The Wife Who Saved England (flash nonfiction)

They hated her. She had flirted with him. She was married, after all. Wicked, exotic, American divorcee. She had no shame. She put her designs on him and trapped him. Everyone said it.  Even though they knew better. It was important to control public opinion.  To protect the royals.  Didn’t the pictures even reveal a great love between the two? For years they carried on.  Forbidden love seemed sweeter—how utterly romantic that he would give up the kingdom for the woman he loved. To be exiled from his homeland. It was better than anything Hollywood could have invented.

You know the history. He was king fewer than 12 months in 1936. His brother reined successfully through the second world war. His niece became queen in 1953.

He died, still exiled, in 1972. By the time she died in 1986 she had stayed loyal to her third husband and had never spoken out about any strangeness, disease or malady that might have inflicted the abdicated king.  Conjectures looking far back into their past are the tools of the future to help defend or right the cruel luxury of harsh judgement.  He had anorexia nervosa, a disease that caused him to be trapped in a demanding juvenile obsession with the woman he loved; there are letters he’d written to other lovers before his marriage and escape from kingly responsibility where he referred to them as “mummie”; his threats of suicide; and her secret letters to the husband she had never fully intended to leave bore her loneliness and regret; he showed signs of having Asperger’s—even his own staff had claimed he was mad, as mad as king George the III.  But she had never said anything.  Never complained.  Never asked for help. For forty years. How much pain could she have endured in all the years that followed what she had thought was harmless flirtation?  What wondrous love is this?

While all around were accusations and bitterness between the men and women that made up the royal family and governing body of the land, a young lady growing up alongside all the politics must have felt mercy and love for her uncle.  Secure in her rein, she made a forgiving gesture by inviting the exiled prince to join the family in celebrating his mother’s 100th birthday.  He died not long after that.  When she died in 1986 the Queen granted her uncle’s wish that his wife be buried alongside him at Windsor.

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Losing things...

One minute I put both earrings down on the counter in the bathroom.  Next morning I chose a different pair.  Halfway through the morning had to change clothes and noticed...there was only one earring there of the pair I’d put there the day before.

I remember in the night I couldn’t sleep so through the darkness I walked from bed to sofa and reached in to the counter in the bathroom to get my glasses.  Couldn’t see them, but I always put them in the same place.  There are certain things I am pretty good at following a routine with so I don’t have to hunt them or lose them.  Keys go on the key nail just inside the back door.  Flashdrive of my whole life rests under its plastic cover on the corner of the chest of drawers with the tv, cable box, roku and dvd player.  Glasses get put on the counter by the sink last thing before bed.  Earrings, rings and necklace go on or near the miniature blue willow dish behind where I put the glasses.  All three remotes stay near the corner of the left side of the sofa along with the list of tv programs and days they come on.  Checkbook is either on the desk in the study or the elephant chair.  Stamps are on the shelf above the desk in the study. Clothes could be anywhere.  I mean anywhere.  On the floor in the bathroom, by the bed, in the closet, or hanging, or on the elephant chair or down here by the sofa and I think there’s a shirt in the kitchen.  But I don’t ever really lose my clothes.

But I’ve lost one of my favorite earrings.

They say the descent into madness is preceded by obsession.  I know I’ve heard that in the implication of many stories, probably read it in articles here and there...I read it again just the other day but don’t remember the context, just that it fit part of the exploration of the novel we’re studying in school so it stuck once again.

Lately I have felt a bit out of control in the stress of my work and concern for my mama’s surgery Monday.  There’s no such thing as minor surgery and I just want it to be over.  Even three hours away I think I’m absorbing her angst over it and the time it could take to recover, not to mention the pain she is living with daily until then.

Stress (get ready for a firm grasp of the obvious) exponentiates.  My shoulders are in knots, my breathing has become shallow to the point I have to mentally remind myself to inhale and exhale and relax my shoulders.  My stomach is churning.  I cannot get enough done in a day and I have too many students at school and when a handful at a time are involved in behavior issues, or are failing, or plagiarizing and I have to write reports and call parents (which is more often a kind of nervous phone tag stretching out the process for days). This is stressful.  Adding to the stress is having been moved from a portable surrounded by windows from which I would walk to the main building for the bathroom between classes putting me outside for five minutes every 85, to inside a building built like a bomb shelter or tomb where now the last two years have seen a classroom reduction to 25 students max but they shortened the classes so they could add two more, increasing the number of students and driving us all mad.  We have no windows.  We have no outside air.  And we have too many students which drives us inside the building for all the daylight hours and some of us can’t handle that.  At all.  And I am...losing my mind.

I’ve lost one of my favorite earrings.

The friend who gave them to me keeps saying it will show up.  Or it’s not something I should stress out over, she’ll get me another pair.

But that’s not the point.  I’ve lost one of my favorite earrings.  The other day I lost my flashdrive—the one that is “always” placed on the chest of drawers with the tv, the bottom drawer holds the batteries and the lightbulbs.  I finally, finally found it after much prayer and many tears because this is my life’s work since my computer has a “disintegrating hard drive” (according to my beloved computer guru).  It was in my little fannypack because, I remember now, I had taken it with me on my last visit to mamandad’s.

The point is I lost my ring a week before that.  Suddenly in the middle of yoga I realized it wasn’t on my finger.  I remember in school that very day, playing with it, twisting it.  Often in class while we’re discussing the depths of meaning found in the elements of fiction, the way in which a particular author might use the devices of literature to develop a particular element, and so forth, I play with my rings and move them from one finger to the next.  The danger is if I leave it on, say, my middle finger, it might slip off...it needs to be on my thumb or index finger and now I have two rings about the same size because of a Christmas present.  That ring I had on, but the ring that has the Hebrew lettering that promises, “God will call you back to God” was no longer on my finger and even though we were calmly stretching and posing in various warrior and balancing poses and breathing deeply and focusing on something through the window that wasn’t moving, I could feel the panic searing through my veins that I had no idea where my ring was.  And then I realized my necklace too was missing but I remembered before leaving the house that morning that I had changed shirts so I was fairly confident it slipped off my neck at that time, fairly confident.  But the ring.  I could not lose that ring.  The history of that ring on my finger traces back to a time it slipped off my finger when I stood outside the back door of the little house I lived in in Oklahoma and was throwing out some old potatoes and with one of the baseball-like pitches I felt the ring fly off my finger and thought I saw which direction it went to.  Somewhere I have that story.  Maybe, unless it is lost to one of the horrible times a computer has died and taken the story with it.  It took several days of obsessive looking, and borrowing, finally, a metal detector to find that ring.  But I knew where it had to be.  And I refused (obsessed) to leave until I found that ring.

I know that earring has to be in this house.  But the stress of it missing adds to the stress of school and being behind and having no daylight to speak of and all of it is like a mental, emotional, spiritual spiraling of toilet water as my mind is being flushed into oblivion.  I am descending into madness.

And I sleep well, I eat well, I’m even exercising, though it’s getting too cold to swim at 5 in the morning right now.  I have to manage the stress better.  The obsession with trying to get all these papers graded, the obsession with the backdrop of concern for my mom, the obsession with getting to the sunlight has paralyzed me to the point of insanely losing an earring.  How does it happen that ONE is missing when I distinctly remember pulling both off and putting them on the counter?  Then again I remember distinctly playing with my rings.  After yoga I drove back to school but the ring was not anywhere to be found.  I came home and there it was on the counter by the sink near the miniature blue willow dish where it belonged.  It had never reached my finger that day.  The necklace was there too.  So what in the name of all that is sane distracted me between rings?  I put one on, why not the other?  I had on earrings, why not the necklace?

So no, I can no longer with full confidence know that I took off both earrings and put them on the counter...but I would have noticed, wouldn’t I, that only one earring was in my ear?  And wouldn’t the other still be there?  Yes I searched the bed and the sheets and pillows and pillow cases and the floor under the bed and all the clothes on the floor and in the closet.

I have to find that earring.  Restore the balance to at least one small corner of my life.  How much of all this tells me that the source of the stress is some insane need to control things I cannot control?  There are things I can control and things I can’t and somewhere in the shattering recesses of my mind I recall the wisdom that we should focus only on what we can control and let go of the things we can’t...that obsessing on things we can’t control is really what drives us to madness.

Okay fine whatever.  But my shoulders are killing me, my stomach is in knots and I can’t breathe.  I have lost one of my favorite earrings and I can’t seem to calm down with no sunlight trapped in that tomb all day and the rage and tears hover very close to the surface and if I could just find that earring I believe it would put back a piece of my peace that I have lost and am losing and I’m not too sure what exactly is under my control and what isn’t because the lines are unclear and most things in my life overlap.

Normally when I write something like this there is an epiphany that comes in time to wrap up a profound and memorable conclusion, satisfying with a kind of comforting closure.  I’m pretty sure that’s what drove me to write this this morning because I have been a little jittery now for a couple of weeks and that earring has been lost now for two whole days and even the day I took off, day before yesterday, was marred fairly early in the morning by a frantic drive to school where my large cup of scalding tea fell into my lap and the telling of all that would be another story but the loss of things includes the loss of my sense of having that cup of tea on my dashboard like I have every morning and yet the insane traffic I am not used to so late in the morning distracted me to sudden fits and starts, throwing the cup into my lap.  So that day I lost a couple of hours of grading to the pain and drain of dealing with all that.

And it was during that madness that I think something happened to the earrings that I had taken off the night before and noticed halfway through that morning, Tuesday morning, that one was missing and it was in the bathroom that I had taken off so carefully the clothing that had received the scalding water and I put on dry clothes to go on to school to pick up the papers from first block and return and when I returned with packets of mustard from the school cafeteria and put on a second lathering to prevent blistering and relieve the pain, that’s when I noticed that one of the earrings was missing and I truly believed that it must have been swiped off the counter in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep and had gotten my glasses so I could watch a little tv to relax but I have looked everywhere through every stitch of clothing and pocket, taken the sofa apart, every drawer and cabinet in the bathroom, behind or underneath everything five times and no earring.  But initially at that late morning hour, I distinctly remember earlier in the morning before the frantic late trip in, that I started to wear those earrings (note the plural) and chose instead to wear the old standby ones.  Wouldn’t I have noticed THEN that there was only one?  Seriously I think they were both there that first time about 7 in the morning and it was about 9:30 when I noticed one was missing.

My friend says it will turn up.  But in the meantime I am losing my mind and the missing earring seems to be ... a kind of metaphor.  Definitely a sign that I am distracted to the point of doing stupid and dangerous things in the mindlessness of overwhelming stress.  And I know I’m not the only one who is overwhelmed and stressed out.  So that means there are a great number of us out there losing things and becoming dangerous.