Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Enforced celibacy. Not a pretty picture. Less pretty as you get older.

  As you become mature. Ah yes, mature. Right, Russell?

  Dear old Russell. I turn to him on the pillow. Sleeping so peacefully, his face all smooth, relaxed. Breathing metronomically. Never guess how pissed off he was last night to look at him now. I loved you once, Russell. Didn’t I? I remember loving you. Do I love you still? Do I? Sometimes memory of love can itself get you through the transitions with a man. The transits of Venus are always painful.

  Goodbye Venus, hello Mars! That’s where Russell and I are. A transit of Venus. Something’s moving and moving away, though we are two stationary bodies in this bed. We are slowly transiting our way through Venus toward Mars.

  Russell says he wants to get married, for clarity, for definition, for commitment. His athletic insistence on commitment, definition, drives me into pissedness. ( Pisséd are the meek for they shall inherit the earth they are buried in, and not another divot of sod. That’s what Christ really said. St. Luke got it all wrong.) I am driven to a state of pissedness when Russell announces, declares his love for me, frequently and at startling moments. When I am up to my cheekbones with one minor crisis or another, Russell says, I love you, Celia, and the declaration itself obliges response, affirmation. Whatever else, it can’t be ignored. Another woman might find this endearing. A younger woman might find it enchanting. I find it exasperating—worse, because these declarations of love become the text, the pretext, the subtext for extended discussion. Which Russell adores.

  And when I decline to participate—not even pissedly refuse, just obliquely decline—he sulks, or makes a scene, or goes all pouty and punitive like last night.

  He says we need to spend time working on our relationship. I tell him, last night, I explained to him as best I could, speaking 18

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  neutrally, calmly, Russell, I already have enough work for three or four women, or a dozen men. Russell, I have so many other obligations and deadlines that require my ongoing tension and attention (Bethie’s getting married, Russell. Remember Bethie? My eldest daughter is having her engagement party at Henry’s House day after tomorrow. Lunch for 150 people for Bethie’s engagement party…yoo-hoo, Russell) that I just can’t spend time working on a love affair.

  People don’t have love affairs anymore, Celia, says Russell. Love affairs are for people in 1940s black-and-white movies because they had to swoon at one another rather than having actual sex. Two unmarried people who have sex over time are said to be in a relationship. In an enduring relationship—you know this, Celia—the couple needs to contribute mutuality, and share responsibility, to be alert and sensitive to each other’s needs. They need quality time undistracted, lots of communication and a willingness not to be bound by gender stereotypes.

  Really? I say. I guess that’s why I still take out the garbage, is it?

  He rolled over and accused me of being on the rag. Well, that’s as good an excuse as any. Better than some.

  How comforting to be able to pin my every foul mood on something inevitable as biology, incontrovertible as Nature. But what will happen to me when I have to take hormones instead of blaming them? What will happen when Nature is through with me? When I cannot be on the rag, but become the rag itself? When I am flung out because I’m biologically threadbare?

  Who was it, some guru, who advised women after menopause to grow herbs and tend their gardens? Is that all there is? Just a new Lot in Life where we can sniff the mint and come into the fullness of our being undistracted by biology? I like being distracted by biology. By men who appeal to me. Distracted by that glandular conviction of interest, of reciprocity, that glimmer and spark: a man who might be flint to my tinder, all that distraction you can feel racing around your bloodstream like your corpuscles are on some 911 high.

  Spread the alarm! Wake up! Something distracting and exciting (at the very least, entertaining) is about to happen. It’s not love, this feeling. (Love is like virtue, and worthless untested.) It’s not even happiness. It’s a sort of discov-19

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  ery. Perhaps this is the only discovery you can make more than once, make over and over, and still have it be fresh and sweet, savory, compelling.

  Will it ever again be fresh and sweet for us, Russell? Do I still love you? In this intimate predawn dimness, I study Russell’s well-known face on the pillow. I won’t marry you, Russell. Not you. Not any man. I could not weave my whole life around a man. Only reckless and romantic girls do that, girls who come to bad ends, to early widowhood and long court battles over controlled substances and undeserved inheritances. That girl died with Henry Westervelt. The woman who lived on—me—well, I am chastened if not chaste.

  After Henry died, the closest I came to that kind of single-minded passion, consuming love, was my love for my children, my firstborn, especially. When they put that baby girl in my arms, oh, I have never been so moved to tenderness as at that moment. I thought: This is it, this baby, my beautiful daughter here in my arms, she is the center, the meaning of my life. But she wasn’t. She is the center, the meaning of her own life. She grew out of my arms, but not out of my heart.

  And now she’s marrying Wade Shumley. And I’m the only one who thinks he’s unworthy of her. Even people you’d expect to know better, they all just melt into little pools of superlatives when they meet Wade. They gush: Oh, Celia, isn’t it marvelous that Bethie is marrying Wade? Bethie’s so flighty. He is so mature, decent, upstanding, hardworking, dependable, churchgoing, community-spirited and honest.

  What am I supposed to say? Thank you?

  Should I say: Well, I think such people are fine. Such people are dandy. I don’t mind people like that at a distance. I don’t mind them at a party. I can be polite. But I sure as hell don’t want my daughter to marry one! My free-spirited Bethie? Footloose, charming Bethie, ready to change jobs or change lovers at a whim? Bethie—who adores lost animals and Fred Astaire movies and bicycling—marrying Wade Shumley? He brings up the hair on the back of my neck. Just like the New Disciples used to do.

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  From the time I was old enough to go to Sunday school, I chafed at the New Disciples, strangled on their starchy diet of Old Testament injunction, their reflexive repression served up in neat little spoonfuls of thou-shalt-nots. Wade makes me feel the same way. Even though I’m a grown woman, I feel like a kid around him, antsy and pissed off and foul-mouthed. I gag.

  Like a gob in the throat, I gag at Wade Shumley. Something I can’t quite spit out. Not because I can’t spit. I can. A real accomplishment, spitting. For a woman, anyway. For a man, it’s nothing. Everything in society says to a man: Hey, you got something in your throat?

  Some nasty taste? Something yucky you pulled out of your sinuses?

  Out with it! Spit! Don’t hold it in! Get rid of it! But to a woman, society says: Swallow. Swallow, honey, and smile while you’re at it.

  And having swallowed, perform its corollary process, hold it in and work it through slowly, out over time. No instant expectoration for women. No wonder women hold things in, hold on, why they can’t let go. No wonder women cling to everything, regardless. No wonder they can’t release pain, however crippling, can’t release hope gone putrid, or men turned bad. It’s because we’ve been swallowing ever since Eve: take it inside you, keep it up inside of you, in all those dark and secret places till you have to puke or bleed just to get rid of it.

  This is a fundamental difference. When I was a kid, my brothers could spit. They could be talking to you, and just turn, hack one off to the side, never missing a beat. I’ve seen my dad roll down the truck window and hurl out a lugie, middle of winter, blinding snowstorm. Then, one day—how old was I, five? six?—we’re all out back by the shed watching Dad faith-heal a goat. This goat, whew, he was sick and he smelled fierce. My brother turned and spat and I did the same. Mom just reached over and smacked me. Girls don’t, she said.
Then she turned her attention back to Dad and the goat.

  Girls don’t. More’s the pity. Because if girls don’t, women can’t.

  Literally. They cannot spit.

  Except for me. I taught myself. In secret. Practicing with 21

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  watermelon seeds in summer, apple seeds the rest of the year, walking to school, practicing spitting. I got pretty good. In the ninth grade I was the envy of the other girls and a lot of boys. I was behind the gym one day, teaching some girls to spit when the PE teacher strolled by. You’d have thought she’d caught me crucifying baby rabbits. The girls lit right into Adam’s refrain, She made us do it, she made us…and I got marched down to the Girls’ Vice Principal, Mrs.

  Digby. Mrs. Digby was a New Disciple.

  Mrs. Digby had allergies and she kept handkerchiefs stuffed down the front of her dress so they looked like an extra boobette in between the other two. Her eyes were always red and teary. She told me she was suspending me for three days. Immediately. Calling my parents this minute and telling them what I’d done. She reached in between her buttons, pulled out her hanky and dabbed her eyes. Celia, she said, weeping, tears welling up, spilling, men spit, women swallow.

  So then I understood, didn’t I? Ninth grade is old enough. You begin to see the weird things your body’s doing to you and you have some inkling that if girls don’t, women can’t. Women have to hold, to process, develop. You begin to see that women can bring to birth a lifelong sorrow just as easily as a baby. And maybe you have to get fucked, or fucked over to do the one, same as the other.

  My dad came to school to collect me in the truck. When I got in the cab, he asked who in the hell did I think I was? Not yours, I said.

  I’m nothing of yours. Not any of you. All of you smell. And that was the truth, literal truth. Everything around our rented place, garage, sheds, all of it smelled like sick animals. My dad claimed to have the power of healing in his hands and he would do the laying-on-of-hands for animals, just like the Elders would do for people. He ran quite a little side business with sick animals, though sometimes he’d dose them with this or that, vile stuff he cooked up on the stove.

  He’d never admit to the dosing. Just to the laying-on-of-hands.

  He laid his hands on me. Whap! Whap! So what? I knew I 22

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  was free of all of them. It was only a matter of time before I left.

  They’d never be able to hang onto a girl who could spit.

  I tried to teach my girls, Bethie, Victoria, and Sunny, how to spit.

  Took them down to Sophia’s Beach with a watermelon when they were all little and I said, Have at it, girls. It’s important. Sunny took to it right away. Quite the champion, Miss Sunny Jerome. Victoria refused on the grounds that spitting was gross. Bethie lost patience and interest when she didn’t win the spitting contest and she wandered off to find some poor stray cat or puppy, some lost animal she could bring home.

  Like Wade.

  I roll over, hit the alarm so it won’t buzz. Russell can sleep. I can’t.

  No rest for the wicked—and the righteous don’t need it. So saith Sister Broadbent. I know which camp I’m in. The bed groans as I get out and shiver, slide my feet into the Birkenstocks, my arms in the old robe. I rattle downstairs to greet the dogs, Sass and Squatch, who follow me to the bathroom like there are Milk-Bones in the toilet.

  I turn on the marine radio weather, grind up the coffee, start the coffeemaker, turn on the burner, a low flame under the stock-pot, turn on the computer, hit the button for yesterday’s voice mail. A far cry from the days when it was just Henry and me, no phone at all. The first message is Shirley, Russell’s ex-wife. Russell lives here, but maintains the fiction of his own apartment over in Massacre.

  Russell only moved to Isadora to escape. Not to escape Shirley, but to escape a grad student he’d been involved with (an affair that ended with considerably less dignity than his marriage). Russell is on this island, but not of it.

  Shirley always leaves long messages reminding Russell what he’s left undone. She calls here because I run a business and there’s no bullshit about the machine not working. I’ve never 23

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  met Shirley, but I can picture her, just from having met her kids and from her voice. Her kids are joyless and her voice is full of want.

  She was a faculty wife because Russell was faculty. And after the divorce Russell was still faculty. And Shirley? What was she?

  I glance at the long white tongue of paper lolling out of the fax machine, but I won’t read the faxes now. I like e-mail best because it’s easy to ignore. When I bought all this business equipment, Lester Tubbs was so proud of me. I even built on this addition, a sort of electronic shed just to shelter all this beeping and flashing, clicking, paper-dribbling, memory-hogging, disk-eating personal servant plastic stuff. Welcome to the modern world, Celia, said Lester, naturally thinking he’d soon be out of a job. Wrong. I have all this technology, but I don’t trust it. I don’t embrace it. I trust Lester, but I don’t embrace him either. Still, I’ve been running this B-and-B, Henry’s House, successfully all these years, doing things my own way, no MBA, no bullshit courses in hotel management, no certificate from the Cordon Bleu, just my own good instincts and Julia Child’s cookbooks. I learned from Julia and I work from instinct. This house is my command post. Henry’s House can be beautiful because mine isn’t. Not efficient. Not pretty. I keep notes to myself all over the huge kitchen (huge because I tore out the interior wall fifteen years ago) and notes on the service porch and menus stuck to the doors of the fridges, reminders on the cupboards, yellow stickies with shopping lists taped to the door and a big, dusty chalkboard on one wall. I impale receipts on those vicious-looking little spindles, and my reservations are written out by hand in a big ledger, penciled so the pages are blurred and fogged and begrimed, a sort of graphite swamp. I like life in pencil. So it can all be changed.

  Sass and Squatch want their breakfast, but they know the drill.

  First the morning counterpoint: weather on the marine radio, messages on the voice mail, while I stand at the kitchen window and drink my first coffee. Dawn pales over the yard, light coaxed, eked from silverside of clouds, like a picture emerging from a photographic negative. Rain ripples down the unprotected windows and my utilitarian yard is puddled and muddy. From the 24

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  outbuildings, the sheds and garage and Launch’s apartment, water, splashing from the gutters, rivulets its way through little gullies in the tough and rangy grass. The eaves drip. Year after year, in these eaves, the same sparrow families conduct their quarrels in public.

  No shame whatsoever. And in the orchard, the apple trees host generations of robins, stellar jays and nattering finches and all these birds, their wars with the worms go on in the rain. Everything goes on in the rain in Washington. Moss grows on the north side of your bones.

  Is that Sunny on the voice mail? Sunny Jerome? She’s on her way up here? She’s left California. What did she say? The 4 p.m. ferry?

  I’m just about to punch the buttons so Sunny can repeat herself, but the next voice halts my hand. A woman from Joie de Vivre! in New York, an editor there, Diane something. She waxes on about the wonderful things her readers have told her about Henry’s House and our famous reputation all over the Northwest. She and her assistant and her photographer would like to come to Henry’s House and do an article, run a feature in Joie de Vivre! about our ambience and cuisine.

  The dogs are deeply interested in cuisine. I bring their dishes to the sink, scoop up their chow and mush it for them with hot water while I tell them, “Hot tamale, Sass! Joie de Vivre! Squatch! Imagine that! The first national notice for Henry’s House. Oh, this is great!”

  Dog dishes in hand, I back the message up to listen again to her, Diane Wirth of Joie de Vivre! “Even here in New York we’ve heard that the cuisine and ambience of Henry’s House are so marvelous, so satisfyi
ng, a place that embodies the essentials of warmth and affection, those family ties that reflect all our deepest needs.”

  I put the dishes down. Sass finishes first and tries to eat Squatch’s.

  “Stop it, this minute, Sass! Russell’s up. You hear him upstairs?”

  The drains in this old house gurgle and groan as Russell starts to shower. When he comes downstairs, he’ll say: Celia, I think we should talk. It’s a question of protocol and appearances. Russell is completely pissed off that I didn’t place him at the family table 25

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  for tomorrow’s luncheon. Especially since Bobby isn’t even Bethie’s real dad.

  It’s not even the wedding yet, and everyone in this family (and a lot who aren’t) are already bitching and griping, getting their feelings hurt. Only Bethie is oblivious to what’s going on. Bethie is in love.

  Oh, Bethie, Bethie, fine, be in love, but don’t marry. You don’t have to marry someone to love them. Look at your sister. Look at Victoria. Victoria can live with Eric Robbins and be in love, build a life without being married. Victoria and Eric didn’t need to mutter a lot of mumbo jumbo in front of a preacher to know they could have a life together. Fine, Bethie, pledge yourself to Wade at some wild, free place that reeks of magic and light, but why should you, why should everyone stand closeted, claustroid in a church, Wade’s pastor droning, with all that weight—civil and religious—bearing down on us?

  But I can’t say any of this. If I did, Bethie would just shrug and ignore me. She knows, everyone knows, I’ve always been against marriage. Not against long-standing unions, just legal marriage. I’ve always told my girls to keep their love unfettered and their unions free. Like Victoria and Eric. So if I object to Bethie’s marrying Wade, it will seem merely reflexive on my part, and not worth heeding.

  Bethie will say, You’ve done weddings for lots of others who’ve got married at Henry’s House; you did a great wedding, five hundred people, last year for that TV newscaster. Can’t you do the same for me, your own daughter?