Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

“Out of my breasts,” I said.

  The novelty of it appealed to Adam; he willingly got into his high chair. I picked Lucy up and pulled a chair over for myself to sit in next to Adam’s high chair, and opened my robe and got Lucy’s greedy mouth onto my left nipple. I held her with my left arm and fed Adam his food with my right hand. The girls continued to watch television. It was as if the three of us simply were not there. I felt a rage bubbling within me, but I tried to keep it down, not wanting to mix Lucy’s milk with acid.

  My stomach growled. I had not had anything to eat or drink since lunchtime, when Charlie had been there to fix my food; that protected friendly time seemed ages away. Now I felt like an unwanted stranger in my own home. There I sat, weary and aching and bleeding and leaking and longing for a kind and interested word. There I sat with my new baby, and Caroline and Cathy did not so much as turn their heads to see what Lucy looked like. There I sat, feeding Adam as I nursed Lucy, while Caroline and Cathy stared at the television, and ate the casserole I had made, and acted as if no one else were in the room. It was strange. It was awful.

  “Do you suppose one of you could get me a plate of the casserole?” I asked. “I’m very hungry. And could you please pour me a beer?”

  Caroline and Cathy looked at each other, exchanged a long, bored, superior, put-upon look.

  Then, “I’ll get it,” Caroline sighed. She rose and opened a beer and without pouring it into a glass plopped it down in front of me like a surly waitress. Then she glopped the casserole on a plate and shoved that in front of me. She sat back down again.

  I was nearly in tears. I felt as though the world had gone mad. The hate that radiated from the girls was suffocating me. I could not understand what happened, but I knew that if I tried to discuss it with them I would burst into humiliating sobs and not be able to stop.

  “Could I please have a fork?” I asked. I thought of all the times, the thousands of times, that I had cooked dinner for them, and set the table, and done the dishes.

  Cathy rose this time, and got a fork from the drawer and laid it down near me. Then she, too, sat down to stare at the television.

  I was so hungry that I somehow managed to eat my dinner and feed Lucy and feed Adam all at the same time. I switched Lucy to my right breast, put a mouthful of food in Adam’s mouth, then quickly stuffed food in my mouth while Adam chewed. I had to ask the girls for another beer, for a napkin, for an apple for myself and a banana for Adam. Finally I felt satisfied, and Adam had eaten everything, and Lucy’s mouth went slack around my nipple. I held her against my shoulder and patted her until she gave a loud, most vulgar burp. The sound made Adam laugh, and I smiled, but Caroline and Cathy appeared not to hear it.

  I pushed back my chair, and laid Lucy on the floor, and helped Adam out of his high chair. Then, without speaking to the girls (after all, what could I possibly say?), I picked Lucy up and took Adam by the hand and led him up the stairs. We went into his bedroom, and I spent two long hours there, playing toys with him, reading him books, while Lucy lay on the floor, looking up at the light. Now and then she would cry a bit, and I would hold her, and she would snuggle against me, not sleepy, but content. Finally I managed to get Adam into his summer pajamas, and into the bathroom to use the toilet and to brush his teeth, and finally, finally, he was in bed. I was exhausted. I felt like a prisoner in my house. I could hear sounds of the television below me. Lucy did not want to sleep, so I sat with her on my bed for a while and sang to her, and let her lie on her stomach on my rug while I tried to write a few birth announcements to friends. But I was tired, too tired. I craved rest and sleep. I longed for a hot bath, a stiff scotch, and twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep. I wished that someone friendly would call me to see how I was; I wished Caroline and Cathy would come up and ask how I felt, if there was anything they could do to help. I wondered why on earth they were behaving like such total rotten spoiled bitches; I didn’t have the emotional or physical energy to try to figure it out myself. I decided that in the morning I would definitely screw up my courage and ask them what was going on. If I could be brave enough to ask point-blank right into their bitterly closed faces what was going on, surely they would have to answer.

  I nursed Lucy again, earlier than she should have been, but I was hoping it would make her sleep, and it did. At nine-thirty I put her to bed and checked Adam, who was sleeping soundly, and then, passing up the hot bath I longed for, fell into my bed, into a thick and fitful sleep.

  Lucy woke at two and decided to stay up the rest of the night. Apparently her five-hour nap during the day had given her energy; now, according to her system, it was time to wake up and play. She would not sleep. She nursed, and then messed around with my nipples awhile, and I sang to her softly and rocked her and talked with her and walked her around and rubbed her back, and she would not sleep. She was adorable, and I adored her, but I was tired. She was just over three days old. I needed sleep. I longed for sleep. I thought of going downstairs to ask one of the girls to hold her for me for just one hour but decided against it. I didn’t feel that I could trust them with Lucy or face their hate in the middle of the night. So I took care of her myself. Luckily she was not crying, she had no colic, she was not upset, she was just awake and looking for some action, and the only time she cried was when I put her back down into her little wicker cradle. I felt like a candle melting, all my skin and flesh seemed to be drooping downward from exhaustion. I wanted to let go, to sink, to lose myself in sleep. Instead I held Lucy for three hours, studying her sweet delicate face, talking to her. Finally, at five, I put her down in bed next to me and nursed her again, and we both fell asleep, in our hot moist bed, together.

  Adam woke me at six-thirty. He came pattering into my room, crying, “Mommy, Mommy, where are you?” His face was so brilliant with joy when he saw that I was there, really there in the bed, that I had not left him, that even though I was nearly sick with the need of sleep, I could not be angry with him for waking early.

  “Come into my bed and snuggle with me awhile,” I said, and I scooted Lucy over and made room for my son. We snuggled and talked for a while, and it was sweet. But all too soon Adam wanted to get up, he wanted to eat his breakfast, he wanted to go out to play.

  Lucy still slept. I took Adam by the hand and led him downstairs. Little dots danced before my eyes as I walked; I was so tired. I was so sleepy. I ached with exhaustion. It hurt my knees to walk down the stairs. My breasts ached, my back ached, my bottom ached. Panic was rising within me. I could not cope alone. I was too tired.

  I knocked on the parlor door. No one answered. I knocked again, more loudly. Still there was no answer.

  “Girls?” I said. “Cathy? Caroline?”

  There was no answer.

  I pushed the door open and went into the room. Both girls were in the sofa bed, twisted in the sheets, their heads hiding under their pillows.

  “Girls,” I said, “I’m sorry to wake you up, but it’s seven-thirty, it’s not too early. I was up all night with Lucy, and I am really exhausted. Could you please get Adam some breakfast and take him outside to play a bit? It looks like a beautiful morning.”

  There was no answer.

  “They’re sleeping,” Adam said. He was holding on to my hand very tight and standing very close to me. “Let’s go.”

  I moved close to the bed and gently shook a body—it was so hidden by pillows and covers that I couldn’t tell whose it was.

  “Please,” I said. “Wake up. Please help me. Your father is paying you a lot of money to help me this week, and I need help right now. I’m going to be sick if I don’t get some sleep. Please wake up and give Adam his breakfast and take him outside for a while.”

  Slowly the two girls surfaced from the bed. Their hair hung in their eyes. They sat up and stared at me as if I were some monstrous stranger asking obscene favors.

  “Good morning,” I said, and tried a smile.

  “Let me get my clothes on and I’ll get him breakfast,” Caroline
said, not returning my smile, not attempting to be pleasant in any way.

  “Come watch cartoons, Adam,” I said to my son. “You can watch television while the girls dress, and then you can have breakfast and they’ll take you outside to play. Caroline, I’ll get him settled in front of the television in the kitchen. Then I’ve just got to go back to bed. Lucy’s still sleeping, and I’ve got to sleep while I’ve got the chance.”

  Caroline said nothing.

  I took Adam into the kitchen, put him on a chair, gave him his blanket to cover up with and to rub against his cheek, turned on the television, then shuffled back upstairs to my bedroom and the hot sinking luxury of my bed.

  It was two hours later when I awakened to the sound of crying. It was not Lucy crying; she was still lying on my bed, awake now and sucking her fist, but looking at the sunlight on my wall and seeming quite content. The sound of crying came from downstairs. My body did not want to respond to the sound, every muscle and bone and nerve pulled me back down into the dark heart of necessary sleep. It hurt to open my eyes. It took effort to keep them open. But it was Adam crying, and he was crying very hard, forlornly, and I could not let myself sleep.

  I rose and shuffled down to the bathroom. I noticed that I was still bleeding heavily; the blood was shocking to me, so bright, thick, messy. It irritated me that my body continued to do such things without my knowledge or consent at this time when I could not stop to understand the significance. I washed myself, and longed to sit for a while in a nice warm tub of water, and heard Adam crying still, and knew I could not. I rinsed my face with cold water quickly, hoping that would help me wake up. Then I hurried as fast as I could back to my bedroom to pick up Lucy, who was by now beginning to make little whimpering sounds. With her in my arms I made my way down the stairs.

  The noise was coming from the kitchen. Adam was in there, lying on the floor and crying. Caroline and Cathy were there, too. Caroline was on the phone, talking, and Cathy was standing next to her. When they saw me come in, they turned their faces away.

  I laid Lucy on the rug and knelt and took Adam in my arms.

  “Adam, hon, what’s wrong?”

  “I want to go out and play. I’m tired of watching television. I want to ride my little car.”

  “Haven’t you been outside yet?”

  “No. I want to ride my little car.”

  I turned to look at the girls. Caroline had hung up the phone. They were both at the sink, pretending to rinse off the breakfast dishes.

  “Adam said he wants to go out and play,” I said. “Can’t you take him outside for a while? You don’t have to play with him, just be there.”

  There was a long silence, and then Cathy said, “It’s so boring.”

  “What?”

  “It’s so boring,” Cathy said. “Just watching him play.”

  Lucy began to cry. Adam was still sniffling against my nightgown. I hurt everywhere and felt weak and vulnerable; yet from some new source of energy anger was surging inside me.

  “Oh, Cathy,” I said. “Oh, Caroline. Lots of jobs are boring. I’m only asking for a few days, a few hours of help. And we’re paying you a lot of money. Why can’t you help me a little? I am tired. I am hurt. I need rest. I need help. What has happened, what have I possibly done to make you two act this way? Can you tell me? Will you please try to talk to me about it? I just don’t understand. I used to love you girls, and I thought at least we were friends, and friends help each other. But you two seem to hate me, and I don’t understand it. What is going on?”

  Cathy burst into tears and ran from the room.

  Caroline said, “We don’t like to be here. It’s boring. It’s a real drag. We want to go home.”

  There was no trace, no sign, that I had ever so much as passed the young woman on the street before. I did not know her. Her eyes were metallic, ungiving; what she was doing, the way she was staring at me, seemed a form of killing.

  Squirming against me was Lucy, waving her tiny fists in the air and howling now, partially because of hunger, partially, I am sure, because she was feeling the waves of disbelief and anger and self-defense that surged outward from my body.

  “All right,” I said, and forced myself to rise from where I knelt with Adam on the floor. My knees were trembling so that I thought I would fall, but I wanted to rise to a full and wrathful height; standing somehow made me seem less powerless. “All right, then,” I hissed, and I was suddenly angry beyond tears. “Go home. Get out. But don’t either one of you ask me for anything again. I’ll see to it that you don’t get your goddamned two hundred dollars; you certainly haven’t earned a penny of it. You’re both just—just cruel and unkind and selfish. I’ve done a lot for you in the years I’ve known you; you can’t imagine what I’ve done for you, but I will never do anything for you again.”

  “I don’t care,” Caroline said. Her face was white, but her eyes were still hard. She crossed the room, and I heard her go into the parlor.

  Adam was hanging on to my legs with both hands and had his head buried into my bottom. Lucy was still whining, and I absentmindedly patted her back with a quivering hand. I stood there, frozen, shaking, and listened to the sounds: suitcases closing, the girls speaking in whispers, the front door opening, the front door slamming shut, and then the sound of the car, their Beetle, starting and driving away.

  I went to the phone and called Mrs. Justin. When she answered it I was so out of control I could scarcely make myself understood over the sobs. “Mrs. Justin,” I said, “could you please come up and help me for a little while right now?”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  She came right away, and by then I had managed to get to a chair and to nurse Lucy, who had not been changed and who peed all over herself and my nightgown, and to stroke Adam’s hair as he sat next to me, listening to me say over and over again, “It will be all right, honey, don’t worry, it will be all right.” I was trying to comfort myself as well as my son.

  Mrs. Justin found an old farm woman to come help with the housework and the kitchen, and a young teenage girl to come sleep overnight. The girl was not very bright and she was overweight and had thin hair and pimples, but she did wake up cheerfully, she did fix Adam breakfast, she did take him out to play. She smiled at Adam, and talked to him in a gentle tone of voice, and she chattered cheerfully to me, “How’s the new baby this morning; oh, there she is; what a little doll; would you let me hold her? Oh, what a cutie pie.” The girl asked me how Lucy was sleeping, and about nursing, and about Adam’s birth, and she told me stories of the births of her brothers and sisters, and she brought me beers and lunch while I sat on the sofa nursing Lucy, and she took Adam for piggyback rides around inside the house and for long walks outside. I loved her. Her name was Tina. She was a nice, warm, loving, cheerful human being, exactly what I needed at that point in my life. She was sloppy and dirty and messy and not very smart, but I was absolutely thrilled to have her around me. When she first walked in the door and smiled at me and picked Adam up in her arms, and nuzzled him and said, “My, aren’t you a big boy for two!,” I felt tears of gratitude spring into my eyes. I was so grateful to her I could have died of it on the spot. She stayed all week, and I do not know what I would have done without her.

  When Charlie came back from his conference, I told him about the trouble I had had with the girls. Charlie said he was sorry, that he didn’t understand it, that he would call them to find out what was going on. But every time he called, the girls were out. The days passed. Finally he wrote them a long letter, which they never answered.

  “Well,” he said wryly, “let’s wait until the end of the summer. Let’s wait until they need college tuition and money for clothes. Let’s wait till check time. We’ll hear from them then.”

  And of course he was right. But we did have the whole summer without them, and for once I didn’t feel sad not to have the girls around. I felt happy and peaceful. I didn’t know what their particular problem was, but I was
too busy to care. And it is true, I was more than too busy to care, I was angry and hurt and sad. I resented them for making the birth of my daughter and the first few days of her life into such a melodrama of anger and resentment and smothered negative emotions. At that point in my life I didn’t know if I would ever be able to forgive Charlie’s daughters. I didn’t know if I would ever want them around again. I felt that something had been destroyed.

  * * *

  And now Lucy and Adam are two and four, and I take their lives for granted, I stomp around and curse them under my breath for taking up my time, for using up my life. I swat them and yell at them and make faces at them that would scare a grown-up, and they yell at me and make faces at me and whine and demand and clutter and wail and pull and pull and drag. They gnaw at me. They eat me alive. Here in Helsinki it is the end of November and quite quite cold. It takes long, clumsy, muttering ages for me to get the children into their snow clothes: long underwear, three pairs of woolen socks, undershirts, shirts, sweaters, coats, mittens, knit scarves, hats, boots—and then someone has an itch, or has to pee, or has a bump in his boot. Finally we go down all the stairs, the surrealistic harsh gray stairs, and out of the apartment to the crisp white air. I take pictures with my little black camera: click, there you have it, the lie: two beautiful children looking bright and gay in red and blue winter clothes, their cheeks rosy, their smiles real, the landscape white and soft. Adam is eating snow. Lucy is trying to pull her orange plastic sled. No, it is not a lie, it is true. They are beautiful children, they are happy, they feel loved, it is winter, they will play in the snow and laugh and I will laugh with them. Now, with my own children, I am learning. I am learning daily, with our little fights and wars, with our daily misunderstandings, I am learning daily to forgive and forget. It doesn’t matter that upstairs I yelled at Adam, “Dammit, when will you ever learn to put on your own clothes! This is driving me crazy. Now stick your foot in harder, dammit!” Now we are downstairs, the moment has passed, this is a new moment and we are happy together. It doesn’t matter today that Adam said yesterday, “I don’t love you anymore.” He does love me. He loved me even then as he spoke, and I knew it. I love him even when I’m shaking him for writing on the walls, and he knows it. Underneath all the whirling, whisking light loud froth of daily hurts and angers stands the foundation of our love, too deep to ever be damaged, too solid, too significant to be even slightly chipped. This is what it means to be a mother with a child, to be a child with a mother. Such deep, satisfying security. Perhaps this is what makes the difference between mothering and stepmothering, between being a child and being a stepchild: the lack of that basic foundation of love and trust that stands solidly under the torrents of daily emotions, rage turning to laughter, smiles turning to frowns, hugs turning to spanks and snarls, hate melting to forgiveness and love. Probably that foundation can be built up, and depending on the people, it can probably be as secure as if it had sprung up naturally, like the earth beneath one’s feet, as normal mothering and childing do. Perhaps it is easier, surely it is easier, if one has one’s own children first and then accumulates stepchildren. One’s own children will have taught one the lesson of instant forgiveness, instant hate and love. I don’t know. I know only that I came to the knowledge of forgiveness, real forgiveness, late in life, after my own children were born, were there to teach me.