Stepping Page 13

  “Come on, Mommy,” she said, “Let’s go buy a present for Daddy.”

  She was only seven years old, but her radar was working even then.

  There was nothing I could do but laugh. I had absolutely forgotten Charlie’s daughters and their three friends. I had also absolutely forgotten Charlie. I felt rather foolish. I also felt rather sad, rather trapped, rather old.

  Goodbye, football poet.

  “Sorry,” I smiled at him. “I forgot all about the girls. I’d better get them ice cream cones.” I didn’t even think to tell him that I wasn’t the mommy of all those girls, that I wasn’t anyone’s mommy at all.

  “See you around,” the boy said, and went on out the big glass door into the hot summer day.

  “Pretty funny joke,” I said to the girls, and they all cracked up again, giggling hysterical giggles and holding their sides. I bought them all ice cream cones.

  I think that was the first, last, and only time they called me “Mommy”; I know it was. They had a mommy already, after all; they didn’t need another. And physiologically it was only barely possible for me to be their mother. I was twelve years older than Caroline and fifteen years older than Cathy. Also, they looked nothing like me, nothing at all. They were so tall and big-boned and blond and I was so short and dark and small. I couldn’t have been their mommy. And I don’t believe I ever did the things that mommies do. I didn’t worry constantly about their health, for one thing. Dentist and doctor appointments were Adelaide’s responsibility, though Charlie paid the bills. Perhaps only three or four times during all the years they came to stay with us did I ever have to get up in the night to help them when they were sick. During the day—that was a different matter. Their mother had impressed upon them just how very delicate and precious they were, and apparently one of the favorite ritual games in their house was illness. Caroline and Cathy both described being ill with as much enthusiasm as they showed for Christmas. Being ill meant lying in bed, and being completely waited on and pampered, and having presents and medicine and solicitous remarks, and having the TV set in the bedroom all day. I never liked the game much from my vantage point; I got tired of carrying endless glasses of 7UP to the bedroom. Mainly my reaction was one of secret distaste because I knew that usually the girls were faking it. There would be no rise in temperature registered on the thermometer, no cough, no vomiting, no darkness under the eyes to signal sickness. Usually the sickness was preceded by a boring day, or the announcement that Charlie and I had a social engagement the coming night. Then one or the other would feel “feverish” and “achy” and would take to her bed. Back in Massachusetts, in their three-female household, the ritual response to such claims was immediate attention and the dismissal of all other occupations of the day. Being sick in Massachusetts meant: you are special. You are now worth noticing. You are important. Being sick in Kansas City was not so much fun. I suppose I was a wicked stepmother; I didn’t try to make being ill a special event, a wonderful thing. After a while the girls stopped getting sick at our house.

  I never worried about Caroline’s and Cathy’s schoolwork, either, although I read to them and gave them books and introduced them to ballet music and took them to concerts, and so on. I never worried about whether or not they had friends, or the right kind of friends, or any of the zillion little worries a mother has about her child’s social life. Actually, when the girls were not with us, for more or less ten months of the year, I didn’t worry about them much at all. Now it seems that I worry almost constantly about Adam and Lucy. Will it ruin Adam’s life if he goes for these nine months without having any friends? Why won’t he try to get himself dressed in the morning when Lucy, who is two years younger than he, zips right through it all, even puts on her snowsuit and boots? Will Lucy be pretty? I can’t tell, little funny girl with chicken feather hair sticking up all over. I think I’m liberated, but I still want Lucy to be pretty. Pretty people are so pleasant to look at. Will both children survive all the screaming and stomping and crying I do here? It has become terrible. I scream and stomp every day, and tears shoot out from my eyes like bullets from a gun, they are propelled by such an angry force …

  Today a letter arrived from the States from Ellen, Stephen’s wife. All the news fit to print; gossip, Joe’s teeth, Carrie’s colds; how were we liking Finland?; she and Stephen had left the children with grandparents and spent a glorious few days swimming, horseback riding, and hiking in the New Hampshire woods; and Stephen had hired two new full-time people. Both women. One, an older woman with a PhD, who would teach Shakespeare and Renaissance lit; the other, a younger woman still working on her PhD thesis, to join the freshman comp and lit staff. Fall was beautiful in New Hampshire, etc. They were carving lots of pumpkins; did they have Halloween in Finland?

  I felt so sad at heart after I finished Ellen’s letter that I wanted to weep. It was as if the leaden skies of Finland had finally dropped their heaviness down onto my shoulders. I couldn’t bear the burden.

  “I don’t want to go to the Park Auntie’s today,” Adam whined. “I don’t like it there. Just babies go there. I don’t have anything to do there or anyone to talk to.”

  I had just finished reading Ellen’s letter. But if Adam doesn’t go to the Park Auntie’s today, I thought, I will not have a minute alone to think.

  “Oh, sweetie”—first I tried the soft sell—“you always have fun once you’re there. There are dump trucks, shovels, the sand—” It didn’t work. “Adam, you have to go!”

  “But I HATE it!” Adam wailed. “I never get to be alone with you. Lucy gets to be alone with you every afternoon while I’m at school.”

  “But Lucy naps usually, Adam, or has quiet time by herself in her room.” So that I can sit at the kitchen table soaking in the silence, sorting out my thoughts, thinking through things. “I need the mornings to go get groceries. It’s hard to get groceries with you around, honey, and it’s boring for you. I want you to go to the Park Auntie’s.”

  “Yaaaaaah! I don’t want to go!” Adam swept his Legos onto the floor, and they scattered about like plastic fireworks, red, yellow, black, white, and blue pieces skittering across the floor.

  Slap! I slapped his bottom and yelled, “Go to your room, you spoiled little monster!” Then I burst into tears. Lucy, watching it all, ran to Adam and threw her arms around him, trying to kiss and soothe him, but he pushed her away so hard she fell. And of course she cried, then, too.

  I ran to my room and fell on my bed, on the ugly, grimy quilt that came with the bed in this rented apartment, and I cried. I hate myself when I spank Adam; I think it is an unnecessary thing to do. Yet I do it more and more, and right then, instead of remorse, I still felt anger. I had so many emotions colliding inside me that I couldn’t sort them out. Was I so upset because Stephen had had a few romantic days and nights with Ellen? Did I miss pumpkins and crackling fires and football games and pumpkin pies so much? Or was it really that I felt my job had been taken from me at the university; Stephen had given it to another woman. Whatever it was, I needed time and space to think it all out. I felt pressured to the bursting point. Yet I realized that Adam’s complaints were valid. Poor little boy: for two months he hadn’t had one child to play with who spoke his own language and who would openly smile and relate to him. He sees children at his school, but they speak only Finnish and live far away. There are no children his age in the forty-eight apartments in our apartment house here. I know he is lonely. And he is so bright; I should read to him, help him write, paint, create, draw. His preschool is more pre than school, and because of the language problem he is not taught his words or letters. I should spend more time with him, hold him on my lap, gently say, “This is the way you write your last name,” and so on. That would make him happy, I know. But what will make me happy? How do I get rid of this rage? I am overflowing with it, and I’m not sure why. Do I hate Finland so much? Do I love Stephen? Do I hate motherhood? Am I tired of following Charlie around everywhere?

  L
ast night I dreamed a beautiful and erotic dream. I went into a house, and there was Count Dracula, very aristocratic and handsome and mysterious. I fell in love with him and embraced him: merely embraced him, we did not kiss. I yearned to be with him, he was so tempting, and yet I knew everything about him was dangerous and wrong, and yet that only made him more attractive. I finally left his house, to walk in a garden, to think, to try to decide whether I would choose to live with him, really live with him, or not. There were heavy moral and religious questions involved, I knew. I had to do serious thinking, but underneath it all I was sexually stirred and excited as never before. And I was so happy, so exquisitely happy.

  I wonder who Dracula is for me. Help, Freud.

  I wonder if I can get through this gray day without screaming again or spanking one of my children.

  * * *

  I have never hit or screamed at Caroline and Cathy. It would almost undoubtedly have been better if I had; the noise and motion might have broken down some of the barrier that stood between us. In the later years, during the times I felt most bitter and angry, it would have made things much clearer if I had been able to scream at them, but by then the pattern had been too firmly set. And in the early years I felt resentful of them, or angry with them now and then, but I never felt the pure passionate wrath that my own children can call forth from my depths almost daily. A queer thing, this. A queer thing that I should feel so powerfully angry with my own children that I sometimes have to restrain myself from throwing them across the room. I never much yelled at Charlie, though once in a quarrel I threw my Betty Crocker cookbook at him and broke the book’s spine. Yet it was only four days after Adam’s birth that I wailed, “Oh, Adam, will you please shut up!” (Then in horror and remorse I grabbed him up and nursed him again.)

  But in the first year of both my children’s lives anger was rare. It was the second year, and the third, and the fourth, that it really flourished. I was so sure that I would feel nothing but love for them that for a while, when I first felt the anger boiling up inside me, I thought I was going mad. What I didn’t know was that mothers of small children need lobotomies. They need to be able to say, “Dear, would you please get your elbow out of your plate?” and, “Darling, no, you may not play with Mommy’s lipstick, it is not a toy!” and, “Oh no, you wrote all over the wall with Mommy’s new lipstick!” and, “Please don’t climb up my leg and screech right now; this is a long-distance phone call,” and other such phrases at least six thousand times a day. They must be able to say them sometimes simultaneously. They must be able to refrain from making love in the daytime and be prepared to interrupt lovemaking at any moment in the night if a sick child cries or coughs. They must be able to jump quickly at any given second. They must bend and stoop and lift and rock and wrestle, and sit with little feet pressing against their legs. Little feet pressing against Mommy’s legs; how endearing it sounds. And they don’t mean to hurt, they simply can’t keep from moving, and they like to keep in contact with Mommy. But bruises build up anyway, especially on the side of the thighs, where little feet press and push while little hands are sticking little forks up little noses during the process called mealtime. All that is endurable. One doesn’t get really angry over having to say, “Adam, this is the fourth time I’ve asked you to wipe your hands on your napkin instead of your clothes.” One gets really angry on the rainy days, when one’s husband is out of town for three days, lecturing in Copenhagen, and civilization and its beauties seem unimaginably distant to the mother stuck home with small children. Then one gets angry when both children want the star cookie cutter for their play dough, and they won’t share and the phone rings, and when you come back they have mashed play dough into each other’s hair. But mostly one gets angry, really angry, when the children get the parent trapped, so that there is no time in the day to think or read or even pee without a child crying or needing something. And as they get older, they become so disagreeable, they argue and fuss and demand and whine and say, “You’re not my friend.” And they don’t care who you are or what you’ve done in life; they really don’t care at all. They just want more, more of everything, pudding, toys, swinging, more of you. And these are good children, children you love, children who worry when you cry and who say from an airplane, “Oh, look at that big beautiful cloud, that must be God’s cloud!” or when seeing a huge silver moon in a play, “Mommy, how close that moon is. I could run up and put my arms around it and give it to you.” Adam is, after all, the only one in my life who has literally offered to bring me the moon.

  Of course the daily sweetness outweighs the daily nastiness. That is the other side of the story. Children are sweet and real and very, very beautiful. After baths, when Adam and Lucy run around naked, I love watching the way their plump legs and bums move, I love their perfect flesh. Sometimes I think I won’t know how to endure it when I don’t have all this voluptuous, creamy, smooth, silky, perfect flesh to wash and clothe and hold and kiss and smell and see. I think when my children are gone I’ll have to raise horses, dogs, cats, flowers; I’ll have to have beautiful fabrics to wear and sleep and sit on; I’ll have to surround myself with cold beautiful artifacts to endure the sensual deprivation of my warm living babies.

  Because I have friends with young children, I survive. My friends share their feelings, their angers and frustrations, and we dissolve much of our wrath in mutual helpless laughter. Because I have older friends, I know I will also survive the time when Adam and Lucy are grown and gone. In fact, if I can be like my older friends, then I will really flourish. I wanted my children, I want them now, even on the darkest days, but I want to teach, too, and so I watch my older friends like a teenager watching a movie star, and I store hints for the future in the back of my mind.

  Part of my rage here, I suddenly realize, is because I am here, in Finland. It seems impolite and unsporting to criticize one’s host country, but then I must say I don’t feel that Finland is a host country. It wants my husband here, but it doesn’t want me here. It is doing nothing to make my stay here pleasant. Part of it is of course due to what the Finnish travel books call “the Finn’s innate shyness,” which may be shyness to them but comes off as rudeness toward me. When I walk our children to the Park Auntie’s, I feel more and more like a leper; no one smiles at me or says “Paiva.” And the harder thing is that no one speaks to my children, except to tell them to go away. The other part of my difficulty in this country has to do with being a woman and a mother. Today, for example, professors are taking my husband to see Turku, an interesting Finnish town with an ancient castle and cathedral. I am left here in the apartment, alone with my children. My children and I are valueless here; we have no value; and no one will help us. When we arrived here in Helsinki, there was one orientation by the Fulbright people which I was unable to attend because I couldn’t sit through the all-day lectures with my two small children, and since I had just arrived I had not yet been able to locate a babysitter. No one here helped me to find a babysitter. No one told me about the Park Auntie or helped me to find a school for Adam. It was as if I were set down in a cold foreign world and forced to fend for myself, to discover everything for myself, without help, without anyone caring, without anyone even saying hello. They said hello to my husband, of course, formally, at the official Fulbright functions. My husband did not have to stay home with small children. He is a professor. His happiness matters. He matters. The children and I do not. The prejudice here is not against Americans or women as such, but against women with small children. And it is such a subtle prejudice: we are simply ignored, left frightened and alone to fight our trivial daily battles.

  Only because I was lucky enough to have the washing machine in the bathroom break the first time I used it was I able to stay here at all. The machine broke the third day we were here. I called the talonmies—custodian—and a pleasant woman in her thirties came to the apartment. She smiled, she was warm, she spoke perfect English. I nearly wept simply to have her speak to me. She said i
t was a matter of a bad electric connection, and that her husband would fix it that night. During the few minutes she was in my apartment, she told me about the Park Auntie, and later called the Park Auntie to ask her to accept my children even though she officially had room for no more. She told me about babysitters and suggested preschools. She told me about the grocery store, the parks nearby, the library. And I have called her about once a week to ask where to get vitamin C tablets, or what a police form means, or which way to go to find the zoo. Thank God for this woman, whose name is Gunnel; she has truly saved my life. Without this accidental, completely chance acquaintance I don’t know how I could have survived here.

  And yet it’s more than all that, and different: it’s me. If I were not so crazily ambitious, if I did not have this itch to teach, to work with words and people, I could be happy here. I could relax, enjoy myself, enjoy my husband, enjoy my children, enjoy the experience of a foreign country. It is not simply that I am a spoiled American woman who feels seriously deprived without all my electrical luxuries, although that is part of it; heaven knows how I miss Sesame Street. It is that I have managed to become competent in a certain field. It is that I want to work. That is part of who I am, who I have become. I cannot imagine Charlie without his work; the thought is absolutely impossible, a contradiction in terms, Charlie is his work, and without it, without his books and working papers and felt-tip pens and lecture invitations and phone calls and students, without his work he simply would not be Charlie. He would not recognize his face in the mirror; I would not recognize his body in my bed. Charlie is a historian; that is as much a part of the man as his muscles or his breath. I am not so complete—and perhaps, because of the children, I can’t be, for a while—but I still feel that my work is a part of me, an essential part, and without it I am weakened, disabled, blunted. I’ve lost my sense of humor, my sense of delight. Even if Finland were heaven, I would still be grousing because I could not work. It is unfair of me to be here, grumbling and unappreciative; it is doing no one any good. I don’t see why I should stay here. I don’t want to stay here—I won’t.