Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

But she did not object. She did not show the least dismay. There was no mention of stealing, shoplifting or how, exactly, the vase came to be in her pocket. Instead, she looked as though she’d been reunited with someone dear to her. Dampness gleamed at the corners of her eyes. “Who’s Clara?” she asked at last, with a little smile.

  “I don’t know. I never did. This afghan was part of a big purchase I made over in Snohomish. People do that a lot, when there’s going to be an estate sale or something, they let me know early on and I buy stuff by the lot for Henry’s House. It’s none of it sentimental, at least not for me. I keep it all at Henry’s House so people will feel like it’s a home.”

  “Oh, I know why it’s there. And I know Clara. I know her very well. And this vase…” Dorothy wrapped it in her hand and gazed serenely out the window which gave on to the Island Medical parking lot. “Has Victoria ever told you about my house?”

  “Victoria tells me very little,” Celia admitted. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be like Victoria to notice a house. She’s not that sort.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong! When Victoria came to my house, that first time, when the kids were still in college and Eric brought her home with him, Victoria noticed everything. She commented on my floors and I thought, What an astute young lady.”

  “Hmm.” Could it be that Victoria had a whole life of which Celia was completely unaware?

  “From my house in Bellevue, right on Lake Washington,” Dorothy went on dreamily, “we can see the lake and the skyline 124

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  across the lake, the boats in summer, the whitecaps in winter. It’s lovely, absolutely lovely. But I realize that when I picture it, I see it like a postcard from a long-ago vacation. Rome, maybe. I don’t picture the lake as though it is there every day, and the reason is, I didn’t see it at all. I didn’t look out the window. I didn’t look up. I don’t know how many years have passed since I looked up. For years I’ve seen nothing but my floors. What does that say about my vision? My eyes have been downcast”—she paused, as if searching for the rest of some lyric, some old hymn perhaps—“but my floors!

  Oh, if my floors were violins they would be Stradivarius! If my floors were roses, they would be in the White House garden! If my floors had law degrees, they would be Supreme Court justices! Really! My floors were so polished I could see my own reflection in them. Like Narcissus. You remember the story of the young man who so loved his own reflection he died of it?”

  Celia nodded, wondering how Clara and the bud vase had brought this on.

  “My floors were the most dazzling in the world—so I thought.

  That is, until I came to Henry’s House and saw your floors, Celia.”

  Celia winced, and she pasted an insincere smile across her lips.

  She loathed housekeeping discussions. She quickly offered the name of the firm who stripped Henry’s House floors for her once a year, hoping she could cork this conversation before it got started. No such luck. Dorothy rattled on about her floors, rhapsodized about care and feeding of her floors, and how they were inferior to the floors at Henry’s. O God of the New Disciples, Celia prayed inwardly, spare me Olympic Housekeeping. Spare me events in Downhill Mopping, the Five-Hundred-Meter Bed-Making, the Ironing Board Slalom. Is there anything worse than women assessing, asserting superiority in a field so incredibly trite? Ordinarily Celia would have bolted right then, but she was stunned by the web of banality she’d flown into; she felt pinned to the chair and tied up in dust ruffles. Then she remembered Dorothy’s own dying

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  words. What Celia thought were her dying words. To hell with good manners. “Maybe your floors didn’t need to be that clean.”

  “Well, that’s exactly right, isn’t it?” Dorothy exclaimed enthusiastically. “And more than my reflection was in those floors. My whole life—oh, Celia, it was terrible. A terrible loss of a life, don’t you see?

  I have squandered my life in the service of my floors. Not in the service of an idea or a principle, not even an institution, like a library, or a law firm, or the University Women’s Club—Madcap Barb gave them her life and service and they revere her name at the University Women’s Club. You would have adored Madcap Barb. But me?

  What have I to show for my life? I didn’t even waste it on a man.

  Women who squander years of their lives on worthless men, they’re better off than I am!”

  “That’s probably not altogether true.” Celia spoke with some experience.

  “I would be better off in Pioneer Square, stinking drunk with my bottle in a bag, panhandling tourists. That woman, that raving drunk, that slut—that strumpet!—at least she has a story to tell. What have I been doing all my life? A housewife! Shocking! Oh, don’t you think that’s shocking?”

  “Not all that shocking,” Celia soothed, fearing for another siege of chest pains.

  “But don’t you see? To be a housewife implies you were married to the house itself, doesn’t it? The wife of the house. The companion, the lover, the lifelong partner of the house! Ghastly! Horrible. Terrible. What have I got to show for my life? Other than my floors,”

  she conceded.

  “You raised four sons.”

  “That’s not an achievement. Children grow up no matter what you do with them. Neglect them altogether and they still grow up, don’t they? And it’s not even a question of how they turn out.

  Whatever you do, you can’t control how they turn out.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “Some of the best mothers in Bellevue have drug addicts for children. It’s the truth. Wonderful mothers, but their children as unlike them as day from

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  night. Why, look at your own daughter. Could anyone be more different than you? Look at Victoria.”

  This was so indelibly true as to defy denial and Celia started to offer the usual drivel, the conventional wisdom she assumed Dorothy wanted to hear, phrases about respecting differences, etc. etc.

  “God gives you children to sharecrop,” Dorothy interrupted her.

  “You rent this piece of ground and you till it, plant it, work yourself old and ugly worrying about it and then, if it brings in a good crop, you get none of the credit. If it’s bad, everyone blames the mother.

  So children are not an achievement, more of an accident. I can’t count on my sons to give me a sense of self. But I must have something besides the floors. Don’t you see? If I look up from the floors I have no reflection at all. I have nothing. I’m invisible.” In her thin hospital gown Dorothy’s shoulders slumped and she seemed to diminish visibly. “Like a ghost.”

  “Not yet. You’re not a ghost yet. You’re alive.”

  “I knew you would understand. Everything. I knew the woman who could create Henry’s House would understand completely.

  Neddy doesn’t. He thinks I’m mad. He knows you saved my life, he just doesn’t know how.”

  “Dr. Aagard saved your life.”

  “When you caught me when I fell, it was for a reason. Don’t you see? I have so much to learn from you, Celia!” She pressed the little bud vase in her palms. “You have so much to teach me and I assure you I’m an excellent student. Cum laude. I graduated with honors from the U. Neddy didn’t.”

  “I’m not a teacher,” Celia protested.

  “You are, you just don’t know it. A teacher and an artist.”

  “No, that’s Sophia. You’ve got me confused with Sophia Westervelt, who built the place as a school. What I run is a business like any other.”

  “That’s not true,” she retorted with Mrs. Digby-ish certainty. “If it were true you would not leave the lamp lit in the high bedroom.

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  and Henry Westervelt and how he died. All the gory details. Terrible.

  So young. Imagine how his mother felt. But Henry’s House—oh, Celia! Henry’s House is a work of a
rt. It’s like walking into a painting—with all those textures and colors and the way the light plays off the past—all that experience is waiting to be collected, gathered up and held close, as though—as though—the chairs are still warm from the bodies that we’ve loved in the past and the flowers will never die. You’ve painted a place where the flowers are real and fragrant as those daffodils, but they will never die. That’s improbable, isn’t it?”

  Chagrined that she’d forgotten to give Dorothy the daffodils, she handed them to her. Dorothy unceremoniously thrust them in the water pitcher where they lolled forward like gossips not wishing to miss a juicy word. Celia said yes, it was unlikely that flowers could live forever, adding thoughtlessly, “Dying is a condition of life.”

  “Not in art. Ars longa, vita brevis.”

  “What?”

  “Life is short—oh, don’t I know it?—Art is long. Art remains, but we’re all just flowers.” She reached out and touched the trumpets of the daffodils. “It’s so sad. Neddy thinks I’ve lost my mind. He said, Dorothy, you’ve lost your mind, but I tried to explain to him, Yes, I have lost my mind and I must find it. I shall not return to Bellevue until I have found it. I shall not go back without my mind.

  Neddy was—well, you probably saw him. You must have heard him.”

  “He was very upset.”

  “Ignore him. He’s like an old dog with a shoe. It will take him a long time to come around because he won’t make the effort. That’s entirely up to him, isn’t it? I am not responsible for Ned. It’s all finite, Neddy—” She called out as though he might be lurking in the hall, waiting to contradict her. “Once you know it’s finite, everything changes. Everything must. You ask yourself not what do I want, but what can’t I live without. What must I do before dying?” Dorothy wept. “I was at death’s door, I tell you, Celia. And there was none of that embraced by the light,

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  or any such heavenly crap! It was hell! I mean it was horrible to see—how near death I have lived!” Dorothy began to mop her nose with the sheet. “My whole life was in those dazzling floors and not just on them. Isn’t that pathetic?”

  “Please, Dorothy, you’ll break your heart again.” Celia went to her and put a consoling hand on her shoulder.

  “But I have lost my mind!” she sobbed.

  “And you’ll find it. Just like you told Neddy. Ned, I mean. You’ll find it and when you go home, your floors will still look good,” she added to soothe.

  But Dorothy sat bolt upright and cried, “I won’t care by then! Isn’t that marvelous? I told Neddy! Do what you want with the floors.

  Flood them! Freeze the water, ice-skate on them. Bring on the grandchildren and their Rollerblades. Little barbarians, my grandchildren. Let them skate all over the floors! Neddy said, Dorothy, you’re mad. Mad, mad, mad! But the freedom of it, oh, the freedom of peeling my reflection out of those floors!” She used the sheet to polish very quickly the silver bud vase, and Celia understood where her son had gotten his housekeeping skills. “I could say that to Neddy—to hell with the floors!—because I won’t be there to see it.

  I’m not that strong. Not yet. But I will be. And I will be happy. When I find my mind, my sense of self, and some new reflection, I will be happy. I have not been happy for a long time. I told him at last: Neddy, I have not been happy for a very long time. Not since Eric was in high school. Maybe before that. Do you know what Neddy said? He said at my age it was stupid to want to be happy. He said it was enough to have health and money. That’s all people our age should ask for. Oh, thou heartless husband! To be told to narrow down my every expectation in life to health and money! Health and money are fine, in their way, necessary—and, well, you can see, I certainly have more of one than the other—but what of passion and triumph? What of the past? The future? What would I be if I had died the other day?”

  “Dead?”

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  “I would have been a broom-wielding ghost, a mopping specter, a waxing ghoul.”

  “I’ve met ghosts with brooms.”

  Dorothy pulled the pitcher of daffodils swiftly to her bosom and inhaled passionately. “I said, Neddy, the floors did not have to be that clean—and you know what he said, Celia? He said yes, they did. They needed to be that clean and I told him, Well, fine, then you do it, Ned. You keep them up. I’m not coming home to look at the floors. I’m finding a new reflection.” Tears streaked down her face and she clutched Celia’s hand as she had the day she fell into her arms. She pressed the bud vase against her narrow chest and the thin hospital gown. “I knew you would understand! I’m staying here with you, Celia. I’ve told Ned. I’ve told Eric. I’m staying here and I’m going to learn everything you have to teach me.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve misspent my life but I have another chance. When this vase spoke to me, cried out, Liberate me, Liberate me, I thought it was speaking of itself, but it wasn’t. It was speaking not just to me, but of me! You know what it was saying? Liberate through learning!”

  Three days ago Celia had scarcely known Dorothy Robbins existed, except as a vague reference in the life of her daughter. She scarcely even knew that Eric had parents, much less brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews. On meeting the Robbins family briefly at the engagement party, her first impression was that Ned was an insufferable prig, that Dorothy was a gentle nebbish, that Eric’s brothers had all attained Black Belts in Boring, that their wives had brooms up their butts, straw end first. And now she was about to become responsible for the liberation of Dorothy Robbins? Celia was less alarmed than curious. “You think the vase was telling you to stay here,” she inquired, “on Isadora, with me?”

  “Liberate through learning,” Dorothy insisted. “I can’t go home until I have a new reflection, something beyond the floor, until I have learned what you need to teach me. I was cum laude,” she repeated, lest Celia should have missed the implication. “And 130

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  I’m eager to learn. If I go back now, you know what will happen to me.”

  Celia considered. “Narcissus’ fate?”

  “He drowned in his own reflection. He died in it. That’s what would happen to me. What almost did happen to me. But I am determined to live! To experience happiness. To expand and learn. It’s not too late, is it?”

  “It’s not Bellevue either,” Celia cautioned her. But she had not been asked for her consent. Dorothy had already assumed it, already told Ned she wasn’t coming home. And Celia could not have sent her back. She heard in Dorothy’s outburst, echoes of her own rebellion, over lo these many years—pushing fifty years—rebelling against the men in her life, beginning with her father, and probably not ending with Russell: her ongoing quarrel with those male voices, authoritative Elders, repeating no doubt Adam’s advice as far back as Eve. Don’t bother looking up and don’t bother looking ahead, keep your hand on the pot and process. Let men deal with the products. The processes of daily life will suffice for women. The products of achievement are for men. Men lived on those Assumption Islands and women just made Useless Points. “Sometimes,” Celia said slowly, “when you look up from your Lot in Life, you can tell it needs to be completely plowed up and replanted.”

  “The curse,” Dorothy declared, smoothing her sheet again, “gives way to the change.”

  For a woman fond of quoting Wordsworth, the poem about the Maid of Dove, the girl whom there were few to praise and none to love, Dorothy Robbins brought into Celia’s life a cast of thousands. Not only was Henry’s House booked every weekend that spring, but so, in a manner of speaking, was Celia’s. Day-trippers everywhere. The dogs loved it. Brio loved it. Baby Herman loved it. Russell hated it.

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  what with Sunny, Brio and Dorothy living there. Often reservations were required for the upstairs bathroom. No shirt. No shoes. No service. To Celia the ho
use now felt pleasantly crowded, lively, full of noise and voices as it did in the days when there were lots of kids and their friends, indeed the days before that, when Henry was alive, and friends came and went like tides upon Sophia’s Beach.

  Dorothy’s was the other small room at the top of the stairs which had been cleared of the accumulation of years, stuff donated to Island Thrift, or carried down to the basement. In her small room Dorothy kept her narrow bed meticulously made, with Clara folded neatly at its foot and the bureau always dusted, the silver bud vase refreshed always with some token of the progress of Isadora’s spring.

  She had assured Ned she needed nothing from Bellevue but a few clothes, but he brought lots of family pictures anyway, most of them taken in the days before their sons had married. The men all looked like the later Elvis.

  Ned came faithfully, every weekend throughout the spring, persistently flinging out deadlines by which time Dorothy must return home. The deadlines passed, each of them without the dire consequences he predicted, and he reminded her she could not always rely on his indulgence. To this Dorothy replied she had never asked to be indulged and she did not do so now. Their reunions were rocky.

  Her sons, as well, arrived in droves and hordes with a squadron of spouses, battering ram by blood tie, brandishing the pikes and arrows of family, insisting that Mom go home to Dad and cease all this foolishness. They even brought their children, the youngest of whom were about Brio’s age. These children amused Brio until they began to play catch with Baby Herman. Then Brio, Baby Herman under her arm and Sass and Squatch right behind her, went into the orchard and like her mother before her, selected a favorite tree, climbed up and said she would not come down till those “bwats”

  were gone.

  Ned and sons and spouses had thought that the grandchildren could work a maternal miracle on Grandma. Each one had urged 132

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  her to home to Grandpa. After the first such assault, Dorothy suggested that they not all come at once. Of course she was happy to see them, pleased that they cared about her well-being, but they should stagger their visits and call first. “It’s too much for Celia and Russell and Sunny and Brio. It’s not my home, you know.”