Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  I won’t.

  I will write the mathematician who is renting our farm to tell him that he must be out by January first. I’ll tell him that for emergency health reasons (my mental health) I have to come home. I’ll tell Charlie to stay or to come with us, but I won’t be dissuaded from leaving here. Today I will begin to write letters to the universities and colleges within driving distance of the farm to see if they will hire me—but I know the chances are slim. If I don’t get hired, if that particular miracle does not happen, I’ll go home anyway, and put Adam and Lucy in a preschool and spend every afternoon working in a library on the research papers I’ve been longing to do, and perhaps they will get published and pave my way into a university position. I don’t need to stay here sniveling, feeling sorry for myself and my children, hating Charlie for his success. I need to go home; I need to go to work. And I will.

  I will.

  * * *

  Hooray! Hooray! Everyone was happy! It was July 1966, and Caroline and Cathy were coming to spend their second summer with us in Kansas City. They were so happy to be coming because this time their mother said she wanted them to come. And of course she did; why not? We were providing free babysitting service while she got married again. Not that we thought of it in that way—well, perhaps I did, since I did the cooking and laundry and other dirty work, but Charlie didn’t. He was simply overjoyed to be having his daughters with him again. He was glad the psychological counseling had paid off; Adelaide was okay, Adelaide had found someone else to love her; Adelaide was getting married. He was sure that she wouldn’t call crying that summer.

  This summer when Charlie wrote to ask about flying the girls out, he had received a pleasant letter telling him exactly what days to book both arriving and returning flights. “By the way,” Adelaide had written, “as the girls will tell you, I am going to be married this summer, July 3, to a wonderful, wonderful man. He doesn’t have much money and he is also divorced. And as he is good and moral enough to pay his wife alimony as well as child support, we won’t have much money, so don’t think you’ll be able to get out of sending the child-support checks. Still we are buying a nice house and I’m hoping we’ll be able to have another baby or two; I know Cathy and Caroline would like that. Please take good care of my little girls this summer.”

  “Everyone will be happy this summer!” Charlie said.

  And that summer, everyone was. I had the brilliant idea of having a party at the house for the girls, and invited children from all over the neighborhood, and eventually Caroline and Cathy made friends. They were happier because they spent time with girls their own age, and I was happier because I had more time to myself. Of course things were not perfect: once again I couldn’t kiss or touch Charlie when they were around, and Cathy still occasionally sent little eye spits of hatred my way, but on the whole, it was a much better summer than the first had been. Charlie was busy completing a book in time for a contract deadline, so I took the summer off from my studies to play with and take care of the girls. With friends their own age around they were braver, and we went down to the farm and rode the horses and swam in the pond and took nature walks on the farm, and the girls slept out on the screened porch in sleeping bags. We made fires by the pond late at night and cooked hot dogs and marshmallows. When I had time during the day I read literary criticism and T. S. Eliot and e e cummings. In Kansas City we went to movies and swimming pools and parks and zoos again, and if I was slightly bored it was all right; everyone was happy. Adelaide called several times that summer, and cried a little bit, missing her daughters, but not quite so desperately. We even spent a few pleasant afternoons with June and Anthony Leyden. I thought we had all entered a season of peace and content. When Caroline and Cathy left at the end of August, they cried, and I felt genuinely, if minutely, sorry to see them go, and they both came to me and held their pretty faces up to be kissed goodbye.

  It had been a good summer. It went by fast. In September what I considered “our” season—Charlie’s-and-mine—began again. The blissful freedom of being alone to make love in the daylight in any room of the house, the uninterrupted moments spent reading together or discussing our separate days, the burden of extra cooking and laundry and cleaning and driving and organizing and caring and pleasing so completely removed—the girls had come and gone. Now there were fires in the fireplace and late pizza dinners and long hours in the library or with a pile of books and note cards at home. On weekends the farm and the horses, and kisses in the crisp fall air. And then it was Thanksgiving, and time to start buying Christmas gifts for Caroline and Cathy.

  Christmas Day, 1966, Charlie called his daughters to wish them Merry Christmas and to see if they liked their presents.

  Caroline answered the phone.

  “Daddy?” she cried. “Oh, Daddy, I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call. Daddy, please, I want to come live with you!”

  I was upstairs on the extension phone, where Charlie had told me to be, my mouth open in readiness to yell, “Merry Christmas!” Instead, on hearing Caroline’s words, I went speechless.

  “Why, Caroline,” said Charlie, “what’s wrong?”

  “Daddy, please, please, just let me come live with you. Cathy wants to, too. Please—” she cried, and then there were scuffling sounds and the next voice was Adelaide’s.

  “Charlie?” she snapped. “Is that you? What do you want?”

  “I wanted to wish everyone Merry Christmas,” Charlie said. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong!” Adelaide shrieked, and the sound made my ears ring. “Stop prying into my private life!”

  “Caroline said she wants to come live with me,” Charlie said.

  “Nonsense. She’s just had a bad day.”

  “She’s had a bad day on Christmas Day?”

  “Oh, you always were the most sarcastic goddamned bastard!” Adelaide said. “Why don’t you leave me alone!”

  “Adelaide, I just want to say Merry Christmas to the girls. That’s all. Okay?”

  “NO! NO, it’s NOT okay! Now STOP IT and LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  There was a harsh click; she had hung up the phone.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said to Charlie over the hum of the disconnected line.

  “Wow,” said Charlie.

  So that Christmas Day was spent with Charlie in his study, talking to the Ascrofts. It seemed that Adelaide’s new marriage was having problems. The Ascrofts were vague, and they wanted to protect Adelaide as much as possible. They said they thought she was fine psychologically, just having a difficult time at a rocky spot in her marriage. The Ascrofts thought the reason Caroline and Cathy were upset was that they didn’t get along with their new stepbrother when he came to visit. They thought there was some kind of rivalry, jealousy, there, but nothing to get excited about. They promised to keep an eye on things and to let Charlie know if there was anything he could or should do.

  At the moment, there was nothing Charlie could do but worry. And he worried. That Caroline, quiet, restrained Caroline, had cried and asked to come live with him amazed him. He worried that if he called her back Adelaide would be furious with Caroline, but that if he didn’t call her back Caroline would feel he had deserted her, that he didn’t care.

  I tried to reassure Charlie because that was what he needed, but secretly I felt sorry for the girls, too, and perhaps understood their problem more than he did. I had found stepping to be difficult and painful at best, and yet I was an adult: I had the power to change things, at least the freedom to leave the situation forever or to simply walk out of the house and down the street and away from an angry situation. But Caroline and Cathy were children, minors; they were trapped in the way that all children are trapped. Then, too, when they came to stay with us in the summer, we all knew it was a temporary arrangement, and there was a solace in that that made it all much more tolerable. We could temper our anger and secret resentments with the knowledge that it was not going to last forever, we would be fr
ee from each other soon. But Adelaide had remarried. That meant that Caroline and Cathy had to deal with a stepfather on a permanent, daily, and apparently eternal basis. They could not live for the end, or even rush off in a huff for one day. They must have felt panicked, as any helpless creature does when imprisoned in an unpleasant home.

  Yet there was no way I could help them. I had no proof that they would be any happier living with their father and me than with their mother and a stepfather. The thought of the four of us living together on a permanent basis was something past the scope of my imagination. It seemed to me that the only likely result of such an arrangement would be that they would come to hate and resent me. I did not know what to say or do, what advice to offer Charlie. And selfishly, I worried about myself, about my work. I had only one semester left to finish my master’s degree, defend my thesis, and take my orals. The coming spring would be the busiest time for me, with teaching and my studies. I really didn’t want the girls to come then, with their problems and their mother’s phone calls; I needed silence and peace around me; I knew I could not offer the care and attention that such a new situation would deserve. But I said nothing about all this to Charlie. They were his daughters; if they wanted to come, then this would be their home.

  We spent a restless spring. Charlie wrote the girls and called them several times a month, but his letters were never answered and the phone conversations were unrevealing. Apparently the girls were happier, apparently some sort of peace had been achieved; at least that was all we could think given the information we had. Still, we worried; and felt helpless, because any attempt to help or understand would be seen only as an attempt to interfere and agitate.

  In May, two nights before I was to have my oral examination to defend my thesis, Adelaide called. It was perhaps ten minutes till midnight. Charlie and I were in bed, asleep. I answered the phone.

  “I want to talk to Charlie,” Adelaide said. Her voice was clear, strong, calm, and grim.

  I handed the phone to Charlie and sat in frightened silence as he talked.

  Caroline was in the hospital. For several days she had been having severe stomach pains, and the physicians could provide neither diagnosis nor cure. Adelaide wanted Charlie to fly out the next day to see Caroline. She was worried, and she thought, quite rightly, that by God, Charlie ought to worry, too. Adelaide said that perhaps Caroline was having some kind of psychological problem because of the conflict of having two fathers. Charlie said that he would come as soon as he could. The conversation was short and quiet.

  After he hung up the phone we sat up in bed among our wrinkled sheets, talking. We turned on the bedside lamp, as if seeing would help us hear each other better, and the warm circle of light seemed to create a magic small world that held only the two of us and our cozy bed, but the illusion was false. Other people were with us; too many others.

  “I’ll have Anthony take my class and I’ll fly up tomorrow,” Charlie said.

  “Charlie, could you wait two days? Till after my orals? I’d sort of like your support—”

  “Oh, Zelda, Jesus, I’m so sorry. God, what timing! Listen, what can I do? What would you do in my place? My daughter’s in the hospital, having severe stomach pains. If Adelaide thinks I can help—”

  “I know. I know. You have to go. There’s nothing else you can do. I hope she’ll be okay, Charlie. I’m sure she will.”

  “Zelda, I’m really sorry about having to leave right now.”

  “I know. It’s all right. Let’s go to sleep; tomorrow will be busy.”

  We turned off the light and the warm enclosing circle disappeared in the darkness. We turned away from each other, Charlie to worry about Caroline, me to worry about my orals, and the great deep canyon suddenly there between us.

  Charlie left the next day for Massachusetts, and the day after that I took my orals. They were held at three in the afternoon and went on until five-thirty. Afterward I was so weak-kneed and exhausted that I could scarcely walk. The head of the department, the notorious Catholic, woman-as-mother-lover, woman-as-intellectual-hater, had been unexpectedly nasty and petty and picky. He had led me astray, interrupted me, laughed at me, and in general looked down his nose at me until I wanted to rise from my chair and punch him in his nose. But I had kept my cool—he was the head of the department—and riding on the energy and sharpness that fear and anger provide, had done my best. I even had room in the back of my mind to wonder as I spoke if male master degree candidates worried about the way their legs were crossed while they discussed Eliot’s Four Quartets. And I wondered how much different the whole scene would have been if there had been just one woman professor on the committee instead of the five males. Would I have felt less threatened, one female facing a mixed group rather than one female facing five stern men?

  When it was over, they asked me to wait in the outer office. I did. The secretary had gone home; everything was quiet. I stood next to a window, looking down at the grassy square and praying, “Please God, please God,” over and over again.

  Finally the door opened and my favorite professor came out and said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Campbell.” My first thought was that I wanted to burst into tears from sheer exhaustion and relief, and then that I absolutely must not. The other men, including the department head, came out and shook my hand and offered their dry congratulations. We talked a bit of small talk, simply to prove that we were now all friends instead of adversaries, and then we all went home.

  They went home and I went home, all by myself. It was spring, a warm May evening, a soft sexy evening, and I walked home alone. Everyone seemed to be outdoors, playing and laughing and being with everyone else, and when I saw my tiny pretty house I finally did begin to cry because it was so empty, because no one was in it to share my triumph. The windows reflected the sun and green trees and passing cars as if everything important were happening outside, as if there were nothing inside waiting for me. I didn’t want to go in the house. But I couldn’t simply stand outside and cry. I went in. The first thing I did was to take the phone off the hook. I didn’t want Charlie to call and ask how it had gone and to hear my news, and then for it—my triumph, my success, my achievement—to be diluted by my having to ask, “And how is Caroline?” And he would say she was fine—he had called me the night before, and she was fine—and then we would have to discuss Caroline and Cathy and Adelaide, and my one bright golden moment would be muddied.

  But, after all, things worked out, and perhaps in the long run worked out better than if Charlie had been there. For without him I had to take the first real, small steps from dependence on him to dependence on myself—and it is harder to be elated without the one you love than it is to be depressed; one can easily indulge in depression alone. I made myself a vodka tonic and sat down at the kitchen table, preparing to drink myself into a state of maudlin self-pity, accompanied only by the empty buzz of the telephone receiver as it hung by its cord to the floor. But my drink did not taste good; I did not want a vodka tonic, I wanted champagne. I had achieved something—I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to celebrate even if I had to do it without Charlie. I put the phone back on the hook, then picked it up again and dialed my mother and father, and then Alice, and then all the other friends I had, to tell them that I had finally, at last, done it: I had defended my thesis, I had won my master’s degree. Finally, unsure of what reception I would get, I called Linda. She had dropped out of the MA program the past semester to have her baby, and I had sent her flowers and bought a small pink knit bunting for her new daughter, but she had been so wrapped up in the baby, and I had been so wrapped up in my books, that our conversation had kept sliding off into mutual uninterest. This night when I called her, however, she responded with the beautiful manic enthusiasm I had been so used to and invited me over to her house to celebrate. Her husband was out of town; her daughter was asleep. I stopped at the liquor store and bought a magnum of champagne. The two of us drank it all. What a wonderful evening it was: we left the doors and
windows open and let the sounds of the spring night drift in, and we sat in her messily luxurious living room eating cold roast, cheese, crackers, olives, nuts, anything we could find from her pantry, and drinking the champagne, and telling each other secrets, and laughing at the secrets until we both ended up rolling on the floor with laughter. We didn’t get tired until three in the morning, and because it was so late and her husband was not home, I spent the night there. Before we staggered into our beds to sleep, we crept into the nursery, where little Dina, Linda’s daughter, lay sleeping amid white and pink quilts in a small white cradle. How warm, how moist, how sweetly aromatic that sleeping child was. I can remember it even now. The sight and scent of the little girl moved something inside me, like a small, pure, crystal chime just beginning to stir in a breeze. I hung above the baby, seeing her tiny white hand plump and relaxed among soft quilts, and felt a most delicate, exquisite, puzzling desire.

  The next morning I had a hangover, but only a slight one. I drank black coffee and watched Linda give Dina first a bottle and then various globs of warm smooth food, and finally left for my own house. I brushed my furry teeth, took a long bubble bath, put on fresh clothes, and then fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke up, it was late afternoon and Charlie was home.

  We kissed, and Charlie sat down next to me, and we talked about Caroline. She was out of the hospital and doing well. The physicians thought she had been chronically constipated, but they agreed something psychological was going on. Caroline had said only that she was perfectly happy and felt fine except for the stomach pains. Adelaide had admitted that she had never given the girls the letters Charlie had written—she thought they were too upsetting for Caroline and Cathy—but had agreed in the light of Caroline’s strange illness to let them have the letters from now on as long as Charlie wrote only light happy things and never said he missed the girls or asked them to live with him. Adelaide had said that her marriage was fine, just fine. Cathy seemed content. Charlie was as satisfied as he could be in the situation.