Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  Many things might make one forget the desire for babies, but a year in France is not one of them. Charlie and I found a small cheap apartment on rue de la Rochefoucauld, and we bought a small white Fiat 850, and when Charlie wasn’t teaching we were in the Fiat, driving to Switzerland or Germany or different parts of France. When he was teaching, I made trips to museums and cathedrals and learned how to cook rabbit and sat in cafés, drinking and talking with friends. I drank an awful lot of wine, and read Balzac and Stendhal in French, thinking I was improving my mind, and memorized unnecessary facts about de Gaulle and Fouquet, and sat in le Jardin du Luxembourg, feeding pigeons, and wrote lots of letters and sent lots of presents back to Caroline and Cathy. I bought Christian Dior underwear for myself, and all sorts of expensive perfume, and several thousand postcards. And every day when Charlie was teaching, I lay on my bed sobbing and digging my fingernails into my arms. I hated myself for it, but France in all its beauty was not what I wanted; it was not sufficient. While walking through the great gardens of Versailles, I would think, Yes, yes, it’s beautiful, but all these statues are dead and I’m alive. I can create something beautiful, and alive, too. I began to resent Charlie for denying me what I wanted most—his child.

  Paris became a blur. I was either drunk or crying. All the beauty and excess of the place stirred me up, but perhaps anything would have then. In March a graduate student sent me a list of critical books he thought I should be reading so that I could keep up with my work. I went to the William Smith bookstore, near the Place de la Concorde, and found a few of the books and went back to my apartment to settle down to work. For some reason bells were ringing that day, and their sounds moved through me as though I were made of air. Charlie was teaching and I was alone in our troisième étage flat. Something was simmering in wine on the stove, and I had a glass of wine at the little table I used for a desk. I felt lonely and incompetent and useless and drunkenly morose. The essays I was trying to read were stuffy and petty, and I suddenly knew with the wisdom that wine drunk in the afternoon brings that I couldn’t stand to read another essay. I felt I had to do something drastic and dramatic to clench my decision, so I went out on our tiny balcony and began tearing out the pages from the book of essays. I let them float and fly, one by one, down to the street below. After a while people began to look up at me, after a while the pages were badly littering the street, but I didn’t care. I didn’t stop until all the nice new pages of the books were torn out and set free. Then I went back into the apartment and fell onto the bed and slept. When I woke up I remembered that I had been drunk and wasted money and acted foolishly, but I also remembered my decision, and I knew I would not change my mind. When Charlie came home that night, I told him that I had to have a baby or I would leave him and find a new husband/father. Charlie said all right, since those were his choices, we would have a baby, although he was afraid it would ruin everything between us.

  * * *

  And after all, perhaps it has. After all. Now, early in November, here in Helsinki, Charlie’s been gone almost a week to lecture at various universities in Germany. Before Adam and Lucy, I would have gone with him. We would have enjoyed seeing a new town together, tasting new food, making love in new rooms and beds. But now, with four of us, it is too expensive and I really couldn’t enjoy it anyway, dragging my two little ones from railway station to small hotel in the cold November rain. I wouldn’t be able to go dining and drinking with Charlie and his friends; the children are too young to be left with a strange babysitter every night, and they don’t go to sleep before nine, so I wouldn’t be able to slip off down to the bar or restaurant, as I did when Adam was just a baby. They are too young to appreciate Germany, and the hotel rooms would have nothing to occupy them. And there would be all the paraphernalia, diapers and diaper liners, bottles and nipples and caps, clothes and love blankets and toys. No. I could not go this time.

  My babysitter has just called to say she cannot come to babysit tomorrow, after all, so I will not be able to go out to meet Charlie’s plane when he returns. Before the children I met every plane that Charlie returned on. I would laugh and cry with joy to see him so big and real again, and we would come home and throw off our clothes and make love, and then eat and drink and discuss his trip and my week, and then we would make love again. Now I won’t be able to meet his plane—and we won’t be able to make love when he gets here. We won’t be able to eat and drink and relax and talk. Adam and Lucy will be mad with delight to see him again, and they’ll climb all over him and insist on sitting on his lap and climbing up his leg and having pony rides and showing him all seven million pictures they painted and drew this gloomy wet week. If Charlie and I try to talk for a long time, they’ll become jealous and feel ignored and go crazy. I don’t hate them for this, my children. I understand how they feel. They are in a strange country, away from friends and toys and Sesame Street and the comfort of their cozy rooms. They can’t remember the past or dream of the future to help them make it through the present. Now to them is a cold gray linoleum floor and a big window full of cold gray sky and electrical power lines and construction cranes hanging deadly in the air. Now is a season of harsh weather and frozen sand and the swings removed from the playground so that their hands won’t stick to the icy metal rungs. Now is having no little friends to giggle with and no safe secret place to hide and no granola bars. They need the comfort of my smile and touch and lap. I cannot bear for them to be unhappy for long. For a few minutes, yes, but not for hours, not for days.

  When I gave birth to Adam and Lucy, I changed. It was as if when they were inside my body they had reached up and literally torn off a piece of my heart and my stomach and swallowed them, so that they now carry a part of me everywhere with them. I am linked to them by something more physically real and less scientifically observable than laser beams or remote control. They are small creatures, but I love them hugely, more than I love the earth or myself. More than I love Charlie. There it is. My children have become my lovers. I am finally unfaithful to my husband. Their smooth, fresh, rounded plump limbs are juicier and more delicious than Charlie’s. I fondle them more. Their eyes are brighter, their breath sweeter. They gave me an understanding of life at their birth that Charlie had never been able to reveal to me; they connected me up to something deep and wide and wild and good in this world. Their births gave me the shocking great knowledge that I could eat grass, dance in trees, fall from roofs, and dissolve into shimmering molecules of sparkling snow. Their births made me know that I was grabbing death and tearing it in half and washing it away with my warm proud blood. When I took their naked perfect bodies in my arms, I felt ecstasy and content. Now, four and two years later, that hot exhausted joy is over, but the strength of feeling remains. I press their bodies against mine and kiss them and stroke them more than I do Charlie. They surprise me more than Charlie does; they are more extravagant and lustful and ferocious in their love. After we have known each other for thirteen years, I am sure my children and I will be less hot and vivid in our relations with each other. Undoubtedly I will be more rational. But until then, at least for a few more years, I will continue to wade through this life with my little children as if I were wading through a vat of hot, sticky, sweet chocolate: the chocolate impedes me, slows me down, often irritates me, but I still stay here, happy in the hot thick gooey mess, licking sweetness off my fingers and arms and belly.

  Charlie needs only what he has always needed: me as a companion and lover and live-in friend. I need more. I need my children, and I need a lover and live-in friend, and now I know I need to teach. Charlie wants only one thing, or perhaps two, counting his work; he does always want his work. But I want three things: him, my children, and my work. I want three things. Suppose I can have only two? I realize more and more, as I live out my time here in Helsinki, that as a woman, an American woman, I am spoiled. I have many luxuries, many electrical conveniences and psychological freedoms. And yes, when I think of it, I feel guilty, and yes, I woul
d change it if I could. I would like for the whole world to be in a better balance. I know I do want everything—husband, children, work, harmonious complications. I seem to myself a bit greedy. Or is that old-fashioned thinking; am I trying to protect myself from the responsibility of a decision? After all, I must go home sometime, and I really don’t see how my not teaching can help anyone else. How tangled my thinking is, yet certain lights are beginning to shine through.

  * * *

  But after all, I didn’t make the decision in Paris. That day in the spring of 1971 when I got drunk and threw the essays out of the window and told Charlie I would leave him if I couldn’t have a child passed. The next day I received a letter in the mail and ran to Charlie, crying, “Cancel yesterday! Forget everything I said!”

  A former professor of mine had just become the new head of the English department at a small junior college. He was writing to ask if I would be interested in teaching freshman English and literature full-time the coming year. He had always been impressed with my teaching, he wrote, and hoped I could join his department. He didn’t care whether or not I had finished my PhD.

  I went mad with joy. Charlie was pleased. I accepted.

  That summer when we returned from France was a totally happy one. Charlie and I scarcely had time to unpack before his daughters arrived. Caroline was sixteen now and a serious reader; Cathy was thirteen and a teenager. Cathy had braces now, too, and both girls glittered and flashed when they smiled, if they didn’t remember to hide their mouths with their hands like timid Japanese. Charlie was working on a paper, but it didn’t consume all his time. I was busy getting together my stuff for the fall. I was so excited by the prospect of teaching again after three years away from it that I prepared more lesson plans, diagrams, exercises, jokes, quizzes, and reading material than I could possibly have used. I read and reread the grammar book and the anthology of literature. While driving to the grocery store or dentist I would imagine my first day in class, and my second and my third. What would I say? How could I inspire them? How could I make them love the language?

  I asked Caroline a thousand times for her opinion. She was very bright and helpful. She read some of the short stories and discussed them with me. We spent a lot of time in the backyard in our shorts and halter tops, with our bare feet in the water of the little lily pond and books in our hands and a pad of paper next to me and a pencil behind my ear. How beautiful Caroline was then, even with her braces and the short chopped hair she had appeared with that summer. She was slender to the point of skinniness, all ribs and elbows, but her hair was the thick silver-lighted gold that Charlie had; it gleamed when she turned her head. She looked, in fact, as Charlie would have if he had been a girl. She was still shy, still reserved, she still could not easily touch anyone. She always kept a space between herself and others, as if contact might cause pain. Except for that one characteristic she was a normal, happy girl, and to me, a friend.

  Cathy still adored her father, still followed him everywhere. When he was working and Caroline and I were reading, she did elaborate jigsaw puzzles or macramé, or she sewed. Usually, if we weren’t at the farm, or swimming, she was off with her girlfriend Nicole. Caroline had let her neighborhood friendships lapse and seemed to prefer staying with me, but Cathy flew out of the house every morning after breakfast to go to Nicole’s house. They preferred Nicole’s house to ours because Nicole had older brothers and their house was full of current rock records going full blast and fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys. Charlie thought Nicole was rather dumb and dippy, too silly and boy-crazy for thirteen, but he didn’t interfere with Cathy. Instead he spent more time with her, trying to get her interested in other things: art, classical music, history, watercolor painting. Still, that summer Cathy seemed to be nothing more than a giggler, flashing out the door, letting it slam behind her.

  One week it rained, and Nicole and her family were away on a trip, and Charlie had meetings and the week seemed stuck in mud. It was a dirty, dull week, it wouldn’t move. After three boring days we came up with the deliciously foolish idea of writing and presenting a play. The girls—and I—were still enamored of monsters and werewolves and ghouls, and that week the setting seemed perfect for horror, what with the windows darkened by the perpetual rain and clouds and the sky dramatically shaking with thunder. I popped popcorn and the three of us sat around cross-legged on the floor, writing a play for three parts: the heroine, the vampire, and the hero. I was certain the girls would cast me as the villain, but they didn’t. It was after all the best part. They had to toss a coin to see who got the villain’s role—Cathy—and Caroline became the heroine. I had to be the hero. It was awful, being the hero, I only got to run in during the last two minutes of the play to stab the vampire through the heart. The vampire got to die a writhing and melodramatic death. Caroline swooned and said, “My hero!” and I got to say my lines: “There! He’ll never bother you or anyone else again! Once more goodness triumphs!”

  Since I had such a short part, I was also made into general stagehand, director, and wardrobe maker. Caroline had to wear something appropriately heroinical and flowing, so I took her to my room to try on my long dresses. She was now at sixteen a good inch taller than I, and when she put on one of my dresses tears jumped into my eyes. Suddenly she seemed grown-up. Mature. After that summer I thought of her as a grown-up, and that was a mistake. She was still a child, needing what children need. Cathy wore her best slacks and a white shirt of mine and a bow tie of her father’s, but we had to buy black material for a cape. It was cheap shiny material and it made a great cape: in the dim rainy light it glistened elegantly, voluptuously, sleekly. I wore some slacks and a tailored shirt and Charlie’s suede jacket and cowboy hat, both of which were far too big for me. Still, without a hat I didn’t look male enough to be a proper hero.

  Our play seemed so good that we invited all the neighborhood children. About fifteen of them came and squashed themselves into our dining room; our stage was the living room, and we entered from the hall closet. We had draped the furniture with dark quilts and turned down the lights and hung construction paper bats and spiders all about. No one forgot her lines. We were a splendid success. I sat in the coat closet waiting for the end of the play and my three lines, and smiled as I watched Caroline and Cathy through a crack in the closet door, and thought that we were now really all friends—comrades. I thought we would always be close and good friends.

  I was sad when they left that summer, but not too sad: I was eager for the fall, and for my teaching.

  * * *

  That fall Anthony Leyden came to our house to tell us that June was divorcing him. She had been having an affair with her children’s piano teacher, and she wanted to marry him. I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop for several minutes when Anthony told us the news. June, proper, prissy June! Had fallen in love with her children’s piano teacher! And wanted to leave her children’s father! I loved it; it was wonderful. I hoped that someone somewhere would righteously snub her as much as she had snubbed me, but I also wished her well. I thought she was doing a splendid and valiant thing, giving up her respectable home and its superficial tidiness for the messy depths of sexual love.

  Part of the problem, Anthony said, was that she didn’t want the children. She was fixed on the idea that she and her pianist would go to the Caribbean for a year of sun and love. He would support them by playing at a piano bar in a tourist hotel. She would wait tables at night, if necessary. This set me off into laughter again, the thought of June Leyden in a little cocktail waitress uniform, with black lace stockings and flounces around her prim little butt. Anthony said he thought it was humorous, too, and that didn’t really bother him, June leaving him that way. What bothered him was that she wanted him to keep the children. Dickie and Dierdre were now sixteen and thirteen, not babies but not old enough to be on their own. And Anthony, handsome Anthony, didn’t want them around. He had a lover himself, a young girl who had been a student of his. He didn’t plan to m
arry the girl, but he did want to live with her awhile. He wanted some romance and freedom, too, and he couldn’t have that with two teenagers in the house. He thought that June should keep them without question; she was after all their mother. He would give them lots of money to live on, he said; he just wanted his own apartment and his own life, without two hulking teenagers trailing through it, dropping clothes and knocking on closed bedroom doors.

  Charlie gave Anthony the name and address of his lawyer. I sat and laughed. I felt glad for them all, even the children. Dickie and Dierdre had become spoiled, coddled, snotty teenage kids, and I didn’t like them. Caroline and Cathy didn’t like them, either, and always tried to see as little of them as possible. I thought that perhaps this change would be good for the Leyden children, would toss them out of their complacency, would reveal to them the turmoil of emotions hiding beneath ironed sheets and behind polished windows.

  I would have given a lot to read the letters that passed between Adelaide and June. I wondered: If Adelaide condoned June’s mad amorous actions, could she still hate Charlie for his? Would she think it acceptable for a woman to leave a man because she loved another man but still not acceptable for a man to leave a woman he had stopped loving?

  We hadn’t heard much from Adelaide that summer. When the girls were asked about her, they said that she was happy, more or less, and settled. She didn’t date, they said, she was bitter toward all men. She thought men were a rather shabby lot compared to the noble species of women.

  “And how do you feel about men?” Charlie asked Caroline that summer.

  Caroline went pale, as she always did when the talk got serious.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I don’t hate them, like Mother does, but I know I’ll never be able to trust them.”