Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  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.

  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.