The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “You two should write a book,” Mr. Gray said. “Your own fairy tale. The Princess in the Tower.”

  “How about the Princess and the Tower?” I said. My father would have laughed, might even have thought of the joke himself, but Mr. Gray shook his head like my self-deprecation troubled him.

  “The Princess and the Taller Princess,” he said. “And maybe no tower at all.”

  “In your stories there was always a tower,” Sonia said. “Sometimes a dragon.”

  “Well, in your story let’s have no tower or dragon.” Over Sonia’s head he winked at me. “No princes, either.”

  Sonia laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “No sign of a prince yet.”

  Mr. Gray looked at me. “Not for you, either?”

  I shook my head. His expression was so sympathetic I had to bite back the urge to tell him about my unrequited crushes, to unspool again the sad story of Mitch.

  “He’ll turn up,” Mr. Gray said. “I’m sure of it.” He went back to the stove and started singing again, and I thought with a quick pang of envy how lucky Sonia was, forgetting for a moment that she was her mother’s sorrow as well as her father’s joy.

  Sonia looked up suddenly from her sketching, her gaze going over my shoulder toward the door. “Shit,” she whispered.

  I glanced behind me. “What?” I said, and then Madame Gray appeared in the doorway, and I knew. She had brushed her hair and put on lipstick, but there was still a line from her pillow across her face. There was a break in the music. Mr. Gray looked up. I felt that for a moment all three of us held our breath.

  “Bonjour, Simone,” Madame Gray said to me. Simone was my French name, from her class.

  “Comment allez-vous, Madame?” I asked her.

  “Well,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t killed myself yet.”

  I had no idea what to say to this. Sonia dropped her eyes to the drawing.

  “Dinner’s almost ready, honey,” Mr. Gray said, like he wasn’t surprised she’d emerged from her room, like she hadn’t said anything strange. He always behaved like whatever she did was normal.

  Madame Gray rounded the table and looked over Sonia’s shoulder at the picture, putting her hand on top of Sonia’s head. “Pretty,” she said. She smiled at me. “You’re a pretty girl, Cameron,” she said. “Pretty and smart.” When she said smart, she squeezed the top of Sonia’s head, and I could see the tension in her fingers as she pressed down, like she was trying to do something to Sonia’s brain. Sonia didn’t move away; her face was calm, but she pressed down her pencil with extra force.

  “Merci, Madame,” I said.

  “So,” Mr. Gray said, “what are you girls planning to do tonight?” He was trying to help, but this was the worst thing he could have asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. I shot a look at Madame Gray, but she didn’t appear to have heard. In fact, her mood seemed to have changed. She was smiling in an inward way, her hand still in Sonia’s hair.

  “When you were a baby your hair was like wisps of silk,” she said. She began to stroke Sonia’s head, letting strands of hair slide through her fingers. “Remember that, Gordon? What a beautiful child. Remember how you used to tell people we’d found her sleeping in the petals of a giant flower?”

  “Hmm,” Mr. Gray said. His stirring spoon had slipped into the sauce, and he was trying to fish it back out without burning himself.

  “You were a beautiful baby,” Madame Gray said. Sonia closed her eyes. She leaned into her mother’s hand like a kitten. I wondered what she would have given for things to be like this all the time. When her mother drew her hand away, Sonia opened her eyes with a startled jerk, as though she’d lost her balance. Madame Gray went over to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of wine. Sonia looked down at her sketch pad and for a moment didn’t seem to understand what she saw there. Then she ripped the paper off the pad and handed it to me.

  I studied the picture of myself. In it, I gazed off to the side, a little half-smile on my face. I looked cool and detached, which was just how I wanted to look—like a keeper of secrets. “Looks like me,” I said.

  Sonia frowned. “It’s not perfect,” she said.

  “So, girls,” Madame Gray said, coming back to the table, “what are you planning to do tonight?”

  “Probably just go to the movies,” Sonia said, but her eyes darted back and forth in a way I called “being shifty.” With time to prepare, Sonia was a great liar, as good as I was. But I could lie at the drop of a hat, and she couldn’t.

  “I can see your eyes, Sonia,” her mother said.

  Sonia sighed. “We’re going to cruise Main.”

  “I’ve never understood that particular pastime,” Madame Gray said. “I suppose it’s just a mating ritual.” She took a sip of her wine. Her voice was entirely reasonable when she said, “You’ll stay in tonight.”

  I saw our plans slipping away—I saw the taillights of the boys’ truck receding into the distance, two other girls inside, and in the grip of that vision I spoke up when I otherwise wouldn’t have. “But Madame Gray,” I said, “all we’re going to do is drive up and down.”

  “Oh, I trust you, Cameron,” she said. “It’s Sonia I don’t trust.”

  Right at the moment Sonia had been feeling most loved, Madame Gray turned on her, like love was just the setup for a practical joke she fell for over and over. Sonia stood up, facing her mother. “Daddy already said we could go out,” she said, but I could tell she had no confidence in this line of argument.

  Mr. Gray kept his attention on his pot of sauce. “I’m sorry, Princess,” he said. “I didn’t know your mother would object.”

  “I wouldn’t object,” Madame Gray said, “if I had any faith in you at all.”

  “Why don’t you trust me?” Sonia said.

  “You just lied to me, Sonia,” Madame Gray said. “Not five minutes ago. I’m supposed to believe you’re not going to meet boys?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” Sonia said, “if you weren’t so unreasonable.” Her voice began to tremble. “You spend the whole day in bed,” she said, “and then you come down here like nothing’s wrong and start making rules.”

  “I’m your mother,” Madame Gray said. “I’m doing what’s best for you.”

  “That’s not true,” Sonia said.

  Mr. Gray said, “Sonia,” but she ignored him.

  “You’re unhappy,” she said, “so you want me to be unhappy!” She was shouting now, her face red. I stared, paralyzed. I’d never seen Sonia lose her temper like this. “You want me to be as miserable as you are!” she shouted. “You don’t care about me! You wouldn’t care if I was dead!”

  Her mother threw her wineglass at Sonia. It missed her and shattered against the wall, spraying wine and shards of glass. Then Madame Gray grabbed Sonia by the ears and began to shake her. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that,” she said. “You little slut.” Sonia went limp as her mother rattled the life out of her.

  I’d known from the first day I saw her that something was wrong with Madame Gray. But the behavior of a parent still seemed as inevitable as the weather, as the fact that we had to go to school. You could complain about it, but it didn’t call forth the sort of anger that led to action. For the first time, as I watched Madame Gray shake Sonia like she was trying to pull loose her ears, I felt enraged. I wanted to knock that woman down, to take Sonia by the hand and lead her to a place where these sorts of things would never happen to her. Without planning to, I stood up. I felt my fists clench. I might have tried to intervene if Mr. Gray hadn’t been there.

  “Stop it,” he said, stepping forward to grab his wife’s arm. “Stop it right now.”

  For a moment she didn’t seem to hear him, and then abruptly she let go of Sonia. Sonia’s ears were bright red. Her mother took a step back, breathing hard. Then she grabbed Sonia’s arm and marched her out of the room and up the stairs. Mr. Gray and I just stood there, not looking at each other.

  �
�Please, Mommy,” we could hear Sonia saying. “Please. We had plans.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have done it,” her mother said.

  “Done what?” Sonia asked. “Done what?” She asked like she was begging her mother to tell her what she had done wrong, not just tonight, but in the whole of her life.

  There was no answer from Madame Gray, just the sound of Sonia’s door slamming, and then her own.

  I looked at Mr. Gray, and he shook his head. I couldn’t tell if that shake was denial or apology, or just a request that I not speak. He reached into his breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes and went out the kitchen door to the backyard. I’d noticed before that he often snuck out there to smoke, usually when his wife was in bed. I’d never understood how Sonia and her mother failed to smell it on him. My anger at his wife extended at that moment to him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t protect Sonia, so there was only me.

  I crept up the stairs and into Sonia’s room. She was lying on her back on the bed, and as I got closer I could see the tears running down her temples. She didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “That you had to see that.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Your mother went crazy.”

  “But she was right, wasn’t she? We were going to meet boys. Who knows what I would’ve let them do? Maybe I am a slut.”

  “Sonia,” I said. “You’ve never even kissed a boy.”

  She closed her eyes. “You know when I was younger she used to scrub my mouth out with soap? She scrubbed out the dirty words. I wish everything dirty could be scrubbed out like that. I wish there was nothing I wanted in the world.”

  “Sonia,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “You’d better go,” she said. “I don’t want to get in any more trouble.”

  I’d never felt so useless as I did then, leaving her there, as if I’d come to rescue her and then failed to break the enchantment. I went back to the kitchen for my purse, and Mr. Gray came in. “Oh, Cameron,” he said, his voice sad. We looked at each other, and my anger at him drained away. I understood that he felt useless, too, and ashamed that I had witnessed his uselessness. But I couldn’t say any of that, so I just said good-bye.

  Outside the house, I stared up at Sonia’s window, wishing for it to open, for her to throw out a rope and climb down. I thought of her saying that every decision affected the rest of our lives, and I wondered what it would mean for me to walk away and leave her now. That self-loathing in her voice, when she said she was a slut, when she said she wished to want nothing, that was a curse her mother had put on her, a curse that could last the rest of her life. If I could get her out, if she could kiss a boy like a normal teenage girl, that would break the spell. It occurred to me that Mr. Gray hadn’t locked the back door when he came inside.

  I parked up the street, just near enough to see the lights of Sonia’s house, and then I waited. When the lights went out, I walked up the street and slipped around to the back of the house. The gate was unlocked, as was the kitchen door. I was so nervous as I crept inside, I felt with every step that I might turn back.

  Sonia was asleep in her clothes on top of the covers. She was still wearing her shoes. I touched her arm and whispered her name. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and then she was sitting up, blinking at me. “Am I dreaming?” she whispered.

  “No,” I said. “I came to get you.”

  “You came to get me?”

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s a jailbreak.”

  In the hallway, Sonia paused, staring at her parents’ closed bedroom door. “What if she catches us?” she whispered.

  “She won’t,” I said.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Pretend you’re not,” I said, and I reached for her hand. Because she was afraid, I suddenly wasn’t. My sense of purpose overrode my nerves, so that I could observe with detachment the hammering of my heart.

  We crept down the stairs like criminals. I led the way. I held Sonia’s hand and waited for her to step down each stair like she’d just learned to walk. We went out the kitchen door into the backyard, still holding hands, each of us deep-breathing like we hadn’t been outside in months. Sonia turned to me. “Freedom,” she said. She reached for my other hand and began to spin. We leaned back and spun until I could have sworn our feet left the ground.

  Later that night we’d find those boys and we’d kiss them, sitting in the waiting room of the law office belonging to one of their fathers. I’d feel a boy’s tongue inside my mouth, a boy’s body pressing against mine, and find it hard to believe it was really happening. Then I’d glance over at Sonia, and see her kissing the other boy, and she’d glance back at me and widen her eyes, and in that silent exchange I’d know that the moment was real, because she was there, too, because she witnessed it. But all that was later, and though kissing those boys was part of the story, boys themselves didn’t matter yet. What mattered was the two of us as we were at that moment, spinning so that if one of us let go the other would fall, back when we loved each other more than anything.

  11

  Sitting on Sonia’s bed that first morning in her apartment, I looked at a postcard with a picture of Main Street on the front, the word Clovis in red beneath it. On the back I read, Ma chére Sonia, N’oublie pas ta maison. Je t’aime. Je t’embrasse, Maman. The card was dated two days after we arrived in Nashville, freshman year. There was a little puncture in the top—Sonia had kept it pinned to the bulletin board above her desk. For the first few weeks, when our hallmates asked us where we were from, we’d point to that card. The wide, flat street. The lines of low, tan buildings leading to the redbrick box of the Hotel Clovis. The blue, blue sky, full of clouds so low and full they seemed to be alive, racing the pickup trucks below them on the street.

  The card had been in a box labeled VANDERBILT, which I’d pulled down from the top of Sonia’s closet. Inside the box I’d also found Sonia’s bid-day photograph—she and Suzette smiling in the center of a crowd of smiling girls, all of them wearing identical sorority sweatshirts—and a notebook from a class she took sophomore year on assessment of learning disabilities. The first two years, she was an education major, something she took on even though it required math. Only three days into the semester, her interest in assessment seemed to peter out, and she began to narrate what was happening in the classroom, the attempted invasion of a squirrel through an open window: A flurry of blond-haired shriekers fleeing to the other side of the room, clutching a variety of Cosmos and notes. In the margin of this page she had drawn tiny Chinese ideograms, sketched a flower, and written the word synecdoche and circled it. On another page I found a note that said, I wonder what Camazon is doing right now.

  It was almost noon, and I hadn’t even showered. I hadn’t meant to search Sonia’s apartment and yet I’d spent the morning doing just that. When I started opening drawers, I’d wanted only to find some clue to her whereabouts—something that might tell me the date of her wedding, her fiancé’s name, where she worked. But even after I found a paycheck stub—she worked for a photography and literary magazine whose name I recognized because they had once done an interview with Oliver—I kept looking. In part, I wanted to see the letters Oliver must have written her, letters about me, letters she had surely kept, though not in any place I could find.

  Most of Sonia’s clothes were black, with only the occasional splash of red. In high school, red had been her favorite color. In college, she went through a pastels phase—the influence of her sorority. She owned an impressive number of shoes—six pairs of red alone, so she did still have a preference for it—and she kept them organized neatly, color-coded, on three shoe racks. In her bathroom was an array of half-used beauty products. She had five different kinds of eye creams, claiming to reduce wrinkles, shadows, puffiness—did she not sleep well? On the table beside her couch she had a framed photo of her father and a pair of opera glasses, decorated with what looked
like mother-of-pearl. Did she regularly go to the opera, the ballet, the theater, or did she just find the glasses pretty? I didn’t find any opera in her CD collection, except The Marriage of Figaro, which she’d bought for a class on Mozart we took in college. Her taste in music was eclectic, almost random—she had the first Garth Brooks album, the Modern Lovers, Al Green’s Call Me, more Mozart, Papas Fritas, U2, Phoenix, and lots and lots of show tunes. She owned a Mensa puzzle book, full of difficult questions about math. Had she bought that to torment herself when her mother wasn’t around to do it for her? She was a reader of contemporary short stories. And she had one of Oliver’s books, which I snatched from the shelf and flipped through, but there was nothing—no inscription, no letters from him tucked inside.

  Under her bed were dirty clothes, credit-card offers, magazines—she subscribed to both The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly. There were also old receipts—she’d bought her throw pillows at Pottery Barn—and crumpled sketches, mostly of half-finished faces. And, beneath a hairbrush on her dresser, there was a small blue envelope containing a birth announcement from my college boyfriend, Owen, who, I knew now, was married, lived in Brooklyn, had a four-week-old little boy, and still kept in touch with Sonia, something that surprised and upset me. I hadn’t been in touch with Owen in eight years, and yet I felt like he and Sonia, like Oliver and Sonia, were communicating behind my back. Beneath the baby’s weight and time of birth, Sonia had scrawled a large blue question mark. What question was she asking? What question was I asking? What did I hope to discover about Sonia now, rummaging though her things?

  When I was in graduate school, and the disastrous end to my relationship with Sonia was still recent, I told a new friend what had happened. She wanted to know why, and I did my best to tell her. I told her about Sonia’s father dying the summer before our senior year. I told her about Sonia’s mother. Then she wanted to know why Sonia’s mother was like that. We were English Ph.D. students and we spent all of our time “unpacking” images and sentences and words, and when we weren’t working we turned that attention to other people. Though my attempts to explain Sonia, and myself, satisfied my friend and made me feel better, there persisted a nagging feeling that ultimately it couldn’t be done. A person is not a suitcase, with a finite number of items to unpack. A person is a world. Look at any photograph—of a stranger, your father, your very best friend. Sometimes the mystery is all you can see.