Past Perfect

by Leila Sales

  “I don’t know,” Fiona said.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “It just seems easier,” she said, “not to really care about them. If your life is anything to go by, it seems to me like it gets really complicated once you start to care. No offense.”

  “But if you don’t care, then what’s the point?”

  “Um, it’s fun?” Fiona laughed.

  “Seriously, even if it winds up with your heart getting shattered . . . or even if it winds up with you breaking someone else’s heart . . . it’s still worth it, Fi. To actually care about someone.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  I nodded.

  “Huh.” She leaned back on her hands and considered me for a moment. “I’m sorry that things with Dan didn’t work out,” she said finally.

  A “thank you” caught in my throat. I hadn’t thought about it before, but no one had said they were sorry that me and Dan didn’t work out. Not anyone at Essex, of course—because they weren’t sorry—but not Dan, either. Not even me.

  “I feel really bad,” I confided in a whisper, as if someone might overhear. “I feel horrible about what I did to him.”

  “If it makes it any better, the Civil Warriors did this to themselves. If it hadn’t been you to figure out that they falsified those documents, it would have been someone else. They dug their own grave.”

  “‘The truth will always out,’” I quoted the TV newscaster, hugging my knees to my chest.

  “Anyway, without knowing him at all, except that he’s the enemy, he sounds like a good guy. Not a complete asshole like Ezra.”

  “Ezra was not a complete asshole,” I said.

  “Are you kidding me?” Fiona gave a dramatic sigh. “Still?”

  “Yes, he broke up with me, and that was kind of an asshole move . . . But he had his reasons. Everything else about Ezra was perfect. The only imperfect thing about him was that he didn’t want to be my boyfriend.”

  “Oh my God, Chelsea, that is delusional. You are filled with delusions.”

  “You just hate him on my behalf because he broke my heart,” I said. “Which is sweet of you, but you’re biased. You don’t know what it was really like, because he wasn’t your boyfriend.”

  “I do know what it was really like,” she replied, “because I was the one who spent hours every single night rubbing your back while you cried.”

  “That was after he broke up with me,” I reminded her.

  “Oh no, it wasn’t.” Fiona got to her feet and echoed my father’s words from last night. “You don’t remember everything, Chelsea. For someone who’s supposed to be an expert at history, you suck at remembering what’s real.”

  “What do you mean?” I shaded my eyes to look up at her.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” she answered. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself. Stop hanging out inside of your own head all the time and pay some attention to who Ezra actually is.” She put her hands on her hips as she looked down at me. “You met another guy. You felt something for him. So now what are you waiting for to get over Ezra?” she asked.

  But I didn’t answer. Because I didn’t know.

  Chapter 19

  THE TRUTH

  Neither my father nor I have any sense of nutrition, or food groups, or even necessarily what “tastes good.” Our favorite kind of food is whatever makes us stop feeling hungry and start feeling full. (The exception, of course, being ice cream.) So with Mom out at a stalp gig on Friday night, Dad and I cooked up a box of Kraft macaroni and ate it in the living room. When we pretend to care about things like kale or tarragon, it is exclusively for Mom’s benefit.

  “I don’t know why no one ever hires me to stalp,” Dad grouched, putting his legs up on the ottoman and resting his large bowl of mac and cheese on his thigh. He doesn’t care what he eats, but, whatever it is, he likes it in mass quantities. “I can stalp with the best of them. Is it because I’m not an attractive young woman?”

  “Mom isn’t that young,” I pointed out.

  Dad narrowed his eyes at me.

  Stalp gigs, otherwise known as Stand There and Look Pretty gigs, are the historical interpreter’s best get-rich-quick scheme. All you have to do is dress in your fanciest Colonial garb and mill around a corporate function or themed wedding party and let drunk guests take endless photos with you. At the end of the night, you can emerge with hundreds of dollars, not to mention take-home bags of leftovers. There’s probably not a big market for stalping in, like, Iowa. But here in Virginia, event planners can’t get enough of it.

  The only thing about stalp gigs is that, in order to Stand There and Look Pretty, you have to be at least base-level pretty. Which may explain why my heavyset, balding father was not in high stalp demand.

  I pushed my mac and cheese around in circles while Dad wolfed his down. These days it felt like there was constantly a rock in my stomach. I was never full, but I was never really hungry, either.

  “I wish I could just leave,” I muttered.

  “Leave what?” Dad didn’t pause in his steady noodle inhalation.

  But I didn’t answer because I didn’t even know what I wanted to leave at this point. This house. This town. This state. I wished I could leave myself behind and start over again, brand-new, the girl with no history who is free to invent herself.

  “Do you ever wish you could go back to the Colonial times for real?” I asked Dad. “Just ditch the twenty-first century?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “They played a mighty poor excuse for baseball in the eighteenth century. I would find it very depressing.” This cracked him up. Let us all take a moment to be thankful that my father became a silversmith instead of pursuing a career as a stand-up comedian.

  “That being said,” he went on once he’d finished ho-ho-hoing, “I can think of nothing I would love more than going to visit the Colonial times. Not forever, but there are so many questions that we can’t answer without going and seeing for ourselves. It can be frustrating to spend your whole life studying a society that you will never get to see. Of course, it’s no different from a paleontologist, who will never see dinosaurs. Or a physicist, who will never see electrons. We just have to trust that these things exist.”

  “But it’s not just trusting that they exist,” I protested. “We know that Essex is real.”

  “Do we?” Dad asked in his most infuriating PhD voice. He set aside his scraped-clean bowl and leaned back in his chair. “How do we know that? Were you there, Chelsea?”

  “No, but we don’t have to be somewhere to know that it exists. I mean, what, are you claiming that none of it really happened?” I asked. “That the whole Revolutionary War is just a figment of our national imagination, and Essex was built last week?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Dad shook his head, like he thought I was being purposefully recalcitrant. “Of course the Revolutionary War really happened. We have letters and diaries and gravestones and bayonets—all these primary sources so we’ll never doubt that it happened. We have the outcome itself, which may be the most powerful proof of all: America is a sovereign nation, a free democracy.

  “Unquestionably, the Revolutionary War happened. This is why Holocaust deniers are so infuriating and upsetting. Because it takes an insane amount of dissociation from reality to be able to look at all the primary sources, and to look at the outcomes, and still to conclude that a historical event didn’t happen. This is why it’s unacceptable to invent paperwork, as Reenactmentland did. There’s a difference between reimagining and lying.”

  “Okay, but that’s what I was saying in the first place. So what’s your point?”

  Dad loves to be asked what his point is. There is literally nothing he would rather do, in life, than explain what his point is. He said, “My point is that, although things actually happen, we don’t remember them the way they actually were.

  “History doesn’t intend to have some particular emotional value, or any particula
r moral. History doesn’t have any intentions at all. It’s just a never-ending web of events that can have pretty much any meaning at all.

  “But we, in retrospect, make this web into a story that makes sense. We superimpose onto it a beginning, middle, and end. We decide who the main characters are, the good guys and the bad guys. We decide what the moral of the story is, and how everyone is supposed to feel about it.”

  “But history is facts,” I said. “It’s not a matter of opinion.”

  “To a certain extent,” Dad granted. “The facts matter, to a certain extent. You can’t create a story without some facts to base it on. But what ‘really happened’ doesn’t matter. What matters is how we agree to remember it. Here’s an example for you, Chelsea: the Boston Massacre.”

  “March fifth, 1770,” I supplied automatically.

  Dad said, “In retrospect, many historians come to describe it as the night the Revolution begins—though at the time, of course, the people don’t know that they are headed toward all-out war. British soldiers stationed in Boston shoot into a crowd of Colonials and kill five. This event is reimagined almost immediately thereafter as a ‘massacre,’ even though five deaths is nothing of the sort. Calling it a ‘massacre’ is branding, it’s propaganda to drum up support for secession. You have, of course, seen Paul Revere’s famous political cartoon, depicting an orderly line of British troops opening fire on docile, unarmed Bostonians. Not true.

  “These days most U.S. history textbooks teach how few victims there are in the Boston Massacre, how Revere’s cartoon is exaggeration to make a point. But what these textbooks leave out are the exact circumstances of March fifth. What happened is this: Bostonians pour out of taverns, where they’ve been drinking for hours. They pelt the British troops with rocks and chunks of ice. They call them names that I’m not going to repeat in the presence of my teenage daughter. These men are not civilized, politically minded Patriots. They are drunks and thugs, and there’s an argument to be made that, when the British troops open fire, they’re acting in self-defense. So whose fault is the Boston Massacre: the soldiers or the colonists?

  “Or, for another example, consider Thomas Jefferson,” Dad went on. “What do you know about Jefferson?”

  “Mike interprets him,” I answered readily.

  Dad sighed. “Anything else, or is that all that ten years of Essex employment and public-school education have taught you?”

  “Thomas Jefferson . . . A great Patriot. Wrote the Declaration. The nation’s third president. The Louisiana Purchase. Founded the University of Virginia. Come on, Dad, ask me a hard one.”

  “That’s fine,” Dad said. “But do you know that Jefferson used his presidential term to undermine Federalism as much as he possibly could? That he promoted traitorous relations with France at the same time that President Washington was trying to forge a peace treaty with England? That he owned slaves his entire life and refused to take responsibility when he fathered children by one of them? That his goal was to forcefully remove all nonassimilated Native Indians from U.S. soil? That he opposed giving women the right to vote because he believed they weren’t as smart as their male counterparts?”

  These, incidentally, are what are known as “rhetorical questions.”

  “Is that all true?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged. “It’s as true as the ‘great Patriot’ story. They’re both just stories, just different lenses through which you can view the same man. We tend to choose the rose-colored lenses, because they make everything prettier. History is written by the victors, and the victors want to make themselves look good. Who could blame them?”

  I thought about our War with Reenactmentland and said, “I don’t blame them at all.”

  Dad got to his feet and picked up our bowls. He ate a forkful of the macaroni that I’d left congealing in mine. “Are you going out tonight?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  He frowned. Even when I’m not trying, I always somehow find a way to give my father the wrong answer.

  “I’m going to a party at Maggie’s tomorrow night, though,” I added. “If that’s okay.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “You’ve spent too much time home alone lately. You should be out with your friends.”

  It sounded so simple, coming from his mouth. Just go out with your friends! You know, those people who you like, who like you in return!

  “Hey, Dad,” I said as he was about to leave the room with our bowls. “Thanks.”

  He paused. “Thanks for telling you that you should be out with your friends?”

  That wasn’t what I meant at all. What I meant was something like, Thanks for telling me about history. But instead I said, “Thanks for dinner.”

  He shook his head. “It was only macaroni, Chelsea.” He went into the kitchen, and I slipped upstairs to my bedroom.

  I shut the door and took out my Ezra file. Although I had kept the items inside pristine, the folder itself was beginning to show signs of wear and tear. One of its corners was creased. There were a few smudges on the outside.

  I sat down on the floor, flipped open the folder, and pulled out the first artifact. The photo of us sitting together on one sled, him wearing a dumb cap topped with a pom-pom, me resting into him, our camera-ready smiles.

  Leaning against my bed, I remembered the day this photo was taken. It was a Wednesday, and school was canceled. We’d gotten ten inches of snow the night before, a bigger blizzard than this part of Virginia had seen in years. It was hard to imagine it, on this hot summer night, but I tried my best: the way the tiny snowflakes stung my face, how I had to wear two jackets just to go outside.

  I was going sledding with Fiona and a bunch of our friends from school, but I didn’t even own a sled. I’d had to stop and buy one at the dollar store on the way to the golf course. Ezra met us there, and I still remembered the comfort of his arms around me as we catapulted down the hill, going faster and faster. I would have been scared without him there, but as it was, I just closed my eyes and let the wind whip past me because I knew, without a doubt, that in his arms I would be safe.

  You don’t remember everything, Fiona told me.

  What ‘really happened’ doesn’t matter, Dad said. What matters is how we agree to remember it.

  What really happened, the day Ezra and I went sledding. What really happened was that all my friends were going to the golf course, and I was so excited because I hadn’t been sledding since I was a little kid, and Ezra didn’t want to go. What really happened was that we spent an hour on the phone in the morning, with me begging him to come sledding with us.

  “It’s cold,” he said. “It’s wet.”

  “You’ll be fine. You’ll dry,” I said.

  “Why don’t you just come over to my house? We can watch a movie. We can make popcorn.”

  “Because I can go over to your house any day. We can watch a movie any day. But we can only go sledding today, because today is the only day there’s snow.”

  “Why don’t you just do your stupid sledding thing,” Ezra proposed, “and get wet and cold, and I’ll stay home and watch a movie?”

  “Because”—and for some reason I wanted to cry, as I tightened my grip on the phone and stared out my window at the snow twirling in the wind—“it’s a snow day. It’s special. So I want to spend it with you.”

  I finally bullied him into coming, but by then we had spent so long arguing on the phone that, when I got to the dollar store, they had already sold all the good snow tubes. I had to buy a crappy plastic sheet that barely counted as a sled. And, of course, I blamed Ezra for this.

  He arrived at the golf course shortly after I did, and, even though everyone else took run after run, Ezra didn’t want a turn. He just stood at the top of the hill, scarf pulled up past his nose, hat pulled down past his eyebrows, arms in a tight hug around his middle, shivering dramatically.

  “You can go home if you want,” I told him. “If you’re not going to sled at all, you should just go home.”r />
  But he shook his head and said, “No. You said I had to be here. So I’m here.”

  This was in January, when Fiona was in the middle of her two-week relationship with Reginald Ellis, who was at our school only for the second half of his senior year because his father had been transferred from London. Fiona and Reginald went flying past us on her sled, her giggling, him hollering “Bollocks!” as they hit a bump.

  I remembered this made me feel so desperate, that Fiona should be having this romantic interlude with a guy whom she’d first met literally one week ago, whereas my boyfriend and I couldn’t muster up one single romantic moment, not even in this incredibly romantic winter wonderland.

  “Please,” I pleaded with Ezra, almost in tears. “Please let’s just sled down the hill together once. Then we can leave.”

  So we sat down together on the sled, and that was when one of my friends snapped the photograph that I now, nearly seven months later, held in my hands. If I looked hard, I could see my eyes in this photo sparkling, though I couldn’t say whether it was with happiness or snow or tears.

  After the camera shutter clicked, we were off, down the hill. And it was perfect, for a moment. For a moment, we were perfect. I hadn’t made up any of that memory. His arms really had wrapped around me, I really was pressed back against his chest, the wind really did feel so clean and pure.

  When we hit the bump at the bottom of the hill, we fell off the sled together and tumbled into the snow, landing softly with his body on top of mine, pinning me down. I was laughing and gasping for air, and he said, “That is possibly the shittiest sled a person could own.”

  Maybe he meant it as a joke or maybe he meant it as a criticism, but, either way, the smile cracked off my face like an icicle. I said, “I would have been able to get a better sled if I hadn’t had to spend all morning on the phone with you.”

  “You wouldn’t have had to spend all morning on the phone with me if you hadn’t made such a big deal out of us going sledding together,” he replied.