Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  If this engagement party is a preview of Bethie’s November wedding, then oh, Sister Broadbent, you were so right! There is no rest for the wicked. Everyone with any sort of claim (however tangential) on the bride, they’re at it already, fighting and sniping, carping, sulking, chewing on remembered wrongs, creating new ones, digging up old wounds. Oh yes, the nuclear family. Nuclear’s all wrong to describe families. Nuclear smacks of physics, doesn’t it? So dry and theoretical: random particles crash into one another indifferently, bloodlessly. Nuclear is the wrong way of describing families, metaphorically incorrect, misleading. Forget

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  physics. Families reek of biology—and not quivering-cell biology, those little liquidy units shivering under the microscope—but the great, broad-canvas biology, Darwinian biology. All those warm-blooded mammals, begetting and begatting, the grunt and thump, bloody birthing, wet suckling, the pain of dying, rot, decay—only to begin again. That’s what families have done since the beginning of time. Since Eve.

  And at least Eve didn’t have a bunch of steps and exes to contend with. Me, I have to write to San Jose and tell Bethie’s sperm donor—excuse me, her father, Gary Alsop—she was getting engaged and would be married in November. Of course he’ll come. He’ll bring his wife too. Oh God, I can just see the reception line at this formal wedding Bethie insists upon. Mr. and Mrs. Gary Alsop, they stand there, lined up with the rest of us: smile, shake hands, heads bobbing up and down. We’re Bethie’s parents. This is what Bethie wants? Oh yes, says Bethie, who wants the whole family to be here to share her nuptial happiness. She wants Gary Alsop there—but she doesn’t want him to be father of the bride. No, that’s for Bobby.

  Bobby Jerome was a true father to her and Bethie loves him best. So Bobby and his wife Janice, they’ll be in the reception line too. We’re Bethie’s parents. And because Bethie wants Grant and Lee, her ex-stepbrothers for ushers, then that bastard Andrew Hayes must come too. He and his current wife. And they too will join me and Russell, and all the rest of us in the reception line-up. We’re Bethie’s parents.

  We’re Bethie’s parents…

  I put a halt to this. At least for the engagement party, I told Bethie, there will be no formal reception line. My last word on the subject.

  But at the wedding? Bethie is adamant. I’ll have to endure it, and take such comfort as I can. At least Gary Alsop called and he can’t attend the engagement party. He’s in the middle of a really big corporate audit and the IRS can’t spare him. But on the phone he’s in-dignant: If I go to all the trouble and expense to come to the wedding, Celia, I ought to be able to walk my daughter down the aisle. Why should Bobby Jerome give the bride away?

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  I’m her father. Well, yes, Gary, and your last known contact with the bride was a check on her eighteenth birthday.

  Oh Lord, how can I face this? The wedding of the TV news-caster last year, feeding the five hundred, that was nothing. Bethie’s wedding will be a nightmare. Even the engagement party is unendurable.

  Maybe a big asteroid will hit the earth before then. Make it tomorrow, Lord, so I won’t have to deal further with Janice, who has let me know, repeatedly, that she expects her mother, Thelma, and her son, Todd, to be seated at the family table for the engagement party. I’ve tried to make it clear that Todd and Thelma are no relation whatever to Bethie. Tweaked off, Janice informs me that Todd and Bethie are step-siblings, and that Thelma is the only grandmother poor Bethie has ever known. Janice gave me an earful.

  I’d no sooner hung up with her than Andrew calls. It’s been years since he’s called me, since I’ve heard his voice on the phone. It was his old seductive voice. But he’d called up to bitch. He thinks it’s unfair we haven’t asked his wife’s children to come to the engagement party. I tell him, Andrew, Bethie wouldn’t know your wife’s children if they mugged her. Why should they come? Grant and Lee are coming, says Andrew. So then I have to remind him that Grant and Lee lived with us, with all of us: once upon a time Andrew moved in with me, and shortly thereafter his ex-wife dropped his twin boys off at the Useless post office. They had ringworm. They were brats and in perpetual trouble. The fact that they grew up to be fine young men reflects at least as much on me as on Andrew.

  Sunny never did RSVP so I figured she wasn’t coming, and now she’s showing up. Sunny will certainly have to sit at the family table, and maybe her little girl, though she didn’t say if she’s bringing the little girl. I’ll have to make up beds for them in the girls’ old room, but she didn’t say a word about the party, did she? She didn’t say if—

  “Celia! I think we should talk about this, about this luncheon tomorrow,” Russell calls out as he opens the bathroom door. Steam rushes out and the dogs scramble upstairs to give him the 28

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  canine equivalent of a standing ovation which he accepts with ducal noblesse. “I think it gives the wrong impression to everyone on this island, to the family, to Wade and Bethie and their friends if Bobby Jerome sits with you at the family table, as if you and he are still a couple. You and I are a couple, Celia. Bobby’s not even Bethie’s real father. If Bethie wants him to be the father of the bride, fine. But Bobby is not the husband of the bride’s mother. Celia?”

  He has a way of elongating my name so that it floats downstairs like a banner. I sneak into the computer room and glue my gaze to the brilliant blue of the screen. The little arrow scurries across; bleeps and rings connect me to the outside world, but the words flicker in front of me without my reading them at all. I pretend I don’t hear Russell. Pretend I am immersed in e-mail, but I watch the rain instead. I don’t want to hear Russell. Don’t want to talk. For Russell, even the simplest conversation (like, Goodbye!) requires deconstructing.

  Honestly, I don’t care where they sit. Any of them. Russell, Andrew, Bobby and Janice, Todd and Thelma. The lot of them, their spouses and lovers, their steps and exes. I don’t give a flying fuck.

  I feel like a general conducting a campaign in which I have no stake, no interest and no objectives. I want only to live through this awful engagement party and get on with my life.

  I hear Russell calling my name and I wonder if my life will include Russell. Perhaps I ought to break it off with him. He wants to get married. So let him. Just Not me, not me. The longer Russell and I go on, the more we get on each other’s nerves. I feel constricted. He feels ignored. Not like a love affair at all. I’ll say, You’re right, Russell, it’s not a love affair, and since it’s not, what the hell’s the good of it? It’s going nowhere. But I know I won’t say this. In truth, the fact that it’s going nowhere with Russell is part of its appeal, if not its pleasure, part of its comfort, if not its charm. I must be getting old. Old and ugly, PMS goodbye, farewell to the rag, I am pushing fifty, sniffing mint and wading through the weeds grown all over my Lot in Life.

  Give it up, I tell myself, you’ve long since ceased to be a lovely girl.

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  But I am not a wise woman. Life has larded me with experience, but shortchanged me on wisdom. Maybe for wisdom, fifty years isn’t enough time. Maybe for wisdom you need a hundred years, or eight or nine hundred, like Eve, centuries spent squatting in the ashes of oblivion, ankle deep in the dust-unto-dust you created. Eve peopled the world with her progeny, but after eight hundred years, could she tell one from the other? Were they not all faceless begats, anonymous begots by then? Unmemorable, save for those two, those two indelible boys, the lost sons. Maybe wisdom is distilled from regret, a sour brew of alcoholic consolation. The aged Eve probably clutched her bottle, pressed it to her loveless breasts and drank in swift and bitter swills, hunched beside the dying fire, remembering Abel’s sweet face and Cain for the reckless boy he had been, the winsome youth.

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  P A R T I I

  Return of the Native

  All those years in Southern California had blinded
Sunny to the color gray, to the shades implicit, the nuanced grays stippling and brindling, watercoloring the coves and beaches of Puget Sound. Late on this dank, raw afternoon, Sunny and her little daughter sat in a small outboard motorboat across from a man, middle-aged, leonine, leathery and tanned who kept a practiced hand on the tiller. Leaving the ferry landing at Dog Bay, they still kept close to the shore. The boat and the people in it were dwarfed by the great brooding mountain in whose shadow they passed. This mountain, its steep slopes home only to nesting seabirds, eagles and gulls, was completely inaccessible, threaded only by logging roads, but it dominated Isadora Island. From this mountain, land formations swept down and out in a northwesterly fashion, sloping into hills and farmlands, woods, meadows and finally out to a broad and lacy apron of rocky beaches and inhospi-31

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  table coves. Never an altogether invitational place, despite its wild beauty, even Isadora’s landmarks rang with some foreboding.

  Massacre, the island’s one real town, was built on an afterthought of land that curved, fanning out, forming a sort of earthly question mark around Moonless Bay. That name commemorated the slaughter, two hundred years before, of an entire village of sleeping Indians, killed by another warlike tribe who crossed the bay one moonless night in their canoes. For a hundred years all civic attempts to change the name to something less grim, all these conscientious efforts had failed, and the anonymous victims of that ancient mas-sacre would not loose their hold on the island’s imagination. A ferry landing could not be built at Massacre because Moonless was too shallow, nor at Useless Point because of the low tides and rough currents, so ferry service had come late to Isadora Island, and the landing at Dog Bay was more or less midway between Massacre and Useless and inconvenient to everyone.

  Sunny and her daughter had left their few other bags at the ferry landing and Sunny carried only a black canvas travel bag, beaten gray in places, and the little girl’s Minnie Mouse backpack which held a blanket, crayons, paper, several much-thumbed books, a much-loved doll named Baby Herman and a silver spoon with her name engraved on it, Brio. None of the three in the boat spoke, though their silence seemed agreed upon, rather than enforced, and the only sound punctuating the watery quiet was the outboard motor, spluttering rhythmically. The man, universally known by the single name of Launch, did not speak by choice. Brio, at four, had sunk into one of those long bouts of infant resignation, since she was powerless to change anything and too tired for a full and proper tantrum. But Sunny had been startled into silence. Living in Los Angeles had inured her to constant change, change as certain as the tides, if not as predictable. So she was shocked to return to Isadora Island and find it unchanged: the water, the woods, the taciturn evergreens, everything exactly as she had remembered, everything as it was in some ancient age, as though the island had bought itself immunity from

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  human time and subscribed only to geologic time, ignoring those brief chronometers of human bloom and vegetable decay.

  Hugging the shore, the small boat made its way past shallow coves, in some of which pilings, vestiges of past docks, rose out of the water like rotting teeth. Trees stubbled the shoreline, the woods so dense that sunlight never reached the ground. Even those places where houses were tucked in the trees, the roofs were carpeted with moss and in the windows, lamps were lit, summer and winter. As it was March now and the afternoon sky thickly quilted with clouds, those houses with unlit windows probably belonged to summer people who would not return for months. As the boat chugged past a darkened cove swallowed up in the trees, Sunny saw a small house, its roof completely furred with moss, and she believed that was the suicide’s cottage. How the island children had scared themselves spitless with tales of the undead. Sunny could all but hear her own young voice, calling all the other kids chickenshit babies, leaving them at the road while she alone plunged into the woods. She had raced breathlessly through the overgrown path, knocked on the suicide’s door and returned to the road, triumphant, telling the waiting children that a clawed and disembodied hand had opened the door, just a crack, and slid a Hershey bar at her. She let the other children all smell the chocolate on her breath. Now Sunny wondered if that was where she had first learned—not to say remembered—that the fear was worse than the feat.

  The suicide’s cottage had been sold finally to summer people, ignorant of its pall, but it too looked unchanged. Even Launch looked virtually the same. Grayer, she noted on peering more closely, though it was hard to tell since he was wreathed with so much hair. Eccentricity was a precondition for living at Useless Point (not obliged of summer people), but Launch was visibly weird. He cut his hair and beard only four times a year. At each of the solstices and equinoxes, he would go down to Sophia’s Beach at high tide and there amongst the driftwood logs, he would sit, cross-legged, facing the water, scissors in hand and cut away, without benefit of mirror. The vernal equinox, March 21,

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  was some weeks from now and so, Launch approached his hirsute apogee. A longtime friend of Celia’s, an island fixture, Launch had worked as a resident gardener and handyman for her for years and lived in one of the little outbuildings clustered in her yard. He had gone to India in about 1974 and Sunny could still remember the day he returned some two years later. He had passed around to everyone a hand-lettered note, which said he had decided to forsake speech for spiritual reasons, and after unspecified experiences in India.

  Would they all understand? He had not said a word since.

  Following the coastline, the boat rounded a curve leading along a graceful beach which swept in an arc, perhaps a mile long, a broad beach, rocky and strewn with great driftwood logs, pale and massive as the bones of dinosaurs. Sunny pointed landward. “This is Sophia’s Beach, the most magical place on the island, Brio.”

  “How can you get there? There’s no parking lot,” Brio observed.

  Across from them, Launch grinned, his head happily bobbing up and down; enthusiastic assent was Launch’s response to virtually any observation.

  “There’s a path. Can you see it, there through the trees? From the high road you come down that path,” Sunny advised, waving toward some obscured, remembered path, not visible at this distance.

  Sophia’s Beach was protected by low, thickly wooded cliffs, sheering down to a dense stand of trees, maples and madronas, their baroque branches resisting the advance of spring, though the underbrush had already succumbed, and a web of new-green tangled with autumnal rot. The threadline path had been beaten out by generations of feet and it led down the slopes to the rocky beach where the driftwood, the very stones mottled all those myriad hues of gray.

  As it was low tide, they could see great bony formations clawing at the water, like metacarpal tide pools.

  “There is a swing hanging from one of those tall trees, Brio. Is the swing still there, Launch?” In reply, he nodded, grinning furiously.

  “My dad put that swing up. It was a gift to all of us 34

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  girls, but everyone has used it ever since. The swing is so high and on such a long, long rope that you can go so far out over the water, especially at high tide, you feel like a bird. Like you can fly.”

  “I don’t want to fly. I want to be warm. I don’t like this place at all. It’s spooky.”

  Sunny pulled her little daughter closer and assured her soon there would be so many people around, she wouldn’t have time to think of spooky. Soon she’d have a big family. “That’s what you said you wanted. You said you were tired of it being just you and me. You wanted a big family like Olivia Hernandez has.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to move,” Brio sulked. “I didn’t say that.

  You didn’t tell me all this family lived in this cold, nasty place. You’d have to be a Huggamugwump to live here. Is this where the Huggamugwumps live?” she asked, referring to a tribe of small, furry creatures who had endle
ss adventures at bedtime and whose domestic arrangements included rolling themselves into balls and snuggling all together. “Is this ‘Deepest darkest Alberta, by the shores of beautiful Lake Huggamugwump’?”

  “No, that’s much further north. This is Isadora Island in the Puget Sound, and right around this bend and up a bit, you’ll see Henry’s House.”

  “Who’s Henry? Who’s Sophia anyway?”

  “They’re both dead. Oh, long ago.”

  “Then why is it still her beach? And why is it still his house?”

  “The house isn’t really Henry’s. It’s Celia’s and it’s not really a house you would live in. No one does. It was a school to begin with, once a long time ago, but now it’s a B-and-B.”

  “What’s that?”

  Sunny did her best to explain that a B-and-B was a sort of hotel.

  People came to spend the night. Lots of people. It was a famous place.

  Thank you for calling Henry’s House at Useless Point, Isadora Island, Washington. Henry’s House is open from April 1 to November 1. If you would like to send a fax, just press your start button now. If you are calling about a reservation, we are booked for summer weekends, 35

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  but we have a wait-list and we still have weekday openings. If you would like to be wait-listed, please punch 1. If you would like to leave a message, please punch 2. Henry’s House can also be reached on-line at henrys-house.com.” The voice repeats the e-mail number; it’s Celia’s clear, un-troubled voice, her public voice. Sunny punches 2 and leaves a message that the phone has eaten her thirty-five cents and that she is here, just arrived and wants to come to Isadora Island, that she has returned to the Northwest, to Washington, for good, or if not for good, at least for better or for worse.

  Worse seemed to rise now in Sunny’s throat, but perhaps it was only the dreadful hot dog at the bus terminal. Certainly, she still wore the mustard stain on her jacket. And on her pants, the stain from the tea she had spilled on herself when Brio—suffering from fifteen hundred miles on buses and the ferry—had heaved up her hot dog on Sunny’s shoes. Mother and daughter were both pale with fatigue, varnished with the old travel-patina of grease, exhaust, their hands grayed from the print of tickets and sticky with all the shared effluvia of handrails and benches, bathrooms, stairwells, seats and tables that were the collective property of anyone with the price of a ticket and a destination. Sunny had always envied people with the knack of creating comfy little encampments wherever they went.