Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Celia was like that, Sunny remembered from family trips to Disney-land. Celia Henry could domesticate an airport bathroom. She was like one of those desert nomads adept at setting down their tents, tethering their goats and calling it home. It was a gift, not a practice.

  Celia seldom traveled and yet she had this gift. Sunny had been to all the great cities of the world and she did not. Sunny traveled badly.

  Worse now.

  Catching a whiff of stale vomit off her athletic shoes, Sunny tried to tuck her feet further underneath the black canvas bag. Her narrow shoulders hunched forward with the self-effacing posture of people embarrassed by their own beauty. Like a rose trying to pass as a common weed, Sunny habitually wore sloppy, floppy, unappealing clothes, like the overalls she had on now beneath her oversized jacket. Hers was not a conventionally pretty face of 36

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  planes and angles, but something more luminous and less standard, a tenderness and intelligence in the direct gaze of her great blue eyes. Her dark hair was cut very short, a stubble over her head, and each ear studded with tiny rings. All her life Sunny had been told she had beauty and talent. Of the Henry girls, Bethie was The Charmer, Victoria was The Smart One, Sunny was The Talented One. She had dazzled Isadora as a kid, starring in every school production, whether she was the lead or not. She had gone to L.A.

  like so many other aspiring talents, but Sunny was insufficient to the task—and it was a task—of being an actress. To be an actress in L.A., you needed, concealed beneath your beauty and talent, some rough-grained toughness Sunny did not possess. She was perhaps like her father in that regard. She had worked at any number of numbing jobs, and for a while, briefly, ingloriously employed as a model, changing clothes in fluorescent-lit cubicles for cokehead photographers. Finally she got and kept a job, assistant to a cokehead producer. He relied on her to organize his life, tote his coffee, clutch assorted clipboards as he made movies with names like Dirty Dark Death Blood Angel Fist Sport III, movies which were dubbed in Asian languages and released in faraway places. So Sunny’s name was in the credits after all, at the end, and rolling on screens she would never see.

  “Is there a swimming pool at Henry’s House?” As a California child Brio was obliged to ask this and when her mother said no, she relaxed into disappointment.

  But Sunny tensed as they motored toward Useless Point, Assumption Island in the distance. Assumption was a two-acre rock and no one lived there: it was good for picnics only, and home to a noisy tribe of seals. They rounded Useless Point and Sunny could see the Useless public dock, so beautifully maintained, painted bright white and garnished with hanging baskets of flowers. The baskets were empty this early in Washington’s raw uncertain spring. But by April, the beginning of the Season, they would be waving color and holiday promise. The stairs at the end of the dock led up to a tiny, manicured park, complete with pastel benches and more hanging baskets. Oh, it was all too cute for

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  words. Made you want to puke. Or perhaps that too was just the old hot dog.

  Sunny could remember when there was no dock, when Useless Point was only a potholed road that dead-ended into Puget Sound, like all the other island roads. Useless Point owed all its abundant charm—and its attendant prosperity—to the zeal of Celia Henry, to her unrelenting pursuit of a mainland bank all those years ago, after the Island Bank had firmly refused to finance the restoration of Henry’s House, saying she had no credit, no education, no MBA, no proven business sense. Undaunted, Celia traded on the name Westervelt (a name she refused to wear) and got financing from a mainland bank with the help of Mr. Ellerman. With the restoration of Sophia’s school building once underway, Celia had set about rousing the torpid and suspicious Isadorans at Useless Point to form a cooperative to finance the building of this dock. Now, despite the treacherous currents known to swirl in this channel, people would sail all the way from Seattle. In summer, boaters were constantly flocking here, some merely to have lunch at the Useless Cafe, or to buy ice cream at the Useless Store, pottery at Useless Ceramics, or merely to mail their bills at the post office and have them marked Useless.

  Henry’s House, from its proud perch on the hill, presided over everything, the lawns downsloping to undulating gardens, its views unobstructed of Useless Point, the Sound, the other islands rising in the west. Built in the early twenties, it had begun life as a school, on the model of Isadora Duncan’s schools, offering interpretive education in the arts. The ceilings were twelve feet tall and all its other proportions equally broad and generous. Two stories high, a long gallery ran the length of the building in the front, its roof providing a balcony for those second story rooms that opened on to it, each with French doors. In one of these rooms, the window was lit. At either end of the gallery, just off the conservatory, and the other just off the library at the other end, dual arbors were gnarled with thickly twisted wisteria vines, leafless now in March.

  Six brick chimneys, cold, smokeless, lined up perfectly along the roof. Henry’s house, painted pale yellow,

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  trimmed in creamy white, greeted Useless Point, Assumption Island, the other San Juan Islands, the Puget Sound, the whole world for that matter, with serenity: a work of art, a thing of beauty, a joy forever, set upon the hill. A cake of vanilla certainty in a world pickled with doubt.

  But Celia did not live there. Celia lived in a house you could not see, a house without a water view, a house obscured, tucked behind a small orchard of apple trees, their branches gnarled, lichened and nubbly with the promise of spring. This narrow house, narrow windows, narrow doors, had its own uphill driveway, out of sight, the entrance far down the road beside the Useless Cafe. But on foot, from the dock, the house was best reached by a shortcut, if you knew where to find it. Launch (who did not drive any vehicle, but could maneuver a boat anywhere) let them off at the Useless dock while he went back to the ferry landing to get their other bags. Sunny pulled her reluctant daughter in her wake, while Brio moaned that her knees were tired, that she was cold, that she wanted to go home.

  “This is home,” replied Sunny unsympathetically.

  She took Brio’s small hand and they started uphill, their feet crunching on the great graveled drive of Henry’s House. For a quarter of a mile this drive curved up toward one of the most spec-tacular views in the Northwest. Thickly wooded with birch and maple on either side of the drive, there were massive rhododendrons set close, which had yet to bloom, but a ragged carpet of crocuses frayed across the ground and the first early daffodils waved at each other across the drive like overeager sorority girls.

  Sunny found the shortcut through the rhododendrons and birches to the right, and made her way up to the orchard where she was surprised to find a smoothly curving concrete path weaving through the trees. That was new. Connecting the service 39

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  entrance of Henry’s House with Celia’s house, the path had narrow gauge tracks running on one side. Sunny and Brio followed these till they came to an unpaved yard surrounded by outbuildings, garages, sheds, wood stored in tin-covered lean-tos and the house itself. Like many Northwest homes, it had a prim, pince-nez effect, resulting from the windows set too close together and a roofed porch like a narrow mouth. But this house also had several unaesthetic additions appended, tacked on (no doubt in the usual Isadoran fashion without permits or permissions). As Sunny and Brio approached, two nervous mutts bounded toward them, barking ferociously. “Just stay still,” Sunny cautioned Brio as she knelt and held out her hand, calling cheerfully, “Here Sass, here Squatch.” She could not tell the dogs apart, but Celia’s dogs were always called Sass and Squatch and they were all undifferentiated mutts.

  With the dogs as excited escorts they walked past Celia’s blue 1968 Dodge pickup and a 1986 Jetta. None of these had changed either. They approached the house where crates and boxes, recycle buckets and crab pots were littered and s
tacked the length of the long covered porch. Additionally there were perhaps half a dozen carts with metal wheels, clearly meant to go along the tracks on the paved path. Someone had cleverly devised this trolley path to ease the burdens of traffic between Henry’s and this house, Henry’s out-of-sight command post. The screen door hung uncertainly and none of the windows were curtained.

  Peering through the window into the kitchen, Sunny watched Celia pacing, cordless phone to her ear, as she restlessly checked the oven, hung up a few miscreant saucepans, picked up the remote and flash-flooded through a bunch of TV images before turning it off. Celia always seemed taller than she was. She wore a man’s sweater, wheat-colored, draped over faded jeans, and thick wool socks over feet thrust into ancient Birkenstocks. She had thick hair, blunt-cut, salted with gray which Sunny did not remember. Other than that, Celia too had not changed. Sunny picked Brio up and pointed. “That’s Celia. That’s who we’ve come to visit.” Turning toward the window, Celia’s face lit with

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  welcome when she saw them. Still holding the phone, she hurried to the door, opened it, hugged them both, ruffled their hair, held Brio, embraced her, kissed her, put her down, laughed, and did all this without making a sound or interrupting the flow of her quarrel (and it was clearly a quarrel) with someone named Russell. She pointed toward the five earrings in Sunny’s ear and rolled her eyes, carried on with the exaggerated gestures, fluid expression and animated body language of a silent film star portraying unrestrained welcome. Her dark eyes shone with undiminished brightness, and she seemed to Sunny, as always, to have more moods, more zest, more love and wrath, more irreverence, more native exuberance than any three people combined. Her energy was formidable. It wore Sunny out, sometimes, just to watch Celia in action.

  “You’re being unreasonable, Russell, you are—” Celia drew Sunny and Brio through the service porch past the three institutional-sized fridges, two freezers, a washer and dryer, the washing chugging, the dryer whirring. She rattled and nattered, tried to explain to Russell that she didn’t want to have this conversation and certainly not now, but he clearly kept interrupting. She led them toward a large, marble-topped table dusted with flour where some serious baking had been going on. Fragrance wafted from the oven of the massive gas range which dominated the whole room. That was new.

  As were the three or four food processors and giant mixer, a built-in microwave, lots of other tools of the cooking trade stacked on shelves, hanging from the ceilings. Years ago Celia had knocked out the wall between the kitchen and what had once served as a parlor.

  She had no use for a parlor and she had never let a wall stand in her way. An unlit fireplace gaped in the wall and near it an ironing board and a basket of linen napkins starched to look like meringue peaks. The place was heated by ancient radiators, and atop them, pots of red geraniums limped through the winter. Over this there rattled the singsong voice of the marine radio. And under all this there persisted the thread of steam from the stockpot, still bubbling away on a back burner. The smell was the same. The stove was new, but

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  the pot was its old battered self. One never knew what went into that stockpot; what came out was always savory and heavy on the thyme.

  While Celia paced and continued her quarrel with Russell, or rather tried to extricate herself from the conversation, Sunny took off her hat and jacket. She wore a tank top, two shirts and a flannel work shirt underneath her overalls and she knelt to help Brio, similarly clad, out of her coat. Brio drew from the Minnie Mouse backpack Baby Herman, a battered Cabbage Patch doll of uncertain gender dressed in oversized jammies, and she ministered to its needs. Sunny sank into a chair and looked about. Perhaps all was not as she remembered it. In a small room off the kitchen, an addition, a bank of electronic lights blinked and a blue computer screen glowed. A fax machine dribbled out white paper and the buttons on three or four phones winked red and green, but they made no sound, no ringing at all. Together with the TV, VCR and CD player in the kitchen, the place had the look of electronic heaven. Only the marine radio chattering its inexorable and uninflected information on the shelf seemed familiar to Sunny. Still, there was the same ugly, cracked linoleum from twenty years before. Such light as there was (a precious commodity in western Washington) filtered through the kitchen windows where myriad jars filled with shells and rocks and seaglass lined up, some jars dated, some not; there were beach stones and pieces of petrified wood, and tucked amongst all this, there was a fortune in sand dollars collecting interest. And dust.

  “I tell you, Russell, for the last time, I have to go! I have company!

  Sunny. Yes, Bobby’s Sunny. Yes, she’s here. I don’t know—” Celia gestured, grimaced in a veritable dither of pissedness, but seemed absolutely unable to get him off the phone. Finally she butted in,

  “No. Tonight stay at your own place. Please, Russell. Tomorrow, yes, yes.” She held the phone at arm’s length and an anxious male voice peppered out objections and then there was an audible click.

  Celia grinned at Sunny and said her first actual words of greeting.

  “Don’t you just hate a man who always wants to talk?”

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  She set about immediately making them comfortable, all of them, including Baby Herman (such was the name of the Cabbage Patch doll who persisted as a female despite the masculine name). Celia listened intently to Baby Herman’s catalog of woes and observations; first, Baby Herman’s knees were tired and second, she was hungry.

  Celia clucked sympathetically, she had the very thing: boxed macaroni and cheese. Brio’s face lit. Celia put on the water, exclaiming at the surprise of their visit, how beautiful Brio was, asking after their journey, the weather in L.A., the ferryboat, asking after everything (except, directly, why they had come, though she did ascertain that Sunny had not informed anyone in the family, including her father or sisters of their arrival). She filled the kettle for tea and offered a hit of Wild Turkey to sweeten the tea, and all the while surveyed Sunny critically. “You look like hell, Sunny. I have to say it. You’re beautiful, you’ll always be beautiful, but you just look terrible.”

  “Travel doesn’t agree with me.”

  “You’ve traveled everywhere! You sent me postcards from Tokyo and Australia and Mexico.”

  “I used to. It didn’t agree with me then either.”

  Celia’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not one of those women sticking her finger down her throat and puking for fashion, are you?”

  Sunny shook her head, stifling a smile, never having heard bulimia thus described.

  “And you’re not into Recovery, are you?”

  “Recovery?”

  “You know, coming off some dreadful drug and wanting everyone to embrace your pain?”

  “What would make you think that?”

  “Forgive me. I’m sensitive on the subject.” She sighed and turned to Brio and Baby Herman. “I should be beaten for asking Sunny a question like that, don’t you think? Just like in the rhyme, right, Brio? ‘So she gave them all butter without any bread and beat them all soundly and snapped off their heads.’”

  “It doesn’t go like that,” Brio condescended to correct her. “It’s

  ‘sent them to bed.’”

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  “Well, you will just have to teach me all these rhymes. I’ve heard them all wrong, I guess. But if you’ll tell them to me right, in return, I’ll tell you all about the Huggamugwumps.”

  But Brio was not to be outdone here either and she proudly asserted that she knew all about the Huggamugwumps. She recited the opening unchanging lines about deepest darkest Alberta.

  “Celia invented the Huggamugwumps,” Sunny admitted sheepishly, never having exactly assigned credit for the original creation of these legendary little balls of fur and muscle. “I just borrowed them.”

  “Nonsense. I didn’
t invent them. I discovered them.”

  “Then they are here!” Brio’s face brightened at the thought of seeing a Huggamugwump in its natural habitat.

  “They were here,” Celia sighed sadly. “No longer. But once they were all over this island. They’ve left artifacts. I’ll show you one day, but now it’s off to wash your paws!” She included Sunny in this injunction as though she were about ten and hustled them both to a small bathroom off to the back (another addition) to wash up.

  When they returned to the kitchen, a tall, solid-looking man in work boots stood warming his hands at the radiator, enormous hands, the long, sinewy fingers lined with dirt. His hair was thick, dark, coarse, curly and unruly, and he wore delicate round glasses with wire frames which gave a scholarly cast to his face, entirely out of keeping with the rest of him. A stubble of beard stippled his jaw and a faded Huskies sweatshirt touting some long-ago Rose Bowl win hung from his broad shoulders.

  “You remember Grant Hayes, don’t you, Sunny?”

  “No, I don’t. Sorry.” Hunching over this half-truth, she busied herself tucking a napkin in Brio’s shirt. The man in front of her was a stranger, but the other half of the truth was that of course she did remember the twin brothers, Grant and Lee Hayes. Nasty boys. She had hated their father. She had hated their mother without ever having met the woman. She had hated Celia as well at the time, and her own father, Bobby too, hated all adults, hated the squalor they created with their sex, with their endless messy 44