by Leah Stewart
“He’s your nephew?”
“Well, grandnephew,” she said. “My husband’s, really. I don’t claim him.” She groaned, lowering herself to sit beside me. “It’s okay. I’ve no doubt he deserved it.” I saw her eyes go to the opal ring on my left hand, and moved it out of her line of sight. No doubt she’d think I wheedled a family heirloom from an old man.
“That’s a beautiful ring,” she said in a neutral voice. “Opals, right?”
“Oliver gave it to me.”
“Oh?” She reached for my hand, and reluctantly I showed it to her. She touched the ring. “Looks antique.”
“It belonged to his aunt. Your great-aunt. The one who lived here. You don’t recognize it?”
“No, and I’m surprised.”
“Surprised he gave it to me?”
She sighed. “Surprised she wore it. She was a superstitious woman, and her birthday was in June.”
“Oh.” I looked at the wine, wanting to drink it, wishing she would leave so I could. “I guess I’m braving the bad luck.”
“I guess so.” One corner of her mouth lifted in a rueful smile. She ran her hand down the roof of the dollhouse. “What are you doing up here?”
“I’m looking at photos.” I flipped back a few pages, to a picture of Sonia leaning on an old-fashioned gas pump, somewhere on Route 66.
“Daddy’s?” Ruth asked.
I shook my head. “Mine.”
She leaned in. “Who is that?”
“An old friend.”
“She’s right pretty,” Ruth said. “As somebody used to say. Can you pass me that wine?”
Surprised, I handed it to her and watched her throat work as she drank. “My God, those people,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “They’re never going to leave.” She looked around the attic. “I haven’t been up here in a long time,” she said. “I’m not surprised you like it up here. Daddy always did. You and he are a lot alike.”
This disarmed me, although I wasn’t sure she meant it as a compliment.
“I was sorry we didn’t hear from you at the funeral,” she said.
“What do you mean? No one asked me to speak.”
She looked puzzled. “Didn’t you hear me at the beginning? It was an open mic.”
“Oh,” I said, chastened. “I came in late.”
“That explains it.” She smiled. “I’m glad to know that. I was rather offended.”
“I guess I was rather offended, too.”
Ruth sighed. “You always assume the worst of me, don’t you,” she said gently, and then she patted me on the leg. “Daddy always said you like to say no first.”
I was stung. “He said that?”
“He didn’t mean it as an insult,” Ruth said. “Although I’m not sure how it’s not. Oh, hell.” She took another swig of the wine. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not trying to insult you. I know you took good care of my father, and that he adored you. I’m grateful.”
I was staring at the photo album, blinking and blinking. Sonia’s face swam in and out of focus. “I was up here when he died,” I said.
She looked at me.
“I was reading your uncle’s letters from the war. I didn’t hear a thing,” I said. “He might have called out, I don’t know.”
Ruth picked at the label on the wine bottle with her thumbnail. She had a French manicure.
“I found him at the bottom of the stairs.” I swallowed. I could see him there, sprawled out, facedown, one hand on the bottom step, like he was trying to reach me. “I ran down the stairs so fast I stepped on his hand.”
Ruth flinched.
“I feel like I killed him, Ruth.”
“He was already dead,” she said.
I swallowed again. That didn’t matter. “I thought I could keep him from dying.”
Now she gave me a sympathetic look. “Oh, my dear,” she said, just like her father used to. “He was ninety-two. How could you possibly?” She handed me the bottle of wine and urged me to drink it, like it was medicine. When I had choked some down, she patted my shoulder. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do now?” she asked, brisk as a career counselor. Her thin lips were stained purple. “You must be qualified for any number of jobs. You could work in the bookstore. I assume you’re planning to stay in town. Where else would you go?”
I shrugged, too weary to bristle. That was Ruth, managing to insult you even when she was trying to be kind. I looked at a picture of myself striking a conqueror’s pose on the side of a mountain, both hands on my hips. “When do you need me to be out?” I asked.
Ruth clicked her tongue against her teeth. “My dear, that’s not what I meant. For God’s sake, you make me feel like a foreclosing bank. This is your home, and you belong here. You can stay here as long as you need to.” She looked around the attic. “I don’t know quite what to do with the place, anyway. Maybe you could be the caretaker for a while.”
I wanted to say yes. It would have been so easy to stay up there in the attic and become a ghost. But hearing Ruth say that I belonged, I knew that I didn’t. My name penciled in on the family tree didn’t make me family. Once, Oliver told me I was lucky not to have the kind of past embodied in this vast, treasure-filled attic, where for more than a hundred years his family had stored their memories. He said, “You make your own history.”
Now he was dead, and the history I’d made fit in a single cardboard box. It hadn’t rooted me in anything, just brought me to a place where there was nothing guiding me, nothing telling me which way to go. I shut the photo album on Sonia’s face and told myself that in a way Oliver was right about my luck. To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.
6
When I was a child, my father encouraged me to belong nowhere, to immerse myself in the culture of each new place and then just as easily leave it behind. I learned not to complain about moving, about the friends I’d lose, because he’d just shake his head, amazed and disappointed by my cowardice, and ask, “My God, are you going to cry about it?” He didn’t believe in living on base; he said there was no point in moving if every place we lived was essentially the same. In England this meant that we rented a house in a village complete with real British people and a village green. The kitchen had a tiny British refrigerator that my mother never stopped complaining about for three years. It was the one adjustment she couldn’t make.
We had been in England for two weeks when I started all-day school at Stanton Primary. I was four and a half. I had a bad first day. In the morning the lesson involved reading aloud words printed on little plastic rectangles. Each word we could read, each punctuation mark we could identify, we could put inside folders marked with our names. The teacher said that the words in our folders were the only ones we would be allowed to use when we wrote stories. I wanted them all.
When it was my turn I read everything without hesitation until I came to a square with a black dot in the center. “That’s a period,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” the teacher said.
“Yes, it is,” I insisted. My mother had taught me to read six months before, and I was very proud of my knowledge. In Idaho I had been well ahead of the other children in my preschool. The teacher there had said, “Oh, very good,” and “Aren’t you smart?” She had been pretty and young and quick to smile. This teacher was square-jawed and gray-haired. Her accent made everything she said seem clipped and disdainful.
“That’s a period,” I said again.
“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s a full stop. Read the next one.”
I went on, but I couldn’t recover my confidence. A voice in my head kept insisting, “It’s a period,” but it grew increasingly uncertain. Maybe what I had thought was a period actually was a full stop. Maybe, more alarmingly, my mother was wrong. And now I had a folder full of words, but without full stops they’d never make sentences.
As the day went on I found again and again that I didn’t know t
he names of things. In the line at the cafeteria, a lady asked me if I wanted pudding and then gave me something that looked more like pie. I had learned my lesson. I didn’t try to explain to her that it wasn’t pudding. I just went quietly to a table and sat.
For a moment, I ate happily. This was uncomplicated—I was hungry, and the food was good. Then a lunch lady appeared at my side. She said, “Oh, no, that’s wrong.” She took my silverware from my hands and switched them, knife in the right, fork upside down in the left.
I said, “But I don’t do it this way.”
She said, “Now you do.”
I said, “But I’m American.”
She said, “Not here, you’re not.”
She left me there at the table, clutching the silverware like a monkey at a dinner party. Even after she was gone I was afraid to switch the silverware back. She had been so plump and stern, so certain that I was wrong. I tried to go on eating, but my hands didn’t seem to work anymore. The whole process, which had been so natural only moments before, was now unwieldy, impossible. I began to cry, but quietly. Even at that age I was embarrassed by tears. They trickled down my cheeks as I struggled to push peas onto the back of my fork. The peas just rolled right off.
Across the table a girl my age was watching me with interest. She had long brown hair, like mine, held back at her temples with two barrettes. Her cheeks were pink. “Do it like this,” she said. She pushed a few of her peas onto her fork, then, without removing the knife, she mushed the peas down. They stuck. She put them in her mouth, slid the fork out, and grinned at me as though she had done a magic trick. It must have been a pleasure to astonish with such a basic and common skill. Surely no one had ever found her ability to eat remarkable before.
I sniffed and swallowed and tried to stop crying. My breath was still coming in little hiccups. I copied her movements. Some of the peas escaped but several made it into my mouth. I watched closely as she cut her meat. I imitated her. This was much easier.
“You’re American, then?” she asked. “What’s that like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Just two weeks before, I had had nothing to compare it to. “I say Mommy, not Mummy.” I had noticed this difference at the corner shop, where my mother had given me fifty pence, my strange new allowance, and let me pick out an Enid Blyton book.
“Well, that’s odd, isn’t it,” she said. “You’d better change that.”
“Okay.” I was willing to make any number of accommodations for her. She had taught me to eat, and with that small triumph, a few little peas, it had become possible once more to negotiate the world.
After that, every time we moved I was on the lookout for what changes in me would be required. Like the friends I’d had elsewhere, Sonia enjoyed teaching me about life in her town, everything she took for granted. She said showing me the ropes made her feel like she knew all there was to know about this life, like she’d already lived it a thousand times over and because of that would always know just what to do and say. She taught me that on weekend nights teenagers cruised Main, driving up and down in their pickups and El Caminos and red or silver Camaros, bouncing to the music that drifted out their open windows. She taught me that the high-school girls who dated airmen were called barracks bunnies, that the Future Farmers of America wore Wranglers and hung out behind the Ag building, that at the Trinity Church, a strange little box of a place downtown with no visible windows, people were rumored to speak in tongues.
But unlike other friends, Sonia showed me what was different about this new place without ever seeming to require me to change. The slight Texas accent I acquired, the knowledge of how to two-step—I picked up those things on my own. With Sonia, I belonged for the first time with a person, instead of pretending to belong to a place. When one of us walked into a room alone, “Where’s Sonia?” or “Where’s Cameron?” was the first thing said.
Sonia didn’t explain to me, at first, why I’d seen her mother hit her, why she couldn’t multiply seven times eight. That time in the gym, we climbed out of the pool and walked in silence outside, where we stood dripping in the courtyard, wringing out our hair. I asked her how she was going to get home.
“I don’t know,” she said, like it didn’t much matter.
“We can give you a ride.”
“That would be nice,” she said. “Thank you.”
After that she was silent. I took her silence to mean that I was a reminder of the scene I’d witnessed, that she now wished I’d disappear, and that she’d avoid me in the future. I knew this was how I’d behave if I were her, but the thought that Sonia might ignore me made me sad. I wanted to be her friend. Already I wanted to protect her, less because of pity than because of my admiration for her resolve, which seemed to me to make her deserve protection all the more. There she was, soaking wet, her clothes clinging to her body, and for all I knew she could still feel the sting of her mother’s slap against her cheek. But she stood without hunching her shoulders or twisting her legs, with no appearance of self-consciousness. When a boy from our English class walked by, I crossed my arms over my chest—my nipples were showing—but Sonia just said, “Hi.” She met his gaze like there was no need for explanation, and he didn’t ask for one. She embodied the lesson I’d learned from my dealings with my father: Show no weakness. The world will use it against you.
At last my mother arrived. She didn’t offer her usual explanations for her lateness; she was too busy staring at me and Sonia. “Mom, this is Sonia,” I said, opening the front door. “She needs a ride.”
“Nice to meet you,” Sonia said. “Do you mind taking me home?”
“Of course not,” my mother said, and only then did Sonia climb into the car. “What on earth happened to you two?” my mother asked.
I didn’t look at Sonia. “It was freshman hazing,” I said. “Some of the upperclassmen pushed a bunch of us into the pool.”
“That’s terrible,” my mother said.
“No, no,” I said. “If they haze you it means they think you’re cool. It would be worse if they ignored us.”
“It’s hot out, anyway,” Sonia said. I chanced a look back at her. She met my eyes and smiled, this smile she had that made her look like a child given an unexpected gift, a smile that said she was delighted with you, and amazed at her own good fortune. I’d passed a test. She knew I’d keep her secrets.
Sonia’s house was in a subdivision not far from the one where we lived. It didn’t have any of the southwestern flavor of our house. It was gray brick, tall and narrow, and I imagined that her mother peered at us, witchlike, out of a second-story window, malevolence in her eyes. Before she got out of the car, Sonia asked if I wanted to come over after school the next day. “If that’s all right,” she said to my mother, and my mother, surprised by her politeness, said of course it was.
“Okay,” I said, resisting the urge to ask if she wouldn’t rather come home with me. As Sonia walked to her porch and climbed the steps to her front door, I felt like we were delivering her back to captivity, like she was a princess returning to the castle of her long imprisonment.
“I’m glad you made a friend,” my mother said.
During French the next day, Sonia passed me a note that said, Wait for me at the end of class. So I did, lingering awkwardly among the desks while Sonia told two other girls she’d catch up to them later. Madame Gray was flipping through a stack of papers—she’d given us a pop quiz on the night’s reading, and even though it was only the second day of school, the class already knew better than to complain. The other girls dispatched, Sonia waved for me to join her at her mother’s desk.
“Madame Gray,” she said, and then waited for her mother’s attention. When she got it, she said something in French. I caught only my name and the words après l’école. Madame Gray looked at me, surprised, and I was sure she was going to say no. She narrowed her eyes, appraising me. Then she pulled out my quiz and scanned it.
“You did the reading,” she said. Now she looked up
at me with a smile. “You got every question right.” She addressed her daughter without looking at her. “She’s a smart girl, Sonia.”
Despite myself, I was gratified. “Merci, Madame,” I said, and then—I don’t know what possessed me—I made an odd, abbreviated curtsy.
“You’re welcome,” Madame Gray said, with the gracious nod of a queen. “Okay, girls,” she said. “Meet me in the faculty parking lot after school.”
As we went out into the hall, Sonia appraised me in a way not unlike her mother, and I wondered if she thought perhaps I’d gone too far with the curtsy, that I might not be an ally after all but a potential teacher’s pet. To distract her, I asked, “Why are you in this class, anyway? Shouldn’t you be in French Four or something?”
“What do you mean?” she said. “I’ve never taken French before.”
“But you speak it so well.”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “No, I don’t,” she said. She turned as if to go, and again I worried that she’d changed her mind about being my friend. But she stopped. “Well done, by the way,” she said, and then she disappeared into the crowd.
I anticipated the end of the school day with a mixture of excitement and dread. In my mind, that narrow gray house assumed gothic proportions, with Madame Gray a woman of the sort who tormented poor orphan girls in Victorian novels. I imagined her shouting questions at me in French, then sending Sonia to fetch the rod. When I got to the faculty parking lot, Sonia was already leaning against a car, and I was glad to see that her mother wasn’t there yet. Sonia was excited—she’d made the JV cheerleading squad. She started describing for me the girls she’d been up against, the whole process of the tryouts, but she stopped abruptly when she saw her mother approaching. “Don’t say anything to her,” she said.
Madame Gray insisted I sit in the front seat, to accommodate my long legs, and all the way to their house she asked me questions about myself—where I’d lived before, what my parents did, what I liked to study in school. I tried to give minimal answers. It was clear I needed to be polite to Madame Gray to be allowed to spend time with Sonia, and yet every politeness I offered her felt like a betrayal.
