by Leah Stewart
After three months of this, he said, “That’s enough.”
“Okay.” I clicked off the tape recorder. “Enough for today.”
“No,” he said, with a sweeping gesture. “Enough for forever. I’ve been humoring Ruth, but I’m not interested in my own life. Please note my all-consuming interest in the lives of others.”
“So I’m fired.” I felt at once ashamed of my failure, and relieved. “At least I can stop trying to figure out what you want.”
He laughed. “Of course you’re not fired.” He leaned forward in his chair. “As for what I want . . .” He directed me to the window of his den, which looked out on the driveway, where a burgundy Crown Vic peeked out from under a blue tarp.
Oliver hadn’t been behind the wheel in almost a year—Ruth had forbidden him to drive after he blew out a tire hopping a curb in a McDonald’s parking lot—but that day, he got the car up to eighty-five on the interstate. He looked happier than I had ever seen him, and so I said nothing, even though I was certain he was going to kill us. When the cop pulled us over I was rather glad, but when I looked at Oliver his face was pale and his hands were trembling on the steering wheel, and I remembered that whatever else he was, he was a frail old man, and under my protection. I leaned over him to roll down the window, and when the officer appeared, I said, “I’m so sorry, officer, Grandpa isn’t supposed to be driving.”
“Why is he, then?”
“I ran over a dog,” I said, and as I said it my eyes filled with tears. “It just ran right out in the road. We stopped, but it was dead. I was shaking so much that I had to let Grandpa drive.” On cue, a tear rolled down my cheek. I’ve always been a good liar because I have the ability to believe that whatever I’m saying is true.
The cop let us go with a warning after I assured him that I would take the wheel. He got in his patrol car and watched us in the rearview mirror as we made the switch. Oliver was delighted with me. “Attagirl,” he said once he had eased into the passenger seat. He banged on the dashboard with the flat of his hand. “Getting Grandpa out of trouble. What a performance. In the old days I would’ve thought of that.”
I wiped my eyes, which continued to tear even after the need had passed. “All this time,” I said, “you just wanted to have a little fun.”
“My dear,” he said. “Of course.”
I busied myself with adjusting the seat, which Oliver had pulled up so close to the wheel that I was bent in half. It was clear he hadn’t thought me much fun before. My entire life I had been accused of being remote and stern, sometimes mysterious. Many times a person had said to me, after a long acquaintance, “At first I was convinced you didn’t like me” or “I thought you were a bitch.” When I was younger I was bewildered by these misconceptions. I thought maybe it was my height, which set me apart, that made other people think I had set myself apart. By this time I had come to accept the version of myself reflected back by others, as you cannot help but accept the image you see when you look in the mirror.
I put on my seat belt and looked up to find Oliver watching me like I was his science experiment.
“Let’s have fun from here on out,” he said. “There’s no reason to be so stern, is there? I already have Ruth for that.”
I pulled out onto the road. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he was a pain in the ass. It was what I would have said to my own father, and he would have laughed and approved. Instead—I don’t know why—I said, “You make me nervous.” Even this small confession made me feel wretched with vulnerability. I felt a flush rise in my cheeks and kept my eyes trained on the road, waiting for him to tease me. I added, “And you’re a pain in the ass.”
He laughed and patted my knee. “Tough hide, soft heart,” he said. “That’s my girl, all right.”
I would have stayed with Oliver, if only he had not died.
In the three days between his death and funeral, I felt a righteous indignation directed at everything around me, especially Ruth. After all our bickering over the question of whether Oliver might need more care than I could provide, I imagined that I detected in her bearing an accusatory smugness, as if Oliver’s death were the final point in her favor. I suspected that she intended to sell the house immediately, that she was just waiting for the dirt to cover Oliver’s grave before she asked me how long until I could be gone. When I’d moved from Chapel Hill to Oxford, I’d shed every possession that would not fit in my car. Everything I owned was in my little room. I could have been packed and gone in a day. Once, I’d been proud of how portable my life had become—far better to accept a transient and unstable life than to pretend permanence when there was no such thing. Now this same idea made me angry. Every day, I looked at the suitcase on the top shelf of my closet and defiantly left it sitting there.
Late to Oliver’s memorial service, I slipped into the last pew in the middle of a testimonial from an old friend, or maybe a cousin—some story about Oliver wading into a stream, trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. “He was so sure he could do it,” the friend/cousin said, shaking his head in sad amusement, as the people in the pews laughed or murmured or dabbed away their tears. Who were these people? I’d seen only a few of them at the house, but it seemed to me that every one of them arose on cue, one after another, and went up to speak. There were dozens. Ruth was the last. In the middle of her speech she tilted her head back abruptly and looked up at the vaulted ceiling, trying not to cry. She waited a long moment, and then lowered her head and went back to talking. Not a tear escaped. I tried not to be hurt by the fact that no one had asked me to speak. At the graveside I stood outside the tent that sheltered Ruth and the other close relatives, who sat in folding chairs. I couldn’t hear anything the minister was saying. I stared at the spot of sun on the grass near my feet and thought that soon it would be summer. I had not yet cried.
Afterward, back at the house, I stood in a corner of the living room with a glass of wine in my hand and watched people eat. Ruth and her husband had added the extra leaves to the dining- room table, which was now covered with food. Three different people had brought deviled eggs, which seemed to me food more suited to a picnic than a death. Ruth’s son manned the bar in another corner of the living room. There was a silver ice bucket like something out of a bantering 1940s comedy. I’d never seen the bucket before, but it was a big house, and Oliver owned a lot of things. All day I’d had the feeling that I was outside whatever room I was in, watching the action on a movie screen.
Ruth stood in the center of the room, surrounded by an endless flow of people kissing her cheek and pressing her hand. Ruth had Oliver’s big, sharp nose, without his plump mouth to offset its haughtiness. Her lips were thin. In old pictures she had a severe, spinsterish look, but age had softened her face. And she wasn’t a spinster—she’d been married for forty-two years to a sweet, quiet man named Bill, who seemed an odd choice for a woman raised by Oliver. Ruth’s mother, Oliver’s wife, had died in her late thirties. She had been pretty, with large eyes and a baby-doll mouth, which Ruth did not inherit.
Ruth had gone to the beauty parlor to have her hair fluffed into a cloud of white curls. Over the other conversations I heard her say, “Daddy would have been so happy you were all here,” and I thought that if she believed that, she didn’t know her father very well. I also thought how strange it was for a sixty-year-old woman to call her father Daddy.
Ruth glanced over at me and then looked away. She hadn’t bothered to introduce me to anyone, and so I’d spoken only to the handful of people I already knew. I’d caught several of the others staring at me with expressions that said, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Now, listening to Ruth use the words Daddy and my father from her position at the center of the room, it struck me that to the world at large Oliver was not anything to me but my boss. It was unfair. Perhaps he was not my father, but he was my something. I couldn’t find a word that measured both our relationship and my grief.
A large man in a black suit appe
ared next to me, a plate piled high with food in his hand. He was sweating, and he mopped at his brow with a cocktail napkin. “Hot in here, isn’t it?”
I agreed that it was.
“He was a great man,” he said. “I’m a cousin.”
I wondered if he was one of the cousins Oliver had meant for me to marry.
He sighed. “I wish I’d been able to see more of him,” he said. “I’ll miss him.”
At the sorrow in his voice, my own throat tightened. “Me, too,” I managed to say.
The man looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “So what’s your story, anyway?” he asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
After that I finished my glass of wine and drank two more in rapid succession. I had just gone back to my corner with my fourth glass when a woman I knew from Square Books squeezed my arm. I’d seen her just a few days before, when I went to pick up a book Oliver had ordered. “Give him a kiss for me,” she’d said. Now she asked me what I was going to do next. The truth was, I had no idea, and when I thought too hard about it I felt blank, empty, and scared.
“Bartending school,” I said.
She laughed. “Will you finish Oliver’s memoirs?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not? Don’t you have lots of material?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because most of what he told me wasn’t true.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s see,” I said. “He used to say that he had his first harem at the age of five. Every little girl in town followed him around, and he put them in order—first wife, second wife, and so on. He said his nickname was Beau, and they used to fight over him, screaming, He’s my beau, he’s my beau.”
The woman laughed again. “I love it,” she said. “What else?”
I was drunk. I didn’t want to use Oliver to entertain. “He told me he’d live to be a hundred,” I said. I looked into my empty wineglass until she moved away.
I threaded my way through the crowd, avoiding Ruth. I passed through the library, swallowing the urge to tell the couple pawing Oliver’s precious books that he didn’t like people to touch his things, and found myself in the Hall of Ancestors. I looked at my name on Oliver’s family tree. “I just pretend to be a weak old man,” Oliver had said. “So you’ll let me lean on you a while.”
I lifted my wineglass and remembered it was empty.
“Do you have a cigarette?” somebody behind me said.
I glanced down to see a kid, no more than nineteen, looking up at me. He was not especially attractive, but I had a sudden, fierce urge to take him upstairs and remove his clothes. “No,” I said.
“You look like you smoke,” he said. “Do you?” He opened his palm to show me two dented cigarettes.
I shrugged. “Okay.” I set down my glass and followed him outside, where he led me around to the side garden, like we were guilty children, and lit both cigarettes in his mouth. When he handed me mine, I let my fingers linger a moment against his. I had never been a smoker, and hadn’t had even a casual cigarette in years, but I inhaled like a professional.
“What were you doing in there?” the kid asked.
“Trying to escape the deviled eggs,” I said. “Why?”
“You looked like you were thinking about something really cool,” he said. “I saw you earlier, at the funeral. There’s something about you. You really stand out.”
“I’m six foot two,” I said. “All I have to do is stand up.”
He laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “I’ve never seen a girl as tall as you.”
I blew out smoke and raised my eyebrows. “No?”
He shook his head. “I wonder how much taller you are than me.”
I took a step closer to him. “Turn around,” I said. He obeyed, and I turned, too, so that we stood back to back. I felt the heat of his skin through his shirt, felt him move to press his back more firmly against mine. I reached around and touched his head, then lifted my hand to my own. “Four inches,” I said, with total authority. I stepped away, disappointed that the warmth of his body offered no comfort. I licked my fingers and pinched the lit end of my cigarette until it went out, dimly aware through my wine-induced haze that I was burning myself.
The boy looked up at me like he was about to run up a mountain, then darted in for a kiss. He had to reach up to pull my head closer, and when he did I stepped back and slapped his face so hard that tears popped into his eyes.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He pressed a hand to his reddened cheek. A plume of smoke rose from his cigarette, which he must have dropped when I hit him. I stepped on it, bent to pick it up, and said apologetically, “Oliver doesn’t like litter in his garden.”
“Fuck,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips. “That hurt.” He sounded plaintive as a child.
“Good Lord,” I said. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
I felt unhinged—drunk and flirting with teenagers like a character in a Tennessee Williams play. “Is this really happening?” I asked the boy. “Am I really standing here?”
He dropped his hands and treated me to a disillusioned stare. “You seemed so cool.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good at that.”
Back inside, I waited until Ruth’s son wasn’t looking to snatch a bottle of red wine from the box behind his bar. I stopped in the kitchen for a corkscrew on my way up to my room, where I found the box of photo albums I had been hauling, unopened, from town to town for years. I hefted all of this up the attic stairs. The attic was my favorite place in Oliver’s house. Up there, on the other side of that door, I couldn’t hear anything that went on below—no small talk, no platitudes, no come-ons from teenagers.
I set down my box and my bottle and stood for a moment in the dusty silence. The attic was vast, stretching so far ahead of me that it seemed to grow fuzzy at the outermost edge, like a far horizon. In the dim light everything looked brown, each mysterious shape a rumor of itself, not an object so much as a possibility. I was reluctant to turn on the light. For a moment I allowed myself to live in the mystery. Then I pulled a chain and the world brightened. Things were things again.
I’d been exploring the attic for years, and yet every time I climbed those stairs I stumbled upon a treasure I’d never seen before. There were pieces of furniture—a child’s armoire containing one black shoe, a cedar washstand, an old rocking chair for a very small adult. There were hardback suitcases, copper kettles, an enormous piece of stoneware with two handles on the lid. There were boxes—packing boxes, old liquor boxes, boxes for vacuums and fans and televisions. There were wooden crates stamped with pictures of fruit or the name Coca-Cola in swirly script. There was a wicker chest, a blanket chest, a steamer trunk, a footlocker in army green. Inside one box were telegrams announcing the combat deaths of sons, love letters between husbands and wives, a diary kept by Oliver’s grandmother that contained the entry, Henry is dead. I am utterly alone. Her grief lived in the attic, that single line on an otherwise white page as stark and sad as the day she wrote it.
In many of the other boxes were pictures—daguerreotypes and tintypes of unsmiling men with mustaches, unsmiling women with their hair in tight buns centered atop their heads. And there was my favorite—the tinted photograph of Billie, Oliver’s girl. Now I wondered how he’d left her behind, and why, and how it changed his life. Now I would never know.
I sat down next to the dollhouse, nearly as tall as my waist, a perfect replica of Oliver’s house. I had the stupid thought that if I opened it I would find a tiny version of him, not dead, but asleep in his blue recliner. I resisted the urge to check, muttering, “Stupid, stupid,” to myself as I wrested the cork from my wine bottle. I should have thought to bring a glass; straight from the bottle, the wine went down harsh and left me spluttering. From my own box of photos, I selected the album from the final trip I too
k with Sonia, a long, meandering drive from Tennessee to New Mexico after college graduation.
It amazed me that I’d made this album, considering how the trip ended, and I tried to remember, but couldn’t, if I was angry or sad when I arranged the photos on the pages, smoothed the wrinkles out of each plastic sheet. The last picture was of Sonia, in the motel room in Big Bend, wearing a green clay mask. I remembered how pores were her latest beauty obsession, how I had been threatening to take her women’s magazines away if she didn’t stop talking about cleansing and tightening, how I raised the camera to freeze her there, half laughing, half annoyed, her hand flying up to conceal her strange green face. After that there was a blank page.
One night, late in that trip, Sonia had lined up all my exposed film in a row on the motel-room dresser and made me count the rolls. There were twenty-six. After that, whenever we stopped to admire something beautiful—the red mountains of New Mexico, a river winding deep between canyons in Big Bend—I tried to resist the urge to reach for my camera. I tried to look, really look, as though this took a kind of effort far greater than the movement of my eyes. You are here, I would say to myself, no part of this moment melting into the future. You are only here and nowhere else. But I could never believe it. So I would take a photo, to stop the world, so that I could keep moving. The photo was just an approximation, the world flattened and made small. But I could paste it in an album, put that album in a box, pack the box in my car, and drive. The best I could do was record where I had been before I kept on going.
Of the two of us, Sonia had the gift for photography, but she’d just stand there, arms on the guardrail, and gaze at the landscape like it didn’t matter what her memory lost.
I’d never answered her letter. I wondered how long she’d waited for a reply before she stopped hoping, whether she was married by now.
“I saw you slap my nephew,” Ruth said, startling me. I hadn’t heard her come up. I looked up from Sonia’s face to hers. “I went outside for a breath of fresh air, came around the corner, and pow.”
