Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  Then we talked about me, about my small success. Charlie said he had not worried about me a bit, he had known I would do fine in my orals, but he still felt bad that he had not been there to support me or celebrate with me. I said what I had to say: nonsense, nonsense; he was not to feel bad that he had not been there; I had not minded; it hadn’t mattered at all. Because of course I knew that he had done only what he had to do, being the good man that he was. And then I did not want him to know how really petty and selfish I was, that I had resented him and for a while even hated him, and his daughters, because I had childishly wanted for one day, one evening, to shine, to be the star, and had not been able to. It had been no one’s fault; there was no one to blame. There was nothing to be done about it but to go on with goodwill. And Charlie did take me out to dinner at a marvelous restaurant that night, and he ordered a wonderful French champagne, and later he made love to me so beautifully that I would have eagerly forgiven him anything.

  After I finished my master’s I fell into a deep, deep slump. Part of it was because Charlie had agreed to be a visiting professor at a university in western Michigan the coming fall semester. A historian who taught there had arranged it; he and Charlie were working together on a book. In one way I was glad, because Alice, the woman I had fallen in love with at the symposium, lived there. And after the crush of work finishing my master’s I wanted a break from my studies. But I was also eager to start work on my PhD, for I realized that that was the only way I’d be able to continue what I liked best (outside of making love and riding my horse): teaching English comp and lit to college kids.

  That was the other part of the reason for my slump. I could no longer teach. I had somehow always blithely assumed that they would want me to teach part-time at the university. I was so good, and I was so cheap. During the loose final days after I took my oral exam, I kept drifting back to campus even on the days I wasn’t teaching. I wanted someone to ask me my plans; I wanted someone to say offhandedly as he passed me in the halls, “By the way, Zelda, we’re planning on you for two introductory comp courses next year.” But no one said it. No one really spoke to me at all. It was only by having coffee with some of the male graduate students that I found out who had and hadn’t been chosen as part-time instructors for the following year. How damned mad I was as I sat there hearing the news from the other students. I got even madder because when I realized I hadn’t been asked to teach tears came into my eyes and I wanted to blubber and wail. Instead I dug my fingernails into my fist, and smiled and acted nonchalant, and after a while we all got up to go our separate ways. I went to the office of my favorite prof, the one who had advised me on my thesis. He was in and not surprised to see me. Our session was short and not sweet: “Zelda, the way things are set up here we were able to give you a teaching assistantship while you were working on your master’s. But we make PhD students part-time instructors, and the pay scale goes up. It’s handled differently. You’ve got a husband on the faculty. You’re a woman. We’ve got to give these plusher jobs to the men who have families to support.”

  “But Crawford? You know I’m a better teacher than Crawford!”

  “Yes, but he’s a brilliant scholar and his wife is pregnant. We have to support him. Good Lord, we all know you’re a great teacher; this is no reflection on your teaching abilities; don’t take it personally.”

  “I’ll work without pay. Just let me teach.”

  “Oh, Zelda. You can’t. We couldn’t even let you; it would blow all the fuses in the payroll computer. Come on. Be reasonable.”

  There was absolutely nothing I could do. Perhaps, back in 1967, if I had realized that women all across the country were reeling from the same shock from the same sort of words, I might have been able to do something—anything else. As it was, I just went home and cried. I felt defeated, I felt rejected. I felt that I had failed, that if I had only been better they would have had to hire me in spite of my being married to a faculty member, in spite of the English department head, who disliked women.

  I began the summer of 1967 feeling dejected and defeated. For the first time in my life I was formally through with my studies; really through. I would go to Michigan with Charlie the next September instead of plunging into a new course of work, instead of setting out for a new goal. The freedom and looseness and lack of responsibility were the most awesomely depressing things I had ever experienced. Of course I still had to play wife and housewife, still had to do the cooking and dishwashing and housecleaning each day, but all that did not really matter, did not really count. I did not take it seriously; it was of no importance to me. It did not even take up very much of my time. There were only the two of us, and we ate out many nights, or ate large lunches together at the university, then merely snacked at night at home, and the house did not get terribly dirty with both of us gone so much, and Charlie always helped me with the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning; there was not enough there to occupy my time or my mind. I could not think of it—being the keeper of Charlie’s house and meals—as what I was about. What I was about was loving Charlie—but he was involved in teaching or working on his papers and books most of the day—and books and students and teaching, but I had been cut off from all that and could find no way back in. I felt lonesome, wasted, adrift.

  I was accepted into the PhD program, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to attend classes until the second semester. Charlie suggested that I spend the summer and fall reading and relaxing. He thought I deserved a vacation. I didn’t want a vacation. I was twenty-four, I had a master’s degree and teaching experience. I wanted a job. But when I tried to explain it to Charlie, I succeeded only in making him feel bad. “I know you want to get started on your PhD work,” he said, “but this semester in Michigan is crucial to the new book. I’ve got to go. You could stay here, of course—”

  But of course I couldn’t stay. I had to be with Charlie. He would have his fortieth birthday that fall, and I wanted to make it a great big smashing occasion. Even without the birthday I never once thought seriously of staying apart from him that semester. It would have been like agreeing not to breathe for a few months.

  And I must be honest: I didn’t want him to stay home, either. The royalties from his first book were not large, but they were all the difference between scraping along on what was left from his salary after child support and doctor bills went out and living an enjoyable life. I liked having a little bit of money. I wanted him to write another book. I wanted him to go to Michigan, to write the book he and the other historian were planning. I wanted to be with him, always. I simply had to put my own life off track for a while. I knew I was making my own decisions. I had no one to blame for the direction I led my life.

  Caroline and Cathy arrived in July for their third summer with us. Now they were nine and twelve; big girls. Each could make her own toast. The first few days they were abnormally quiet and jumpy and tense and nervous, but I was too wrapped up in my own gloom to care. I went about taking care of them with an automatic dutiful friendliness, and read Gothic romances when I had free time. Luckily they had friends in the neighborhood to play with, and to spend the night with, and to generally fill their time with. I read lots of romances and mysteries and ate ice cream sundaes with the girls and gained weight and didn’t care. It was a sloppy, superficial, easy sort of summer. It went by very fast. We were not friends yet, but we were no longer enemies. Caroline’s stomach problems had disappeared, at least for a while.

  One August evening the four of us went to see some idiotic horror show at a drive-in and had to leave early because of a sudden violent summer thunder- and rainstorm. We felt somehow cheated as we pulled away from the drive-in, and somehow saddened by the rain sweeping down over the cars and streets. The movie hadn’t been good, but we felt grumpy being deprived of its ending. Charlie decided to stop at a pizza parlor on the way home, and we were all immediately cheered up. The pizza restaurant was as warm and cheery as a fireplace in autumn, with its padded booths and bright
lights and spicy smells.

  “Caroline,” Charlie said, “I guess you are really all well. That’s your fourth piece of pizza, and on top of popcorn, too.”

  Caroline grinned, her mouth full of pizza.

  “It wasn’t her stomach at all,” Cathy volunteered. “It was her mind making her stomach sick; the doctors told us so. She didn’t like calling Mommy’s new husband Daddy, and it made her sick.”

  “Well, then why did she call him Daddy?” Charlie asked.

  “Cause Mommy told us to,” Cathy said. “She said he was our real father from now on, not you. She said we were finally one big happy family again, and he was our real father. We had to call him Daddy. She spanked us and took our allowance away if we didn’t.”

  “Wow,” Charlie said.

  “It wasn’t like that,” Caroline said in a sudden desperate tone. “Mommy wasn’t trying to be bad, she just wanted us all to be close together and to love each other a lot and to be happy. She wanted us to be happy a lot—”

  “I made a calendar for you for Christmas in Brownies,” Cathy said. “It said, ‘To My Father,’ and it had my picture on it and I had decorated it, and Mommy made me give it to her new husband. His name was John, but Caroline and I called him Toilet secretly. You know—John—Toilet—”

  The girls looked at each other and went into fits of guilty laughter.

  “Mommy didn’t make me sick,” Caroline said when she stopped laughing. “She didn’t, really. She was trying to make us all feel good. She wanted us to be a family.”

  “Yeah, but ol’ Toilet was a real stinker,” Cathy said, and again both girls cracked up. “He had hair in his ears! And he burped at the table!” Both girls began to giggle and fidget as if they were drunk.

  “And he spanked Cathy once when she wouldn’t eat her liver!” Caroline laughed.

  “And he had these old cigars he smoked all the time and left lying in the ashtray like a dog poop!” Cathy yelled, her giggling almost uncontrollable.

  “Yeah,” Caroline agreed, “we always said, ‘Why, why is old Toilet leaving this poop around? He’s a Toilet; why doesn’t he just eat the poop?’ ”

  The girls were laughing so hard that even Charlie and I had begun to laugh, helplessly, aware of our silliness. In the back of my mind a sudden thought occurred: What nickname do they have for me? What jokes do they tell about me?

  “And Toilet had a little boy, and you know what his name was? PETER! Ha-ha-ha, and you know what we secretly called him? Pee! Hee-hee-hee-hee.… ”

  “He was awful. He came only on weekends, but he got to have his own room in our house and Cathy and I had to share a room. And he always got more presents, Mommy said to make up for not being able to live with us.”

  “I never liked Pee; he stunk as much as Toilet!” Cathy said.

  “Yeah, I’m glad they’ll be gone when we get back,” Caroline said.

  “Gone?” Charlie asked.

  “Yep, gone,” Caroline said. “Really gone. Mom and Toilet are getting divorced this summer. Whoops, we weren’t supposed to tell you that.”

  * * *

  At the beginning of September that year Charlie had a conference in New York with his publisher. Since we were going to be up in Michigan anyway, we decided to drive to the East Coast. With what we saved on plane fares we spent a week in Kennebunkport with Caroline and Cathy. It was a good time, the best time the four of us had had together. We lay on the beach or swam all day and ate like crazy at night, then took long walks all over the little town. One night we walked along the beach in the moonlight and I was humming a song, and the girls were humming it, too, more softly, and then Charlie began a sort of rhythmical clopping counterpoint noise. No one else was near us on the beach, and somehow we all began doing a silly dance-march to the music there on the sand, the cold water racing down toward our toes.

  “La plume de ma tante, BOOM BOOM!” I sang, and

  “BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!” Cathy yelled, and

  “La plume de ma tante est sur le bureau de mon oncle!” Caroline sang, and

  “Clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop!” Charlie went, and we all marched, knees silly and high, funny gestures, loud singing, along the beach. It was the moonlight, and the hot sun still burning on our skins and the cool sand under our bare feet and the gay white line of surf chasing after our toes, it was a magic end of a summer night: the four of us all happy together. We were all slaphappily in love with one another, and wrapped arms around each other for warmth as we walked back toward the hotel.

  We drove the girls to Massachusetts on Saturday. We had spent the morning swimming, then cleaned up and checked out of the hotel at noon, and driven three or four hours back into the continent. We arrived in Hadley drowsy from the ride, stunned suddenly by the end of the summer.

  Charlie found Adelaide’s new house, the house she and her second husband had bought. It was a lovely old white frame colonial. It had a Realtor’s “For Sale” sign in front of it, stuck into the grass.

  I said goodbye to the girls and gave them quick pecks on their cheeks, then got out of the car to help them get all their luggage. Charlie took the two biggest suitcases and walked with the girls up to the door. The three of them went inside.

  I got back in the car and sat and waited. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the clothes come flying out of the front door of the house.

  “WET!” Adelaide seemed to be screaming, and then she appeared on the front porch of her house. She had a suitcase in her hand and was apparently trying to tell me something about it.

  I got out of the car, puzzled and slightly curious.

  “Wet!” Adelaide screamed, and flung more clothes from the suitcase to the grass. “You stupid little girl, don’t you know any better than to put wet swimming suits in a suitcase? Now ALL THE CLOTHES ARE WET AND WRINKLED AND I HAVE ALL THIS IRONING TO DO!”

  Those were the first direct words Adelaide had ever said to me. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe she was standing on the front porch of her house on a glorious sunny day with people bicycling and walking by, that she was standing there in shorts and halter top throwing clothes all over the grass. It seemed unreal.

  Behind her I saw Charlie coming out the door, and I saw Cathy’s and Caroline’s anxious little faces.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, since it was obvious that I had to say something. “I wrapped the suits in towels—”

  “Yes, and what do towels do, you ninny? They absorb!” More clothes flew about.

  Well, you’re right about that, I thought, it’s just that I never thought about it before. I haven’t thought about towels, absorption, wet suits; it never interested me before—“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Yes, you send home two suitcases full of wet dirty clothes—”

  “I always wash and iron their clothes just before they come home,” I said. “I’ve never sent home dirty clothes—” I couldn’t believe our conversation. I was afraid people were staring. I was embarrassed. I also wanted to break out laughing, but knew it would be entirely the wrong thing to do.

  “Yes, but this time you spent the last week at a beach. You can’t wash and iron at a beach!”

  “They wore only a few shorts and tops. Everything else is—”

  “WET! Everything else is wet! Because of those damned swimming suits!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. I didn’t know what else to say. I felt terribly bad about the whole thing. I felt I had ruined our whole summer by getting the clothes wet. And yet the comic aspect still made my mouth twitch.

  Charlie came out of the house then and took Adelaide by the shoulders and pulled her into the house. Later he told me that he gave her twenty-five dollars to pay for a woman to wash and iron the clothes. Caroline and Cathy came outside and began to pick their clothes up off the grass. They didn’t look my way or at each other, and they didn’t talk. Then Charlie came out and kissed each girl and held them against him for a long moment. He came out
to the car and we both waved and got in and drove off. We were on our way to Michigan.

  That evening Charlie made a phone call from our motel room to the Ascrofts. He wanted to be assured that Adelaide and the girls were okay. The Ascrofts told him not to worry. They said that now that she had her girls back Adelaide would be fine. She had probably been in a bad mood that day—she had had such a terrible summer, the Ascrofts said. As if her second marriage breaking up hadn’t been enough, the month her second husband had moved out Adelaide had found out that she was pregnant by him, and she had had an abortion in August.

  Five

  In the fall of 1967, Charlie was a visiting professor at a university in a small town in Michigan. He was Distinguished Visiting Professor; I was wife-in-limbo. I couldn’t take courses or teach, I couldn’t get my life to work for me. And then, that fall, when I was almost twenty-five, a strange thing happened to me. A shocking, totally unwanted and unexpected thing happened to me: I began to want to have a baby, a child of my own.

  It was as if I had been strolling in the woods, innocently enjoying the peaceful day, and suddenly a huge and gloriously beautiful tiger pounced upon me, and dug his claws into me, and I was engaged in a furious struggle for survival, suddenly forced to claw and bite back, to fight him off.

  Of course I was bored that semester, and dejected, and unsure of my future, and that was part of my ammunition against myself. You don’t really want a child, I said to myself. You’re just bored and dejected and unsure of yourself. Boy, you’re a mess. You get away from a university routine for one semester and you go insane.

  Part of it, too, I realized, was Alice, and Alice’s friends. They were all such lovely women, and some were quite talented and some had professions, and some just played lots of tennis and golf, but they all had children. And even though they all had children, none of them was boring. It was amazing.