Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  If the weather cleared, they might go as far as 214

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  Rosario on nearby Orcas, or Friday Harbor, but those were all weekend jaunts and did not involve the coast of Baja. Even some weeknights in the long dusk, the Pythagoras might sail around to Useless dock where Sunny would be waiting. Then they would sail just out of the reach of the rest of the world and anchor there for the night, motoring back to the Useless dock at dawn so Sunny could run back to Celia’s, take off her overalls, get in her nightie and be in the bed beside Brio’s when Brio woke up.

  Celia assured Sunny she was happy to watch Brio on these evenings and the arrangement suited Brio because Celia let her stay up late (except on Island Preschool days). Brio became quite the fixture in Henry’s kitchen, and a big help to Celia in hers. Brio was especially good at testing frosting. This was her forte and Celia declared she could not possibly make a cake without Brio’s expert opinion. Her favorite was chocolate orange frosting on chocolate orange cake.

  “I’ll remember that on your birthday,” Celia assured her as they walked back through the orchard early one afternoon, holding hands along the concrete path. In her other arm Celia carried a bag of oranges. The rain had stopped without quite clearing and the trees dripped all around them. As they approached Celia’s, Sass and Squatch yapped with happy apprehension and Celia was surprised to see Russell’s Saab pulled up in front of her house, its doors open and its trunk gaping open like a mouth awaiting root canal.

  The door to the house, too, was wide open and Russell came out hoisting two suitcases which he threw in the trunk. “Hey, Russell!”

  she called out brightly. The bow-tie crease between his brows had knotted itself into a bulge and his mouth was stitched in grimness.

  In the car she could see his things, his books, his clothes, the computer he had kept in their room, his framed picture of the two teenage children. She sent Brio inside. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  “Will you marry me, Celia?”

  “That isn’t a very romantic way to ask,” she chided, hoping 215

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  to soft-pedal, deflect his righteous anger, and anger it was. It rolled off him in waves.

  “I’ve asked romantically before. Will you?”

  “Why can’t we just go on, Russell? Why does marriage have to be the automatic end result of a love affair?”

  “Three years and it’s just a love affair to you?”

  “What’s wrong with that? We should be proud of that.”

  “I want,” Russell drew a deep, exasperated breath, “I have always wanted, a real relationship. Marriage.”

  “Is that the only real relationship possible? Aren’t there lots of others? And do we have to talk about it out here in the yard? Can’t we go inside? Upstairs, maybe?” A bauble of anticipation twinkled in her voice.

  Russell was having none of it. “Why should we? There’s no more privacy there than here in this yard. I wanted a home, Celia. A home for you and me. A place for us to be together, to build a life together, but you wanted to run a halfway house for runaway wives like Dorothy and runaway drug addicts like Sunny.”

  “Don’t you say that about Sunny!”

  “That black bag she takes everywhere with her. It’s full of drugs.”

  “Oh, Russell, you’re so judgmental. You don’t think!”

  “Me? I think all the time. I’m paid to think. You should think, instead of encouraging this sick relationship between Grant and Sunny.

  It’s like incest, two stepchildren sleeping together. And you should never have let Dorothy just move in here either. She has a home.

  How can you possibly have a real relationship with me when your in-laws, your steps and exes are popping in and out all the time?

  This was supposed to be our home.”

  “It is,” she assured him, afraid suddenly: losing Russell, what would that mean? He was part of the fiber of her life. “It is our home.

  I love you, Russell.”

  “I loved you, Celia. I love you still. I wanted to be with you, with you always. Spend our lives together.”

  “Then why are you leaving?”

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  “I’m leaving Isadora altogether. I’ve given up my apartment in Massacre.”

  She peered at him more closely. “You’ve got island fever, don’t you?”

  “Good God! Why are you so blind and stubborn? Why don’t you ever look at anyone except through the lens of your own needs? I’m not some Diane Wirth you have to charm! I’m the man you love.”

  “Then why are you moving out? Because I won’t marry you? Wait a minute.” Celia paused, peering into the car. “This isn’t spontaneous, moving out because you’re just pissed off, is it? If you’ve given up your Massacre apartment, you must have a place to go. If you have a place to go, you’ve thought this out.” Russell gave her a look of consummate distress in which Celia thought she saw the man he would become one day, the aged Russell, fretful and under-loved.

  She wondered if he could see in her the aged Celia, The Hunchback of Isadora Island, terminally eccentric, weird as the currents between Useless and Assumption. “Where are you moving to, Russell?”

  “I’m going home. To Shirley.” He said this without any particular angst or anger, as though Shirley’s was a simple destination for which he had a ticket. “She’s my wife and we have a family. We have a life together. It was interrupted, but we’ve put it back together. We’re getting remarried.”

  Celia took this news on the solar plexus and momentarily she was stunned. She managed finally to eke out the question: When? When was he getting married?

  “Remarried. Soon. I don’t know exactly. Next month, I guess. Late September, before the term starts.”

  “That’s where you’ve been going every weekend, isn’t it? To Shirley’s. All summer. You haven’t been going to Massacre at all.”

  “I could hardly stay here with your ex moving in.”

  “My ex did not move in. He spent a couple of nights. He hasn’t been back since that terrible night when he collapsed.”

  “You slept with him.”

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  “Oh, Russell, I slept beside a man who was wounded. I was wounded. We—”

  “If you would marry me, I would stay.”

  “Medicinal marriage?” Celia inquired sardonically. “Marriage that tastes like mouthwash—it’s nasty so you know it has to be good for you? No, I won’t marry you. I don’t want to live like that. I never have and I never will.”

  “Some things change, Celia. Things change as you get older. They must change. Life changes. The things that made you happy at twenty-four don’t make you happy when you’re pushing fifty. You’re not unfettered, Celia. Look at you. You’re the most fettered woman I know and you don’t know how to be otherwise. You’ve got that hulking place over there that keeps you tied to it day and night for six months of the year, and if that weren’t enough, you keep a whole menagerie of weird friends in and out all times of the day, Launch, Nona, Ernton, Grant, then you let people just come and camp here, like Sunny and Dorothy. How can you possibly talk about the Unfettered Life? You’re deluding yourself.”

  “Well, I guess I’m unfettered now,” she said evenly, meeting his gaze. “You’ll be gone.”

  “Your key is on the table.” Russell slammed his car doors resound-ingly, got in and drove downhill.

  So goodbye had not needed deconstructing after all. Goodbye, Russell.

  It ended up being as simple as her feelings for him were complex.

  She picked up the bag of oranges and went into the house and there indeed on the kitchen table was the key to her house, none the worse for wear.

  When Sunny returned, she was flushed, a little breathless, her face slightly windburned and her hair damp. She and Grant had spent Saturday sailing to Friday Harbor and back and she was full of 218

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ES

  tales of things she’d seen and done. She took off her cap, shook her hair like a puppy, left her damp jacket by the washer, her shoes by the door, and cried out, “I’m back!” She dashed into the electronic addition, hit the computer so it would come on and made a beeline to the bathroom. “The toilet on the boat,” she called out, “is not very reliable.” When she came out she was surprised that the marine radio was not on, and without its ongoing story, the place seemed disconsolate. “What’s wrong?”

  “Russell’s moved out,” Celia said simply, turning off the water and picking up a towel. “He got island fever and he left. They all do get island fever. They think by moving off island they’ll be connected to some great enterprise, but in truth, people live in tiny little islands anyway—the route to work, the route to the store—they seldom go outside that island. But when it’s physical, when it’s bounded by the sea, they think, Oh, the great world out there is waiting for me, if only I could get to it.”

  “Did he give you any warning?” asked Sunny, surprised. She thought Russell was as much a part of the house as the wallpaper, although unlike wallpaper, of course, he left on weekends.

  “He wasn’t a tenant, Sunny. He didn’t have to give a month’s notice and get his deposit back. No. He just left this afternoon.”

  “Oh, Celia, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, so am I,” she confessed. “Sometimes I wanted to be rid of him and sometimes he drove me into a froth because he could be so pedantic. We were very different in lots of ways, but you know, whatever else, he was part of my life. He was comfortable. Is that such a bad thing to want? I just wouldn’t marry him. It didn’t mean I didn’t love him. I did love him and it had become like marriage.

  At least for me. Clearly, not for Russell. My life is breaking up, Sunny.” Her eyes lit with sadness. “Bethie is lost to me, won’t talk to me, returns my letters unanswered. Victoria is so distant, so cold, she might as well be calling from Turkestan. And now Russell’s gone. I guess I’m not as elastic as I used to be. All this loss, it breaks my heart.”

  “Maybe Russell will be back.”

  Celia shook her head. “He’s going back with his ex-wife.”

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  “Shirley? I can’t believe it!”

  “Oh, I can, but I don’t think they love each other. But maybe they didn’t want to be loved. Maybe marriage is more important than love. At least to them. Not to me.”

  “Did he move out because of us, Brio and me and Dorothy? Russell hasn’t much enjoyed having us here, from the beginning. I knew he resented us.”

  “It was the idea of all of you he objected to. Russell thought his world ought to be two by two, like the Ark, and this place has never been like that. There are almost as many people in and out of this house as Henry’s. There always has been. Bethie would come back and leave again. People like Nona and Ernton and Angie, Lester, they’re always in and out. Launch is always here and Grant, well, Grant and Lee were here building that path before you came home.

  Now, of course, Grant—”

  “Do you think Grant will get island fever?” asked Sunny, suddenly fearful.

  “Only if you do.”

  Sunny smiled, breathed a great sigh of relief and tossed a bundle on the table, saying she’d picked up the mail. “Look, Celia, it’s Joie de Vivre! We’re in here, but we’re not the cover story like Diane promised.”

  Celia regarded the glossy magazine with no particular interest.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “I don’t really give a damn anymore. Joie de Vivre! So fucking what? I keep hearing in the back of my mind Diane’s chirpy little observation, that we’re all prisoners in victimville and it’s a dirty little war. Too bad Bobby’s in such a terrible state. He could put that little ditty to music and we could go around humming it. Happy prisoners.”

  “You know, Celia, the other day, I was working on the computers, I was e-mailing a supplier in Renton, and I started to think that with computers, e-mail, you don’t hear an actual voice, but you catch a tone in the words on the screen. I thought, really, maybe we ought to e-mail Wade. We could concoct a really careful e-mail to Wade and ask for a meeting with Bethie. We

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  could make it work on the screen and be very, well, humble and conceal what we really feel about him.”

  “Tut-tut, Sunny. Lying to Wade?”

  “I was thinking not of lying, but acting. Cleopatra at the computer.”

  “She died.”

  “I meant only that she knew how to get what she wanted from men. And what we want from Wade is that he will let us see Bethie, talk to Bethie.”

  “Which he won’t.”

  “So maybe what we need is not a way to talk to Bethie, but a way to talk to Wade. A way that he will have to respond to.”

  “I want to hear Bethie’s voice, touch her hand, hold her, Sunny, not spew my heart and guts out in some blinking, blipping electronic machine.”

  “But that’s the point, Celia. If you spew your guts out, you’ll lose.

  Wade never spews his guts out. He’s got a ready-made language.

  It’s all predictable, like an order form, an invoice. His words are all like cans on a shelf. He just keeps his phrases in cans and then when he needs one, he pulls it from the shelf. So if we were to deal with him, that’s how we’d have to do it. In his language.”

  “I could never blather all that bullshit.”

  “But you could write it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “All right, you write it however you want it—you call him a class-A bastard if you want and then you give it to me. I’ll cool it down.

  The computer is a cool medium, Celia. You can keep things crisp, refrigerated in a way. You can use all Wade’s phrases, use his lingo as you never could if you saw him in person. We have to get past Wade before we can see Bethie.”

  “I’m not a writer,” she protested. “I’m a doer. I need to use my hands.”

  “You write it out,” Sunny insisted, “and I will chill it down and we’ll send it to him through e-mail. We’ll go at it slowly, formally, arrange for a meeting.”

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  “You think it would work? We could see her?”

  “It’s Wade we need to convince. We could say, well, we could say—confrontation in the interest of healing is justified. We could say we need to recover the truth. We’ll let him think we really have subscribed to ReDiscovery and then when we get there…”

  “What?”

  Sunny didn’t know what. She said they’d have to get there.

  So in this very modern fashion—through this electronic medium—Sunny posted e-mail messages that she had groomed and cooled. At first she had to completely rework Celia’s language, not merely excise confusion, but dim all Celia’s passion for Bethie. But when at last Wade actually replied, Celia was thrilled. The horizon brightened.

  Together, Sunny and Celia learned to use the phrases Wade was fond of, phrases he could hardly discredit or deny, phrases he was obliged to respond to. It was its own language, like Latin, and as Latin had once served Christendom, uniting disparate peoples, so Wade’s lingo allowed the disparate family to commence negotiations.

  These proceeded with diplomatic finesse, so fine-tuned they would have impressed seasoned UN observers. Carefully, slowly, over a couple of weeks, using Wade’s phrases, indeed plucking their phrases from his replies, they negotiated where, when, what and how.

  Where first. Sunny and Celia had hoped for Isadora Island. Out of the question, said Wade, who also squashed the hope they could meet in Bethie’s favorite Seattle eatery, the Queen City Grill. Elizabeth was not strong enough for a protracted public outing, Wade said. The only possibility was their Wallingford condo, his home turf. He was inflexible on this. This delicacy once resolved, consideration moved forward—through the ether—to questions of when.


  That was easy compared to the thorny path toward what could be discussed and what could not. Diplomatic amenities were scrupu-lously observed on both sides, but there was no question as to which party was the supplicant. Negotiations reached a nasty stall when Sunny e-mailed Wade (and it was all Wade; Bethie had no part in this) that Grant

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  wanted to drive them to Seattle: could Grant come? Finally Wade conceded that Grant could drive them and be present, but he could not participate; it was not Grant’s place to say anything. Grant himself had to e-mail back that he agreed to this. Victoria too was required separately to e-mail her signed understanding of the conditions agreed thereunto. It was all excruciating, empowering and conducted in code.

  And so, the usual family avenues of expression, family means and methods of communicating in a crisis, channels by which families have always addressed disagreements and difficulties, however base or lofty, all these traditional means of dealing with the other parties in an intimate dispute—which is to say, anger, insults, sulking, silence, tears, tantrums, hurt feelings, low gossip, irrational arguments, ill will, overt attacks, name-calling, backbiting, going for the throat, betraying secrets, withholding confidences, striking at well-known weaknesses and the like—these well-trod paths which families have taken since the days of Cain and Abel, all that was jettisoned. In its stead (and begging the pardon of Leo Tolstoy) unhappy families began to be unhappy in exactly the same way. Unhappy families now speak a new language, a lexicon of dysfunction, a lingo corseted, laced, prim, downright Victorian in its insistence on rectitude, yea, devoted to the understanding that each individual commits to affirmation. Positive construction only is allowed; nothing negative or critical will be permitted. There will be only serious discussions. Everyone must subscribe to the proposition that thou shalt not disrespect anyone else’s feelings, even covert disrespect, even disrespect implied, or cast in such a way as to carry this lightest whiff of humor. Forbidden. No violations of the right to get your feelings hurt will be tolerated. Do you have a problem with that?

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  P A R T V I I

  Prisoners in Victimville