Stepping Page 22

  For a moment the glare of that bright clean room startled me. I came back. I said, “Charlie, I’m going to have a baby.”

  Charlie said, “Do you want something? For the pain?”

  “I’m thirsty,” I said. “If they could just let me have something to drink—”

  Someone wet my lips with a moist cloth, and I said “Thank you,” and then the fist inside my stomach reached up and pulled me down.

  “Push,” someone said. “Really push. Get mad.”

  Someone in white accidentally hit the mirror so that I saw my face. The sight shocked me. I was red and shiny-looking, and it seemed I had two chins, for I was digging my chin down into my chest as I pushed. I saw that I was not Zelda; I had become something else, not even a woman, but a female creature, sister to cows and bitches and tornadoes and floods, a shining hot dynamo exploding life.

  “DON’T LOOK AT ME!” I screamed, and I grabbed the handguards of the table, and let go of myself, and arched my back, and pushed. I felt that if I pushed with one more ounce of strength I would burst apart and set the delivery room and everyone in it on fire.

  “Keep your butt pressed against the table. Keep your bottom down,” a nurse said to me.

  I pushed and screamed again.

  Charlie said to the doctor, “Is she okay?”

  The doctor said, “Look, the head is crowning.”

  I stood on a high red cliff and pushed myself off, and shouted with joy as I fell.

  “Zelda, Zelda, it’s all right,” Charlie was saying, pressing his hands on my shoulders. I was shaking all over.

  “Of course it’s all right!” I shouted, and pushed again, this time with a final furious, elated force that welled up easily within me. My baby slid out. He cried.

  When he cried, I became myself again. It was very strange. I became myself again, a queer, wild, slightly drunk self, but still Zelda. “He’s here!” I shouted. “Let me hold him! Oh, too bad it’s over, that was fantastic— Look. Look. What a funny-looking little thing he is.”

  So Adam was born. My son. Everything after that was reasonable and sweet: the tiny nightclothes and diapers, the trusting glazed gaze, the beautiful fist clenching my finger, and Charlie’s tears running freely down his face as he watched the two of us together, as he held his new son. It was a special time, those first few days of Adam’s life, and Charlie and I shared it together, like a fresh sweet fruit. I talked about feeding schedules and burping with nurses and other mothers and wrote letters to friends, and learned to nurse, and soon was a nice normal person again. Yet sometimes as I looked out my bedroom window on the fifth floor of the hospital, I would long to open it, to break it open, and to throw my body out into the cold wild air, so that I could experience it again: the terror, the pain, the wild spinning fall, the soaring on the back of some universal power that dipped me deep into the oceans of fear and joy, that soared me high into the skies of an agonizing joy where words can never go. I felt sorry for Charlie because he was a man. I knew I would have to have another child. I wanted to go soaring again.

  Seven

  “You are being ridiculous. You are being irrational. Zelda, get hold of yourself, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I am getting hold of myself, dammit. And I am not being irrational. You’re the one being irrational. You’re being irrational and insensitive. Ouch—oh shit; oh, that was a good one.”

  “If we don’t leave right now, you’ll have the baby in the car.”

  “Then call Mrs. Justin and ask her to come over.”

  “We don’t need Mrs. Justin. Catherine and Caroline are here. Now, God dammit, stop it!”

  “Charlie, please, Charlie, I’m begging you. I can’t leave Adam alone with them. Please don’t make me leave Adam alone with them. Oh, fuck shit shit; oh, it hurts. Charlie, please.”

  “Zelda, my love. Lie down a minute. Stop talking and do your breathing and listen to me a minute. Adam will be just fine with the girls. They’ll take good care of him. You’re being crazy.”

  “Charlie. We are a good ten-minute drive from the nearest person. Your daughters have come to visit us only two times in the past two years, and they have not spoken one word to Adam, or held him, or smiled at him, in all that time. Just because you are paying them for helping doesn’t mean they’ll be nice to him. He’s just a little two-year-old boy, and he doesn’t even know who they are, and his mommy and daddy are going away to get a new baby. He needs someone he trusts. He’s got to have security today. Please. He loves Mrs. Justin. Please call her.”

  “Zelda, you make the girls sound like monsters.”

  “Well, they are monsters. They are spoiled, selfish, inconsiderate, unloving, hateful, spiteful monsters.”

  “Zelda, calm down. We’ve talked about this before. There’s bound to be some jealousy. You can’t expect them to love your children.”

  “Who’s asking for love? I’m asking for a smile now and then, maybe a hug or a nice hello? Jesus, Charlie, just think about how they were last night when they arrived. Have you ever seen two more sullen faces? Did they speak to Adam or smile at him? Did they offer to help me with anything? My God, they just sat there at the dinner table looking surly while I fixed the meal and set the table and did the dishes. When I brought Adam downstairs to say good night they didn’t even look at him, they just kept staring at the television. You think they’re going to cuddle and kiss him today? Not very damned likely.”

  “It’s their age. And it’s a tough situation. You’ve got to understand. It probably looks as though I love Adam more than I love them because I’m always holding him on my lap. He can say, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and run to me and I’ll pick him up, and they can’t do that anymore. They’re bound to resent him.”

  “Well, dammit, Charlie, if you know they’re bound to resent him, why in God’s name did you ask them to come up here and help us now? If they resent Adam, they’re going to hate taking care of him while we have a new baby.”

  “Look. We’ve been through this before. Caroline is in college and Cathy will start in another year. They need money. They need lots of money for tuition and books and clothes. I don’t have lots of money. I can’t afford to pay for help for you and the farm and Adam and take care of their needs, too. It is only sensible that they come up now; it’s summer, they don’t have jobs, they ought to earn some of the money I give them.”

  “Oh, Charlie, I understand all that, and I wanted it to be that way, too. But it’s not working out that way, can’t you see? Charlie, please. I hurt. Listen, let’s do this, let’s make a deal. I know you’ve got to go to that fucking conference, and I want you to go. I’ll manage here somehow after the baby’s born, when I can be here to watch the girls with Adam. But please, today, please let’s have Mrs. Justin come. Let Adam be with someone he loves and trusts for this one day. Please.”

  I was sobbing. The sun was rising and I was rolling on the floor in my summer nightgown, sobbing. My contractions were coming every two minutes. The hospital was a good twenty-five minutes away, but I would not leave Adam, my helpless sleeping son, I would not leave him alone with my stepdaughters. I could not.

  “Zelda …” Charlie began again.

  “Charlie. Help me. I hurt.”

  Charlie went to the phone and dialed Mrs. Justin, our good old reliable babysitter. She was a grandmother who lived on the same farm she had been born on seventy years before, and she was the closest thing to a grandmother that Adam had, because Charlie’s own mother was dead now and my mother was a snazzy businesswoman, not at all interested in coming back to a New Hampshire farm to help with diapers and housework and gardening.

  “She’s coming right away,” Charlie said to me. “Now let me help you get up off the floor. Let’s get you to the car.”

  “I don’t want to leave until she’s here.”

  “All right. Let’s just get you down to the car.”

  “I want to go look at Adam before I go.”

  We shuffled slowly into his room. I bent
and clutched the bedpost and panted through a contraction as I looked at him. He was wearing light blue summer pajamas, and his hair was curly from the heat, and his face was rosy and flushed.

  “My little boy,” I whispered.

  “Don’t wake him up,” Charlie said. “Come on, Zelda. He’ll be fine.”

  As we slowly made our way down the stairs, I thought how different the house looked this time: in the two years since I had had Adam, I had devoted myself entirely to the house. I had scraped off old paint and wallpaper in each room and repainted, rewallpapered. I had learned to garden, to can and freeze, and cook and bake. I had the house looking lovely, perfectly lovely, and I had the cookie jar full of homemade oatmeal-raisin cookies, and the freezer full of nutritious casseroles. If I hadn’t been roaringly happy during those two years, at least I had been content, fatly, gooily content, loving my living child and then the new kicking secret in my tummy. I had done the best I could to live up to a certain fantasy, a certain image in my head of motherhood and the good life on a farm.

  Charlie had been in paradise. He had taught at the university, and spent his free time chopping firewood for the winter or helping with the garden. He enjoyed writing in his study and stepping out into the fresh country air whenever he needed a break. And Adam bloomed on the farm like one of its natural wildflowers. He toddled after butterflies, and ran splashing in the pond, and tried to catch frogs, and wandered through fields of grass higher than his head. I sat in the sun reading all the useless pleasurable novels I had deprived myself of during my PhD-oriented years, and Adam dug in the sand or chased chickens or played with our cats. From time to time I surfaced enough to go around to the colleges within driving distance to see if they needed anyone to teach, and they didn’t. It was 1975. The money was disappearing from colleges and universities. Jobs were getting harder and harder to find. I moved slowly, read and rested, took care of my little boy, fixed up the house, and grew a new baby inside me.

  I was quite content. I felt myself in a sort of resting place, a holding pattern. I knew in a few years I’d get back out to the real world to study and work and teach, but I had had enough of that for a while. I was ready for babies and a farm. I accumulated loose milky flesh about my body, and a corresponding loose milky joy around my life. I relaxed. I expanded, my whole body expanded, as one does when lying in the warm sun on a summer’s holiday.

  And Charlie loved Adam.

  I had been preparing myself for the opposite. Adam would be an interference, I knew, he would be noisy and bothersome and demanding. Charlie was now forty-five; he had one family almost grown-up; he would be bored with babies, I thought. But a great fierce bond seemed to spring up between my son and my husband immediately, perhaps because Charlie held Adam the first few moments of his life, and looked into his dark satisfied eyes and felt the infinite perfection of the small body. I don’t know. How can it be explained? Charlie loved his son, and I loved Charlie even more because he did love his son, and there we were, all of us in love with each other. Charlie carried Adam everywhere in a backpack as he planted trees that spring or dug the soil in the garden or went for walks in the woods. He put him on the floor in his study while he worked. He brought him little toys. He took him with him when he drove off to town for errands. He held him on his lap while he ate. He was truly in love with his child. Of course it helped that Adam was still a baby, not old enough to whine or talk back or tear up important papers. Later, love would be tempered by righteous irritation. But that first year we were all in love, and it was a sloppy, gooey year, perhaps the happiest year of our lives.

  Caroline and Cathy did not come up to see Adam as a baby. We called them from the hospital the second day of Adam’s life to tell them about him, and they both said the same thing: “Oh.” No giveaway tone to the voice, no other words. We thought, Are they happy? Sad? Bored? Charlie wrote each girl a long letter telling her how much he loved her, why she was special to him, how he would always love her. I sent two silver bracelets with a silver heart-shaped charm saying “I love you,” on one side and “Adam Campbell, January 30, 1973,” on the other to Caroline and Cathy. As far as I know, the girls received them, that is the bracelets never came back in the mail; but the girls never mentioned them and never wore them. We called and wrote several times, asking the girls to come up and visit that spring; we now lived so close. Charlie offered to go down to pick them up by car, or to send them bus tickets, but there were always excuses. School, tests, parties, the possibility of jobs. I felt bad that they didn’t come up. I thought that if they could just see Adam, small innocent baby, they would like him, if not love him. And I missed the girls, missed their jokes and gossip and simply the sight of them, so tall and slim and pretty. They had become a part of my life, and their absence was noticeable. But I didn’t want to force their presence, and Charlie didn’t want to, either.

  At the beginning of the summer Charlie received cool little letters from the girls saying that they would prefer not to come visit us that summer. They said they both had a lot of babysitting jobs, and their mother’s mother, their grandmother, was coming up to visit that summer, and they wanted to spend as much time as possible with her now that she was growing old, and they wanted to spend as much time as possible with their friends. They were sensible letters. I was sad they weren’t coming, but also relieved. I remembered the negative side of our Amsterdam stay, when the girls turned bitchy at the sight of housework. The farm and Adam both required a lot of work. I didn’t need the girls around, scowling at the sight of work.

  It was the end of December and Adam was eleven months old before Caroline and Cathy ever saw him. They had finally condescended to come visit us at the end of the Christmas vacation; probably their decision was based on the fact that Charlie told them he was giving them a car. It had been my idea, the car; I thought such a grand expensive gift would prove to them that Charlie still loved them in spite of the fact that he had a new child. I also thought it would make it easier for them to come to see us. And, truly, I thought it simply would be very nice for them to have. It would be in Caroline’s name because she was older and had a license, but Cathy would eventually be able to use it, too. Charlie and I spent hours looking through car lots at good used cars and finally settled on a very swanky red VW Beetle convertible. It was a cute car, squat and classy; lovable. I couldn’t wait for the girls to have it.

  Charlie drove down to Hadley to pick the girls up; he drove the red VW, and at my suggestion stuck a big red bow on the hood. Later he told me that the girls were appropriately thrilled, in their own quiet standoffish way; they seemed to be more upset that it was only one car and they would have to share it than happy that the car was theirs at all. This made Charlie feel sad and mad, and their drive back to our farm was not as gay as I had predicted it would be.

  I stayed home that day, taking care of Adam and fixing a huge party dinner and wandering through the house admiring my work. I had had only a year there, and during that year I had had a baby, but I had still accomplished a lot of redecorating. The house, except for some old peeling ceilings and a few shabby rooms here and there, looked lovely. I had put fresh evergreens from our farm all around the house, tied with red ribbon, and we had cut our tree from our own land and it still stood in the front parlor, with Caroline’s and Cathy’s presents under it. Adam was starting to walk, and was full of giggles. He was plump and happy; he had a six-toothed smile that I thought no one could resist.

  He was taking a nap when the girls arrived late in the afternoon with Charlie. I had put him down late especially for that reason, thinking it would be good for us four to have some time alone, without the new person around. Charlie’s daughters came into the house and let me kiss them on their icy cheeks: they were taller, slimmer, and much lovelier than they had been in Amsterdam. They were young women. They were absolutely gorgeous. “How lovely you have become!” I kept saying to them, I couldn’t help saying to them. “Oh, aren’t you happy to be so beautiful!” I wa
s really happy to see them. I almost cried out of sheer delight. These were my—my what? I had no word for it. Not daughters, not relatives, not friends, but my somethings, creatures that I had known for a long time and helped and influenced and cared for.

  Caroline and Cathy turned eyes on me that were as cold as the December air. They held their bodies stiffly. They stared at me as if I were a stranger, as if they didn’t know me, and didn’t like me, and didn’t plan to. They’ll warm up, I told myself, but they didn’t, not for a second of the two long days they were there.

  I poured myself a stiff scotch and suggested we go in by the tree. It was too dark and cold to go out for a walk or a ride; too early to eat. I hoped that opening their other presents would brighten them up a bit. Charlie and I had both written the girls letters during that long year, and we had mentioned Adam only briefly. The girls had never answered any of the letters. I think I had regretted that the most, that Caroline, especially Caroline, who had written me such long intimate, openhearted young letters, had stopped writing to me completely. But when Christmas came around, a new problem presented itself: we did not know what the girls wanted as presents. We had written them to ask; they had not responded. We did not know their sizes, interests, desires. So their major present that year was the car. I bought them each an Indian cotton top, and two or three books, and crazy socks with each toe made and colored separately. Because I was into my earth mother stage, and because I thought handmade gifts would show love because they showed time instead of money given, I knitted them each long mufflers with matching caps.