Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  But if Dorothy had stayed decently home, none of this would have happened. And why hadn’t Bethie (so eager to confront in the interest of healing) considered what a prolonged dose of Celia (or Bobby, for that matter, or Nona and Ernton and Launch) might do to Dorothy Robbins? Poor old Dorothy, so undone, she nearly croaked.

  She fell, literally, into Celia’s lap. And stayed there. And now Victoria’s adult life, her very own unclouded life, was being infiltrated all over again. Celia was again coloring up Victoria’s life, moving through it like a sort of plume of dark ink slowly dropped in standing water. Every weekend Eric dragged Victoria back to Isadora Island to see Mom. Both moms. Every weekend Victoria suffered island fever all over again and vowed she would not return. Every weekend she did, drawn back like the tide inexorably pulled by an otherwise innocent moon. She returned to Isadora Island, with its great brooding mountains, thick shadows, its obscure bays and tangled undercurrents.

  Even Victoria’s weekday life had been completely altered by that fateful party in March. With Dorothy camped at Celia’s and refusing to leave Isadora, Ned now swooped down every night 242

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  on Victoria and Eric. Eric, the more fool he, had given Dad a key to their house (without asking Victoria’s permission) and so now Ned never even knocked, but showed up each evening in his usual funk.

  Poor old Ned. Having insisted that Dorothy do all his emoting for the last thousand years, Ned had no resources to deal with the crisis.

  Which was, of course, that Dorothy wasn’t there to emote. Dorothy would not come home. Ned dissolved under the hurt and dissatisfaction, and visited it on Victoria and Eric. Nightly.

  “I don’t see why you care if my father eats dinner with us,” Eric complained one evening as they were changing after work, expecting Ned at any minute. “I don’t ask you to cook. We almost always go to a restaurant, or get Chinese takeout. If he didn’t eat with us, Dad would be alone.”

  Inevitably in the course of these conversations, Eric gave his wife a look she found increasingly annoying, a great bruising of the eyes, lower lip thrust out in the tiniest defiance, defiance that could turn swiftly to pout if it met with anything but instant compliance. He looked exactly like his mother.

  “I don’t want to be your mother. I don’t want to be a stand-in for Dorothy, not for you and not for Ned either. It’s not fair and I shouldn’t have to do it, and neither should you.” It had been a particularly long day at Nordstrom’s marketing department. Victoria put her heels neatly in the closet, slithered out of her panty hose and into a pressed and belted pair of slacks and an ironed T-shirt.

  “All right then, Victoria. I’ll take Dad out by myself. You can stay home. But we are all going to have a drink here first. You can do that much for my father, can’t you?”

  As he had been trained since childhood, Eric hung up his pants, put his shirt and socks in the laundry basket and smoothed the beautifully made bed where his rump had rumpled it. These were things Victoria had always adored about Eric, and watching him now in the shaded sanctuary of their bedroom, she felt a sort of lush contraction of tenderness and desire. She might have moved toward him, opened her arms and pulled him into her 243

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  embrace, but Ned was due and she didn’t want to have to hop in and out of bed like teenagers. She remembered how Eric had made the bed after the first time they’d made love. Now, that was a man you could count on.

  “Why doesn’t your dad go to one of your brothers’ houses?” she asked more reasonably.

  “My brothers all have kids. Kids get on Dad’s nerves.”

  “They’re not little kids.”

  “All kids get on Dad’s nerves.”

  “Didn’t he have four sons? What did he do when he had four children of his own?”

  “He wasn’t home a lot. It was always Mom,” Eric confessed. “We almost never had to eat with him.”

  “So what’s he doing now? Making up for lost time?”

  “Please, Victoria—you know the strain my family has been under since Mom had her heart attack.”

  “And you think my family hasn’t!” Victoria’s voice raised to a screech. “My sister has accused my father of child molesting! I’d say that was pretty damn stressful, Eric!”

  “If your dad wanted to come here night after night, honey, I would welcome him.”

  That was a lie, but one so obvious and moot that it didn’t bear comment. Victoria sat at the vanity (replete with framed photographs of her and her husband in jaunty poses) and furiously brushed her thick straight hair.

  “Anyway, the strain your family is under, is all your own fault,”

  Eric went on wickedly. Two could play at this. “Your sister brought it down on you. My family—we didn’t ask for this. My mother had a heart attack. She almost died. And now she refuses to budge off that island. She prefers to live with your mother and her boyfriend—”

  “Russell moved out.”

  “—with people she never laid eyes on before that day,” Eric continued undaunted, “rather than come home to her own husband and family. It’s your fault, Victoria. What happened to Mom is your fault.”

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  “Mine! Mine?”

  “All right then, Bethie’s. How was I to know you’d never told Celia we were married? Why did Bethie butt in? Why should she care what you and I did?”

  Victoria had so often blamed Bethie for inflicting unjust suffering that not only did she not defend her sister, but joined Eric in heaping invective on Bethie. The exercise brought them closer together.

  Bethie had made an Issue of everything.

  And indeed, this is what Victoria had told Eric when she had returned that afternoon from the ill-fated interview at Wade’s apartment. She had told Eric it did not go well there at the condo in Wallingford. She had not said there were further accusations of inappropriate intimacy leveled against Grant and Lee Hayes. She did not want to put that thought into Eric’s head. Impossible as the thought was. True, Grant and Lee had been odious boys, but they were not perverts, and Eric already thought her family was weird.

  They were weird; Victoria thought so too. Living with Celia wasn’t even like a home, it was like a tide pool: people and things deposited and withdrawn by the flux of events, by tides of Celia’s friends and lovers. Victoria again picked up her brush and brushed energetically.

  “All I’m saying, Victoria, is that I expect you to welcome my father into our home. You’re part of my family now.” Eric paused briefly before adding, “And I’m part of yours. That’s what marriage is about.”

  No wonder Celia avoided it, Victoria thought almost wistfully, watching in the mirror as her husband slid his long, pale legs into a pair of jeans. The very word husband used to give her such pleasure.

  She would say it to herself, adore it, relish, husband. The word and the man. She and Eric wanted all the same things: commitment, careers and a lake-view home. The good life. Except for those days when they caught planes for lovely vacation destinations, Maui or skiing at Mount Hood, their alarms went off at the same time every day. Each morning they woke, showered, dressed, ate the same hi-fiber breakfast cereal, rinsed their dishes and put them in the dishwasher, gave each other the same

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  perfunctory, but sincere kiss before going off to the corporate world, into their upwardly mobile lives. They had bought this lakefront home very near Eric’s parents, though not as grand, within six months of their marriage. Their lives were regular as heartbeats.

  But this summer. This wretched summer. Something had happened. Not to the life itself, but to its desirability. Something Victoria could not quite fathom, much less articulate. It was as if one of those big clocks in Henry’s House, those windup metronomes of life’s passing hours—tick-tock, tick-tock—had suddenly taken up syncopation, tick-tock tick-tick tock-tick tickety-tock tock-tockety tick-tick.

  �
�What the hell are you doing?” asked Eric, watching Victoria drum her fingers irregularly on the vanity top, endangering her manicure.

  She brought her hands together and turned to face him. “Eric, it’s not good for us to have your father here every night. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for me. It’s not that I don’t like Ned, I do. I adore your parents. I always have. They are the parents I always wanted to have, and they are fine people. But it’s not fair, Eric, it’s not fair for us to be responsible for your father’s well-being and mental health. You should share this responsibility with your brothers.”

  “My brothers take him out to dinner now and then.”

  “Two weeks ago. That was the last time any of your brothers took him out to dinner. That was the last time you and I were alone together. I don’t want to be responsible for your father,” she said firmly.

  “I don’t care what you want.”

  This uncharacteristic response was not what Victoria had expected.

  She thought it best to broaden the venue. “As a family,” she began,

  “the Robbinses all need to deal with Dorothy. You and your brothers need to bring more pressure on Dorothy to come home to Bellevue and look after Ned.”

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  into a chair, his legs splayed, his arms akimbo on the sides of the chair. “You think we haven’t tried?”

  “Try harder.”

  “Every weekend we try! My dad, my brothers, my sisters-in-law!

  They call Mom every weekend. I go to Useless, I tell her, Mom, Mom, think of Dad! Dad can’t live without you! Mom, he’s turning into the shell of his former self. But there’s nothing I can do to get Mom away from your mother, Victoria. What is it about your mother?”

  Victoria bit back, “You think Dorothy’s being kept prisoner by my family?”

  “Then what is it? What has my mom found there that’s more important than us? What has she found there that we couldn’t give her?”

  It was a son’s plaintive cry, the male’s absolute inability, Victoria realized, to grasp that a woman could have any more significant tug on her loyalties than his.

  “If Mom had got religion,” he went on miserably, “I could understand that. You remember my frat brother, Mike? He got religion and—”

  “I don’t want to hear about Mike. Anyway, Dorothy hasn’t got religion.”

  “Then what’s she got?”

  “Something else.” Victoria took a measured breath and prefaced her remarks by reminding Eric that certainly she didn’t know Dorothy as her own dear son knew Dorothy, but nonetheless, she thought that Dorothy’s remaining on Isadora Island, with Celia, had something to do with work. “I think she likes the work.”

  “She could get a job in Bellevue.”

  “No, Eric, I don’t mean a job. I mean she’s found something she does well and something she believes in and something she can be part of. Something rewarding.”

  “She’s already part of a family.”

  “But a family’s not necessarily rewarding. And your brothers 247

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  aren’t exactly captivating, on a day-to-day basis,” she added with a little verbal kick.

  “What sort of rewarding?”

  “A sort of process where you’re part of something that’s changing and absorbing. Like your work for Microsoft. Like mine for Nordstrom. Work that makes your days contrast, one to the other. Work where you grow and you know you’re learning, getting better and more accomplished every year, work where you feel you’re contributing your skills to something outside of yourself. Now instead of staying home all day, her days are, well, satisfying.”

  “More satisfying than Dad?”

  “You don’t understand, do you? I’m going to have to give you chapter and verse.”

  “Do it.”

  “When my mother decided to reopen Henry’s House as a B-andB, she lived like a woman with a mission. I was very little, so I don’t much remember those early days, but once the place was up and running, we were, all of us, constantly going between Henry’s House and our own house. Our house was this ramshackle, rundown place, cramped, messy and crowded. You never knew when people like Nona York and Ernton Hapgood and the other old Isadorans would drop in. In and out all the time, like Sophia never did die. Like Henry Westervelt was still alive and entertaining them. We had Launch who used to scare the hell out of my school friends because he wouldn’t talk, just grin and point. We had my mother’s lovers and their children and their families and even their in-laws. Phillip’s mother and sister were raving bitches and the sister’s kids were lunatics and they stayed, lived with us one whole summer. Phil said we were all cousins.” Victoria shuddered. “I found it intolerable.

  But there was—you had to admit—a rhythm between our house and Henry’s. There was contrast and texture. You might get pissed off, but it was hard to be bored. Because right through the orchard, you could go from all that crowded squalor to Henry’s House. And there was all of this studied opulence! This measured beauty, 248

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  everything arranged just so and calculated for gorgeous effect and it was all just lovely. The work was hard, but rewarding because you could watch the results right in front of you. People adore Henry’s House. They come back. They write it up in Joie de Vivre!, stupid rag that it is. But at Henry’s there’s always this sense of change and knowing that you’re learning. You’re growing and getting better.”

  “Your mother’s not a figure skater, Victoria. She’s a glorified cook, a glorified bed-maker, a glorified housekeeper,” Eric scoffed. “She’s made my mother into the same thing. For forty years my mother made mushroom gravy with Campbell’s soup and now she’s doing it at Henry’s House. How is that growth?”

  “Be that as it may, Eric, you say they’re glorified cooks, but did your family ever glorify Dorothy?”

  “We adored her,” he replied, without a trace of irony. “My father adores my mother and her place is with him.”

  “I don’t think you quite understand.”

  But any elaboration Victoria might have volunteered was cut short because they heard their front door open and their nightly visitor, Ned, call out.

  “Well, let’s go.” Eric hove to his feet and went to the door. “Are you coming?”

  “Not anymore, Eric.”

  “You’re going to stay here in this room?”

  “No, I’ll be out in a bit. I’ll be nice to Ned. But I’m not carrying your dad around anymore like a baby, listening to him whimper and whine. And I’m not coming to the island with you anymore either. Not this weekend. Not ever, if I can help it. I made my escape from Isadora, Eric. You were my escape. Now you’re dragging me back. I don’t want to go back, and I won’t.”

  “Fine. I’ll go without you. I’m not giving up on Mom.”

  He left her in the bedroom and she heard him greet his father. She could imagine Ned, his balding pate furrowed with the day’s dilem-mas which he now rained down on Eric, requiring Eric (and Victoria when she was there) to listen to him, as Dorothy had always listened to him. Dorothy had always said something

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  soothing like How Nice, Dear when things went well, or Isn’t That Terrible when things went badly, or Humph when things were really unspeakable. Eric did a fair Dorothy-imitation, allowing for slightly different choices in diction. Victoria did not do it well. Hereafter she would not do it at all. Not ever again. Having refused, she had expected to feel a great sense of relief. No longer would she endure suffering. No longer would she be a martyr and a victim. But she still felt like a stupid shit.

  She went, eventually, into the living room, greeted Ned and flopped inelegantly on the couch while Eric mixed them all a drink, gin and tonic in honor of the heat wave. Eighty-one degrees. A Seattle scorcher. Sunlight glinted off the lake punctuated by lots of little sails, pleasure boats
puttered about. Victoria did not contribute to the conversation. It was the same conversation every night. Eric handed Victoria her drink and went back to his father. These were the Coming Attractions for the rest of her life.

  She’d done it herself, she realized now. In parting with the secret of her marriage, she had tarnished it. The secrecy itself was the romance and the rebellion, rolled into one. How sweet, how exhilarat-ing it had been for Victoria to know she was loved—and at the same moment to defy her mother, to rebel against her parents’ every value, to repudiate everything Celia stood for. For Victoria, the I do’s were part of the storybook marriage, the storybook life. She had blessed the fetters that tied her to her husband. She had what her mother repudiated: a husband.

  Moreover, in marrying Eric Robbins she had united herself with a family that represented everything Victoria had longed for, united herself with people as far from the haphazard passions of her childhood as could be humanly imagined. Victoria had embraced, adored everything about Eric Robbins. He was bland and handsome.

  He wanted a good job, a career. He wanted to get married. Everyone in his family was married, including his parents. His mother doted on him and he was convinced he deserved to be doted on. His family was decently dull, thoroughly accessorized, everything in good taste, understated, less-is-more, that sort of thing. When she had first gone to their Bellevue house, Victoria

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  had endeared herself to Dorothy by commenting on the glorious floors and the gleaming kitchen with its empty counters and shiny chrome. So unlike her own cluttered home (which she left un-mentioned). The Robbinses did not have a stockpot bubbling constantly on some back burner, a stockpot into which went God Knows What, and the smell ever-present. The Robbins house smelled like Lemon Pledge. They did not say fuck. Dorothy and Ned were sexless as clams. Having lived her whole life around people who were physically affectionate, demonstrative and percolating with sexual tension or sexual fulfillment, it delighted Victoria that she could not imagine Dorothy and Ned in bed. There was the suggestion about Eric’s parents that their children were begot while Dorothy wore white gloves and Ned thought of new ways to make money. Best of all, none of the Robbinses talked about life in general as though everything were a work of art in need of framing and how best to go for effect. The Robbinses cared nothing for effect. They cared for a seemly shallow dignity. They did not believe that charm, slavishly applied, was a substitute for that dignity. They had reserve. They voted Republican. And now everything that had made the Robbinses and their life, Victoria’s marriage, so appealing, had corroded and was indelibly stained with the life she had escaped.