Stepping (24 page)

Since I had such a short part, I was also made into general stagehand, director, and wardrobe maker. Caroline had to wear something appropriately heroinical and flowing, so I took her to my room to try on my long dresses. She was now at sixteen a good inch taller than I, and when she put on one of my dresses tears jumped into my eyes. Suddenly she seemed grown-up. Mature. After that summer I thought of her as a grown-up, and that was a mistake. She was still a child, needing what children need. Cathy wore her best slacks and a white shirt of mine and a bow tie of her father’s, but we had to buy black material for a cape. It was cheap shiny material and it made a great cape: in the dim rainy light it glistened elegantly, voluptuously, sleekly. I wore some slacks and a tailored shirt and Charlie’s suede jacket and cowboy hat, both of which were far too big for me. Still, without a hat I didn’t look male enough to be a proper hero.

Our play seemed so good that we invited all the neighborhood children. About fifteen of them came and squashed themselves into our dining room; our stage was the living room, and we entered from the hall closet. We had draped the furniture with dark quilts and turned down the lights and hung construction paper bats and spiders all about. No one forgot her lines. We were a splendid success. I sat in the coat closet waiting for the end of the play and my three lines, and smiled as I watched Caroline and Cathy through a crack in the closet door, and thought that we were now really all friends—
comrades
. I thought we would always be close and good friends.

I was sad when they left that summer, but not too sad: I was eager for the fall, and for my teaching.

* * *

That fall Anthony Leyden came to our house to tell us that June was divorcing him. She had been having an affair with her children’s piano teacher, and she wanted to marry him. I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop for several minutes when Anthony told us the news. June, proper, prissy June! Had fallen in love with her children’s piano teacher! And wanted to leave her children’s father! I loved it; it was wonderful. I hoped that someone somewhere would righteously snub her as much as she had snubbed me, but I also wished her well. I thought she was doing a splendid and valiant thing, giving up her respectable home and its superficial tidiness for the messy depths of sexual love.

Part of the problem, Anthony said, was that she didn’t want the children. She was fixed on the idea that she and her pianist would go to the Caribbean for a year of sun and love. He would support them by playing at a piano bar in a tourist hotel. She would wait tables at night, if necessary. This set me off into laughter again, the thought of June Leyden in a little cocktail waitress uniform, with black lace stockings and flounces around her prim little butt. Anthony said he thought it was humorous, too, and that didn’t really bother him, June leaving him that way. What bothered him was that she wanted him to keep the children. Dickie and Dierdre were now sixteen and thirteen, not babies but not old enough to be on their own. And Anthony, handsome Anthony, didn’t want them around. He had a lover himself, a young girl who had been a student of his. He didn’t plan to marry the girl, but he did want to live with her awhile. He wanted some romance and freedom, too, and he couldn’t have that with two teenagers in the house. He thought that June should keep them without question; she was after all their mother. He would give them lots of money to live on, he said; he just wanted his own apartment and his own life, without two hulking teenagers trailing through it, dropping clothes and knocking on closed bedroom doors.

Charlie gave Anthony the name and address of his lawyer. I sat and laughed. I felt glad for them all, even the children. Dickie and Dierdre had become spoiled, coddled, snotty teenage kids, and I didn’t like them. Caroline and Cathy didn’t like them, either, and always tried to see as little of them as possible. I thought that perhaps this change would be good for the Leyden children, would toss them out of their complacency, would
reveal to them the turmoil of emotions hiding beneath ironed sheets and behind polished windows.

I would have given a lot to read the letters that passed between Adelaide and June. I wondered: If Adelaide condoned June’s mad amorous actions, could she still hate Charlie for his? Would she think it acceptable for a woman to leave a man because she loved another man but still not acceptable for a man to leave a woman he had stopped loving?

We hadn’t heard much from Adelaide that summer. When the girls were asked about her, they said that she was happy, more or less, and settled. She didn’t date, they said, she was bitter toward all men. She thought men were a rather shabby lot compared to the noble species of women.

“And how do you feel about men?” Charlie asked Caroline that summer.

Caroline went pale, as she always did when the talk got serious.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I don’t hate them, like Mother does, but I know I’ll never be able to trust them.”

“Not even me?” Charlie asked.

“Most of all, not you,” Caroline said. “You left us. I mean I don’t hate you; I love you. But you left us. I guess you thought you were taking just yourself away, but you took everything, it seems, everything. You took yourself, and our home. And in a way you took our mother. She changed. She couldn’t be just for us. She wasn’t home when we came home from school; she was at the university, working. She didn’t spend lots of time with us, she had to see her friends and boyfriends and psychiatrists and such. I know you think you did the best thing for us. But still
you left us
, so how could I trust you completely?”

“That’s too bad,” Charlie said. “I’m really sorry, Caroline. Please don’t hold my faults against all men. I—I did do it the only way I thought best for all of us.” He was quiet a moment, thinking.

“
I
like men!” Cathy volunteered. “I have lots of boyfriends. And even though Mother hates you, Dad, don’t worry, cause I love you anyway. I can see why Mother hates you, but I love you, and I always will.”

I sat silently through the conversation. It was a rare one, for the girls seldom
discussed love and hate face-to-face. I kept hoping that Caroline or Cathy might say, “And we’re glad you married Zelda. It’s been neat knowing her.” But no one mentioned me at all. I felt like what I was: an interchangeable part.

I still longed for a child of my own. I was still determined to have one. But that summer the desire was subdued. I was excited about teaching again. And I told myself that I was only twenty-eight; I still had a lot of time left, I could really establish myself at the junior college, become a part of it, and then have a baby. For once it seemed that I had my life in control, that I was doing what I wanted to do, that I was going where I wanted to go. I was happy.

Six

“No! No, I won’t be ‘reasonable’!
You
be
reasonable
! What you’re asking me to do is to give up
everything
in order to have
nothing
!”

It was April 1972, and I was yelling. I was yelling at Charlie. In February he had been offered a prestigious chair at a university in New Hampshire. Now the time had come to let them know his decision. He wanted to move, of course. I didn’t. I didn’t want to move at all.

“I didn’t know that you thought of your relationship with me as
nothing
,” Charlie said.

“Oh, Charlie, that’s not fair. I don’t think of our relationship as nothing. I love you.
I love you
. But I love my work, too. You can have me and your work. Why can’t I have you and my work?”

“You could finish your PhD at the university there. They’ve got a good English department.”

“I don’t want to finish my PhD. I want to teach.”

“You could probably teach there, somewhere. There are surely junior colleges and small colleges in the area.”

“Charlie, you know how it is these days. A thousand English majors are wandering the continent, looking for work. There are no jobs. You have to
know
people. I don’t know anyone in New Hampshire. And I want to stay here. I like it here. Wilbur likes my work; he’s going to give me tenure.
Me. Tenure
. I could stay here forever and teach and help develop the department, even influence the development of the college. I love it. It’s my work. How can you ask me to give it up?”

“How can you ask me to turn down the Wallace Chair? It’s one of the greatest honors a historian can have. And I’m tired of the department here. I’ve outgrown it—”

“Oh, Charlie, I know, I know. But—”

“And there’s the matter of money. The Wallace Chair would give us more income than both of our salaries here.”

“But I don’t care about the money. My life doesn’t revolve around money. Besides, I want to be making
my own
money. It may not be much, but it’s very important to me to make my own money.”

“Look, Zelda, be realistic. We’re just making it now, even with your money. In another year Caroline will start college. And then Cathy. The only way I can send them to college is to make more money.”

“You could write more books—”

“Oh, darling, you know how little my books bring in. And my work is growing more and more philosophical and difficult; only a few will be interested in it. I’ve got a reputation, and my writing will secure that. But it won’t send the girls to college.”

“So. We send your daughters to college and you get a prestigious position and I get nothing.”

“There are other things in the world besides teaching. You could work in some other field. You could—”

“Oh, Charlie, stop it. You’ve won. You’ve beaten me down. We’ll move. But Jesus Christ, I hate it.”

“Zelda, don’t cry. Zelda, don’t. Zelda, believe me. I don’t want you to be so unhappy. Zelda, I love you. I want you to be happy. Zelda, listen. You could have a baby.”

During the first weeks of June, Charlie and I and a moving company moved us to New England. Once Charlie had said the magic words, everything seemed to fall into place. We sold our Crestwood house and the Ozark farm and spent Easter vacation in New Hampshire, looking for a new home. We found what seemed to us a small paradise: thirty acres of land with a rushing brook, an old apple orchard, two fairly usable barns, and a lovely old colonial house. The house was red brick with green shutters and slate walks. It had four fireplaces and four bedrooms. Charlie and I would share the largest room; I thought I would fill the remaining bedrooms with children. I would have at least three, I thought, and perhaps, since there was room, six. I would grow our own vegetables, make our own applesauce, and raise healthy, laughing children.

In April, after our decision to move to New England, Charlie received an
invitation to teach at a university in Amsterdam. We decided that we wanted to go; we had enjoyed Paris, and we agreed that it wouldn’t be so easy to travel once we had children. Charlie’s department in New Hampshire was willing to let him have the fall semester off so that he could go to Amsterdam; he would start his teaching duties in January. It all worked out, so easily. We felt certain that we were doing exactly the right things.

I planned to become pregnant sometime while in Amsterdam, perhaps in December, so that I would have time to work on the inside of our house in the spring, and to plant and harvest my first real garden. Instead, to my amazement, I found that I was pregnant in June, one month after I had stopped taking the Pill. I almost couldn’t imagine how it had happened. I had been having intercourse for so many years without any noticeable result that I thought getting pregnant would be a more momentous event than it was. I didn’t know when I conceived; there was no heart-stopping, heart-starting moment. By the time I was aware of it in early June, it had already happened. I sat for hours staring at my flat tummy, talking to it as if it were a stranger with a secret and willful life of its own, which after all it was.

It was as if I were the first woman ever to become pregnant. The world spread out in lovely waves from my stomach. I wouldn’t have traded places with kings. I missed teaching, my students, my colleagues, my office and papers and books, the thought of a settled future of teaching, but all this didn’t matter quite so much anymore. I listened to my stomach, noted each slight change, and began to read books on natural childbirth. I had gotten pregnant so easily that it seemed, along with everything else, to confirm my feelings that Charlie and I were doing everything right, going in the right direction.

Caroline and Cathy came to the farm in the last days of June. They were now seventeen and fourteen. Teenage girls. Caroline had her braces off and her smile was stunning. Such perfect, even, white teeth. Her blond hair had grown to her shoulders, and she now stood a good three inches taller than I. Walking along beside her, I felt like a dark little peasant escorting an Amazon princess. Cathy still had her braces, but she was pretty, and she was seriously interested in boys, even more than Caroline. Both girls oohed and aahed when they saw the big old house, the apple orchard, the rolling green pasture. But it was obvious that farm life was going to be a little too quiet for them. Our
neighbors lived far away, and were older people who kept to themselves. The little town where we got groceries was scenic, but dull. There was nothing exciting to interest a teenage girl. They were too old to spend their days making up silly plays and too young to go off on their own to the bigger town, where the university was, twenty miles away. Even the first day Charlie and I could tell they were bored and restless. Physiology was taking over their lives just as it had taken over mine.

We didn’t tell the girls that I was pregnant simply because I was superstitious about it until I was four or five months along, as if speaking of the baby would cause it to disappear.

“Look, girls,” Charlie said the fourth day they were there, “this can’t be much fun for you. All Zelda and I will be doing this summer is painting and scraping off old paint and fixing fences and unpacking. If you want to stay and help, I’ll pay you for the work you do. But I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you go back and spend the summer with your mother and your friends, and then come spend the semester with us in Amsterdam?”