Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  “Jealousy never does have to make sense,” Charlie said. “I should have told them; it was bad to surprise them that way. Well, they’re resting, maybe they’ll sleep. Maybe they’ll feel better after they sleep.”

  And they did. They woke up in the early evening and came out to ask where the bathroom was, and if they could have something to eat, and then Charlie took them out for a walk around the city, which sparkled with its bright lights and its still warm air and its streets full of young people playing guitars and singing. The girls decided to stay for another day, and after that day, for another, until at last they unpacked their suitcases and hung up their clothes and said they wanted to stay for the semester. It was awkward at first, it was difficult. Everyone knew what the problem was, but no one would discuss it; it was as if talking about it made it real but ignoring it made it nonexistent. And so we lived our lives there, and my stomach grew larger, and the word “baby” was never said. It was as if I were having a surreptitious pregnancy, as if we were all pretending that the offensive part of my body wasn’t really there. It was a strange way to live. I was already head over heels in love with my child, and I longed to call out, “Oh, look! Can you see how he’s kicking? Isn’t he strong? Come feel!” But I knew no one there would share my joy. And that made me feel slightly bitter, slightly angry, slightly sad.

  Our days fell into a pleasant routine. The principal at Caroline and Cathy’s Massachusetts school had agreed to a strange proposition that Charlie, in desperation, had come up with when asked about the girls’ schooling. I was to be their tutor. I was to see that they studied, and to pace their reading, and to compose and give them tests. Whatever grade I gave them at the end of the semester would go on their transcripts. In some states it is true that if the parents are teachers the children do not have to attend school; this was some variation on that theme. So our schedule was set up: every weekday morning I tutored the girls in history, French, English grammar and composition, literature, and science. We hired a special tutor for Caroline’s trigonometry; he was a thin young Dutch man named Martyn who spoke excellent English and came once a week, in the evening, to sit at our dining room table to talk in a low accented voice to Caroline. We used the school’s textbooks, and I typed up tests on Charlie’s typewriter so that they looked appropriately official, and the girls studied well, and did well.

  In the afternoons we went out. Early in the semester, when the sun was still warm, we rented bikes and rode over to Vondel Park and had picnics in the grass. We must have been a strange-looking bunch on our rented bikes: big blond Charlie and his two big blond daughters, and then dark little me with my fat tummy, pedaling along behind them, wobbling along unsteadily, happy and puffing and out of breath. Or we walked, all over Amsterdam, to Dam Square, to tours of the Heineken Brewery, where the international hippies congregated for free beer and cheese, to interesting shops, all about the lovely canals and streets. Our favorite discovery was the Moses and Adam Church, which was a baroque, rococo, almost hideously ornamented once-Catholic church which was now used by hippies as a teahouse and meditation center; the place seemed to perfectly represent the religious tolerance of Amsterdam. Later, as the weather grew colder and darker and rainier, we spent more time inside museums, the Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum, the smaller individual houses, Rembrantshuis, Anne Frank’s house, the Weigh House … There was an endless supply of places to visit and learn from.

  On weekends and long holidays when Charlie didn’t have to teach, we took trips. Sometimes they were short trips to surrounding areas, to Den Haag to see the Mauritshuis, or to Haarjuilens to see the fairy-tale Castel de Haar, or to the somber and authentic castle at Muiden. Friends drove us to Edam and Volendam and Markam, where people still wore wooden shoes and long dresses and baggy black pants. Once we took a long train trip to Germany to visit friends in Lübeck and Hamburg and Kiel and to walk on the fresh sandy shores of the island of Sylt. Another time we rented a little Fiat and drove south to France and spent days being tourists in Paris, showing the girls the Louvre and Sacré Coeur, getting drunk with old friends at La Coupole. We strolled along the rue de la Rochefoucauld, showing the girls where we had once lived. I smiled to myself as I looked up at the balcony where I had once stood ripping essays from a book, daring to make a decision. Being Americans in foreign countries made us draw closer together, made us laugh at things—the harsh German toilet paper, our dreadful French and German accents, the trivialities we missed from home.

  We were the closest, Caroline and Cathy and I, on Thursday evenings. That was when an hour-long American show came on television, with the words spoken in English. We would prepare for the show by going to Dyker and Thies, a specialty import store just across the street from our apartment, and buying an expensive can of S&W popcorn. Then we would all sit, grinning and munching popcorn for one happy American hour, watching a droop-eyed detective in a sloppy raincoat. We would complain about feeling homesick then, but not for long. There was too much else to do; we never had time to sit and sigh. We met people, and were invited to homes, and had friends in, and Caroline flirted with boys on the street and sometimes went off with them to a movie or Orange Julius while Charlie lectured or wrote and Cathy and I stayed home and played cards. So our days were neatly patterned, and filled with an endless variety of pleasures and delights.

  The best time of all—for me, just for me—was Tuesday afternoon. That was when I took the tram by myself to Schubertsstraat to take Lamaze courses from an elegant sexagenarian named Madame Rouva-Carmen. It was the only time I was able to feel openly, happily pregnant. I hated to leave when the hour was over, I wanted to linger with all the other mothers, to hear them talk about childbirth and breathing and nursing and such. I was so grateful for any chance remarks—“You’re carrying your baby low, that means you’ll have a boy!”; “You’ve gained weight on your body but not on your face, that means you’ll have a girl!”; “I’m starting to have awful cramps in my feet, do you get them, too?”—that I nearly cried when spoken to. It was so good to have my pregnancy spoken of as a normal, natural, acceptable thing. I was proud of my stomach, I adored it. But in our apartment on the Prinsengracht everyone simply pretended that it wasn’t really there. I felt that pregnancy was something that I was actively doing; it was a part, a joyful part, of my life, and I hated pretending otherwise. I began to long for my parents, for my American friends, for Alice, for anyone, to say, “How are you feeling this morning? Are you keeping your weight gain down? Have you thought of a name yet? Do you want a boy or a girl?” Sometimes in the privacy of our bed I would talk to Charlie about “it”—the baby—or about myself. And Charlie was kind, but not really interested, not full of passion and hope, as I was. And I suppose it was then that I felt again the rift between us: not a great sudden overwhelming chasm, as in times of crisis with the girls or Adelaide. Not that. This new division was more like the flat bare stretch of sand between the shoreline and the water when the tide has ebbed; we know the rush of ocean will return, but the long empty space caused by its absence brings an uneasiness, a pang.

  December was the best month. In Amsterdam the custom is for St. Nicholas to come from Spain by boat with a Moorish helper, Swart Piet, to give small gifts and ginger-flavored cookies to very young children. There are parades by boat and by horseback throughout the city on various days, and from the first of December small children wake up every morning expecting a small treat from St. Nicholas. The custom was too charming to be ignored, even if Caroline and Cathy were no longer little; we bought and hid little gifts each night: small blue and white porcelain Dutch shoes, fingernail polish, fancy chocolates, souvenirs. Charlie and I had as much fun finding and choosing and secreting the presents as Caroline and Cathy did in discovering them each morning. And on December fifteenth, the day before the girls left to go back to the States, Charlie and I awoke to find little gifts for us placed next to the door of our bedroom. Chocolates for us both, a necklace for me, a book for him. I cried that mornin
g because, for the first time in all the Christmases we had known each other, Caroline and Cathy had given me a present. I had not minded before, all those Christmases when I did not receive a gift from the girls; I knew that present-giving in our situation was fraught with tense significances. When Charlie and I chose Christmas presents for Caroline and Cathy, we had to walk a dangerously thin line: if we didn’t send enough, it was a sign that we did not love them; we were selfish. But if we sent too much, we were either trying to make up for our lack of love by tangible items bought with money or we were trying to show them how wealthy we were, how much we could give, and thus were trying to lure them away from their mother. There were always so many clever ways to interpret and warp and ruin the simplest act. I could imagine the difficulties that Caroline or Cathy might have had if they, with their very limited amounts of money, saved allowances, had wanted to send me a present. If they had, for instance, ten dollars to spend on Christmas gifts, just how much of that could they spend on me without hurting their mother’s feelings? How much should they take from their mother’s gift to spend on me? No, it was too complicated, too complex for them to handle. So I was pleased and touched when Caroline and Cathy gave me a present that year in Amsterdam—although the necklace, charming as it was, was not the present I would have chosen for them to give me. If I could have chosen a present, it would have been for them to say, just once, “Gee, Zelda, you are sure getting big; look how tight that maternity top is. I’ll bet you can’t wait to have your baby.” Perhaps the girls felt that way now and then. They certainly had to notice; we lived together, months passed, my baby grew. There were times when I was tutoring the girls when I would lean over Caroline’s shoulder to point out a mistake or an interesting phrase and my fat stomach would accidentally press against her shoulder, my baby touching my skin, my skin touching Caroline. The kitchen we had was so tiny in its quaint European way that after a while no one else could come into it when I was in there. If Caroline came in to get the silverware to set the table while I was draining the spaghetti, she simply had to brush against my belly; there was no other way.

  But all that time, after that first surprising day, no word was ever said about my pregnancy or the coming child. It was as if we had made a pact, as if, without words or gestures, we had all made a secret, irreversible agreement not to mention the new child. Perhaps Caroline and Cathy thought that if we didn’t speak of it, if we pretended it was not there, it would not be there, it would go away. Probably Charlie felt as I did, that in keeping quiet about the baby we were keeping a peace and making the girls feel important. If words were what was measured, the girls must have felt very important, and the baby should have felt of no significance whatsoever. And I suppose I understood. I understood that although Caroline was seventeen and taller than I, that even though she could solve mathematical problems that boggled my mind, that even though she threw around words like “self-aggrandizement” and “global love,” she still was a child. Charlie’s child. Charlie’s first child. And even though Cathy was fourteen and wore pierced earrings and eye shadow and lipstick and blush-on and ankle bracelets and received letters in the daily mail from three different boyfriends, she was still a child. Charlie’s child. Perhaps his favorite child. And my child, the new child, was not welcome.

  We had gone back, I suppose, in a way, to square one, to the early years, when things were confused. The complication now was that not only did the girls love Charlie and because of that not want to hurt him or make him angry, they also cared for me. I will not say they loved me. If they loved me, if they ever loved me, they never told me, they never made it clear; it would have been only a vain and optimistic and probably erroneous guess on my part. But I do think that they cared for me by then, after seven years of knowing me, and in their way they probably felt as they had when they first met me. They wanted me to be happy because they liked me. But they didn’t want me to be happy in the way that I was happy, by being pregnant.

  It was the worst of our times together. I was miserable and lonely, I felt unloved, slighted, unappreciated, mistreated. I knew, because I had friends with teenagers, that teenagers, no matter how sweet and willing they might have been a few short years or even months before, eventually become surly and unwilling to help with household chores. This was the first time we all had lived together for any length of time, and it was the first time that I actually wanted and needed help. Domestic tasks in small European apartments are time-consuming and difficult. I had to go every day to the butcher and the greengrocer and the baker because our refrigerator and kitchen were so small. We had no washing machine, and I had to carry piles of sheets and jeans and towels several blocks to the laundry, and back again. There were four of us living together, four large people, and that required lots of cooking and dishwashing and cleaning. I at first blithely assumed that Caroline and Cathy would gladly help with all of this, simply out of their own sweet natures. And at first, for the first two or three days, they did. But then, to my amazement, a simple task such as drying the dishes that I was washing became the cause of a major fight. Caroline would hiss at Cathy that it was her turn, and Cathy would hiss back that she had done them two nights in a row, and quite often I would end up doing it all rather than asking for help and starting a quarrel. It was even worse when I needed help to do the things that were awkward for me to do because of my pregnancy. It was difficult for me to carry a large basket full of laundry; my arms simply would not reach out in front of both my stomach and the basket, and if I tried to carry it on one side or the other I felt unbalanced and uncomfortable. When Charlie was around, he would of course help, but when he was gone, I did everything myself. If I asked for help, both girls responded with such weary, superior, put-upon expressions that I felt a balloon of rage well up and explode inside me. It was easier to carry the laundry than to cope with the rage. I had heard, everyone had told me, I knew when I was being sensible, that this was the way that teenagers were; still it hurt me that the girls acted this way when I needed help. Everything logical seemed on my side: I was doing so much for them, not just buying food and cooking for them, but spending so much time tutoring them and making up tests for them and taking them around cities, trying to point out things of interest, playing cards with them when they were bored and I would rather have been reading a book. Even if I hadn’t been pregnant, I should have had more help from them, I thought. But they had become creatures that I didn’t really know, creatures I wasn’t totally comfortable with anymore. On one day we might all discuss an interesting idea from a textbook, and laugh at the gulls as we leaned over a stony bridge throwing bread crumbs, and sit in a movie together, and yet if I asked for help with the dishes so that we could go to the movie on time, I was treated to looks of great disdain and what seemed to be even hatred. It was startling. It was disconcerting. I had thought that I loved them, certainly that I had loved Caroline. Now I was not so sure. It is hard to love into the face of hate.

  Yet it was also in a way the best of our times together. Because they were teenagers, they could now discuss and understand things that I was interested in; we could share many things. And Amsterdam was such a happy city, so full of music and life, that one had only to go out onto the streets to feel one’s spirits lift. There were parades of all kinds, and Jesus freaks who ran down the streets at night playing guitars and singing happy loud songs about God and Love, and there were the organ-grinders with their marvelous ornate oompah-pah calliopes all gilt and gay, and there were the Hare Krishnas who moved along the streets with their long back braids and their robes, chanting melodiously, and there were men standing on the street corners playing violins while their dogs waited nearby. The young women were wonderfully bright, with orange hair and black fingernail polish and green boots and purple coats; they mingled on the streets with the very many handsome gay young men who walked along in matching silk suits and high boots and leather purses holding hands and hugging. Everyone laughed and kissed on trams and buses and smiled at us
as we passed by, and quickly offered help if we were lost. Nothing was too far away or difficult to get to, we could walk or tram everywhere, and yet everything was there, the marvelous ballets and concerts at the Concertgebouw or the Opera House, the newest American movies, Spanish or Russian or Filipino dance troupes, restaurants of any nationality serving excellent food in exquisitely diverse and luxurious settings, and of course the Rijksmuseum. It was simply impossible not to be happy in Amsterdam. We were happy in Amsterdam, all of us, together; we were a sort of family, that is a group of people connected to each other, sharing life.

  * * *

  I was happy in Paris, more or less, and I was happy in Amsterdam, more or less. Why am I so unhappy in Helsinki now, when I have more of what I thought I wanted? Why was I so euphoric and hopeful and optimistic and cheerful when I was pregnant, why am I so depressed and pessimistic and strung-out now that my children are here, alive and walking around? It is not just Helsinki. Helsinki also has great concerts, museums, ballets, movies, and restaurants. The Esplanade is beautiful now, all covered with snow, and the marketplace on the harbor is bright with its orange tents full of vegetables and fruits and fish and fresh flowers. It is not the outside world which troubles me, or rather it is only partly the outside world, for with children my outside world is limited mostly to our small gray apartment and their small constant needs. I am the cause of my trouble, and I know it. I’m floundering around this way because for once I have to make, all by myself, a crucially important decision. It seems that the only other major decisions I’ve made in my life were to fall in love with Charlie and then to have children. But then they were not really decisions; they were wild, irresistible desires, birds that grew out of my belly and carried me high and far away. But now I am thirty-four, a mother and wife and a grown, intelligent woman. Surely now at this point in my life I should be able to take charge of my life, to get it in control. Surely now I’ll be able to take each decision in my hands as if it were a puzzle, and I’ll be able to ponder all the pieces and work them out so that they fit together perfectly, so that the puzzle comes out just the right way. A nice metaphor that, one that comes easily to me, because I am always doing small wooden puzzles made in China which I bought here for my daughter. Each little puzzle is thick and solid and brightly painted, each has nine pieces, each one is a picture of an animal playing a musical instrument: a dog playing a banjo, a rooster blowing a horn, a bunny playing the drums. My daughter’s hands have dimples in them, and because she is chubby and young it takes her sweet fat hands a long time to put the pieces together. It is difficult for her, yet she eventually does it, gets all the pieces to fit together the right way, making the right bright cheerful pretty picture. We clap and say “Hooray” and celebrate each time she finishes a puzzle. It is nice to have that accomplished, to make something whole and good out of pieces. Yet the pieces were made that way, were meant that way. I do not think that life is so concrete and easy; I see no signs that indicate a pleasant, pretty, sensible whole.