Stepping (25 page)

The girls stared first at Charlie and then at each other, surprise and hope and fear spreading across their faces.

At last, almost whispering, Cathy spoke first. “We’d have to be home for Christmas. Mother made us promise that no matter what we’ll always spend Christmas with her.”

“Of course you can go home for Christmas,” Charlie said. “Look, why don’t I call Adelaide right now and see what she thinks?”

What Adelaide thought, after an hour’s polite persistence on Charlie’s part, was that yes, that would be all right. She could hardly refuse a European experience twice for her girls, especially since the orthodontist bills were paid and Charlie promised to keep the child-support checks going to her even when the girls were with us in Amsterdam. And she was happy at the thought of having the girls with her once for the entire summer. She was not pleasant on the phone with Charlie, but she wasn’t hysterically raging, either; it was as if she had worked a few things out, had reached if not a beautiful at least a calm resting place. The next day the girls went back down to Massachusetts—their home was now only a three-hour drive from our home—and we didn’t see them again until September, when we all flew to Amsterdam.

Charlie and I flew to Amsterdam first and got settled in our apartment. We had a beautiful apartment right on the Prinsengracht and the Leidsestraat, looking over the prince’s canal and the gay street where trams ran and calliopes played. In September the trees were still green, and they arched over the canal as perfectly as if drawn there by an artist, and ducks swam in the water and gulls dipped in the air. Amsterdam was full of museums and concerts and ballets and great shops and things to see. I knew we would all be happy.

And we all were happy, but not at first. At first we were all miserable, for a while.

When we arrived in Amsterdam, I was four months pregnant and wearing maternity clothes simply because my regular clothes were too tight and I knew I’d eventually be in maternity clothes and didn’t want to have to pack two sets of things. By then the baby was kicking and I was through having morning sickness, and was feeling totally rosy and fine. I was so happy to be pregnant that I was gay and sexy and silly all the time, and of course Charlie enjoyed that. Somehow we forgot that he had never told Caroline and Catherine about my being pregnant, and I was so used to being pregnant, to looking pregnant, that I didn’t stop to think that I would look different to Caroline and Cathy than I had a few short months before.

Charlie met his daughters at Schipol airport and brought them back to the apartment, where I was waiting. I had been fixing their room up, as I always did, putting little Dutch presents on the beds and planning what sightseeing we would do first. When the door opened and the three of them walked in, I rose from the sofa, where I had been sitting sorting travel brochures, and went to kiss them. At first they smiled at me, and then their faces changed: they blanched, stopped, looked confused and hurt. Then they turned and looked at each other with that secret resigned put-upon look that they so often in their teenage years had shared. When I kissed them, they turned their cheeks away, and their hello was cool. That is, Caroline’s was cool; Cathy’s was nonexistent. She burst into tears and pushed me away and said, “I want to go home!”

“What?” I said.

“What on earth?” Charlie said. He tried to take Cathy in his arms, but she pushed him away. “Cathy, what on earth is the matter?”

“
Nothing’s
the matter,” Cathy said. “Just let me go home.”

“Look,” Charlie said, “you can’t possibly go home right now. You’ve been flying for hours, you’re exhausted. Let me take you to your bedroom, and you lie down and rest a bit. Then if you still want to go home, you can.”

Caroline put her arms around Cathy. “Come on, Cath,” she whispered. “Let’s go to our room for a minute. Come on.”

“Look,” I said, “please tell us what’s wrong. You walk in the door with smiles and suddenly you want to go home. Can’t you please tell us?”

But the girls drew together, pulled away from me, actually shrank from my touch.

“I want to go home. I want to be alone,” Cathy cried, and her cries turned into real wracking sobs.

Charlie led her and Caroline into their little bedroom. I didn’t follow. I heard him shut the door; I heard him put the suitcases down. It was at times like this that I wished I smoked; I longed for something to do to keep my hands busy. Instead I was simply left standing there, the space around me vacant and disturbed. I could hear low voices coming from the girls’ room and I felt crazy with desire to know what they could possibly be saying. Too curious to restrain myself, I crossed to the wall that separated their bedroom from the living room, and pressed my ear against the wall, and listened.

“Yes, she is going to have a baby,” Charlie was saying. “But that won’t affect our love for you at all.”

“But I don’t want you to have a baby,” Cathy was sobbing. “It’s not fair. We never had all of you, and now we’ll get even less. You’ll give all your time and love to her baby.”

“That’s not true,” Charlie said. “I love both of you girls with all my heart. I couldn’t possibly love any other child more. You two are my first children, remember that, I’ve loved you first.”

“It’s just not
fair
,” Cathy wailed. “Oh, I want to go home. I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

“Cathy, baby, please—”

“Don’t call me baby! I was your baby once, but I’m not anymore. You’ve got yourself a new baby now. A nice new baby who can live in your house and be yours all the time.”

“Caroline,” Charlie said after a while, “is this the way you feel, too?”

There was a long silence. I could imagine Caroline sitting on the bed, staring down at the floor, her hands twisting in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “It doesn’t really matter. I don’t care.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It’s my fault. I mean we shouldn’t have surprised you with it like this. I should have told you before. But I actually sort of forgot it until now. Zelda sure looks fat and funny, doesn’t she?” That brought a slight, grim, satisfied chuckle from one of the girls. “Zelda’s been wanting to have a baby for a long time—you girls know you both want children when you grow up, I’ve heard you say it a thousand times. Well, Zelda wants children, too. But she loves you, and I love you, and no new child will change that. I was hoping that you would enjoy having a little brother or sister around. I thought it might even be fun for you.”

“Zelda’s baby will never be
my
brother or sister.” It was Caroline speaking, and her voice was so hard and cold and sure that it cut me like a knife.

There was more silence. I leaned against the wall praying for Charlie to say something, to somehow find the right, the perfect words. But after a long while all he said was, “Well, then, I don’t know what more I can say. I’m sorry you both feel this way. I love you both. You know that. I’ll always love you. Zelda loves you. We were planning to have an exciting time here in Amsterdam—the baby isn’t due until the end of February. We were planning to go down to Paris in November, and—well, we had a lot of things planned that we thought you’d enjoy. I think it would be too bad if you deprived yourselves of an experience like this simply because Zelda happens to be pregnant. The baby isn’t even born yet. Why don’t you wait till then to worry?”

“You’ll never understand,” Cathy said.

“Perhaps I won’t. Perhaps I can’t. Look, why don’t you both lie down and rest? You’ve been traveling for a long time. You’re exhausted. Just do this for me, lie down and rest, and if you want something to eat or drink, let me know. Then if you still want to go home, you can.”

I left the wall and walked over to the tiny kitchen area and was busily making tea when Charlie came out of the room. I felt like crying myself; I hadn’t thought at all about how the girls would react to my pregnancy, but this certainly wasn’t the way I would
have chosen. I felt sorry for them, and yet already strangely defensive for the unborn child inside me. I didn’t want him or her exposed to the hate of the girls. And I felt really, deeply hurt: if the girls loved me, I reasoned, they should love my child.

It occurred to me as Charlie crossed the room that I should still not know what the trouble was. I didn’t want Charlie to know that I had been curious enough and devious enough to listen at the bedroom wall. I was afraid my face would show something, everything. I turned my back and looked for teacups.

“They’re jealous of the baby,” Charlie said, and put his hands on my shoulders and leaned against me. “It’s too bad. I didn’t think, hell, I didn’t give it a thought how they’d react to the baby.”

“But they’re fourteen and seventeen!” I whispered. “How can they be jealous of a baby? I’d understand it if they were small, but they’re not. They’re almost grown.”

“Jealousy never does have to make sense,” Charlie said. “I should have told them; it was bad to surprise them that way. Well, they’re resting, maybe they’ll sleep. Maybe they’ll feel better after they sleep.”

And they did. They woke up in the early evening and came out to ask where the bathroom was, and if they could have something to eat, and then Charlie took them out for a walk around the city, which sparkled with its bright lights and its still warm air and its streets full of young people playing guitars and singing. The girls decided to stay for another day, and after that day, for another, until at last they unpacked their suitcases and hung up their clothes and said they wanted to stay for the semester. It was awkward at first, it was difficult. Everyone knew what the problem was, but no one would discuss it; it was as if talking about it made it real but ignoring it made it nonexistent. And so we lived our lives there, and my stomach grew larger, and the word “baby” was never said. It was as if I were having a surreptitious pregnancy, as if we were all pretending that the offensive part of my body wasn’t really there. It was a strange way to live. I was already head over heels in love with my child, and I longed to call out, “Oh, look! Can you see how he’s kicking? Isn’t he strong? Come feel!” But I knew no one there would share my joy. And that made me feel slightly bitter, slightly angry, slightly sad.

Our days fell into a pleasant routine. The principal at Caroline and Cathy’s Massachusetts school had agreed to a strange proposition that Charlie, in desperation, had
come up with when asked about the girls’ schooling. I was to be their tutor. I was to see that they studied, and to pace their reading, and to compose and give them tests. Whatever grade I gave them at the end of the semester would go on their transcripts. In some states it is true that if the parents are teachers the children do not have to attend school; this was some variation on that theme. So our schedule was set up: every weekday morning I tutored the girls in history, French, English grammar and composition, literature, and science. We hired a special tutor for Caroline’s trigonometry; he was a thin young Dutch man named Martyn who spoke excellent English and came once a week, in the evening, to sit at our dining room table to talk in a low accented voice to Caroline. We used the school’s textbooks, and I typed up tests on Charlie’s typewriter so that they looked appropriately official, and the girls studied well, and did well.

In the afternoons we went out. Early in the semester, when the sun was still warm, we rented bikes and rode over to Vondel Park and had picnics in the grass. We must have been a strange-looking bunch on our rented bikes: big blond Charlie and his two big blond daughters, and then dark little me with my fat tummy, pedaling along behind them, wobbling along unsteadily, happy and puffing and out of breath. Or we walked, all over Amsterdam, to Dam Square, to tours of the Heineken Brewery, where the international hippies congregated for free beer and cheese, to interesting shops, all about the lovely canals and streets. Our favorite discovery was the Moses and Adam Church, which was a baroque, rococo, almost hideously ornamented once-Catholic church which was now used by hippies as a teahouse and meditation center; the place seemed to perfectly represent the religious tolerance of Amsterdam. Later, as the weather grew colder and darker and rainier, we spent more time inside museums, the Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum, the smaller individual houses, Rembrantshuis, Anne Frank’s house, the Weigh House … There was an endless supply of places to visit and learn from.

On weekends and long holidays when Charlie didn’t have to teach, we took trips. Sometimes they were short trips to surrounding areas, to Den Haag to see the Mauritshuis, or to Haarjuilens to see the fairy-tale Castel de Haar, or to the somber and authentic castle at Muiden. Friends drove us to Edam and Volendam and Markam, where people still wore wooden shoes and long dresses and baggy black pants. Once we took a long train trip to Germany to visit friends in Lübeck and Hamburg and Kiel and to walk
on the fresh sandy shores of the island of Sylt. Another time we rented a little Fiat and drove south to France and spent days being tourists in Paris, showing the girls the Louvre and Sacré Coeur, getting drunk with old friends at La Coupole. We strolled along the rue de la Rochefoucauld, showing the girls where we had once lived. I smiled to myself as I looked up at the balcony where I had once stood ripping essays from a book, daring to make a decision. Being Americans in foreign countries made us draw closer together, made us laugh at things—the harsh German toilet paper, our dreadful French and German accents, the trivialities we missed from home.

We were the closest, Caroline and Cathy and I, on Thursday evenings. That was when an hour-long American show came on television, with the words spoken in English. We would prepare for the show by going to Dyker and Thies, a specialty import store just across the street from our apartment, and buying an expensive can of S&W popcorn. Then we would all sit, grinning and munching popcorn for one happy American hour, watching a droop-eyed detective in a sloppy raincoat. We would complain about feeling homesick then, but not for long. There was too much else to do; we never had time to sit and sigh. We met people, and were invited to homes, and had friends in, and Caroline flirted with boys on the street and sometimes went off with them to a movie or Orange Julius while Charlie lectured or wrote and Cathy and I stayed home and played cards. So our days were neatly patterned, and filled with an endless variety of pleasures and delights.