Stepping (4 page)

IF EITHER GIRL GETS EVEN SLIGHTLY SICK I AM TO BE NOTIFIED AT ONCE NO MATTER DAY OR NIGHT.

4. General
.

They are not to do any of your housework for you.

Do not take them to see movies which might have violence or anything sad; they are delicate, and anything like that will upset them dreadfully. The same with TV.

If they go swimming, they must be supervised at all times.

They are not to be left with a babysitter.

When riding in a car they must wear seat belts.

If they want to call me at any time of the day or night, they are to be allowed to call me. They are to call me every Wednesday night at six so that I can see if they are all right.

They are not to play with boys.

I have sent all their clothes freshly washed and ironed and expect them to be returned in the same fashion. They are to put on clean underwear and clean clothes every morning. Their nightgowns must be washed once a week.

They are not to go barefoot. They might cut their feet on glass or something.

THEY MUST NOT BE YELLED AT OR MISTREATED IN THE SLIGHTEST WAY. They are very good little girls, and never do anything wrong, so they should not ever be punished. They are wonderful, sweet, very precious, fragile children and must be treated as such at all times.

Adelaide.

I finished the letter just as Charlie reappeared in the living room, one fragile, precious pale blond daughter on each side of him. I stared at them a moment, horrorstruck. Nails clipped, I thought, liver, seat belts, vitamins, clean pajamas. I can’t handle this.

I must have looked as awful as I felt, for Charlie crossed the room and took the letter from me. He read it quickly, his twitching mouth breaking open into a genuine smile. Then he crumpled the letter into a ball.

“You’ve read it,” he said. “Now forget it.”

But I couldn’t forget it. The letter had the unmistakable mark of authority on it. If Charlie hadn’t thrown it away, I think I would have taped it on the kitchen door so that I could reread it morning and night. I wanted desperately to do everything right.

It was difficult, the first day or two. The girls had to learn that their flesh would not instantly rot off if I touched them. I learned all about daytime television shows for children. Charlie learned that the girls were really afraid of him, that he would have to regain their trust. Those first few days were completely given over to wooing the girls. We took them to Walt Disney movies, to the zoo, to parks. I had saved all my grocery stamps for nine months and gave them all to the girls, who happily pasted them in the books; then I drove them to the store to exchange the stamps for whatever they wanted. Predictably, their mother’s daughters, they chose baby dolls. The stamps were a big hit. We took them to get ice cream cones, we took them shopping. We spoke to them gently, we smiled all the time.

With all the treats and ice cream cones and new toys and Charlie’s persistent gentle love and my good-natured friendliness, it went very well. The girls opened up a
bit, they stopped answering questions with monosyllabic mumbles and moved right along to complete sentences. But then there were the phone calls from Adelaide.

Now I do not think that Adelaide meant to be divisive; I think that first summer she simply could not help herself. The first night the girls were with us it was only natural that she should call to see if they had arrived safely. Charlie put the girls on the phone, one upstairs in the bedroom and one downstairs in the kitchen, to let them talk to their mother. But after a few minutes, when tears were rolling down Caroline’s cheeks and we could hear Cathy openly sobbing upstairs, Charlie took the phone away from Caroline. He sent me upstairs to take the phone away from Cathy, and before I could get the receiver down I heard Adelaide screech:

“
Damn
you! God damn you! How can you take my babies from me? I’m all alone here; they’re not in their beds. How do you expect me to make it through the night?”

Charlie talked with Adelaide for an hour that night, trying to calm her down, while the girls hid in the coat closet, crying. Later, years later, Caroline told me that she and Cathy had hidden in coat closets long before that year, hiding away from the sounds of their mother and father fighting. It even became a catchphrase for the girls; in their teens they would say, “When I saw Bob at the movies with Annie, I just wanted to run into a coat closet and cry.” That first year, that first night, I tried to coax the girls out, but they only cried harder, so finally I shut the door and left them alone. What an introduction to stepping: the two of them in the closet, and Charlie talking soothingly to his first wife on the phone, and me sitting on the front porch step, watching a lovely summer evening slide away.

Eventually Charlie hung up the phone and got the girls out of the closet and held them and soothed them and we all went out for ice cream, which Cathy ended up throwing up all over the bedroom floor and which I sweetly cleaned up. It was that night, that very moment, that I had my first moment of stepping bitterness—She’s
your
daughter, I thought,
you
clean up her vomit. But Charlie was rocking Cathy and giving her sips of 7UP and we had all had enough drama for the night.

The pattern was set. The days went by pleasantly, so that we all felt friendly by night, and then Adelaide’s calls would come and shatter everything. Already I’ve promised myself that if Charlie and I are divorced and Adam and Lucy go off to stay with
him, I’ll bring in a lover or go stay with a friend or drink myself into oblivion, anything rather than experience and cause such pain.

On Thursday night Charlie told Adelaide he was taking the girls on a little trip and he would have them call her once a week, on Wednesday nights, as she had suggested. And on Friday morning we all left for the farm. That day rushed by, busy with unpacking and buying supplies and giving the girls horseback rides (very short horseback rides; they were afraid of horses) and walking with them to the pond (which they wouldn’t swim in because it might contain snakes or bugs or worms or fish). And suddenly it was Saturday morning, and I was fixing breakfast in my pajamas, and Anthony and June Leyden arrived.

The Leydens were old friends of Charlie’s, of Charlie-and-Adelaide’s. Anthony was handsome, and clever, and irritatingly brilliant. He taught at the same university, in the same department, with Charlie. In fact he had been instrumental in getting Charlie his job. He was really Charlie’s friend. But not mine. First of all, he didn’t take Charlie-and-me seriously enough. I felt strongly, seriously in love with Charlie, and Anthony kept making lewd remarks about both of us and trying to feel me up whenever Charlie was out of the room.

And I didn’t like June, Anthony’s wife, or what Anthony and his wife represented together. Anthony by himself could be gay and clever and funny, but his wife was so prettily, properly, righteously solemn that together they seemed the embodiment of Marriage, Property, Children. Everything tidy, approved of by church and state, locked up.

I had met June several times before Charlie and I were married, and each time was a trial. June had been, and still was, by letter, a close friend of Adelaide’s, and even though I hadn’t met Charlie until after Adelaide and Charlie’s separation, June still disapproved of me, still insisted on casting me in the role of homewrecker. If I saw her, in her dust-free house with her two coy children and her electric washer and dryer and blender and floor buffer, with her small print cotton housedresses and ruffled aprons, as a real-life
Leave It to Beaver
’s mother sort of woman, she certainly saw me, with my long hair and my lack of interest in housey things and my hands all over Charlie, as a sort of Wicked Woman. I thought she was pompous, and she thought I was frivolous, and I
suppose we were both right. I was still in a sorority before I married Charlie, I was concerned with insignificant things, such as our sorority’s competitive skit for Hippodrome rather than with improving the city’s elementary schools. Now I know: children do weigh one down, one does become responsible, one can no longer do whatever one likes at any moment. Compared to her, I
was
frivolous. But still, looking back most generously, I think she was purposely unkind to me. She saw me as an enemy, a threat. Back then I thought she was a bitch. In the earliest days, just before Charlie and I married, she was forever, certainly intentionally, irritating me.

“Charlie!” she would cry when she saw us together. “
Dear Charlie
,” she’d say, kissing him on the cheek, totally ignoring me, “
how
are you?” And she’d stare at him with a sympathetic sweetness, as if recognizing his secret sorrow at having to be with me and not with Adelaide.

Or “Oh, Charlie,” she’d laugh, “remember what a great time you and Adelaide and your girls had with us last year when we went on that picnic?”

Or, “Yes, this bread
is
delicious, isn’t it. It’s Adelaide’s recipe. She is the
best
cook.”

Or, “Yes, my children are sweet, aren’t they. But then, all children are beautiful. They’re the living product of a man and woman’s eternal abiding love for one another.”

Or, pulling Charlie aside, in stage whispers, “I saw Adelaide today. She’s gotten her hair cut and she looks like a new woman. You really ought to stop by and see her; you’d be delighted, I know.”

After Charlie and I were married and Adelaide and her girls moved to Massachusetts, June’s attitude didn’t change. If anything, she became even sterner and less open to me, as if trying to be the messenger of Adelaide’s bitterness.

Back then—it seems so long ago, so much has changed—things were really different for women, especially for Kansas women. Adelaide and June were closed into a way of life which meant only husband, home, and children. I was ten or twelve years younger than they (and my mother and grandmothers had all gone to college and held vaguely liberated philosophies); I wanted something different from what they had. I was their enemy, openly announcing that I did not think their way of life significant, satisfying, enough for me. And in a way they were my enemies: specters of what I could
be if I once forgot to take my Pill, if I bought a fondue pot or looked at fabric samples. I intended to get a PhD, to teach at university level, and I was as eager as any man to read everything, to sharpen my wits in stimulating conversation. Charlie, who had been smothered by routinized domestic life, loved the crazy way we lived, eating at least half of our meals out at all times of the day and night, doing the laundry and cleaning together or ignoring it, making love or horseback riding instead of looking at furniture or rugs or chairs. But when we were with Anthony and June, I was never comfortable. I didn’t want to listen to her recipes or stories of children’s illnesses or cutenesses. I wanted to be talking with Charlie and Anthony, not with her. We had nothing to say to each other.

Back then things seemed black and white. I did not like June; she did not like me. But I did not protest when Charlie invited Anthony and his family down to the farm on that first Saturday. I suppose I thought that the presence of Charlie’s girls in
our
home with me cooking for everyone and flitting about being sweet would make me more acceptable in June’s eyes. Charlie cared a great deal for Anthony and tolerated June. I wanted the Leydens to like me. No, I wanted them to love me. I wanted them to think I was absolutely wonderful. I wanted them to bless Charlie-and-me. I should have had more practice at cheerfully flitting. We should have waited a few more weeks to invite Anthony and June down.

It went bad right from the start. We four were all just out of bed, stumbling around the kitchen yawning and trying to wake up, when Charlie saw the Leydens’ car crossing the entrance to the farm.

“Holy cow,” Charlie said. “There’re Anthony and June. They’re here already. Can you believe it? Hold the fort, Zelda. I’ll go on out and meet them.”

“June and Anthony?” I said, panicked. I wasn’t prepared for them yet, not at all. “Are you sure it’s their car? Oh, Lord, I’m not even dressed. Okay, go on out, Charlie, stall them, and I’ll— Caroline, would you please watch at the window and be sure Mr. Leyden shuts the gate so the horses don’t get out? Cathy, would you make some more toast? I’ve got to get dressed.”

“Squeak, squeak …” Cathy said.

“Sorry, Cathy, I didn’t hear what you said.” I paused halfway into the bedroom.

“I said I don’t know how to make toast,” Cathy said, staring at the tablecloth.

“Oh well, that’s easy, honey. You’re seven years old; it’s time to learn. Just stick two pieces of bread in those little slots and push the red button down. When it pops up, take it out and butter it. That’s all there is to it. Oh, Lord, they’re getting out of the car. I’ve got to go get my clothes on and comb my—”

“Squeak, squeak …” Cathy whispered.

“What did you say, Cathy?” Unbuttoning my pajamas, I came back into the kitchen.

“I said I might do it wrong,” Cathy said.

“Oh, honey, no one can go wrong making toast,” I told her. “Just stick the bread in and push the lever down. I’ve got to get—”

“Squeak, squeak …”

“What?” I was ready to scream. I could see the Leydens approaching the house with Charlie.

“I might burn my hands. Mother says I must be very careful in the kitchen or I’ll burn my hands.”

“Oh, Cathy, oh dear, burn your hands, oh wow. Look, Cathy, it’s simple. You won’t burn your hands, I promise. Just put those two pieces of bread— Oh no, Cathy, are you crying because I want you to make toast? Cathy—”

At that point the Leydens came into the house. Anthony took one look at me and began to laugh. He was in fine spirits for so early in the morning. Behind him June stared on with pleased disapproval.

“Oh, happy days!” Anthony yelled at me. “Oh, joy supreme! A sight I never thought I’d be blessed to see, Zelda Campbell in shorty pajamas. You’ve got great legs, Zelda, but I must admit I’m disappointed in your taste. Blue-and-white striped pajama shirt with red elbow patches?
Not
very sexy. I would have thought some lace or see-through or at least a ribbon; you haven’t been married even a year yet. What are brides coming to these days? I know, they’re coming to their husbands, yuk, yuk—”