Oh, what will this year bring?

Fairy Tale Rewritten

August 31, 2007 on 9:56 am | In Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I felt foolish pulled over at the side of the road, sobbing hard into the steering wheel, the cars rushed past me, too fast, too close, and yet I cried uncontrollably for a woman I had never met, yet knew as well as I knew myself.

The headline in the paper stunned me at breakfast: Diana Dead in Car Crash. My husband handed it to me, not because he knew of my connection to her, I never would have revealed that to him, but because it was so shocking. “That’s not right,” I said. I expected him to take it away and hand me the real front section of the paper, not the one with this erroneous story. This wasn’t right because it’s not the way the world works, it’s not the way of the universe, the stars must have misaligned, misfired. And yet, it had to be true: this was unexpected — nothing else had turned out as expected in her life, or in mine. I’ve never been one to follow the British royals, before or since, but the summer of Diana’s courtship was the same as my own. At the time, we wore the same hairstyle as so many of us at that age did. I saw her in interviews, shy and immature, a sly sense of humor, Charles trying to keep up, not quite sure what to make of her but clearly fascinated by her. He was older, she quite a bit younger, just as my fiancé and I were. She was awkward with his family who were cool and reserved; I was awkward with my fiancé’s family who spoke very little English and slapped the table as punctuation. It felt like an adventure marrying this man, we would travel and laugh and build things like houses, and computer programs, and a family. He was different from anyone I’d ever met – wasn’t the prince very different from Cinderella? It was our differences that would allow us to live happily ever after. I married in January, Diana in July. By then I already knew I had done the wrong thing, that things weren’t turning out to be the way the story was written. An immediate change came over him when we married: no travel (must save money), no laughter (must work to exhaustion), no building (his anger at me for not knowing things was unbearable). Already I was lonely – he disliked all of my friends, now he disliked my family too, and I thought if I didn’t see them, didn’t talk to them when he was around, he’d be happier. He’d be happier with me. I didn’t watch Diana’s wedding. It was televised at 4 in the morning – how foolish he would have thought me to get up that early to watch such nonsense. I didn’t need to give him more evidence of my failings, so I watched the highlights on the news, sated with just that. Maybe her life would turn out differently; she really was marrying a prince, surely that was where I had gone wrong.

Our lives worked in parallel for so many years: she bore two sons, I bore two sons. We outshined our husbands, proved ourselves valuable at our work, drew flirtatious looks from other men. I started a successful business (his had failed), I deftly handled work, child-bearing and rearing, and putting a well-balanced meal on the table for dinner each night. She rocked AIDS babies, campaigned against landmines, danced with John Travolta at the White House. It was her picture, not his, that appeared in the news. And behind closed doors, it was the same in both our houses. Every action under scrutiny, nothing ever good enough, always complaints about the things we did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, who we were and who we were supposed to be instead.

I remember feeling happy at the news of her divorce because it’s what I wanted too. And sadness too, because I knew that the fairy tale was gone forever. I hadn’t been able to make it work, that was my own fault, but if she couldn’t, then the story was false, maybe it had been false all along, but I had believed just as she believed. We tried, we really did. I knew this was not what she wanted for her sons, just as it was not what I wanted for mine, but now she was free, free to be who she wanted to be, the kind of person she really was, doing the things that she desires. I envied her. I wouldn’t be there for another 8 years. As I formulated my plan in my head, I looked to her to see how my life would go once I was on my own. I never envisioned a fiery car crash in a tunnel in the dark of night. That’s not the way our stories were supposed to end. It’s not the fairy tale we once believed in, but we still had a chance to live happily ever after, just in a different story, one we’ve written ourselves.

For three days after her death, I cried in secret. When I tried to explain that she was my sister, people laughed. They focused on her beauty or fashion or coy spirit. No one said, yes, I know that same loneliness of marriage that she endured, the voice of failure that confirms your worst thoughts. I know the divinity of sons and the salvation of good works. I know the hope that cannot be squelched, no matter how hard anyone tries, that there’s something inside that can be dampened but not snuffed out that provides the courage to keep going because better days are ahead. We’re primed for the best days of our lives.

 At least that’s the way my new story goes.