Stepping Read online

  “Not even me?” Charlie asked.

  “Most of all, not you,” Caroline said. “You left us. I mean I don’t hate you; I love you. But you left us. I guess you thought you were taking just yourself away, but you took everything, it seems, everything. You took yourself, and our home. And in a way you took our mother. She changed. She couldn’t be just for us. She wasn’t home when we came home from school; she was at the university, working. She didn’t spend lots of time with us, she had to see her friends and boyfriends and psychiatrists and such. I know you think you did the best thing for us. But still you left us, so how could I trust you completely?”

  “That’s too bad,” Charlie said. “I’m really sorry, Caroline. Please don’t hold my faults against all men. I—I did do it the only way I thought best for all of us.” He was quiet a moment, thinking.

  “I like men!” Cathy volunteered. “I have lots of boyfriends. And even though Mother hates you, Dad, don’t worry, cause I love you anyway. I can see why Mother hates you, but I love you, and I always will.”

  I sat silently through the conversation. It was a rare one, for the girls seldom discussed love and hate face-to-face. I kept hoping that Caroline or Cathy might say, “And we’re glad you married Zelda. It’s been neat knowing her.” But no one mentioned me at all. I felt like what I was: an interchangeable part.

  I still longed for a child of my own. I was still determined to have one. But that summer the desire was subdued. I was excited about teaching again. And I told myself that I was only twenty-eight; I still had a lot of time left, I could really establish myself at the junior college, become a part of it, and then have a baby. For once it seemed that I had my life in control, that I was doing what I wanted to do, that I was going where I wanted to go. I was happy.

  Six

  “No! No, I won’t be ‘reasonable’! You be reasonable! What you’re asking me to do is to give up everything in order to have nothing!”

  It was April 1972, and I was yelling. I was yelling at Charlie. In February he had been offered a prestigious chair at a university in New Hampshire. Now the time had come to let them know his decision. He wanted to move, of course. I didn’t. I didn’t want to move at all.

  “I didn’t know that you thought of your relationship with me as nothing,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, Charlie, that’s not fair. I don’t think of our relationship as nothing. I love you. I love you. But I love my work, too. You can have me and your work. Why can’t I have you and my work?”

  “You could finish your PhD at the university there. They’ve got a good English department.”

  “I don’t want to finish my PhD. I want to teach.”

  “You could probably teach there, somewhere. There are surely junior colleges and small colleges in the area.”

  “Charlie, you know how it is these days. A thousand English majors are wandering the continent, looking for work. There are no jobs. You have to know people. I don’t know anyone in New Hampshire. And I want to stay here. I like it here. Wilbur likes my work; he’s going to give me tenure. Me. Tenure. I could stay here forever and teach and help develop the department, even influence the development of the college. I love it. It’s my work. How can you ask me to give it up?”

  “How can you ask me to turn down the Wallace Chair? It’s one of the greatest honors a historian can have. And I’m tired of the department here. I’ve outgrown it—”

  “Oh, Charlie, I know, I know. But—”

  “And there’s the matter of money. The Wallace Chair would give us more income than both of our salaries here.”

  “But I don’t care about the money. My life doesn’t revolve around money. Besides, I want to be making my own money. It may not be much, but it’s very important to me to make my own money.”

  “Look, Zelda, be realistic. We’re just making it now, even with your money. In another year Caroline will start college. And then Cathy. The only way I can send them to college is to make more money.”

  “You could write more books—”

  “Oh, darling, you know how little my books bring in. And my work is growing more and more philosophical and difficult; only a few will be interested in it. I’ve got a reputation, and my writing will secure that. But it won’t send the girls to college.”

  “So. We send your daughters to college and you get a prestigious position and I get nothing.”

  “There are other things in the world besides teaching. You could work in some other field. You could—”

  “Oh, Charlie, stop it. You’ve won. You’ve beaten me down. We’ll move. But Jesus Christ, I hate it.”

  “Zelda, don’t cry. Zelda, don’t. Zelda, believe me. I don’t want you to be so unhappy. Zelda, I love you. I want you to be happy. Zelda, listen. You could have a baby.”

  During the first weeks of June, Charlie and I and a moving company moved us to New England. Once Charlie had said the magic words, everything seemed to fall into place. We sold our Crestwood house and the Ozark farm and spent Easter vacation in New Hampshire, looking for a new home. We found what seemed to us a small paradise: thirty acres of land with a rushing brook, an old apple orchard, two fairly usable barns, and a lovely old colonial house. The house was red brick with green shutters and slate walks. It had four fireplaces and four bedrooms. Charlie and I would share the largest room; I thought I would fill the remaining bedrooms with children. I would have at least three, I thought, and perhaps, since there was room, six. I would grow our own vegetables, make our own applesauce, and raise healthy, laughing children.

  In April, after our decision to move to New England, Charlie received an invitation to teach at a university in Amsterdam. We decided that we wanted to go; we had enjoyed Paris, and we agreed that it wouldn’t be so easy to travel once we had children. Charlie’s department in New Hampshire was willing to let him have the fall semester off so that he could go to Amsterdam; he would start his teaching duties in January. It all worked out, so easily. We felt certain that we were doing exactly the right things.

  I planned to become pregnant sometime while in Amsterdam, perhaps in December, so that I would have time to work on the inside of our house in the spring, and to plant and harvest my first real garden. Instead, to my amazement, I found that I was pregnant in June, one month after I had stopped taking the Pill. I almost couldn’t imagine how it had happened. I had been having intercourse for so many years without any noticeable result that I thought getting pregnant would be a more momentous event than it was. I didn’t know when I conceived; there was no heart-stopping, heart-starting moment. By the time I was aware of it in early June, it had already happened. I sat for hours staring at my flat tummy, talking to it as if it were a stranger with a secret and willful life of its own, which after all it was.

  It was as if I were the first woman ever to become pregnant. The world spread out in lovely waves from my stomach. I wouldn’t have traded places with kings. I missed teaching, my students, my colleagues, my office and papers and books, the thought of a settled future of teaching, but all this didn’t matter quite so much anymore. I listened to my stomach, noted each slight change, and began to read books on natural childbirth. I had gotten pregnant so easily that it seemed, along with everything else, to confirm my feelings that Charlie and I were doing everything right, going in the right direction.

  Caroline and Cathy came to the farm in the last days of June. They were now seventeen and fourteen. Teenage girls. Caroline had her braces off and her smile was stunning. Such perfect, even, white teeth. Her blond hair had grown to her shoulders, and she now stood a good three inches taller than I. Walking along beside her, I felt like a dark little peasant escorting an Amazon princess. Cathy still had her braces, but she was pretty, and she was seriously interested in boys, even more than Caroline. Both girls oohed and aahed when they saw the big old house, the apple orchard, the rolling green pasture. But it was obvious that farm life was going to be a little too quiet for them. Our neighbors lived far away, and were o
lder people who kept to themselves. The little town where we got groceries was scenic, but dull. There was nothing exciting to interest a teenage girl. They were too old to spend their days making up silly plays and too young to go off on their own to the bigger town, where the university was, twenty miles away. Even the first day Charlie and I could tell they were bored and restless. Physiology was taking over their lives just as it had taken over mine.

  We didn’t tell the girls that I was pregnant simply because I was superstitious about it until I was four or five months along, as if speaking of the baby would cause it to disappear.

  “Look, girls,” Charlie said the fourth day they were there, “this can’t be much fun for you. All Zelda and I will be doing this summer is painting and scraping off old paint and fixing fences and unpacking. If you want to stay and help, I’ll pay you for the work you do. But I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you go back and spend the summer with your mother and your friends, and then come spend the semester with us in Amsterdam?”

  The girls stared first at Charlie and then at each other, surprise and hope and fear spreading across their faces.

  At last, almost whispering, Cathy spoke first. “We’d have to be home for Christmas. Mother made us promise that no matter what we’ll always spend Christmas with her.”

  “Of course you can go home for Christmas,” Charlie said. “Look, why don’t I call Adelaide right now and see what she thinks?”

  What Adelaide thought, after an hour’s polite persistence on Charlie’s part, was that yes, that would be all right. She could hardly refuse a European experience twice for her girls, especially since the orthodontist bills were paid and Charlie promised to keep the child-support checks going to her even when the girls were with us in Amsterdam. And she was happy at the thought of having the girls with her once for the entire summer. She was not pleasant on the phone with Charlie, but she wasn’t hysterically raging, either; it was as if she had worked a few things out, had reached if not a beautiful at least a calm resting place. The next day the girls went back down to Massachusetts—their home was now only a three-hour drive from our home—and we didn’t see them again until September, when we all flew to Amsterdam.

  Charlie and I flew to Amsterdam first and got settled in our apartment. We had a beautiful apartment right on the Prinsengracht and the Leidsestraat, looking over the prince’s canal and the gay street where trams ran and calliopes played. In September the trees were still green, and they arched over the canal as perfectly as if drawn there by an artist, and ducks swam in the water and gulls dipped in the air. Amsterdam was full of museums and concerts and ballets and great shops and things to see. I knew we would all be happy.

  And we all were happy, but not at first. At first we were all miserable, for a while.

  When we arrived in Amsterdam, I was four months pregnant and wearing maternity clothes simply because my regular clothes were too tight and I knew I’d eventually be in maternity clothes and didn’t want to have to pack two sets of things. By then the baby was kicking and I was through having morning sickness, and was feeling totally rosy and fine. I was so happy to be pregnant that I was gay and sexy and silly all the time, and of course Charlie enjoyed that. Somehow we forgot that he had never told Caroline and Catherine about my being pregnant, and I was so used to being pregnant, to looking pregnant, that I didn’t stop to think that I would look different to Caroline and Cathy than I had a few short months before.

  Charlie met his daughters at Schipol airport and brought them back to the apartment, where I was waiting. I had been fixing their room up, as I always did, putting little Dutch presents on the beds and planning what sightseeing we would do first. When the door opened and the three of them walked in, I rose from the sofa, where I had been sitting sorting travel brochures, and went to kiss them. At first they smiled at me, and then their faces changed: they blanched, stopped, looked confused and hurt. Then they turned and looked at each other with that secret resigned put-upon look that they so often in their teenage years had shared. When I kissed them, they turned their cheeks away, and their hello was cool. That is, Caroline’s was cool; Cathy’s was nonexistent. She burst into tears and pushed me away and said, “I want to go home!”

  “What?” I said.

  “What on earth?” Charlie said. He tried to take Cathy in his arms, but she pushed him away. “Cathy, what on earth is the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Cathy said. “Just let me go home.”

  “Look,” Charlie said, “you can’t possibly go home right now. You’ve been flying for hours, you’re exhausted. Let me take you to your bedroom, and you lie down and rest a bit. Then if you still want to go home, you can.”

  Caroline put her arms around Cathy. “Come on, Cath,” she whispered. “Let’s go to our room for a minute. Come on.”

  “Look,” I said, “please tell us what’s wrong. You walk in the door with smiles and suddenly you want to go home. Can’t you please tell us?”

  But the girls drew together, pulled away from me, actually shrank from my touch.

  “I want to go home. I want to be alone,” Cathy cried, and her cries turned into real wracking sobs.

  Charlie led her and Caroline into their little bedroom. I didn’t follow. I heard him shut the door; I heard him put the suitcases down. It was at times like this that I wished I smoked; I longed for something to do to keep my hands busy. Instead I was simply left standing there, the space around me vacant and disturbed. I could hear low voices coming from the girls’ room and I felt crazy with desire to know what they could possibly be saying. Too curious to restrain myself, I crossed to the wall that separated their bedroom from the living room, and pressed my ear against the wall, and listened.

  “Yes, she is going to have a baby,” Charlie was saying. “But that won’t affect our love for you at all.”

  “But I don’t want you to have a baby,” Cathy was sobbing. “It’s not fair. We never had all of you, and now we’ll get even less. You’ll give all your time and love to her baby.”

  “That’s not true,” Charlie said. “I love both of you girls with all my heart. I couldn’t possibly love any other child more. You two are my first children, remember that, I’ve loved you first.”

  “It’s just not fair,” Cathy wailed. “Oh, I want to go home. I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

  “Cathy, baby, please—”

  “Don’t call me baby! I was your baby once, but I’m not anymore. You’ve got yourself a new baby now. A nice new baby who can live in your house and be yours all the time.”

  “Caroline,” Charlie said after a while, “is this the way you feel, too?”

  There was a long silence. I could imagine Caroline sitting on the bed, staring down at the floor, her hands twisting in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “It doesn’t really matter. I don’t care.”

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It’s my fault. I mean we shouldn’t have surprised you with it like this. I should have told you before. But I actually sort of forgot it until now. Zelda sure looks fat and funny, doesn’t she?” That brought a slight, grim, satisfied chuckle from one of the girls. “Zelda’s been wanting to have a baby for a long time—you girls know you both want children when you grow up, I’ve heard you say it a thousand times. Well, Zelda wants children, too. But she loves you, and I love you, and no new child will change that. I was hoping that you would enjoy having a little brother or sister around. I thought it might even be fun for you.”

  “Zelda’s baby will never be my brother or sister.” It was Caroline speaking, and her voice was so hard and cold and sure that it cut me like a knife.

  There was more silence. I leaned against the wall praying for Charlie to say something, to somehow find the right, the perfect words. But after a long while all he said was, “Well, then, I don’t know what more I can say. I’m sorry you both feel this way. I love you both. You know that. I’ll always love you. Zelda loves yo
u. We were planning to have an exciting time here in Amsterdam—the baby isn’t due until the end of February. We were planning to go down to Paris in November, and—well, we had a lot of things planned that we thought you’d enjoy. I think it would be too bad if you deprived yourselves of an experience like this simply because Zelda happens to be pregnant. The baby isn’t even born yet. Why don’t you wait till then to worry?”

  “You’ll never understand,” Cathy said.

  “Perhaps I won’t. Perhaps I can’t. Look, why don’t you both lie down and rest? You’ve been traveling for a long time. You’re exhausted. Just do this for me, lie down and rest, and if you want something to eat or drink, let me know. Then if you still want to go home, you can.”

  I left the wall and walked over to the tiny kitchen area and was busily making tea when Charlie came out of the room. I felt like crying myself; I hadn’t thought at all about how the girls would react to my pregnancy, but this certainly wasn’t the way I would have chosen. I felt sorry for them, and yet already strangely defensive for the unborn child inside me. I didn’t want him or her exposed to the hate of the girls. And I felt really, deeply hurt: if the girls loved me, I reasoned, they should love my child.

  It occurred to me as Charlie crossed the room that I should still not know what the trouble was. I didn’t want Charlie to know that I had been curious enough and devious enough to listen at the bedroom wall. I was afraid my face would show something, everything. I turned my back and looked for teacups.

  “They’re jealous of the baby,” Charlie said, and put his hands on my shoulders and leaned against me. “It’s too bad. I didn’t think, hell, I didn’t give it a thought how they’d react to the baby.”

  “But they’re fourteen and seventeen!” I whispered. “How can they be jealous of a baby? I’d understand it if they were small, but they’re not. They’re almost grown.”