Steps and Exes Page 11
“Oh, we still saw each other all the time, either here or at my dad’s place. Twice a month for sure.”
“You didn’t feel the pain of separation?”
“Of course we felt it, but—” Sunny stammered, unaccustomed to verbalizing her emotions. “We still had an island childhood. Little savages, that’s what we were. That’s what you want as a kid. Haven’t you ever read Where the Wild Things Are? Hasn’t Bethie ever told you about the Huggamugwumps?”
He laughed with genuine warmth. “Oh yes, in detail! I’ve heard more Huggamugwump stories than I care to admit to.”
“Has Bethie taken you around Isadora much?”
“Everywhere. She’s shared everything with me.”
“Well, it’s a magical place, especially for a kid.”
“Is that why you brought Brio back? Elizabeth thought you’d 88
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never return to Washington, that you had become a real Californian.”
“There are no real Californians. There are only people who live there and people who don’t. It’s not like the Northwest. Up here, to belong, you have to be native. You must know that if you’re from Northridge.”
A gentle and forebearing smile lingered at his lips. “I’m not from anywhere, really. Military brat. Emphasis on the brat. I’m one of those people from nowhere.”
“And no one?”
“My father died a long time ago, when I was just a boy and my mother remarried quickly. She won’t have anything to do with me.
She has cut me from her life. I’m saddened by that, of course, but I understand her pain.” Wade regarded the crowded library reflectively. “Of the many things Elizabeth has helped me ReDiscover, I most value love, friendship and family. You can see I’m blessed with many friends, and Elizabeth is all the family I need.”
“Well, in that case,” Sunny said dubiously, “you might be getting more than you bargained for.” She regarded her extended family, overextended, like credit or debt: Odd Todd ricocheting around the room perilously close to where Victoria’s father-in-law had surrounded himself with a bevy of his sons, a sort of circling of the Robbins wagons to ward off Todd. Bethie was showing off her engagement ring to Lee and Launch, and not far distant Celia charmed the socks off rapt Recoverees whose solemn little faces lit with laughter, whose spirits seemed to rise, buoyant with the warm, wood-smoke scented air. Other Recoverees, not so fortunate, were in the thrall of Nona York who was describing herself as the Amelia Earhart of romance novels, and extolling the historical significance of her heroines: the first in their genre to give blow jobs. Grant, pinioned to the book-shelves by Russell Lewis, nodded gravely as Russell described his own wonderful chiropractor, and the groin injury he—Russell—had been cured of, certain that an old football injury of Grant’s could be similarly cured. Fascinating material, Sunny could tell, just from looking
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at the faces of Russell’s two wretched teenage children, sitting side by side, their knees pressed together, lips closed over their braces.
Bobby bounced in with Brio and his guitar, announced he was ready to perform. Janice had Victoria in the grip of Chronic Pain. The Wookie was fending off Ernton’s attentions. Eric fussed over his mother, Dorothy, whose knuckles had gone white clutching her pearl choker. Surely this was what Dante had in mind for hell. Why would anyone willingly marry into this? Sunny shook her head. “I’d take the ferry to Vladivostok rather than marry into this family.”
“It was important for Elizabeth to include her whole family in this occasion, in our happiness. She knew that everyone needed this healing moment to accept one another.”
“Oh.”
“There’ve been so many breakups and so many hurt feelings and the traumas of so many men in your mother’s life, so many surrogate fathers.”
“Celia’s not my mother. She’s my stepmother. Ex-step-mother.”
Sunny squirmed slightly. “Bethie actually told you all that stuff?”
“We have no secrets. Our relationship is based on complete emotional honesty and responsibility. Elizabeth is my life. She’s made me realize everything I’ve missed in the world. I spent all those years messed up on crack and for the last eight years I’ve been so fulfilled with ReDiscovery, I’ve forgotten what it is to be loved. In fact, I’ve never known what it is to be loved as she loves me—and as I love her. Elizabeth taught me all that, and I’m grateful.”
“I can’t think of her as Elizabeth,” Sunny confessed.
“Elizabeth Ann Shumley,” he mused. “The three most beautiful words in the language.”
“That’s not her real name, you know. They chose those names.
Well, Bethie chose them. Victoria was still pretty little, but Bethie just announced one day that they wanted to be queens, and they were changing their names to Elizabeth and Victoria.” From the look on Wade’s face, she instantly regretted her revela-90
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tion, but there was no turning back. “What could Celia do about it?
When you subscribe to the Unfettered Life, as Celia always has, you can’t just deny people the right to choose their own names, even if they are in elementary school. Besides, when Bethie sets her mind to make you do something, well…” Sunny’s voice trailed off.
“What are their real names?” asked Wade, the genial set of his mouth tightening slightly.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m a firm believer in keeping secrets, and I’ve broken my own rule, haven’t I? It’s Bethie’s secret to tell, not mine.”
“Bethie and I have no secrets.”
Sunny was spared any reply because Bethie waltzed over, took Wade’s arm, practiced again their nuptial kiss. She implored Sunny to come visit them at their condo in the Wallingford district in Seattle, and to see the offices of ReDiscovery, in fact to come to some of the ReDiscovery workshops.
“But I’m not a drug addict,” Sunny protested.
“Everyone is a victim to something,” Wade smiled.
Victoria bore down on them, again clucking over Sunny’s too-short hair, her ill-fitting dress and her unlovely makeup. “For someone who was an actress and a model, Sunny, you have no fashion sense whatever. You’ll just have to come shopping with me soon. Really soon,” she added, with a critical look, up and down.
“The rope-heeled platforms have to go. The Lancôme rep is a friend of mine and—”
“Did you tell her?” Eric burst in on them, interrupting Victoria’s plans for Sunny’s makeover. “I have to go to the car to get Mom’s sweater and her heart pills, but I want to know if you did it. Why won’t you tell me? Did she?” he inquired bluntly of Bethie.
“Victoria has to learn to speak up for herself. Go on, Victoria.” In the shelter of Wade’s embrace, Bethie regarded her sister expectantly.
Victoria studied her French manicure. She indicated in a series of staccato retorts that, yes, she had told Celia they were actually, 91
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legally married. There was a tiny chip in the polish of her index finger and Victoria applied herself to it. “Celia wasn’t surprised and she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t anything. She didn’t say anything, really. I don’t think she cared one way or the other. It was all anticli-mactic, and I wish, Bethie, you had not made such an issue of it. I would have told Celia, in time.”
“In time? What time!” demanded Eric. “When hell freezes over?
When pigs fly?”
“In time. I would have—”
“A year!” Eric lowered his voice. He looked like Ken when Barbie wouldn’t let him drive. “I can’t believe for a year you never told your mother we were married, Victoria! That’s why we went to the judge’s office and did it all so fast and hush-hush, wasn’t it? So you wouldn’t have to tell your mother! Are you afraid of Celia?”
“Of course not. It just didn’t seem worth the effort.”
“Marriage to me? Marrying me wasn’t worth the effo
rt!”
“It isn’t you, Eric. It’s just the way she is. Trust me. I know my own mother.” Victoria cast a look of extreme pissedness to Bethie and tried to soothe Eric who was having none of it.
Sunny wanted to console poor Eric who felt undervalued, even unloved. She thought Bethie was wrong to have pushed the issue, but her heart broke for Victoria. All her life Victoria had fought her parents’ romantic values: The Smart One, high school valedictorian, straight-A student, Island Rotary Girl of the Year, Junior Achievement, alumni scholarship to the University of Washington. Victoria Henry (Jerome) had always been an exemplary achiever, and in any other family she would have been the paragon of perfection. In her own family she was completely anomalous. Her father went in for daytime dreaming and ambition unsullied by action. Her mother ran a business like a work of art, ran people’s lives, ran through lovers, raised five kids, cooked for hundreds, had had people in and out of her home for years, and yet subscribed to the Unfettered Life.
Victoria had not the slightest use, ever, for the Unfettered Life, or Love Unfettered, and she had shed these values and this island as soon as she could. Proudly,
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bravely and against her family’s values, Victoria had gone to the University of Washington where she had picked Eric out of an Econ class, tried him on for size, as one might try on Italian pumps. Like the pumps, Eric was comfortable and becoming, and immediately after graduation, she took him to the judge’s office and married him.
With her university degree she got an enviable job in marketing, at Nordstrom; she was the driver of a BMW with gold hubcaps, the owner of a lake-view home in Bellevue, not far from her in-laws’
gorgeous place. She was a married woman of style, substance and assured upward mobility in the grown-up world. She had fulfilled ambitions undreamed of by the residents of artsy-fartsy Useless Point. Yet she had not had the courage to tell her mother she had legally wed the inoffensive Eric Robbins. And now, since Celia did not seem to care, the keeping of the secret looked pitiful, ludicrous, and Victoria’s single failure of courage was public.
“Your mother is a nutburger,” Eric muttered. “Everyone on this island is as weird as owl shit, if you ask me.”
“Well, Celia’s right about one thing”—warning rattled in Victoria’s voice as surely as if the marine radio squawked nearby,—“if you don’t get married, you don’t have to get divorced.”
But Eric plunged heedlessly into danger. “What does Celia think happened with her and Bobby? What does she call that? Mint chocolate chip? So they didn’t get legally divorced! The effect on you—on all of you—was the same, wasn’t it? They are divorced even if they never got married.”
“Sunny never got married, did you, Sunny?” Victoria turned briskly to her sister.
“I never wanted to marry. I only wanted Brio.”
“Have you ever been married, Wade?” asked Victoria, desperate now for some backup.
He drew Bethie’s arm through his and kissed her forehead. “I’ve never been married. For that courage and commitment, you need someone to love and to teach you love. Now, with Elizabeth, I’m ready for that challenge.”
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“Wade was waiting to get married till he met me,” Bethie beamed.
“Destiny. Just like Celia and Henry.”
“Oh God, spare me Henry Westervelt!” Victoria rolled her eyes,
“I’m sick of all this crap and blather about love. I hate love. I hate hearing about it, talking about it. Look, Eric, I’ve told my mother.
I’ve done it. What more can I do? What do you want of me? Some belated bachelor party?”
“I want to know why you could not admit you’d married me, why all this time has passed and—”
“Sometimes maturity doesn’t always come with growing up,”
Wade offered, his palms upturned, his face serene. “So we must free ourselves from the old dependencies, we must stand up and be new, rinse off the sources of confusion and abuse, and learn to give ourselves permission to be free. And sometimes that permission itself is painful, and through that pain we recover and discover.”
“Oh, balls.” Victoria walked out of the library, her high heels clicking on the teak floors, Eric right behind her on his way down to the car to get his mother’s sweater and her digitalis pills.
“Misdirected anger only hurts the emanator,” Wade commented.
“Victoria will get over it,” Bethie laughed. “That’s just the way she is. Her room was always neat, her clothes were always ironed and her homework always done. You can’t hold it against her. Look, there’s Grant. He’s going to be an usher at our wedding in November, Sunny. Him and Lee both.” She waved to Grant who smiled and strolled toward them. “Honestly, honey”—she held Wade close to her—“you can’t imagine Grant and Lee when they were kids.
Such nasty snots! They were so mean and always in trouble. They used to pull the heads off our dolls. They stole their father’s truck and wrecked it on a logging road. Andrew used to beat them. Tried to anyway. But they got big fast. They were awful, weren’t they, Sunny?”
“Beasts.”
“But they could be tons of fun. Remember, Sunny, they taught us to smoke cigarettes?”
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“First and last time I ever smoked.”
“Grant lives on a boat now. I bet he’ll take us out in it this summer, Wade. He lives on this boat over in the Massacre Marina, don’t you, Grant?” she asked when he joined them. “What is it called? Some funny Greek name.”
“Pythagoras.”
“That have to do with math?” asked Bethie.
“With symmetry.”
No one knew quite what he meant and he did not elaborate, but he turned to Sunny and asked if she would like to dance.
“There isn’t any music.”
“Listen.”
From the conservatory and over the voices came the sounds of the string quartet. “You can’t dance to Mozart,” Sunny replied.
“You can if you live con brio.”
But Sunny excused herself to find her daughter, and Bobby strummed his guitar and announced he’d written a special song for Bethie and Wade’s engagement and he would now perform. The happy couple practiced their nuptial kiss.
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The Maid of Dove
Dorothy Robbins was cold. Exceptionally cold these days and she didn’t understand why. Long since finished with the indignities of menopause, Dorothy was annoyed, of late, to be so inconvenienced by her body which was generally so cooperative. She had sent her son Eric to the car to get her sweater and her digitalis pills, but her hands were so cold, they were beginning to ache, and she could hardly chafe them vigorously in the library with all those awful people about. Someone might think she was applauding Bobby Jerome’s singing. Far from it. What a wretched lot they were, Victoria’s family. Imagine, quarreling, talking about groin injuries at a party, discussing blow jobs to Amelia Earhart. Disgusting. Dorothy decided to warm her cold hands under hot water, but three or four women were already waiting in line for the downstairs bathroom, and had been there for a while, judging from their chummy conversation. Thank you, no. Dorothy went
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upstairs. Far better. Even had there not been a line, Dorothy preferred to undertake all bathroom activities, however innocuous, far from the madding crowd, so to speak. She had always been like that. Even as a college student at the University of Washington, she would never enter a stall directly adjacent to one already occupied. To do so seemed to her, if not a breach of etiquette, at least a lapse of taste.
Climbing the gleaming staircase she came to the second floor of Henry’s House which was unheated, chilled actually, but she found a bathroom that suited her. She was gratified too to escape the party.
Though she did not need to pee, she did so anyway, remembering s
ome wordless edict of her mother’s. Turning on the hot water, Dorothy chafed her hands over and over, rubbed them, ran hot water over them. It must have been the long ferryboat ride over to the island which had penetrated her bones with cold. She made a mental note to wait for summer, high summer, August, before she went on the boat with Ned and the boys.
She thought of them as boys, but all her sons were grown men now. Eric, the youngest, was the one she most doted on, perhaps because he was her unexpected gift in middle age, or maybe he truly was the most winsome of the four. Or perhaps it was merely a process of elimination. The other three all seemed strangers to Dorothy, like colleagues of her husband’s, colleague-clones she might have met at professional parties of like-minded stockbrokers in similar Seattle firms, and not at all like boys she once had snuggled and adored. Moreover they were not adorable, her sons. She had to admit it, to herself alone perhaps. Dorothy’s regard for the truth kept her honest, if not candid.
Like her other sons, Eric had married young, but unlike them, he was not eager to drop his old affection for his mother, to trade his love for his mother for an exclusive allegiance to his wife. In fact, Eric’s wife didn’t seem all that interested in staking out territorial claims to his affection, not like Dorothy’s other daughters-in-law had done. Why, those other boys were all but picketed and posted no trespassing within months of their marriages. Victoria 97
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was different. You wouldn’t have known it to look at her. She looked like all the other daughters-in-law: pretty, chic, groomed, coiffed, plenty of exercise at the gym, vitamins, fresh fruit and vegetables, mineral water, poached fish. That sort of thing. And, like them, Victoria was a professional. Were all young women professionals now? When Dorothy was a young woman, she and the other wives talked of their children, their husbands, their golf game, their bridge game, but young women now talked incessantly of the Workplace, talk in which Dorothy could not share, and in truth, had no interest.
Victoria too talked of the Workplace. She was a buyer, or in marketing or some such thing for Nordstrom. Handbags, wasn’t it? Accessories? She always gave Dorothy accessories for Christmas. So yes, Victoria looked like all the other girls, wives to her sons, and she sounded like them, and seemed yes, very nice, and though her parents were divorced (divorce was common enough. Fine. And remarriage, well, that was a fact of modern life), there was nothing upon meeting Victoria that would have suggested to Dorothy and Ned—never mind to Eric!—that she came from such a revolting tribe of noisy and licentious weirdos.