Stepping (19 page)

But, after all, things worked out, and perhaps in the long run worked out better than if Charlie had been there. For without him I had to take the first real, small steps from dependence on him to dependence on myself—and it is harder to be elated without
the one you love than it is to be depressed; one can easily indulge in depression alone. I made myself a vodka tonic and sat down at the kitchen table, preparing to drink myself into a state of maudlin self-pity, accompanied only by the empty buzz of the telephone receiver as it hung by its cord to the floor. But my drink did not taste good; I did not want a vodka tonic, I wanted champagne. I had achieved something—I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to celebrate even if I had to do it without Charlie. I put the phone back on the hook, then picked it up again and dialed my mother and father, and then Alice, and then all the other friends I had, to tell them that I had finally, at last, done it: I had defended my thesis, I had won my master’s degree. Finally, unsure of what reception I would get, I called Linda. She had dropped out of the MA program the past semester to have her baby, and I had sent her flowers and bought a small pink knit bunting for her new daughter, but she had been so wrapped up in the baby, and I had been so wrapped up in my books, that our conversation had kept sliding off into mutual uninterest. This night when I called her, however, she responded with the beautiful manic enthusiasm I had been so used to and invited me over to her house to celebrate. Her husband was out of town; her daughter was asleep. I stopped at the liquor store and bought a magnum of champagne. The two of us drank it all. What a wonderful evening it was: we left the doors and windows open and let the sounds of the spring night drift in, and we sat in her messily luxurious living room eating cold roast, cheese, crackers, olives, nuts, anything we could find from her pantry, and drinking the champagne, and telling each other secrets, and laughing at the secrets until we both ended up rolling on the floor with laughter. We didn’t get tired until three in the morning, and because it was so late and her husband was not home, I spent the night there. Before we staggered into our beds to sleep, we crept into the nursery, where little Dina, Linda’s daughter, lay sleeping amid white and pink quilts in a small white cradle. How warm, how moist, how sweetly aromatic that sleeping child was. I can remember it even now. The sight and scent of the little girl moved something inside me, like a small, pure, crystal chime just beginning to stir in a breeze. I hung above the baby, seeing her tiny white hand plump and relaxed among soft quilts, and felt a most delicate, exquisite, puzzling desire.

The next morning I had a hangover, but only a slight one. I drank black coffee and watched Linda give Dina first a bottle and then various globs of warm smooth food, and
finally left for my own house. I brushed my furry teeth, took a long bubble bath, put on fresh clothes, and then fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke up, it was late afternoon and Charlie was home.

We kissed, and Charlie sat down next to me, and we talked about Caroline. She was out of the hospital and doing well. The physicians thought she had been chronically constipated, but they agreed something psychological was going on. Caroline had said only that she was perfectly happy and felt fine except for the stomach pains. Adelaide had admitted that she had never given the girls the letters Charlie had written—she thought they were too upsetting for Caroline and Cathy—but had agreed in the light of Caroline’s strange illness to let them have the letters from now on as long as Charlie wrote only light happy things and never said he missed the girls or asked them to live with him. Adelaide had said that her marriage was fine, just fine. Cathy seemed content. Charlie was as satisfied as he could be in the situation.

Then we talked about me, about my small success. Charlie said he had not worried about me a bit, he had known I would do fine in my orals, but he still felt bad that he had not been there to support me or celebrate with me. I said what I had to say: nonsense, nonsense; he was not to feel bad that he had not been there; I had not minded; it hadn’t mattered at all. Because of course I knew that he had done only what he had to do, being the good man that he was. And then I did not want him to know how really petty and selfish I was, that I had resented him and for a while even hated him, and his daughters, because I had childishly wanted for one day, one evening, to shine, to be the star, and had not been able to. It had been no one’s fault; there was no one to blame. There was nothing to be done about it but to go on with goodwill. And Charlie did take me out to dinner at a marvelous restaurant that night, and he ordered a wonderful French champagne, and later he made love to me so beautifully that I would have eagerly forgiven him anything.

After I finished my master’s I fell into a deep, deep slump. Part of it was because Charlie had agreed to be a visiting professor at a university in western Michigan the coming fall semester. A historian who taught there had arranged it; he and Charlie were working together on a book. In one way I was glad, because Alice, the woman I had fallen in love with at the symposium, lived there. And after the crush of work finishing
my master’s I wanted a break from my studies. But I was also eager to start work on my PhD, for I realized that that was the only way I’d be able to continue what I liked best (outside of making love and riding my horse): teaching English comp and lit to college kids.

That was the other part of the reason for my slump. I could no longer teach. I had somehow always blithely assumed that they would want me to teach part-time at the university. I was so good, and I was so cheap. During the loose final days after I took my oral exam, I kept drifting back to campus even on the days I wasn’t teaching. I wanted someone to ask me my plans; I wanted someone to say offhandedly as he passed me in the halls, “By the way, Zelda, we’re planning on you for two introductory comp courses next year.” But no one said it. No one really spoke to me at all. It was only by having coffee with some of the male graduate students that I found out who had and hadn’t been chosen as part-time instructors for the following year. How damned mad I was as I sat there hearing the news from the other students. I got even madder because when I realized I hadn’t been asked to teach tears came into my eyes and I wanted to blubber and wail. Instead I dug my fingernails into my fist, and smiled and acted nonchalant, and after a while we all got up to go our separate ways. I went to the office of my favorite prof, the one who had advised me on my thesis. He was in and not surprised to see me. Our session was short and not sweet: “Zelda, the way things are set up here we were able to give you a teaching assistantship while you were working on your master’s. But we make PhD students part-time instructors, and the pay scale goes up. It’s handled differently. You’ve got a husband on the faculty. You’re a woman. We’ve got to give these plusher jobs to the men who have families to support.”

“But
Crawford
? You
know
I’m a better teacher than Crawford!”

“Yes, but he’s a brilliant scholar and his wife is pregnant. We have to support him. Good Lord, we all know you’re a great teacher; this is no reflection on your teaching abilities; don’t take it personally.”

“I’ll work without pay. Just let me teach.”

“Oh, Zelda. You can’t. We couldn’t even let you; it would blow all the fuses in the payroll computer. Come on. Be reasonable.”

There was absolutely nothing I could do. Perhaps, back in 1967, if I had realized
that women all across the country were reeling from the same shock from the same sort of words, I might have been able to do something—anything else. As it was, I just went home and cried. I felt defeated, I felt rejected. I felt that I had failed, that if I had only been
better
they would have had to hire me in spite of my being married to a faculty member, in spite of the English department head, who disliked women.

I began the summer of 1967 feeling dejected and defeated. For the first time in my life I was formally through with my studies; really through. I would go to Michigan with Charlie the next September instead of plunging into a new course of work, instead of setting out for a new goal. The freedom and looseness and lack of responsibility were the most awesomely depressing things I had ever experienced. Of course I still had to play wife and housewife, still had to do the cooking and dishwashing and housecleaning each day, but all that did not really matter, did not really count. I did not take it seriously; it was of no importance to me. It did not even take up very much of my time. There were only the two of us, and we ate out many nights, or ate large lunches together at the university, then merely snacked at night at home, and the house did not get terribly dirty with both of us gone so much, and Charlie always helped me with the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning; there was not enough there to occupy my time or my mind. I could not think of it—being the keeper of Charlie’s house and meals—as what I was about. What I was about was loving Charlie—but he was involved in teaching or working on his papers and books most of the day—and books and students and teaching, but I had been cut off from all that and could find no way back in. I felt lonesome, wasted, adrift.

I was accepted into the PhD program, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to attend classes until the second semester. Charlie suggested that I spend the summer and fall reading and relaxing. He thought I deserved a vacation. I didn’t want a vacation. I was twenty-four, I had a master’s degree and teaching experience. I wanted a job. But when I tried to explain it to Charlie, I succeeded only in making him feel bad. “I know you want to get started on your PhD work,” he said, “but this semester in Michigan is crucial to the new book. I’ve
got
to go. You could stay here, of course—”

But of course I couldn’t stay. I had to be with Charlie. He would have his fortieth birthday that fall, and I wanted to make it a great big smashing occasion. Even without the birthday I never once thought seriously of staying apart from him that semester. It
would have been like agreeing not to breathe for a few months.

And I must be honest: I didn’t want him to stay home, either. The royalties from his first book were not large, but they were all the difference between scraping along on what was left from his salary after child support and doctor bills went out and living an enjoyable life. I liked having a little bit of money. I wanted him to write another book. I wanted him to go to Michigan, to write the book he and the other historian were planning. I wanted to be with him, always. I simply had to put my own life off track for a while. I knew I was making my own decisions. I had no one to blame for the direction I led my life.

Caroline and Cathy arrived in July for their third summer with us. Now they were nine and twelve; big girls. Each could make her own toast. The first few days they were abnormally quiet and jumpy and tense and nervous, but I was too wrapped up in my own gloom to care. I went about taking care of them with an automatic dutiful friendliness, and read Gothic romances when I had free time. Luckily they had friends in the neighborhood to play with, and to spend the night with, and to generally fill their time with. I read lots of romances and mysteries and ate ice cream sundaes with the girls and gained weight and didn’t care. It was a sloppy, superficial, easy sort of summer. It went by very fast. We were not friends yet, but we were no longer enemies. Caroline’s stomach problems had disappeared, at least for a while.

One August evening the four of us went to see some idiotic horror show at a drive-in and had to leave early because of a sudden violent summer thunder- and rainstorm. We felt somehow cheated as we pulled away from the drive-in, and somehow saddened by the rain sweeping down over the cars and streets. The movie hadn’t been good, but we felt grumpy being deprived of its ending. Charlie decided to stop at a pizza parlor on the way home, and we were all immediately cheered up. The pizza restaurant was as warm and cheery as a fireplace in autumn, with its padded booths and bright lights and spicy smells.

“Caroline,” Charlie said, “I guess you are really all well. That’s your fourth piece of pizza, and on top of popcorn, too.”

Caroline grinned, her mouth full of pizza.

“It wasn’t her stomach at all,” Cathy volunteered. “It was her mind making her
stomach sick; the doctors told us so. She didn’t like calling Mommy’s new husband Daddy, and it made her sick.”

“Well, then why did she call him Daddy?” Charlie asked.

“Cause Mommy told us to,” Cathy said. “She said
he
was our real father from now on, not you. She said we were finally one big happy family again, and he was our real father. We had to call him Daddy. She spanked us and took our allowance away if we didn’t.”

“Wow,” Charlie said.

“It wasn’t like that,” Caroline said in a sudden desperate tone. “Mommy wasn’t trying to be bad, she just wanted us all to be close together and to love each other a lot and to be happy. She wanted us to be happy a lot—”

“I made a calendar for you for Christmas in Brownies,” Cathy said. “It said, ‘To My Father,’ and it had my picture on it and I had decorated it, and Mommy made me give it to her new husband. His name was John, but Caroline and I called him Toilet secretly. You know—John—Toilet—”

The girls looked at each other and went into fits of guilty laughter.

“Mommy didn’t make me sick,” Caroline said when she stopped laughing. “She didn’t,
really
. She was trying to make us all feel good. She wanted us to be a family.”

“Yeah, but ol’ Toilet was a real
stinker
,” Cathy said, and again both girls cracked up. “He had hair in his ears! And he burped at the table!” Both girls began to giggle and fidget as if they were drunk.

“And he spanked Cathy once when she wouldn’t eat her liver!” Caroline laughed.

“And he had these old cigars he smoked all the time and left lying in the ashtray like a dog poop!” Cathy yelled, her giggling almost uncontrollable.

“Yeah,” Caroline agreed, “we always said, ‘Why, why is old Toilet leaving this poop around? He’s a
Toilet;
why doesn’t he just eat the poop?’ ”