Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

“Tomorrow?”

  Sunny flushed. “I’m sorry, Grant. I should just tell you, so there’s no hard feelings, but I don’t date people.”

  “Oh.” He rose and dusted off his backside.

  “Goodbye then.” She started uphill.

  “Gnomes?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you date gnomes? I could grow a beard and wear a pointed cap and floppy shoes and hunch over if you think you’d like me better. Get a big fake nose. Brio, would you like me better if I were a gnome?”

  “Yes.” Brio’s face puckered. “What’s a gnome?”

  “Like a Huggamugwump,” Sunny explained, “only not so furry.”

  “And taller,” Grant added quickly. “Better-looking. Smarter. Talented. Oh, gnomes are really talented. Notoriously talented. They are the champion kite flyers of the world.”

  “I thought you lived on a boat. You can’t fly a kite off a sailboat.”

  “Last time I looked, Moonless Bay was right across Massacre, about half a mile from the Massacre Marina. Moonless is low and flat and treeless. I build kites and fly them, but I’m tired of flying kites solo. Man against the wind, you know. Tedious, really.”

  Sunny said goodbye and left him, going up through the orchard to Celia’s. She could see the Swan’s delivery truck already there in the yard. She had lingered too long on the lawn. Dorothy was showing the driver where the freezers were. Sunny quickly got her clipboard and inventory and checked each item and quantity off in her methodical fashion as he loaded the two freezers. Brio went out to play, and Dorothy returned to her Nona York novel.

  After the deliveryman left, Sunny found Brio in the orchard, in her own favorite tree. Since Brio was supposed to be invisible, 160

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  Sunny called out only generally, “I’m going to Henry’s and I’ll be back in a bit!” Approaching Henry’s, she could hear Grant and Launch, the sounds of their hammers ringing, their voices, just out of sight. She went in through the kitchen, calling out for Celia, who did not answer.

  She found Celia finally in the foyer using the electric buffer on the floors, dancing to the music in her headphones, Motown girl-groups, Sunny suspected. She stopped the buffer, the noise died and the headphones sounded tinny. “I can’t believe Dorothy used to do floors for fun.”

  “Maybe she’d do them here.”

  “No floors for Dorothy. Not anymore.” Celia turned down her headphones. “Anyway, she should just be getting her strength back now.”

  “She takes long walks with Nona every day.”

  “Yes, and we have to keep a careful eye that she doesn’t snatch dish towels and start flagellating herself with them, don’t we? Ned would think it was all my fault.”

  Still moving to some Motown rhythm, Celia unplugged the buffer and carried it back to the kitchen. “The spring is my favorite part of the Season. The work doesn’t all have to be done on a tight schedule, and we can relax a bit. The weekends are crowded, but during the week, we don’t usually have many people.”

  “No one tonight.”

  “It’s nice we’re booked through September. I like a house full of people.” She put the floor polisher by the back door. It would go out in one of the small neat sheds where Sophia had once raised chickens for the school, and where now (the chicken smell entirely gone) they kept appliances out of sight. The kitchen itself was high-ceilinged like the rest of the house, with long windows, walls painted a pale vanilla color, and blue tiles behind the stove and sinks. Blue and pale yellow accented everywhere, from the ceramic handles on the ancient spigots to the knobs on cupboard doors. Along one wall there was a huge, five-foot-long cooker, too big to be called a stove, black metal with brass fittings,

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  ovens large and small, grills, the whole of it overhung by an enormous hood at either end of which copper pots hung. For all the versatility and expanse of Henry’s kitchen, the truly messy work got done at Celia’s kitchen, so that this place should always look as though all meals cooked themselves, and phantom hands were ever-present to clean up.

  “I need Friday off next week,” Sunny began. “I have to go to the doctor. In Seattle. Dr. Aagard said the best doctor he knew was there and I made an appointment.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Haven’t you ever been to the doctor for anything other than pregnancy?”

  “I had an ear infection once. Hurt like hell.” Celia turned on the tap high over the soapstone sink. “I have to be at death’s door to go to the doctor.”

  Sunny took a deep breath. She knew that Celia loathed illness, hated talk of illness, knew how impatient she was with people who rattled on about their health, their bodies as topics of conversations or competitions, but that was not Sunny’s situation. “I’m not pregnant,” she said flatly as Celia continued to echo some deathless doo-wop. “You remember my mother, Linda?”

  “Of course. I never met her though. She was, well she was gone before Bobby and I…”

  “You remember what she died of?”

  Celia turned off the tap and the headphones, turned to Sunny.

  “She died of cancer. Breast cancer.”

  The fear is worse than the feat, Sunny told herself. “Linda didn’t give me very much, my blue eyes, I suppose, and these rotten genes. I had a radical mastectomy of my left breast, Celia, well up into the armpit area. They took out thirteen nodes and of these, ten were malignant.”

  Celia paled and sat down, sank into a chair, knotting her hands one over the other.

  “But that was two years ago almost and I have been OK—not altogether fine, maybe. I don’t have a lot of stamina and I have to be careful, always get rest and all that, but so far the 162

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  cancer hasn’t returned. And that’s really miraculous. Even the doctor said so. Miraculous.”

  “Why didn’t Bethie or Victoria tell me?”

  “They didn’t know. Don’t know. Still don’t know.”

  Momentarily speechless, Celia finally spluttered, “Still? You were diagnosed with cancer, had a mastectomy, chemo, recovery, you went through all that alone?”

  “I wasn’t altogether alone. I had friends. Good friends and support in L.A., and I tried, really, more than once, to call home, but it was just too terrible. Cancer was too awful to say. I knew my dad would dissolve—he fell apart when Linda died and he hadn’t even heard from her in years. I knew Victoria and Bethie would be on the first plane to L.A. and that the whole family would be all over me. I couldn’t bear it. And if they came, Brio would know I was really sick. And even if I could have told them”—she bit her lower lip and swallowed hard—“I couldn’t tell Brio. There are no words to tell a child that.”

  “Oh, Sunny—you should have let us help you. You should have turned to us.”

  “I told myself, I’ll wait. Till after the surgery. If the doctor says to me: You’re doomed, you’re finished, you are dying, Egypt, dying, I’ll call my family in Washington. But he didn’t say that. I have a chance. Five years.”

  “Five years to live?” cried Celia.

  Sunny sat down and slumped forward. “Five years to stay clean.”

  “They make it sound like alcoholism.”

  “Standard advice for cancer patients. And that’s after all the really terrifying stuff, after the mastectomy, after I’d been drained and post-op’d and taught to sleep with pillows under my left arm, after I’d been therapied and dosed with tons of meds, after aggressive chemo. Five years was the good news. I get tests every three months—that’s why I’m going to Seattle. Dr. Aagard said he was only a family physician and the best doctors were in Seattle—and take my meds, and if the cancer doesn’t come back in five years, I have a good chance for a normal life. Whatever that is.”

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  Celia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and struggled against tears. “That night, when you just showed up before the engagement
party, you said you’d reached a point in life when you asked yourself what you couldn’t live without.”

  “Doesn’t speak much for my maturity that I had to undergo breast cancer, a mastectomy and chemo before I asked the question, I suppose,” Sunny conceded sadly. “I had to wait for someone to tell me I was going to die. Of course, everyone’s going to die, but people don’t think about it, don’t wake up in the morning and say to themselves: I’m going to die one day so I should leave nothing undone. I should embrace every moment because all this—life—is finite.

  People always say you should live intensely, like every day will be your last, but you can’t. You’d go mad. No, you need to be able to believe you’re not going to die. You need to believe you’ll live forever and your days will ripple out endlessly. You have to believe in your own life. Once you believe in your own death, you ask questions.

  Difficult questions.”

  “That’s exactly what happened to Dorothy with her heart attack.”

  “Cancer isn’t like a heart attack. Cancer is a long drawn-out process and in all these years, it’s Brio I embrace every day. I try not to think: If I die now, she’d scarcely even remember me. I hold her and love her and I ask God, Just let me live to see her grow up. But if He doesn’t—” Sunny toyed with the buckle on her overalls. “What I mean is, I couldn’t live without Brio, but I couldn’t die without knowing she was safe and protected and raised by someone who would love her.” Sunny rested her gaze on Celia’s well-known face.

  “You said I should have let you help me. I’m asking for your help.

  I need your help. That’s why I came back here.”

  “You want me to raise Brio.”

  “Yes. Please. If I die—”

  “I’ll raise Brio. I’ll love her like my own. She’ll be my own.”

  “If I die, you’ll raise my daughter?” It had to be said, outright, attested to.

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  “I promise. You won’t die, but whatever happens, yes, you have my promise.”

  “Please don’t cry, Celia. I just had to do this now while I have the time and the strength. I can’t count on either. I had to bring Brio back to Isadora so she could get to know you and you would know her, and if things went badly, if I got sick again, if—”

  “This is your home. Both of you. For as long as you want. Always if you want.”

  “Can we ask Mr. Ellerman to—”

  “After these Joie de Vivre! people leave, we’ll both go to Seattle and see Ellerman. I’m honored, Sunny, especially since I know I haven’t been the best of…” She sought some phrase that would encapsulate all the complicated past. “You and I haven’t always—”

  “It doesn’t matter. We haven’t always gotten along, you and I, but what mother and stepdaughter do? What’s important to me now is that you always accepted me here, like I was your own.”

  “And you are! Bobby feels the same way about Bethie. Bobby and I have done some harm in our time, but we always agreed that the girls were all sisters and should stay that way. We tried, anyway,”

  she added.

  “I was happy here as a child. When I came back a couple of months ago I wanted to be certain that I hadn’t remembered it all wrong, or just through the veil of nostalgia. I wanted to live here for a while and see if you were still the woman I remembered and Isadora was still the place I knew.”

  “Nothing changes here. Very little anyway.”

  “You’ve changed. You have. You’re more tolerant.”

  “That’s old age. I’m pushing fifty, you know. I hope I die before you do, Sunny.” She opened her arms to Sunny and they cried silently against each other’s shoulders.

  “You gave me my dreams, Celia. The famous battery-powered dress. The Spirit of Christmas.” Sunny sniffed, drew back and wiped her nose. “You made the dress. You coached me in my lines. I stood on that stage and I thought: I want to do this 165

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  to audiences for the rest of my life. The fact that I’ve let go of those dreams doesn’t reflect on you. That has to do with me, my health, the way things turned out. All I want now is to see my daughter grow up and if I can’t do that, then I want to know she’s loved.”

  Celia looked up to see Launch gesticulating that she should come see the work that he and Grant had done. “You have my word,” she said to Sunny.

  “And you won’t tell anyone else? Not Bethie or Victoria or Bobby?”

  “I think you owe it to them to be honest, Sunny. I do, but you should do it in your own time, and at your own moment.”

  Sunny well knew what her own sisters would say when she told them. They would be hurt at being excluded and critical of Sunny’s decision to make Celia Brio’s guardian. They would pull from the trough of anecdote endless stories of Celia’s being generally impossible, occasionally unfathomable, often unrealistic and always stubborn. But the difference between Sunny and her sisters was that Sunny had not needed to assert her adolescent independence from Celia. To be a stepdaughter was to be, in its own way, independent.

  Sunny understood that however impossible she might otherwise be, Celia’s generosity was a great gift in a stingy world. Celia’s insistence on experience, her wish to be loved, her willingness to crash through life, to gnash and weep when love broke down, to make mistakes and to make up stories, these were aspects of a life writ large on an island that was small. Celia had offered Sunny what no one else, including Sunny’s own mother, had offered her: a childhood, a tiny island of time where she could count on being loved, rooted, connected. And if these things turned out to be ephemeral, that did not make them false. If you’d once been given these things as a child, no one could ever take them from you, and if not, no one could ever adequately fill that void.

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  After the initial flush of pride, the massage to her vanity and a spasm of self-congratulation, Celia regretted having anything to do with Joie de Vivre! The undertaking had thrust her into downright intimacy with Diane Wirth, the Joie de Vivre! editor who was constantly telephoning from New York to set things up to her own specifications.

  Diane believed that Joie de Vivre!, having bestowed the honor, should dictate the menu, the guests, the occasion, and the weather if that were possible. There had been several major differences of opinion.

  Celia was in a state of pissedness.

  Sunny stood with Celia and Dorothy, awaiting the rented car that would bring Diane and her crew from the ferry landing to Henry’s House.

  “How many are they, the crew?” asked Dorothy.

  “I don’t know. I could never get an answer out of her to those simple kinds of questions.” Celia sighed, “I dread this whole thing.”

  But when the car pulled up and Diane Wirth emerged, she hugged Celia, like they were old college friends; she was introduced to Dorothy and Sunny and she hugged them too, enthusiastic embraces all. If this had been an athletic contest of effusive charm, Diane Wirth blew away all other contenders. With Diane as a sort of cheerleader, they all agreed this experience was going to be wonderful! Diane exclaimed in joyous bursts: How lovely was Isadora Island! Henry’s House a jewel! Useless Point so delightfully quaint!

  Sunny distinctly thought she heard one of the men with Diane mutter, “Fuck quaint,” but she couldn’t be sure. He was a surly man, a good deal younger than Diane, and she did not bother to introduce him formally, only waved her hand in his direction, said he was the photographer, Woody, and behind him, the general gofer, a kid named Scott.

  Since cooking for the dinner party would absorb all of Celia’s energies, Dorothy undertook to supervise the housekeeping during Joie de Vivre!’s visit and Sunny volunteered to be Joie de Vivre!’s island guide and liaison. Almost immediately she wished she’d changed jobs with Dorothy. Diane was a tyrant of the worst kind, 167

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  and expected Sunny to succumb instantly to her demands. Clearly, Woody and Sc
ott had, though not gracefully or willingly. The two of them exuded a dogged churlishness, reminding Sunny of medieval serfs. Woody, especially, grumbled continually, profanely under his breath. Diane Wirth failed to hear or notice. She paid no attention whatsoever to his Brooklynese under-mutterings, perhaps because Diane was all Manhattan, with a dash of Albuquerque.

  A sleek, fastidious woman in her early thirties, Diane Wirth had great green eyes polished by contacts, clothes of casual silk, and turquoise and silver jewelry that clanked and rattled with her every gesture, of which there were many. She was Joie de Vivre!’s answer to Cecil B. DeMille and a self-confessed control freak. “I’ve already had a few little differences of opinion with Celia,” she told Sunny,

  “but trust me, I’ve done this before. I know how it works.”

  “It might not happen that way here,” Sunny cautioned her. “Celia takes Henry’s House very seriously. It’s her own personal work of art.”

  “Of course it is! That’s why Joie de Vivre! is here!”

  While Celia, the maestro of timing, worked according to her carefully laid plans in her own kitchen, Sunny guided Diane and crew all around Henry’s House, inside and out, down through the gardens (though not through the orchard, or over to where people really lived). Diane wanted to know all the famous artists and writers and musicians who lived here, past and present, but other than Nona York, she knew none of the names Sunny offered. The luster of the old Isadorans, Sunny realized, had dimmed considerably over time.

  Diane was even more disappointed that Henry’s best-known celebrity guests were a couple of Seattle TV personalities and an ex-governor. Sunny could see the place diminishing in Diane’s Manhattan eyes. “The most famous guest here was Isadora herself,” Sunny volunteered. “Isadora Duncan. She and Sophia were best friends.

  Sophia named the island after her and she came here to visit,” said Sunny, traipsing lightly around the summer of 1927, and leaving out the Bugatti. And

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  Diane asked no difficult questions, apparently unaware who Isadora Duncan was.

  “Tell me all about Nona York,” Diane said in a low intimate voice.