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not to go barefoot. They might cut their feet on glass or something.
THEY MUST NOT BE YELLED AT OR MISTREATED IN THE SLIGHTEST WAY. They are very good little girls, and never do anything wrong, so they should not ever be punished. They are wonderful, sweet, very precious, fragile children and must be treated as such at all times.
Adelaide.
    I finished the letter just as Charlie reappeared in the living room, one fragile, precious pale blond daughter on each side of him. I stared at them a moment, horrorstruck. Nails clipped, I thought, liver, seat belts, vitamins, clean pajamas. I can’t handle this.
    I must have looked as awful as I felt, for Charlie crossed the room and took the letter from me. He read it quickly, his twitching mouth breaking open into a genuine smile. Then he crumpled the letter into a ball.
    “You’ve read it,” he said. “Now forget it.”
    But I couldn’t forget it. The letter had the unmistakable mark of authority on it. If Charlie hadn’t thrown it away, I think I would have taped it on the kitchen door so that I could reread it morning and night. I wanted desperately to do everything right.
    It was difficult, the first day or two. The girls had to learn that their flesh would not instantly rot off if I touched them. I learned all about daytime television shows for children. Charlie learned that the girls were really afraid of him, that he would have to regain their trust. Those first few days were completely given over to wooing the girls. We took them to Walt Disney movies, to the zoo, to parks. I had saved all my grocery stamps for nine months and gave them all to the girls, who happily pasted them in the books; then I drove them to the store to exchange the stamps for whatever they wanted. Predictably, their mother’s daughters, they chose baby dolls. The stamps were a big hit. We took them to get ice cream cones, we took them shopping. We spoke to them gently, we smiled all the time.
    With all the treats and ice cream cones and new toys and Charlie’s persistent gentle love and my good-natured friendliness, it went very well. The girls opened up abit, they stopped answering questions with monosyllabic mumbles and moved right along to complete sentences. But then there were the phone calls from Adelaide.
    Now I do not think that Adelaide meant to be divisive; I think that first summer she simply could not help herself. The first night the girls were with us it was only natural that she should call to see if they had arrived safely. Charlie put the girls on the phone, one upstairs in the bedroom and one downstairs in the kitchen, to let them talk to their mother. But after a few minutes, when tears were rolling down Caroline’s cheeks and we could hear Cathy openly sobbing upstairs, Charlie took the phone away from Caroline. He sent me upstairs to take the phone away from Cathy, and before I could get the receiver down I heard Adelaide screech:
    “ Damn you! God damn you! How can you take my babies from me? I’m all alone here; they’re not in their beds. How do you expect me to make it through the night?”
    Charlie talked with Adelaide for an hour that night, trying to calm her down, while the girls hid in the coat closet, crying. Later, years later, Caroline told me that she and Cathy had hidden in coat closets long before that year, hiding away from the sounds of their mother and father fighting. It even became a catchphrase for the girls; in their teens they would say, “When I saw Bob at the movies with Annie, I just wanted to run into a coat closet and cry.” That first year, that first night, I tried to coax the girls out, but they only cried harder, so finally I shut the door and left them alone. What an introduction to stepping: the two of them in the closet, and Charlie talking soothingly to his first wife on the phone, and me sitting on the front porch step, watching a lovely summer evening slide away.
    Eventually Charlie hung up the phone and got the girls out of the