Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  I wouldn’t have wanted to be Linda, or Sylvia, and that was the point. Some of the nineteen male graduate students were married, some weren’t and liked to flirt, some were smart, some were dumb, but they were all set on some kind of track that they’d seen other men run first. As a Methodist from Kansas, I had already derailed myself enough by marrying a divorced man fifteen years older than I and leaving the safety of my sorority and home. I knew what I wanted to do, but I was rather afraid that the sky might fall in. My best friend from college had stopped working on her master’s in psychology in order to have babies and work in her home as a typist to help meet the expenses while her husband went through med school. My own mother was now a successful research administrator for a hospital, but she hadn’t begun her work until all of her children were happily at high school or college and so almost out of the cozy nest she’d built for us. My grandmothers had both gone to college, which had been unusual in their times, and my mother’s mother had even published a few essays on the history of Oklahoma and Kansas in historical journals. But both grandmothers had married and had children and kept house all their lives, with church and book club meetings as their only outside activities. When I married Charlie, my mother’s mother said to me, “Honey, I know your parents are upset about your marrying this man, but you just hurry up and have a baby and everything will be fine. There’s nothing like a nice new baby to get everyone to make up.” And the minister of the church we belonged to, the nice Methodist minister, said to me the week before I married Charlie, “Well, my dear, since you are so set on doing this thing, see that you do it well. Marriage is a sacred trust. It will be up to you as the woman to create a home, a loving atmosphere for you and your husband and your children—”

  “I won’t be having any children,” I had interrupted. “I’m going to get a PhD and teach at a university.”

  Reverend Walsh had smiled at me—a smile much like, in its benign and knowing way, the smile I’d later get from the famous psychologist. “Oh, Zelda my dear,” Reverend Walsh said, “children are the reason we are put here on earth. They are the reason for living. But I won’t argue with you now. You will see, I know, you will see. Just remember, it’s nice to be educated, but education means nothing in God’s eyes. What really matters to God—and to all of us, when we are finally lying on our deathbed and can see things clearly—is that we have tried to live a good, joyous life, loving men and God.”

  I had loved Reverend Walsh. He had been my minister for as long as I could remember. He was tall and gentle and homely, rather like Ichabod Crane, but he had powers of magic in his hands and voice and eyes, and a mysterious gentle dignity. I remembered him in white robes at Easter, in black robes at funerals, his eyes full of knowledge, his hands full of blessings. There was no evil or malice in Reverend Walsh, and after listening to his sermons for so many years I knew there was no stupidity in him, either. I wanted to believe in him in order to believe in God. It was difficult, painful, to think differently than he did. It was as if I were turning my back on the benedictions of my youth.

  Everything at that point in my life seemed against my ambitions. My mother, grandmother, friends, minister, all pushed me toward the old familiar female roles, and although I seldom saw them after my marriage to Charlie, their eyes and words and values followed after me. The English department in a big, sophisticated, beautiful city was not any help; the professors who didn’t openly dislike female graduate students didn’t encourage them either. And with Linda on one side and Sylvia on the other, I was beginning to feel a little freaky. Alone, I’ll go to the international symposium, I told myself that March, I’ll go away from the Midwest to an international gathering, and that will give me a different perspective!

  And at the international symposium it was all the same story, simply a larger, more glittering stage.

  I am envious of my stepdaughters, who are receiving priority now in the job market simply because they’re female. Last January, I left my children with Charlie and took the bus down to stay with Caroline in her apartment in New Haven. It was the last semester of her senior year. She and all her roommates were discussing jobs and ideas as much as they were discussing boys. They had jokes about vibrators mixed with save-the-ecology posters on their walls. Natural History and National Geographic were on the tables and shelves instead of magazines on makeup and hairstyles and manipulating men. Caroline had already turned down a marriage proposal; she just wasn’t interested yet.

  If we are progressing in queer little half steps, I had silently wondered, from traditional Adelaide Campbell to confused Zelda Campbell to right-on, freed-up liberated Caroline and Cathy Campbell, what then will Lucy be? Will fashions and ideas do a switcheroo? Adelaide is twelve or thirteen years older than I; I am ten or twelve years older than Caroline; Caroline is twenty years older than Lucy. By the time Lucy is in college, will Caroline advise her to marry or to work?

  Of course, it is all a crazy question anyway. If things continue as they have, Caroline won’t even care what Lucy does. We Campbell women may be progressing by half steps, but no one is passing anything on. That’s the problem with stepping; we keep tripping and falling backward over an old, old grudge.

  * * *

  After the 1966 symposium in New Hampshire, Charlie and I went to Massachusetts to see Caroline and Cathy. It seemed a good thing to do; we didn’t get all that many expense-paid trips back East. Also, I suspected that Charlie wanted to check up on Adelaide, just to see how she looked and was acting. After the hearing in January a sudden calm had hit. No more angry phone calls or letters. Only the canceled child-support checks. In February, Charlie wrote Adelaide to explain that he would be in the East for a conference—an expense-paid conference; he made that clear—and that he would very much like to see the girls. What he would like, he proposed, would be to pick the girls up on Friday evening and have them eat dinner and spend the night with us. We would take them shopping Saturday, if it was all right with Adelaide, for shoes or perhaps an Easter outfit, or whatever she felt they needed. We would return them to her in time for dinner Saturday night.

  We cringed and jumped around the house for two weeks after Charlie sent the letter, expecting each phone call to be Angry Adelaide and her screaming serenade. But all that came was an envelope addressed to Charlie. He opened it to find his own letter inside. On the bottom of the letter Adelaide had written simply, “All right. A.” Charlie didn’t know if that simple agreement after all her drama was a good sign or a bad one.

  Friday afternoon we rode down from the beautiful old spa-hotel back to the Boston airport in the hotel’s limousine. Several of the other participants rode with us, on their way to Logan field and their various planes to their various homes. This time, however, the ride was fairly quiet. The conference was over, the show had ended, the duels had been fought, the egos had been sufficiently exhibited. There was a general feeling of exhaustion all around, and it was true, they all had worked hard. Now they were eager to get home, loosen their ties and belts, kick off their shoes, and sort through the week’s mail. Two of the men slept for the whole drive, trying to recover from hangovers and a general lack of sleep. I noticed how sleep changed them, those brilliant, important men. They sagged and slumped and drooled a bit, and seemed vulnerable and totally dispensable. Charlie sat next to me, scribbling notes about something. There were no other women in the car. I looked out the window, enjoying the passing scenery—the mountains, curving roads, great rocks jutting from snow, winter-gray bare-branched trees. I felt sad. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because both Alice’s exuberantly maternal life and the lives of these significant intellectuals seemed equally inaccessible to me.

  In Boston we rented a small Dodge Dart to drive to Hadley. It was a three-hour drive, and this time I slept. When I awoke we were just entering the little village of Hadley, a small town almost inseparable from Amherst. Charlie had lived in this area before; he had no trouble finding the right streets.

  Adelaide and her d
aughters lived in a great big beautiful old colonial house that had been divided and made into a two-family house. It was charming. There were trees all around, and nice homes, and I could tell that Charlie was glad.

  “I’ll go up and get the girls,” Charlie said as we pulled into their driveway.

  “Fine,” I replied. I looked in the rearview mirror and combed my hair and put on lipstick. I had no desire to go with Charlie, although I was curious about Adelaide. At that point I had never met her. I had only seen an old black-and-white photo that Charlie had of the four Campbells when Cathy was just born. Adelaide’s hair had been chopped short and her lipstick had been dark and thick and her eyebrows had been plucked and drawn in a thin unbelievable arch. She had been holding Cathy and smiling slightly. Charlie’s hair had been shorter, and he had been much thinner then; together they looked like some family from an old magazine, advertising RCA Victor radios and Ava Gardner movies. The picture hadn’t meant anything to me; I wouldn’t have known any of the people if I had passed them on the street. At the time it was taken I had been in high school. I could have babysat for such a family.

  I knew Adelaide was pretty; I gathered that from the old photo and what people told me and from seeing her daughters. But of course I always wondered: was she prettier than I? That is one of the problems with stepping; the children are always there to remind you that your husband loved someone else first. That he had put his arms around her and held her to him and kissed her tears and given her gifts. That he made a home for her, bought her clothes, and especially shared her bed. When I first married Charlie I used to lie awake in agony at night, thinking of him making love to Adelaide. Had he kissed her nipples so reverently, nestled his head in her stomach, nipped and licked the fruity flesh between her legs? If nothing else, he had certainly entered her, strong muscular arms and chest rising above her like a shield. He was very, very good in bed. He hadn’t learned all that from history books. I couldn’t stand to think of Charlie with Adelaide, but I sometimes could not keep from thinking of it. I was totally in love with him, I wanted to possess him, all of him, his past, present, and future. I wanted to be all his wives, all his children, I wanted to be his mother. I could not bear it that he had been with Adelaide; if tearing the skin off my breasts would have torn away, erased, that part of his life, then I would have torn away my flesh with my own hands. As it was, I lay awake crying silently, biting my hands until they bled, torturing myself with jealousy. As time went on, I grew less jealous of his past, I forgot his life with her just as I forgot any old unconquerable sorrows. But when the girls came to stay, they might as well have brought a thirty-foot red and gold banner and draped it across the walls of our home: Charlie loved and made love to someone else first.

  Then, sitting in our little rented car, I waited restlessly. Charlie had gone inside the house. Inside with his old wife and their two children. What were they doing? Smiling at each other? Kissing? I would never kiss him again, ever, if he kissed her. He was in there for so long, so long, the sun seemed to set and rise again and set and rise again. I felt superfluous, the fifth wheel, the odd one. I was not part of that group. They were in the warm house and I was alone in the car, and the March night was sinking in and the car was growing cold.

  Still he didn’t come. No one came. Because of the division of the house the entrance was on the side, and I could see only one small window, which was dark. There was no movement.

  I grew alarmed. What had happened? Had she fired a gun and shot him as he walked in the door? Had the sight of her again—hair back to blond now—entranced him so much that he had strode across the room to her and picked her up in his arms and carried her up the stairs to bed? Were they all four sitting together on a sofa, laughing over old family photograph albums? Was she simply screaming and screaming at him, now that he was there in person? Were the girls clinging to the furniture, pleading not to go with us, begging him to leave them alone? What was going on?

  I could see only the black window and the neat red brick wall of the house. How thick that wall was, how silent, how blind.

  More minutes passed.

  I was still sitting in the little rented Dart, twisting in an agony of suspense, when the ambulance came screaming up. It pulled in so fast, so close to the Dart, that the bumper touched; the Dart rocked a bit. The siren snapped off, and two men jumped out and ran past the Dart into the red brick house.

  “My God!” I cried out aloud to myself. For a moment I couldn’t move. I was horrified. I didn’t want to know what had happened.

  Then I jumped out of the car and ran to the house.

  The men had left the doors open. I raced inside, expecting to see—what?—Charlie bleeding, everyone dead?—and saw only a quiet, neat, coolly luxurious living room. No one there.

  I heard noises and went for them. Up the beautiful wooden staircase. Down the carpeted hall, into the back bedroom.

  And the first time I saw my husband’s ex-wife, she was in his arms, Charlie was holding Adelaide as if she were a giant child. She appeared to be peacefully asleep, or drunk; she was limp. A man in a white coat was looking at her eyelids. Another man was talking to Charlie.

  “We’ll get her into the hospital and pump her stomach,” he said. “If it’s been only an hour or two, she should pull through without any problems.”

  Caroline and Cathy stood shock-still in the corner of the bedroom, white, clenched, past crying.

  “Charlie?” I whispered.

  “An overdose of sleeping pills,” Charlie said. “We don’t know how many. Caroline said she had three bottles and they’re all empty.”

  My first thoughts, I must admit, were not kind. I thought, Damn, what a phony! She didn’t mean to kill herself really; she just wanted to ruin Charlie’s weekend with the girls. My next thought was, Good God, if Adelaide died, the girls would have to live with us.

  But she wouldn’t die, I knew. She didn’t want to die. She had simply been calling for help in the only way she could.

  I took one more look at her: she was blond, and unbelievably pale, and so slim. Marriage and its sensuous pleasures had plumped me out a bit. But she was so slim, so trim and neat and small. Small waist, small hips, small, almost nonexistent, breasts. Little woman, sound asleep, pale Adelaide.

  The men took her from Charlie and put her on a stretcher. They strapped her in, covered her body with a blanket, and carried her from the room.

  Charlie went to the corner and picked both girls up in his arms and brought them out of the bedroom. He knelt down and stood them up gently, as if they might fall, and with his hands on their shoulders he said, “Your mother will be all right. Caroline and Catherine, I promise you. She will be all right. I am going to go with the ambulance to the hospital. I’ll stay with her. But they know how to take care of her there. I promise you she’ll be fine. She’ll probably be home tomorrow. Now I want you to go with Zelda. Get your overnight bags. Zelda will take you to the motel and get some dinner, and I’ll be there later, as soon as I can. Don’t worry. Your mommy won’t die. She’ll be fine.”

  The girls stared, said nothing.

  “Is that okay?” Charlie asked. “Will you be all right?”

  Dutifully they nodded yes, two good children, shock-white, two little blond china dolls.

  Charlie rose and handed me the car keys. “I made reservations at the August Inn, in Northampton,” he said. “You can get the girls some dinner there. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Do you have enough money?”

  “Yes,” I said, and took the keys, not touching Charlie’s fingers. The skin under his eyes had gone gray. He looked old. “The girls will be fine,” I told him.

  Then, “Come on, girls, let’s get your bags,” I said.

  We went back downstairs, not touching, three zombies. The bags were packed and waiting by the open front door. We went out into the black night; it felt strange outside, like a new cold universe. As if in those few moments the very air of the world had changed. I settled the girls
together in the front seat of the Dart and put their bags in back. Before I could get in, Charlie came out of the house, pulling the door shut behind him. He passed us by without looking at us and got into the back of the ambulance with Adelaide. The doors slammed shut; the ambulance screamed off. I felt betrayed.

  Damn Adelaide, I thought.

  I got into the little Dart and started the engine.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to the girls as I drove. “Your mother will be fine. Your daddy will come to the motel soon. Everything will be okay.” I repeated those words with several variations on the way to the motel. Of course I didn’t know that what I said was true, but it seemed the necessary thing to say.

  Once at the motel, I ordered room service dinners for the girls and two big scotch and water drinks for me. The girls didn’t eat their dinners, but I drank my drinks right down. It was a crazy, spacy time, the hours we spent in the motel room waiting. Nothing seemed appropriate—eating, watching television, going to the toilet—everything seemed in bad taste and irreverent. The phone would not ring and the silence was loud. The girls sat on chairs for the first half hour, looking at each other or the walls or at me, and I drank my drinks, but still felt cold and lost and strange. I didn’t know how to comfort the girls. It was not time to flip on The Partridge Family. I didn’t know what to do, how to make those awful minutes pass.