by Leah Stewart
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew. He’d read the letter, of course.
“I mean this girl. And how you parted. Why have you never mentioned her before?”
He reached for the mayonnaise jar again, and I snatched it back and replaced the lid, tightening it with unnecessary force. “That’s unsanitary,” I said. “And that”—I pointed at the letter—“is my personal mail.”
“You left it there on the table,” he said. “In full knowledge of my nature. You knew I’d read it.”
I recognized the expression on his face, the mixture of intensity and detachment. I’d seen it on other occasions when he caught a hint of something he didn’t know about me, some avenue he hadn’t yet explored. “I’m not a research subject,” I said.
“At this moment you are. If I tell you you’re far prettier and more interesting than any of my other subjects, will you tell me the story?”
“I’m prettier than William Faulkner?” I took the mayonnaise back to the refrigerator and got out the milk. “How flattering.” I didn’t look at Oliver, instead keeping my gaze on my hands as they lifted down two glasses, poured the milk. I was sorry to have a witness to my reaction to the letter, even Oliver. I was sorry to be pressed for details before I’d even decided what my reaction was.
Oliver followed me to the table, where I set down the glasses. He eased into his chair while I went back for the plates. I sat and reached for my sandwich, but he ignored his. He didn’t even turn toward the table, just sat watching me with both hands on his cane. “I think lunch is under control,” he said. “Now we can talk about this.” He nodded at the letter.
I took a big bite of my sandwich. The chewy white bread stuck to the roof of my mouth.
“Come now,” he said. “What’s the story? What happened?”
I swallowed. “What always happens,” I said. “She did something wrong. I did something wrong. The end.”
“And was that end a turning point?” he asked. “Is she right?”
I had wondered, in self-pitying moments, if Sonia had dismissed me, what she’d done, what I’d done, the instant I disappeared from view. I found that I was oddly gratified to learn that the end of our friendship had been a significant event in her life, even as I resented the suggestion that it had somehow shaped the course of mine.
Oliver thumped his cane against the floor. “Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening. But it’s an impossible question.”
“I don’t see why,” he said.
“Are you telling me there are moments in your life that you can pinpoint, you can look back on and say, ‘This is the turning point; this is where everything changed’?”
“Yes,” he said. “And there are some I would go back to if I could and make things turn another way.” He leaned toward me, his gaze intense. “I’ve often wondered why you’re living the way you are.”
“Because of you,” I said. “I wouldn’t eat bologna on my own.”
“No, no,” he said. “I’m asking you, of all possible versions of your life, why have you chosen this one?”
“What’s wrong with this one?” This line of questioning seemed like it might lead to one of Oliver’s attempts to plan my future. From time to time, he’d list potential husbands from among his distant relations. He’d begin letters to old friends at universities, trying to find my next job. These projects were always abandoned quickly. Neither of us wanted to consider what my future really meant. Oliver was no more reconciled to the idea of his death than I was.
“You know what’s wrong with this one,” he said. “You are too much alone.”
“I know everyone in town,” I said, and immediately felt ridiculous, though it was true—I knew a lot of people. I knew the curator at Rowan Oak. I had friends who taught in the English department, and there was a graduate student I slept with on occasion. I had had drinks at the City Grocery with a group that included the mayor. I resisted the urge to list my friends and acquaintances, trying to resist as well the feeling that I had to testify in my own defense.
He snorted. “Everyone in town,” he said, as though I’d just claimed a friendship with the rabbits in the garden. “You’re not close to any of those people. You don’t have a beau. You hardly ever talk to your parents. There’s a distance between you and the rest of the world.”
“But I’m never alone.” I got up from the table and took my unfinished sandwich to the counter. “I’m always with you. Don’t you count?”
He picked up the letter and waved it at me. “Are you going to write her back?”
“No,” I said, because it was the easiest answer.
“She’s getting married,” he said. “She misses you. You can’t ignore that.”
“Well, I’m going to.”
He still held the letter, extended toward me, but now he let it go slack in his hand. He let his face go slack, too, so that he didn’t look curious, or menacing, or handsome. He looked old and sad. He looked, for the first time that I could remember, defeated. “What will become of you?” he asked.
I knocked my plate into the sink, suddenly furious. “I don’t know,” I snapped. “What will become of you?” Before he could answer I stormed past him out of the kitchen and took the stairs two at a time, trying to outrun my anger and my shame. I knew the answer to the question I’d just asked. I’d seen on his face that he knew it, too.
3
My room was the smallest in the house, and when I moved into it Oliver scolded me for my choice. He never went upstairs; he didn’t even really like to leave his part of the house—a bedroom, bath, and living-room suite added on when the house was more than a hundred years old. Oliver had been a traveler for most of his life, but as he aged, he told me, he found that he wanted less and less freedom. First he came home for good, and then he moved, gradually, into a smaller and smaller part of that home. “There’s a whole world back here,” he would say. “If you’re the dormouse, the world is a teacup.” But he said I was too young, and too tall, to live in a teacup, and it disturbed him that I limited myself to such a small portion of a completely uninhabited space.
Despite what Oliver thought, I didn’t choose the room out of compunction about my status as an employee. I chose it because it reminded me of the bedrooms I had imagined for the heroines of books I’d read as a child. At first I was worried that the room had belonged to Ruth when she was a little girl, but hers was the large one down the hall, still furnished with her four-poster bed. My room was up three stairs from the rest of the second floor, tucked high in a corner like a tower. Inside were a double bed, a coarse round rug, a wardrobe, a bookcase lined with old children’s books—The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, The Bobbsey Twins on the Deep Blue Sea—and a desk that had a hidden drawer. I checked that drawer occasionally, but I never found anything except the 1936 penny that had been there the first time I looked. There was a window seat in the front window, overlooking the lawn and the street. From that vantage point I could watch the cars, the joggers, the dog walkers with a pleasurable feeling of secrecy and remove.
I sat there now, but for once there was no comfort in feeling like I was up in a tower, at a distance, as Oliver had said, from the rest of the world. I’d run upstairs jittery with anger, but it was ebbing away—I could feel it draining out of my body as my face cooled and my heart rate slowed—and I was sorry to see it go, because I was left feeling guilty and lonely and, in some way I couldn’t explain, like I had failed. I was surprised by a sharp desire for Eric, the graduate student I sometimes slept with. I might have called him, if he hadn’t gone to Oregon to attempt a reconciliation with his ex. Even though I didn’t love him, at that moment I missed him, and was sorry that he could so easily leave me behind. Sonia was engaged. Oliver’s gift of the ring was the closest I’d been to romance in quite some time. I’d dated several men in the years since college, but I hadn’t loved any of them, something that, since I’d come to live with Oliver, had more or less stopped bo
thering me. I’d been in love only twice in my life. Both boys were best forgotten, as was Sonia, as was all love that ended in failure and grief. Of course, if Oliver was right about time, then that love still existed, and so did the grief.
What’s the story? Oliver had asked me, because he wanted to know the end.
When I was fourteen we moved to Clovis, New Mexico. My father was in the air force. It was the sixth time I had moved since birth, and this time I was angry. We had left Fairfax County, Virginia, with its proximity to malls and monuments, where everybody’s parents drove the beltway to play some part in the large and mysterious doings of government, for this cow town, dusty brown and flat, like an old postcard. While my friends went on to high school together, I was set adrift again with no one but my family, three passengers afloat on a dirt sea.
We arrived in Clovis at the beginning of August. It was 105 degrees, and already I took issue with everyone who had ever insisted that dry heat was somehow less difficult to bear. The skin on my hands seemed to crack like clay the moment I stepped out of my father’s van onto the driveway of our new house. My father came and stood next to me. “You’ll be okay, Cameron,” he said. “Maybe the heat will shrink you.” I was already five ten, and still growing. My father had nicknames for me: Green Giant, Tammy Tall, Camazon.
“Shut up,” I said. “It’s your fault I’m so tall.” He was six three; my mother was a far more reasonable five seven.
He punched me lightly on the arm and laughed. My father was one of those rare people—so often portrayed in Hollywood as drill sergeants and tough-as-nails professors—who really did like you better once you faced him down. There was nothing he hated like he hated a crybaby.
My mother pointed out the yucca growing in the yard and wondered aloud if we’d see any chaparrals in our subdivision. All across America she had read to us from guidebooks. She made the best of things, my mother. She said the move would be a good chance for me to learn Spanish. Sure, our furniture wasn’t arriving for a couple of days, but we could put our sleeping bags on the floor and it would be like camping. Once we had gotten settled in the house, she said, we could go out for pizza.
I lived in Clovis until I graduated from high school, but I never went back to the pizza place again. I remember it only because two significant things happened there. In the bathroom, while my parents were still eating, I looked at my underwear and realized I had started my period. Even though I had known it was coming—I was later than many of my Virginia friends—I was shocked and a little dismayed, and it made me feel even more alone to have it happen on my first day in a new town, in a shabby public bathroom. It all seemed symbolic, though of what, I wasn’t sure.
I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the table. I didn’t want to see my father, and I didn’t know how to separate my mother from him without raising suspicion. So I went outside to the parking lot and walked through it, toward the road. I thought that I was going to be miserable there, that the entire place looked like it had been made out of dirt.
And here came the second significant thing, although I didn’t at that moment realize it. A girl was walking toward me down the sidewalk. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder why, in this town where no one walked anywhere, she was on foot. Later I’d find out she’d had a fight with her mother in the parking lot of a fast-food place, that her mother had driven off and left her to make her own way home. What struck me about her at that moment was that she was much closer to my height than most other girls my age—probably only three inches shorter. The sun brought out the red gold in her brown hair. She moved as though she were at home in her skin in a way I never could be. It was already hard to remember when I had been unembarrassed by my physical presence in the world. Not a day went by when some stranger didn’t tell me I was tall.
She reached me and looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun. She had a wide, country-air sort of face, a French farm girl face, one of her boyfriends would later say. Her eyes were blue and so big that even into adulthood she would retain a quality of innocence.
“Don’t be so unhappy,” she said, pausing a moment beside me. “Look up. It’s a gorgeous day.”
I looked up and saw, rolling above me in the endless blue sky, perfect white clouds, so puffy they could have been picked like cotton.
The girl went on by me, and I felt an urge to follow her, a tug, as though I were caught in her wake. To counteract that urge, I stepped, without looking, off the curb and into the path of a car with a long, dark body and wicked headlights. It sped toward me like a destiny. But somehow the girl was there, and her hand was on my arm. She yanked me back so hard that I seemed to leave the ground. I landed beside her on the sidewalk as the car flew by, its horn blaring. My first thought was that she was incredibly strong.
“That car almost hit you,” she said. We were both shaking. She was still clutching my arm.
I said, “You saved me.”
She let go of my arm and took a deep breath. She shook back her hair. “What’s your name, anyway?” she said. “I should know it now.”
“I’m Cameron Wilson,” I said. “I just moved here.”
“I’m Sonia Gray,” she said. “I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
She said the same. We looked at each other a moment, and then she said, “Okay, well, I’ll see you later,” and she walked away.
“Thank you,” I called after her, and without stopping she turned, waved, and then turned back around. I watched her go, frustrated that I hadn’t been able to say more, that I hadn’t been able to say what I wanted to—I’d felt a jolt when she touched me, as my life passed into her hands.
I didn’t see Sonia again until the first day of school. Although I had three classes with her—French, English, and algebra—I didn’t talk to her during school that day. She seemed to be very popular. In the halls she always had a crowd of girls around her, and I noticed that even upperclassmen spoke to her, especially the boys. I spent most of that day feeling like a circus freak—taller than the other girls, and with bigger breasts. I didn’t have a perm or wear blue eyeshadow. I didn’t go to church or listen to country music. I hadn’t arrived at school in a pickup truck. To make matters worse, I was wearing a silly shirt my mother had bought, with bright appliqué patches that looked like labels: a Campbell’s soup label, a Dole banana label. She had insisted that in it I’d make an impression, and I was afraid she was right. In each class, I arrived early and sat in the back. For her part, Sonia swept in at the last moment it was possible to be on time and took a desk in the front row, offering a grateful smile to the person who’d saved her the seat.
French class was half over before I learned that the teacher—a woman whose soft voice suggested a tight and frightening control—was Sonia’s mother. I wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance. She was not as pretty as her daughter. She was farsighted, and her big round glasses rendered her already large eyes startlingly huge and emphasized the sharpness of her nose. Her chin was more pointed than Sonia’s, too, and when she was angry she seemed to jab the air with it as she talked.
I learned who she was when Sonia accidentally addressed her as “Mom.” Madame Gray whirled on her like she’d shouted an epithet. Before Madame Gray resettled her face, I saw the anger beneath her control. She reeled off a few sentences in French that, judging from the puzzled expressions around me, no one understood. I caught the word l’école, which I recognized from skimming through the textbook. Sonia listened with her head cocked. “Pardonnez-moi. Je suis désolée,” she said when her mother was finished. “Vous êtes Madame Gray.” She went back to taking notes. I admired her self-possession. If I were to be called out by a teacher like that, mother or not, I hoped I’d be able to remain that steady and calm.
It’s possible that Sonia and I would never have become friends, certainly not best friends, if I hadn’t stumbled on her two most closely guarded secrets at once. That afternoon, my mother, with her ter
rible sense of direction compounded by the move to an unfamiliar town, was already an hour and a half late to pick me up after school. I’d been wandering up and down the curb, trying not to look friendless or, increasingly, as the afternoon wore on, motherless, when I heard raised voices coming from the gym. I remembered hearing that there were cheerleading tryouts, and I followed the sound into the cool interior, hoping to watch the auditions unseen. But they were already over. There, under the basketball hoop, was Sonia. Her schoolbooks were scattered around her on the floor, along with a few pens, a stick of gum, an empty duffel bag, and the skirt she had been wearing that day at school. Now she was wearing running shorts and Keds. Her eyes were fixed on the person who paced in front of her—her mother, Madame Gray.
“What’s seven times eight?” her mother said.
“Sixty . . . five?” Sonia said.
Her mother slapped her across the face. I jumped like I was the one who had been hit.
“Twelve?” Sonia said. I heard panic in her voice, all the more startling after the composure she’d shown in class.
“Seven times eight!” her mother said.
“Uh, uh . . .” Sonia was breathing hard.
“Uh, uh . . . ,” her mother mocked. “Fifty-six, Sonia. It’s fifty-six. A second-grader knows that. You’re never going to learn, are you? You’re never going to try hard enough. Pretty face. Big breasts. You’re never going to get anywhere but some man’s bed.” Madame Gray looked Sonia up and down and then said, in a cold, flat voice, “It’s incredible that you’re my daughter. Sometimes I wish you were never born.”
This was the worst thing you could wish on a person, worse than wishing they were dead. I wondered if my mother ever felt that way about me, and felt a stab of fear at the thought. It had never occurred to me that your mother’s love was something you could lose, even if she was ninety minutes late to pick you up on your first day at a new school.
