Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Sunny laughed, “I guess Bethie and Victoria have told you some of my stories.”

  “And you have all summer to tell me the rest, because if you’re going to work at Henry’s House, you’re going to live here. You and Brio will live with me. You can have your old room and stay all summer. It’ll be so much fun—have the house full of people again!

  And I won’t hear of anything else.”

  She fended off Sunny’s protest and vanished into the small room where she could listen to her voice mail messages. Strange voices, preceded by electronic pings and beeps. These sounds followed Sunny as she obediently trudged up the creaky stairs, meeting Grant on the landing. He told her there was a lamp in her room, but no overhead light anymore and Sunny replied it was OK, she was used to the dark and she would find her own way.

  She’d brought only the one dress, a loose, unstructured thing, grazing her ankles, almond-colored magnolias on a beige background. The fey young man at the Hollywood thrift shop where she’d bought it had assured Sunny that Jean Arthur wore this very dress in one of her films. Sunny bought it on the spot. Brio had two dresses, but no proper party dress, she complained, and no

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  party shoes. Sunny pointed out she too had no party shoes. She was wearing a pair of platform sandals with knee-high stockings.

  “At least you don’t have to wear shoes like this,” Brio complained, pointing to her high-tops.

  “Quit squirming and let me tie them up.”

  “Olivia Hernandez has a party dress and party shoes. Why don’t I? Isn’t this a party?”

  “Yes, yes, Miss Fashion Plate. You sound just like Victoria.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your aunt. Mama’s sister. You’ll meet her today. You’ll meet the whole tribe of your family today. All at once,” she added with less enthusiasm.

  Sunny and Brio were to go over to Henry’s House early to serve as Celia’s emissary while Angie held down the fort in the kitchen and Celia rushed home to effect her own transformation from General MacArthur into mother of the bride. As Sunny and Brio hurried through the orchard along the concrete path, Sunny nonetheless stopped, turned her face to the fine rain and breathed in the smell of spring near the sea, the old lathe of time turning the year, the earth and season. She wrapped herself momentarily in the silence, pocked by gossiping finches, the starlings rustling in the vestigial leaves.

  These trees were full of ghosts for Sunny, and their lichen-scabbed branches supported scaffolded specters, shimmering girl-ghosts, voices echoing, singing, calling out, inviting one another to their house or ship or fort or school, whatever function the apple tree was called upon to fill at any given imaginative moment. Orchard protocol was inflexible: one sister could never climb another’s tree without an invitation. Adults too were bound by it; once they were in the trees, the sisters were deemed invisible, and Celia or Bobby, any adult, could only summon them by a generalized call through the orchard, never a direct address to a certain tree. This remembered orchard oozed largesse: apples in autumn, shelter in summer, dreams dreamed and songs sung. Sunny could all but hear, stirred by the damp wind, the verses they had made up, “Man of the Moment,”

  to the tune of “Man

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  of La Mancha,” lyrics funny and unflattering to Celia’s various men, the term itself indelible and unflattering, especially on the day Celia had caught them at it, had heard them laughing, mocking the man of that moment, Phillip, the marine biologist (the lyrics naturally rhyming with fishes and wishes). Celia had ordered them out of the trees and they stood before her. They were too old to be spanked and too young to be grounded. Sunny was especially afraid, certain she would be dispatched back to Seattle on the very next ferry. Sunny no longer lived on Isadora, but in Seattle with Bobby, though the sisters spent weekends together at one place or another. Standing there, head bowed with Bethie and Victoria, she remembered the terrible insecurity of her position, not being Celia’s actual daughter and so, subject to dismissal. Celia berated them soundly, forbade them to sing that song again, threatened dire consequences if they did. But she had punished them equally, not singling Sunny out for exile. She had marched them all over to Henry’s House and put them to work polishing furniture since they had all that excess energy.

  Excess energy, thought Sunny, coming upon the back garden at Henry’s and the service entrance, too bad you couldn’t store it in some liquid form, cork it and swill it when needed.

  As she let Brio into the kitchen, Angie cried out her name, embraced them both and introduced them to the high school students—all dressed exactly alike, neat black pants, starched white shirts, black bow ties—who were following instructions left by Celia, Angie there to oversee. Angie was a tiny, nervous woman who smelled of Newports. She had indeed brought the cake from Massacre, a three-tiered beauty, white frosting, blue and yellow rosettes.

  Escorting Sunny through the kitchen, Angie warned her, the task she’d taken on, working for Celia. “Maybe you can organize her.

  I’ve been trying for a hundred years and she still does everything in the same haphazard, half-assed way. She doesn’t seem to understand that not every decision is an aesthetic decision. Henry’s House is a business.”

  “Not today,” Sunny replied. “Today it’s a party for Bethie.”

  Angie rolled her eyes. “Well, they’re all here.”

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  “But the ferry—”

  “Not them. The old Isadorans.”

  “Of course they would be here,” Sunny laughed. Wherever there was food and liquor, preferably free, the old Isadorans would be the first to arrive. They would submerge their long-standing quarrels and would leave only when the liquor ran out. The bar, bartender and half a dozen tables for hors d’oeuvres had been set up in the enormous dining room and indeed, that’s where Sunny found them.

  In a single arthritic whoop of welcome, they greeted the return of the native and her little daughter.

  To Sunny, the old artists were yet more evidence that Isadora Island had somehow exempted itself from human time. Not that the old Isadorans hadn’t changed—they had, of course, and some had died—but they subscribed to collective memory, unchanging memory, and for them, time stilled, slowed, stopped and they curled round their old antagonisms and ancient gossip. For them, the Henry Girls remained indelibly Bethie, The Charmer; Victoria, The Smart One; Sunny, The Talented One. Sunny’s title was bestowed upon her that night of the Christmas pageant at the elementary school, dancing across the stage in her battery-powered dress laced with twinkling lights. So convinced were the old Isadorans that Sunny was, and would always remain, The Talented One, they all asked after her acting career (after all, she’d moved to L.A.; they knew that). They wanted to know why they had never seen her on TV.

  “I’ve never been on TV,” Sunny explained, hoping that answer would suggest what had happened to her acting career as well.

  Ernton Hapgood, a difficult old man with a stupendous waxed moustache and skin coarse and mottled as an aging potato, patted her shoulder. “Hollywood has no regard for talent. Talent cannot sleep with Mammon, can it?” Peter and Louise Marchand nodded gravely. Befitting ceramicists, both Marchands looked like porcelain dolls, ivory complexions with bright lips, rouged cheeks and dreamy expressions.

  An endlessly eccentric lot, the old Isadorans all had artistic 65

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  pretensions and many had artistic achievements. Their elderly fingers were still nicotine-stained, or paint-stained, clay-stained or ink-stained, and they lived lives pinched by penury and enriched with art. The men were still inevitably rakish, though bald, with big ears and heavy dentures. The white-coiffed women could not be described as matronly; they were regal, despite their advanced ages, aristocratic in their bearing, weird in conversation. The old Isadorans prided themselves on their La Bohème sensibilities and would never h
ave been so crass as to ask after Sunny’s husband, or the father of her daughter, Brio—who, they all agreed, looked exactly like her, especially now that Sunny’s hair was cropped so short, short as a man’s.

  They frowned to see the five rings punched in her ears, and more than one remarked that at least Sunny didn’t have a ring in her nose.

  “The girl who bags your groceries has a ring in her nose,” Nona York interrupted majestically, joining them and enfolding Sunny in a great, warm embrace. “Ah, Sunny! I’d heard you’d come back, but I didn’t dare believe it.”

  “But I only just got here last night.”

  “This is an island. News travels at the speed of light. Gossip even faster.”

  Of all the old Isadorans, Nona York was Sunny’s favorite. She was a romance novelist, though not a romantic figure. She always wore Wellingtons or shit kickers, or stout shoes, no-nonsense trousers, thick sweaters, and her still-graceful hands twinkled with many rings. Her hair was cut short (though not as short as Sunny’s) and it surrounded her face like a silver Roman helmet. Indeed, there was a kind of Roman quality to Nona York. She took everything seriously, and she had never been known to giggle; she was as astute and inquiring on sexual questions as any diplomat on questions of state.

  She was not, however, always diplomatic. Listening to Nona extol at length the possibilities inherent in flesh-puncturing, Sunny hoped that for the sake of Wade Shumley and his friends, Bethie had fore-warned them about Nona, about Ernton and the Marchands (both of whom rouged their cheeks and colored their lips and kohled their eyes).

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  “I understand that young people puncture and ring themselves in their nipples and in their belly buttons. Lower than that, too,”

  Nona added ominously. Nona spoke always through her nose which was high-bridged and monumental. “But I cannot help but think that a ring through the nipples, the belly button, much less the clit-oris, would not enhance coitus. I speak purely physically, of course, and perhaps I’m missing something in the realm of the imagination.”

  “You would never miss a single thing in that realm,” Sunny offered. The room had started to fill with other guests. The old Isadorans were drinking gin, vodka or whiskey. Everyone from Massacre nursed a white wine.

  “Personally I cannot imagine submitting to such an indignity as a ring in my flesh. A ring in the flesh, especially the sexual flesh, smacks of slavery, doesn’t it?” Nona was wonderfully imperious.

  “But the truly significant question is why are young people doing it? What does it mean about the way they perceive themselves? And love? What about love?”

  Sunny could feel the old Isadorans, their glasses poised, staring at her as though Sunny alone in this room could answer the question.

  Their clothes smelled faintly of mothballs and their romantic notions ditto, Sunny thought, but it pleased her to be in their company.

  Having spent all those years in L.A. amongst slouching cynics, buff skeptics and preening egos, these octogenarians with their watery eyes and palsied hands exuded unfashionable exuberance. “Naturally I’ve been in love. I have a daughter, after all,” she added, consonant with their assumption that a love child could only be the fruit of a love union. “But I don’t think about romance or men anymore. When you have a child, other things are more important. My daughter is my life.”

  Few of them had children. Nona, for instance, had never married though she was certainly the resident expert on sex. Titles of her romance novels often took the form of commands, Take Me to Heaven, Bring Me Your Heart, Bid Me to Fly, and so on. A fabulously prolific author, Nona’s novels had provided Sunny, her sisters and many another island girl with the rudiments of sex 67

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  education—or romantic standards, depending on the girl. Nona donated copies of each of her books to the island library and York novels filled two shelves with paperbacks, the jackets mostly in vermillion or royal blue, bold gold lettering. In L.A. Sunny was always surprised to see Nona’s books lined up, beckoning, at the checkout counter in the supermarket. Did adults actually read these books? The sex was repetitively rapturous. If the scribes of the Middle Ages were renowned for balancing hundreds of angels on the head of a pin, Nona York was equally adept at balancing hundreds of adjectives on the head of a penis.

  “We haven’t seen your dad on the island for ages,” said Nona, clinking the ice cubes in her empty glass. “Is he still married to Chronic Pain?”

  “Janice and Bobby are into double digits for their anniversaries.”

  Nona clucked sympathetically. “Of all Celia’s men, Bobby is the one I liked the best. Of course, it doesn’t pay to get too attached to any one man. Celia’s quite right in that. Men come”—Nona paused significantly—“and then go. Have you met Celia’s latest? Russell Lewis? He is her first excursion into academe since she slept with her English teacher.”

  “She did?”

  “They all did.”

  Nona nodded toward Russell, a portly, middle-aged man who did indeed look very natty and academic, complete with a little bow of worry knotted between his brows. He blinked frequently in the manner of people with annoying contact lenses. Russell had adopted a professorial stance, including an expressively wagging finger. But perhaps, thought Sunny, that’s because he’s talking to a man so much younger, a tall man clad in a navy blue blazer and wool slacks.

  Just then this man winked at her. And for the second time Sunny failed to recognize Grant Hayes, no longer stubble-bearded or sweatshirt-clad.

  Celia joined them, sailing into the dining room at that moment like a flagship, having effected a transformation from generalissimo to mother of the bride. Although that office usually calls 68

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  for something in organdy pastel, a frock on the order of a petit four, Celia wore a long, rich red dress, glass beads, the simplicity enlivened by high, laced boots and a fringed piano scarf of Aegean blue silk, befitting her Corinthian posture. The orchid corsage she was to have worn pinned to the maternal bosom was tucked rakishly in her hair. She checked her watch and smiled as the string quartet of high school students, set up in the conservatory, broke into strains of Mozart there amongst the potted palms and wicked bromiliads.

  The floors of Henry’s House were teak so the music reverberated underfoot as well as through the air. “Perfect and on schedule,” she commented benignly. “The early afternoon ferry will be pulling to the dock just about now. It’s twenty minutes from Dog Bay to Useless, twenty-five with traffic. People should be arriving in about a half hour. I am the maestro of timing.”

  “Some would say the monster,” offered Nona.

  “It’s a question of perspective.”

  Russell came over, kissed Celia on the cheek; she tucked her arm through his and introduced him to Sunny Jerome, Bobby’s oldest girl. Russell was courtly to Sunny in his professorial way, though consternation crossed his face when Celia announced that Sunny and Brio were back for good, that Sunny would be working for her for the Season, the two of them living at Celia’s. Nona thought this delightful news, as did Grant who joined them informally, and whatever reservations Russell had, he mastered them quickly and said he looked forward to knowing Sunny very well.

  Grant excused himself, wandered over toward his brother, Lee, who waved happily at Sunny from across the room. She did indeed recognize Lee’s wife, Robin; they’d gone to elementary school together. She was brought back to the conversation when Nona asked her what her father was doing these days. “I can’t remember,” Sunny admitted. “I haven’t kept up with anyone the past couple of years.”

  “Whatever he’s doing,” Celia volunteered, “you can bet it’s 69

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  something with lots of potential. Bobby is potential personified and I’m sure Janice is getting him vocationally rehabbed—again.”

  “Bobby has a vocation. He needs a job,” Nona declared. “Bobby Jerome will never do anyth
ing in the workaday world.”

  “He certainly never has,” commented Russell dryly.

  Sunny felt obliged to defend him. “My father is very spiritual.”

  “So was St. Peter,” offered Celia, “but it didn’t keep him from working.”

  Sunny winced on Bobby’s behalf and kept her eyes on the floor.

  Bobby had tried the patience of everyone who ever loved him, including Sunny.

  Celia glanced at her watch. Abandoning Russell to Nona, she took Sunny’s arm. “They’ll be here almost instantly, and I’ll need your help. We’ll take their coats and reassure this lot.”

  “Reassure them of what?” asked Sunny, as they walked down the long central hall.

  “These will be mostly all Wade’s friends. You’ll see exactly what I mean.”

  Celia, the maestro (or monster) of timing, was absolutely correct: the ferry guests began to arrive en masse, their cars pulling up the graveled drive in a sort of sporty cortege. And, since Henry’s House had begun life as a school, it had a walled cloak-room off the foyer and Celia tossed people’s coats and jackets gaily to a high school student positioned there for that very purpose. As these guests moved into Henry’s House, Sunny marveled at the way Celia bathed people in the bright aura of their own importance, paying effortless court to that person’s individuality, that individual’s personality. If she had met them, Celia remembered their names, their spouses, where they lived, what they did. If she had not met them, they were spontaneously refreshed and refurbished in her presence, made certifiably memorable, engulfed in welcome, awash in warmth.

  Celia’s charm was legendary—if a trifle practiced by now—and she wielded it reflexively rather than reflectively, impersonally as the butterfly who charms the

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  flower. If the flower is uncooperative (and some were), the butterfly moved on, its feelings unhurt, its abilities unimpugned.

  “Sunny,” cried Celia, peering out the open front door, “hurry! I can see Victoria’s car coming up the drive—go find Brio! This’ll be such a surprise!”