Stepping (21 page)

It all got even more confusing that summer, the fourth summer the girls came. Caroline was thirteen, and had braces, and Cathy was ten, and gawky and trying to act like her older sister, who had wondrously become a teenager. Both girls were interested in horror movies and clothes and rock music and competitive sports, and I was glad to drop my studies for a while in order to take them to horror movies and shopping and swimming and riding. Charlie was finishing up his book; that summer the girls spent more time with me than with him. The girls seemed to relax with me that summer, and we began to enjoy each other.

We began to share jokes.

CAROLINE
: Do you know why the Dairy Queen got pregnant?

ZELDA
: No. Why?

CAROLINE
: Because the Burger King couldn’t handle his Whopper.

ZELDA
: Caroline! You’re only thirteen!

Mad hysterical fits of laughter.

We began to share likes and dislikes.

CATHY
: Which movie did you like best?

ZELDA
:
The Claw of the Cat
.

CATHY
: Me, too. It was scariest of all. I loved the part where they found the hand.

And we began to share memories. That was very nice, sharing memories.

CAROLINE
: Is Liza getting old?

ZELDA
: No, not really, she’s only ten.

CAROLINE
: Well, she
seems
old. It seems like I’ve been riding her forever. It’s just like sitting on a big ol’ comfortable grandmother’s lap. I can really trust her. And I can remember that first summer, how scared I was of her, how afraid I was to ride.

ZELDA
: Yes, I always felt bad about making you ride, because I knew you were afraid. But I wanted you to learn. I knew you’d like it when you had learned.

CAROLINE
: Yeah, it was funny. I hated you when you made me get on the horse, but once I was up there I was glad you had made me. Sometimes I liked you for it while I hated you for it, you know?

ZELDA
: Yeah, I know.

And we began to share hopes for the future.

CATHY
: Zelda, we all aren’t driving back to Maine this summer again, are we?

ZELDA
: No, darn it, we’re not. I wish we could, but Charlie’s got to teach this summer, and he’s got to get that damned book finished.

CATHY
: Well, maybe we can go next summer. I’d love to go to the beach again. And we could all go eat at that neat lobster place!

It had happened. By the fourth summer I had been accepted, or assimilated, or something. I was part of their lives. We could share things. We could talk.

They were turning from children into pretty girls. They were clever and bright and imaginative. Caroline showed me how to do simple macramé. Cathy, who was good at sports, began to beat me at swimming races. They were beginning to add things to my life. And when they left at the end of that fourth summer, I missed them. I missed them very much. They had told me about their friends, their projects, their fears, their desires. I found myself wanting to know how it all worked out: did Caroline get the good grade-seven teacher or the bad one? Was Cathy invited to rich Jennifer’s birthday party? Suddenly the world was filled with things I wanted to share with the girls—movies, music, clothes, puzzles, jokes, games. I thought of them every day after they left. I remembered what rich pleasure it had been that summer, giving them things, how it had been as if I were giving myself presents because I enjoyed their pleasure so much. More and more my PhD studies and professors seemed dry and dull and insignificant. I had to
force myself to leave the summer, to enter the fall.

Charlie, on the other hand, was plunging deeper and deeper into his work. He had finished all his little projects, and the book he had co-authored with the other historian was now at the publishers’. Charlie was starting another book
—his
book—which he had been collecting information and notes on for years. Everything other than The Book became a distraction for him. He taught and attended committees dutifully, then rushed back to his study at home. We had books and note cards all over the house, we read constantly, and spent less and less time at the farm, or eating out, or seeing friends. We worked. Charlie was past happiness; he was absorbed in his work. But I was lonely, and grew lonelier every day. I missed teaching very much. I often walked slowly by the classrooms, listening to other instructors explain metaphor or syllogisms, and I yearned to be there, in a classroom full of scratching, yawning, gum-chewing, note-taking kids. Instead I had the library, with its silent heavy books, or my house, decorated with piles of white note cards.

Adelaide had called several times that summer, but not so frantically, and once Charlie agreed to pay the bill for both Caroline’s and Cathy’s orthodontic work she stopped calling him completely. For once a fall passed without letters from her threatening to go to court. The girls had said very little about her that fourth summer, just that Adelaide was taking a vacation in Maine with a woman friend, and that she was taking a few craft classes, and that she wasn’t dating at all. The girls were very happy that she wasn’t dating. The three of them had moved into a small colonial house, and little by little were making it their home, and that made them all very happy, planning curtains and carpets and wallpaper and mirrors and such.

The first week in September that the girls were gone, I wrote them a letter. I almost couldn’t help myself; I missed them. Still, I didn’t say that; I didn’t want anyone to get sad or mad. Two weeks later I was shocked to find a letter for me from Caroline. It was a long, newsy, silly, sweet letter; Caroline was warmer in correspondence than in person. I noticed that Adelaide had put the return address on and I smiled: so Adelaide had accepted me, too. To “Mrs. Zelda Campbell,” from “Mrs. Adelaide Campbell.” How funny. After that I wrote Caroline and Cathy about once a week, sending clippings from cartoons, jokes, and sometimes a tiny present, a dollar, or a little ring. I looked forward to
Caroline’s letters. She was a sensitive girl, I thought, always asking questions of herself or of me.

Whenever I listen to music, I’m happy. It’s like being in a hot bathtub after a rainy day, I feel so warm and content. I
love
the Beatles, and I think I would die for them. I would give up all my possessions just to talk to John Lennon for one hour. Why do I feel this way? I think sometimes I love the Beatles more than I love Cathy or Mother or anybody. Isn’t that strange? And I’m supposed to love God, but I think church is so boring. I feel closer to God listening to the Beatles than in church. I wonder why this is. Do you know? It’s really embarrassing in a way, how warm and happy the Beatles make me feel. I think I must feel like adults do when they’re drinking wine.

I always answered Caroline as well as I could, and I sent Cathy little letters each time I wrote Caroline. I didn’t want to seem to like Caroline more, even though secretly of course I did. I kept reminding myself that Cathy was younger and not interested in writing letters yet, that she was a different person.

The fall semester passed slowly. The spring semester came. Nothing changed. The year clicked over; it was 1969. I wrote letters to Charlie’s girls and waited for their letters, and wrote Alice and waited for her letters, and read books and wrote papers and waited for my professors’ remarks. Charlie buried himself in his study, and when he came out it was to ask me to read and criticize the latest chapter of his book. The few friends I made at the university were graduate students, too, fighting the same battles I was fighting: when we talked, we talked about literature. My world seemed made of words. Printed words. All life seemed like chapters from books, overheard conversation seemed like dialogue. I couldn’t look at a person without finding his twin in some literary work; I couldn’t look at the countryside without trying to find the perfect words to describe it. When I slept at night I dreamed of my papers, of footnotes, bibliographies, indented quotes, words in rows. Sentences rearranged themselves in my head. I cooked
absentmindedly, reading a book with one hand while stirring with the other, and it didn’t matter, for we ate absentmindedly, uninterested in our food. Our Christmas vacation was spent on the farm, and our one escape from words was to ride the horses. But as soon as we entered the house, we saw the books and papers we had brought down with us, and we made a big fire and weak drinks and settled down to work again.

I was doing well. I was getting the best grades, the best remarks from my professors. I was doing what I had dreamed of doing all my life, and I was doing it well, and I was miserable beyond the reach of all those words at my command. A year had passed since I had seen Alice and her children, yet I thought of them every day. Alice and I wrote to each other often, and occasionally she included in her letters photos or a splashy bright painting made by one of her children for me. I would tape it to a mirror or the refrigerator door, and it would bring back to me vividly the laughter, the noise, the caressing and cuddling, the sheer good busyness of life which was a part of Alice’s world and not a part of mine. I began to apply images of barrenness and sterility to myself. I would read Eliot’s words, “ridiculous the waste sad time,” and think of myself as a pale sad half-moon, curving emptily around nothing, drained instead of filled. When I saw pregnant women on the street I stared with envy and amazement: how could they have done it? Did they choose it? How did it feel to be so full, to carry another life? I would look away, ashamed. When I saw little babies in their mothers’ baskets at the grocery store I would stare, dumbfounded at the size, wondering how it would feel to hold something so very small in my arms. When I visited Linda and saw little Dina, who walked and talked now, and cooed and babbled when she saw me, who was all soft pink flesh and immediacy, I felt nearly sick with longing. Sometimes, when I was very sad or tired, I would let myself indulge in the ultimate forbidden delight: I would imagine a child, a real child of mine and Charlie’s, a child who would cuddle against me, a child who would hold my hand.

I did not understand what was going on. Had instinctual desire to reproduce suddenly risen within me like a yeast bread? If so, how base, how animalistic. I had to fight it off. I told myself that my feelings were temporary. I told myself that I would absolutely not give in to them. I took my birth control pill with fanatical regularity. I told no one, not even Charlie, of my feelings. I knew that what I wanted was ridiculous,
unnecessary, senseless; I could not think of one good logical reason for having a child. Yet I wanted one with all my heart, every day.

I had my pride and the Pill as weapons against myself; I decided they weren’t enough. I got a cat. A beautiful Siamese chocolate point. I named him Jami, after a Persian poet, and Charlie enjoyed Jami, too. He was an intelligent and a playful animal, and he entertained us and gave us a break from our work, and gave me something to love and to buy little treats for. I bought him a basket and wove blue ribbons in and around the wicker and tied a blue bow on top; he soon tore the bow to shreds. He slept on my lap when I read, he greeted me at the door when I came home. He rubbed against my ankles or arms when I cried, and when I looked into his face I only cried the more because he was a sweet cuddly creature but an animal, with whiskers and crossed eyes.

Finally the spring semester ended and the summer began. I was amazed at the joy I felt when the semester ended and at the relief I felt when I said, “No, I won’t be taking courses this summer. Charlie’s girls are coming again for two months. I’ve got to play stepmother. Charlie’s almost through with The Book—he’s got to work on it this summer.”

I spent hours planning special events for the summer, hours looking at children’s clothes which I eventually didn’t buy, not knowing Caroline’s and Cathy’s sizes after a year’s growth, hours looking at card games and toys. The night before Charlie’s daughters arrived it finally hit me: boom. I was putting a huge stuffed teddy bear on each bed, a surprise for the girls. How happy they would be, I thought, when they saw the bright cuddly bears. I grinned in anticipation. I looked at the big stuffed bears. And knew—boom—what I was doing. I was acting as if Charlie’s daughters were mine. I was making myself happy through them.

Jami wandered in and rubbed against my leg. I sat down on the bed and picked him up and stroked him.

“Is it a crime?” I asked him. “Is it, Jami? Whom am I hurting? What am I doing wrong?”

Sitting there, I remembered that whenever people used to ask me, “Do you have any children?” I had laughed and said, “Heavens, no, and I don’t want any! I’ve got too many other things I want to do!” But now when someone asked I always said, “Not yet,
though I do have two stepdaughters.”

“This is terrible, Jami, terrible,” I said. “I think I’m going nuts. I’ll take those damned bears back to the store and use the money to buy that set of critical essays I’ve been wanting.” But I didn’t.

I played with the girls all that summer of ’69. They were suddenly perfect ages; fourteen and eleven; old enough to take care of themselves, dress themselves, enjoy the same museums and concerts and movies and jokes, yet young enough not to worry about being seen in public with adults. Charlie finished his book that summer and took us all to Colorado for two weeks. We rode horses and swam and hiked mountain trails and laughed in the exhilarating mountain air. Somehow, subtly, without announcing it, we had become two pairs: Charlie and Cathy; Caroline and me. Cathy at eleven was still gawky in the way a prizewinning show horse is gawky as a filly. Her lines and instincts were good. She adored Charlie and held his hand almost constantly. If he went to the garage to see about tires, she went. If he went to the post office to pick up a package, she went. She stayed up late at night, sitting by his side on the sofa, sitting in my former spot, curled against him, reading. Twice every half hour she would say, “Can I get you anything, Dad? Tea? A glass of water? Some cake? A brandy?” When the mail came, Cathy ran to get it from the box and brought it all to Charlie eagerly; if she’d been a dog, she would have wagged her tail and drooled. When the four of us played Parcheesi, she never captured or blockaded Charlie, she tried to help him win. She was forever praising him, complimenting his clothes or hair or laughing at his slightest joke. Watching her, I felt both amused and saddened: she was acting just as I had acted when I first met and married Charlie, and I didn’t act that way anymore. I couldn’t—I had changed. I was so torn, so almost maddened, by my desire to have a child and my desire not to want one that I lived in a state of fury every day. Yet Charlie never guessed this; worse, he never did what I longed and longed for him to do: he never said, “Zelda, I can’t stand it anymore. I want to have a baby with you. I want you to have my child.” The fact that Charlie didn’t long for the same thing I longed for, the fact that he didn’t even guess at my raging subterranean desire, made me feel a real and sudden separation. We were not one person after all; we were two. We were separated from each other deeply. We were alone. It was frightening. I did not know then how in the course of a marriage, over a
stretch of years and years, two people can ebb and flow together, ebb and flow in closeness and then in isolation, yet never really part. I knew I loved Charlie; I knew he loved me. We were still happy with each other in our daily lives. Yet I was lonely. There was something I wanted him to know, something he did not guess and I could not bring myself to say.