Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Steps and Exes

  a n o v e l o f f a m i l y

  LAURA KALPAKIAN

  This book is for

  BEAR AND BRENDAN

  and all those island days

  Contents

  PART I

  Men Spit, Women Swallow

  1

  PART II

  Return of the Native

  31

  PART III

  The Maid of Dove

  96

  PART IV

  Dying, Egypt, Dying

  150

  PART V

  Some Remembered Eden

  174

  PART VI

  Eau de Soleil

  190

  PART VII

  Prisoners in Victimville

  224

  PART VIII

  Island Fever

  241

  PART IX

  A Change of Life

  253

  PART X

  Turn of the Century

  292

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY LAURA KALPAKIAN

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  P A R T I

  Men Spit, Women Swallow

  Sometimes I think about Eve. Not the Eve of the Garden, supple, young, seduceable, innocent perhaps, ignorant certainly, beautiful above all, not Botticelli’s Eve, but the other one. The one on the other side of Eden. Predawn, lying here in bed, I think about Eve and all the women like her, like me, who rouse early to work, day after day, rain pelting the still-dark windows, the house yet cold, the dream unfinished, the man beside me asleep, his breathing even.

  The alarm will buzz, inescapably, and I will sonar my way downstairs, the daily route predestined, certain as death or taxes: turn on the kitchen lights, turn up the heat, grind up the coffee, boot up the computer, turn on the burner under the stockpot, read the faxes, feed the dogs, flip on the marine radio to hear the singsong weather voices rattle marine poetry—the wind in knots, the sea in ripples, the ridges and fronts bearing down, the eternal 1

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  chance of showers here in the Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, these last terrestrial apostrophes thrown off by the continent millions and millions of years ago.

  But I have time now. Stretch, groan, curl up, but sleep won’t come, nor come back. Insomnia’s worse when Russell’s here. He snuffles down into his comfy dream while I lie awake and wade through whatever the night tide’s brought up, whatever old thought-flotsam bobs before dawn, sloshes to the top of my bilgewater brain, the day ahead, the days behind, my Lot in Life. The Lot I share with Eve. I always thought of Eve as a real person with her own life and woes.

  Especially woes. Woe is reserved for women, Mom used to say, women shared Eve’s Lot in Life, as though that lot could be surveyed, divvied up and parceled out amongst all of us.

  What happened to Eve, Sister Broadbent? The Bible doesn’t say. Sister Broadbent taught Sunday school to us, the children of the New Disciples. Since she had raised eight kids of her own, no budding post-puber could ruffle her composure. A battleship of a woman, Sister Broadbent, iron-plated breasts and a high turret of a chignon atop her head with two chopsticks sticking out on either side like radar antennae, alert for any commotion which might smack of sex or heresy, which were identical in her mind. Why didn’t God tell us anything about what happened to Eve, Sister Broadbent? He didn’t even tell us how she took the news about her sons, Cain and Abel. Sister Broadbent’s chopsticks twitch and bristle and she zaps me with her anthracite eyes, but she announces (with Almighty authority), Celia, it is not your place to question God’s word or His judgment. Good Christian girls don’t ask those kinds of questions. Oh, I know what good Christian girls do. I had four older sisters, didn’t I? Each one had a slobbering babe at the breast before she was eighteen. Good Christian girls applied themselves to the begets and begats. Literally. They went forth and multiplied. They were fruitful. They left fruitless speculation to the Elders. Men got Elder, women got older. From the time I started Sunday school where we chanted the books of the Old Testament, my

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  childish voice ringing with the others, I’d mutter under my breath, Not me not me not me. This is not me, not my life.

  But that Old Testament stuff, it’s like tattooing your lover’s name on your butt along with a heart and a wreath of roses. After the affair is finished, Bye Bye Love, there’s his name still emblazoned for your next man to ask after. So even though I’d left Idaho and came eventually—circuitously—here, to this island, this house in which I’ve lived my whole adult life, raised my kids (my own and those who came with the men I loved, children born into one union, and brought up in another), I brought those Old Testament voices with me, a booming patriarchal bass. God’s opera has no sopranos.

  Eve, she came too. It was like she lived here, my Lot in Life near hers, companionably close by, her daughters and mine, stepdaughters, stepsons and the fathers of all these children, families constantly fluxing. I have cooked, I figure, a million breakfasts, packed two million lunches, made dinners, yea without number, and caused, for over a quarter century, that holy and mysterious ascension of the laundry: the white dove who falleth soiled to the service porch, This is my laundry in whom I am well pleased, washed in the blood of the Tide, transformed and soaring up unto the bedrooms. Women and children first? That’s a laugh, isn’t it? A sop to some imagined gallantry. A theory, a song or story perhaps, perpetrated by men.

  But in practice? Ever since Adam, it’s always been men first. Ask any woman. Ask Eve—you can see her over the back fence of your Lot in Life.

  Back in the seventies when we all got our consciousness raised, all the women on this island, every woman under eighty and a few over, we enclaved and conclaved and mavened. We guru-ed ourselves silly with serious reading and discussion groups, sessions spent over books like The Goddess Within and Man Proposes, Woman Disposes, tomes thick with information, gray with facts and wonders, explaining to us how it was capitalism that had done all this to women. Back before capitalism, there was an antique time, a golden moment when men and women were equal, some remembered Eden. These books said back when peo-3

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  ple were living in mud huts and scratching the ground with sticks, clubbing their kill, communicating with a palette of expressive grunts, men and women were equal because they contributed equally to the tribe’s food supply and well-being. Men were the hunters, women the gatherers.

  Me, I flung this book across the room. That author doesn’t have the brains she was born with. Imagine: the hunt is over and everyone’s back at the hut and the fire’s roaring and the kill is crackling away on the spit. Now, I ask you—where are the men in this picture?

  They are sitting on their haunches in front of the warm fire trading bullshit stories about whose mighty stick felled the beast. And where are the women? They’re stuffing the animal entrails for sausage, tanning the hides for leather, boiling the hooves and antlers for soup or soap (or both together). Imagine their hands. Tough as the hooves they boiled.

  My hands are like that. Can’t see them in this darkness, these un-distinguished hands. Blunt. Strong. Nails cut short. Ringless fingers.

  How many tears have they wiped from childish cheeks, snot from childish noses, shit from baby bottoms? How many meals prepared, spills mopped, clothes wrung, dishes washed, pots scrubbed, toilets plunged, how many, how much, how often, all of that work? Lost work, unremunerated, unremembered, unsung work, all of it mulched into mere process with no product to show. Men keep the products. Women get the process, and their work all vanishes, as Eve vanished from the Bible. T
he woman who was once coaxed into Cosmic defiance, charmed by a snake (and what woman hasn’t been charmed, at least once, by a snake?), who was fig-leafed and finally driven out by a pissed-off God, Eve was sent not merely out of the Garden, but into Oblivion. Vanished from the story, from the Bible, Eve was, except as a birth canal, a pair of open legs, all bloody, pulsating, pushing, grunting, bringing forth in sorrow boys who would inflict on her more sorrow, the worst sorrow a mother could endure: fratricide.

  And even then the Bible’s omnipotent narrator ( God? Was it really, Sister Broadbent, God Himself who wrote this down?) didn’t see fit to stick around while Eve got the baleful news that Cain killeth 4

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  Abel. One son dead, one son exiled, both sons lost. The Bible’s remarkably silent on this, isn’t it? But you can guess, reading on, you can guess what happened, what this fratricide did to the marriage of Adam and Eve. Another hundred years or so passed before Adam again made love to Eve. Adam was 135 when he begat Seth on Eve.

  That’s what it says, isn’t it? ( Yes, Celia, Genesis is God’s Own Word.) Did Eve mind the long abstinence? A hundred-plus years of celibacy—and you have to guess she was celibate. Who else was there to sleep with but Adam? Then she brought forth Seth and then she vanished from the story. Adam didn’t. Adam lived some nine hundred years and begat sons and daughters. On Eve, you have to suppose. Eve probably had hundreds of kids. And even after they’d all grown up and left home, she’d still be carping and coping and carrying on with Adam. She probably shuffled around the hut in a goatskin housecoat, her feet splayed in leather thongs, skinny haunches, her hands sinewy, rugged as bark, her knees knobby, her breasts all hangydown from suckling those thankless boys and in-grate girls, her teeth gone, bones brittle, hair thin, nerves shot. And still, she had to wait on Adam and fuck him whenever he felt like it. Thy desire shall be to thy husband, declareth God, and he shall rule over thee.

  Bullshit, said Eve, but not too loud. No, after that little debacle in the Garden, she would have kept her voice low, her head down, her eyes fixed on the pot she was stirring.

  I like to think Eve got a break now and then. Just up and told Adam: Hold down the fort, dearie, I’m off for a long weekend. Pack up a thermos and some sandwiches and she’d join a caravan of goats and camels, complete with tour guide to the land of Nod, her companions a gaggle of other thick-handed matrons and their balding, paunchy husbands. Eve would have been alone. Adam would never have consented to such an outing. (Adam wanted to put the whole thing behind him. Adam was the world’s first whiner. She made me do it, Lord, she made me…) So Eve would have been a woman alone on this jaunt, obediently following the guide East of Eden where she could peer past the flaming cherubim picketing the Garden gate, denied entrance, but able to

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  gawk, like holidaymakers peering through the gates at Buckingham Palace. Unlike the other tourists, Eve remembered a world before the snake, remembered the lion beside the lamb, the tree as yet un-plucked. Perhaps, if she could just see past those cherubim and their flaming swords, perhaps she could see that tree. Maybe old Eve thought, Well, perhaps it wasn’t foreordained after all, and maybe other endings might have ensued. You’d have to be old to think that. Older, anyway. Mature, as they say.

  Like Eve, my whole life—or the life I ended up with anyway—dangled, hung from one central transgression. An unoriginal sort of sin, mine: six joints and a few sugary tads of LSD that day on the 28-foot sailboat, Deo Volente. God willing. God willing? Thy will be done? What the hell kind of joke was that, Deo Volente? That afternoon all those years ago, sailing all around Useless Point. Both of us naked as Adam and Eve, and I went to sleep, but when I woke I was alone. My Adam gone. Irrevocably gone as though God Himself just reached down and plucked Henry Westervelt from that sailboat, picked him up by the nape of his beautiful neck, held his broad, tanned shoulders and snatched Henry unto Him. Deo Volente itself pitched and a couple of boat fenders tumbled along the deck, hit me and I lurched awake, falling in what I thought was a dream: the boom crazily, cruelly squealing above me, pulleys rattling, the sail helplessly flapping overhead. I roll out of the boom’s path, the boat heeling to one side, and I scream for Henry. I scream and scream and finally some holiday boaters hear me, hear my cries for help and for Henry. Help came, but not Henry. The boaters right the boom, right the boat, fig-leaf me. The Coast Guard comes and I’m still crying out for Henry. But Henry was never found. His body, anyway, never even washed up. Full fathoms five lies Henry Westervelt, my

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  husband, my ever and only husband, full fathoms five, or however deep is the Puget Sound, a feast for fishes. Henry.

  Or maybe it wasn’t Henry’s death. Maybe it was the marriage from which my life dangled, the single salient fact. Without this actual legal marriage, my attorney, Mr. Ellerman, told me I would have found myself in a very different kettle of fish—fish heads, tails and guts more to the point— Deo Volente or not. Old Man Westervelt had as much Will as God ever had—and more money. The Westervelts thought I killed Henry, sailing stoned that day, and the old man tried to get me charged with murder. Murder won’t work? OK, how about manslaughter? No? Criminal negligence then, let’s try criminal negligence. But all this king’s horses and all this king’s men couldn’t manufacture enough evidence to get me criminally zapped, not for Henry’s death anyway. There was, though, that little matter of felony possession, marijuana and LSD. Mr. Ellerman managed to get me off with probation, pleading to the court that I was only twenty-three ( Widowed at twenty-three, your honor) and I had no previous record and I had suffered enough.

  Ellerman didn’t know the half of it.

  Mad with suffering, crazed with grief and loss, smashed, flattened, empty of everything except suffering, alternately inconsolable and raging at the Westervelts who wanted to keep Henry all to themselves, as though in death they could have him back forever. They hoarded his memory. Big memorial service. Six hundred people filled the pews at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle and I was not amongst them. Not invited. Not even informed. I was not there when into that Valley of Death streamed the six hundred, sucking up to the Westervelts. How sad, too bad, your youngest son has drowned. That’s all there was to say. There was nothing to bury. Full fathoms five lay Henry Westervelt, my lover whom I last saw as I drifted off to August sleep, naked in the sunshine on the Deo Volente, Henry naked at the tiller, his skin pinking in the sunlight, laughing when cold spray would hit him, splash across his back and belly like dew. I, smiling, slept, dreaming how I would lick the salt water off his

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  skin, the boat rocking me to sleep, water-whispering, while I, loose-limbed, wide-legged with anticipation, eager because when I woke, Henry…

  But when I woke, I was alone. Deo Volente, how could that happen?

  Your husband, Ellerman said when he came back over to the island, just showed up one afternoon, maybe six weeks later. He didn’t call because we didn’t have a phone, didn’t want one, Henry and me, and now it was just me, and I was mad with grief and didn’t want to talk to anyone. So Ellerman showed up and said your husband, and I had to think, Who in hell is he talking about? I said to Ellerman, It was a wedding, not a marriage. We didn’t care about marriage. We were lovers and the wedding was just a golden groovy thing to do, a lovely way to ennoble a summer afternoon on Sophia’s Beach with our friends and a handful of the old Isadorans hanging around for Dearly Beloved. Even the minister, Launch, was a friend, very spiritual and into Indian mysticism, but he’d sent in his twenty bucks for a certificate as a minister of the Universal Life Church and he wanted to marry someone just to prove he could legally do it. Henry and I said, OK, fine, let’s get married. We stood there on Sophia’s Beach, ribbons tied to the trees, sweet-weed incense blowing in the wind, and repeated a bunch of poetry we’d written and promised to love each other always. The wedding took a
really long time because weed always makes time slow, slower, then still. Still-unto-stagnant time becomes, and you can see it for the truly gelatinous thing it is. We were standing close to the water and the tide was rising, and now and then the icy water would pluck at my sandals and nibble my bare toes and I knew we should have stood further back, closer to the woods where the water couldn’t get Henry and me, where the tide couldn’t rise and get us.

  Mr. Ellerman listened to all this, sighing sort of, eyeing his watch.

  (You never forget time when you live on an island and have to ride ferries back and forth; time perks along, all staccato, not gelatinous at all.) And since Mr. Ellerman couldn’t leave be-8

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  fore the ferry did, he listened till I finished talking and then he said again, Your husband, Celia, wrote a will. He came to my office to start proceedings for changing his name to Henry West. Yes, yes, I knew that.

  What has that to do with me? And at the same time he drew up a will.

  I didn’t believe it. No one who knew Henry would have believed it. Henry Westervelt would never do anything so conventional, so—well, so ordinary and tomorrow-oriented, so law-abiding. So dull. A will? I said to Ellerman. A will? Deo Volente, that kind of will?

  But Mr. Ellerman said a will outlining the dispensation of his property in the event of his death. Sorry, I said, but Henry Westervelt invented the Unfettered life. Single-handedly. Unfettered people don’t think about property and securities and inheritances and all that trash.

  It wasn’t all trash. There was some money, not a lot, and some securities and stock in Westervelt Corporation which I sold (stupidly) and this island property: Sophia’s great school, all gone to ruin and decay, I inherited that, as well as this upright narrow two-story house behind the school where I’ve lived ever since. I inherited all that, and the apple orchard in between and all the land sloping down to the Sound, Useless Point, all mine. Everything Sophia had left to her great-nephew when she died in 1964—it all belonged to me. I never knew Sophia, never knew any of them except for Henry. I never even saw them except in court.