Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  A predatory, lecherous man, not content with the woman’s body, but lusting after the little girl, a man who bullied and cajoled the girl, who pushed his way into her bedroom, who kept her there on the bed, with fear and promises. He was the father figure after all.

  There was no help for the little girl. Her mother wouldn’t help her.

  Her mother preferred not to know. The stepfather punished and exacted compliance, threatened and prodded her child’s body.

  Rumbling through the wall Bethie heard Wade’s voice. “And he fingered you like that? Every night?”

  “Days,” sobbed Jennifer. “He worked nights. He’s a night cook at Denny’s and home days.”

  “Happy as gnats on jam-day,” I said to Brio when she commented on the uneven swarm of black gnats buzzing in narcotic ecstasy.

  There were little clouds of them hovering over the peaches still in crates, or on those lying skinless and halved near the food processor, those steeping in bowls full of sugar, and over the piles of peach pits soaking through the newspapers on the table. Brio and Baby Herman were zapping peach pulp in the food processor, 306

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  all three of us clad in aprons stained with years of this sort of cyclic endeavor. Next month there would be days spent marching the apples through the peeler and into the pots for applesauce, pears similarly sauced and laced with brown sugar. There was basil to be put down in salt and oil, all the autumn rituals, separating pith from peel. This moment, just past the last stroke of summer, you try to encapsulate, to freeze it, before the frost can touch or blacken. September sunlight slanted in the long, dusty windows where sand dollars collected cobwebs, crane flies staggered amongst jars of seaglass and shells long past their significance. The overwhelming sweetness of the peaches congealed somehow with the light. A few flies droned lazily in the warm air while the marine radio weather, in its uninflected voice, foretold the immediate future.

  Brio and I were near the end of daylong undertaking. I always make jam in single batches though I buy the fruit in bulk. It’s time-consuming, but better than risking the ruination of whole flats of peaches with a single miscalculation. I have learned this concept the hard way, naturally. Brio’s interest in all this had waned and she amused herself putting Baby Herman in school, and being, in general, a joy underfoot.

  Soon, when rents drop in the off-season, Sunny and Grant have told me they will get their own place. I’ll see them often, of course, but it will be a change for me. I’ll be alone. On Labor Day Dorothy returned to Bellevue on the Robbinses’ 40-foot Tollycraft powerboat, the old Strumpet, renamed Mom’s Victory. No longer the lonely Maid of Dove, Dorothy is a student at Lake Washington Technical College in hotel and restaurant management. We talk all the time on the phone and I’ve told her I think she’s right, there is a career possible, a cafe, say, that specializes in meat loaf and rice pudding.

  I stood at the stove, wooden spoon in hand, like a conductor for the Jam Overture, Peach Rondo, Sure-Jell Gavotte. Peach pulp cooked away on the front burner and on the back, the last of the jars bubbled and chattered in boiling water, and over all this kitchen cacophony, I heard a car pull into the yard and Sass

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  and Squatch going into their usual dither. From the kitchen window I could see Nona’s Jeep. Launch, stacking firewood in the back of my truck, saw her too and waved in greeting. He was closely shorn now, past the autumn equinox, and he waved and grinned and greeted Nona, but then—oddly, I thought—his smile faded and he returned to stacking the wood. Then I saw why. Nona had a passenger.

  Dark glasses obscured Bethie’s eyes, but her mouth still had that bruised pout. Her hair had grown out and grazed along her shoulders. She had tied a sweatshirt around her waist. She was not the athletic Bethie, but neither was she amongst the walking wounded, as when I’d seen her last on her knees between Wade’s legs.

  She waited till Nona had dealt with the doggies, leashed them in the shade near Sass and Squatch’s water dish. Then she followed Nona inside the house, took off her dark glasses and said a sheepish hello to me and Brio.

  “I found her at the ferry landing,” said Nona, beating herself absently with the dish towel. “She was walking home so I gave her a ride.”

  I nodded, murmured something, but turned my attention back to the pot of Sure-Jell which had cooked. I took it and poured it over the bowl full of peach pulp and sugar and the smell that dazzled up out of that bowl was overwhelming, concentrating, consecrating all the summer’s peaches into one final bouquet too intense to be borne, and so it must disperse. What I felt on seeing Bethie was just that intense; I could not speak till some of my emotion dispersed. I loved her. I was joyed-over to see her again. But dulling all that was, equally, anger, bitterness and recrimination. How could it be otherwise?

  “Who are you?” Brio demanded.

  Bethie looked hurt. “Don’t you remember me? I’m your Aunt Bethie. I’m your mother’s sister.”

  “Is that so?” I asked, pissedly. “The last I heard, you had dis-avowed Sunny altogether. You said she was not your sister at 308

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  all.” I turned to Brio. “Can you and Baby Herman go to school upstairs or outside?”

  “Can she have a cookie?”

  “Are you back or just here, Bethie?”

  Bethie pondered this, sinking down into a kitchen chair. “I’m back here. I’m not engaged anymore. I broke up with Wade.”

  “When?” I gave Brio the cookies and she and Baby Herman went outside.

  “This morning. I drove his car to the ferry terminal and parked it there and threw the keys in the water.”

  “And the engagement ring?” asked Nona. “Did that go in the water too?”

  “I left it by the kitchen sink. Maybe Jennifer will steal it.”

  “Where does Wade think you’ve gone?” I asked.

  “Out for cigarettes.”

  “You hate cigarettes.”

  “I was going to get them for Jennifer. I had to have a reason to leave. I didn’t want it to look too obvious because, well—I just wanted to be casual so I wouldn’t be tempted.”

  “Tempted to what?”

  “To explain. To try to talk to Wade. To make him understand why I was leaving. If I tried to talk, I’d just get confused and end up thinking I was wrong. I’d end up wondering how I could have wanted to leave. He’d get me into bed and I never would leave. I knew I just had to get on Route 5 and go north. Catch the ferry and get to Isadora.”

  “What for?” I didn’t ask the question to be flip, but it sounded that way.

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go.” She slid her purse on the floor.

  “I guess I could have gone to Victoria’s, but I knew she’d just take me shopping and get my hair cut. That isn’t enough.”

  Neither Nona nor I said that Victoria’s house would not exactly provide a haven for anyone lately. We didn’t see Victoria or hear from her. We got our news of Victoria through Dorothy. Eric had told his mother the marriage was breaking up and he 309

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  was powerless to stop it. Victoria was clearly bent on one of her unremitting courses of action and Eric was no match for her. I didn’t say any of this to Bethie and neither did Nona. What would be the point?

  Bethie looked up at me plaintively. “Aren’t you the least bit happy to see me? Not even a little?”

  I picked up the bowl of molten peach jam and poured it, like golden lava, into the waiting jars and freezer containers, scraped out the bowl and capped each container without securing the lids.

  “I’m afraid of what you might have brought with you. More destruction? More accusations? More pitch and tar and turds you intend to smear on all of us?”

  “I didn’t bring anything.” She stood up, arms out. “Look. Nothing.

  No clothes. No money. I just left him. It’s over.”

  Of course I was glad to see her. Glad she was Wade-less.
Glad that the trembling, sickly girl staked to Wade with no more strength than a sweet pea, that girl was gone. This one was not exactly Bethie The Charmer, but at least she’d gotten tired of being handmaiden to an ersatz god. “How’s Jennifer? Your stepdaughter.”

  “She’s not my stepdaughter—and don’t tell me she is just because I was living with her father. Nona’s already lambasted me with that, all the way from Dog Bay.” Bethie took down a cup from a hook and poured cold coffee, zapped it in the microwave. “Jennifer is terrible. You know she’s terrible. You saw her. You brought her to my house. She’s worse than she was then.”

  “How could she be any worse? Did her nose rings get infected?”

  “Actually they did. Her nose was all red and infected. Ugh. But that was nothing. She’s back on drugs. Maybe she was never off. I don’t know. I don’t care. She’s not my stepdaughter and I don’t have to live with her anymore.”

  “So you’ve left Wade for good?”

  “Forever. I told you. I threw his keys in the water.”

  The phone rang and I moved to pick it up, but Bethie said it was probably Wade. So I left it for the answering machine.

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  “Why would Wade think you’ve come here? You were finished with us. He knew that. This is the last place you’d come.”

  “I’ve been gone a long time. I left this morning. He would have tried everywhere else.”

  It was Wade. The three of us listened, Bethie plucking nervously at her lip as his rich voice swelled and seeped into the kitchen, not a note of alarm or indictment in it, just a request: if Elizabeth should come here, please have her call home.

  “It’s not home. I’m never going back. Never, Celia. It’s over and I’m free of him. Really, I’m free. Unfettered,” she added expectantly.

  I knew what I was supposed to do: take her in my arms and say how wonderful that was. Nona and I were supposed to join in some sort of gospel anthem to Bethie’s newfound freedom, but all I said was, Well, that was fine, and I wondered if Bobby Jerome was free too. I turned off the marine radio because they were predicting storms moving in and the barometer was rising.

  Bethie looked momentarily confused by the silence. She glanced imploringly at Nona, who kept her Roman general’s expression without an ounce of indulgence. Bethie seemed to crumple before us. “I’ve really hurt everyone badly, haven’t I?”

  I didn’t trust myself to speak. I measured out the sugar for the last batch of jam.

  Nona dug through a crate of peaches and found one not overripe, washed it and bit into it. “To call it hurt is like putting a Band-Aid over a bomb site,” she said.

  At that Bethie began to blather. She always did talk too much when she didn’t know what to say, and in this she had not changed.

  She began to slide out from responsibility for the things she’d said and done, to deconstruct the whole experience, using Wade’s own lingo: how truth and lies lived close together, so close you couldn’t tell one from the other, what you thought was true turned out to be a fiction and fiction had its roots in truth. On and on.

  I couldn’t bear it. I picked up my paring knife and used it didactically on a peach. “I’m sure that all that ambiguity suits 311

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  Wade Shumley. He thrives in it, like some kind of hothouse fungus, but it doesn’t suit me, Bethie. And certainly not in this instance. Say whatever you want about us, about me, about Bobby, about the way all you kids were raised. Say that I was a mediocre parent, or a bad parent, that I was too taken up with my own life, but do not say that Bobby Jerome finger-fucked you and made you perform oral sex on him, that he used your hand to jerk off and that I colluded in this.”

  Bethie gave little high-pitched gasps.

  “Don’t you look so shocked at me, Bethie Henry, like it’s terrible for me to say these things. You said them. That’s what you accused Bobby of. A gross breach of trust. You accused me of acquiescing in this, and that together he and I destroyed and blighted your young life. And that is a lie. And that particular lie is not neighbor to the truth, but the enemy of truth, and so is your accusation against Grant and Lee.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she cried. “I wanted to call you and tell you, later, that I knew that never happened. But of course I couldn’t talk to you. But really, it was just sort of—well, I didn’t even mean, really, to say it. I’m not even sure now that I did actually say it. But Wade thought it and I let him think it.” She put her face into her hands and wept. “I loved him,” she sobbed. “I loved Wade and I wanted to make him happy.”

  “And it made him happy to think that your stepbrothers had abused you? That made him happy?”

  Bethie didn’t answer, just wept on and I looked over at Nona, but neither of us rose to the occasion, to the obligatory There, there, not because we didn’t know or understand or sympathize with the anguish she felt (and what woman hasn’t blurted out those words, I loved him, in defense of some foolishness or other) but because I had heard Bethie cry and whimper and drivel on about love—in person or on paper—for almost a year now and I was sick of it.

  And then, perhaps because neither Nona nor I rushed up to her with Kleenex and cups of tea and the observation that all men are brutes, she gradually hiccupped her tears down, and got 312

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  her own Kleenex from the bathroom, blew her nose and asked if we wanted to know what happened.

  “I’m curious.”

  “I’m curious,” Nona seconded.

  “It was the girl, Jennifer,” she admitted. “And it wasn’t just because I didn’t like her. Though I didn’t like her. She came between me and Wade and she made trouble between us. At first she just took all his attention because he didn’t know what to do with her.

  But then it got worse. Then he sort of gave up on her. He left me to deal with her. I was supposed to stay at home and bring her up. He didn’t come home till late. Work—it was always work—but I knew, really, that girl just defeated him. I resented it. I didn’t want a daughter, especially a teenage daughter. Especially her. She was awful. She was always buzzed up on some drug or another and I could smell marijuana in her clothes like incense. She stole. She brought home the most awful people and they stole. Wade came home one night and the keyboard from the computer had been disconnected and it was gone and so was the VCR. Wade blamed me!

  Like it was my fault she hung out with thieves and drug addicts.

  But even through all that, I didn’t leave him. I wasn’t happy, but I loved him, and I was loyal, and I stayed on for him, not for her. I couldn’t stand her. Besides, everything got better when he let me go back to work.”

  “He let you? That sounds ominous.”

  “Well, I worked for him,” she said with an uncaring shrug. “So he had to tell me when I could go back to work. He was the boss. It was better then. At least I wasn’t home with Jennifer all day.” Bethie licked her lips and kept her gaze on the kitchen windowsills, all the summers collected there, the single drooping sunflowers Brio had stuck in Coke bottles. “He took more responsibility with Jennifer after that. And it seemed like he was making some progress. She didn’t go out as much and the drug addicts quit coming over and she didn’t even watch too much TV anymore. She just stayed in her room and cried. Wade kept saying the pain was good for her and soon she would be new and whole.”

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  I remembered Bethie kneeling between his legs, his beckoning to Jennifer, and her going to him, the look on his face. You wouldn’t forget that. “I’ve seen what Wade considers new and whole.”

  “At first I didn’t care that she cried all the time, because I didn’t care about her. Anyway Wade can reduce whole audiences to tears.

  I’ve watched him with groups. Wade tells them they have to think of those tears like rainwater, rinsing away the old addictions and afflictions and destructive affections and starting all over again.

  They hav
e to cry so they can be new. But Jennifer was different. It wasn’t enough for Jennifer to cry and be new. She had to—” Bethie finished her black coffee in one audible gulp, as if that were the only way she could keep words back down in her throat. “With Jennifer, he was like a wrecking ball. Like he had to pull the old Jennifer-building down, down into dust and rubble. Once she was wrecked, then he could build a whole new Jennifer. And sometimes when I listened to her cry at night, I thought, well, sometimes it seemed so familiar. I was afraid…” Bethie took her cup back to the sink and stood there, her back to us.

  “What was he using to destroy a girl who was already on drugs?”

  I asked. “A girl who’s been arrested for prostitution, who has spent months in juvie, who’s been in rehab before she’s sixteen? What could you possibly use to destroy such a girl?”

  Pacing the kitchen, reacquainting herself with every homely object in it, Bethie finally said, “Her past. He used her past. I’d listen to her cry and wail like she’d lost everything, like she had been so battered, she’d never heal, like she was in so much pain, she wanted to die, might die if someone couldn’t clean up all those addictive and inappropriate behaviors and get them out of her life. She had to get rid of the abuse and the abusers. He was helping her discover so she could recover.” Bethie pulled her arms up tight against her body, against the cold, though the kitchen was warm. “I heard him asking her questions that weren’t questions, that were, well, suggestions.

  I heard her crying and coughing up old hurts and it all sounded really familiar. Like my hurts. Like

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  what had happened to me had happened to Jennifer. And then I wondered if it did happen to her. And then”—Bethie’s hands knotted—“I wondered if it had happened to me. You know?” she added plaintively. Nona and I were silent. “He was like a wrecking ball. I couldn’t stay there and fight him, and I couldn’t stay and figure it out. What else could I do? I said I’d get Jennifer some cigarettes.”

  “And have you figured it out?”