Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  STEPS AND EXES

  coupling and uncoupling, their noises behind closed doors. Now she chewed ineffectually on her thumbnail and listened, because Grant remembered her. Brio listened, wide-eyed as Grant detailed Sunny’s childhood exploits, like her knocking on the door of the suicide’s cottage. “The rest of us just hung back because it was way deep in the woods and scary, but Sunny Jerome just crashed through and went to the door and saw the ghost who gave her a Hershey bar.”

  “There was no ghost. I had the chocolate bar in my pocket.”

  “Then there was this story we heard how Sunny found her little sister crying because some fifth graders had called Victoria a shrimp on the schoolyard.” Grant and Celia both laughed. “And Sunny said,

  ‘You just point them out to me, which ones, Victoria?’ Sunny punched them out, every last one of those boys. She told them, ‘No one calls my sister a shrimp!’”

  “I lost,” Sunny informed Brio. “My dad had to come get me out of the principal’s office. And I was black and blue for a week.”

  “Oh, Sunny Jerome,” Grant ruminated, fondly rubbing his hands over the radiator, “she was just a legend. She jumped out of the swing once on Sophia’s Beach because she was convinced she could fly.”

  “I broke my arm. I could have broken my neck,” Sunny explained dryly. “It’s very stupid to jump out of swings on a rocky beach.”

  “Your mother was the bravest girl on this island.” Grant pulled a chair up at the table and sat down across from them.

  “Now I’m the bravest girl,” Brio asserted. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “It’s not the same thing, you know,” Sunny said pensively. “You can be afraid of something and still be brave. Maybe that’s the bravest thing of all.” She put her arm around her little daughter. They were the image of each other, or perhaps Brio was the image of the child Sunny had been: an independent girl, sturdy and confident. But all that glamorous readiness for experience had receded in the adult Sunny and she had developed a reserve, calculating constantly the outlay of energy that any given situation

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  would oblige of her. Certainly she did not want her combative self held up to Brio as a glorious model of childhood excellence, even though she could still remember, if not re-create, the imaginative conviction that had impelled her—her whole family watching her—to believe she could fly, get that swing high, high over the water, over the tide so she could jump, arms outstretched and fly. A certainty short-lived.

  “You’re here for Bethie’s party tomorrow?” Grant asked brightly.

  “Her birthday’s not till May.”

  “It’s for her engagement,” said Celia in a deliberate voice as she put three cups on the table and the teapot, a battered tin thing, devoid of aesthetics and long on service. “You got an invitation, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, I forgot.” Sunny stifled a moan. “The invitation got lost, I guess. If I’d remembered…” I certainly would have waited to come. I would not be here now. But Sunny did not say this, mused only. “So she’s really going to do it? Marry Wade Shumley.”

  “You know him?” Celia seemed amazed.

  “I know about him. At Christmas Bethie called me and said she’d met the man of her dreams. She was crazy with love. She said she was going to marry him, to have a real wedding, and she asked if I would be a bridesmaid.” Sunny poured three cups of tea and pushed Grant’s toward him, making a little path in the flour. Sipping the hot tea spared Sunny having to add that on the phone she had suggested to Bethie that bridesmaids and white weddings didn’t exactly run in their family. Probably what Bethie wanted was a witness for a courtroom wedding, right? But this is not what Bethie wanted at all. No, Bethie wanted—and would have—a formal engagement, announced in the Seattle paper, engagement pictures and a diamond engagement ring. And for the wedding: real bridesmaids in pastel dresses, tuxedo-clad ushers, flower girl (Brio), a gorgeous white dress for the bride, long veil, the whole Traditional Event, including a real preacher, Pastor Lewin of Wade’s church. Bethie went to church nowadays because Wade went to church. Bethie had declared outright she

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  would not give in to Celia’s stupid flower-power notions of barefoot unions on Sophia’s Beach. Nor would she organize her love life as their other sister, Victoria, had done. A year ago Victoria had legally wed Eric Robbins in a judge’s office, but never told her mother she had done this Dirty Deed, since Celia was dead set against marriage, against all the social crust and custom it implied.

  Warming her hands on her cup, Sunny observed that Celia must truly have mellowed. “I can’t imagine you giving an engagement party—I mean not for someone in your own family. It’s not like you.

  Didn’t you try to talk Bethie out of it?”

  Celia paused reflectively. “I tried my best. But you should see Bethie nowadays. She’s on the rampage for tradition, for bringing the whole family together—really together.” She shuddered. “She’s insisted I invite Eric’s whole family too. She’s absolutely bullying everyone into doing what she wants.”

  “Even you?” asked Sunny.

  “Especially me,” Celia replied glumly.

  “One hundred fifty people,” Grant offered in the ensuing uncomfortable silence, elaborating on the great plans. His account alone fatigued Sunny and she desperately wished she had come a few days later. She should have remembered the invitation and avoided all this. Now she would have to deal with the family in one great, awful mass. As a group, her family always reminded Sunny of a sackful of kittens about to be drowned.

  Celia brought the pan to the table and dished up two bowls of goopy over-yellow macaroni-cheese, one for Brio and one for Baby Herman. Sunny declined, feeling still too rocky to eat.

  “Why can’t Bethie just fall in love?” Celia bristled. “Why get married? It’s a stupid legal artifice. I’ve told her that, of course, but she’s besotted.” Though the furrows between her brows had deepened, Celia wore her laugh-and-worry lines well and her mouth retained a supple quality, which suggested that life had not yet altogether constricted around her. She had an olive complexion, the more drab for its being March in the Northwest, the long, gray winter behind them, the uncertain spring before. “Why go through all that dry, ugly, legalizing, pulverizing bullshit of 47

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  the law? If you don’t get married, you don’t have to get divorced.

  They don’t even call it divorce. They call it dissolution, like you’re going to dissolve. Or worse, after the love has all been choked out, people stay shackled to the institution. Marriage is nothing but a property arrangement between people who have decided to consol-idate their assets and register themselves as card-carrying dupes to convention.”

  Sunny was certain that next would come some reference—Shakespearean in its inflection and intensity—to the Unfettered Life or Unfettered Love, something like that, and Celia did not disappoint. “Love is unfettered or it isn’t love at all,” she added.

  “You told that to Russell lately?” inquired Grant without a trace of irony.

  Celia shot him a dirty look. “At least Victoria never felt obliged to marry Eric. She knows better than to tether herself, body and soul.”

  “If you think about it,” Grant mused, blowing on his tea, “it’s pretty remarkable that Victoria didn’t get married. Eric’s a nice guy, but he’s conventional to the core.” He glanced at Sunny, mirth just visible in his eyes, and then he looked away. Did he know that Victoria and Eric were married? Sunny wondered. Did everyone?

  Everyone but Celia? Or did he just enjoy nettling her?

  “Did you get married, Sunny?” asked Grant.

  “I got what I wanted.” Sunny reached over and touched Brio’s head in an affectionate gesture at once reflexive and instinctive, smiled in her self-effacing way. “My sweet girl. Will Bobby be here tomorrow?” she asked, deflecting conversation from herself, though
she well knew her own father, Bobby Jerome, would act as father of the bride. “And what about Gary Alsop? Will he…?”

  “Be a pain in the ass?” Celia supplied. “Of course. But he’s not coming tomorrow. Thank you, Jesus. But for the wedding in November, oh yes, he’s insisting on being father of the bride.”

  He was the bride’s father, actually, though Celia was always embarrassed to have been so enamored, to have made serious love 48

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  with someone who could conceivably do corporate audits for the IRS. In consequence she had perfected a sort of fable about Gary Alsop, a story which ran something like this: in the colorful past, Celia personally had drafted Gary Alsop into the Army of Youth, Peace and Love, and that he did his tour of duty here on Isadora Island, comporting himself with abandon, smoking dope, dancing naked on Sophia’s Beach, making love with Celia Henry and acci-dentally begetting a daughter on her. Celia refused to marry him, and off he went in a huff, back to San Jose and his college sweetheart and the IRS. The fable stopped there and did not indicate how important Gary Alsop had been to all of them. Once a month, they had all adored Gary Alsop. Sunny could remember Celia putting Gary Alsop’s monthly support check on the mantel when it arrived, and the family’s Ritual Dance honoring the check, Bobby making up the song and playing it on the guitar, Celia and Bethie, Sunny and later baby Victoria, doing an impromptu, not to say Isadorish dance of thanksgiving before Gary Alsop’s check. Then they would all pile into the ’68 pickup and drive to Massacre to cash the check, and the Henry girls got ice cream cones in Gary’s honor. They were all known as the Henry girls.

  The timer sounded, and Celia jumped up; the kitchen filled with a burst of sumptuous fragrance and the clatter of bread pans as she opened the oven. She returned to the table with a single loaf and tumbled it out of its pan, saying they could spare one loaf. “I can’t wait to see Bobby’s face tomorrow when he sees Brio! You are going to adore your grandpa, and he is going to adore you. Oh, make no mistake, all the kids adore Bobby Jerome.”

  “My grandpa gave me my name.” Brio brought Baby Herman closer. “Tell them, Mommy. Tell them the story.”

  “In music, con brio means with spirit, with verve”—Sunny tenderly brushed her daughter’s cheek—“and my dad always used to tell us girls to live con brio! Whatever you do in this world, he used to say, do it con brio! With verve and spirit! So when my baby was born, I thought, What better name? Now I can live

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  always con Brio. Your grandpa is going to be so surprised tomorrow.”

  “Are you my grandma?” Brio inquired of Celia.

  Celia pondered this for a while and said she would adore being Brio’s grandma, but Brio had better ask Sunny what she thought. “I mean, there’s Janice, isn’t there?”

  “Janice doesn’t count.”

  “Who’s Janice?”

  They all three unraveled it for Brio. Or tried to. How Bobby and Celia had once been Together, the capital T implied, as opposed to having been merely married (which they each had been before, and which Celia did not approve of and Bobby also did not approve.

  Though clearly, since Bobby had actually married his first wife, Linda, Sunny’s mother, and since he had also actually married Janice, this suggested that he had responded to the strength of Celia’s convictions against marriage, responded to her powerful personality and not that Bobby himself held these sentiments). When Bobby and Celia were Together, they had lived on Isadora Island in this very house. They had lived with Celia’s little daughter, Harmony (now known by the more prosaic Bethie, short for the queenly Elizabeth) and Bobby’s daughter Sunny ( née Soleil Jerome, daughter of Linda who fled Bobby, fled Sunny, fled Seattle, pursuing her art in Denver).

  Together Bobby and Celia had had their own little daughter, Clarity (better known now and always addressed as Victoria) and they were all five happy here, Edenically happy for a long, long while. Until they were Not Together. (And in the unraveling, nothing more specific was offered or alluded to, certainly not Andrew Hayes, Grant’s father, whose tenure in Celia’s bed had predated Bobby’s departure.) Bobby and Celia had split up. Bobby went back to Seattle, and naturally his daughter Sunny went with him. Then, later (and several other women left unspecified), Bobby met and married Janice.

  Janice had a son already by her first marriage and his name was Todd. Odd Todd. That’s what they all called him. But they assured Brio she would like him. Todd was a college freshman and most of them were odd anyway. Janice, however,

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  was not sufficiently odd and it remained to be seen how Brio would like her. Janice worked for the State of Washington as a vocational counselor in Workers’ Compensation, heading up the office of Chronic Pain. And finally, they all agreed, truly, it didn’t matter if Janice insisted on being Brio’s grandma because everyone was entitled to two grandmothers after all, so Celia could be one and Janice the other.

  Brio might have followed all this, even pretended to be mildly interested, but these complexities, however diluted, towed her under with fatigue. She drooped over the table, over Baby Herman, and Celia said to take her upstairs. “The girls’ room is sort of ready, not very well made up, I’m afraid, I only had time to put sheets on the bed when you called. I haven’t—”

  “It’s fine,” Sunny assured her. “It will be fine. It’s good of you to put us up at all without notice. Especially with all the work you have for this party, and all the other burdens.”

  Grant picked Brio up. Sunny, carrying the Minnie Mouse backpack and Baby Herman, followed him up the stairs, which creaked where they had always creaked and groaned where they had always groaned. She was surprised to find that no one had ever painted over the flowers she and her sisters had daubed all over the stairwell walls. That was how Bobby had measured their growth; periodically he would give them all paintbrushes and tell them to draw the tallest flower they could draw and then he would date each drawing with each girl’s name, so their growth was measured not in how tall they actually were, but how far they could reach. So like Bobby to measure by aspiration, not actuality. At the top of the stairwell there were three bedrooms and a bath. Grant had to duck to enter the low door.

  As Sunny entered the room, she was accosted by the Damp. So powerful and pervasive is the Damp in the Northwest that it has a life of its own. Perhaps the Damp even has feet and can paw and crawl into rooms, into clothes, and blankets and drawers and closets, into books and letters. Like a stubborn tenant, the Damp will not be dislodged. Here in this room, the Damp reigned. There were boxes thrust into corners and the odd lamp,

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  typewriter and old toys Sunny vaguely recognized and two children’s beds, one on either side of the narrow window. As Grant laid Brio down, she murmured something about Baby Herman and her blanket and Sunny handed them both to her and unlaced her shoes.

  “I’ll go get your bags,” Grant offered. “Launch probably left them down by the Useless dock.”

  “Has Useless changed so little that they are safe by the dock?”

  “Nothing changes here. That’s its charm.” He paused but did not leave and Sunny could feel him physically filling up the door frame behind her. “Do you really not remember me?”

  She busied herself with her daughter’s Osh-Koshes before she answered. “I remember you. I didn’t recognize you. There’s a difference.” He offered nothing, so she added, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make fighting the boys and jumping out of trees sound glamorous to my daughter.”

  “You know, Lee and I had no part in all that. It was our dad and Celia who—”

  “Please don’t bring up the past.” Then she thanked him for getting their bags, and bent over Brio, smoothing her dark hair back from her sweet forehead, and whispering in her ear the rhythmic and well-remembered litany of the Huggamugwumps, but Brio was asleep before Sunny even got to their adventures. Sun
ny remained sitting on the bed, looking out the darkened window and listened as Grant retreated down the stairs and shared an exchange with Celia. She heard his car start up in the yard and waited till its head-lights broke up the blue dusk hovering, smudging the window.

  Returning to the kitchen she found Celia on the phone again, no quarreling this time, just checking with Lattimer’s Bakery in Massacre, strategy for the delivery of the cake tomorrow. Celia did all this while she ladled out a bowl from the omnipresent stockpot, seasoned it liberally and set it before Sunny at the table. She sliced the fresh bread and buttered it, pointing to the repast and indicating that Sunny should eat. To the baker she repeated that she wanted the cake early, even though the party had to be 52

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  timed with the ferry’s arrival (and its departure). “Angie will come early. Send it with her.” Celia signed off with the Lattimers and apologized to Sunny for the uninspired meal. “But it’s all I can do right now.”

  “It’s fine. Thank you.” Sunny tucked into it to prove it was fine.

  “How is Angie? Does she remain unchanged like everything on Isadora?”

  “Things change here, Sunny. Children grow up, after all. Angie’s two boys are teenagers now. They are monsters.”

  “Really?”

  “I mean they’re enormous. You’d never think someone little and skinny as Angie would have two such hulking boys. Anyway, Angie says she had her kids so late in life that now she and her teenage sons are growing their mustaches together.”

  Sunny laughed, “That sounds like her. Does she still run Duncan Donuts?”

  “She’ll run that cafe from the grave.”

  “Do you think she might need some help in-season?”

  “Angie always needs help in-season. Everyone does on this island.” Celia had been mopping flour off the table with a damp cloth, and she flung the cloth, perfect drop shot, into the soapy water in the sink. “Who did you have in mind?”

  “Well, me. I’d like to stay on Isadora for a while. For the Season anyway.”