“I only just left this morning.”
The phone rang again and we let the machine pick up while the three of us waited. It was Fran. Breathy, excited, worried Fran. This time the message was for me. “Celia, if you know where Elizabeth is, would you please call Wade at home? Or you can call me here and I’ll get the message to him.” Fran nattered a bunch of phone numbers at us, his, hers, the cell phone, the pager, the ReDiscovery voice mail. “Elizabeth took his car, and no one has seen her since about ten this morning. Wade is sick with worry. We’re all very worried about her. I don’t mean to alarm you, but Wade is thinking of going to the police.”
“He won’t call the police.” Bethie sagged forward. “I don’t care what Fran says. Jennifer was gone once for three days and he didn’t call the police.”
“What about the car?” I brought the last of the peaches to the table and began peeling them, skinning them swiftly, the juice dripping through my fingers to the bowl.
“He’ll say you stole his car,” said Nona.
“It’ll get towed away. I parked illegally. They’ll call him eventually. He’ll have to pay. He’ll be really disappointed in me.”
We heard voices outside, Sass and Squatch putting up their fuss, Sunny’s laughter and the sound of her picking up Brio and the little girl shrieking with delight. Sunny and Grant came through the service porch, but suddenly they were silent as oysters.
“I’m back,” Bethie said with a nervous laugh. “It’s over with Wade.
I broke up with him.”
Still stunned, Sunny finally managed to ask when.
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“About ten. This morning.” Then she added, “It’s been coming for a long time. Ever since Jennifer. Maybe before. All I know for sure is that I’m through with Wade and I’m not going back there.
Ever. Love has its limitations.”
“Maybe that’s it,” said Nona reflectively. “Maybe that’s the New Romance. Love being limited. Necessary, but not as central, not the single measure of a woman’s success. After all, women’s lives are more than compendiums of the men they’ve slept with. Women are asking more from the world. If the world gives you more, then you need less from men. Women are asking less from love. If you ask for less, you’re more easily fulfilled. If you’re fulfilled, you can get on with the rest of your life, and all the possibilities in it. Men have to be time-effective for a woman. Romance,” she added, beaming,
“in the age of efficiency!”
Well, who knew what in the hell she was talking about? But Nona was enormously pleased with herself. You could tell that just to look at her.
“I’m not asking anything more of love,” Bethie assured her. “I’d just like my old job back at Duncan Donuts. You think Angie will give me back my old job?”
“A lot has happened in the year since you gave up that job, gave up your apartment, gave up your cats and moved to Seattle to live with Wade.” I pulverized the peeled peaches with each of these various observations. I had the sugar all measured. “Angie’s hired someone else. And Sunny’s working here even if Dorothy isn’t.”
“Who’s Dorothy?”
“Don’t you remember! Victoria’s mother-in-law?”
“Oh, her.” A look of acute peptic distress crossed Bethie’s face. “I never should have made Victoria bring them to the party. I never should have made her tell you she got married.”
“Well, it looks like she’ll be getting divorced pretty soon, if that makes you feel any better.” I lined the jam jars up on the counter and took all but one of the bowls to the sink. “So you see, Bethie, life has gone on here on Isadora. Things change.”
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“Nothing ever changes here. People die. That’s the only change possible on this island.”
“Russell’s moved out. He went back to his ex-wife.”
“The one who always used to call here?”
“He only had the one ex-wife. He had a couple of ex-girlfriends.”
“Think of Russell without his bald spot,” Nona volunteered wistfully.
“Could I work at Henry’s House and have my old room back here?”
“The Season’s drawing to a close.”
“You mean I can’t stay here?”
“It’s unrealistic of you, Bethie, to come back to Isadora and pick up life just where it was. There are people you have wounded and relationships you have destroyed. Pain inflicted. You know, Bethie, pain like old Wade’s favorite pleasure, that kind of pain. And now just because you wish it, everything, everyone can’t now miraculously fall in with your plans.”
“But all the time I was with Wade, you were always telling me you loved me. All of you,” she protested. “You begged me to come back with you, Celia, the day you brought Jennifer. You wanted me home. You said you loved me! You all said you loved me.”
“We do love you. We loved you all through that ordeal and we love you now, but there are people you have wronged and somehow you’ve got to make some of that up. I don’t say all at once, but you have to start somewhere.”
Bethie began with Sunny, apologized first to Sunny for inflicting pain, for denying they were sisters, for hurting Sunny’s father and making Sunny miserable. Bethie told Grant she was sorry. It wasn’t true—well, the part about the headless doll and cheating off her homework, the goldfish and the lavender soap, that was true. “But the rest was all just part of a sickness I had.”
“You made other people sick too, Bethie.” Grant sat down beside Sunny, his hands laced together, and he stared at them.
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“Why did you do that, Bethie? Why lash out at all of us like that?”
“It was like—” Bethie started slowly. “Well, when I moved in with Wade, I met all these people, and they were all in such pain. They all had old hurts and old angers and lousy parents, cruel siblings that they had to discover before they could recover. They had to meet the pain and go beyond it and be, well, deepened. It was like, if you weren’t in some kind of pain, then you must be a shallow twit. If you were sort of happy and”—she looked around for the word—“energetic, then you couldn’t possibly understand anyone else’s pain because you didn’t know what pain was. And there I was, with Wade, who knew more about pain than anyone. After all his years as a drug addict, Wade—” Bethie squirmed uncomfortably.
“I was a prisoner in victimville and it was a dirty little war. I’m sorry to you too, Nona.”
“I accept your apology, Bethie. Of course, I wasn’t one of the ones indicted.”
“I’d do anything to make it all right. With everyone. Even if I can’t make it all right, I’d still do anything.”
“Then you go back on the afternoon ferry. You can borrow my car if you want,” I said, “and you go to Bobby and you see him and you tell him that.”
“I’ll call.”
“No.”
“I need time.”
“Then take it. Fine. But you can’t stay here. If you want to stay here, then you go to Bobby and you ask him to forgive you. You were not the only prisoner in victimville, Bethie. You fell victim to a man who could not bear your strength and high spirits and the fact that your family loved you—weird as we may be, we loved you.
So he had to make you weak and tear you away. He wanted to destroy you and hurt us. But Bobby hurt more than anyone because Bobby is not a man with weapons. He doesn’t have the instincts of a fighter. These accusations of yours destroyed Bobby and you owe it to him to apologize to his face.”
“Janice will eat me alive.”
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“Janice will. She’ll protect him and you’ll have to get past her and the Wookie.”
“The Wookie too?” Bethie paled slightly. Then she started in how none of this was her fault. She went on and on. Her explanations, like a house of cards, collapsed continually under the weight of her flimsy logic. Then she’d start
back up again. I made the whole last batch of jam while she wended her way through excuses and apologies. Bethie had left Wade, but clearly it would take her a while to shake him off. To peel Wade off her brains would be harder than leaving his ring by the sink and his keys in fifty feet of salt water.
She waxed on at length what it was like to be living with Wade the good shepherd, and the rest of his flock. It was like sleeping with Buddha. If you were going to sleep with the Buddha, you had to be Buddhist. “Really,” she concluded at last, “the one who ought to apologize to everyone is Wade.”
Nona observed coldly, “If love has its limitations, Bethie, so does forgiveness. Don’t test the frontiers.”
Bethie’s shoulders sank. “I didn’t mean to hurt everyone. I’m sorry. I’ve made mistakes. I just want my old life back. I want my own past back. I wish I could have my old name back.”
For a minute I didn’t know what she meant. Forgot completely that I’d named the girls Harmony and Clarity, that Bethie had christened herself Elizabeth, and her sister, Victoria. I’d forgotten they were ever anything else. But once, a long time ago, I’d named my daughters Harmony and Clarity. Bobby and Linda named their daughter Soleil. Of the three, Sunny alone lived up to, lived into her name. For my girls, their names had brought them neither clarity nor harmony. Quite the opposite. Perhaps I ought to have named them Strife and Obscurity. Clarity was certainly opaque, obscure to me. Through a glass darkly was the erstwhile Clarity. And Harmony?
Look at the discord Harmony had wrought. It’s hard now to remember that Clarity and Harmony and Soleil all went to school with little girls who answered to Summer and Autumn, Rain and Bluejay, Star and Skye. Their elfin names say more about us, their fey parents and the world
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we believed in, or maybe just hoped for. Lots of us tried to create such a loving world, but then we got tired, gave up, got jobs, thought of ourselves as Boomers instead of Flower Children. Certainly, were no longer children in any event. We had children—with names like Harmony and Clarity, Sunshine, Yarrow, Dove, Strawberry, Feather.
Their world, the world they’ve inherited, is not at all fey or flowery.
To these grown women how awkward their poetic names must feel in an age of efficiency. Isn’t that what Nona called it? These years, on either side of the millennium, the turn of the century. The phrase has a nice optimistic savor to it. I guess. It’s really more like an epochal equinox. Or maybe the century actually does turn somewhere, deep inside the earth’s core, and we’ll hear the grind and groan of it, birthing itself, the new century. I will be in it, but not of it. I am of the old century, the greater part of my life lived in the old century. But Clarity, Harmony and Soleil, the greater part of their lives will be lived in the twenty-first century. Deo Volente. God willing, Sunny will live well into the next century. Deo Volente, let her live well in any event, Grant and Sunny and a life con brio. L
Bethie agreed at last to go see Bobby. She begged Sunny to go with her. But Sunny said no, and she and Brio left to walk Grant back to the Pythagoras tied up at the Useless dock.
I gave Bethie the keys to the Jetta and some money for the ferry.
“What if I weaken?” she asked.
“Then you just dig down a little deeper and find strength you didn’t know you had,” I replied. “Don’t come back unless you’ve talked to Bobby. Apologized.”
“You come see me when you get back, Bethie,” said Nona, “you come tell me all about it.”
They walked outside and Nona’s little dogs went into a frenzy of welcome that sent Sass and Squatch running for cover. Nona, whipping herself with the dish towel, opened the car doors and they all leaped in, the doggies still yapping as they drove downhill. In the old Jetta, Bethie followed.
I went the other direction, over to Henry’s House to start 320
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dinner for tonight’s guests. Almond pesto is best when the basil, parsley and thyme are picked just before you’re going to make it. I started through the orchard on the path Grant had built, some of it already overrun with red clover, waving grasses and creeping weeds.
The Season was drawing to a close and in a few weeks I would close up Henry’s House and it would be darkened, save for the upstairs lamp. Already the orchard is thick with autumn. The apples still pendulous, blushing and unripe, hang from the branches and late afternoon light trickles through the interstices of the leaves that have already fallen and the fruit that has not.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to express her gratitude
to the following individuals:
Juliet Burton
Deborah Schneider
Jennifer Hershey
Tia Maggini
Nick Sayers
Fiona Stewart
Connie and Bob Eggers
Gen Galloway
Jay McCreary
Meredith Cary
William J. Johnson
and
Peggy K. Johnson
for her tireless artistry at the keyboard
ACCLAIM FOR LAURA KALPAKIAN’S
STEPS AND EXES
“The pages fairly crackle with energy…. Kalpakian’s descriptive powers are wonderful. Characters, landscapes, interiors, and even a bevy of small dogs…all which lodge firmly in the reader’s imagination.”
—Seattle Times
“Tart and pungent reflections on the nature of family, life and love.”
—Washington Post
“Beguiling…. Kalpakian evokes the pervasive dampness, insularity and placid beauty of island existence with pungent and sensuous detail…her involving story succeeds on the strength of its snappy dialogue and tart observations.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Lush, often laugh-out-loud prose…. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Real…. Kalpakian finds an immediacy and honesty in both her descriptions and her dialogue.”
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“Sharp and earthy…original and thought-provoking.”
—Toronto Sun
“[Laura Kalpakian’s] stories are witty, sometimes farcical; her language is lyrical and powerful, but it is her unusual characters that inhabit the reader’s imagination…. Her entertaining style and her relentless search for the real amid heaps of phoniness will make this a favorite for many.”
—Eugene Register-Guard
Also by
Laura Kalpakian
CAVEAT
THESE LATTER DAYS
GRACED LAND
CRESCENDO
DARK CONTINENT AND OTHER STORIES
FAIR AUGUSTO AND OTHER STORIES
COSETTE: THE SEQUEL TO LES MISÉRABLES
BEGGARS AND CHOOSERS
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
STEPS AND EXES. Copyright © 1999 by Laura Kalpakian. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader March 2007
ISBN 978-0-06-137625-2
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Document Outline
Cover Image
Title Page
Dediaction Page
Contents Part One: Men Spit, Women Swallow
Part Two: Return of the Native
Part Three: The Maid of Dove
Part Four: Dying, Egypt, Dying
Part Five: Some Remembered Eden
Part Six: Eau de Soleil
Part Seven: Prisoners in Victimville
Part Eight: Island Fever
Part Nine: A Change of Life
Part Ten: Turn of the Century
Acknowledgments
Praise
Also by Laura Kalpakian
Copyright Notice
About the Publisher
Steps and Exes Page 36
