Stepping Read online

  We walk around the apartment building now. Behind the apartment is a lovely wooded area. There are great gray rocks to climb on, and a swing set and sandpile, which of course is now covered with snow, and there is a miniature valley in the midst of the trees where an enormous gray rabbit lives. He is almost the size of a kangaroo, this rabbit, and very brave, and quite handsome in his rather frightening largeness. The children love to see him, we all love to see him; he hops here and there, avoiding us yet somehow playing with us, bouncing here and there to lead us away from his nest. He is gray, and the undersides of his feet, which we see when he hops, are white. But now, as we approach his small wooded area, we have a wonderful surprise. There is the rabbit, “our” rabbit, perking up near a rock, studying us, ready to move, and he is no longer gray. He has turned snow-white.

  “Mommy, Mommy, look at the bunny!” Adam calls. “He’s all white!”

  “It’s marvelous!” I say, and kneel to put my arms around Lucy, to point out to her exactly where the rabbit is sitting. It’s hard to see him against the white snow. “It’s natural camouflage,” I tell Adam. “In the summer he grows gray fur to be the color of the rocks, so that predators can’t see him, and in the winter he turns white. Why do you think he turns white?”

  “Because snow is white,” Adam says impatiently, as if I’ve asked an obviously stupid question, which perhaps I have. “But what’s a predator?”

  “Something that would want to kill a rabbit and eat it,” I say. “A cougar, or a wolf, or a dog, or perhaps a man.” I’m not in the mood for a heavy discussion about predators and guns and death this morning. Wonderfully the rabbit obliges and begins to hop about, and both children shout with joy and chase after him clumsily, wading through the snow.

  Off they go, happily. And it feels good to have them go, for a while. I know that the petty, trivial, yet wearing and down-pulling daily quarrels of ours are necessary, are a preparation. Someday these two little people, my children, will grow and change and want to be separate from me. They will want to leave me, suddenly they will want to leave me more than anything else. An uncontrollable force will push them from me just as fiercely and irrevocably as the force that pushed them from me at their births. The difference of course will be that I won’t be ready for it, no matter when it comes. I will have gotten used to having them around; I won’t want the separation. They will seem too young, or too vulnerable, or I will be needing their companionship, or something. Perhaps by the time they are grown our society will have developed even queerer refinements, and parents will be able to have accouchements during the days the children leave. How nice it would be, I can imagine it; let’s say when Adam is finishing his freshman year in college. He’ll want to leave me, to live on his own. He won’t want to tell me whom he’s dating or what he’s smoking or where he’s working, for a while. And I’ll simply go into a hospital, and sit around in nightgowns eating chocolates and having nurses bring me meals on a tray and give me back rubs. I’ll receive flowers from friends and cards in the mail; the cards will be a sly mixture of congratulations and sympathy. Perhaps by then the greeting card companies will have coy little rhymes for such things:

  Hello, Mother dear, are you feeling queer?

  Now that your child is leaving his home?

  Is he acting unpretty, in fact downright shitty

  Because he wants to be out on his own?

  Don’t worry, don’t fret, and please don’t forget

  That all one’s children must leave the nest.

  Now he’s acting rotten, but that will soon be forgotten

  When he’s learned how to fly along with the rest.

  So don’t worry, don’t fear, your sweet little dear

  Is trying his best to become a man.

  Let him alone, he’s got to leave home,

  It’s all just part of Nature’s Plan.

  These tough days won’t last, they quickly will pass,

  It’s hard when a young one is learning to fly.

  And he’ll be your friend in the future; till then

  Get a prescription for Valium and try not to cry.

  They were going through it then, Caroline and Cathy, through the pains and pangs of coming-of-age. They needed the support of the adults in their lives at the very time that they most needed to break from those adults; they needed the adults to be nicest to them at the time when they, the children, needed to behave most horribly. And there was their mother, Adelaide, with her new important job and her leather briefcase, all happy and self-proud, suddenly like a mother hen that has become a bird of paradise. And there Charlie was with his work, his more and more all-encompassing work, and there I was, of course, with the babies. I know this now, I see this now. In fact, I began to understand when Adam was about three; I’m a quick learner. Once when I was very tired I almost screamed at Adam that I hated him. I didn’t scream it at him, but I did stomp around the kitchen in the middle of the night muttering it to myself as I fixed him some warm milk. And after a while I knew that yes, Caroline and Cathy had acted hatefully toward me at the time of Lucy’s birth; more than that, they had hated me. They had thoroughly and unreservedly hated me. As blood draws sharks and nightmares call up forgotten pain, so their new hatred summoned the old. They hated my new children, their father’s new loves. They hated me for having the children. And finally, at last, they hated me for the old initial sin: for living with their father when they were little girls and needed him still. Finally, at last, it all came out, the grief and fury of their childhood years, the unremitting despair that things would never change; that their Daddy would never come back; that I was the woman in his house. Perhaps they were not conscious of their hate and its deeply rooted reasons; I certainly did not figure it out right away. It was all I could do to survive in the face of it, in the face of that destructive force that rose up from the past to confront me at the time I was most vulnerable, most unable to respond or understand. Because I was their stepmother, I was not able to love them through that time of hate.

  But because I was their stepmother, I did come to love them again. And that, in the end, is the important thing.

  Love. We didn’t see Caroline and Cathy again until a year later. They called up unexpectedly one June morning to ask if they could come up for a visit and bring friends. We said of course. Charlie had written to them sporadically, and paid their bills, and we had sent them small checks for Christmas, but we had not asked them up to see us that summer. Cathy had turned eighteen; now the girls were no longer children who had to come stay with their father during the summer months because of court orders. Charlie was glad that they were coming up; I was not so sure. Lucy was now a year old, and walking and running and cooing and laughing, and Adam was a bright chubby three. I was nervous about seeing the girls again, nervous about having them see my children. I knew that Caroline and Cathy would not apologize for their actions the year before, but I still wanted some sign of regret on their part, some reparation. Yet I knew there would be none. I was not quite sure what to do. I was afraid to see them again, face-to-face. For all I knew, they still hated me, and I was not sure how I felt about them.

  Lucy fell asleep in the early afternoon, and I put her down for her nap. Then, because I was restless and worried, I saddled Liza up and told Charlie to listen for Lucy, and took Adam up on the horse with me and went off for a slow, gentle ride. It was summer, and hot, and lush everywhere, green and fertile and juicy everywhere. We rode across the pasture and up a trail in the woods to a small stream. We stopped there a while, and waded in the water and listened to the silence. Finally we rode back. I unsaddled Liza and turned her loose in the pasture, and took Adam by the hand and led him to the house. The Beetle was parked near the barn; I knew the girls had arrived.

  Our entry into the kitchen was complicated, as the rest of my life would be, by a child’s urgent, uncivilized needs: Adam had to go to the toilet. We walked into the kitchen, saw five people standing there, and suddenly I had to rush off af
ter Adam to help him on the john. When we returned, the introductions were made: Caroline had brought a young man with her. His name was John and he was very tall and rather nondescript, with long hair in a ponytail and blue denim clothes. Cathy had a boy with her, too, a shorter blond named Mike, who had magnificent green eyes. Both girls were slim and tanned and tall and shining. Both girls, it was at once obvious, were in love. Their men were chatting with Charlie about the joys of the country, and the girls listened with obvious, violent contentment. They said hello to me pleasantly, and even smiled and talked to Adam a little bit, and it was as if I were meeting strangers, seeing the girls for the first time. We all drank beers and then went out walking as Charlie showed everyone what he had done to improve the farm, and our garden, and the new chicken shed, and so on, and then we came in and I fixed dinner. Incredibly, unbelievably, Caroline and Cathy played with Lucy and Adam while I cooked. They did it as easily, as easefully, as if there had never been any tension, any hatred, any discord, the year before. They didn’t kiss and cuddle the children, but they did treat them nicely, they did talk and laugh with them, they bounced Lucy on their knees.

  John and Mike didn’t last very long, not much more than a year, but I feel eternally grateful to them for what they did. They fell in love with my stepdaughters, they made Caroline and Cathy fall in love with them, and in the midst of all that strong, sweet joyful love everything else was smoothed over. We sat around the table that summer night, all of us happy: Charlie and John and Mike discussing the merits of farm life, Cathy and Caroline occasionally speaking but usually merely sitting back with proud pleased smiles, Lucy hammering on her high chair with her spoon, Adam playing under the table with a cat. The sky was still softly bright when the four young people left at eight-thirty to drive back to Hadley. Charlie had invited them to stay, but they all had jobs to get back to. I saw how eager the girls were to leave us, this time their eagerness because they wanted to slide into the dark intimacy of the car, to press up against the strong male flesh of the men they loved, to lean their heads against the men’s chests, to stroke and kiss. They were so happy. And Adam, sleepy in his father’s arms, and Lucy, drowsing in mine, and Charlie, and I, were all happy, too. How magic love can be, like a spell, like a balm, spreading over everyone and everything, curing ills, healing wounds, wordlessly, silently soothing. That was a good year, the year that both Caroline and Cathy were in love.

  Eight

  The little notebook I am writing in is 5½ inches by 7½ inches; the back is turquoise in color, and on the front, framed in the same turquoise, is a color photo of a man, complete with goggles, helmet, racing clothes, and special boots, racing a motorcycle. In the photo it looks as though the man is coming right at me; if the action were to start with a burst of speed and sound, the man on the motorcycle would roar from the picture right over me, right up over my chest and face. Men are dangerous. But all I have to do is to open the little notebook to write in it, and there he is, the motorcycle man, facedown, pressed against the kitchen table. If he came out now he could only smash into the wood, hurting no one but himself. I didn’t choose this particular notebook. It was one in a set of three which I bought wrapped in cellophane at the local grocery store for five Finnmarks, forty pennies. Dear dumb little notebooks, they are like a sort of God to me, or at least an angel: they listen to my confessions and enable me to forgive myself and to understand. I don’t attend church here in Helsinki, although I have gone to hear the cantor minores sing at the Temppeliaukio Church, the church carved out of a rock, and found it a sternly inspiring place to be. But I haven’t attended church anywhere for several years. Since I became an adult I found church too hypocritical a place to feel comfortable in. Now that I am older, things become less sharply delineated, and I see that I am like the others; that I, too, do things wrong and need a sense of forgiveness and love. And metaphors: the church provides metaphors that help one if not understand his own life at least see it embellished, befriended, echoed, transcended. I like metaphors. I need one for myself, and I don’t care how corny it is. The man on the motorcycle on the front of this book does not provide one for me; he is too artificial. I will have to make up my own, I suppose, here, now, in this dumb little, dear little confessional notebook. I will have to create something beautiful and simply structured to help me make some sense out of my life.

  It is midnight. Charlie is somewhere in Sweden, sleeping, having delivered a lecture at the University of Lund. Adam and Lucy are in their little room, sleeping, innocent among their covers, faces flushed. Stephen is somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, in a silver 747 heading for Boston and Logan International. Goodbye, Stephen; thank you and goodbye.

  I feel guilty because of Stephen, because of how I was with him, I feel guilty because of the decision I have made about my life, guilty because it will undoubtedly hurt Charlie. I feel guilty because I’ll be taking my children away from their father, at least for a while. But one way or the other I knew I would end up feeling guilty about something; I’m still a Methodist from Kansas. At least I have done it: I have made a decision. Strange how effortless that decision was. And this way, the way I have chosen, I feel least guilty about the most things and happiest about the most things. I think. I must be a very slow person. Meanings come to me after actions, after I have thought things out, as I am thinking them out here in my turquoise motorcycle-man book.

  I had quite enough time to make decisions in advance. I had all the time, and all the information available, before I went to the hotel to meet Stephen. I am still amazed at how dazed and undecided I was right up to the moment I knocked on his bedroom door. I spent the days before his arrival, and the very minutes I sat on Bus 90 riding closer and closer to the Rautatientori and the Hotel Vakuuna, frantically asking myself questions. Did I love Stephen? Did I love Charlie? Did I want to sleep with Stephen? Would I sleep with Stephen? Should I sleep with Stephen? What about Ellen—she was my friend—what did I owe her? What about Charlie—he was my husband—what did I owe him? What did I want? How did I feel? What was important? What would I do?

  Amazing. Amazing that a supposedly intelligent person could have such a thoroughly muddled mind on such clean-cut subjects.

  I certainly acted as if I were going to sleep with Stephen, no matter what I thought I was going to do. I arranged for a babysitter to stay all day, all day, seven long hours, with my children, and I refused to think about the fact that she was an older woman with good recommendations from the American Women’s League in Helsinki, but that I and my children had never seen her before. I took a shower, shaved my arms and legs, put on creams and lotions and perfume, dressed in my most elegant and attractive casual clothes, even bought myself mouthwash and breath mints, like an eager young lover on a television commercial. I wore fresh underwear, my best pair.

  When Stephen called from the airport to tell me he had arrived, I told him to go to the Hotal Vakuuna. Other hotels might have been better, certainly less centrally located, farther away from places where I might run into Americans or Finns who knew me. But of course when Stephen called I hadn’t thought of a place for him to stay, I hadn’t found out about any faraway intimate hotels, and the Hotel Vakuuna just popped out when he asked for a suggestion. Later I decided that it was a good choice even though it is so close to the America Center and the United States Information Service, and so on. For one thing, it was easy for me to get to, it didn’t involve time-consuming tram and bus changes or long walks in the cold. It was only a block from the large brick-paved square where the buses stopped. I had only to cut through the large marvelous railway station and cross the taxi island and another small street, and there I was. The other good thing was that the hotel was located next to Sokos, a large department store. If people who knew me saw me in the area, they would assume I was going into Sokos; in fact, on one side of the hotel there was a small door at right angles to a door leading into Sokos. If anyone saw me coming out of the Hotel Vakuuna, I thought I would simply laugh and say
that I had gotten confused, had gone in through the wrong door.

  But as it turned out, no one saw me.

  I went in through the door of the Hotel Vakuuna and up the stairs; Stephen had called when he was settled in the hotel to tell me his room number: 561. The closer I got to his room, the more frantically my thoughts raced, the less sure I was of what I wanted. I felt I owed Stephen something simply because he had pursued me, because he had come, because he was there.

  “Hello,” he smiled, opening the door.