The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “I’m sorry,” Sonia said. “I’ll try. Seven times eight. It’s fifty-five.”

  “Fifty-six,” her mother shouted, her hand flying again to Sonia’s cheek. The crack of the slap echoed off the walls of the gym. Madame Gray made a strangled sound. Then she turned and fled like she was trying to outrun her own anger. She didn’t see me standing there. After the metal door clanged shut behind her, there was that eerie silence particular to places that should be filled with noise.

  Sonia looked up at me. She wasn’t crying, as I had expected her to be. A red handprint faded from her cheek. Without a word she walked out of the gym, toward the locker rooms. I hesitated only a moment before I followed.

  I found her standing a few feet from the pool, near the deep end. She watched me approach. “I heard you come in. I thought it would be better if she didn’t know you were there,” she said. “It’s not her fault, you know. It’s because I’m stupid. It’s hard for her, because she’s so smart, to have such a stupid child.” She held out her hand. “C’mere,” she said.

  When I reached her, she clasped my hand. “On the count of three, we jump into the pool,” she said. “We stay under until we can’t stand it anymore.”

  I didn’t think to protest, to say that I was fully dressed or that my mother might by now be waiting.

  “I had a feeling about you, when I saw you the first time,” Sonia said. “And now we have to be friends.” Although it seemed to me that she was right, I didn’t at the time know why. “Count to three,” she said. “Then we run.”

  “One . . . two . . . three.” I took a deep breath as she tugged me toward the pool, and then I was under. I felt the shock of cold, the drag of the water on my clothes. I opened my eyes. She was watching me. She kept her eyes fixed on mine. I counted in my head, slowly at first, then faster, and by the time I got to sixty I was desperate for air. How calm she looked, like a mermaid, her hair floating around her, her blue eyes wide, and yet her grip kept tightening on my hand. I pointed toward the surface, and she shook her head. Her mouth shaped a no and a stream of bubbles rushed out. I knew it was silly, I knew we were just in a pool, but I started to panic. I had the sensation that there were sharks all around, a tail whipping just out of my view. I reached for the ladder, even as Sonia pulled on my hand, and when I managed to grab it I burst out of the water, gasping for air. I clung to the ladder with one hand, and with the other I held on to Sonia. I held on to her until she was ready to come up and breathe again. I felt that if I let go she would let herself drown.

  In my head I began to compose a letter to Sonia I knew I’d never write. This is why we were friends, I told her, because when we met, you grabbed hold of my life and then, in exchange, offered me your own. We rescued each other, not only from a speeding car and a swimming pool, but from our separateness, each of us at once the savior and the saved.

  4

  Downstairs, it was quiet. Oliver wasn’t in the kitchen, and he hadn’t eaten his sandwich. He had, however, picked the broken pieces of my plate out of the sink and put them in the trash. I felt a pang of guilt, looking at the three china triangles on top of a wad of paper towels. The plate was old, thin, and delicate. I fished the pieces out, thinking I could glue them back together, a notion I abandoned when I saw that the edges were jagged, the sink still full of little shards. My guilt increased—Oliver shouldn’t have been handling such sharp pieces. He was on anticoagulants, and bled easily. I tended to forget how vulnerable he was.

  I went next to Oliver’s suite, expecting to find him in his favorite chair in the den, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the library, either, or in the little room adjoining it. Oliver called this room the Hall of Ancestors because of all the genealogies he kept there. He collected them from sources all over the country. They arrived regularly in the mail from used-book stores, many of them homemade, stapled affairs with scrawled notes in an old lady’s crabbed handwriting. For a long time he wouldn’t tell me what he was doing with them.

  On the back wall of this room hung an enormous, framed family tree from Oliver’s mother’s side. Ruth was his only child, but she had had five children, and they had had children, and while I was with Oliver, two more great-grandchildren had been born. When this happened, he had me lift the family tree from the wall—it was surprisingly heavy—and pry it open so that he could add their names in his shaky block print. This seemed to give him enormous satisfaction. “I never guessed, when we had Ruth, that it would lead to so many descendants,” he told me more than once. He’d smile in a faraway manner, as though contemplating all the ways the branches on that family tree would grow and split.

  There was very little Ruth and I agreed on, including her father’s refusal to move into what she called “an assisted-care facility,” and I imagined how she would look at me now if she’d witnessed the morning’s scene—with an expression of triumphant reproval. Just a few months ago she’d shouted at me that I couldn’t keep Oliver safe. She’d slammed her coffee cup down on the counter after I dismissed her concerns by saying that I could take care of him, that we were doing fine. “He’s doing fine now,” she said, “but what are you going to do if he falls in the middle of the night? He’s an old man.”

  “If you put him in that place, you’ll kill him,” I said.

  That was when her face flushed red. She looked away from me for a moment, and when she looked back her expression was hard, her voice steely. “You’ve been very good to him,” she said. “But I’m his family.”

  “Yes, but I . . .”

  “You’re not his family,” she said. She kept her gaze fixed on me. How did she know this was the way to win the argument, the worst thing she could have said? She was right. For a little while I had forgotten.

  Oliver had found me in my room an hour later. I was sitting cross-legged in the window seat, thinking about where I could go if I left here. I’d lived so many places already, it seemed to me in that hour that I had exhausted all the possibilities. Because I could not retrace my steps, I’d simply have to disappear. A little out of breath, Oliver said my name, and I started. “How did you get up the stairs?”

  He grinned at me. “I crawled.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and took a deep breath. “She’s gone, you’ll be happy to know.”

  I nodded.

  “I heard what she said to you,” Oliver said. “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “She’s your family.”

  He nodded. “She is,” he said. “Get up now. Help me down the stairs.” I obeyed. As we made our way down the stairs he clutched my arm like I was the only thing keeping him upright. I started to lead him to his recliner, but he stopped me. He pointed down the hall toward the genealogy room.

  “Was somebody born?” I asked. He gave me a mysterious smile.

  We stood in the center of the room for a moment. He was leaning heavily on me, and I thought guiltily of my argument with Ruth. Maybe I couldn’t take care of Oliver. Maybe my desire to keep him here was two parts concern, two parts selfishness. “So,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  He sighed impatiently and pointed at the family tree. I walked us both closer to it. He pointed to his own name. There, he had added another branch beside the one that led to Ruth, and above it he had written my name. I stared at it, stunned, tears starting in my eyes. “Oliver,” I finally managed to say.

  He patted my hand. “I know you have your own family,” he said. “But I wanted you to know you belong here, too.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I turned to him. “Ruth’s going to be pissed.”

  He gave me his wicked grin. “I know,” he said. “Why do you think I did it?”

  “How did you get this down by yourself?”

  “I just pretend to be a weak old man,” he said. “So you’ll let me lean on you awhile.”

  I looked around the room, at shelf after shelf of carefully bound pages, list after list of names. I wiped tears fro
m my eyes. “Are you ever going to tell me what all this stuff is for?”

  He sighed, serious again. “I had this idea, a long time ago, of making a family tree that connected everyone. The family tree. I knew even at the time that it was impossible. It’s like trying to map every star in the universe.”

  “But you started collecting them anyway.”

  He shrugged. “My dear, I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t bear to think of them languishing in used-book stores, unless the Mormons took them to save some souls. This is my way of saving souls. Making sure they’re not forgotten.” He pulled from the shelf a booklet with yellow construction-paper covers, opened it, and ran one finger down a list of names. “Susannah Waverly Howse,” he read. Then he smiled at me. “See?”

  “Susannah Waverly Howse,” I repeated.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Now someone remembers her name.”

  I found Oliver, at last, in the parlor, a room we rarely used, dark and heavily furnished in what he described as “the great-grandmother style.” He didn’t look up when I walked in, so I hesitated just inside the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Have I ever told you this house survived the Civil War?” Now he did look up, though his eyes slid off my face. He made a sweeping arm gesture, like a tour guide. “It survived, even though General Smith burned much of the town.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It was briefly a boarding house for university students.” He frowned. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the dates.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “No matter,” he said. “It’s only one among the many things I know.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry about before.”

  He looked at me. I must have looked upset, because he held out his arms to me, as though I were not a six-foot-two woman but a child who could crawl into his lap. I perched on the arm of his chair. He took one of my hands in both of his. He sighed. “Whenever you don’t know what you’re feeling, you reach for anger.”

  “I know.” He had told me this many times before.

  “There are other emotions.”

  “I know.” I tried a smile. “But they’re so much harder to express.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have latched on to the letter the way I did,” he said. “It was this idea of her marriage, of the turning point . . .” He stopped. “Did I ever tell you I got married in this house?”

  I shook my head. He rarely spoke of his wife, and in this I sensed judgment held in polite reserve, and perhaps regret as well.

  “I remember that feeling, the one your friend Sonia is trying to describe,” he said. “I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for my bride, and on this momentous occasion being more aware of the people I’d lost than of the people who were there. Those lost people passed in front of me like a parade. My parents. My best friend growing up, a boy named Tommy. I don’t even know what happened to him. Sometimes, even now, I see these people, all the ones I lost because of choices I made. Some of them I haven’t seen in sixty years, and still they show up and ask me, ‘Where did you go?’ ” He stopped and shook his head. “Especially Billie.”

  “Another friend?”

  “No,” he said. “Billie was my girl. The girl in the picture you showed me.”

  A few months before, I’d found in the attic an old tinted photograph of a girl, about sixteen, in a scoop-neck dress, a pendant at the hollow of her throat. She was smiling, and her cheeks were painted pink, her pendant gold, but her gaze was inward and her eyes were sad, as though, at the moment the photograph was snapped, she had a painful vision of the future. The day I found her I brought her down to show Oliver. He adjusted his glasses for a long time before he said, “Now there’s a story, but I don’t want to tell it.” He gave me back the photo without appearing to see me, his eyes as sad as hers. For weeks I longed to hear the story, but I couldn’t bear to see that sorrow cross his face again.

  “What happened?” I asked him now.

  “Oh, Cameron,” he said. “I did what you have done. I left her behind.” He said this as if he judged me for leaving Sonia behind, as if he knew just how I’d done it. He couldn’t know, of course, but I bristled anyway.

  “Sonia wasn’t my lover,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “But she was someone you loved. And you could go back for her now. That’s something I can no longer do.”

  “I can’t do it, either,” I said. “She’s not there anymore. She can’t possibly still be the girl I knew. She’s a stranger.”

  “But she matters to you still,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t be so upset.”

  “She shouldn’t matter,” I said. “She was a long time ago.”

  “So was Billie,” he said. “A much longer time. I don’t know what I’ve taught you, if not that time is meaningless.”

  “When something is over it’s over.”

  “But she still dreams about you.”

  I knew what he meant by this. He’d read an article once about how there was no essential difference between the mind’s experience of waking life and the mind’s experience of dreams, and he’d talked about it for weeks. Sometimes he had memories, he told me, that were as vivid as his life in the here and now. This, he said, was time travel—exactly what I had no wish to do. I wanted to stay in the here and now, in this house where I’d been happy, where Oliver said I belonged.

  When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “All right,” he said. “I won’t talk about her anymore.” He squeezed my hand. “I love you very much,” he said. “I can’t possibly be the only one.”

  “You’re enough,” I said. I put my other hand on his. He leaned over to brush his lips against my cheek. Then he rested his head on my arm. We sat like that a long, long time.

  Two months later, Oliver was dead.

  The whole time I lived in that house I wanted to take a particular kind of photo of Oliver in front of it. In the photograph I envisioned, he was dressed in one of his southern-gentleman suits—not unlike the ones Faulkner wore in the postcards for sale at Square Books—with both of his hands resting on his cane. But the one time I tried to pose him, he looked so unsteady that I couldn’t bear to leave him standing there unsupported. I settled for a picture of him sitting at an open window. In it you can just make out the shock of his white hair, a glint of light off his glasses, his lifted hand, blurry with waving.

  5

  Oliver used to tell people that he had found me wandering in the woods, taken me home, and adopted me, and though this couldn’t have been further from the truth it was certainly how I felt. I didn’t see my parents very often—my mother, remarried, lived in California; my father, retired, lived in Montana and volunteered at Yellowstone. Between dropping out of graduate school and going to work for Oliver, I had a series of unsatisfying jobs—cataloger in a used-book store in Austin, waitress in a vegetarian restaurant in Asheville, copy editor for a university press in Chapel Hill. I had even gone back to Nashville, where Sonia and I went to college, for a summer, and had a brief tenure as a secretary in the Vanderbilt English department. When I left Austin, the man I dated there said that I thought that because my father was military, I was, too. He said I’d treated my life there, and my time with him, like a tour of duty, and that the only reason I was leaving was that my year was up. I said, “You’re probably right,” and then he was quiet. I accepted this view of myself as restless, and thought I would probably move around forever, and most of the time that was fine with me. There were times, though, usually late at night, in a new apartment, when I was lonely, and sorry that I’d never found a place where I wanted to stay.

  Oliver’s daughter, Ruth, was the one who hired me. She’d been trying for years to get her father to accept a live-in aide. He was almost ninety and, while mentally acute, he was frail. He had refused her offer to hire help until she began to call this hypothetical employee his “research assistant.” That was me. Ruth heard about me from my undergraduate advi
sor, who had never given up hope that I would do something with my education, maybe even go back and finish the doctoral program I’d abandoned after less than two years. Every few months, he wrote me an impassioned letter about his latest scholarly interests, meant to convey to me the pleasures of the life of the mind. I appreciated his efforts, but I hadn’t found graduate school to have any pleasure in it at all. Ruth’s husband knew this professor, and through him she tracked me down in Chapel Hill. I’d already begun to have the feeling that signaled an upcoming move—that my life was a piece of paper I wanted to ball up and throw away—so Ruth had no trouble convincing me to relocate to Oxford. She wanted me to encourage Oliver to write his memoirs. He had written many books about other people, and was famous for doing so. In high school I’d read his biography of Faulkner; in college, his history of southern race relations. Among other things, he had once won the Pulitzer Prize.

  At first I actually tried to do the job I had been hired for, getting out my little tape recorder and doggedly asking Oliver questions he was usually in no mood to answer. “Tell me about your parents,” I said, and he said, “She was a cold woman. And he was a philanderer. The end.” He tried to turn the conversation to me, wanting to know what I thought of Oxford or what my social life was like. He said that he could tell I was wicked, like his old-maid aunt had been. It was true that when I did go out, which was seldom, I went to the City Grocery and sat at the bar drinking bourbon. And then there was the graduate student I had met there. But I couldn’t tell him about that, and so I beat back his questions with my own. My persistence made him irritable. He began to seem bored and frustrated with me, but I didn’t know how else to interact with him. I was miserable because I lived and worked with him, and I admired him, and so he was like a father and an employer and a respected professor—all of them impossible to please.