Stepping (39 page)

“I’ll try,” I said. “I’ll write you if I find out anything.”

“And you’ll have to decide about Caroline,” Charlie said. “If you want her to come live with you.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Of course I want her to come. I like Caroline. It will be fun having her there with me, great just to have another adult in the house. I’m going to have a lot of long, lonely nights.”

“You can sit up grading your precious freshman comp essays,” Charlie said. “That should keep you happy.”

I smiled. “I think you’re absolutely right. Charlie, I can’t wait to be home, to teach again.”

* * *

And now, on this cold January morning, I am doing the final necessary things so that I can go back home. I will let the children sleep a few more minutes. Last night I laid out all their clothes and packed their little backpacks full of books and toys and raisins and gum so that our long flight home will be tolerable. I scarcely slept all night, and have been up and dressed for almost an hour. While Charlie shaves in the bathroom, I pace one more time these small gray rooms, checking to see that I have not forgotten anything. I pause in each room to stare out the window at the gray Helsinki sky, at the stern modern apartment buildings and the autoroute, at the shivering birch and spruce and pine trees. In a while Gunnel, my friend, will come to drive us all to the airport, and all this will be behind me. I am not sorry to be leaving, but really I am not sorry that I was here.

I see that I have forgotten something. My Finnish fortune. It is a small, twisted, silvery piece of lead which created itself for me at a Finnish New Year’s Eve party just a few nights ago. It is a custom in Finland to tell one’s fortunes on New Year’s Eve by melting a small block of lead in a special long-handled pan over a fireplace fire, then quickly throwing the melted lead into a pail of cold water. The melted lead immediately
congeals into a solid shape, and the shape is symbolic of one’s fortune for the next year. The final product is actually extremely pretty, like a small sculpture, glistening and silver, feathery and delicate and charming. Our hosts at the Finnish New Year’s Eve party helped Charlie and me cast and read our fortunes, and we took turns with all the other guests holding up the sculptures and guessing what they meant. Some were easier than others: several fortunes looked like sailboats, which delighted the Finns, who love to sail. One was full of dark spots, which indicate money, and of course that made that person happy. Charlie’s, if we all used our imagination, resembled an airplane, which was fitting, for he had more lecture trips lined up for the coming year than ever before.

My lead fortune, everyone agreed, looked like a series of steps. Twisted, knobbed, convoluted, ornate steps.

“It’s not to predict your future,” one Finn said to me. “It’s to help you remember your past here—all those steps you had to climb to get to your apartment!”

We had all laughed. Earlier that New Year’s Eve, when the clock had struck midnight and we watched out the window as the sky filled with bright fireworks, I had cried. I had cried out of happiness and exhaustion and fear and hope. Charlie had put his arms around me and held me tightly, and I had cried all the more, knowing how I would miss the comfort of his arms in the months to come.

And now here I stand, rubbing my twisted piece of Finnish lead, staring at the sky, crying again. I am sad to be leaving Helsinki and the friends I’ve made here; I am very sad to be leaving Charlie, even for this little while. But I am going to go; it is what I want to do, it is what I have chosen to do. I have made a decision; I am going to carry it out. Still, I think I never will get over how relationships and people and meanings change.

Last fall, in early September, just two days before we came to Finland, Caroline came up to the farm to see us and say goodbye. It was a Saturday, sunny and mild. She had Brad, her newest boyfriend, with her, and she was happy. She had graduated from college that spring and was now working for the government on a short-term federal project, studying gypsy moths, trying to find a way to keep them from destroying the trees and shrubs around New Haven. She had cut her hair to just below the ears, and given it a side part, and she looked much more mature, and less ordinary, than she had when she had had her hair long and straight and parted in the middle. She had been
wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she had walked about the house and farm easily, relaxed, relaxed with the wonderful ease that comes from having a weekend off from a likable job and an enjoyable man to spend the weekend with.

I was frantically packing. The dining room was layered with open half-full suitcases, jars of peanut butter and popcorn, and cartons of granola bars and Jell-O. I kept putting dresses and sweaters in and taking them out again, not sure what to take, not wanting to take too much or too little. I felt pressured and grouchy; I had been sad that I was losing the chance to teach again. People kept dropping by the farm spontaneously: the mathematician who was renting it for the year, wanting to go over the water system and fireplaces with Charlie; friends bringing goodbye gifts; adoring graduate students of Charlie’s. The children ran around outside in unmatched too small clothes; everything decent was packed. The beds were unmade, the dishes were undone, the washer and dryer were running, people were coming in and going out, piles of necessities accumulated around the suitcases, and I could tell I was forgetting something. There was no way in the world I could manage to take everything we would need in a strange country for nine months.

Toward late afternoon Charlie went down to the cellar and came up with a few bottles of champagne. People kept coming and drinking a glass or two, but there was still enough for me to get slightly tipsy on, and that helped. Someone decided I shouldn’t have to cook dinner that night (I wasn’t planning to, anyway), and Caroline and her boyfriend volunteered to drive the long drive into town to get it. Adam asked to go along because he wanted to ride in Brad’s car, which was a great old wine-colored Jeep with a raccoon tail hanging from the antenna, and Lucy wanted to go because Adam wanted to go, and Charlie decided to go, too, so that he could drop some last-minute mail at the post office. I chose to stay home and take a long hot bath.

Suddenly everyone was gone. The place was silent. Our dog fell asleep on the kitchen rug. The sun began to set. The champagne bottles were empty. I stripped off my jeans and sank into a luxurious bubble bath, soaking in the heat, the pleasure, the silence. Then I dressed again and went back downstairs. I couldn’t stand to stay in the house—there was too much demanding chaos in every room—so I went outside to walk around.

The silence of a farm, of the countryside, without people, is a profound and
mysterious thing. I can understand the people who become hermits and mystics, for being alone in the countryside exposes one to the powerful sense of life that shimmers in inhuman things. I walked about the farm, my farm, my home, looking at the orange and brown mums I had planted, at the last roses, at the apple trees now laden with fruit, the berry bushes now beginning to show spots of rust and scarlet and flame. Birds chittered in the trees, the trees themselves breathed almost audibly. There was a tension in the air, between the excitement of fall approaching and the restfulness of the more quickly approaching night.

I walked up our dirt drive to the barnyard, where the horses stood. Dear Liza, dear Gabe. They were now nineteen and seventeen years old. They were standing together at one end of the barnyard, eyes half closed, doing nothing with that marvelous sense of significance that animals have. I went inside the barnyard and walked over to Liza and leaned up against her. It had been days since I had had the time to ride her. I hoped she would make it through the cold New England winter. I wished there were a way to make her understand that I was going to be gone, but that I was going to come back. I stroked her neck. She was still in good shape, although the hairs around her mouth and in her mane had grown humorously gray.

“I love you, Liza,” I said.

She knocked her nose into my shoulder in reply. Gabe began to sniff around my hands and pockets, and sensing no sugar or carrots, stamped and snorted and walked away.

I stood there leaning on Liza as the light failed in the sky. I felt a marvelous sense of loneliness; no, not of loneliness, but of aloneness, of individuality. The horse I was leaning on was truly a friend, a creature on this earth that knew me and loved me and responded to me and trusted me, a creature I knew and loved and responded to and trusted. I had known her longer than I had known Charlie or Charlie’s children or my own. It seemed amazing. I calculated years in my head, and no, given even the most optimistic measures, I knew it would not be possible for her to still be around to comfort me when my children had grown and left home. She, Liza, would leave us first.

“I love you, Liza,” I said again, and wrapped my arms around her neck.

Liza tolerated my affection for a moment, and then, bored with it, bent her neck
away from my grasp and began to nibble at the stubbles of barnyard grass.

The wine-colored Jeep came bouncing back to the farm just then. As I walked from the barnyard I saw the people get out; they were like bright-colored beads of life exploding from a box. Big Irish Brad, wriggling noisy Adam, large strong Charlie, and then Caroline, slim and blond, with Lucy in her arms. Lucy had fallen asleep and lay against Caroline, totally limp, lips open, sighing in her sleep.

It was a strange sight to see the two of them: Charlie’s daughters, one twenty-three years old, the other only two, one asleep in the other’s arms. I wondered if it seemed to Charlie that Caroline looked like Lucy’s mother more than I. They had the same coloring, the same bone structure, the same features; both girls were long and slim, fair-haired, green-eyed, white-skinned. At Lucy’s birth I had been afraid that she was dead, because she was so pale, as white as a sheet of paper. But she had been perfectly healthy; she simply had managed to have Charlie’s coloring. I remembered the time in Michigan when I had held Alice’s little girl and longed for a little girl of my own, one who looked just like me. Now I had a little girl of my own, and she looked just like, exactly like, my stepdaughter. How strange life is.

We all went into the house, and because it was growing cool Charlie made a fire in the kitchen fireplace. Brad went downstairs and found more champagne. “Champagne and pizza!” we all cried. “How weird!” But it was delicious.

“Let me take Lucy up and put her in her crib,” I said to Caroline.

“That’s okay,” Caroline said, settling into a kitchen chair. “I’ll hold her. She might wake up if you move her. She’s fine. I’ve got a free hand to eat with.”

We sat about the round oak table, eating pizza, drinking champagne, watching the fire. Irish Brad entertained us with stories, but I didn’t listen carefully. I kept looking at Caroline, holding sleeping Lucy, eating her pizza carefully, so that she wouldn’t joggle Lucy too much and awaken her. I wondered if Caroline was perhaps sitting in the same chair she had been sitting in two years before, right after Lucy’s birth, when I had sat holding Lucy at my breast, and feeding Adam and myself with my one free hand, and hating Caroline and Cathy with all my heart.

Oh, love. It is not a constant thing, though we would all prefer it to be so; it would certainly make for a calmer life. Love and time; love needs time; love must climb time as
if time were a series of beautiful, twisted, convoluted stairs, with landings to rest at, and window seats looking out over the past, and railings to hold to against a fall into nothingness, and perhaps, one hopes, a room of wisdom and knowledge at the last step, at the top.

Here in Helsinki, I am not anywhere near the wisdom of that last step, but I have come this far, I do see now that I love Charlie, and that I always will. He loves me. We have come this far, quite far, together. I realize now that it is okay, it is allowable, to love other things at the same time I love him; my love for him is not diminished. And he realizes now that I must do the things I want to do or become a stunted person. In our case the way of separation enriches our love; the way of togetherness would have destroyed it. He will travel and lecture, and I will teach and play with the children, and we will write letters to each other. In a few short months we will be together again. It will be nice, coming together again. Perhaps there will be more comings and goings in our lives now that we are mutual people, both of us standing on our own personal ground. I will love him better for being independent of him. He will love me better, I think, because I will become a better person to love. It seems exciting. After thirteen years of marriage it seems that we are starting all over again.

And I love my children. I will love them enough to know, to accept the knowledge, that there will be times when I will hate them, when they will hate me, when we will make each other grieve and cry. But for the most part I will happily soak in the love, the beauty, the joy, of living with these young people.

I love my stepdaughters. Yes, I’ve climbed this far; I can say with honesty that I love them. It will be an interesting experience living with Caroline. Will she expect me to be her mother and keeper and cook and maid, or will she want to live as if we are friends? What will Adam think of having her in the house with us? He is almost five now, beginning to ask questions, sense relationships, put things together. He has never asked Charlie or me why Caroline calls Charlie “Dad” or why Caroline’s last name is the same as ours, but I know the time will come when he will. What will I, or Charlie—it’s his problem after all—say to Adam, innocent Adam, about Caroline and Cathy, these first children of his? What will we say to Adam about marriage and divorce and children then? Will Adam be afraid then that Charlie will leave him? Well, if so, he’ll just have to
be afraid; there is always that possibility. This is the twentieth century, and even though we live on a farm now, we are caught up in the values of our time. All in all, I think Caroline and I will have a good time together this semester. I am looking forward to talking and laughing and sharing life with her. It’s obvious that I care for her—love her—more than I do Cathy. It always has been that way. But I feel no grudge against Cathy, and I think she carries no grudge against me. Out there in California with her guitar-playing boyfriend, she probably doesn’t think of me at all. She’s never needed me, leaned on me at all; it’s always been men she’s preferred, right from the start. Well, Adam is turning out to be a handsome and charming boy; perhaps when Cathy comes back this way she will enjoy his company. Perhaps someday Cathy will take Adam and Caroline will take Lucy to a movie, and they’ll sit and eat popcorn and laugh together, and perhaps, since they can never live as brother and sisters, perhaps they’ll live as friends. Perhaps they will somehow enrich each other’s lives. That is the most I could hope for. That would be a very fine thing.