Mom Rethinks Free Love When Her Daughter Gets Engaged

STEPS AND EXES

A Novel of Family By Laura Kalpakian Avon; 321 pages; $23

Celia was married once, and when her husband died she vowed never to legally bind herself to another man. This policy didn't prevent her from having three daughters and a handful of lovers, so she's less than thrilled when her daughter Bethie announces her engagement to Wade.

According to Celia, "Marriage makes of love not the union of hearts and minds, but an Institution. And then you get swept into the Institution, and with it the crusts of custom, the old carapace of civil codes, and your love hardens into law. Later . . . lawyers shuffle through your human misery like ragpickers at the dump of love."

The first third of the book concerns Bethie's engagement party at Henry's House, the bed and breakfast Celia runs on an island in Puget Sound. For a while the party appears to be the set piece around which the rest of the story is built.

But then Celia's large, messy clan finds itself navigating a plot as bumpy and twisted as a seldom-used island road.

The road is further muddied by Kalpakian's excessive language, especially when she writes from Celia's perspective. Her sentences certainly don't lack lyricism, as in Celia's mock-Biblical description of her work:

"I have cooked, I figure, a bazillion breakfasts, packed a gazillion lunches, made dinners, yea without number, and caused, for over a quarter of a century, that holy and mysterious ascension of the laundry: the white dove who falleth soiled to the service porch, This is my laundry in whom I am well pleased, washed in the blood of the Tide, transformed and soaring up into the bedrooms." Such language becomes tedious after a few chapters, and the reader begins to long for succinct, declarative sentences.

The novel resolves itself into a more formal structure after the engagement party. Bethie sends Celia, and most of the rest of the island's residents, a letter accusing one of Celia's past lovers of child molestation.

The astringent emotions of the letter make a real, meaty counterpoint to Celia's soupy platitudes about free love and open hearts. Bethie's accusations are the worm in the Edenic apple of the island, and the question remains as to whether Celia's unconventional family structure is, at its core, rotten or intact.

As Celia comes to realize, "All Edens are remembered." Although she believes she provided her daughters an idyllic, if unconventional childhood, Bethie's letter makes her take a sober look at her assumptions about her cobbled-together family.

In detailing Bethie's story, Kalpakian finds an immediacy and honesty in both her descriptions and dialogue. In the first part of the book, characters speak either to deliver convenient, condensed life stories or espouse equally bite- sized personal mythology. But Kalpakian grasps the language of recovery and wields it shrewdly, not only to undermine Bethie's accusations but also to point out the essential hypocrisy in Celia's platitudes.

There may be a difference between Bethie's fiance, Wade, giving her a stuffed Pooh bear to "help her learn how to cherish, to parent and discipline the inner child within herself" and Celia encouraging her children to slay imaginary dragons with stick "Boomerquangers," but is it of intention or degree?

In its final chapters, "Steps and Exes" reveals itself to be wiser and clearer-eyed than the reader suspected at the beginning. Rather than unite all the characters in a big love- fest of forgiveness, Kalpakian leaves room for doubt, even for headstrong, self-assured Celia, who comes to realize there are fetters inherent in even the most well-intentioned love.