Steps and Exes Read online

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll take the Season to think about it and decide in the fall.”

  “You mean you’re going to stay up here? You’re not going back to California?”

  “Yes. I’m here for good. I’ve come back.”

  “But what about being an actress? Oh, Sunny, don’t give up your talents. You are a marvelous actress! Oh, that Christmas pageant—we were all of us blown away, just sitting in the school cafeteria—you, in your dress with its twinkling lights and your little arms outstretched, the spirit of Christmas!”

  “That wasn’t the highlight of my life, Celia.”

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  “It was the mother of all Christmas pageants.”

  Sunny ate silently while Celia resurrected the wonderful Christmas pageant, the dress she had designed for Sunny, battery-powered and dazzling in the darkened cafeteria. Celia had coached her on her lines and Sunny had captivated the whole island. Finishing her soup, Sunny put her spoon down. “I’m old enough now, I mean, you reach a certain point when it’s not enough to hitchhike through life and expect a bit of luck or the right man, or both, to pick you up. You spend your youth expanding, but then, one day you start to narrow it all down, to ask, What do I want? What I mean is, you ask, What can’t I live without? What will finally matter to my life?

  And you realize you have to put your own hand to this effort, to your life. Once you know this, then everything has to change.” Sunny spoke slowly, as though picking each word from a garden of thought.

  “So what was it? What made you realize everything had to change?”

  “Oh, no one thing in particular. It was a process, not a moment.

  Maybe it started when I had Brio. Everything changed when I had her. Change for the better. Your whole vision alters when you have a child. Or at least it should. Mine did.” She brought her great blue eyes up from the table and she smiled at Celia. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “It’s been long over with Brio’s dad. I know you and I haven’t kept in touch, but I’m sure Bethie or Victoria, someone must have told you he was already married. It wasn’t a secret. He already had a family for that matter. The wife and kiddies and a Bel-Air home.

  What he wanted from me was that I should be a beautiful ornament on his arm, and I was. Actors are like that. Most people in Hollywood are like that. When I got pregnant with Brio, he counseled abortion, said he’d pay for it. He said I should do it for the usual reasons, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to. But after that I wasn’t so ornamental.

  My breasts were used for nursing and I smelled like baby spit-up.

  And once I had

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  Brio, I didn’t want a man who believed that an ornament was all I was or ever would be.”

  “So it wasn’t a tragedy, your breakup with him?”

  “It was a choice. He’s always been regular with the support checks for Brio, but they come from his accountant. And that’s fine. He’s taken up with lots of different women since me. I wasn’t the love of his life. If he needs a family, he can go home to Bel-Air. But if I need a family, I have to come back up to Washington.”

  “And you haven’t told Bobby you’re back? Your dad doesn’t know?”

  “Seattle isn’t home. Isadora is.” She toyed with her spoon. “I’d like Brio to have some time here. I know there’s no good job for me, but I wanted Brio to climb up in the apple trees and have Launch show her how to fish off the Useless dock and be scared of the watch-geese. I wanted her to go over to Assumption Island for picnics with the seals, and to run along Sophia’s Beach like we did, go up high on the swing and play with the otters and climb over the rocks and have Boomerquanger duels.”

  “Oh, Boomerquangers! I haven’t heard the word in so long. Who made that up?”

  “Bethie. We’d each have to find a stick on the beach, perfect for sword fighting, and there were some that were just sticks, but some were Boomerquangers.”

  “I’ll bet we still have Boomerquangers out in some of the sheds.”

  “Brio will have to find her own Boomerquanger. No one can do that for you. It’s one of the things you have to do alone.” Sunny tried to brush the fatigue from her face, and looked to the kitchen windowsills. “You see all those jars full of rocks and seaglass, shells lined up? It’s like the past all caught and held. I’d like to line up lots of jars full of Brio’s summers, of shells and rocks and bits of glass she’s found on island beaches. I’d like to have lots and lots of them, jars full of summers with my daughter. I want to give Brio a place where she can feel like a native.”

  “Well, Sunny, I’m happy to have you back, but you don’t 55

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  have to go all the way into Massacre for a seasonal job that pays shit.

  You can stay right here and work for me! I pay lousy wages just like Angie. Just like everyone else on this island.”

  “I don’t mind working for low wages.”

  “You will. These are all pay-and-flay jobs, you know. The kind where you get paid, but you feel flayed. All island jobs are like that.

  They’re all service jobs tied up with tourism, or fishing, or logging if you work for the Westervelts. Wages here are so low, our greatest export is our children. Very few come back. Bethie did, now and then, but only between love affairs. Grant’s back, but he won’t stay.

  He and Lee are both working construction for Andrew, but Grant has more ambition than that. Did you see that trolley path connecting this place to Henry’s? Grant went to Washington State, got a degree in engineering. This was his senior project, this path through the orchard. He told me he’d been planning it for years, ever since he was a kid! He designed the whole thing at Washington State and when he came back, he and Lee built it. They built the carts and everything. It’s a marvel! You remember how we used to have to haul everything, however hot, however heavy, rain or shine, uphill through the orchard?”

  Sunny dutifully nibbled her bread and butter, drank her tea and listened to Celia wax on about the charms of the trolley system, the carts and how they had made things so much easier, especially for this god-awful engagement party. Tomorrow Sunny could expect to see the whole Isadoran cast of thousands, well, hundreds. All of Useless Point was invited, from the postmistress, Nancy, to the old Isadorans, a term reserved to describe those cantankerous artists whose residence on the island dated from Sophia Westervelt’s day when she had imported artists to teach at her school. The school had failed, but the artists stayed on. Because of them, Useless Point was the premiere artistic address on Isadora. There was in fact a sort of rivalry between Useless and Massacre, so much so that Useless people refused to patronize Duncan Donuts for its exploitation of Isadora’s name. People from Useless Point believed Massacre was a hotbed of tourist-suckups

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  and crass commercialism. To people from Massacre, the Useless Pointers were truly useless, artsy-fartsy types who threw pots and smoked it too. Sunny wondered now how one island could contain so much variety, vitality and ill will. It was like a little terrarium, Isadora Island, a closed environment where for six months a year everyone courted tourism, and fought for the tourist dollars that kept the island alive at all. Then, off-season, everyone lapsed into a languorous, uncommunicative torpor. Massacre and Useless remained suspicious of one another all year long. Celia congratulated herself for being so democratic, because Massacre was invited, Dr.

  Aagard, Lester Tubbs, the island librarian, as were the farmers and commercial fishermen who were Celia’s suppliers and whose own high standards had contributed to Henry’s House’s success. “And speaking of reputation! Guess who called this morning— Joie de Vivre!”

  “Really? That high-class rag?”

  “That high-class rag,” Celia grinned. “No other Washington Band-B has ever appeared in their pages. Joie de
Vivre! writes up places all over the world—and there we’ll be. But I can’t even think about Joie de Vivre! till this terrible party is over. Forewarned is forearmed,”

  Celia cautioned Sunny. Then, at tedious length, she enumerated the number of family hatchets to be buried, the many island feuds that would be soft-pedaled, the number of ruffled feathers that would all be soothed for Bethie’s sake.

  “I’m sure everyone will be on their best behavior,” Sunny replied unconvincingly, especially when she found out Andrew Hayes was coming. Both Andrew and his current wife. As well as, no doubt—Celia pointed out—whoever else Andrew was sleeping with.

  Celia was a veteran of his infidelities. “You can bet he’s sleeping with someone.”

  “I hope Nona York is coming.” Nona was the island’s resident romance novelist.

  “Nona’s the only one Andrew hasn’t slept with.”

  Sunny knew from her sisters that Celia’s relationship with Andrew Hayes, though long over, was still rocky. All her other exes had outlived—or outloved—their moment. Not Andrew.

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  That’s what happened with sexual meltdown, Sunny thought. Once you melted down, you could never quite pull yourself upright. At least not with that particular man. Sexual meltdown was not in Sunny’s personal catalog of experience. But she had seen it happen to others and it seemed to her that Bethie was deep into sexual meltdown with Wade.

  Celia said if their extended family had its way, the family table would take up the whole room. Russell, Celia’s Man of the Moment, insisted on sitting with her, and he’d insisted that his kids come too.

  Janice wanted to join Bobby—and bring Odd Todd. And Thelma, naturally.

  Sunny winced. “The Wookie is coming?”

  The girls used to call Janice’s parents Jabba the Hutt and the Wookie. But then Jabba (Janice’s father) died, and it didn’t seem right to speak of the dead in those terms. Thelma, however, continued as the Wookie in the family’s collective parlance.

  “Janice says Thelma is step-grandmother to Bethie. Like Barbara Cartland was to Princess Di.” They both burst out laughing. And speaking of far-fetched connections to the bride: Bethie absolutely insisted on having all of Eric Robbins’ tribe “to share her joy.” Celia’s lip twisted painfully. “Eric has three married brothers and his parents, so that’s eight people. How can they share her joy if they don’t know her?”

  Sunny had no answer. Her head hurt.

  “Let me live through it, Lord, that’s all I ask. Family up the ying yang. Everyone there to watch Bethie flaunt the engagement ring on her left hand and practice her nuptial kiss.” Celia sighed. “Bethie says that all the time: Watch us practice our nuptial kiss.”

  “It could be worse,” Sunny offered tentatively. “Getting engaged isn’t so very bad. I mean, it’s not the Unfettered Life, but it’s not the army or the priesthood either.”

  “Getting married to Wade is like the priesthood.” Celia thrummed her fingers in the flour. “He has missionary instincts. Maybe that’s what I can’t bear. He goes after people just like a missionary goes after people and he bewitches them.”

  “Missionaries are supposed to convert, not bewitch.”

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  Eyeing an antidote to introspection in the ironing board, Celia walked over to it, turned on the iron and ruffled through a basket of starched linens. “Call it what you will, I just know Wade Shumley makes me want to spit.”

  Sunny sugared a fresh cup of tea and suggested, gently, that perhaps Bethie wanted someone mature, hardworking, suggested (without ever quite saying so) that given Bethie’s upbringing, such a man, might look, well, exotic. Appealing. Even interesting. Certainly that could be said of Victoria’s domestic partner, Eric. Sunny was careful to say domestic partner, not husband.

  Celia spat on the iron, but it wasn’t yet hot. “Wade and Bethie asked us—that is, me and Russell, and your dad and Janice, and Odd Todd and the Wookie—to a potluck dinner at their church because they wanted us to meet the pastor who will marry them, and some of their friends. Wade’s friends. Of course, they love Bethie, and Bethie just loves them too. Oh, big love bath. Everyone just splashing around in this love bath. And during the evening—which, I assure you, was a mere coming attraction for tomorrow’s festivities—all these people tell me, really, the same story, variations on a theme: how wonderful Wade is, how noble, how remarkable, how willing he is to admit his own flaws. Such bravery for a man. And I said—Well, what does that make him? An Olympic moral athlete?

  When a woman admits her own flaws, is she merely stating the obvious?” Celia snorted and laid out the body of a resistant linen napkin. “If you ask me, I think Wade is overfond of his flaws. I think he loves his flaws and he wants us to love them too.”

  “Bethie said Wade didn’t have any flaws.”

  Celia spat on the iron, and this time it hissed and crackled. “He’s a former crack addict. Did she tell you that?”

  “She said he’d recovered. Eight years ago.”

  “You misheard her, Sunny. None of them are recovered. They are Recovering. There’s a difference. They are Recoverees. That way, it’s all still in process. They might slip down that dreadful path again, any minute, and so we’re all obliged to be supportive and give them—continually, mind you—great dollops

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  of assurance. We must constantly remember to restore their shaky selves, to build up their wavering self-confidence and polish their poor self-image. Oh, it takes a fucking village all right.”

  “Well, that’s better than still being on drugs. Drug addicts are very unpredictable.”

  “Wade is predictable, all right. He leads a group called ReDiscovery and they get to embrace all their pain, and, at the same time, they get applause for embracing it.” For the sheer pleasure of the hiss, she spat again on the upturned iron. “He’s addicted to recovery.”

  The kitchen suddenly fell silent, no beeping faxes, no whooshing dishwasher, no clicking phones and voice mail, no washer or dryer, quiet save for the marine radio, the steady hum of the fridges and the freezer in the service porch and the thump of Celia’s iron as she flattened out the napkins. Sunny took her dish to the sink where houseplants straggled in varying stages of neglect. “Maybe it’s just a moment in his life.”

  “Eight years?” Celia ironed the napkin into a linen brick and stacked it with the others. “I suppose Bethie told you how they’d met. A romantic tale, that one,” she added sardonically.

  Bethie had indeed told Sunny a romantic tale, entirely in keeping with Bethie’s way of looking at the world. Bethie had energy and vitality, great warmth. She was Bethie The Charmer, affectionate, restless, athletic but impatient with anything that required careful reflection. When she spoke of Wade Shumley, however, she evinced passion. Not puppy love. It was sexual meltdown all right. Fusion.

  And perhaps Celia was right and Bethie was bewitched, but that’s what love does to you. Before Wade, Bethie had had different love affairs and different jobs, and always, when one or the other ended, she always bounced back with a bright resilience reminiscent of Celia herself. But Wade Shumley was different. Sunny knew from the tone of Bethie’s voice, that first phone call. Breathlessly Bethie had recounted to Sunny how they’d met: she was working at Angie’s Duncan Donuts and Wade came in and said he was looking for Island High and did she have a map of the island? Bethie had had a bad day

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  at the cafe, and she retorted that on Isadora Island a map wouldn’t do you any good, here, you needed sonar. But she had directed him to Island High and later that afternoon, after he’d finished at the high school, he came back to Duncan Donuts and asked her to go out to dinner. Bethie said he waited for her to finish her shift, just sat there with a cup of coffee and a book, for hours, looking up at her, smiling now and then, till she finished her shift and he took her to the Chow
der House for dinner.

  “And he missed the ferry,” Celia snapped. “So you can guess where he spent that night. Bethie was renting a studio apartment in Massacre, but within two weeks she’d left Isadora and moved in with him. Two weeks!”

  Celia’s outrage seemed to Sunny rather unwarranted, coming from a woman who had kept Isadora Island enthralled with her sex life for years and years. But Sunny merely asked what Wade was doing at the high school. “Is he a teacher?”

  “Oh, Sunny, how banal! Wade, a teacher? That would be too easy, too straightforward! He calls himself an educator, a counselor, a healer, but he’s a fucking missionary. He brings people his message—oh, you’ll hear it, no one is spared. Please, God”—Celia gazed heavenward—“don’t let him tell it tomorrow. But sooner or later, Sunny, you’ll hear his sad tale. Everyone hears his stories. He has a counseling service in Seattle and he tells all his clients this story. He gives it out at high schools, to kids in juvie, to troubled families: how his life had sunk to the very pits for drugs! He robbed his own mother to get money for drugs! He watched his best friends shoot up heroin with infected needles and die of AIDS.” Celia struck her breast theatrically. “He went homeless, he sold his body, he stole for drugs! He was arrested, tried, convicted, went to prison—and even there he somehow got drugs. Drugs made my life a living hell—and they made that hell tolerable, yea, a heaven,” Celia concluded with lionesque gravity. “Don’t you see? Wade gets it both ways. He gets to be a paragon of sterling strength and a victim of the cruel world. At the same time.” She turned the iron off and rubbed both hands across her forehead, as though chasing a headache.

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  The lights of a car flashed into the yard and Sass and Squatch set up a great howl and Celia said her dogs would have a coronary going after a moth, but they’d welcome the Hillside Strangler. Grant brought in Sunny’s bags and started to carry them upstairs, but Sunny protested.

  “Oh, let him carry your bags, Sunny,” Celia chided her, waving Grant on up the stairs. “No one thinks the less of you here if you let a man carry your bags. It’s not like L.A. You don’t have to tip him, and he won’t ask you to read his screenplay.”