Steps and Exes Read online

  The engaged couple had the place of honor, at the center of the table, Victoria beside Bethie, Celia to Wade’s left, Bobby to Bethie’s right next to Victoria. Bobby rose, put on his half-glasses, 79

  Laura Kalpakian

  arranged his note cards against his water glass and pinged on the wineglass with a fork. High school students moved amongst the round tables, serving the first course, a savory soup, a pale cream of leek, each bowl with a jaunty cap of fresh parsley atop it, and guests leaned forward to breathe in its fragrance, anticipate its taste.

  The students moved like black-and-white-clad butterflies (a few nose rings amongst them) as Bobby slowly collected the attention of the guests and launched into his speech, announcing this was the happiest day of his life. “To have all three of my girls together for the first time in eight years! To have my beautiful little granddaughter, Brio, here with me at last! My world is complete. My family is complete.”

  “And Wade,” Bethie reminded him in a whisper. “Wade.”

  “And Wade. Add Wade to my list of blessings. And Eric! Victoria’s fine, fine…”

  Beside him, Victoria murmured that it was OK and Bobby went on to use the actual word, husband, creating a tide of surprise amongst the Isadorans present, not that they hadn’t already known Victoria was legally married. They had, but they wanted to watch Celia absorb the news. They were disappointed because Celia did not so much as flinch or grimace at husband. On the contrary, she actually appeared interested in Bobby’s remarks, contexted with quotes from the poets, the Bible and the Beatles, as he came at last to Number Three of his twelve note cards.

  “We are all here to celebrate love! True love. Let us say with the poet, with all the poets who have embraced love, that love knoweth no season or clime! Love will defeat the rags of time! Let us celebrate here the love of Bethie and Wade. Love is more important than marriage, though I suppose there are those who would disagree with me.”

  His wife for one, Sunny noticed, regarding the scowling Janice in the mirror opposite the family table. And clearly, at the various tables, other people disagreed. Eric’s mother. What was her name?

  Victoria had introduced her in-laws to Sunny, but they were a colorless lot, and this wan woman, plucking nervously at her pearl choker, she was…? Dorothy. Dorothy Robbins disagreed 80

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  with Bobby so vividly, she shivered and her left eye twitched uncon-trollably till she put her hand over it. Her husband dozed beside her; Ned Robbins was sporty, corpulent and his bald pate pink from a Maui sunburn. What a disparate crowd they were, Sunny thought from her vantage point overlooking the whole room. Could the marriage of Wade and Bethie truly unite such a group? As Bobby waxed on, eloquent in the service of love, Sunny surveyed the tables, feeling a furtive pang of pity for those Recoverees sitting on either side of Nona York, two young men, their skin still angry about some adolescent outrage. Clearly, Bethie had done nothing to prepare them for the likes of Nona York.

  But Celia had carefully placed Grant Hayes beside Launch, as much to protect Launch as anyone else. People always thought him deaf or retarded because he was mute and they often hollered at him cruelly. From across the room, Launch caught Sunny’s eye and he waved enthusiastically. He was nicely dressed, no doubt in borrowed clothes, a clean white shirt, buttoned to the neck, though his wild hair and uncombed beard radiated around his face. Grant Hayes winked at her again and Sunny managed a smile in return.

  Looking around the gathering, Sunny recognized remnants of her island childhood: Lester Tubbs, silver-haired Ian Ellerman, Dr.

  Aagard, who had set Sunny’s broken arm when she jumped out of the swing, Angie and her sons, two teenage boys who towered over her, over everyone for that matter. There was Nancy, longtime Useless postmistress, the Lattimers from the bakery, and the librarian, Edith Anthony. Though she could not name them, representatives of Isadora’s unambitious fishing fleet were easily distinguished, as were the local farmers, who were Celia’s suppliers. These men were mostly bearded, burly and uncomfortable in tight-fitting coats and narrow ties, their women brushing wrinkles out of dresses they hadn’t worn in years, all of them being exceedingly polite to the high school students serving, who were, for the most part, their own children.

  And there was Andrew Hayes—his blond hair gone gray, gone 81

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  altogether, lots of it, his big teeth yellowed, his fair skin darkened with age and the weather, his thirty-year loyalty to Budweiser evident in his paunch and the pouches under his eyes. But here he was in a suit, his arm around his wife (Number Three? Number Four?), listening studiously to Bobby Jerome wax on about love.

  Emollient love. Ennobling love. Bobby said not a word about the old destructive, wrecking-ball love, about sex, about love providing a mere perm for the proverbial beast with two backs. Sunny still thought of Andrew as a beast, blond, hairy, uncaring. She had loathed him, loathed his blue eyes, his big grin, his big hands and the easy lope of his walk, the clank of his tool belt when he came, day after day, to Henry’s House, where he was the contractor overseeing its restoration. Sunny had known her stepmother was sleeping with Andrew Hayes before Bobby knew it, maybe even before it actually happened. Subtlety was never Celia’s forte. These careless adults had seemed to the children like dinosaurs crashing through the lush world of the Henry girls. Bethie and Sunny and Victoria had all scurried and crouched, trembled like tiny mammals trying to survive this perilous moment, the disintegration of their warm, tropical world, the coming of the cold. Like small, strong, warm-hearted, warm-blooded little mammals, furry and fleet, the girls trembled when the dinosaurs thundered, when their footprints gouged the alluvial mud, when they brought massive trees smashing down. And when those dinosaurs succumbed, fell over and died, they crushed all the little creatures below. Sunny wondered if perhaps Celia had come by the notion of the Huggamugwumps, those unlovely little burrowing creatures, by watching children try to evade the fate that giants could impose on them. Sunny put a protective arm around Brio; she would never do that to her daughter.

  She knew how painful and powerless children felt, remembered the hollow feeling in her heart as she had crouched there under the stairs with her sisters, knowing their parents were breaking up, and they would be severed from one another, their family, their very world.

  And look at these destructive giants now. Celia and Bobby, the very picture of the bride’s parents, full of rectitude and pomp, 82

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  not the tiniest indication that all their passion and desire, their lust and hunger had made people crazy and toppled worlds and wrecked marriages and flung children around, yanked Sunny and Bethie and Victoria, Grant and Lee for that matter, in the wake of whoever their parents decided to sleep with next. Look at them all. Middle-aged people for whom all passion was visibly past. They looked contented certainly, complacent probably, boring, no doubt. All tucked happily into ruts. Just as though Andrew never banged Celia blind, never betrayed Bobby, never moved into Bobby’s bed, into Bobby’s house and eventually inflicted his own two brats on the family. What a lot of wasted energy and emotion, Sunny thought bitterly, all of it squandered so these middle-aged men and women could regard the world and one another cordially, even warmly, as though those old storms had not only passed, but they had never really mattered.

  Maybe they didn’t. Sunny suffered a twinge of envy for these middle-aged people, envied them the time they’d had to put their struggles behind them. To quit caring and call it perspective. Sunny put her lips to her little daughter’s bright head, whispered applause for her good manners, her good behavior in the face of Bobby’s stupefyingly boring speech.

  “We are gathered here today not only to honor the love of Bethie and Wade”—Bobby took a fresh note card from his pile—“but the love of families as well and the achievement of raising children—and those of you who don’t think it’s an achievement have never had children!” He got a laugh for that and moved o
n (though not swiftly) to truth and beauty, quoting from Keats and returning to Sophia Westervelt and her idea for the school. How this connected to Bethie and Wade, Sunny did not know. No one did. “Truth and beauty still live on Isadora Island. A haven for unfettered spirits.

  More in peril now than ever before, since missionaries and technocrats have taken over the world.” Bobby took a sip of water.

  By now the efficient high school students had served everyone and though there was a general flurry of starched napkins and 83

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  though wafts of fragrant steam hovered above the bowls of cooling soup, not so much as a spoon was lifted.

  “Pity us poor mortals at the end of the twentieth century,” Bobby declared ominously, on card Number Eight. “The technocrats have invaded our most private lives! They tell what is Good, what is True, what is Beautiful and prescribe what we must do. They tell us what to eat, what to drink, what to think. Preserve us from the experts who will insist we obey their oppression, and who will call our obedience health!”

  Eric bent closer to Sunny. “Does he always sound like he’s on the gallows and making his last speech?”

  “And the missionaries!” Bobby continued. “They smile and tell us God loves us the more for our repression! They tell us, line up, two by two, one man, one woman, each couple standing before God upon their connubial bed so that we may float into heaven on these little islands of conformity! But I thank God the pagan spirit still lives on Isadora Island! Thank God, poetry and art and music and love still flourish here and pagan souls still dance naked on Sophia’s Beach!”

  At the mention of dancing naked, Dorothy Robbins shivered violently and seemed to jolt in her chair. Ernton Hapgood leered at the Wookie, and Sunny rather feared the Marchands might peel their clothes off and dance à la Isadora Duncan. They had been known to.

  “Missionaries and technocrats believe we live in sin, but let me assure you, Dearly Beloved, that the only living sin is to live without love! I hope that Wade and Bethie will live in love always. Make love always. Anyone can have sex. Only lovers can make love. Why can’t people say that anymore? We made love! We make love, damn it!

  Why must people say, We had sex. Or We have sex often, or They had sex? It’s as though the act of love was a root canal! I don’t understand it. I object! To have sex is not the same thing as making love! You can have sex—like you can have lunch. You can have sex, like you can have the flu, or a dentist appointment or an overdrawn check at the bank. To have sex is not a creative act! It’s like the difference between Wonder

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  bread and making bread. Wonder bread is a processed product. I might hold Wonder bread in my hand, but that doesn’t mean I’ve made it! Now this bread”—he reached out and hoisted a nearby loaf, held it high—“has been fashioned, created with hands and care and time. The very things you need for making love! One is a creative endeavor and one is not. Only a true lover can actually make love.”

  Launch jumped up, applauding wildly, grinning, his woolly head bobbing, gray hair waving, white teeth glowing in his leathery face.

  Beside him, Grant also rose, reluctantly perhaps, but clapping just the same, and slowly the rest of the assembled company rose to their feet, applauding Bobby who smiled, bowed, and in glancing at Janice beside him, received the marital cryptogram that he had best shut up. Raising his glass, Bobby toasted Bethie and Wade and everyone followed suit and Bethie and Wade practiced their nuptial kiss.

  Bobby warbled more quickly through the rest of his note cards and finally, everyone could eat. The soup was cold.

  After lunch, coffee was served in the library at the opposite end of the long hall from the conservatory, but such were the fine acoustics that the music still wafted in. The smokers (including Angie, Nona and Ernton) all bolted outside to smoke on the veranda.

  Coffee in hand, others strolled through the long hall, the beautifully appointed rooms, though most remained crowded here in the library where the sense of cohesion, conviviality and well-being was aug-mented by the smell of leather bindings and early narcissus in vases and a bowl of white tulips. The sterling-white tulips waved beneath Ernton Hapgood’s oil portrait of Sophia Westervelt, whose clear, gray-eyed gaze went directly across the room to another Hapgood painting, three little girls, Sunny, Bethie, Victoria as children. He had made the girls all look serene and confident.

  Sunny came upon this portrait with some surprise, like unexpectedly meeting friends in a place full of strangers. Wade’s friends were certainly strangers, and though Sunny did her best to balance their names and faces, there was an unremitting sameness to the 85

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  Recoverees. The friends of the groom-to-be were all tentative, sub-dued, wore athletic shoes, well-washed jeans, and seemed unwilling or unable to make eye contact as they made anxious small talk. Celia was right, they did need reassuring. Strange, Sunny thought, to have her maternal instincts stirred by people who were, many of them, a good deal older than she was.

  But odder still was the sensation of seeing Henry’s House through their eyes. As she moved amongst them, in a sort of choral unison they enumerated to Sunny the glories of the place: the polished floors and fine rugs, fires burning briskly in the fireplaces, flowers in the vases, the ping of fine china, the ring of silver surfaces.

  “You’re Elizabeth’s sister, so you must have grown up here too,”

  said the pastor who would marry Wade and Bethie. Pastor Lewin was a solid man, perhaps forty, with a doughy complexion, thinning hair and a five o’clock shadow well before five. He had the look of a curator, expertly assessing goods as he turned his saucer over to inspect the mark. “How marvelous it must have been to have such a home.”

  “We didn’t live in this house,” Sunny replied. “No one did. No one does. No one’s ever lived here. It isn’t meant to be lived in.”

  Sunny tried to explain it was meant to be absorbed, experienced, that everything here was designed to affect and for effect, but she seemed to splash and flounder in the effort and Pastor Lewin’s attention wandered. He smiled benignly and left for more coffee.

  Sunny sipped a glass of water and moved toward the further reaches of the room. She watched the Recoverees as one might watch the seals on Assumption Island. Knowing Celia’s true feelings for Wade, Sunny was even more impressed to see her so affectionate to him, absolutely radiating warmth to his friends. Was this reflexive charm, or unmitigated hypocrisy? Sunny rather shrugged at some hypocrisy (believing it to be standard issue for adult life), but Celia was clearly determined to be loved by Wade and his friends, to shower on them some measure of her affection for Bethie. People drew in toward Celia. Her stories had sent

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  ripples of laughter and pleasure eddying through the library, drawing people from their own conversations and pulling them into her orbit, a sort of Celia-centric universe where even people she didn’t like felt warm and wanted. She did it all so effortlessly, Sunny thought, her warmth expanding, as heat expands.

  “I’ve always rather fancied myself a mother out-law rather than a mother in-law,” Celia laughed when someone mentioned how marriage changed people’s relations. “But all at once, I find I’ve got all these new roles. Suddenly I have a granddaughter.” She gave an appreciative nod to Sunny, though Brio was not to be found, but off with Bobby somewhere. “I discover today I already have one son-in-law and will shortly have another.” Behind her logs gave way in the fireplace and a fine pine plume of smoke scented the room. “It just goes to prove that you’re never too old to enjoy change. Endure it, anyway.”

  “Your sister is a very fortunate girl,” said a jittery voice behind Sunny and she turned to find an angular young woman with long hair, loosely braided down her back. She introduced herself as Fran from ReDiscovery, noting for Sunny the caps. “Wade is dedicated to doing good in this world. He is a great man. Make no mistake.

&nb
sp; Wade is dedicated to easing others’ pain.”

  “Well, that presupposes pain, doesn’t it?” Sunny replied lightly, knowing she was not equal to hearing, yet again, how lucky Bethie was to be engaged to Wade. Truly, it was as Celia had foretold, and Sunny could certainly understand her impatience with all this Wade-worship. But on the other hand, it didn’t necessarily mean he was a pump-sucking pious missionary. “Does Wade require pain?”

  “Wade is a good shepherd,” Fran replied.

  Sunny was about to inquire after Wade’s flock, but just then Odd Todd bounded up to her with a burst of brotherly love, hyper-brotherly, as Todd did everything, his awkward enthusiasm exacer-bated by an enormous shambling frame, a heavy jaw, thick mustache and great drooping brown eyes. Like the walrus he resembled, Todd too barked and flapped in the crowded library, very nearly spilling more than one cup of coffee as he dithered

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  on to Sunny about North Seattle Community College and his computer classes. Someone had given him the engagement page from the Seattle Times for this Sunday, complete with picture of Bethie and Wade looking beatifically happy. When Wade wandered over and joined them, Todd drew his attention to this astonishing coincidence. Wade had graduated from CalState Northridge and Todd’s own favorite professor at North Seattle Community College graduated from CalState Northridge! Imagine that!

  Wade listened, intensely interested, until Todd, clutching his newspaper clipping, went barreling over toward Janice, who was deep in conversation with Dorothy Robbins. Dorothy continued plucking distractedly at her pearl choker, edging closer to the fireplace while she clucked and bobbed and ineffectually responded to Janice. Nearby sat the Wookie, frowning, indicating approval and disapproval with the same generic snort.

  Wade moved a bit closer to Sunny. “It must have been very hard for you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I meant, to have had your childhood so ripped up and torn apart, to be split up like that, you and Elizabeth and Victoria.”