Stepping (16 page)

I met the woman who is giving the Halloween party at a Finnish-American Women’s Club meeting which I went to out of desperate need to meet someone who speaks English and has small children. Rija is interesting to me for several reasons, mostly because she is so very nice, but partly because she is also a stepmother. And much more a step
mother
than I ever was.

Rija married an American just one year ago. He was a handsome man, in Helsinki on some sort of business, and they fell in love and were married in Finland just four weeks after their first meeting. She is Finnish and loves Finland, but agreed to live with him in the States. He took her home with him to Chicago, and for a while they lived happily. One Sunday afternoon the doorbell of their apartment rang, and when Rija opened it, she saw two little boys standing in the hallway, crying. She called to her husband, who came to the door and said in amazement that the two boys were his sons by a former marriage. He couldn’t imagine what they were doing there, but when he saw the little suitcases full of clothes he began to guess. The children had been abandoned by their mother, and although Rija’s husband had very good connections with the government and other police agencies, no one could find out where the mother had gone. They had of course taken the boys in, and Rija, after the first shock, had gladly played mother to them. They were attractive little boys, only five and three years old. She decided that she would have a baby herself, now that she had so suddenly accumulated a little family. But before she could get pregnant, something else happened.

Her husband worked for the United States narcotics agency; she had known that
when she married him. One night they were all coming home from a drive-in movie. The children were asleep in the backseat of the car. Rija was curled up in the front seat, her head on her husband’s lap. They had been married almost seven months. It was dark. Her husband stopped the car, got out to open the garage door of the apartment building. A huge figure emerged from the dark. Rija sat up just in time to see the figure raise a pipe above her husband’s head. She screamed, “Michael!” and her husband turned so that the pipe, coming down, broke his shoulder instead of his skull. Rija, insane with fear and anger, grabbed the loaded pistol which she knew her husband kept in the glove compartment of the car and jumped from the car and ran to the man. She pointed the gun at the man with the pipe and told him she would kill him if he tried to run. Apparently she sounded serious enough with her accented English; the man did not run. Her husband lay moaning at her feet and her husband’s children sat crying in the car and the man with the pipe stood staring at her while Rija stood on a Chicago sidewalk screaming, “Help! Police! Help! Murder!” Finally other apartment lights came on, finally a police car came. She told the police the story; the police checked her husband’s identification papers. They took the man with the pipe away. Later she had to go to the police station to fill out papers. She agreed to be a witness at a trial.

Three days later the police informed her that there had been some problem, some accident, the man with the pipe had escaped from jail. She had thought, Escaped from jail? How? She asked her husband, who was in the hospital with his broken shoulder, and he said that he was sorry to get her involved, but in the international narcotics world all things were possible. The next day she took her husband’s children with her to get groceries. She came back in time to see part of her apartment on fire. Firemen arrived quickly and put the blaze out, but much damage was done. The next day she went down to the locked garage to get the car, and the car had been destroyed, the fender and hood and trunk and doors hammered in, the windows and windshield completely broken, pieces of jagged glass sticking up. She had called a taxi and taken the children to the hospital to ask her husband what to do, and he was gone. Her husband, Michael, had disappeared. The police couldn’t find him. No one could find him.

Ten days after her husband disappeared, Rija and her husband’s two sons were in Helsinki. Fortunately her husband had some money in the bank and her signature was on
the account card. The police had been instrumental in helping her get passports for the two boys. Now she lives in a rented apartment with the boys, and she thinks she has enough money to live on for a year. After that she doesn’t know. Supposedly people are looking throughout the States for her husband and his first wife. On her worst days, when the boys are sick and whiny, she suspects that Michael and his first wife are somewhere together on a Caribbean island, laughing because they’ve managed to get someone else to take care of their kids. She thinks they might show up to claim the boys in a few years. But the boys are nice, and handsome. Rija is sure her husband loved them; she is sure her husband loved her. She thinks he will come for all of them if he is alive. She waits. The boys like her. They are happy. She likes them, but she doesn’t
love
them, and she certainly isn’t doing what she meant to do. Children don’t go to school in Finland until they are seven, and she can’t afford preschool for them. She is stuck in a small apartment with someone else’s children, and it is not what she wants to do. She thinks it’s crazy. When I first heard her story, I felt nearly sick with guilt, as an American, and I thought she would hate people from the States. But she doesn’t. She says she loved the way her husband treated her, the way he gave her both respect and freedom, and if she could, she would marry another American in a minute. She holds no grudge against the United States; instead she plays Sonny and Cher records constantly, and sends money back to Chicago so that former neighbors will send the children
Sesame Street
books.

She is giving the little Halloween party to make the boys happy and to bring some American gaiety into their lives. And after all, she has to do something with her intelligence and energy. She speaks seven languages fluently: Finnish, Swedish, Russian, English, French, German, and Danish. She was, before her garbled marriage, an interpreter for businesses. She is also an artist, although it’s possible that she doesn’t realize yet just how very good she is. When she finishes a canvas, a gallery in Helsinki always takes it, and it always sells quickly. But she doesn’t have much time to paint these days. She writes letters to federal agencies in the States asking for her husband or his first wife, and she stays in a small Helsinki apartment and takes care of her husband’s boys. They call her “Mother.” “Aiti.” “Mommy.” She didn’t tell them to call her that, but she doesn’t know how to ask them to stop.

Caroline and Catherine never called me “Mommy” or “Mother,” of course, and
Lord knows I never wanted them to. Oh, but there was one time, the second summer they were in Kansas City with us. That summer I had managed to get them to meet some other girls in the neighborhood, and they made some good friends, and we were all a lot happier. One rainy afternoon I had taken five little girls, ages seven to eleven, shopping at a big covered mall in Kansas City. We were walking along, looking at windows full of toys or clothes or shoes or pet food, when I noticed further on down the mall a student I had had the previous year. He had been one of my favorite students; I suppose the ones you convert always are. He had begun my freshman lit class disdainfully, a big bad jock totally uninterested in anything intellectual, and he had finished the course with an A. He had started writing poetry himself, good strong stuff; he slipped the poems to me privately, for comments. When one poem was published in the college paper and he got more praise than mockery for writing it, for writing poetry, big football boy that he was, he said he thought he’d switch from a phys ed to an English major. I hadn’t seen him after that, not for a full year.

“Girls,” I said, after I spotted the young man at the other end of the mall, “I see someone I know. I want to go say hello for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

I left them looking at a window full of stuffed animals. As I walked toward the football poet, he turned and looked at me, and smiled, and stood there just looking at me. He was handsome even with, or perhaps because of, his broken nose. For the first time I realized that I was physically attracted to him. And that he was physically attracted to me. He was after all only five years younger than I, and a good foot taller. Much bigger.

When I was next to him I couldn’t think of anything to say. What I wanted really was to rise on my toes and kiss him right in the middle of the mall.

“Hello,” I finally said. “How are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Fine.”

We stood and looked at each other and grinned for a while.

“I’m an English major now, you know,” he said. “I even got an A from Corbin’s course.”

Corbin was the toughest prof the English department had. His course was a sort of filter to keep out the students who wouldn’t be good as English majors.

“That’s great,” I said. “But I’m not surprised.”

We grinned at each other for a few more minutes.

“Listen, are you busy right now?” he asked. “Want to come get a cup of coffee or something …?”

“Sure,” I said. What was I thinking of? I wasn’t thinking at all. I walked off next to him, breathless.

We were at the door of the mall, going out to the parking lot and his car, when suddenly five little girls of various shapes and sizes came running up to me.

“Mommy! Mommy!” they all yelled.

“Mommy, I found the neatest skirt!”

“Mommy, I want the dolly in that window back there!”

“Mommy, can I have an ice cream cone?”

“Hey, yeah, I want one, too, Mommy!”

“Hey, Mommy, I found the neatest shirt that
Daddy
would just
love
!”

The last was from Cathy, who was hanging on my arms and literally pulling me away from the football poet’s side. All the other girls, Caroline included, were giggling and snorting and acting generally half-assed because of their joke, but Cathy was deadly serious. She looked me right in the eye and kept pulling at me until I almost lost my balance. She had seen or scented something; she knew something the others didn’t know.

“Come on,
Mommy
,” she said, “Let’s go buy a present for
Daddy
.”

She was only seven years old, but her radar was working even then.

There was nothing I could do but laugh. I had absolutely forgotten Charlie’s daughters and their three friends. I had also absolutely forgotten Charlie. I felt rather foolish. I also felt rather sad, rather trapped, rather old.

Goodbye, football poet.

“Sorry,” I smiled at him. “I forgot all about the girls. I’d better get them ice cream cones.” I didn’t even think to tell him that I wasn’t the mommy of all those girls, that I wasn’t anyone’s mommy at all.

“See you around,” the boy said, and went on out the big glass door into the hot summer day.

“Pretty funny joke,” I said to the girls, and they all cracked up again, giggling
hysterical giggles and holding their sides. I bought them all ice cream cones.

I think that was the first, last, and only time they called me “Mommy”; I
know
it was. They had a mommy already, after all; they didn’t need another. And physiologically it was only barely possible for me to be their mother. I was twelve years older than Caroline and fifteen years older than Cathy. Also, they looked nothing like me, nothing at all. They were so tall and big-boned and blond and I was so short and dark and small. I couldn’t have been their mommy. And I don’t believe I ever did the things that mommies do. I didn’t worry constantly about their health, for one thing. Dentist and doctor appointments were Adelaide’s responsibility, though Charlie paid the bills. Perhaps only three or four times during all the years they came to stay with us did I ever have to get up in the night to help them when they were sick. During the day—that was a different matter. Their mother had impressed upon them just how very delicate and precious they were, and apparently one of the favorite ritual games in their house was illness. Caroline and Cathy both described being ill with as much enthusiasm as they showed for Christmas. Being ill meant lying in bed, and being completely waited on and pampered, and having presents and medicine and solicitous remarks, and having the TV set in the bedroom all day. I never liked the game much from my vantage point; I got tired of carrying endless glasses of 7UP to the bedroom. Mainly my reaction was one of secret distaste because I knew that usually the girls were faking it. There would be no rise in temperature registered on the thermometer, no cough, no vomiting, no darkness under the eyes to signal sickness. Usually the sickness was preceded by a boring day, or the announcement that Charlie and I had a social engagement the coming night. Then one or the other would feel “feverish” and “achy” and would take to her bed. Back in Massachusetts, in their three-female household, the ritual response to such claims was immediate attention and the dismissal of all other occupations of the day. Being sick in Massachusetts meant: you are special. You are now worth noticing. You are important. Being sick in Kansas City was not so much fun. I suppose I was a wicked stepmother; I didn’t try to make being ill a special event, a wonderful thing. After a while the girls stopped getting sick at our house.

I never worried about Caroline’s and Cathy’s schoolwork, either, although I read to them and gave them books and introduced them to ballet music and took them to
concerts, and so on. I never worried about whether or not they had friends, or the right kind of friends, or any of the zillion little worries a mother has about her child’s social life. Actually, when the girls were not with us, for more or less ten months of the year, I didn’t worry about them much at all. Now it seems that I worry almost constantly about Adam and Lucy. Will it ruin Adam’s life if he goes for these nine months without having any friends? Why won’t he try to get himself dressed in the morning when Lucy, who is two years younger than he, zips right through it all, even puts on her snowsuit and boots? Will Lucy be pretty? I can’t tell, little funny girl with chicken feather hair sticking up all over. I think I’m liberated, but I still want Lucy to be pretty. Pretty people are so pleasant to look at. Will both children survive all the screaming and stomping and crying I do here? It has become terrible. I scream and stomp every day, and tears shoot out from my eyes like bullets from a gun, they are propelled by such an angry force …