Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  There is a Starbucks in Wallingford not far from Wade’s condo and we met Victoria there. She was early. We were late. We were, all of us, tense unto terrified, though I still believed if I could just put my arms around Bethie, hold her, see her face to face, that nothing was impossible.

  But face to face Bethie Henry was scarcely recognizable. The Bethie we knew—spirited, exuberant, resilient, affectionate—that woman was like a tiny pilot light somewhere in a stove gone cold.

  She came to the door, her tread heavy, the shuffle of a prisoner in victimville. She wore gray sweats despite the summer day, her coloring gray too, but queerly lit by a thick smear of lipstick, like a paint slash across a pale canvas. Sleepless rings framed her eyes, and her hair, hanging listlessly, was uncut, unkempt. Reflexively, Victoria volunteered the services of her own hairdresser, Charles.

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  “What’s hurting is inside my head,” said Bethie, closing the door behind us. There were no hugs. She showed no particular interest in any of us, save perhaps Grant. “Wade’s in the study working with Fran.” She left us, went into the kitchen. We stood there.

  Nearly a year ago I remembered coming to this apartment after that awful church dinner with Pastor Lewin. At that time, I remember thinking Bethie had no presence in this place. But I also told myself it takes time to insinuate yourself into a living space, especially if it’s been lived in by someone else. But now, after a year, there was still nothing except for the engagement picture, framed and sitting on a bookshelf, to suggest that Bethie Henry lived here too. It seemed to me still Wade’s place entirely. The curtains were closed against the sunshine and the room was airless and oppressive. The books, nearly all paperbacks, were stacked around the TV, well-thumbed volumes, many with broken spines, a veritable archive of self-help going back as far as Elbert Hubbard and Norman Vincent Peale with lots of cheerful titles from the seventies like I’m OK, You’re OK. If they were going to reprint this volume in the nineties, it would be I’m Pissed Off and You’re Full of Shit. But when Wade entered, we were all just as cordial as could be, assured each other it was nice to meet again. Wade said we must surely remember his assistant, Fran.

  We all stepped forward and pumped hands up and down, agreeing that Fran was unforgettable. An ageless mind imprisoned in a thirty-something body, angular, swathed with a batik shift, Fran’s eyes were a glowing gray. After the introductions, Fran and Wade made last-minute confirmations about upcoming speaking engagements for him, and then Fran set her briefcase down and she went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Elizabeth. The sound of Bethie’s muffled weeping reached us, along with Fran’s low drone of comfort and support. A terrible metallic taste rose in my mouth, a kind of nausea, dread, the sudden intimation of certain defeat.

  “Nice to see you all again,” Fran said acidly on her way out the door.

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  “She’s been like a sister to Elizabeth,” Wade explained.

  He gestured that we should all take seats, directing the four of us to a ring of kitchen chairs arranged in a semicircle around the coffee table. Wade sat on the couch, one of those low, marsh-mallow sorts, comfy and consuming. By contrast, the chairs, of a Mediterranean cast, all had wrought-iron backs and red leather seats, like we should all sit here with pikes up our butts. Wade busied himself silently rearranging some notes on the coffee table. God help us, I thought, note cards with today’s date.

  Victoria and Sunny and Grant studied the prints from the Seattle Art Museum, and looked wistfully at the engagement picture on the shelf. Beautiful Bethie. So much in love. So vibrant and charming.

  A great void Bethie seemed now. Another void occurred to me. Cats.

  That’s what was missing from this apartment, why Bethie felt absent.

  Bethie had never met a kitten she didn’t like and she had never had an apartment without its feline contingent. “There are no cats,” I said. “Bethie always has cats.”

  “I’m allergic to cats,” replied Wade, looking up from his note cards. “It’s one of the ways I know Elizabeth truly loves me. She gave up her cats to live with me. Greater love hath no cat-fancier.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “Is the teddy bear a substitute?” asked Sunny, pointing to a Pooh Bear on the couch on its back, its expression blissful and unseeing.

  Wade reached over and picked up Pooh, righted it. “Pooh was my Mother’s Day gift to Elizabeth. To help her learn how to parent, to cherish and discipline the inner child within herself. You have to learn to parent yourself before you are ready to fulfill yourself as an adult. You have to be committed to responsibility, but still recognize the need to give ourselves room to play sometimes, to be protected as well as responsible.” He wound the bear’s crank and “Deep in the Hundred Acre Wood” came plaintively from its innards.

  Bethie came in from the kitchen, her lips pressed in a seam, and she collapsed on the couch next to Wade, seeking out his hand. Wade scooted slightly forward from the doughy white cushion. He suggested it would be best if he began by reviewing the 226

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  rules we had all agreed to. This was the first of his note cards. All of us nodded soberly and in unison: we were here to heal and to empower.

  Pooh’s song wound down, stopping in mid-measure. I twitched and bristled in my spiked chair as Wade tediously covered ground we’d been over. On and on. I watched as Bethie seemed to recede altogether. “We know all this, Wade,” I blurted out. Lowering my voice to a virtual Vaseline smoothness, I turned to my daughter.

  “Bethie, we are here because we love you. Because we’re your family and we have known you longer and love you better than anyone.

  We are worried about you, Bethie, and we’re sorry to see you so, well, so, so unhappy. We worry about your health and your well-being. You don’t look well.”

  “How could I be well? How could I be well or whole or happy after what’s happened to me?” And indeed, her mouth was pulled so queerly down, you could all but see a bit between her teeth.

  “What exactly has happened to you, Bethie?”

  “I have to discover before I can recover.”

  I hadn’t expected something so short, emphatic and declarative.

  In the ensuing silence, I said, “And?”

  “What don’t you understand? How can I make you understand if you won’t listen?”

  “I am listening, Bethie. We all are. We have come here so that we can listen—” I nodded toward Victoria, whose brows were pinched in a tiny tent of anxiety over her nose, to Sunny, wide-eyed and closemouthed, and Grant, whose battered hands rested one on each knee. “We’re here to help. We want to see you get better. So talk to us, Bethie. In your own words,” I added without looking at Wade,

  “tell us.”

  I asked for it and I got it. Bethie launched into a forty-five-minute recitation, a veritable New Testament of hurt and anger and ugliness, of abuse and neglect and denial of her feelings, of cruelty implied and cruelty inflicted, of deceit and abandonment. A child crying in the orchard because her mother was banging away in the bedroom with some man or another. A child forced to live with the wretched and unkind relatives of men who were

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  bedding down with Mom. A child, a girl, sent off once a month to stay at the home of a man who molested her, who had molested her for years, who had continually broken the most basic trust an adult can be given. A child whose mother was uncaring at best, malignant often. We heard our past, our collective past, dug up as though it were a graveyard. Bethie exhumed all the corpses, resurrected new instances of uncaring, injustice and abuse. And when I would cry out to correct her, when Sunny said no no no, when Victoria gave little high-pitched yelps of protest, Wade reminded us of the protocol here: this was Bethie’s turn to speak, to release, to tell her truths and recover her past.

  Bethie vomited up for us great toadlike chunks of memory and the o
ld remembered Eden was destroyed. That tropically warm place, that confectionary country we all return to, that was all tarred and tainted, every anecdote soured, and the whole gone vile, venal and thuggish. Oh, I had asked for Bethie’s own words and they came on me like shrapnel. Wounded, I wept, strangled my Kleenex, I’m sorry, Bethie, sorry for not asking your permission if we could all skinny-dip in front of you on Sophia’s Beach, I didn’t think. Stunned at the enormity of the betrayals she perceived, I gulped and stammered, Forgive me, Bethie, I didn’t think about the secondary smoke of joints passed round amongst the adults. Stabbed with remorse, I could only wipe my nose and blubber I was sorry I hadn’t dealt with her childhood tantrums and hurts myself, but sent Bobby in to her, sent her out with Bobby to watch sunsets instead of taking the time myself. Forgive me that I gave my attention to Andrew Hayes while little Bethie wept somewhere. I didn’t know, Bethie…I didn’t know…In my own defense that was all I had: ignorance. The humiliation was killing. Ignorance.

  I thought I would dissolve, slide right off that spiked kitchen chair and puddle at my own feet. I sat there bleeding. And slowly I recognized the weapon. I had been impaled on the past.

  I cherished Bethie’s childhood more than she did. What parent doesn’t? In that childhood the parent too is always young, hand in hand with a beloved boy or girl whose charm, whose laughter, whose tears and joys, whose very brattiness become the occasion 228

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  for smiles. Parents wrap themselves in a sort of warm shawl of that childhood, the pattern fashioned of anecdotes, fringed with vignettes, tasseled with When my girl was little, she…The daughter grows up, moves on, sees herself as a fully fashioned adult, the product. But the parent remembers the process. The parent cherishes the process.

  And now, everything rendered wretched, Bethie led us through a gallery of evils. Some greater than others.

  When at last she wound down, rather like Pooh Bear, in mid-measure, Bethie still remained tearless, she and Wade alone tearless.

  The rest of us, un-recovered, still weeping, wiping our eyes, wincing, unable to collect ourselves.

  Finally Sunny spoke, her voice low and uncertain. “Bethie, no one wants to see you breaking down. No one wants to see you haunted and unhappy. You were always The Charmer, Bethie.”

  “People-pleasers act that way because they need validation outside themselves. It’s not enough for them to be self-sufficient and personally empowered, they’re always looking for applause. They need others to be good to them because they don’t know how to be good to themselves. They get stripped of their own validation and have to go outside themselves to seek it.” Bethie’s lower lip thrust out petulantly. “Besides, what do you care? I’m nothing to you, Sunny.

  An ex-step.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if you were nothing to me, Bethie. You’re my sister. We’re all three sisters. Death or divorce can’t touch what we are to each other.”

  “Celia didn’t divorce Bobby,” Bethie corrected her. “She slept with other men and threw Bobby out.”

  “That’s a rather harsh way of putting it,” Sunny said, to my surprise.

  “She slept with his father”—Bethie nodded toward Grant—“and he and his nasty brother moved in with us.” Bethie chewed her lip and her eyes narrowed. “There’s something between you and Grant, isn’t there, Sunny? I can always tell when people are having sex.”

  “We didn’t come here to discuss ourselves, Bethie,” said Grant, his first words. “We came to make things better for you.”

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  “You can’t discuss yourselves or anything else. You agreed not to talk,” Wade reminded him.

  “Grant and I both love you, Bethie. We all love you.”

  “You and Grant are having sex. My ex-stepsister is sleeping with my ex-stepbrother,” Bethie mused bitterly. “That’s a pretty weird combo, isn’t it? Serial incest?”

  “They never lived together as children,” I shouted, surprised at myself. “They never had any connection at all, except—well, me.”

  I simmered down. “And that was a long time ago.”

  “You seem to bring sex into everyone’s lives, Celia,” Wade observed coolly.

  Before I could say I’m pissed off and you’re full of shit, Victoria put a hand over mine, a gesture so tender and unlike her, I nearly cried out loud. She spoke earnestly to Bethie. “We’re asking everyone to be brave, Bethie. Even you. You remember last spring? Making me tell Celia that I had married Eric? Remember how you insisted I be brave? I was brave for you then. Be brave for me now and talk to us in something besides accusations. Please. There has to be something other than—”

  “You had to admit you got married for your own well-being. You had been living a lie.”

  “It was my own life, Bethie, and I was happy the way things were.

  You convinced me to tell the truth. Now I want to convinced you to tell the truth.”

  “I have.” Bethie twitched and squirmed beside Wade. “I still think it’s really weird and, well, really weird that Sunny should be sleeping with Grant. It gives me the creeps. Grant and Lee give me the creeps.

  They always have. They’ve always made me feel terrible. If you knew, Sunny, how awful they were and how awful their father was, how horrible it was to live with all of them, you wouldn’t have anything to do with him.” She burst into cathartic tears and signaled somehow permission for everyone else to join in. We all wept. Even Wade took a few Kleenex before passing the box on to Grant.

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  just tell us what we can do to help you. We’re sorry you’re so unhappy. We love you. All of us. We want to help.”

  “But you don’t believe me. If you want to be in a relationship with me, you have to believe me.”

  “We are in a relationship with you. I am your mother and these are your sisters.”

  “No.” Bethie shook her head, willing her tears to dry. “That’s a kinship. You can’t help kinships. Relationship is something different.

  Relationship you have to choose and go on choosing. In a relationship everybody has to agree and everyone has to respect. If you want to be in a relationship with me, then you have to believe me. I’m not a liar and I won’t be in a relationship with anyone who thinks I am a liar. If you choose not to be in a relationship with me, I will respect that.”

  “What?” I mopped my eyes.

  “If you love me, then you believe me. You believe what Bobby did to me.”

  I glanced over at Victoria, and at Sunny whose shoulders had narrowed, hunched protectively, rolled forward. “I don’t think it has to be either/or—” I began tentatively.

  “It is either/or.” Bethie’s voice was steady, her tears all dried.

  “Either you believe me or you don’t.”

  “We can love you without believing that Bobby Jerome is a monster. Any man who would do those things to a child—”

  “Why would you want to be in a relationship with a liar?”

  “We don’t, but—”

  “You see! You do think I’m lying!”

  “Of course, you’re lying!” Victoria screamed, departing from the rules. “My father loved us! Loved all of us, loved you! He was the only father you ever had! You wanted him to be the father of the bride you loved him so much!”

  “He didn’t love me,” retorted Bethie. “I was nothing to him. A stepdaughter and a sex object. Anyway, I have my own father.” She regarded me coldly. “You look surprised, Celia. You kept me from Gary all these years. You wanted me to have to trust every man you went to bed with, so I’d be prey to any old person who 231

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  slid under your sheets. You kept me apart from my own father so I’d have no one to protect me. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t sent him away, my real father, Gary Alsop.”

  “Oh, Bethie. I didn’t send him away. I wo
uldn’t marry him, that’s all. I wouldn’t marry anyone. He left because he wanted to get married and work for the IRS.”

  “You sent him packing. He told me! We called him up. He said he always wanted to see me, all those years, and you wouldn’t let him. You told Gary, Just send money and shut up.”

  “Bethie, I never—that isn’t…” Husked inside this patent misrep-resentation were the little rattling kernels of the truth, tiny, percussive and insignificant, and Gary’s thwarted interest in Bethie was the stuff of fiction, but I shut the hell up. I willed myself to clear my head, to kick my way to the surface, not to drown in this widening, deepening cesspool.

  “We’re going to San Jose this fall, to meet my dad, Wade and I are going. We talk to him a lot on the phone. I won’t be cheated out of having a father. My father would never do to me what your father did.” She turned, eyes blazing, to Sunny and Victoria who wilted under the onslaught.

  I had to stand up. To breathe, to walk around this kitchen chair and brace myself, to hold on and hyperventilate because I suffered a sort of burning in the chest, a stab to the heart, a sort of blinding clarity across my line of vision. We had been brought here under entirely false pretenses. There was not, there would not be any understanding reached—much less reconciliation. We thought we’d been so clever arranging this meeting through Sunny’s cool medium.

  But this was not a meeting to resolve family issues. This was not an attempt at understanding. This was a kind of slaughter. There came to my mind the chickens my father used to kill. He would chop off their heads with a couple of well-aimed blows and all us kids would laugh to watch the chickens run around, headless, squawkless, still terrified, frantically searching for what they’d lost, until at last they fell over, surprised to be dead. But if we were the chickens being slaughtered, it came to me, Bethie had been faith-healed like a goat.

  “Go to San Jose,

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  Bethie. I wish you well,” I said slowly. “I wish Gary Alsop well. I think I speak for all of us?”

  Sunny, Grant, Victoria nodded slowly and in unison, watchful, wary, uncertain, knowing with the instincts of children (however grown) that the adults are suddenly dangerous.