Stepping Page 12

  I stopped talking, breathless, somehow hopeful. I was exhausted and a bit embarrassed; I could only hope I had made them understand. Everyone stared at me a moment. Then, “I don’t believe Helsinki has a district as such,” one Finnish man replied finally. “This is a port city, there are probably some places where sailors go.” He said it straight-faced, solemnly, then turned away. The others gave me one last somber look, then also turned away. I took a big swig of my drink. Thank God when I looked at Charlie I saw laughter in his eyes.

  Perhaps it is just talking about screwing the Finns don’t like. I’m sure they do it and like it; they’re human after all. It’s probably very complicated. The Finns don’t have what one would call a rip-roaring sense of humor, and making love does involve the ridiculous: sweat, grunts, insane gymnastic positions. And it does lead to children; here we are at children again. Yesterday a Finnish mother who had lived four years in the States said to me, “The next time a Finn is rude to me on a bus because I have two small children with me, I am going to say, ‘All right, mister, just wait a few years till your taxes are eighty percent because there won’t be many people in Finland because no one has children because Finns hate them so.’ ” It is true that the Finnish families seem limited to just two children; there are few large families. Social censure must be an effective contraceptive device.

  I wonder why they are this way, reserved, quiet, drab, gray, shy. Is it their climate, so cold, their Lutheran religion, so harsh, their heritage and proximity to Russia? Now and then, on good days, when it isn’t raining, I play Hansel and Gretel outside with Lucy and Adam. First I am the mother and I send my children off to the woods to get nuts and berries, and then I hide behind a tree and become the witch. Hansel/Adam and Gretel/Lucy come walking by giggling in anticipation, and I jump out at them, shrieking, “Hee-hee-hee, such nice plump little children, I’m going to eat you up!” Laughing like a witch, hands curved to indicate long sharp nails, I chase them around the trees and sidewalk and catch them and nibble at their necks while they dissolve with laughter. The children love this game; they want to play it again and again. But the Finns walking by always look on with frowns instead of smiles. It seems to annoy them to see us having such silly fun.

  And just last week Charlie and I went to see a Finnish opera, The Last Temptations. It is about a Finnish minister who lived in the 1800s, and the subtitle of the opera was “despair, doubts, pride and delusions.” The music was overwhelmingly fine and powerful, modern. But the scenery was stark; the costumes, like Finnish everyday dress, were black, gray, dull brown, dark blue; the women’s hair was pulled back in severe buns; and the plot was grim. Paavo, the minister, is in despair. His young son dies. The village turns against Paavo and his second wife, Riitta. Paavo dies. I was wearing a bright red dress and I had a wild desire to jump up onstage and start singing and dancing the cancan.

  Of course I didn’t. But I do so miss a sense of gaiety here. Everyone is so restrained and responsible here. Even Charlie. He’s so busy with all his lectures, and sometimes he isn’t home until late, and I am often stuck here, alone, while the gray sky turns black at five, trying to entertain my two children, who have here no television, no friends, and few toys. Perhaps that is why I dream of the past. Perhaps that is why I dream about Stephen and secretly smile as November twenty-ninth grows closer.

  Four

  It’s almost Halloween. Last night I spent three entire hours making popcorn balls and wrapping them in clear plastic and tying the plastic with orange paper bows. Saturday we are all invited to a Halloween party, and I promised I’d help decorate and bring the popcorn balls. Popcorn balls, what a job! Perhaps especially difficult here in this inefficient apartment, where I have so few pots and pans and utensils and no measuring cups or candy thermometer. It seemed to take hours for the syrup to reach the hard-ball stage and I thought: What on earth am I doing here stirring over a hot stove late at night like a cranky witch? Adam and Lucy are only four and two; they don’t know that popcorn balls are a customary Halloween treat. But after all, I know, and I like tradition, ritual, ritual food, and it eases the ache of homesickness a bit to celebrate as if we were at home. They don’t have Halloween here in Finland, but a Finnish woman who lived in the States for a few years enjoyed the custom so much that she has decided to hold Halloween in her own home, every year, for friends and their children. So I spent three hours last night making popcorn balls, and actually I enjoyed it. When I was rolling the balls together, hands coated with butter, picking up the hot candied corn, which I had spread out in the three metal baking pans, I even smiled to myself and dreamed a bit. In just a few years, I thought, Adam and Lucy will be able to help me. Last night they were tucked away safely in their beds, out of the way of the possible harm of bubbling hot syrup. But in a few years—a picture came into my mind. An October evening back home. Crisp air and golden leaves. Adam and Lucy and I in the kitchen, working and laughing together, cheating and eating the sweetened popcorn as we worked. Adam would be interested in the candy thermometer, he already likes things like that, and back home I have a candy thermometer. Lucy would be talking—even now she talks incessantly—about school, and the bats and pumpkins and witches her class would make out of orange and black construction paper. We all three would have butter on our hands, we all three would roll up the crackly balls. Perhaps we would be making them for our own party. Somewhere—in the next room, probably, in front of a fire of applewood—a big dog would be sleeping. After making the popcorn balls we would clean up the kitchen—the children would cheerfully help; it was after all my fantasy—and then go in to sit by the fire. The children would lie next to the dog, stroking his black silky coat (he would be a Newfoundland), and I would tell them a Halloween story, perhaps “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and we would all drink apple cider.

  How funny that I didn’t fantasize a man around somewhere, in an easy chair by the fire, reading the newspaper, or even in the kitchen, joking with us and helping.

  Perhaps I didn’t want to spoil my lovely dream by having to decide just which man would be in the chair. Charlie? I don’t know. Stephen? I don’t know. I do know I certainly didn’t imagine Stephen’s children, Carrie and Joe, in the picture.

  I met the woman who is giving the Halloween party at a Finnish-American Women’s Club meeting which I went to out of desperate need to meet someone who speaks English and has small children. Rija is interesting to me for several reasons, mostly because she is so very nice, but partly because she is also a stepmother. And much more a stepmother than I ever was.

  Rija married an American just one year ago. He was a handsome man, in Helsinki on some sort of business, and they fell in love and were married in Finland just four weeks after their first meeting. She is Finnish and loves Finland, but agreed to live with him in the States. He took her home with him to Chicago, and for a while they lived happily. One Sunday afternoon the doorbell of their apartment rang, and when Rija opened it, she saw two little boys standing in the hallway, crying. She called to her husband, who came to the door and said in amazement that the two boys were his sons by a former marriage. He couldn’t imagine what they were doing there, but when he saw the little suitcases full of clothes he began to guess. The children had been abandoned by their mother, and although Rija’s husband had very good connections with the government and other police agencies, no one could find out where the mother had gone. They had of course taken the boys in, and Rija, after the first shock, had gladly played mother to them. They were attractive little boys, only five and three years old. She decided that she would have a baby herself, now that she had so suddenly accumulated a little family. But before she could get pregnant, something else happened.

  Her husband worked for the United States narcotics agency; she had known that when she married him. One night they were all coming home from a drive-in movie. The children were asleep in the backseat of the car. Rija was curled up in the front seat, her head on her husband’s lap. They had been mar
ried almost seven months. It was dark. Her husband stopped the car, got out to open the garage door of the apartment building. A huge figure emerged from the dark. Rija sat up just in time to see the figure raise a pipe above her husband’s head. She screamed, “Michael!” and her husband turned so that the pipe, coming down, broke his shoulder instead of his skull. Rija, insane with fear and anger, grabbed the loaded pistol which she knew her husband kept in the glove compartment of the car and jumped from the car and ran to the man. She pointed the gun at the man with the pipe and told him she would kill him if he tried to run. Apparently she sounded serious enough with her accented English; the man did not run. Her husband lay moaning at her feet and her husband’s children sat crying in the car and the man with the pipe stood staring at her while Rija stood on a Chicago sidewalk screaming, “Help! Police! Help! Murder!” Finally other apartment lights came on, finally a police car came. She told the police the story; the police checked her husband’s identification papers. They took the man with the pipe away. Later she had to go to the police station to fill out papers. She agreed to be a witness at a trial.

  Three days later the police informed her that there had been some problem, some accident, the man with the pipe had escaped from jail. She had thought, Escaped from jail? How? She asked her husband, who was in the hospital with his broken shoulder, and he said that he was sorry to get her involved, but in the international narcotics world all things were possible. The next day she took her husband’s children with her to get groceries. She came back in time to see part of her apartment on fire. Firemen arrived quickly and put the blaze out, but much damage was done. The next day she went down to the locked garage to get the car, and the car had been destroyed, the fender and hood and trunk and doors hammered in, the windows and windshield completely broken, pieces of jagged glass sticking up. She had called a taxi and taken the children to the hospital to ask her husband what to do, and he was gone. Her husband, Michael, had disappeared. The police couldn’t find him. No one could find him.

  Ten days after her husband disappeared, Rija and her husband’s two sons were in Helsinki. Fortunately her husband had some money in the bank and her signature was on the account card. The police had been instrumental in helping her get passports for the two boys. Now she lives in a rented apartment with the boys, and she thinks she has enough money to live on for a year. After that she doesn’t know. Supposedly people are looking throughout the States for her husband and his first wife. On her worst days, when the boys are sick and whiny, she suspects that Michael and his first wife are somewhere together on a Caribbean island, laughing because they’ve managed to get someone else to take care of their kids. She thinks they might show up to claim the boys in a few years. But the boys are nice, and handsome. Rija is sure her husband loved them; she is sure her husband loved her. She thinks he will come for all of them if he is alive. She waits. The boys like her. They are happy. She likes them, but she doesn’t love them, and she certainly isn’t doing what she meant to do. Children don’t go to school in Finland until they are seven, and she can’t afford preschool for them. She is stuck in a small apartment with someone else’s children, and it is not what she wants to do. She thinks it’s crazy. When I first heard her story, I felt nearly sick with guilt, as an American, and I thought she would hate people from the States. But she doesn’t. She says she loved the way her husband treated her, the way he gave her both respect and freedom, and if she could, she would marry another American in a minute. She holds no grudge against the United States; instead she plays Sonny and Cher records constantly, and sends money back to Chicago so that former neighbors will send the children Sesame Street books.

  She is giving the little Halloween party to make the boys happy and to bring some American gaiety into their lives. And after all, she has to do something with her intelligence and energy. She speaks seven languages fluently: Finnish, Swedish, Russian, English, French, German, and Danish. She was, before her garbled marriage, an interpreter for businesses. She is also an artist, although it’s possible that she doesn’t realize yet just how very good she is. When she finishes a canvas, a gallery in Helsinki always takes it, and it always sells quickly. But she doesn’t have much time to paint these days. She writes letters to federal agencies in the States asking for her husband or his first wife, and she stays in a small Helsinki apartment and takes care of her husband’s boys. They call her “Mother.” “Aiti.” “Mommy.” She didn’t tell them to call her that, but she doesn’t know how to ask them to stop.

  Caroline and Catherine never called me “Mommy” or “Mother,” of course, and Lord knows I never wanted them to. Oh, but there was one time, the second summer they were in Kansas City with us. That summer I had managed to get them to meet some other girls in the neighborhood, and they made some good friends, and we were all a lot happier. One rainy afternoon I had taken five little girls, ages seven to eleven, shopping at a big covered mall in Kansas City. We were walking along, looking at windows full of toys or clothes or shoes or pet food, when I noticed further on down the mall a student I had had the previous year. He had been one of my favorite students; I suppose the ones you convert always are. He had begun my freshman lit class disdainfully, a big bad jock totally uninterested in anything intellectual, and he had finished the course with an A. He had started writing poetry himself, good strong stuff; he slipped the poems to me privately, for comments. When one poem was published in the college paper and he got more praise than mockery for writing it, for writing poetry, big football boy that he was, he said he thought he’d switch from a phys ed to an English major. I hadn’t seen him after that, not for a full year.

  “Girls,” I said, after I spotted the young man at the other end of the mall, “I see someone I know. I want to go say hello for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  I left them looking at a window full of stuffed animals. As I walked toward the football poet, he turned and looked at me, and smiled, and stood there just looking at me. He was handsome even with, or perhaps because of, his broken nose. For the first time I realized that I was physically attracted to him. And that he was physically attracted to me. He was after all only five years younger than I, and a good foot taller. Much bigger.

  When I was next to him I couldn’t think of anything to say. What I wanted really was to rise on my toes and kiss him right in the middle of the mall.

  “Hello,” I finally said. “How are you?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Fine.”

  We stood and looked at each other and grinned for a while.

  “I’m an English major now, you know,” he said. “I even got an A from Corbin’s course.”

  Corbin was the toughest prof the English department had. His course was a sort of filter to keep out the students who wouldn’t be good as English majors.

  “That’s great,” I said. “But I’m not surprised.”

  We grinned at each other for a few more minutes.

  “Listen, are you busy right now?” he asked. “Want to come get a cup of coffee or something …?”

  “Sure,” I said. What was I thinking of? I wasn’t thinking at all. I walked off next to him, breathless.

  We were at the door of the mall, going out to the parking lot and his car, when suddenly five little girls of various shapes and sizes came running up to me.

  “Mommy! Mommy!” they all yelled.

  “Mommy, I found the neatest skirt!”

  “Mommy, I want the dolly in that window back there!”

  “Mommy, can I have an ice cream cone?”

  “Hey, yeah, I want one, too, Mommy!”

  “Hey, Mommy, I found the neatest shirt that Daddy would just love!”

  The last was from Cathy, who was hanging on my arms and literally pulling me away from the football poet’s side. All the other girls, Caroline included, were giggling and snorting and acting generally half-assed because of their joke, but Cathy was deadly serious. She looked me right in the eye and kept pulling at me
until I almost lost my balance. She had seen or scented something; she knew something the others didn’t know.