’d gotten at the Hibiscus Inn.
A start.
I scraped old wax off a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks, then washed a pink depression glass candy dish that I would fill with gumdrops and a milk white bowl that I would fill with oranges—Honeybells, those tiny sweet tangelos that only ripen in Florida during the last couple weeks of January.
I sat on a bar stool at the counter to make a grocery list, bounced back up for the pen. I needed everything. Dad and I had eaten all meals out this weekend—his decision, based wholly on my secondhand dishes. I stared at my pen thinking, then wrote: Candles, gum-drops, Honeybells.
I checked an old tin win
dup clock ticking on one of the bookshelves and discovered it was four thirty. Abruptly my stomach tightened. Sunday evening, one hour before dark, all alone, strange place, no food. Then I regained my balance, added charcoal and chicken breasts to my list and grabbed the car keys. I paused to look around my apartment first. This conglomeration of the shiny and recently purchased, the faded and used was my new home. An emotionally plump sense of well-being rose, almost a giddiness.
I was going to be all right.
Ten
Jess
Who the hell hired Lizette? I looked out the doorway of my office and watched her—short jean skirt, black tights and cowboy boots. How does she walk on ice with those things or keep her cute ass warm with that short skirt on this twenty-six-below-zero morning?
By moving, I decided after watching her a few minutes. She fluttered like a bird. And that huge man’s sweater that swung just two inches above her hemline with the immense arms that stretched like wings from her sides maybe helped to keep her warm, too. She unpacked a box of tropical-colored Teague Family Sports caps sent by the Skipper. Lizette. Her name fitted perfectly. She was pretty and feminine. She reminded me of AnnieLaurie at that age. Twenties—early, maybe mid-. She was goddamn pretty.
She lined caps along her left arm so she could carry a bunch at a time. Half a dozen fell. Why didn’t she just drag the box over to the shelf? It wasn’t heavy. She picked up the caps, stuck some between her knees, a couple on her own head and held one in her teeth, while she lined them up on her arm again. This was painful, like watching Lucy Ricardo without the hope of a TV contract. She had long blondish curls half piled on top her of head, half winding around her neck. I was ready to bet her personality matched her hair: all the hell over the place, but cute.
She couldn’t hear me sitting back here at my desk, though I laughed right out loud. The line of caps on her arm started swaying, and Lizette lost the ones between her knees when she leaped forward to maintain the right balance. I heard a muffled yelp through the cap in her teeth. She was fun to watch.
Dangerous to watch.
Annie, damn you, leaving me alone like this. I felt vulnerable. I grabbed my sheepskin jacket and plowed out the back door. The air slammed my face with such fierce cold, I was afraid my eyeballs would lock up. I headed for espresso, hatless head bent to push against the steel pilings we call winter air out here. In weather like this, I wished I was one of those guys with a lot of body hair.
Men don’t leave their wives for younger women for the sake of upright breasts and stomachs with no stretch marks. It’s because we want back the companions we married. I wanted Annie how she used to be: fun, loving, accepting of me. And she hadn’t shown any relationship to that person for five years. She used to think I was great; now she knew too much about me and had opinions about all of it.
I pressed open the door and felt my body suddenly relax in the instant warmth of the small, steamy café.
“Hi, Jess. Where’s your hat and gloves?”
“Same place I left my brains, Bethany. How you doing?”
“Pretty good. Same old, same old?”
I paused before agreeing to my usual. “Give me something new. Something . . . I don’t know . . . that will make me act smarter, look younger and feel richer.”
“Ever try chai?”
“No. I’ll give it a shot—no pun intended.”
“It’s tea. No shot necessary.”
I carried a mug of what looked like my same-as-usual latte, but smelled spicier, over to the window counter and raised a hip to a stool. From here I could watch the idiots who skied in these subzero temperatures, which was either because they paid for their ski package, by damn, and refused to waste the money or because they were plain local locos who lived only for the slopes. The red tram rolled overhead, carrying skiers toward Rendezvous peak, where at least inversion boosted the temperature up twenty degrees.
In another couple hours I’d have to go home to one more day without Annie. I should be used to a house without a woman since my mother died when I was a little kid. Gran Genie stepped in for a couple years and then Aunt Tula, but by the time I was eight years old, it was just me and my dad. Dad’s idea of home cooking was a thing he called “McFall Food,” a manly frying pan full of browned hamburger and onions with canned gravy mixed in. A jar of applesauce opened, a can of peas warmed and he’d call me for dinner. By the time I was eleven, I began to ask Aunt Tula to show me how to cook pork chops, make meat loaf and beef stew. When I was fourteen I baked a cherry pie to surprise Dad on Father’s Day. From then on, he figured I was the official cook.
Annie and I always shared the cooking, housecleaning, yard work, tackling it together without too much of a plan. If I noticed she’d thawed chicken breasts, I’d start peeling potatoes; if she was weeding the strawberry patch, I’d mow the lawn. I loved how we worked together. But now it was just me in the kitchen, and maybe there was more of a plan than I thought, because I would decide to cook something for dinner, then find there were no groceries. Which matched the fact that I had no appetite anyway.
Housekeeping was easier; somehow it didn’t take any emotion to vacuum and dust, like it did to fix dinner. You saw a dusty tabletop, you swiped it with a cloth; the trash can got full, you carried it to the garbage can. It was all pretty straightforward. Cooking . . . took love. And I couldn’t gather enough of it on my own to even get a grocery list together.
So the house was clean and tidy, ready for Annie to surprise me and come home anytime, but the place was filled with the spirit of a defunct motel room. The house rang with emptiness. The chill on Annie’s side of the bed woke me when I rolled over with the abruptness of a bloody nightmare. But I decided, sipping my chai, when she did come back to me, I was going to kill her for leaving.
I couldn’t sort us out. Where did AnnieLaurie end and I begin? I didn’t even want to know. I liked us all mixed up together. I thought that was love. As far as I was concerned, twenty-some years ago we made a deal: she’d take care of the mushy stuff, except when I wanted to do some, and I’d take care of the practical stuff, except when she wanted to do some. Of course, by the time the boys were born, the store needed Annie’s attention, and that plan turned into each of us rushing from one thing to another to keep disaster at bay. And though it had come down to Annie not caring much for the business lately, she had gotten hooked as I did in the beginning years of its growth. She didn’t just dabble; she brought the babies and all their gear into the store and took over big chunks—to my relief. Annie had a head for business; I didn’t.
But that was when things started to mix up between us. Pretty soon I was full-time baby soother, some days walking the aisles of demo skis singing “Humpty-dumpty doo, humpty-dumpty dee” over and over in my flat, toneless voice, trying to vibrate away colicky pains in a tiny tummy, while AnnieLaurie fought for our financial life in the office with a banker or just alone with the ledger. I guessed I’d gotten us in quite a mess before she came on board.
I finally warmed up and shrugged out of my jacket. The rule for getting warm the fastest was to remove your coat immediately inside a heated place, since the coat trapped icy air. But who could get themselves to take off clothes when they were frozen to the bone?
Bethany brought over a scone and napkin for me. “On the house.”
“Thanks, Bethany. Looks great.” I must strike her as needing some special attention. Maybe word had gotten out about Annie. This was a small village, despite tourists arriving in the tens of thousands. Didn’t like to think that other people were in on my private heartache. Hadley was okay. She’d been in on everything from arguments between Annie and me to teenage trouble with our sons over the years, and she knew how to keep secrets. Maybe Bethany just had an extra scone lying around. I broke off a bit of it and popped it into my mouth, while resuming my stare out the window.
I loved caring for our boys, and customers thought it was charming to see me sell skis and hiking boots with a barefoot baby in on
e arm. People were always telling Annie what a gem she had for a husband. I remembered she asked me once if people said things like that about her to me. But they didn’t. They didn’t see her that much. She was holed up in the office. Anyway, things got all mixed up then. Suddenly one day five years ago she wanted to separate it out again. Decide who did what, regulate our hours. Well, you couldn’t just do that in a day.
Was that really five years ago? Guess we could have made some progress on that if we’d tried. I supposed now that it was more important to her to have some independence than I thought. Maybe she had been unhappy about that. But what the hell? That was only five years at the end of a long marriage.
My breath caught in my throat, cutting off my ability to swallow my sip of chai.
I corrected myself: only five years out of a long marriage.
Eleven
Annie
This morning when I woke up, I realized four days had passed since Dad left, and I was boldly going nowhere. Creating my instant home took only an instant, and now I needed a life to live in it. I could no longer lie here in bed, patting my head over how brave and wonderful I’d been to set up a home for myself in a new place. But in a fresh swell of pride, I patted my head again anyway.
Surrounded by strangeness, I had replayed the lesson I’d learned two decades ago as a new mother: whatever you fed and tended repeatedly became your own—no matter how red and alien it was or how shrill it screamed. So I had filled my new shelves and cupboards and corners, then tended my odd assortment of trinkets and—snap your fingers—I’d created a place I cared about.
By now moldy leftovers even resided in my refrigerator, I discovered when I padded out to the kitchen in my nightgown. I peeked inside a plastic dish. In Florida you didn’t just toss food into the trash can; the process of decay began the moment anything left refrigeration, and the process moved fast. Which was the reason, my father claimed, that the residents rarely left air-conditioned homes, cars and shopping malls. “You begin to rot the minute you step out the door,” he’d said.