Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  And loved her then. She was pretty, she was the baby, she was affectionate. She seemed to understand that I wasn’t going to rat on her. What could I say? “I wish you could see the way Cathy looks at me when you’re holding her and can’t see her face?” I might have been willing to be petty, but not with such vague material. Frankly, I wasn’t, with all my twenty-two years, as clever as Cathy with her seven, and more important, I didn’t know what game we were playing. The third day on the farm, after Cathy’s tantrum over the shrimp and avocado salad and our later friendly silly talk about food in the bedroom, the day after that one nice night when I thought we had all become friends for good, Cathy got to me again.

  We had all finished breakfast, and Charlie had said, “Come on, Caroline. I’ll show you how to drive the tractor. I’ve got to mow. You can have a turn after Caroline, Cathybell.” He had gone around and around the house, mowing down the grass with his big red brush-hog, with Caroline sitting rigidly but happily on his lap, occasionally steering.

  I had done the dishes quickly, then said, “Come on, Cathy. Let’s go weed the garden.”

  “I don’t want to,” Cathy said, curling up in a chair, looking down at her feet.

  Aha, I thought, she’s feeling jealous because Charlie took Caroline on the tractor first.

  “Well, weeding’s not much fun, I know, but I need to do it before it gets too hot. Why don’t you come on out and watch me—and I’ll tell you a story!” Oh, wonderful, Zelda, I thought, what an angel you are.

  No answer.

  “Well, what would you like to do? Is there anything special you’d like to do now? We could ride the horses. Or go wading in the stream. Would you like me to read you a book?”

  No answer.

  “Oh, come on, Cathy,” I said, still lightly, pleasantly. “It’s too nice a morning to just sit in a chair. Why don’t you get a nice cold Popsicle from the freezer”—I briefly wondered if Adelaide would be incensed at my offering a Popsicle at nine in the morning—“and come sit outside while I weed. I know a lot of neat stories I could tell you.”

  No answer.

  “Well, if you want to hear a story, or if you want to go for a walk, or wading, or anything, I’ll be out in the garden behind the house. Okay?” Brightly. Softly.

  No answer.

  I didn’t know what else to do. I went outside, leaving Cathy in her chair, in her sulk.

  The sun was sweet but getting fierce, and I hurried behind the house to weed. I loved my garden, the tiny new peas, the sturdy carrots, the silly radishes, and I was soon totally absorbed in my work. But I had done only two rows, hadn’t even started to really sweat, when I was jarred out of my idiotic bliss by the sudden sound of the tractor engine shutting off. I looked up.

  There was Cathy, sitting in the grass, arms folded on her knees and head resting on her arms, sobbing. Charlie lifted Caroline to the ground and jumped down himself.

  “Cathy? Honey, what’s wrong?” He raced up to her, nearly tripping.

  She didn’t answer. Simply sobbed. I could see how eloquent her tiny narrow back was.

  “Cathy? Talk to me, baby,” Charlie said. He bent and picked her up in his arms.

  “I don’t like being lonely I don’t like being left alone.” Sob, sob, sob.

  “But you were with Zelda. Where’s Zelda?”

  “I don’t know. She wanted me to weed the garden, but I can’t. Weeds make me sneeze. She went off and left me.” Sob, sob, sob.

  “Well, you come on and ride the tractor with Caroline and me. I can hold you both.”

  But of course he couldn’t hold both girls and steer, and after a few moments Caroline got off and ran over to join me in the garden. I told her the best stories I could, but I knew they didn’t make up for having only ten minutes with her father on the tractor while her sister rode around in his arms for the rest of the morning.

  And that was only the beginning. The summer days went by, riddled with small tragedies in which I played the villainess. Cathy’s best thing was being sick or getting hurt. If Charlie and I lingered in bed too long together in the mornings—that is, one or two minutes after Cathy woke up—and especially if the door was closed, Cathy would invariably fall and bruise herself or cut herself or have a tummyache. The one time the whole summer that Charlie and I went riding together, for perhaps fifteen glorious minutes, Cathy came down with stomach cramps and spent the day crying in bed. When we went to the drive-in movies to see some Walt Disney special, Charlie and Cathy and Caroline sat in front and I sat alone in the back. If I washed Cathy’s hair, I got soap in her eyes, and only Charlie could get it rinsed out.

  And through it all I didn’t really mind. She loves her father, I thought, she doesn’t get to see him most of the time, let her have him every minute that she’s here.

  But I wanted to go to the party to meet the famous intellectual woman. In 1965 there weren’t that many of them, and even fewer came to the Midwest. I knew that just setting eyes on the real woman in real life would be important to me.

  “Oh, Charlie,” I wailed, “it will only be for two hours. Or one hour. We’ll hurry.”

  “Zelda,” he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t leave the girls. Not this time.” Then, more hopefully, “You could still go—”

  “Me? Alone? Are you kidding? The only way I can go is as the wife of famous Professor So-and-so. They’re not inviting students to that thing. Oh, Charlie.” I was sick. But it was true. In 1977, I could have gone alone, even as a lowly student. But in 1965 things were more proper, rules were stricter. Women still wore mostly skirts, and gloves, and their purses matched their shoes, and they didn’t go to parties alone, uninvited. I was still mostly only a faculty member’s wife. Low on the totem pole. Very low.

  “I hate being in the middle like this,” Charlie said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Oh, Charlie, you’ve been with those girls, or I have, every minute of the time they’ve been here. Surely that’s not natural. Two hours without you won’t kill them. And Leslie is a lovely smart girl; Caroline and Cathy will enjoy her, I’m sure. Charlie, it’s so important to me, it’s not just a party, it’s like a symbol, a sign—”

  Charlie stood up suddenly. “Don’t, Zelda. Just don’t. Please. I’m sorry, but I’m not going.”

  I immediately burst into tears. Perhaps they had been building up over the summer. I didn’t cry easily then; I didn’t think it was fair to Charlie. But I was sick with disappointment, and I was mad.

  “Jesus,” Charlie said, and walked over and punched the lyre tree on the trunk, hard. “There’s nothing like a house full of weepy females.”

  I jumped up, nearly spitting in my anger. “Don’t you dare class me with them!” I yelled. I now think that he didn’t even think of it himself, but in lumping me with his daughters—weepy females—he lumped me with Adelaide, his former wife, crazy, weepy bitch. And I didn’t want to be like Adelaide in any way at all.

  At that point I noticed that Cathy and Caroline were standing in the back door watching us, and that made me even madder. I felt as though I had spies in my house who would report every negative detail back to an enemy. (As it turned out, I was right.) That summer, when Charlie and I hadn’t been married a full year yet, I wanted the girls to think we never spoke a cross word to each other, that we thought as one. Now here they were, watching us hiss and fight, and the expressions on their faces were unreadable. Surprise? Delight?

  I suddenly felt trapped in my own backyard. I wanted to get away from them all, yet I couldn’t even go into the house because the girls were standing there, together, solidly, like the bottom half of a Dutch door, barring the way. I turned and went around the side of the house fast, and walked off down the street. I didn’t know where I was going on a weekday morning in a nice section of town wearing only shorts and a halter, not even a pair of sandals on my feet. But I had to get away.

  Charlie appeared suddenly at the side of the house.

  “Zelda,” he calle
d, and I looked back to see him standing there, dismayed and angry and sorry and shocked. He was wearing only shorts, and he was so tall and blond and strong that I wanted to run back immediately and press my body against his. In those days we had only to touch each other and a sort of magic balm swept over us, erasing all hurt.

  But then a door slammed and Caroline and Cathy ran to their father’s side and stood staring at me as if I were some kind of animal loose from a zoo. What a picture they were, those three healthy, big-boned blonds! So obviously related. So inseparably related. The blood racing in all their veins was the same blood. I was the outsider. My ancestry was different from theirs; eventually the girls would both grow taller than I, with bigger bones in their healthy bodies. I was dark and small and curly-haired, and alone. There seemed to be nothing I could do but walk off down the street. We lived in a dignified neighborhood; Charlie wouldn’t come chasing after me, I was sure. All right. I thought, at least it’s clear now: Caroline and Cathy are my enemies and they’ve just won a big battle. I hereby retreat. Watch me go.

  I walked down the street and around the corner, past all the pretty Dutch colonials and rambling Victorians and their yards with flowers and shrubs and trees. I felt ridiculous, but I kept on walking. In my fantasies several wonderful things happened: Charlie and Caroline and Cathy got into the car and caught up with me and told me how sorry they were, that the girls would stay with the sitter so I could see the famous intellectual woman. Or I walked to the university and cried on someone’s shoulder (Whose? The head of the English department then was an old married Catholic who didn’t like women in school, who thought they should stay home and cook and have babies), and that someone took me to the party. Or, this as I finally stopped at an elementary school and sank down to dismally sway on a wood and chain link swing, the famous intellectual woman herself would just happen to be out walking on this lovely summer day, having arrived in Kansas City four days early. She’d see me and immediately sense my innate superiority, and she’d come over and sit on the swing next to me and chat. “Leave them all,” she’d say. “What do you need love for? You’ll never get on with a career at this rate. Why not come back to New York with me? I’ll introduce you to people; you can work on a master’s at Columbia.”

  But of course nothing like that happened. I sat on the swing until three boys about Cathy’s age came scuffling over to the playground. They kept giving me strange looks and bursting into fits of embarrassed laughter to see me there, a lone grown woman sitting on a swing. But I stubbornly stayed, swinging slightly and staring back at them or at the sand or the basketball hoop or the jungle gym. The morning sun rose a little higher in the sky.

  The warmth of the sun made me happy. I was still pretty much of an animal. I liked sex, food, drink, the feel of a horse galloping under me, the feel of water surrounding me when I swam. Other things were more confusing: why was it so important to me to see the famous intellectual woman? I wasn’t even interested in her field of study. So why should I long to see her? I couldn’t figure it out. It was all too vague for me. And why did I feel that the girls, especially Cathy, were out to get me? With all the logic and the guilt that a Methodist from Kansas can muster—and that’s a lot, the guilt, that is; we’re quite good at feeling guilty, though not so good at logic—I decided I was paranoid. Caroline and Cathy were only children. Sweet, innocent little girls. They hadn’t said or done anything, really, I thought. They didn’t really want to hurt me. It was easier for me then to believe that I was overreacting than to accept the fact that yes, indeed, Caroline and Cathy did hate me. They would have hated anyone who lived with their daddy. They were hurt. That is the truth, though no one likes to say it: they were hurt. They were little girls, and their daddy had left them, and they had to live with a hurt in their hearts. Caroline at ten was old enough to separate me from my role of evil stepmother. She tried to be nice to me because I was nice to her. And in doing so she had to hide the hate she felt for me—would have felt for any stepmother—and it lay there, that smothered hate, and in the end it did her harm, and showed up at a time when it hurt me most. I wish she had let it out on me then, in those first years. Cathy hated me more clearly and purely, and would have made me disappear, if she could have, simply, with a wand, but she loved her father more than she hated me. She could see that her father cared for me. She did not want to make him angry by openly disliking something—someone—her father had chosen. She had to be subtle. She was happy if she could get me in trouble, triumphant when she could glare at me over her father’s shoulder and see that I got the message but was too puzzled or helpless to respond.

  It might have been better, that first year, if the girls could have arrived with whips and sticks and rocks in their luggage, if they could have spent all their time with us hitting us and screaming at us and calling us names. “You bad ol’ Daddy, how could you leave us?” they could have cried, and, “You bad ol’ woman, what makes you think you’re good enough to live with our daddy? Why do you get to live with him and we don’t? I hate you!”

  If that had happened, the girls might have felt better. Their anger might have exploded and used itself up instead of burning along steadily inside them, gradually decreasing with the passing years, but still flickering inside them and lashing out now and then at Charlie and me. Charlie and I might have felt better, too.

  But we were all civilized. Truths were hidden. If we were nothing else, we were polite. We all tried our best, according to our values. And we were confused, we were muddled. Caroline and Cathy and I were alike in one respect: we all loved Charlie. We wanted to make him happy; we wanted to be with him. But we didn’t know each other. We didn’t love each other. We did love Charlie. Nothing else was clear. We were in a floundering porridgy emotional mess.

  And I think, all things considered, that we did pretty well. Eventually I got up off the playground swing and walked back to the house. I smiled and told everyone I would make a picnic lunch; we’d spend the day at the park. I told Charlie it was fine about not going to the party, not to give it another thought. It was such a great sunny day I felt happy, and Charlie was so glad the pressure was off that he was positively giddy, and I could sense that even Caroline and Cathy were relieved. Poor little girls, they wanted me to be miserable, and at the same time they wanted me to be happy. It was much nicer for everyone when I was happy.

  We had only one week left with them, and Charlie tried to make it a birthday-party-carnival-time-lollipopland of a week, so that they would go back to Massachusetts and nine months with their mother with good, warming, sustaining memories of their father and Kansas City. He bought them new school clothes: dresses, shoes, coats, the works. We had to buy an extra suitcase so they could carry all their new dolls and toys and clothes back. I did my part; I didn’t touch or kiss Charlie all week (except, of course, in the luxurious privacy of our bed). I was as good and friendly as I could possibly be.

  “You look like Mary Tyler Moore,” Caroline said to me the night we got dressed up to go to a fancy restaurant for a last-night dinner. I didn’t look at all like Mary Tyler Moore, but I kissed Caroline on the cheek; I understood that she was trying to pay me a compliment, trying to make me happy.

  The day we took the girls to the airport, everyone ended up crying. Cathy started it, and this time I could tell it didn’t come from her metal faucets. This time she wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone. This time it was for real.

  “I don’t want to leave you, Daddy!” she suddenly wailed as we stood in line at the gate, waiting for them to board the plane. “Please, Daddy,” she cried, “come back and live with Mommy and Caroline and me. I want to be a family again.” She clung to his neck and soaked his shirt collar.

  “I’ll come see you soon, I’ll call you tonight, I’ll write you letters, sweetie,” Charlie said, and his voice was choked and his eyes were red and he couldn’t keep the tears from coming, even in such a public place.

  Caroline stood clutching her new doll and her fli
ght bag full of candy and comic books, clutching them as if someone might suddenly snatch them away if she let down her guard. She watched Cathy and Charlie with an envious haughtiness. She wanted to cry and fling herself and clutch at her father, too, but she was too big. She was older, the one in charge. Two tears escaped before she brusquely wiped them away on the back of her white gloves.

  And I just let the tears go, flow, run. I felt sorry for all of them. For a moment I wanted to cry, “Oh, do go back to Adelaide and the girls; this is too awful to bear!”

  But the flight was called and a stewardess came to take the girls on and told them she’d give them stewardess wings and playing cards and pencils and papers for drawing.

  I said, “Goodbye, girls,” and quickly kissed them again, and Charlie walked on to the plane with them to be sure they were safely settled. He fastened their seat belts. A friend of Charlie’s would meet them in Chicago to help them change planes, just as he had done six weeks earlier on their flight down. Charlie came back and the flight attendant fastened a rope barring the way, and we stood together watching out the window as the plane slowly pulled away.

  The rest of the day was like a canyon without a bridge. There was too big, too deep, too wide a hole in our lives for us to cross. We were silent on the way home, and dinner tasted bland, and we watched television in a stupor. We didn’t make love to each other that night. It would have seemed somehow profane. Charlie called Hadley, and Caroline answered and said they had gotten home just fine and that their mother had painted their rooms and made new curtains and that Cathy couldn’t come to the phone, she was crying.

  We went to bed early. Charlie turned to face one way and I turned the other. I lay awake deep into the night, wondering if this breach meant the end of our lives together. I was more miserable than I had ever been before in my life. But finally sleep came, and somehow the next day Charlie and I both woke up on the same side of that vast, lonely canyon. We went into each other’s arms. Later we ate breakfast and things happened, friends called, days passed, and our lives got back to normal again.