Stepping (2 page)

Lonely and bored. And wasted and unhappy. I feel trapped in these small, low-ceilinged gray rooms. At night when the heavy outside door at the bottom of the stairs slams shut, it resonates as dully and finally as the door of a prison cell. I twist about here, wanting to find a way up and out. It is not just Finland; it is not just having two small children in a foreign and unsmiling country; it is also that I am thirty-four and have given up a job teaching freshman composition and literature at a college to come here. It’s humorous, probably, but teaching freshman composition and literature is something that I do well and love doing. I like the feeling of the students, slightly timid at their first year in college, cynical, optimistic, wriggly, raw; I love it when they first get the resonance of a metaphor or write a decent paragraph. I like working with words and the structures one can build out of words. I like seeing the world go through its cycles, snowstorms and spring blossoms, from the routinely safe and lively boundaries of a classroom or an office. I like talking to other instructors, laughing with them over tea, comparing fan notes from students (“Shit, if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Campbell’s freshman English class, I don’t think I could of wrote a damned thing!”). I like teaching. I don’t like it
instead
of marriage and children; I want those, too. Part of my life has been lopped off by leaving my job and coming here; it adds to the sense of isolation and waste.

Still, I sense that as I sit at this kitchen table, or pace about these four small rooms, bumping into the cold gray walls, I am at work on something. I am working something through. More and more I am thinking of the past, as if understanding it will help me with my future. Or with the present; Lord knows I need
something
to help me
with my present. I used to secretly laugh at Caroline’s and Cathy’s stories of their mother, Adelaide, screeching around the house, hitting them over the head with the bristle end of the broom, but now I find myself screeching around this apartment, kicking at the furniture and walls. Perhaps, after all these years, I do have something in common with Adelaide, Charlie’s first wife: screeching. I screech because I want to teach; Adelaide screeched because she wanted simply to stay home and be a housewife and mother.

Oh, we are different, Adelaide and I, there’s no denying we are. I’ve often wanted to feel, in a grand humanitarian way, like her sister; but I’m not her sister. I don’t even know her. I’ve seen her only two or three times in thirteen years. I wouldn’t like her and she wouldn’t like me even if we hadn’t been married to the same man. She was born and raised in Kansas, as I was, but she was born in 1931; I was born in 1943. She grew up wanting only a house and children and a traditional, secure, conventional life. I grew up wanting everything but that. Well, we have this in common: neither of us got exactly what we wanted. And we have something else in common, too, perhaps
—perhaps—
perhaps we’ll both end up being ex-wives of Charlie’s.

Is it the children—having small children—that is causing the trouble? I think that’s a great part of it. And I wanted these children so. But it’s disturbing to think that my marriage to Charlie could end for the same reasons as Adelaide’s. No, there’s more to it than that. Still, on rainy Sundays here when Charlie and I can’t make love or go to an art museum or a nice restaurant together because we have these small, still uncivilized children hanging on our arms, I wonder about Charlie’s marriage with Adelaide. Mothersuckers, a friend of mine calls her children. Mothersuckers. The name is appropriate. Children start in the womb and continue on the breast and wean themselves from milk on to one’s entire life. Psychologists write of the importance of
bonding
between mother and child; that word indicates ties, mutual physical entities such as ropes joining the two. A perhaps more suitable word would be
siphoning
. For at least the first seven years of life a child siphons off from his mother everything he can get: love, attention, food, warmth, words, touching, clothes, bouncing, a sense of identity. And so what if Adelaide had been, just like me, at that point in her life when it took all of her power to simply make it through the day, attached as she was by psychological suction
cups to two voraciously siphoning creatures? So that she fell into bed with Charlie crying, “Oh, God, please just let me sleep!”; so that she screamed, distraught, “I don’t care about your fucking faculty party, I’m too exhausted to go”; so that the only books she read were about duckies or bunnies or elves. Certainly that had to have been part of the reason she screamed so much and hated sex so much and was the bitchy crazy way she was. Although Caroline and Cathy were eight and five when Charlie divorced Adelaide, she was past that exhausting stage when there’s never a good night’s sleep and one’s arms ache from carrying heavy damp bodies.

I don’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t the children who caused the separation between Charlie and Adelaide; Adelaide always needed her children so much, they provided her with an identity. Those first few years when the girls came to visit us for the summer, Adelaide would call Charlie long distance and sob, “I miss my babies so much I can’t stand it. Oh, why have you taken my little girls from me?” Caroline and Cathy, then ten and seven, used to silently slip into the front hall coat closet during such a phone call, and they would sit there hugging each other and huddling together amid the safety of the coats and rubber boots. Charlie would have to coax them out with promises of ice cream cones or new toys, and he’d try to explain for the hundredth time why Daddy and Mommy weren’t living together and how it was better for them all this way and that their mother really would not die of missing them.

But she did almost die of missing them. They were all she had; they meant everything to her. I am certain that I love my children as much as she loves hers, and yet God knows I wouldn’t want to die if someone would take Adam and Lucy away from me for a few weeks. I’d love it; I’d just sit and stare at the walls and soak in the silence. A curious thought: I’ve spent so much time in my life—the thirteen years I’ve been married to Charlie—taking care of Adelaide’s children. I really tried my best to keep her children healthy and happy when they were with us, and I still care about their happiness. Wouldn’t it be only fair for Adelaide to repay me, to take my children off my hands for a while? Oh, wouldn’t it be heaven if she could repay me a bit, if I could ship Adam and Lucy off for a week, knowing they’d get orange juice and hamburgers and be made to brush their teeth and be treated like treasures and taken to movies and the zoo! Margaret Mead, let’s redefine “extended family”!

Oh, all this Finnish rain is making me nuts. What foolish thoughts. Adelaide hates me, at least she used to, at least Caroline and Cathy told me she did. I could never understand why. I thought she should like me, be grateful. I always worked so hard, trying to keep her daughters healthy and happy when they were with us. As a matter of fact, I think she ought to write me a thank-you note sometime before we both die. Why not? We’ve never spent five minutes talking with each other, and yet we’ve both influenced each other’s lives. Adelaide, do it: write me a thank-you note for all that I’ve done for your daughters.

And I’ll write you one, too. For when all is said and done, I’m glad that Charlie married you so that your two daughters could be in this world. I’m glad you had children with Charlie. I’m glad I had stepchildren.

And that’s saying a lot. I’ve come a long, hard way, thirteen years of bare feet on broken glass, to reach that point of view.

Yet it is both more and less than that. With stepparenting, as with most daily life, trivial actions cause melodramatic reactions. I wish my stepdaughters were here with me now in Finland because often in the past we have had so much fun together, but at least once in my life I have quite thoroughly wished them dead, really dead, and if they were here now we might possibly not have any fun at all. We’ve gone through so many variations, Charlie’s daughters and I. Nothing is simple, nothing stays. Our relationship is never pure and clear and free.

Perhaps it’s all because of me. Perhaps it all has something to do with the fact that originally I am a Methodist from Kansas. Undoubtedly people who were raised in New England or California handle it better, have more fun and less misery with divorce and stepping. Over the years I’ve collected stories from stepparents; I’ve listened to stepparents with full attention, hoping that their lives would cast some light on my own situation. I know one stepmother who calls her son a goddamned asshole to his face (he’s fifteen) and who won’t let him in her house, and she is clear and righteous and doesn’t fret or feel guilty about that. I know another couple who are friends with and regularly visit the wife’s former husband and his new wife, and the man’s children and the wife’s children are all close enough in age to play football or croquet on the lawn while the four grown-ups sit on the patio and gossip and drink. But I also know a woman whose ex-husband
has married a young girl who locks the children in their rooms for hours when she gets angry, and hits them when she gets very angry, and I know another stepmother who simply goes off traveling by herself every summer when her husband’s children visit so that she won’t have to come in contact with them.

In comparison it seems that I haven’t been such a bad stepmother after all, certainly not a wicked or evil one. Stepmothers have had such bad publicity; I always identified with Snow White or Cinderella instead of their stepmothers. I wasn’t prepared for the role; I didn’t choose it.

And that is where I’m at now: this matter of choice. As a good female Methodist from Kansas, I was not trained in choosing for myself. As I look back at my life, it seems that I spent a lot of time accepting what drifted my way, making not-choosing a way of life. This leaves me oddly crippled and very irritable now that I’m at a point where I must make a choice. How did I get to be where I am? What am I going to be? What am I doing in Helsinki, for heaven’s sake, thinking of my stepchildren while my own children are out at the Park Auntie’s, catching colds in the Finnish drizzle? Is everyone’s life composed of such crazily disparate elements? I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I’ll fix myself some Maalva rose hip tea and stare out the window and think of the past. I feel I must know what kind of woman I’ve been in order to know what kind I am going to be.

* * *

I was born and raised in Kansas; that much is simple and easily understood and dispatched. I love my parents, they love me, we write and call each other often. Because they are so busy in their own professions now, they found it easy to let me go, but when I was a child they coddled me, took care that I led a protected and untraumatic life. The one fine good choice I made, if choosing to marry the person one has fallen hopelessly and passionately in love with can be called a choice, was the choice to marry Charlie. Where Charlie and I are concerned, things are wonderfully clear and good. It is only when children get involved—his children, our children—that things become confused.

Charlie and I were married on a brilliant September day in 1964. He was thirty-six; I was twenty-one. He was a professor and a historian; I was a student. We moved to
Kansas City, Missouri, where he taught at the university and I finished my BA. We bought a house, so small and quaint it could have been a doll’s house, located in one of the nicest areas of town, within walking distance of the university. We divided those first few idyllic months of our marriage between the university, our city dollhouse, and the farm.

The farm—we called it that—was not really a farm. No one farmed it, nothing profitable grew on it. It was one hundred acres of rough, rocky Missouri Ozarks land, with small mountains covered with scrub oak and pine and spruce and dogwood and a large open valley sloping down from the mountains to a six-acre pond fed by a rushing stream. We had to drive two hours from Kansas City to get to the farm, and we had to cross a little bridge over the rushing stream to officially enter our property, and so the stream seemed magic, a symbolic entrance, purging us and cleansing us and separating us from anything we did not like.

There was a house there, built by Charlie’s parents as a vacation home, and the approach to the house was a circle drive around an enormous oak tree. The house itself was not much to look at, but it was easy and comfortable to live in, with a big living room that had a rock fireplace to keep us cozy in winter and a large screened-in porch to protect us from the myriad insects that buzzed through the humid Ozark summers. There were two small bedrooms and a large bed-sofa in the living room, and a tiny but usable bathroom.

Best of all, the house was really ours. That is, it had never, ever, belonged to Charlie-and-Adelaide. Charlie’s parents had made the farm their permanent home a few years after Charlie and Adelaide married, and because the parents didn’t care much for Adelaide, and because Adelaide didn’t care at all for farms, Charlie and his first wife had spent only three or four nights of their eight years of marriage there. Right after Charlie divorced Adelaide, his father had a stroke and died, and his mother moved back to the small Missouri town she’d grown up in, and the farm became Charlie’s. He had sold off some land to give the profits to an older brother who lived in California and never came to Missouri but felt cheated by Charlie’s having received the farm, and after that everyone was satisfied. I did some wallpapering and redecorating, and made sure that Charlie and I slept in the room that his parents had had, and sold the perfectly good beds
from the guest room, which Charlie and Adelaide had slept on, and fixed that room up sort of for Charlie’s girls and sort of for any guest. The house was
ours
, Charlie’s-and-mine. Adelaide’s ghost was not anywhere about. Caroline and Cathy didn’t remember visiting it.

The farmland was even more ours, or perhaps, since land never belongs to any one person, but remains solidly, placidly, firmly its own, I should say that the land was even dearer to us. It was rocky, craggy, rough-cut land, the kind that causes you to stumble when you walk. It was populated by rattlesnakes and water moccasins and copperheads, and coyotes and cougars and wolves as well as deer roamed the woods, and although I never saw a live one, a dog once brought me the skeleton, complete with dried canvaslike wings, of an enormous bat, so bats must have lived there, too. The beautiful oak and pine trees mothered poison oak and poison ivy and supported vines as thick and hairy and solid as an ape’s arm. There were spiders in the grass and mice and rats in the old barn and muskrats in the pond and God knows what else everywhere. But in all our years there no one was ever bitten by a snake or spider, no one ever caught poison oak or poison ivy, no one was ever hurt there at all. The place was charmed. The property we owned was shaped like a hand when it’s cupped, with one large mountain behind and one low side where the stream rushed, and the bright blue pond gleaming in the middle. All possible sorts of birds lived there: robins, sparrows, blue jays, cardinals, owls, egrets, herons, hawks, crows, doves, bobolinks, pheasants, quail, and especially whippoorwills. Every morning, spring through fall, they called across the valley to each other, comically, compulsively, hauntingly, welcoming us to day, lullabying us into night. The place was charmed.