Stepping (3 page)

And our horses were there. When we married, along with my other possessions, I brought Liza, my six-year-old quarter horse mare. My parents had given her to me for my sixteenth birthday, when I was furiously in love with horses, and I had boarded her at a farm a good half hour’s drive from my house. It was a delight to have her there on our farm, where I could ride her first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Charlie bought himself a quarter horse gelding, a bigger, showier horse, and we spent hours riding together through the woods and over the meadows, hours of silent rocking joy.

The first nine months of our marriage were perfectly happy. Perfectly. During the
week I had my studies and the movies, ballets, concerts, theater that Kansas City offered, and on the weekends and long holidays I had the farm. And I had Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, big, blond, strong, brilliant, fierce-bodied Charlie, all to myself. I adored him. I loved him. I believed we would be eternally happy.

Charlie’s daughters came to stay with us the last day of June 1965. Their mother didn’t want them to come, and they didn’t want to come, and although I had never met them I wasn’t crazy about having them either, but of course, loving Charlie, I said nothing. But Charlie wanted his daughters with him for a while, and it was a legally arranged agreement that Caroline and Catherine Campbell were to spend every summer with their father. Legalities are by and large a bore and a hassle, but they do have the effect of being rigidly, simply clear right at the time that human emotions tend to be soggy and mushy and confused.

Early in June, Charlie sent a letter with his monthly child-support check, asking Adelaide when it would be best for him to make plane reservations for Caroline and Cathy. Adelaide had, after the divorce, moved back to Massachusetts, to a town near Amherst. They—she and Charlie and their daughters—had lived there for several years while Charlie taught at the university, and Adelaide had friends there, and knew she could get a job as a secretary at the university.

Adelaide’s reply to Charlie’s letter was brief: since the girls were so small, she wrote, so young, she thought it would be better if they did not make a long plane trip this year, which after all would involve changing planes alone in Chicago. Perhaps next year it would be possible.

Charlie stomped and raged for a day. Since his divorce it had been obvious that Adelaide was not going to be cooperative. When he sent the girls gifts, he did not receive any sign that the girls had gotten them. When he wrote them letters, there was never any reply. When he called them on the phone, it was usually lunchtime or bathtime or bedtime; and anyway, he was cruel and malicious, Adelaide said, to call them at all; it upset them so much. At Christmas, Charlie had flown back to New York to some convention and delivered a paper there, then taken a day to drive to Hadley to give the girls their Christmas gifts and to take them out to dinner. Since Christmas, Charlie had not had any word from Adelaide or his daughters except for the canceled child-support
checks. He had called Caroline in February and Cathy in March to be sure they had received their birthday presents, and the girls had said yes, thank you, but not much else. Charlie said that at Christmas the girls had been subdued, even timid with him, not touching, not talking, hanging back, but when he had gotten in the car to leave they had both burst into tears and little Cathy had run to him through the snow to throw her arms about him, to beg him not to go away again. Since then he had been eager for summer, to have his daughters with him for a long period of time, to reestablish the contact, to try to reaffirm his love.

He was furious at Adelaide’s letter, and incredulous that she thought she could keep the girls from him, and hurt that she would want to do so. That night, full of righteous indignation, he called Adelaide on the phone. And got hit with a hurricane punch of hatred and fury.

Of course, she was unhappy, and she was having problems. It is not easy to be divorced and alone with two small children and have to work when all you’ve ever wanted to do was to stay home and be a mother. Women’s lib came unfortunately late for Adelaide. That summer her closest friends were moving away and she had not yet met a man she liked who liked her, and all in all, it was one of those years when nothing,
nothing
was going right. As she said, the girls were all she had; how could Charlie take them from her when she needed them so?

Charlie was unprepared for the fury and the noise and the grief. He sat stunned, saying into the phone, “But—but—but—” I sat next to him, fascinated. I had never seen anything like it except for comic routines on television, where the comedian makes a face and holds the phone away from his ear and a high, shrill, senseless voice babbles on and on and on.

The gist of it was: if Charlie really loved Caroline and Cathy, he wouldn’t have left them in the first place. Since he had left them, he didn’t love them. She, Adelaide, had done her very best to help the girls realize that their father did not love them and that they would be happier without him, just as he was so happy without them. They had managed to start a new life with new friends, and it was absolutely evil of him to try to take the little girls away from a house where they finally felt secure and loved, from a place where they had friends. The little girls had gone through enough pain and
heartbreak, they didn’t need any more. The three of them were happy together, a real family, and it wasn’t fair for him to separate them.

Charlie said, when he could find a space, that he loved the girls and he wanted them to be with him as arranged and he would call his lawyer. He hung up the phone.

Five minutes later it rang. When Charlie answered it, Caroline, his older daughter, was on the line. She was sobbing.

“Daddy,” she cried, “please don’t take us away from Mommy. We can’t live without Mommy. Mommy can’t live without us. Please don’t make us go there. We don’t want to live with you and that lady. We want to stay with Mommy.”

And before Charlie could respond, Adelaide was on the phone again. “See! See what I mean! That was your own daughter begging you to leave her alone. I know you don’t care what
I
want, but surely your own daughters’ feelings mean something, that is if you love them at all. And poor little Cathy’s right here next to me crying her eyes out; she can’t even talk she’s so upset—”

“Adelaide,” Charlie said, “I want my girls to spend two months with me this summer. I’m going to hang up now and call my lawyer.”

And he did.

Two weeks and two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of lawyer’s fees and long-distance phone calls and registered letters later his girls arrived.

Those two weeks were a strange and wonderful and terrible time for me. Charlie confided to me things I had never known before about his first marriage, and if I was relieved at his lack of love for Adelaide, I was worried about and jealous of his great love for his daughters. They had always been Adelaide’s “property,” Charlie said. Things had been clear-cut for Adelaide: work was his, the house and children were hers. She wouldn’t tell him how to teach history or do research if he wouldn’t tell her how to raise children. He had actually felt that he might be able to get closer to his girls, to influence their lives more, to give them more affection, if he were living away from them, if he and Adelaide were divorced.

He asked me to help him. He had two large, important projects to do that summer, projects he had gotten grant money for, and we needed extra money because of phone calls and legal fees and round-trip fares across half the continent. He asked me to help
entertain and take care of his daughters, to make them feel wanted, to make them happy.

I wanted to do more than that. I decided to devote my summer completely to the happiness of Charlie and his girls. I decided that I would keep them healthy, I would keep them entertained, I would keep them uproariously, overwhelmingly happy. They would go back to Massachusetts saying that Charlie was the most wonderful father in the world, and that they had had the happiest summer of their lives, and that I was the most beautiful, wonderful, delightful, intelligent, creative, warmhearted creature that had ever lived, a sort of combination Madonna and Barbie doll. I didn’t know what I was getting into.

Caroline and Cathy arrived on the last day of June, and after the drama of it all, their pale little presences were pretty drab. They were to turn out to be stunningly beautiful women, but of course we didn’t know that at the time, and it certainly didn’t show. Caroline was ten and had buckteeth. Real, obvious buckteeth. But at least she tried to be intelligent and interesting; because she thought she was ugly, she tried to be smart. Cathy, on the other hand, was pretty, in the same classic helpless dumb-blonde baby-doll way her mother was, and as a result she often seemed, although she definitely was not, stupid. What a pair they were! Two pale startled little girls, wearing light blue summer dresses, clean white shoes and socks, white gloves. The sight of them, physically real and
there
, filled me with consternation; in a flash I realized that from now on my life with Charlie would be changed, would be confused. I wanted to be nice; I smiled. But for a moment I could not move. It did not matter. Charlie, overjoyed to see his daughters, rushed to hug them to him. And he brought them back to introduce us, and then I was able to move, a hand, a foot, everything, and my new life had begun. I was walking out of the airport with my husband and his children. In the car on the way home from the airport Caroline and Cathy sat in the front seat with Charlie while I sat alone in the back.

I think we were all stunned that first week. I know I certainly was. Immediately after we arrived home, Caroline fished a thick sealed envelope out of her suitcase and handed it to me, carefully, so that her fingers did not touch mine.

“This is for you,” she said, not looking me in the eyes. “It’s from my mother.”

“What in the world?” I said, and stared down at the envelope as if it were a toad. What Adelaide might want to send me was frighteningly beyond the reach of my
imagination.

“It’s a list of the foods we like to eat,” Caroline said.

“I’ll show the girls their room and the rest of the house,” Charlie said. “You sit down and read the letter, Zelda.” His mouth was twitching with a smile.

Dutifully I sat down in the living room and opened the letter.

“Zelda,” it began, and I thought, Well, of course, I didn’t think she would call me dear …

As you know, I am very much opposed to this visit. My daughters are extremely fragile both emotionally and physically, and they have been further injured by all the changes so cruelly inflicted upon them. I am therefore sending you these instructions, which must be followed to the letter, so that my little girls will be returned to me with the minimum of psychological damage.

1. Basic nutrition

For breakfast, every day, they must have: a full glass of whole milk, a small glass of fresh orange juice, a small bowl of cereal with sugar, two pieces of toast, and one egg, preferably poached or soft-boiled. They may be permitted sweet rolls if they eat their eggs.

For lunch they must have soup, a sandwich, preferably meat, but peanut butter if necessary, a fresh fruit such as an apple or pear, a full glass of whole milk, and potato chips IF they eat their fruit.

For dinner they must have a large serving of a GOOD meat, not just hot dogs or pizza. They must have liver and some kind of fish at least once a week. Steak, lean hamburger, chicken, or well-cooked pork will also do.
Two
vegetables with each meal. A salad of fresh lettuce. A potato or rice. A glass of whole milk. Their
dessert should be something wholesome, like a milk pudding or custard, and Jell-O with fruit.

At bedtime they may have hot chocolate with cinnamon toast.

They must have vitamin pills. I have packed the bottle that I bought with my own money; if they run out while they are there, they are to have CHEWAMINS and nothing else because that is the only kind they like.

They are not to be stuffed with sweets and candy and cookies.

If they have trouble with constipation, they are to eat raisins before going to bed.

They must eat ON SCHEDULE, breakfast by eight, lunch by noon, and dinner at 5:30, or their digestive systems will be upset.

Cook and serve the food in an attractive and appealing manner so they will want to eat it.

2. Sleep and rest
.

They must be in bed by ten o’clock at night, NO LATER, and they should be allowed to sleep as late as they want to every morning since it is school vacation.

After lunch they should have a rest period. It is not necessary that they sleep, but they should lie down or sit quietly for an hour. This is necessary to their health.

3. Other Health Care
.

They must brush their teeth three times a day. Only Crest toothpaste is allowed. If they don’t brush their teeth, they can’t have cinnamon toast. They must have a bath every other day, and if they go swimming in a public swimming pool, they must have a shower immediately afterward. Their hair should be washed once a
week with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. They will need some help from you with this.

They must wash their hands every time after using the toilet and before and after dinner. Also after petting any animal.

Their nails should be clipped once a week.

If it is necessary for them to use a public toilet, it is necessary that you first line the toilet seat with fresh toilet paper so that their skin makes no contact with the seat.

If the girls get sick, they should drink fluids and take aspirin—orange-flavored baby aspirin—but they may not take any medication from a strange doctor without my permission.