Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Are you going home?”

  Without taking off her dark glasses, Bethie stared at Nona. “I guess.”

  “Just couldn’t take the stepdaughter, hmm?”

  “She was not my stepdaughter, Nona,” Bethie snapped. “I was never married to Wade.”

  “Well, Celia wasn’t married to Bobby either and he was your stepfather.”

  “Please. Please don’t talk about Bobby. Don’t talk about any of them.”

  “So Celia’s not expecting you?” Nona asked, knowing full well that if Bethie had been expected, the very seals on the Assumption rocks would have known about it.

  “No one’s expecting me. I’m not expecting me. I don’t even know what’s happened. Do you think they’ll even talk to me at home?”

  Nona shrugged noncommittally, but she leaned over and opened the passenger door and shooed all doggies into the backseat so Bethie could sit up front. Wordlessly she sank into the seat and buckled up. Nona neither asked nor offered anything in particular.

  Bethie’s pain, anger, dismay, all these things palpably filled the car, so much so the doggies felt them; they yipped and whimpered. Nona was less sympathetic. She felt a sort of elation: if indeed there was New Romance, if young women wanted

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  something different, if it were true that Celia Henry would no longer serve her as a mini-muse, perhaps Bethie Henry might. Perhaps Bethie Henry was the very person Nona York needed to see.

  The Seattle schools had long since started, but Jennifer Shumley had refused to attend. She had refused to go to work. Refused all offers of ReDiscovery. Refused to do anything except smoke cigarettes and watch MTV, Pooh clutched in one arm. When the roots on her black hair began to grow out to a nondescript sandy color, she had asked her father for money for hair dye, and when he refused, she shoplifted L’Oréal because she was worth it. She slept in the computer room, along with Pooh. This meant that the computer had to be moved and that meant something else had to be moved. The whole process of displacement and absorption began, a sort of food chain of displacement as Jennifer moved in with her father and her stepmother. She used Bethie’s makeup and Tampax and razors, shampoo and anything else she felt like appropriating. She would eat nothing except Cap’n Crunch and hamburgers. Wade gave her money for Burger King and cigarettes, and so there were butts and hamburger wrappers, French fry packets all over the house. Between the cushions of the couch, French fries petrified but refused to mold.

  Moreover, Jennifer completely absorbed her father’s attention during his nonworking hours as he tried to interest her in ReDiscovery and to find some venue—school, tech school, a job—where her skills could be used. Other than shoplifting, she apparently had no skills. Wade spent weeks seeking alternative education within the district, and within the citywide system, but Jennifer refused to budge. He discussed all this endlessly with Bethie, as if she cared, which she didn’t.

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  each other. Jennifer talked to Bethie only when she needed something, stamps, say, for letters back to her boyfriend in Reseda. When there were no replies from Reseda, Jennifer lapsed into anger, tantrums which she lavished on Bethie all day and on Wade at night.

  And even Wade—the man of patience and forbearance, the forgiveness of a saint—snapped now and then under the stress. But when he did, Bethie bore the brunt of his frustration. Wholly undeserved, thought Bethie, that he should snap at her, growl at her, say tart, mean things to her when Jennifer was clearly the problem.

  There were other displacements as well. Wade’s affections, his attention, his goodwill were now divided, the greater portion going to his troubled daughter. The more time waxed on Jennifer, the less time spent on Bethie. But this meant as well that Bethie no longer needed to make lists, long detailed descriptions, discovering all her family’s betrayals in the past, did not need to recover these wrongs and present them on paper to be worked out with various therapeutic tools. Bethie’s personally tailored ReDiscovery program ended with Jennifer’s arrival.

  Oddly, despite Jennifer’s morbid presence, her black leather and clanking chains, Bethie began to feel stronger. Better. More able to greet the world. She wanted to go back to work at ReDiscovery, she told Wade.

  “Jennifer needs you at home,” was Wade’s reply. “She needs a mother. You can see for fifteen years she hasn’t had a mother and she needs you. You are more important to me at home than you ever could be at the office, honey. Please, stay home and help her.”

  “Why can’t Jennifer come to the office?” Bethie asked. “She could help out there. She could stuff envelopes. It wouldn’t hurt her to put in a day’s work. She doesn’t do fuck-all.”

  “You know I dislike profanity. It’s nothing but a shortcut through what is troubling you. You’ll have to articulate so we can visualize the pain.”

  “Fuck-all.”

  Wade put his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll find a way 299

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  to get Jennifer into ReDiscovery and entice her to go back to school, and once she has her own friends and some social life, everything will be better. I promise.”

  Perhaps. But Jennifer wouldn’t have anything to do with school.

  School sucked. People who went to school were suck-ups. Or else they sucked. Everything sucked. ReDiscovery sucked. She wouldn’t even wear the sucky T-shirt.

  One afternoon on her return from the grocery store, Bethie found the apartment empty and Jennifer gone. She did not come home for three days and Wade refused to call the police. He said she was a resourceful young woman and they would wait for her to run out of resources before calling the police. He didn’t want her to have a police record in Washington. He said he didn’t want to deal with the juvenile authorities as a distraught and ineffectual parent.

  “You’re not the only ineffectual parent,” said Bethie. “Lots of people suffer with their kids.”

  “I am not ineffectual, Elizabeth. I am challenged at the moment.

  Challenge is good. But I have submitted a grant proposal for the city to implement ReDiscovery in their alternative schools, and I can’t be calling the police on my daughter.”

  Bethie suggested they should phone Lynette and her husband and ask if they had any clues where Jennifer could be found. Wade said he wouldn’t give Lynette the satisfaction. Besides, Reseda was not Seattle. Still, he drove all around Pioneer Square, the U-district and any other places where the young and the restless were known to hang out.

  She worried about Jennifer, missing for three days, but honestly, Bethie wasn’t altogether sorry she’d gone. Once Jennifer was out of the house, Wade and Bethie made noisy, passionate love, love as they had not made love in the month since Jennifer had been there, sleeping right in the next room, her ear to the bedroom wall, walls so thin that when she would wind up the Pooh Bear, “Deep in the Hundred Acre Wood” tinkled through to Bethie and Wade.

  But Jennifer did return. Hungry, hollow-eyed, dirty, dishev-300

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  eled, an intoxicant’s stagger to her walk and the puncture on her nose rings red and inflamed. She slept for two days straight.

  “Poor Lynette,” Bethie said to Wade when he came home that night and saw his daughter lying, sprawled and fully clothed, on her bed, her heavy key chain slagged on the floor. “Think what she had to put up with all those years.”

  “The difference between Lynette and me,” Wade corrected Bethie,

  “is that she did not love Jennifer and I do. Lynette didn’t care.

  Lynette told her own daughter she should have put her up for adoption. Lynette is part of the problem.”

  On the tip of Bethie’s tongue was the observation—the obvious—that Wade had bolted. That for twelve years he had never called, never contributed. Maybe Lynette should have given Jennifer up for adoption. Bethie wished she had. At least then Jennifer wouldn’t be
living with her father.

  But she said no such thing. She had discovered since Jennifer’s advent that bursts of candor were more likely to bring reproof than to open dialog. And though Wade’s reproofs were always gentle—never in the year they’d been together had Bethie ever heard him raise his voice—they stung. Bethie tried very hard not to deserve them.

  After the three-day disappearance and when Jennifer finally woke up, Wade went into her room and informed her that she would not be allowed to waste her life in this fashion. He was going to take some definitive steps. Finished with this declaration, Wade left her room, closing the door behind him. Pooh hit the door with a thump, and Jennifer screamed, “I hope to hell you have some fucking Cap’n Crunch in this house!”

  Meeting Wade outside Jennifer’s door, Bethie put her arms around him. “Love has its limits, doesn’t it?” she said sadly.

  Wade disengaged her, regarded her with tenderness and shock.

  “You know that’s not true, Elizabeth. Surely you know that’s not true.”

  And that was what made her think it might be true. Maybe Wade was wrong.

  Still, she loved him, and Bethie was certain that the strains 301

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  and cracks in her relationship with Wade were entirely due to Jennifer. Everything that would ease when Jennifer left. But three years from now? Three years of Jennifer? Bethie secretly began to hope she would get picked up by the law.

  Chances looked good. Clearly Jennifer had found a source, and her behavior and her attitude veered wildly with her ability to score.

  She was, she could be, Bethie thought, dangerous. She began bringing home dangerous friends, street people she picked up and when Bethie told Wade this, he said it was good Jennifer should have friends. It was the first step.

  “You haven’t seen them!” Bethie protested.

  And he hadn’t. He was spending much more time at work now, especially in the evenings when he ought to have been home with his family. That’s what Bethie actually said to him on the phone, referring to herself and Jennifer as a family.

  “You need to be strong now, Elizabeth. For my sake. For Jennifer’s sake.”

  “Half of the time she’s not even here and when she is, she has these awful people with her. Really, horrible-looking homeless types.

  They smell bad and they steal. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Love her,” Wade counseled. “Love her if only because you love me.”

  Then Wade had a call on another line and Bethie was left with the dead phone in her hand. Across the room Jennifer lay on her back in her enormous baggy clothes, dribbling Cap’n Crunch into her mouth, tapping her foot in time to MTV, as faces and butts alternately swam up out of the TV screen in rhythmic little bursts of percussion.

  Bethie stalked over and snapped the television off.

  “Phobe,” Jennifer accused her. “Like mother, like daughter.”

  Bethie burst into tears, knowing that she wasn’t well, she wasn’t strong, she wasn’t ready to deal with this unconscionable burden, wishing, in fact, that she were like her mother. Bethie wished she had some of Celia’s casual strength and insouciance, her old irreverence, her makeshift charm and her ability to differ-302

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  entiate (most of the time) between the destructive and the merely distracting.

  One night when Wade came home, Jennifer’s friends were still squatting in the front room, their bags of aluminum cans on the front porch and a warning from the condo association in his mailbox. He turned off the television. He attempted to talk with them about ReDiscovery which sent them scurrying. At that (and, thought Bethie, at last) even his unflappable goodness began to give way, and all tempers (Jennifer’s made shorter by metham-phetamines) frayed.

  But Wade vented his anger on Bethie.

  Their reconciliation took place in bed. They made love, and afterwards Wade stroked Bethie’s hair and praised her for her good work with Jennifer. He could see a real change in Jennifer and it was all due to Elizabeth’s caring, her love for a troubled human being. And weren’t we, all of us, in some way, troubled human beings? Elizabeth surely knew that, after all the ReDiscovering she’d done this past summer and all the growth she’d made. Look how Elizabeth had come through and come out of the abuse dealt her by her cruel mother and stepfather, by her whole unbelieving family for that matter. It had made her a stronger, better person. And stronger, better people always made effort to give back to others the redempt-ive health they themselves enjoyed.

  In short, Bethie realized when he left for work the next morning, nothing had changed.

  But he didn’t stay away from home anymore in the evenings. He began to shoulder his share of the Jennifer-burden and this eased Bethie’s responsibilities. When Jennifer was not out riding the city buses and scoring drugs, Wade spent hours with her in her room, having long, soulful talks. He emerged from these sessions spent, but confident that he had done some good, that Jennifer had been sent to him to test his own health and welfare, his beliefs. Through the bedroom wall at night, Bethie could hear Jennifer crying, sometimes muffled weeping, sometimes loud boo-hoos, but she felt not the slightest twinge of sisterly—to say nothing of maternal—compassion. Let her cry and get it out, thought 303

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  Bethie. Let her cry it out and get her shit together and get into school where she belongs. Somehow Bethie knew that’s what Celia would say, if she could talk with Celia. Which she could not. She was finished with people who thought she was a liar.

  Jennifer did not go back to school. But she didn’t go out as much either. She spent less time in front of the television and more time sleeping and weeping. Weeping and sleeping. And with Jennifer thus pacified (calmed, said Wade, calmed and getting better), Bethie went back to work at the ReDiscovery office, happy to be out of the house and back amongst the living.

  In the time that Bethie had been gone, ReDiscovery had expanded and Wade had had to hire another girl to answer the phone and be the gofer, but everyone was happy to see Bethie, and she got her old job back right away. Fran in particular commented on how good she looked, visibly recovered from the shock and trauma of the summer. “From discovery to recovery,” said Bethie, “Wade’s program works.”

  Then there came a Friday morning when she answered the phone and a rugged, masculine voice asked to speak to that bastard fuck-hole, Wade Shumley. Taken aback, Bethie replied in her best professional tone, “Mr. Shumley is in a meeting and can’t be disturbed.

  May I say who’s calling?”

  “When I’m through with Wade Shumley, he’ll be in a meeting with the devil at the gates of hell. We got the letter.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The letter Jennifer sent us saying that I’d molested her every day for the past two years and her mother didn’t care and didn’t love her. I never touched Jennifer. I wanted to beat the living shit out of her a couple of times, but I never put a hand on her. Lynette did everything she could for that little bitch. Jennifer’s a stupid, drugged-up, nasty little slut and she’s not smart enough to write like that.

  Jennifer didn’t make it to the eighth grade. You tell Wade that me and Lynette know who really wrote that letter. Lynette is all broken up, but I’m pissed off. You tell Wade he’s full of shit. You tell Wade if there’s any more accusations,

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  I’ll tear his balls off and shove one down his throat and one up his ass. Got that? I’ll kill him.”

  The phone went dead in Bethie’s hand.

  Wade was only in a meeting with Fran, practicing his newest presentation, and Bethie decided to disturb him. It must have been going well because Fran (who liked nothing better than to play Mary and Martha to Wade’s Jesus) was pouring him a cup of coffee, her face shellacked with beatitude.

  Wade was shocked to be interrupted in mid-sentence. Bethie apologized, “Ordinarily I wouldn’t have broken in on your work, but it was Lynett
e’s husband. He said they got a letter from Jennifer.

  He said he was going to kill you. Graphically.”

  “In my work there are always angry people, Elizabeth. Please close the door and hold all calls.”

  That night Jennifer’s weeping and sobbing were worse than usual; she not only cried, she howled. Lying in bed, listening to the girl’s unhappiness echo through the wall, Bethie knew somehow this was not mere adolescent angst or anger, not even drug abuse, drug hunger or withdrawal. This was heartbreaking. Bethie begged Wade to check her into a clinic. “Listen to her—” An eerie wail pierced the plaster. “Check her into rehab, Wade. She’s a minor. You can do it, as her parent. It’s the only merciful thing.”

  “She’s getting better.”

  “She’s not. She’s getting worse. She’s in misery. If that were a dog crying in the night you’d call the humane society. You’d put it out of its misery.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” Wade turned his back to her.

  The next morning, Saturday, Bethie woke late to find Wade gone from their bed. She could hear voices on the other side of the bedroom wall. Voices and noisy snuffling. Jennifer’s snuffling. Wade’s low, soothing voice. She lay in bed and listened. His voice was so comforting in its authority and calming in its assurance, just as she remembered from her traumas; his words were always a balm to suffering. Bethie got up, made coffee, drank a cup reading 305

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  the Seattle paper while Jennifer’s choking sobs sounded throughout the apartment. Bethie got in the shower so she would not have to listen, but when she got out, the moans and tears, muffled voices had not ceased. Quickly throwing on some clothes and kicking herself—mentally and spiritually and morally—she nonetheless went to the bedroom wall, put her ear there and eavesdropped.

  As Jennifer gnashed and flailed, as Wade held her while she hyperventilated, while Jennifer struggled with and against him, wept, Bethie heard a story she recognized. Lurching from her stepdaughter’s lips there emerged the tale of a girl much wronged by a stepfather, the man living with her mother, sleeping with her mother.