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by Lori Robertson
Stepmothers are supposed to be evil, right? That’s what I thought when I acquired one sixteen years ago, when I was just a kid. Back then I expected to spend my weekends at Dad’s scrubbing floors and sniffing meals for traces of poison. Like I’d actually have known what poison smells like, for chrissakes. But Caroline was not evil, no. Evil takes some smarts, and Caroline’s as dense as a block of concrete.
Stepmothers are supposed to be evil, right? That’s what I thought when I acquired one sixteen years ago, when I was just a kid. Back then I expected to spend my weekends at Dad’s scrubbing floors and sniffing meals for traces of poison. Like I’d actually have known what poison smells like, for chrissakes. But Caroline was not evil, no. Evil takes some smarts, and Caroline’s as dense as a block of concrete.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t long evenings of stimulating conversation that my father envisioned when he married her. She had other stimulating attributes that enticed him away from my mother, who was the third of his wives to be dismissed for a younger mate. I was twelve years old when Caroline took over as the balm of youth to my father’s middle-aged soul, and I couldn’t say which one of them I hated more.
My mother cut the old man some slack long before I did. She confided, during one of my adolescent, rage-filled demands for solidarity against him, that the divorce relieved her of guilt for having broken up his second marriage. “It was only a matter of time before it was my turn, Zeldanna,” she said, blandly accepting my father’s abandonment as a refreshing balance of the karmic scales. But years later, over a bottle of wine, she let slip that in their divorce settlement she’d been named permanent beneficiary on his life insurance policy, and that she occasionally indulged in wishful fantasies about his untimely death.
“Oh my god,” I’d said. “Seriously?”
She smiled, and she was beautiful. “I know. You thought I was a saint.”
I took a long sip of my wine and studied her face. “So,” I’d said, casually setting my glass down, “how much is he worth? Dead, I mean.”
“How very gauche of you, darling,” she’d said. “We mustn’t speak so cavalierly.”
Now, there’s a perfect example of the difference between my mother and Caroline. One can use four-syllable words in perfect context. The other spends forty-five minutes a day scrutinizing her face for stray eyebrow hairs. Clearly, my father’s taste in women runs toward decreasing numbers in both chronological age and IQ. Another reason, if I do say so myself, why we just couldn’t abide one another.
Not that I saw him much anymore; mainly just in stilted and obligatory visits on Christmas and birthdays. Invites to dinner dwindled after I announced I was a vegan. Caroline couldn’t figure out what that meant and took offense when I used words like “putrefaction” to describe the contents of her refrigerator. She’d pulled my father aside and whispered, “What is that, David, some kind of cult she’s got herself tangled up in?” He patted her on the ass, gave her an indulgent smile, and said, “Just some phase she’s going through.” In that instant I added spite to the reasons why I won’t eat meat.
And now, out of the blue, she calls me. It’s nowhere near my birthday, no holiday on the horizon, so what does she want? I didn’t answer the call, of course, and her message was vague.
“Zelda? It’s me, Hon. I need to talk to you. Can you just give me a call back? Right away?”
Zelda. Only Caroline calls me Zelda. We've sparred over this since I was twelve years old. Too many syllables in Zeldanna, apparently. I listened to the message again, heard the usual cloying sweetness in her voice, along with something else. Along with just a touch of urgency.
