Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  The poor girl. No wonder she kept her distance from her mother and father. Such an awful father. That ponytail! And he brought his awful guitar everywhere and wrote awful songs and played them.

  Sang them, even. He wrote poetry too, he told Dorothy this afternoon. Though Dorothy’s facial expression had never changed, inwardly she had murmured, Spare me, spare me. He gave piano lessons, though not for a living, a living was provided by his wife, Janice.

  Janice, Victoria’s stepmother, was not at all simpatico to Dorothy.

  Too brusque and too ready with confidences. Dorothy did not approve of unwarranted confidences, in short, gossip, but she had listened, nonetheless, in the library, coffee in hand, to Janice’s sotto voce tales of Victoria’s mother, Celia. Celia was overbearing, always believed she knew best, inflicted her views on people. Celia was a great bully, Janice said. Celia was the island slut and everyone knew it. Janice pointed out Russell Lewis and said he was sleeping with Celia now, poor

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  slob. Janice in fact, pointed out half a dozen men she was certain Celia had slept with, or would sleep with if the occasion arose.

  Moreover, Celia had a real loaves-and-fishes complex. And when Dorothy had inquired quite what a loaves-and-fishes complex might be, Janice retorted that Celia thought she could feed the five hundred and make magic at the same time; Celia thought Henry’s House was a work of art instead of a mere B-and-B, a commercial establishment for tourists.

  Perhaps. But here in this upstairs bathroom Dorothy’s eye fell on a tiny vase of snowdrops tucked in a corner where a guest would come upon it as one would a work of art, a gratifying surprise to the senses. The towels were stacked and arranged so that their individual textures were evident and eye-pleasing, and on the shelf just above the inviting claw-footed tub, a whole array of bubble bath bottles gleamed and twinkled, the light somehow caught liquidly within.

  Leaving the bathroom, Dorothy paused momentarily as voices and laughter from the first floor, applause for Bobby floated up. But rather than rejoin the party, she turned right and wandered down the long hall, ambling, taking her time, regarding the framed pictures—prints, watercolors, a few photographs—which drew her attention, and rewarded her, each in some distinct way. She fondled the satin fabrics on chairs which stood like little sentinels along the hall and touched the polished wood of small tables with curved and graceful legs. She opened doors as she passed along the hall, glancing into bedrooms. She found even a small sitting room created from a space too small to be a bedroom and too big to be a closet, and in here she saw library shelves half filled with old volumes and two leather chairs, a table in between. Pausing, Dorothy breathed deep: pipe tobacco, a smell wholly masculine. Indeed a pipe stand sat upon the table, pipes with blackened bowls. She sniffed from each, as though they were flowers, Daddy, Daddy, as though her father might yet be there, snoozing over his evening paper, as he had when Dorothy was a child, her parents’ only child, beloved by and of them.

  Daddy had owned a small newsstand, a little shop in downtown Seattle

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  till urban renewal put him out of business, and then he worked for others, long hours, low pay and no respect. But Daddy never complained, asked only to have his pipe and paper at the end of the day, and a smile from his wife and daughter. She could all but see Daddy, so Dorothy closed the door softly, not to disturb him, and proceeded along the hall.

  It was all very lovely here, but Dorothy reserved her especial admiration, her downright wonder, for the floors. The floors were dazzling. Of course everything at Henry’s House was meant to be nice (it was, as Janice pointed out, a commercial establishment, and that was its job to be nice, to be lovely) but these polished teak floors, these voluptuous ribbons of gleaming wood, alongside pale, thick rugs, these floors were dazzling!

  In making these judgments, Dorothy Robbins had reached her frontiers of expression. For Dorothy virtually everything could be slotted, described, adequately invoked as Nice, or Lovely, reserving Dazzling for the Vatican which she had seen with Neddy on their honeymoon. Admittedly, on occasion, when honesty and candor were at odds, Dorothy had been known to use Dazzling to conceal patently false statements, but in general Dorothy Robbins preferred to keep the carriage of her conduct behind those two well-known dapple-gray words: Nice and Lovely. The floors at Henry’s House, however, were dazzling.

  Dorothy often judged people by their floors, knowing full well that she shouldn’t, that it was impolite, politically incorrect and probably very narrow to do so. After all, there were people who didn’t have enough money to keep up their floors. There were people who didn’t have enough time, who worked long, numbing hours at wretched jobs for paltry pay, processing fish in canneries or processing checks in banks, people who had delinquent children or unfaithful husbands, people who had been beaten down or cracked up, who were strung out, or hungover, people who couldn’t possibly keep their floors up. Dorothy didn’t disparage them for it. But an unpolished floor always seemed to her to betray a lack of—well, perhaps only a disregard for detail, pointing to some larger lapse.

  Dorothy had always kept her own

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  floors polished. She had kept her own house and reared her own children and cooked the family’s meals and paid the family’s bills and mowed the family’s lawn, unlike her daughters-in-law who all had housekeepers, nannies, accountants, lawn services and someone to do the floors and carpets every three months. No, if Dorothy could judge Celia Henry by her floors alone, Dorothy would be—in fact, was—rapt with admiration. She and Celia might have been very good friends indeed.

  Bobby Jerome must at last be finished because she could hear the string quartet launch into an exuberant Vivaldi which wafted upstairs. Dorothy would have gone back down, but there were too many people, a hundred or more, and they were all too weird: those people in jeans recovering, discovering and sharing their ill-bred pain. Those people were completely foreign. They all talked in phrases, a language Dorothy didn’t exactly understand, and it was too exhausting to translate. Talking to the Recoverees reminded her of the time she had had to use her high school Spanish in Vera Cruz, Mexico, explaining to the pharmacist that she needed something for the diarrhea. Dorothy shivered. And those uniformly queer old people! The couple who both wore lipstick and eye shadow. The old paint-stained artist leering at the women. The novelist nattering about blow jobs! Novelist? Too kind. A scribbler of trash pandering to low instincts in ill-bred female readers. Pity the trees that died to provide that woman with paper. And then, then there were the silent fishermen and the taciturn farmers. In short, there were too many people who were not from Bellevue.

  Dorothy would not go back downstairs. She went into the bedroom at the very end of the hall and opened the door, walked into a large room, of pale pink and green, its colors reminiscent of that moment in spring where the cherry tree blossoms fought their valiant, losing battle against the leaves. Thick matching rugs on (dazzling) floors echoed these tender sentiments and though the drapes appeared to be white, actually the faintest nuancical green tints hovered in their folds. Dorothy closed the door behind her, breathing deeply, suddenly out of breath, desperately chilled

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  and weak, her heart racing violently, as though she had run upstairs, run and run. She would collect herself here, and then go downstairs to get her sweater and her digitalis pills from Eric.

  When she opened her eyes, Dorothy’s glance first fell upon minute sprigs of pink azalea in a crystal vase which sat atop some books on a nightstand next to the big brass bed. A straw hat perched upon one of the bed’s four brass knobs, as if some gladsome girl had just breezed in, left her hat and breezed out. In search of adventure, Dorothy thought, a girl in search of adventure. With the image of the gladsome girl in mind, it was rather a shock to turn to the mirror and see her own face.

 
Dorothy toyed with the pearl choker she habitually wore. An in-voluntary tremor rattled her left eyelid. She peered more closely into the mirror, strained and leaned toward it. She should have brought her handbag upstairs for a refresher on the lipstick. Was it the gray afternoon light that made her look so pale, chalky? Or was it her old self in contrast with the spring evoked here, the ineluctable pinks and flirtatious greens in this room? With both hands she smoothed her short, dark, curled hair. Dorothy had had her hair colored the same color, her natural color, in the same salon and by the same hands for the past twenty years. Maybe twenty-five. All right, maybe more. She always thought of the hair-coloring process as the Triumph of Art Over Nature. But could it be—she frowned at the woman in the mirror—that Nature had played a nasty trick on Art? She had kept her hair its natural color, but it no longer looked natural. She realized with a little start that her dark hair atop her gray face made her resemble one of those ice cream cones at Dairy Queen, pale vanilla, all soft and conical, dipped into dark chocolate, the chocolate sitting on it like a cap. That’s what her hair looked like atop her white face. The effect was neither nice nor lovely, dazzling only in the negative. Slowly she sat down on the bed and shivered.

  She might have lain down, gotten under the covers to warm up, but it smacked of Goldilocks and no grown woman could do such a thing. Lying at the foot of the bed, though, she saw a beautifully handworked afghan, a creamy pink color with green 102

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  highlights, and in the center of it, flowing letters, the name Clara.

  She wondered fleetingly who Clara might be, but she wrapped the afghan around her shoulders, hugging it for warmth. She took off her shoes and chafed her cold feet before padding about the room in her stockings.

  On the writing desk Dorothy was delighted to find another little vase with tight little apple blossom sprigs, and to see there was real ink in the capped crystal inkwell, blue ink, and thick writing paper with blue letters. Neatly stacked, the paper awaited only the pen which also lay nearby, a real pen with a steel nib. At the top the writing paper was embossed with blue letters: HENRY’S HOUSE

  USELESS POINT

  ISADORA ISLAND

  WASHINGTON

  No mention that it was a B-and-B, a commercial establishment. No phone. No zip code for that matter. Dorothy sat down at the desk, picked up the pen, dipped it in the ink, consumed by the need to feel the pen in her hands, to see letters flow from its inky nib, words formed and absorbed by the paper, to write tenderly to someone, oh, to write to someone. Who? Mother. Dear Mother—Long dead.

  So very long dead was Dorothy’s mother, but in the quietude of this room, Dorothy knew her mother would have been comfortable.

  Happy. Daddy would have been happy here. Dorothy was happy.

  She regarded the carriage clock on the desk and it ticked comfortingly. Of course. How caring of Celia and what an eye for detail! All the clocks in Henry’s House ticked. They had to be wound. There were no electronics. No beeping microwaves, no glaring numbers flashing 12:00 from the VCR. No VCR. No television. Was that possible! And no radios either. No ubiquitous telephones, no fax machines or computers burping and tweeping and chirping their electronic chirps. In these rooms people were obliged to talk.

  That was the great pleasure here, wasn’t it? Dorothy turned 103

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  back to regard the room afresh, reassess it altogether. Beautifully hung pictures in perfect frames. Old books on the little table beside the brass bed. Books so well used and loved, their bindings were gray at the ends like the stubble of beards on old men’s chins. People in these rooms must talk or read—or make love, came the thought, unbidden. She remembered Bobby Jerome’s dreadful, windbaggy speech, but at the conclusion he was right, wasn’t he? Making love was a creative endeavor. Talking could be a creative endeavor.

  Reading could be. And these rooms were full of such endeavor, thought Dorothy, rising and going to the French doors. Here, in a room like this, you would make wholesome love, love unsullied by time, uneroded by doubt, untarnished by lies, omissions or innuendo.

  True love. Love that would endure. Or, if it did not endure, at the very least, love you would not forget. You would think of these things in a room like this. Even if you came here alone.

  Clutching Clara to her shoulders, Dorothy looked out the French doors. The roof of the long veranda formed a sort of balcony for those rooms opening on to it and in the cobbled driveway far below, Dorothy could see Eric engaged in what was clearly a quarrel with Victoria. Dorothy waved energetically, but Eric did not see her and slowly her waved died a self-conscious death. She felt silly. Like a ghost her own best-beloved son could not see.

  She turned and walked to the window that gave out, not to the drive and the lawn, but to the Sound alone. There was a lamp on the table in front of it, and the lamp was turned on. The drapes had been parted and tied back. Was this the famous window of Victoria’s story? Victoria had told the Robbinses Celia’s story, in fits and starts.

  And stops, Dorothy remembered rather sourly. The story hadn’t come out until after Eric had married Victoria and by then, Dorothy was already convinced her son had engaged his affections unwisely.

  But it was too late. Poor Eric. Allied to a family like Victoria’s.

  Though Ned did not see it the same way. It raised Victoria in Ned’s eyes that she was related to the Westervelts, even though Dorothy reminded him—

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  over and over, really got impatient with him, the number of times she had to tell him—that Victoria was not related to the Westervelts.

  Ned always bit back, yes, yes, he understood, he wasn’t a fool, was he? He understood that the late Henry Westervelt was Celia’s first husband, not Victoria’s father and not the father of the other girl either. No one’s father. And yet, Ned maintained, you couldn’t deny there was a certain connection. Victoria herself had said so, words to the effect that Henry Westervelt was part of their lives and in strange ways, he was like a father. They were known as the Henry girls. All of them. And then there was this window. Dorothy was certain it was this very window. Look at the lamp, burning away in mid-afternoon.

  Victoria had told them that in the off-season, Celia kept the lamp lit in a window that overlooked the bay and Useless Point. She did it for Henry. In case he needed the beacon, needed a point of light to find his way home, to Henry’s House.

  To leave a light on for a dead man had struck Dorothy as inefficient. It had struck Ned as crackpotted, hairbrained and stupid, until Victoria had added that the dead man in question, her mother’s first husband, was named Henry Westervelt. “But not Victoria’s father,” Dorothy reminded Ned tartly, though he was not here to accept her correction. Oh, the name Westervelt just slew Neddy to pieces. Admittedly, it would have done the same to any Northwest-erner and the Robbinses were native Washingtonians—and proud of it. How could you live in Washington and not know the name Westervelt? Westervelt logging had made the Northwest great long before Boeing ever came to Seattle and started building planes, and a century before Bill Gates started manufacturing his little chips of electronic whatnot. For a hundred years, more, the Westervelts were logging their way through the Cascades, through the Olympic Peninsula, through the San Juan Islands. Their lumber operations had helped build railroads and shipping lines and their mills kept whole towns afloat all over the Northwest. Honestly, as Ned had pointed out, you couldn’t go to the toilet without thinking of the Westervelts since their mills manufactured the toilet paper you wiped your butt with.

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  Dorothy thought this allusion less than lovely on Ned’s part. It was in keeping, however, with the mind of a man who would name his boat Strumpet. Dorothy disliked the boat, but she loathed its name, Strumpet. She felt it always as an indirect insult, a sly jab at her. He had chosen the name, Ned had, without telling her and when she saw it brazened there across the bow, sh
e felt always that it was an indictment, public notice that Dorothy had not given Ned what he wanted, that Ned had—or would have liked to have had—a strumpet to pleasure him in ways his wife wouldn’t do. He called the boat a pleasure craft, though it was a 40-foot Tollycraft powerboat. Power more than pleasure. The Strumpet gave Dorothy no pleasure whatever. People made jokes about the name and when they did so in Dorothy’s hearing, she felt these jokes were jibes at her, stabs at her inadequacies, those inadequacies publicly alluded to, and made the butt of jokes. “Wipe your butt indeed,” she snapped at no one. No one here.

  From the advent of the Strumpet into her married life, Dorothy had drawn away from Ned, oh, not so pointedly that he would have noticed, but drew away nonetheless. Since she had been first and foremost a wife and mother, and since her children were grown and gone, and mother was ended, when she drew away from wife, she found she had no other avenues for her affections, or her energies.

  Such as they were. And so, Dorothy had redoubled her efforts on her clean house, a perfect home, perfectly clean. Perfect. And she had the most dazzling floors in Bellevue. In all Washington State.

  At least that’s what she’d thought until she came here to Henry’s House.

  Ned had asked Victoria why her mother didn’t call it Westervelt House and Victoria had replied that Celia detested the Westervelts, quarreled with them after Henry’s death, so bitterly she would not even wear their famous name, called herself Celia Henry, and that Victoria had been actually Victoria Jerome, though everyone knew her as Victoria Henry. Now, of course, she was Victoria Robbins.