Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Laura Kalpakian

  that the people of Useless Point were two-thirds misfit and one-third mad.

  Nona York, for instance, was known to walk the beaches and the woods, alarming summer people unaccustomed to her working methods, which included a sort of books-on-tape in advance of books-in-print. She would narrate her novels into a tape recorder (breathless dialog and all) as she strolled the woods and beaches with her dogs and her dish towel, the relationship of dogs to dish towel not immediately apparent. Nona’s were a bevy of small dogs, canine shrapnel who would explode, tear madly about and pee on every bush and post, yap and run after people, biting their ankles and barking ferociously, ignoring Nona’s every command until she took the dish towel and began hitting herself with it, calling out Doggy doggy doggy. And to this curious conditioning the dogs responded. The faster Nona thwacked herself with the dish towel, the faster did the dogs obey her. Islanders of course were used to this. During the course of Dorothy’s recovery, on her many walks with Nona, Dorothy got used to it too. She and Nona became the best of friends.

  When Dorothy had first returned to Celia’s after the hospital, Nona brought over a half dozen of her novels. “Just what the doctor ordered,” she said.

  Looking at the covers of these books, Dorothy rather blanched, and would have declined, but she had promised herself Liberation through Learning, and, well, the first step was to take the garters off your mind.

  For Dorothy Robbins, Nona’s novels were as much an education as Wordsworth had ever been. More. They kept her awake at night, reading, pondering, wondering. They gave her insight that more closely resembled oversight: how could Dorothy have gone through her whole life and felt nothing of the vehemence chronicled in these pages? She had been married all her adult life and had borne four children, but she had never felt, could never have imagined, could never have approached such passion. Passion. Dorothy savored the word, passion. Dorothy felt certain Celia Henry had actually lived like a Nona York heroine. She admired

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  Celia the more, though she would never have dreamed of trying to emulate her.

  But when Celia offered to take Dorothy to Sophia’s Beach, along with Brio, to teach them both to spit, Dorothy agreed. It was too early for watermelon, so Celia brought sunflower seeds and as they walked up and down the beach, a tattered shawl of barnacles and seaweed, Celia demonstrated. Brio and Dorothy practiced. It was a leap for Dorothy, but once encouraged, she could spit, perhaps not con brio, or even very well, but there did seem to be something liberating about standing at the tide line and raising your chin, focusing your attention and spitting, getting it out. Letting go.

  Also, it helped that Celia, too, told stories of the old days on Isadora, how years and years ago Sophia’s was a nude beach, even when the kids were little. “Oh, everyone came down here, jumped out of their clothes and jumped in the water. But you can’t stand it for very long. The girls looked like naked little savages. They used to get brown as little berries and fight their battles with their Boomerquangers.” Then she had to explain what a Boomerquanger was.

  “I have some difficulty imagining Victoria running naked with a Boomerquanger,” Dorothy confessed.

  “Well, she wasn’t always naked, of course. Isadora Island got more respectable and people didn’t take their clothes off anymore.

  Isn’t it strange, Dorothy—you raise them up, your children, you think you know them better than anyone and then, once they’re grown, they are a complete puzzlement to you, both my daughters.

  I used to think Bethie was most like me, but not now. I can’t imagine myself ever mouthing all that junk Wade puts in her mouth and Bethie swallows.” On this note, Celia spat. “Every time I see her, or talk to her on the phone, she’s just full of this pious bullshit. Even in love, I don’t think I could have done that. Even for a man who turned me to sexual mush.”

  “Sexual mush…” Dorothy considered the phrase and then spat a sunflower seed with an ineffectual trajectory. “What is sexual mush?”

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  “The agony of the breakup is in direct proportion to the ecstasy of the affair. It’s loving a man who scrambles your brains, no matter what he’s doing to your body. When your brains aren’t congealed with lust, they’re fried with pain.”

  “Sounds like a Nona York novel,” Dorothy observed. “That’s what the sex is like in her books.”

  “I love Nona—but her books? I don’t even try. I couldn’t read them any more than I could watch soap operas.”

  “I used to watch soap operas. When I was done with my floors.”

  “Well, Dorothy dear, spit on! There’ll be no soap operas for you, and no more reflections in floors. Are you ready to go to work? The pay is shit.”

  “But the rewards are great.”

  That was what Dorothy told Ned when he arrived the following Saturday. She told him he would have to stop coming on Saturday because she was starting work at Henry’s House. “The pay is shit,”

  Dorothy said, coloring slightly, “but the rewards are great.”

  “Work!” he cried, ignoring everything else. “Work? You’ve never worked a day in your life!” They had walked through the woods to a fabled Isadoran point, Chinook Lookout, high up over the rocks and the Sound, with the view across to the faraway lighthouse. The view was especially astonishing because coming through the woods one never had the sense of climbing, so on a sunny day, the effect, coming out of the deep woods to bare, moss-thatched cliffs, was—in Dorothy’s lexicon—dazzling. She had spread out a picnic blanket and poured them each two cups of hot tea from the thermos while Ned flustered and fluttered, bludgeoned and begrudged the notion of Dorothy’s new job. “You don’t have to earn your keep here, Dorothy. I offered to pay Celia while you stayed here. I offered! I had the checkbook out and she refused. She refused just to make me angry.”

  “She refused because she knows there are some things money can’t buy.”

  “Like?”

  “If you don’t know, Ned, I can’t possibly tell you what they are.”

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  “Are you getting minimum wage? Benefits? Social Security? I’ll turn her into the feds if she’s abusing your naiveté!”

  “I am not naive.”

  “You’ve never been out in the world. You don’t know what it’s like. It’s…It’s…” Words failed Ned and he huffed and puffed and blew himself up into a dither. “You’ve never worked a day in your life!”

  “That’s not true, Neddy, and it’s not fair and it’s not kind.” She sugared his tea for him.

  “But it’s true, damn it! I’ve supported you since the day we got married.”

  “And I’ve supported you. For better or for worse, I have supported your every endeavor.”

  “What the hell kind of work can you do?”

  “I have lots of experience.”

  “At?”

  “At supporting you, Neddy. Think of it, all those years, advancing your career—and I did a very good job, Ned. Look where you are now, how successful and important. All the things you wanted from life I helped you to achieve.”

  “I thought we both wanted those things, Dorothy.”

  “Well, we did, and we both worked to get them. I worked being kind, being nice, being interested and accommodating to people I scarcely knew and cared nothing for, keeping house, keeping everything running smoothly at home for you. That’s a skill. That’s a talent. I was a good mother. The children annoyed you and I spared you all that, well, messiness. I’m putting all those years to some use at last. I have something more than my floors to be proud of. They didn’t need to be that clean,” she added with dreamy finality.

  Ned’s round face and balding head suffused with color and choler, but he made an especial effort to soften the words he wanted to hurl like rocks. He reminded his wife she had had a heart attack.

  She was supposed to be recuper
ating. “You’re not supposed to take your first job—ever—when you’re recuperating 145

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  from a heart attack. You’re supposed to take it easy and stay at home.”

  “I’m not ready to go back to Bellevue. Not yet. I’m not strong enough to face the floors. I must be cured first, not of the heart attack—which is a condition, not a virus—but of being a floor-o-phile.

  That’s what I was, Ned, I loved my floors. When Bethie was here last weekend with Wade, he said I was a victim of my floors and caught up in very bad addictive behaviors.”

  Ned peered at her weirdly. “I pay a woman to come in once a week and keep the floors up for you, Dorothy. I take my shoes off now, Dorothy, just like you always wanted me to do.”

  “Wear your shoes if you like, dear. It’s all right. I’m weaning myself away from the floors. I’m looking for a new reflection, but I’m not going to ReDiscovery. I shall do this my own way. When I am ready, dear, I shall go home, but I shall not go back.” She leaned over to rummage in the picnic basket and bring out the sandwiches, neatly wrapped. “Celia doesn’t think like anyone I’ve ever met. Such imagination, Ned. Really. Look here. Olive sandwiches. Who else but Celia would think to make olive sandwiches? Mother always did ham or baloney, cream cheese and pimento on your birthday.

  But olive?”

  Ned held his olive sandwich disconsolately, as though it had an-chovies and escargots. “What’s wrong with your hair?”

  Dorothy reached up and touched the crown of her head. “It’s gray, dear. You’re bald and I’m gray.”

  “You didn’t used to be.”

  “That’s because I was having the Triumph of Art Over Nature.

  Once a month.”

  Ned’s whole face strained into a frown. “What are you talking about?”

  So Dorothy nibbled on her olive sandwich and tootled on about the restorative aspects of art and how it could be used, often was used to remedy nature, to prettify nature, to tease us into believing that our lives could be picketed against nature. She understood at last that art was garnish, fine in its way, but once 146

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  it came to substitute for life’s roughage, then something was amiss.

  All nature was cyclic, all art was static.

  “Oh, Dorothy, Dorothy,” he groaned. “You didn’t used to talk like that.” Here in the afternoon sunlight she did look decidedly different from the woman who had collapsed just a few months ago.

  The gray radiated out from the crown of Dorothy’s head in a lengthening swirl, softening her complexion and visibly underscoring her conviction that her life had taken a fundamental turn, a change as certain as if she had crossed into a new country.

  Perhaps she had. Beginning in May, on Fridays and Saturdays Dorothy greeted guests who arrived at Henry’s House. This was her new job. Checking the reservations list (and the method of payment) unobtrusively against a master list that Sunny gave her, Dorothy invited people in, advised them where to hang their coats and hats, to leave their bags in the foyer and to come have tea.

  (Credit cards were not discussed till people had refreshed themselves.) She directed one group to the library, another to the conservatory, one to the wisteria arbor in good weather, and while they meandered off to absorb Henry’s House, Dorothy took a set of color-coded tags (her own invention) from hooks in the cloakroom and put them on bags to let Launch know which ones to take to which rooms.

  Occasionally the sight of Launch, his wild hair and mammoth beard, gray-flecked and wiry, his grinning and bobbing, dismayed guests who saw him hoisting their bags. These people Dorothy calmed with the observation that it was a little like having their bags carried by St. Jerome. “Launch is silent of spiritual necessity,” she added, “but he’s not mute.”

  Then Dorothy would smile. The sort of smile that had so endeared her to the University Women’s Club, the Dahlia Society of Greater Bellevue and the Republican Women of King County. She had indeed a wealth of experience. To be greeted by Dorothy Robbins was like being greeted by your own mother, someone exuding undeserved maternal approbation and—equally undeserved—implicit criticism.

  Dorothy was not above straightening a cuff or collar, brushing a bit of dust (or dandruff) from the shoul-147

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  der, or even righting a brooch, the sorts of actions by which mothers always let children (especially grown children) know they are fine on the whole, but some little detail could yet be improved. There is always some impossible maternal standard which can never be attained. She was priceless beyond rubies.

  And she was not cum laude for nothing. Though some forty years had passed since her graduation from the University of Washington, her unswerving attention to detail—which she had once bestowed upon her studies and then upon her sons, then upon her floors—still served her. From the modest set of responsibility she took on early that spring, Dorothy moved into larger arenas, found reflections that were not in the floor, and in her cool, unflappable way, she rose to the occasion. And while she was at it, she always put the lid on the toothpaste, folded the bath mat and dried the water spots from the chrome fixtures at Celia’s.

  In her married life Dorothy had had a house key and two car keys, but now she carried a key ring noisy with implied responsibility. In fact, the larger measure of both, since that summer the whole edifice of obligation associated with Henry’s House fell on Dorothy. It became her responsibility from that June day she came out to the wisteria arbor, drawn there because she heard the sound of human weeping, sobs, perhaps not even human, sounds so utterly bereft she thought, feared, perhaps she had disturbed ghosts who needed a less stately mansion in which to spew their anguish. But what she saw was Celia Henry, sitting on a bench, broad shoulders heaving.

  To see Celia decimated with sorrow surprised Dorothy more than if she had come upon her in the throes of passion, à la Nona York.

  Has someone died? Has someone died?

  As that terrible summer progressed—and though no one had died—Celia could not recover her old equilibrium. For the first time in her working life, her energy, imagination and stamina failed her, or failed to resuscitate and her endless elasticity could not remain forever supple. Into this void (because Henry’s House must go on; once created, the place had its own demands and 148

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  urgent needs and could not be denied because a place dedicated to the proposition that family could inspire and comfort you must never hint that it could also destroy you) came Dorothy Robbins.

  Dorothy’s equilibrium had never been better.

  The very summer that Henry’s House graced the pages of Joie de Vivre! (its own bit of immortality), guests—who had read of Sesamied Salmon and Chicken Grilled with Peppers and Vermouth, who might look forward to Linguine with Almond Pesto or Chicken Poached in Lavender Water, to Lemon Rice with Basil—found themselves at dinner confronted by meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Salad with thousand island dressing. Rice pudding for dessert. Dorothy’s mother’s favorite cookbook had always been The Wonders of Cornstarch. The book itself long vanished, its coarse pages flaked and fretted, crumbled into the collective memory of generations of people like Dorothy, and their children and their children’s children for whom gravy was sacred, Velveeta sublime, to whom 7-Up salad (lime Jell-O and canned pineapple) was an everlasting delight and no culinary problem so profound it could not be addressed, enhanced or concealed with a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup. It’s good for you, Dorothy told people who prodded at the meat loaf, looking perhaps for pâté de foie gras. Eat up, she said in a voice that had raised four boys to manhood. Extolling the food at Henry’s House, the article in Joie de Vivre! had headlined:

  CUISINE AT THE CROSSROADS OF MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

  Dorothy Robbins came down rather more firmly on the side of memory. Under Dorothy’s regime, judges, surgeons, airline pilots, TV personalities, politicians and Microsoft executives, the successful men and w
omen of this world, retreated into the wary watchfulness of well-brought-up children presented with Brussels sprouts on their plates, their mother’s eagle eye attending them, lest they should slide those sprouts under the rim of the plate, leaving, at the end of dinner, a little green halo on a gray Formica table.

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  P A R T I V

  Dying, Egypt, Dying

  A dandelion in March is more welcome than a lily in June, and despite the unremitting rain, the cloud-clotted skies, dandelions yet dotted the hillsides and roadsides before March surrendered to April. Wet, misanthropic April relented unto May. But spring on Isadora Island is coy and unreliable, and—like a coy and unreliable lover—on those days when it was not false, it felt somehow su-premely true. People came out from under their raincoats and stretched their bare, mushroom-colored arms to the sunlight, closed their eyes and turned their pale faces skyward.

  That’s what Brio and Sunny Jerome did one afternoon on the sloping lawn before Henry’s House. In summer, the lawn was dotted with wicker furniture and wooden deck chairs, but it was too early for such amenities, and Brio and Sunny had spread their jackets out beneath them on the damp ground and lay down, their overalls rolled up to the knee, eyes closed. That’s where 150

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  Grant found them when he paused at the top of the drive. He meandered downhill, sitting down beside Sunny and making a sign for Brio to be quiet so as not to wake her mother. Sunny between them, Grant and Brio looked across Useless Point to Assumption Island’s gray rocks. At this distance the seals looked like rocks themselves, differentiated from the rocks only because they barked and moved now and then, grossly clumsy on land. Sunlight gleamed and rippled in the bright and intersecting circles of water where they splashed.

  Grant had come to Henry’s House to help Launch lift and stack some heavy timbers for a raised herb garden bed just beyond the kitchen, but dressed in ironed shirt and jeans still stiff from the clothesline, he did not look like a man here to do heavy work. A few nights before, Launch had motored his small boat over to the Massacre Marina where Grant lived on the Pythagoras, a 28-foot wooden sailboat he was restoring. With pen and paper Launch communicated what he needed. As Grant had watched Launch gesticulate, he realized that Launch himself was a reliable barometer of the change of season. Merely by looking at him—shorn or unshorn—Isadorans knew that the earth had turned again and some balance struck between the day and night, between light and darkness.