Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  They contested the validity of Henry’s will in civil court and Mr.

  Ellerman defended my right to inherit. Amongst other things, the Westervelts said how could it possibly be a binding document when I was constantly referred to as my lovely girl? My lovely girl, Celia, that’s what Henry had written about me over and over in the will.

  Mr. Ellerman informed the court that Henry could have called me a horny salamander and it wouldn’t have mattered: as long as I was indeed his legal spouse and had a marriage certificate filed in the State of Washington to prove it, the will stood, and the property that Sophia Westervelt had bequeathed her great-nephew, it was mine.

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  Sitting there in court I could feel myself mutating like a character in science fiction: Bye bye, lovely girl and Hello! to the woman I would become. Became. In that woman there is something gritty, decidedly unlovely. Much as I detested those New Disciples, from whose girded loins I had sprung, I was like them. They were mean and tough and ugly, dried up, hard-handed and hollow-hearted, but by God, they would lie down for no man. Fight or spit, it was all the same to them. For generations my people had this unlovely raw stamina, and when they failed at sugar beet farming, they prayed, packed up and moved on. They failed at wheat, prayed, packed up and moved on. They failed at sheep farming, shopkeeping and well digging, prayed, packed up, moved on. They failed at mining too, prayed, but stayed put in Colby, Idaho. They finally ran out of energy. The mines died, closed down, the town wizened up, but by that time my people were too spent to move. We didn’t have a pot to pee in. A rented house with running water and a woodstove, sheds and pens for animals. Old Man Westervelt knew all this about my family. (Though he didn’t know when Henry and I had said our vows on Sophia’s Beach because we didn’t invite him. We didn’t invite either family. Henry wanted shut of his as much as I wanted shut of mine.) But when Henry died and left a will, oh, then the Westervelts knew we’d gotten married. And after that, it didn’t take Old Man Westervelt long to find out that my father worked in the boiler room at the prison and faith-healed animals on the side in Colby, Idaho. They accused me of marrying Henry for his money, their money, Westervelt money. I went on the witness stand and said when I met Henry he told me his name was Henry West and his father owned a lumberyard. How was I to know his father’s lumberyard was the entire Northwest?

  I won the case, and I inherited, even though I wasn’t a lovely girl anymore. But the old man, he never gave up trying to make my life a misery, pursuing me, full of spite and vinegar, making everything as hard as he could. He tried to buy back Sophia’s school and all the land sloping down to Useless Point, offering a big, fat price for it, and even though I didn’t give a rat’s ass about 10

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  it, not in the beginning, I still wouldn’t sell, not to him or anyone who offered after him because I knew they were all working for the Westervelts. The old man set the county inspectors on me and the county surveyors. There were fees and back taxes that hadn’t been paid and faulty sewer lines and improper title transfers and wiring not up to code and levies that hadn’t been assessed, or assessment that hadn’t been levied. I didn’t understand any of this. But I had to. Finally, Nona York—she had loved Sophia and she had loved Henry and she loved this island, and she hated old Westervelt—she said to me: Celia, take all this confusion to Lester Tubbs, Isadora Island’s only accountant. Lester will cost you, but he knows all about this sort of rubbish and he’ll straighten it out for you and keep it straight. It was true. Thank you, Nona. Lester’s still my accountant and my friend. But it was terrible for years, Old Testament terrible, to be pursued by Old Man Westervelt. Like being stalked by Yahweh.

  So Eve and I have that much in common, pissing off the powers that be, and our lives suspended from a single error in judgment.

  But what if…Predawn, what if tiptoes barefoot across the bare boards of my mind, what if? What if Henry had not died? Would he be the man sleeping beside me in this bed? Would we—would I—be in this bed at all? Would Henry be paunchy and balding? Gray? Would he finally, and against his every conscious wish, have inherited that sour stain that taints the Westervelts? (Every August, till he finally died, Old Man Westervelt hired someone to sail the Deo Volente round and round Useless Point on fine summer days, betraying, as Henry once remarked, a zest for cruelty rather than a thirst for revenge.) Would Henry and I have endured, our love endured? Or split at the seams like everyone else? One thing I’m certain of: our marriage would never have degenerated into one of those functional unions, pious, empty, regulated as a gasoline pump, fish on Friday night, sex on Saturday morning. For Henry and me, it was—it would have been—love or nothing. That’s just the kind of people we are.

  Were. Love or nothing. Our love would have endured everything other loves could not, the strains and drains of daily 11

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  life. Would we have had boys beautiful as he was? Girls? My girls, my beautiful daughters, Bethie and Victoria, were begot and begat by other men, other lovers. I’ve had other children too (not mine, not exactly, but not not-mine either), children who came with the territory, stepsons and stepdaughters, children begat and begotten by my lovers in other unions with other women who once loved the men I loved, men who—like old Russell here—occupied what I always think of as the passenger side of the bed.

  Russell wants to change all that. He wants us to get married. He says he’s been divorced long enough (four years) and we’ve been together long enough (three years) and marriage is the mature thing to do at our time of life (pushing fifty, pushing, pushing, like some kind of athletic event). It’s time to ratify all this, says Russell. All what? I don’t believe in medicinal marriage, in getting married because it’s somehow good for you, like Vitamin C. I don’t believe in marriage at all. No marriage for me (except for, Henry), but oh, I have had some great weddings, Bobby, Andrew, Phil: food and flowers and musicians and handwritten vows, lovely dresses, Dearly Beloved gathered on Sophia’s Beach, but thank you, no license, no legal records, no pastors or preachers or judges. Just a hell of a good party. But that’s not what Russell wants. He wants a Mrs. Russell Lewis. Another one.

  It’ll never happen, Russell. Marriage doth not true lovers yoke; marriage chains spouses. Marriage makes of love not the union of hearts and minds, but an Institution. And then you get swept into the Institution and with it the crusts of custom, the old carapace of civil codes, and your love hardens into law. Later, at the end (death or divorce, whichever comes first), lawyers shuffle through your human misery like ragpickers at the dump of love.

  I won’t live like that. It won’t happen to me. Not me, not me. But Russell says my expectations are unrealistic and my wish (insistence, I tell him, insistence) on being happy is overwrought. He says to expect happiness at our age (pushing fifty, pushing) is immature; we should wish for contentment, good health, a reli-12

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  able retirement and comfort. It’s perfectly natural, he says, for expectations to be softened by experience.

  Bullshit. I don’t want my expectations softened, mushy as if I have no teeth to tear into life, as if my brains have gone to some kind of candied-yam consistency. Don’t feed me softened expectations and expect my contented yum yum in response. And if that’s immature of me, well then, just send me to my room and I’ll come down when I’m a big girl in about thirty years.

  Russell says I need to plan for retirement, to look ahead. Russell says, Celia, without planning, you’ll be doing the same thing you are doing now, working just as hard in twenty years. Well, so what? I’m used to it. I’m still working just as hard (harder, maybe) as I was when I started Henry’s House, just treadwater work, lots of it, unremitting, but essential to the thing I’ve created: Henry’s House, the most famous bed-and-breakfast in the San Juan Islands. In the whole Northwest, I like to think, but that may be stretching it. Then again, maybe not.

  It’s work I would
not have done, except that I stumbled on that broom. That phantom broom appeared one day—and one day vanished. I’m sure it was Henry. Henry’s way of reaching me, of whispering, Wake up, Celia, don’t let your life drift, don’t let your days just swing like that boom that killed me. Wake up, Celia! Because after Henry died, I see-sawed along, even after I recovered from the depths of grief and pain, I rocked along. Started at the college across the bay, but never graduated. Mostly my days were pretty shapeless, living on bits and pieces of the inheritance Henry left me. An uncomplicated life. Friends. Lovers. (A few good men, as they say. A few real disasters.) Then I had Bethie, and later, after I’d settled down with Bobby and his daughter, Sunny, we had Victoria. We lived in this house and I seldom went over to the great decayed wreck of Sophia’s school, rotting further with every year that passed, the shell of Sophia Westervelt’s great dream and the incarnation of her failure.

  Blackberry bushes had enveloped and invaded the place, and belladonna too, twisted up all through the eaves and snaking along the floors. The fuse boxes were full of birds’ nests and wiring had 13

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  frayed everywhere, poking out of holes in the walls, all those electrical nerve ends, like copper ganglia, unsheathed and naked. The walls had cracks, holes, some made by vandals, some made by time and neglect (a few made by a man I broke up with who went over to Sophia’s school, broke off a couple of banisters and beat hell out of the place). The building was a palace for squirrels and raccoons, mice, probably rats too. (You live by water, you always have rats to worry about.) Wind whistled through the jagged holes in the windows and inside, if you walked inside, your feet would grind over broken glass littering the floors, that and fallen plaster and the crunchy skins that snakes had slithered out of and abandoned. You can’t have Eden without snakes.

  The day I found that broom, I’d had a fight with Bobby (admittedly one of the most exasperating men ever to draw breath, Bobby Jerome), a colossal fight. Bobby, in his blissful way, refused to acknowledge that it was a fight. I stalked out, crossing the orchard, over to Sophia’s school, punching through a French door (the brass handles long gone), and kicked everything in my path as I stormed inside, crying, cursing, having myself a merry little tantrum. Blubbering tears, smashing through the debris and fallen plaster, I could not see, nor breathe for the dust I raised, a cloud, a curtain of dust.

  I sneezed and sneezed. Dust suspended in the slices of sunlight streaming through broken windows, rising up and then slowly succumbing, a glittering, granular free fall. Through that dust I saw the broom. It leaned against a pillar. I’d never seen that broom. Your ordinary, garden variety broom: paint worn off, as though many hands had held it, bristles uneven, sheered and at an angle, shaped by work. But what work? Everything around me was a wreck, a mess, a disaster. Still sneezing, I walked over to the broom and stared at it, like I expected it to talk. I fit my hands to the handle and started to sweep. I coughed and choked. I raised more than dust with that broom, I roused Sophia’s old dream. The more I sneezed and swept, the more I knew I could, would, do something with this place, this big, wrecked shell. I didn’t know what, but if I kept on sweeping, I was certain it would come to me. Not a school, I’m no educator, 14

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  but in the rustle of the broom, swish, swish, swish, Henry whispered to me, the old remembered conversations about the ways we wanted to use our lives, the dreams we’d hoped to fulfill. And so it became Henry’s House. It had been all along.

  Not just bed-and-breakfast. More than that. A place of peace, full of those disarming simple pleasures (which, of course, require a wealth of complexity), those romantic particulars which, gathered together, create universal conviction: embroidered pillows and silver creamers and ironed counterpanes, vases of flowers, ever fresh, wooden bowls with green apples, hand-painted dressers and hand-polished wood. Stability. Serenity. Security. Here the tea is always hot and served in thin cups, porcelain so fine the tea warms your hands, all the way to the heart. All the clocks are ticking clocks and the scents all fleeting, to tease the nose, to tweak memory, to imply desire, to suggest fulfillment without ever quite granting it: lavender and lemon, cinnamon and rose and something else, a whiff of what must have been—surely, from some remembered Eden. At Henry’s House it’s not remembered. It’s created. Created, compounded, ambience distilled into assurance. Manifested physically in a place like Henry’s House, the notion of family is an irresistible confection.

  The place all but insinuates a voice at your ear, Yes, yes, Henry’s House is what your family had, or could have had—what you deserved in any event—this sense of entitlement, of certainty, the ties of tradition, the confidence intrinsic to roots, warmth, reliable relationships.

  Of course it’s all complete, compelling bullshit. That’s what makes it so powerful. In truth families will tether you to their values and reward you only while—and if—you kiss your own shackles. Families in general want not to launch you, but to humble you, to fetter you with whatever weapons are at hand, money, religion, disapproval. And in my experience, oh I’ve seen how those long legal arteries of begat and begot get twisted, braided, woven into long, long ropes.

  The tie that binds all right. Enough rope to hang yourself.

  My family would have been secretly joyed to see me roped, um-bilically bound to Colby, Idaho, by a squirming ball of baby 15

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  begot on me by some local boy, a New Disciple, natch. As it was, after I graduated from high school I got a job in the law office of Eugene Wenger, a Communist lawyer in Colby who defended prisoners’ rights and (it was well known) helped draft dodgers on their way to Canada up the Idaho panhandle. Mr. Wenger was as close as Colby came to an antiwar protester. In fact he wasn’t a Communist at all, but a Democrat, the only one in Colby, probably, except for the felons in the prison and they couldn’t vote. My father called him an unconverted Commie Jew and forbade me to step foot in his office. If I disobeyed, my father vowed he would cast me out.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly Eden to begin with, was it? And Mr. Wenger paid $400 a month for an eight-hour day.

  I was saving to go to Paris. This obsession was an unexpected gift from my high school French teacher: three years of Mme. Johnson whose idea of teaching French was to extol the beauties, the heritage, the wonders of Paris to ignorant American yahoos. She had been a university student in 1944. Swept into the arms of a handsome Yank, she married him and off to America! No doubt Colby, Idaho, was a surprise to her and the handsome Yank less appealing in his prison guard uniform. She’d been pissed off ever since. But I loved to hear her talk.

  When I mentioned to Mr. Wenger I was saving to fulfill that dream, he said that wishing to go to Paris was the noblest aspiration any young person could have. He said it was good I was living at home to save money. I told him I wasn’t living at home, but in a room over the Colby drugstore (though I did not say I’d been kicked out for working for an unconverted Commie Jew). Mr. Wenger offered to let me live, rent free, in the studio apartment above his office. I climbed the stairs to the studio apartment and dropped my two suitcases on the floor. Mr. Wenger had used this studio to house (or hide) draft dodgers on their way to Canada. The place had an air of makeshift anxiety. When I moved into this room, the news spread all over Colby (and back to my parents no doubt) that I was whoring for the rent. Working during the day, whoring all night.

  (That’s certainly

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  the way the New Disciples would have described it.) In truth, I half-expected to hear Mr. Wenger’s tread on the stairs, coming up to collect his rent off my young body. If that’s what he wanted, fine, I’d do it. I’d already decided that. I put no especial value on my virtue and had gotten rid of my virginity the year before in the back of a Ford Falcon. Mr. Wenger never did come upstairs to extract anything of me, though he was demanding in the office. A sad, intense man, Mr. Wenger’s personal scent was brewed someh
ow of cigarette smoke, Old Spice and alcohol. He drank seriously. He offered me once, after work, a drink called a Sidecar, a wonderful concoction with sugar round the rim of the glass. We talked of Paris.

  When I had enough money for Paris, I gave a month’s notice. Mr.

  Wenger drove me to the bus station, kissed me goodbye and wished me Godspeed. (My own family, when I called, told me I was going to the devil and not to come back.) It was perhaps my experience with Mr. Wenger, who was better to me, kinder than my own father, that crystallized for me, early on, the belief your blood ties could be dispensed with, never minding the shared receding hairlines or blue eyes, that family could be something you created, that really, your relatives are relative.

  And yet, weirdly, I’ve spent my whole working life at Henry’s House maintaining the illusion that family is essential, that happiness is allied to begets and begats, family trees of tradition. Henry’s House is not so much a B-and-B as an Experience. In the drawers of dressers and vanities at Henry’s House I keep little oddball items. Originally I’d just put them there so that people would open the drawers and see something, so the place would feel like a home and not a hotel.

  When these small things disappeared, at first I was surprised, annoyed. Truly, people who wouldn’t dream of shoplifting a candy bar from Target will sticky-finger little objects out of Henry’s House.

  But gradually I understood the impulse for what it was: people need some physical testament to the experience of Henry’s House, something they can hold, their faux-family heirloom from the faux-family homestead. And in its

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  way, the disappearance of these objects (easily replaced in the off-season) is a compliment to the vivacity of what I’ve created here.

  And it is a creation, not a conviction. Personally I believe family can be replaced. It’s connection that’s essential. To live without connection is a sort of solitary confinement. Death by loneliness.