Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  Jami wandered in and rubbed against my leg. I sat down on the bed and picked him up and stroked him.

  “Is it a crime?” I asked him. “Is it, Jami? Whom am I hurting? What am I doing wrong?”

  Sitting there, I remembered that whenever people used to ask me, “Do you have any children?” I had laughed and said, “Heavens, no, and I don’t want any! I’ve got too many other things I want to do!” But now when someone asked I always said, “Not yet, though I do have two stepdaughters.”

  “This is terrible, Jami, terrible,” I said. “I think I’m going nuts. I’ll take those damned bears back to the store and use the money to buy that set of critical essays I’ve been wanting.” But I didn’t.

  I played with the girls all that summer of ’69. They were suddenly perfect ages; fourteen and eleven; old enough to take care of themselves, dress themselves, enjoy the same museums and concerts and movies and jokes, yet young enough not to worry about being seen in public with adults. Charlie finished his book that summer and took us all to Colorado for two weeks. We rode horses and swam and hiked mountain trails and laughed in the exhilarating mountain air. Somehow, subtly, without announcing it, we had become two pairs: Charlie and Cathy; Caroline and me. Cathy at eleven was still gawky in the way a prizewinning show horse is gawky as a filly. Her lines and instincts were good. She adored Charlie and held his hand almost constantly. If he went to the garage to see about tires, she went. If he went to the post office to pick up a package, she went. She stayed up late at night, sitting by his side on the sofa, sitting in my former spot, curled against him, reading. Twice every half hour she would say, “Can I get you anything, Dad? Tea? A glass of water? Some cake? A brandy?” When the mail came, Cathy ran to get it from the box and brought it all to Charlie eagerly; if she’d been a dog, she would have wagged her tail and drooled. When the four of us played Parcheesi, she never captured or blockaded Charlie, she tried to help him win. She was forever praising him, complimenting his clothes or hair or laughing at his slightest joke. Watching her, I felt both amused and saddened: she was acting just as I had acted when I first met and married Charlie, and I didn’t act that way anymore. I couldn’t—I had changed. I was so torn, so almost maddened, by my desire to have a child and my desire not to want one that I lived in a state of fury every day. Yet Charlie never guessed this; worse, he never did what I longed and longed for him to do: he never said, “Zelda, I can’t stand it anymore. I want to have a baby with you. I want you to have my child.” The fact that Charlie didn’t long for the same thing I longed for, the fact that he didn’t even guess at my raging subterranean desire, made me feel a real and sudden separation. We were not one person after all; we were two. We were separated from each other deeply. We were alone. It was frightening. I did not know then how in the course of a marriage, over a stretch of years and years, two people can ebb and flow together, ebb and flow in closeness and then in isolation, yet never really part. I knew I loved Charlie; I knew he loved me. We were still happy with each other in our daily lives. Yet I was lonely. There was something I wanted him to know, something he did not guess and I could not bring myself to say.

  So I played elaborate card games with Caroline, and Caroline and I read biographies of famous people and discussed them. We sat reading in silence while Cathy chattered to Charlie. On the farm Charlie drove the tractor with Cathy standing on next to him; Caroline took Charlie’s horse and went off riding with me.

  That summer I knew I loved Caroline. With her braces and her skinny angular height—she was now as tall as I—and her philosophical curiosities, she seemed marvelously dear and precious to me. It was already obvious that when boys flirted, they flirted with Cathy, not with Caroline; Caroline did not have that winsome instinctive way of charming boys that Cathy had. She tripped when she was near boys her age, or dove into four feet of water and hit her head on the pool bottom, or spilled her Coke, or if she did nothing wrong she still didn’t manage to look up at the boys the way Cathy did, like an ingénue vamp, raising the eyelashes so slowly, letting a slight smile slip out so tantalizingly. Even when Cathy was eleven, boys gave her things; they always would. They couldn’t help themselves. But they barely looked at Caroline back then, and Caroline seemed to shrink inside her clothes when she came near a boy. I wanted to protect her. She was so bright, so sensitive—and in a few years, I knew, and she could not believe, she would be beautiful.

  The night before the girls left that summer, Caroline and I sat up late, talking. Or rather, Caroline talked. She told me about her friends in Massachusetts, and her clothes, and all the items in her room, and her records, and the plots of all the books she’d read, and all the movies she’d ever seen. She didn’t want to go to bed because then she would wake up and leave, but she couldn’t say that to me, and I doubt that she could say it even to herself.

  There was a tension in the air between us, a feeling of longing and need, of things left unsaid. Caroline was not the kind of girl who could say the simple basic phrases; she was saying everything else that came into her head.

  “Caroline”—I finally interrupted her—“I’m going to miss you so much. Do you think you would ever want to come live with me and Charlie?”

  “Me and Charlie,” instead of “your father and me.” It was an impulsive question.

  “Oh, gosh, oh, uh,” Caroline said. “Yeah, of course, but you know—my mother—”

  “How’s your mother doing? She hasn’t called much this summer.”

  “Well, she’s good, you know, really good. She’s taking a course in sailing this summer at the Cape with Irene; that’s her best friend. And she’s really happy with her job. She’s the assistant to the Registrar now; good job, good money, big deal, you know. I mean she’s pretty happy usually. She’s calmer. But I don’t know about leaving her. I mean are you serious you’d want me to come live here? And Dad wants me, too? This is a real invitation?”

  “Oh, Caroline, you know you and Cathy have always been welcome to live here with us, always, at any time.” As I spoke, I remembered the early years, when I would have been absolutely dismayed at the idea of the girls living with us. No, they had not always been welcome, not by me. Perhaps they had known that, had sensed that, as children do sense the unsaid things. But things were different now, had been different for some time, and I wanted to announce the change, to make things clear. I wanted to say the words aloud. “We love you, Caroline. You don’t need an invitation to live here. We want you to be with us. But we don’t want to upset—things—or to interfere or cause trouble. I feel bad even now asking you because I know your mother wouldn’t be overjoyed, and I don’t want to cause your mother problems. But I love you so much and enjoy you so much and miss you so much when you’re gone, and I know Charlie does, too— Caroline, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I wish I hadn’t said anything—”

  “I wish I could live here. I’d like that a lot, I think. But it would kill Mom. And I’d miss Cathy too much. She would love to live with Dad, you know. But we can’t leave Mom. I mean we want to live with her, too. She’s our mother.”

  “Caroline, don’t cry. Really. I’m so sorry I mentioned it. Listen, let’s go make some popcorn and watch the late movie and then go to bed.”

  We made popcorn and ate it as we watched some old black-and-white movies and we went to bed about two-thirty in the morning. At four, Cathy came into our room.

  “Daddy? Can you wake up? Caroline’s got those stomach pains.”

  Caroline was lying in her bed, twisting and moaning, her hands pressed over her stomach just below her chest. Tiny lumps of breasts stuck up under her summer pajamas. Tears were running down her face. Her pillow was wet.

  “It’s those goddamned stomach pains again,” she said.

  “We’ll get you a doctor,” Charlie said.

  “A doctor won’t help. Nothing helps these bastards. You guys go on. I didn’t mean to wake you up. They’ll stop pretty soon, they always do stop after a while. Go back t
o sleep.”

  “We ate popcorn about midnight—” I said to Charlie. I wasn’t brave enough to tell him I’d asked Caroline to live with us.

  “It’s not popcorn,” Charlie said. “Cathy, you go get in bed with Zelda. I’ll sit here and hold Caroline. Come on, honey, I haven’t held you for a long time. I’ll rub your back; maybe that will help.”

  So we ended the summer strangely. Charlie sat up into the morning, holding poor big Caroline, who finally slept, and Cathy sprawled peacefully in the double bed beside me. And I lay awake on my half of the double bed, feeling guilty and bad and sick at heart. I vowed never to ask Caroline to live with us again, never to put her in such an emotional bind.

  The next day Caroline was all right and the girls left on schedule. When they left I didn’t cry, not at the airport. But later that night, in the privacy of the bathroom, running bathwater to hide my noise, I sat in the tub and bawled. Caroline wasn’t my child, she could never be my child. She was Charlie’s child, and Adelaide’s child, and she belonged to them. My position was less intimate, less important; I would forever be something perhaps a bit more valuable than a favorite aunt. Caroline had a mother and a home, and it had been cruel and selfish of me to suggest she leave it. I had been confused and wrong to think she could live with us. And, in a way, I had been immoral and opportunistic. I had wanted to use Caroline to fill a need in me. It was true that I loved her, true that I would have loved having her live with us. But I had let that clean, clear love become entwined with my own physiological greed. I will never know if having a stepchild live with me would have stopped my raving desire for a child of my own, but I think I still would not have been satisfied. I think that seeing Caroline every day would have made me long even more for a daughter of my own.

  I wanted a daughter of my own. I wanted to watch my own child grow and develop, to become pretty, sensitive, interesting. I wanted to guide my own child, to be indispensable. I wanted someone to say of me, with that total unfathomable security and significance, “She’s my mother.”

  I didn’t want to be only a stepmother.

  I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to have a child.

  Instead I had my PhD work. It was fall again, I had courses to take again, and it all meant nothing to me. I hated it. I hated my books, my papers, my schedule. Charlie had finally finished his book and was feeling gay and light. He wanted to go dancing and drinking and driving in the autumn to see the colors of the leaves. He couldn’t understand why I was acting so dull, so leaden, so confused.

  One day he said to me over breakfast, “Zelda. You’ve changed.”

  I said, “I know. I feel so—heavy. Boring. Bored. I want—” I was afraid to say it outright. “I want some life in my life.” I thought that at last Charlie would miraculously understand and say, “Oh yes, Zelda, I know what you mean. We should have a child.”

  Instead he said, “You’re tired of the work, I know. All PhD students go through this. I remember—”

  “Charlie”—I interrupted him, I could hold back no longer, I nearly yelled it—“I want to have a baby.”

  Charlie could only stare at me, his knife and fork raised in the air beside him in surprise. Then, “What in the world?” he said. “Where did you ever get that idea?”

  “It’s not an idea that I got!” I said. “It’s a feeling inside me that I can’t push away. It’s—it’s like a passion, like falling in love.”

  “Oh, Zelda darling; oh, Zelda. You don’t know what you’re saying. A baby—I’m forty-one. I can’t spend the rest of my life raising children. Honey, you don’t know. Babies aren’t just sweet cuddly things. They ruin your body and screw up your sex life and change your whole life forever. Nothing is ever the same again. You’re bright, Zelda, you’ve got a future. You don’t want to waste it. If you drop out after all this work—”

  “I won’t have to stop. I can do it all. One little baby wouldn’t be much work. Babies sleep a lot. I could have babysitters. I—”

  “Zelda, you just don’t know. You’d have one baby, and then you’d decide that an only child would be too lonely and you’d have another. And little babies do not sleep all the time. They would be sick the night before an exam. They would get hurt the day you have to turn in a paper. Babies demand everything of you, everything. There would be nothing left for your work; nothing left for you and me.”

  “I would make space for you and my work. I’d have a babysitter.”

  “Babysitters cost money.”

  “Well, then, I’d work.”

  “You’d work and take courses for your PhD and write your thesis and take care of a baby and run this house and be with me?”

  “You weren’t with me very much this past year. You were always with your book.”

  “But that’s over now. I’m with you now. It took just one year. A baby would take up the rest of our lives. Years without any letup. Zelda, I don’t want any children. I just want you.”

  “But you can say that only because you already have children. I don’t.”

  “Caroline and Cathy spend as much time with you as they do with me.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t mean the same. You are their father. You are connected to them. I’m not. You matter. I don’t. They look like you. They’re a part of you. I want a child to look like me, to be a part of me. I want to nurse a baby and guide a child and teach her about flowers and horses and poetry. I want to sew mother-daughter dresses, God dammit. I want to have someone special in this world. I want to do the normal, traditional, conventional thing. I want to be a mother.”

  “I never thought I’d hear you talk like this, Zelda.”

  “I never thought I’d feel like this. It’s worse than wanting to fall madly in love when you’re only twelve. I’m really longing for a child of my own.”

  “Look, let’s do this, just finish your PhD and try teaching one year. You are so close. You’ve wanted it so much. When we were first married, that was all you wanted—your PhD, your teaching, and me. It will take you just a while longer to finish it. Finish it. Then see how you feel about having a baby. You’re young, after all. You’ve already come so far. And you know how you love teaching, how you miss it now. Think of how you would miss it if you had to give it up entirely.”

  I knew rationally that Charlie was right, although underneath it all I was sobbing and tearing my hair. I agreed to finish my PhD first. I continued to faithfully, furiously take my Pill, but I prayed every night that it wouldn’t work.

  For nine more months I worked on my PhD; I wished I were using those nine months to grow a baby. All that long fall and winter and spring I wandered about the university feeling lonely and bored, calculating just how many semesters, days, hours, it would be before I could get my PhD and then get pregnant. Suddenly, insanely, my PhD seemed only an obstacle in the way of what I really wanted. I appreciated the ridiculous irony of it all, but I couldn’t help myself. My body had taken over with its deep, fierce craving, and it seemed that I spent my days wrestling myself through the world. I became nervous and jumpy and absentminded and sensitive. I longed for magic.

  I finished my fifth semester of PhD work and most of the sixth year of my marriage in the spring of 1970. I was twenty-seven. I felt old. I felt stale. I felt bored. I felt like a princess who wanted to become a frog. By the end of May, I had managed to totally bind my ability to make decisions in irrational ribbons of desire and despair. I should have known it was a classic intellectual disease: too much thinking, not enough sheer pure acts. I wanted a baby, but I was unable to make the choice to have one. One late spring night I approached Charlie about it again. I was timid, irritable. I wanted him to read my mind, to make the decision for me.

  “Charlie,” I said, rolling a pebble from our patio in my hands, “I have to talk to you. I think I’m going crazy. I can’t continue my PhD work. It means nothing to me anymore. Surely you’ve noticed how I’ve changed; this last semester was awful for me. My mind is tired—”

  “Zel
da,” Charlie said, “I know. Listen, I have some news. I didn’t want to tell you until I had it all arranged and confirmed. I didn’t want to raise your hopes and then disappoint you. But the official letter came today. Did you see the champagne I bought? We’ll celebrate tonight. Zelda, you can take a year off and rest your poor sweet tired mind. My love, we’re going to France. I’ve been asked to be visiting professor next year at the Sorbonne.”

  The Sorbonne. Paris. France. Europe. Magic words. I had longed to live in Paris, and now Charlie was giving me the opportunity. I squashed my desires into as small a package as I could make and carried them to France with me, like an invisible, unwieldy, extra set of luggage, like a pair of kittens pushing at the sides of a soft basket, mewing to get out, always there, bouncing and bumping at my side. But I went. We spent a blurred, scurried summer entertaining Charlie’s girls, interviewing people to rent our house, talking with travel bureaus and other friends who had lived in Europe and wanted to give us necessary advice, buying clothes and prescription drugs, practicing our French.

  For once the girls were not the stars of our summertime, and this bothered them; when we told them we needed to send them back to Massachusetts early so that we could pack and get the house cleaned, they seemed relieved. We had asked them if they wanted to come to France, for any length of time at all, and they said that they very much did want to come. But Adelaide quickly ruled out any possibility of that: she said that if Charlie had enough money to buy them plane fares to and from Europe, he certainly had enough money to pay off their orthodontist bill immediately, or to give her some extra money for improvements on their house, which after all would do the girls more long-lasting good than a short trip.… We let the idea drop. We packed our bags, our boxes of books and note cards, and went with all our luggage, real and psychological, to France.