Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Oh, they knew all right. All too well. They came separately, but each time they left they exuded collective indignation, blaming Celia for Dorothy’s bizarre decision to stay in a little room at Useless Point when she could have a lake-view house in Bellevue. Clearly, Celia had done this to Dorothy. Though what Celia had done, they could not say, much less how this transformation had been perpetrated.

  They knew only that their mother was somehow held hostage by the Infidel Celia and, like great lords on the Crusades, they gnashed and stormed the Useless citadel, Robert the Insufferable, Richard the Intolerable and Roland the Unendurable. Robert the Insufferable once took Celia aside and, on behalf of his family, threatened legal action if there were any changes made to his mother’s will.

  Eric came every weekend with Victoria. He bought a small RV

  which, with Celia’s permission, he left in her yard so he could be close to his mother often. He was patiently obliging when Dorothy explained that she had not left Dad, that she thoroughly intended to return to Bellevue. And Eric did admit that Mom actually did look better, that she was contented and alert in ways he did not remember. The little twitches and grimaces that had so often disfigured Dorothy’s face had all but vanished. Still, in some wordless way Eric blamed Celia for breaking up his parents’ marriage.

  The only Robbins who did not blame Celia for Dorothy’s weird transformation was Victoria. Victoria’s attitude to Dorothy was less than sympathetic. Victoria blamed Dorothy for the complete upheaval of her own life. Victoria blamed Dorothy’s near-death encounter for having set in motion those forces which now drew Victoria back to the island, those slow, alluvial forces that pulled her, inexorable as the tides, back to Isadora, back to Useless 133

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  Point, back into her mother’s orbit, to the Celia-centered universe which she had so successfully heretofore escaped.

  Pulled back into the past, Victoria endured ambivalence, excruciating for a woman whose life had achieved a Tinkertoy regularity.

  Victoria’s public description of her having fled Isadora was to laugh lightly and say, Oh, I contracted island fever. Everyone did. You could not live forever someplace where all roads dead-end into the sea. To live forever at Useless Point? To gaze always at Assumption Island? Worse, imagine living in a town called Massacre! No—Victoria would always add blithely—either you got island fever and left, or you went mad. To make her point, she usually brought up Launch, evidence clearly of congenital weirdness if you stayed too long at Useless.

  But now, the past, the old ambivalent past, embraced Victoria, enveloped and upset her every week because her sister and her father were there too. Sunny was utterly changed, Bobby completely static. There were all the old recollected pleasures of life with Bobby, walks they took, had taken, would always take, along Sophia’s Beach, the girls playing on the swing he made; that swing was Bobby’s bit of immortality. Victoria had the sense of encountering her own young self in her little niece, Brio. She and Sunny unraveled for Brio all the remembered pleasures of their island childhood, Bobby’s penchant for sunsets, his belief that each girl ought to have her own day to skip school and ride bikes around the island with him, his impulse-buying. Victoria remembered his having bought her a toy once that made her so happy she could not even eat ice cream: she was already too happy. Bobby made Brio that happy, spinning for her endless songs and stories, some of which Sunny and Victoria knew and some of which were wholly fresh and con brio. They took picnics as they had in childhood, all of them, Celia too sometimes, out to Chinook Lookout, wading through the ferny forest to come to the high cliffs, to see clear across the Sound, where on a good day a tiny lighthouse was visible on a neighboring island, a toy, a chess piece in the hand of God. Never mind all this, Victoria still breathed more freely to feel the ferry pull away from Dog Bay.

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  Determined to make up for time lost with his granddaughter, Bobby Jerome came to Isadora faithfully that spring. Those first few weekends in April he brought with him Janice, Odd Todd and once ( Oh God, thought Sunny and Victoria in silent unison) the Wookie came too. But these efforts to cobble themselves into a stepfamily were not successful. Amongst the Jerome women—Victoria, Sunny, Brio and Janice—relations could be most cordial at a distance, and after these first ill-fated weekends, Janice spent her Saturdays at home resenting the time, money and enthusiasm her husband lavished on the women at Useless Point. She suffered chronic pain which she refused to treat. Bobby of course refused to acknowledge Janice’s pain. He had not acknowledged the pain of any of his women. Ever. Life was sweet. And at Useless Point, he was determined to be loved.

  He came accompanied always by his guitar, and usually a teddy bear or a little toy for Brio and often a little something for Celia and Dorothy, Brach’s chocolates, pansies in plastic pots. He was courtly to Celia, and as for Dorothy, he seemed to want to slay her with kindness, to surround her with warmth, to inundate her with his charm.

  Bobby’s was not the sort of charm to which Dorothy responded.

  In truth, she thought him a silly sort of man. In Dorothy’s experience grown men did not act like Bobby Jerome. Grown men acted like Ned and her sons. Grown men were—well, bristly. Befitting their whiskers. Grown men were not enthusiastic over little children, but reserved their displays of excitement and avid affection for the Sonics, the Mariners or inanimate objects like the Strumpet. Grown men certainly did not have tea parties on the porch with Brio and Baby Herman, or snatch songs out of the air for a child’s amusement.

  When the weather was bad, Bobby sat at a small wooden table near a window in Celia’s kitchen and played Go Fish with Brio and Sunny and Victoria. He lost endlessly. Ned never lost at cards.

  Indeed, for a woman who had raised four sons and been married for forty years, Dorothy got a real education in the ways of men while she lived on Isadora. She had never met a man so 135

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  silent as Launch, so buoyant as Bobby or so jealous as Russell. From Dorothy’s bedroom, contiguous to the one Russell shared with Celia, she could not help but overhear Russell complain endlessly about Bobby.

  “There’s no reason for you to be jealous,” Celia would tell him.

  “I haven’t slept with Bobby for years. I’m not going to sleep with him now. Bobby is as much a historical part of my life as Watergate.

  Just because I enjoyed it once, doesn’t mean I want the rerun.”

  “I know that,” Russell snorted. “I’m not questioning your fidelity.”

  “Then what is it? I’m not jealous of your wife. Of course you slept with her! You had a family with her while you were married to her, of course you should see her when you go back across the bay. Your children live with her. Well, why shouldn’t Bobby come here? His children are here.”

  “Why? Why are they here? I don’t mean Victoria, I know she comes with Eric, and I know why he comes, so don’t rattle on about Dorothy—”

  “Hush, Russell—”

  “But Sunny—why did Sunny come back here?”

  “To help me. You’ve seen what she’s done for the business! I don’t know how I ran it without her.”

  “That’s what she’s done since she got here. Why did she come in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. Keep your voice down. She’s welcome to stay here as long as she likes.”

  “There’s something she’s not telling you, Celia.”

  “Fine. I’m going to sleep.”

  “I don’t like Bobby here all the time.”

  “It isn’t all the time.”

  There was a long silent pause. “Isn’t it enough that you run a Band-B at Henry’s House, why must you run one here? All these people, Celia! What happened to the time we used to have, just us together?”

  Dorothy heard the bedsprings squeal.

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  “I like all these people,” Celia replied. “I like havin
g a house full of people.”

  “Don’t you ever need time alone?”

  “I get up at five a.m.”

  “Don’t you ever need time with me?”

  “I don’t want to have these conversations.”

  “You never want to talk.”

  “You know what my life is like in the spring and summer. It’s the Season, Russell. You live on this island. The Season shouldn’t be news to you. This spring, all right, things are a little more crowded—”

  “A little more? A little?”

  “OK. A lot.”

  “Bobby shouldn’t be here every weekend.”

  “Well, if you can’t hack it here on weekends, you have your own place.”

  And he did. On weekends Russell left early Saturday morning and returned late Sunday night. At first he moved back to his apartment in Massacre, but it was lonely there. Without admitting as much to Celia (and she didn’t care, he told himself) Russell took the ferry back across the bay to visit his own children. They lived with his ex-wife, Shirley. Shirley asked how things were and Russell told her. At length. Shirley thought Celia insensitive, truly thoughtless—no, cruel—to allow all these people to move in and traipse through the house without so much as asking Russell what he wanted. What would suit him? Shirley bristled to know that though Russell lived there too, thoughtless Celia had just altered their whole lives without so much as a What do you think? Domestic decisions ought to be made together during quality time while you worked on your relationship. And she (Celia) not only allowed people to move in, but welcomed their whole families every weekend? The son-in-law had an RV in the yard so he could spend time with his mother? No, seriously? And Celia tolerated without so much as a flinch the presence of her ex-husband, Bobby Jerome?

  (Not to put too fine a point upon the legalism, ex-husband.) Unthinkable, really, that Celia should

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  treat Bobby just as though he had every right to be there? It was Russell’s home, not Bobby’s. What? Bobby missed the ferry one Sunday night (likely story) and Celia made up a cot for him in the kitchen, so there they all were when Russell came home on Sunday night, just a jolly little family group? What was wrong with Celia?

  Bobby Jerome should see Sunny and Brio somewhere else. Why were they living with Celia anyway? Sunny wasn’t Celia’s own child? Sunny was only an ex-stepdaughter? What was she doing there? Why did Sunny come to Celia’s?

  Dorothy thought she knew why: Sunny came because there was something prodigal about Celia; she strewed possibility in your path and made you believe you had the energy to bring those possibilities to fruition. Certainly she had that effect on Dorothy, though she would not hear of Dorothy’s taking up any real work till she had the doctor’s OK. So for the rest of March and April Dorothy did what she could around Celia’s house, carrying on the clean-and-polish work that Eric had begun, till finally Celia forbade her from picking up so much as a broom or a brush. “A dishcloth, fine, Dorothy! A dustcloth, OK, but please, I can’t bear it! You’re putting me to shame!”

  “That’s unfair, Celia,” she remarked with Mrs. Digby’s inflection.

  “No one can put another to shame. One incurs shame oneself.”

  “Well then, allow me to go on being indifferent to this house.

  Really.”

  “Very well. But I must have something to do.”

  “Get better. And when you do, I’ll put you to work if you like.

  You see what I’ve done to Sunny.” And she would fling an affectionate glance over to Sunny who was reading to Brio and who looked up and smiled.

  “On the contrary, Celia, I see what Sunny has done for you.”

  Within six weeks of her arrival Sunny had revolutionized Henry’s House. No minimum-wage bed-making-dish-toting job for Sunny Jerome. She became the Lieutenant Uhura of the electronic addition.

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  software that allowed her to computerize everything, including menus, recipes, reservations.

  From that spring forward, out went the old pencilled ledgers and recipes stuck on spindles and yellow stickies pasted on the door frames. Suppliers that had taken Henry’s House for granted were rudely awakened. Sunny closed their long-standing accounts—for instance, with Isadora Landscape and Garden Supply—when she discovered they were charging a fee every month just to carry Henry’s House on their books. Instead she issued a credit card to Launch so he could shop around for the best price of things he needed. She paid the credit card off every month. Moreover, at Sunny’s suggestion, Celia installed in the employees’ bathroom behind the kitchen (and unseen by guests) a time clock for workers to punch in and out. In this way, Sunny kept more careful track of their wages and hours. And minutes. This annoyed the students since Celia’s bookkeeping had usually worked in their favor, and when it did not, Celia usually assumed herself to be in the wrong. Sunny was not often wrong.

  Among the three of them, Sunny, Celia and Dorothy, there came to be a kind of mutual reliability and camaraderie that annoyed Russell during the week, perhaps even more than Bobby’s presence annoyed him on the weekend. He told Celia flatly he did not like sharing her with so many people, that they never had quality time to themselves. Not only was the house itself crowded (and, he reminded her, he and she had both raised their children and should not be obliged to endure a four-year-old again) and a zoo on weekends (Eric and Victoria and Ned and Bobby reliably, other assorted Robbinses on a need-to-know basis), but also the place was continually crawling with old Isadorans, who, after her heart attack, had adopted Dorothy as a sort of ward, extending to her their geriatric guardianship, which meant they were forever dropping by and asking after her health and well-being, asking her to tea at their various studios, and filling her with tales which Dorothy repeated.

  Only Russell was heartless enough to tell her everyone had already heard these stories about a thousand times.

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  But Dorothy was an entirely new audience for the old Isadorans.

  So, the hoary anecdotes got trotted out, refurbished and bandied about, new and untarnished. Oh, the old days with Sophia! Her vision in founding the school, her teaching methods! Her belief in the melding of art and nature! Her days in Paris at the turn of the century, her hair grayed by the First World War! And how (this was a favorite) Sophia had beseeched her dear friend Isadora Duncan—Isadora the Great, Isadora the One-and-Only—to come to her island namesake and teach a class in the summer of 1927. Isadora Duncan had agreed, booked her tickets for passage to America and to Washington for a date one month after the day when she had her fatal encounter with the scarf and the Bugatti, tossing a long scarf around her neck as she rode out in the dashing Bugatti, the scarf catching on the wheel and Isadora choked to death. Dead of gesture.

  Dorothy was charmed. Never had she lived around such people.

  With such stories! The closest she’d come to such variety and delight was Madcap Barb, but after Madcap Barb died, Dorothy’s zest waned and she let her University Women’s Club membership lapse. Madcap Barb was about the only story Dorothy had in trade for the Sophia Westervelt legends, but just talking about Madcap seemed to Dorothy to bring her more vividly back to life, to re-create Madcap’s effect on Dorothy’s life. She had long since ceased to talk to Ned about Madcap. Her family was bored with Dorothy’s memories.

  What a pleasure that Celia and Sunny and Nona, Ernton, the Marchands and the other aged artists loved Madcap Barb stories.

  For her part, Dorothy never tired of hearing how in 1919 Sophia Westervelt had talked dear old Pa into giving her a huge tract of land on this island which wasn’t even Isadora then, but a Lummi name with a small settlement called Massacre. The island had had a Lummi name in the late 1870s when it was bought, more or less in its entirety, by the first Henry Westervelt, a failed 49’er who had taken up the rather more certain occupation of sell
ing dry goods to the gold fields of California. He moved north and was well-established in Seattle by the 1890s when gold fever 140

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  hit the lower reaches of British Columbia and moved up to the Yukon. Henry Westervelt made his name familiar anywhere men would pay $5 for an egg. Westervelt bought huge tracts of land, timberlands prodigal with forests, and he cozied up to the railroads and they snuggled back, building tracks to reach docks and mills where Westervelt lumber was processed, logs cut from Westervelt land, shipped to ports on Westervelt-leased ships. All that wealth and power notwithstanding, they remained a scruffy lot; the Westervelt men still picked their teeth with knives, and their women’s lips cinched up in Protestant disapproval, not one of them with any vision beyond their bankbooks or their Bibles. With one exception.

  Sophia Westervelt must have risen from the genetic silt of some long-dry family channel. At the age of eighteen Sophia talked dear old Pa into letting her study art in Paris if chaperoned by her aunt.

  Once in Paris she dumped the aunt and moved in with a Montparnas-se artist, counting on her doting Pa to supply her with money. Which he did. Oh, the artist’s life! Her copious diaries suggested she slept with Picasso, with Braque, with Juan Gris, and indicated that she was more than a little friendly with Gertrude before Alice came on the scene. But the artists and the life Sophia had loved impaled itself on barbed wire in World War I, their bodies in uniform turned to tatters, their dreams decayed with their flesh. World War I broke Sophia’s heart, but not her spirit. Determined, indeed vowing to undo the work of murderous men, she would build a school and use education as her tool, convinced that art and education alone could save the world from annihilation.

  It was not Sophia’s intention to become a hermit, but to become a magnet. Not to lose herself but to find others. She attracted to her beautiful school, both as students and teachers, an array of like-minded painters, poets, musicians, dancers, naturalists. No doubt there were a few charlatans too, but for the most part, the people drawn here were an extraordinary group, and though the school failed, hit first by the Depression and then by World War II, Useless Point retained its eccentric cachet. It was said 141