Stepping by Nancy Thayer Page B

all their veins was the same blood. I was the outsider. My ancestry was different from theirs; eventually the girls would both grow taller than I, with bigger bones in their healthy bodies. I was dark and small and curly-haired, and alone. There seemed to be nothing I could do but walk off down the street. We lived in a dignified neighborhood; Charlie wouldn’t come chasing after me, I was sure. All right. I thought, at least it’s clear now: Caroline and Cathy are my enemies and they’ve just won a big battle. I hereby retreat. Watch me go.
    I walked down the street and around the corner, past all the pretty Dutch colonials and rambling Victorians and their yards with flowers and shrubs and trees. I felt ridiculous, but I kept on walking. In my fantasies several wonderful things happened: Charlie and Caroline and Cathy got into the car and caught up with me and told me how sorry they were, that the girls would stay with the sitter so I could see the famous intellectual woman. Or I walked to the university and cried on someone’s shoulder (Whose? The head of the English department then was an old married Catholic who didn’t like women in school, who thought they should stay home and cook and have babies), and that someone took me to the party. Or, this as I finally stopped at an elementary school and sank down to dismally sway on a wood and chain link swing, the famous intellectual woman herself would just happen to be out walking on this lovely summer day, having arrived in Kansas City four days early. She’d see me and immediately sense my innate superiority, and she’d come over and sit on the swing next to me and chat. “Leave them all,” she’d say. “What do you need love for? You’ll never get on with a career at this rate. Why not come back to New York with me? I’ll introduce you to people; you can work on a master’s at Columbia.”
    But of course nothing like that happened. I sat on the swing until three boys about Cathy’s age came scuffling over to the playground. They kept giving me strange looks and bursting into fits of embarrassed laughter to see me there, a lone grown woman sitting on a swing. But I stubbornly stayed, swinging slightly and staring back at them orat the sand or the basketball hoop or the jungle gym. The morning sun rose a little higher in the sky.
    The warmth of the sun made me happy. I was still pretty much of an animal. I liked sex, food, drink, the feel of a horse galloping under me, the feel of water surrounding me when I swam. Other things were more confusing: why was it so important to me to see the famous intellectual woman? I wasn’t even interested in her field of study. So why should I long to see her? I couldn’t figure it out. It was all too vague for me. And why did I feel that the girls, especially Cathy, were out to get me? With all the logic and the guilt that a Methodist from Kansas can muster—and that’s a lot, the guilt, that is; we’re quite good at feeling guilty, though not so good at logic—I decided I was paranoid. Caroline and Cathy were only children. Sweet, innocent little girls. They hadn’t said or done anything, really, I thought. They didn’t really want to hurt me. It was easier for me then to believe that I was overreacting than to accept the fact that yes, indeed, Caroline and Cathy did hate me. They would have hated anyone who lived with their daddy. They were hurt. That is the truth, though no one likes to say it: they were hurt. They were little girls, and their daddy had left them, and they had to live with a hurt in their hearts. Caroline at ten was old enough to separate me from my role of evil stepmother. She tried to be nice to me because I was nice to her. And in doing so she had to hide the hate she felt for me—would have felt for any stepmother—and it lay there, that smothered hate, and in the end it did her harm, and showed up at a time when it hurt me most. I wish she had let it out on me then, in those first years.