by Leah Stewart
Marisa laughed. “Don’t even think it. I don’t want to compete with an angel.”
“You know you’d win,” Noah said, putting his arm around her, and Josh turned to Eloise with a smile of complicit pleasure.
She smiled back, if a little weakly. This party was taking so much effort. Other people wore her out, because—as her friend Heather was fond of pointing out—she felt compelled to entertain them. Well, she was used to everybody looking at her when she talked, wasn’t she? The older she got the clearer it became to her that she liked other people best when they were contained by the seats in her classroom. These days she had parties out of a sense of obligation more than an anticipation of pleasure. This particular party—a celebration of the house’s one hundred and twentieth birthday—she hadn’t wanted to have at all. It had been Theo’s idea. “Why?” Eloise had said. “Houses don’t have birthdays. People will think they have to bring gifts.”
“For the house?” Theo asked. “What do you give a house?”
“Furnace,” Eloise said. “Roof.” She ticked off the items on her fingers. “Water heater. New wiring. Paint. New pipes.”
“You’re afraid the guests will show up with new pipes?”
“I hope they do,” Eloise said. “We haven’t done any plumbing in a while.”
“It’s not just a birthday party for the house,” Theo said. “It’s a going-away party for Claire, since she won’t let us throw her one. We just won’t tell her that.”
Eloise still shook her head. “I think it’s weird to throw a going-away party for a house.”
“For Claire,” Theo corrected. “The house isn’t going anywhere, is it?” Eloise, startled to realize her slip of the tongue, agreed to the party rather than answer that question.
“Hey,” Josh said now, spotting something past Eloise. “Isn’t that Adelaide now?”
Eloise followed his gaze to see a dark-haired, long-necked woman being ushered inside by one of Eloise’s friends from book club. “I think so,” she said.
“Got to be,” Josh said. “Look at her. That woman is definitely a ballet dancer.”
“Will you go talk to her?” Eloise asked. “I’ll see if I can find Claire.”
Eloise moved through the crowd across the foyer to look into the dining room, where people gathered around the hors d’oeuvres laid out on the table. No Claire, but she did see Theo, talking to Josh’s boss, Ben. He was looking through the photo album Theo had made when she was supposed to be working on her dissertation, filled with every picture of the house she could locate, arranged in her best guess at chronological order. Now she was pointing out photos and narrating like a tour guide. Theo, with her mobile, expressive features, her tendency to gesture expansively, was the sort of person whose appearance seems to change with her mood. Happy and animated, as she was now, she was lovely. “This is about the time my grandparents bought the house, in 1958. Some of the woodwork had been painted”—she said this with a shudder—“but they restored it to how it would have looked when it was built.”
“When was it built?” Ben asked.
“Eighteen ninety,” she said. “It’s in the Colonial Revival style, although it has three stories instead of the usual two. Do you know how we came to call the floors of a building stories? Because of the murals on the different floors. So if you were on the third floor you were on the third story.”
“That’s a good fact,” Ben said.
“I know,” Theo said. “I like that one. It’s good to know where things come from.”
“Do you write about houses? Like, architectural history?”
“No,” Theo said. “Not at all. I’ve just researched this house, and the city, too, because I’m interested. I could tell you where the oldest house is, or where there used to be water—”
“Where there used to be water?”
“Yeah, like in Northside—one of the streets has newer houses than the others, because that area was water. Or, Over-the-Rhine used to be separated from downtown by a canal. Did you know that? That’s how it got that name, because German immigrants called the canal the Rhine. When they were taking the canal out, that’s when they got the idea to build a subway. But of course they never finished it.”
Listening to her niece, the pleasure in her voice as she imparted these facts, Eloise winced. She’d tried without success to break Theo of her fondness for their hometown. Theo had come back for graduate school four years before despite offers from more prestigious schools, and moved back into the room she shared with Claire as though she’d never left. She put an I LOVE CINCINNATI bumper sticker on her car and wore T-shirts that said MADE IN OHIO or showed photos of local landmarks under the words THIS IS WHERE I’M FROM. Local landmarks, plus a shot of police in riot gear and one of Pete Rose grabbing his balls with a fuck-you expression on his face. “It’s the complete picture,” Theo had said in answer to whatever wry comment Eloise had made. “Cincinnati’s gritty.”
In Cincinnati you could make a virtue of grittiness, take pride in not living in some cleaner, wealthier, wussier city, though that was a problematic stance if you lived in a house like theirs. Even if it was a six-minute walk from a hot spot of crime, even if a friend who lived two streets over once had to dive under a car to avoid getting caught in cross fire. Did Theo’s civic pride extend to the high crime rate? The conservative provinciality of the population, the intractable problems of the urban poor, the low self-esteem? To identify so strongly with a city like this—what did that say about you? In Cincinnati when locals asked where you went to school they meant what high school. In Cincinnati when locals met a newcomer they asked, “Why’d you move here?” It was a dying city, no matter how Theo winced and protested when Eloise used that term. One day the electricity would blink off, the shops would close their doors, the people would get in their cars and drive away. Abrupt as a cardiac arrest.
A hand slipped into Eloise’s and squeezed. She looked over to see Heather, who released her hand before Eloise could pull away. So careful of Eloise’s desire for secrecy, even as it clearly hurt and sometimes angered her, even as Eloise went on spending nights in Heather’s bed and then introducing her as her “friend.” Eloise wanted to reach out and push Heather’s dark hair back behind her ear, smooth it where the humid weather was starting to make it frizz, but she didn’t. Heather wore the necklace Eloise had bought her the week before at an art fair, a sparkly glass pendant on a black cord. The gold in the glass seemed to call forth gold in her brown eyes. “I really like how that looks on you,” Eloise said.
“Thanks,” Heather said, her fingers going to the pendant. “How are you doing?”
“I’m feeling guilty.” Eloise pointed her chin at Theo. “She loves this house.”
“I know, but she can’t stay here forever whether you sell it or not.”
Eloise sighed. She didn’t know how to make Theo understand that the house was, like many family legacies, as much a burden as a gift. Francine might have hung on to ownership of the house even after she moved to Tennessee, but she’d handed over its upkeep as if she were breaking a curse, or passing it on. Theo would say the place was more gift than burden, but she wasn’t the one who had to offer up a four-figure sum to Duke Energy every month. She could complain about the cold (because winters in Cincinnati were quite cold) or the heat (because summers in Cincinnati were quite hot) without immediately thinking of how much these vagaries of temperature would cost her. Cold winters and hot summers—this unfair combination was another of the grievances against Cincinnati on Eloise’s very long list.
“She’s twenty-eight years old,” Eloise said. “Why does she have to be told to move out? Why doesn’t she want to do it on her own? And Josh. He’s been back a year. He’s still not even talking about getting his own place.” She looked at Heather. “I stunted them somehow.”
“Don’t start that again,” Heather said. “You always encouraged them. They’re just broke. Times like this make you hesitate to spend money. And the house
is really big.”
“I hope someone won’t hesitate to spend money on this place,” Eloise said. “Or I’ll never get rid of it.”
“Have you talked to your mother?”
“Not yet. I thought I’d call once Claire is gone.”
“You think she’ll actually do it this time?”
“That’s what she said, the last time I asked. She’d sign it over once Claire was grown.” Eloise made a face. “But who the hell knows. She lives to torment me.”
“You can just walk away,” Heather said. “Move in with me. You know I won’t charge you rent.”
“But then I have no savings. I have nothing to show for everything I’ve put into this place.” Eloise gave her a rueful smile. “I’m tiresome, I know. I repeat myself. Are you sure you want me in your house, saying the same things over and over?”
Heather pretended to consider. “Do I have to listen?”
“Some of the time,” Eloise said. “But we can bargain. We can work that out.” She looked back at Josh, checking on him, and saw him talking with apparent ease to Adelaide. “I have to go find Claire.”
“She went upstairs a while ago with a couple of her friends.”
Eloise nodded, took a step toward the kitchen, then stopped. “Heather,” she said, “am I wrong to want to sell this place? Does it mean too much to them?”
“You’re not wrong,” Heather said. “They love the house, I know, but they don’t pay the property taxes.”
Eloise found Claire in the den on the second floor, talking to two of her friends. They’d been dance majors together at the performing arts high school, but while Claire went on to a career in dance the other two were going to college, and perhaps because of that they treated Claire as if she were a little bit of a celebrity. It sometimes bothered Eloise that people were so careful with Claire, as if she were fragile, as if she were so special as not to be quite real. True, she was lovely, with her fairy-child eyes, her long, long neck. She looked so delicate, so ethereal, and yet she was anything but.
“Claire, move your butt,” Eloise said, startling the friends and making her niece smile. “Adelaide’s here.” Claire scrambled to her feet with less than her usual grace. She worshiped Adelaide. “She’s in the foyer talking to Josh,” Eloise called after Claire as she and her friends disappeared out the door. For a moment, Eloise lingered, reluctant to return to the fray. This room, repository for the television and the video games and the music in all its assorted formats from records to iPods, had been the playroom when she and Rachel were young, and then the TV room as they grew older, the place they spent much of their time, the more formal first floor being the domain of their mother. Eloise still felt like that part of the house didn’t quite belong to her.
Why didn’t she just move in with Heather, whether her mother gave her the house or not? Why was she dragging her feet? Maybe it was because she’d never imagined finally leaving this house only to move across town. But here was the truth: Eloise was forty-five and this was where she had a job and friends and a secret girlfriend and a house she might or might not be able to sell. This was, now and forever, where she was from.
In the first year or so after coming home for the children, and intermittently since, she’d lived with an intense awareness of elsewhere. In this land, which encompassed New York and Boston and other northeastern cities and towns, life went on at a higher volume, a more rapid pace. While she waited to cross the street, its people built bridges. Their sky was bright with city lights and philosophies. She had recurring dreams of being not just late but incapable of arriving—some party or meeting or class already under way while the minutes sped past on her clock and she stood stupefied at the bathroom mirror, unable to comprehend why she was still half-dressed, why she hadn’t yet brushed her hair. Elsewhere—once upon a time she’d been able to go there by car or by plane. Now she needed a tornado.
2
When the party was finally over, Eloise went up to her room and lay down on top of her quilt with one arm flung in dramatic exhaustion over her eyes. She heaved an enormous sigh, and at that moment Theo came in, said, “That’s how I feel, too,” and lay down beside her. Then Claire, so silent on her dancer feet that Eloise didn’t notice her until the bed shifted under her weight. At times like this, when the girls came to her like children, warm and sleepy, seeking contact, it was easy to forget how old they were. It was easy to forget not to call them “the children.” At most she could get away with “the kids.” Certainly they were still kids to her, even at twenty-eight and twenty-six and nineteen. They were still her kids, even if it had taken her years to stop flinching when people called them that, as if in claiming them as hers she was stealing from Rachel.
“That was too many people,” Theo said.
“It was your idea,” Eloise said, feeling amused, annoyed, and a little sad. Theo was so like her—throwing herself into maniacal organization of a party she hadn’t actually enjoyed.
“So I don’t get to complain?”
“Yes,” Eloise said. “I believe that’s in the contract.”
“I had fun,” Claire said.
“That’s because you didn’t have to think of things to talk about,” Theo said. “You never have to think of things to talk about.”
“I wouldn’t say never,” Claire said. “It’s only because people have so many questions about ballet.”
Eloise took her arm off her eyes to look at her niece. “What do they ask you?”
“They ask what my favorite ballet is, and if I’ve done The Nutcracker. They tell me what ballets they’ve seen. Usually The Nutcracker.” Claire shrugged. “They ask if all the men are gay.”
Eloise laughed. “Haven’t they heard of Baryshnikov? Do women ask you that more, or men?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “I haven’t paid attention.”
From below they heard Josh’s footsteps on the stairs, then silence. “Shhhh,” Theo said, and she and Claire giggled childishly. “Where is everybody?” Josh called. “Why am I cleaning up by myself?”
“Up here!” Eloise shouted.
His footsteps resumed and Theo whispered, “Hide!” The girls giggled again.
“Now, children,” Eloise said. “Be nice to your brother.”
“We’re always nice to our brother,” Claire said, and it was true, they mostly were. Every so often two of the kids bonded in a way that excluded the third. Sometimes it was Theo who got left out, sometimes it was Josh, walking around with an aggrieved and mournful air. It was never Claire. Nor was she ever the one to instigate the excluding. She was the prize in a silent game of tug-of-war. For all Eloise could tell Claire didn’t even notice.
Josh came in the room slowly, nodding as if to say I see how it is. He stood over the bed and crossed his arms. Gazing up at him, Theo said, “Man, you’re tall.”
“Dude,” Claire said. “Dude, you’re tall,” and the girls giggled again.
Josh ignored them. “What do we have here?” he asked. “You guys snuggle like kittens in a basket while I pick up beer bottles?”
“We’re tired,” Theo said. “We’re not as naturally charming as you. We’ve been working hard.”
“Natural charm takes it out of you, too,” Josh said.
“I wouldn’t know,” Eloise said. “My charm is entirely unnatural.”
“You make it look easy, though,” Theo said. “Every time I looked at you, you had a circle of people around you, hanging on your every word.”
Eloise winced. “I talked too much,” she said. “You guys are supposed to stop me from holding forth like that.”
“People like to hear you talk,” Josh said. “You’re interesting.”
Eloise wanted to ask, “Am I really interesting? Or do I just coast on having once been interesting?” But for God’s sake, woman, spare the kids your self-pity. “Play something for us, would you?” she said to Josh.
“Oh, good idea,” Theo said. “I haven’t heard you play in ages.”
“Such demanding women,” Josh said.
“Come on, Joshy,” Claire said, and the nickname she’d used in her baby years worked on him, the way they’d all known it would. He shrugged in that agreeable way of his that sometimes drove Eloise mad—yes or no! she wanted to scream—and sometimes, like now, made her want to squeeze and kiss him like she had when he was a child, tousle his curls, bring out his sweet and joyful smile. He left the room to get one of his guitars, and Eloise said, “I’m surprised he’s willing to play.”
“It’s for Claire,” Theo said.
“It’s for all of us,” Claire said, and Theo said, “No, it’s not.”
Josh returned, sat in the chair at the end of the bed, and began to tune the guitar. “What should I play?”
“A lullaby,” Theo said and yawned.
“A lullaby,” Josh repeated. He strummed, strummed again, staring at the ceiling. Then he sang, his voice low and mournful, “Phone rings in the middle of the night. My father yells, what you gonna do with your life?”
Eloise laughed. Josh had started playing this melancholy version of the song—which at one point had been the girls’ favorite—years ago. He’d always loved taking familiar songs and changing the tone, making a sad song an upbeat jaunt, a happy song a dirge. Emotion for him was malleable, manageable, while for Claire it was a wave you rode, for Theo something you compartmentalized, analyzed, pretended you could control.
On the chorus they all sang. At the end of the song they clapped, but Josh wasn’t finished. “We had a party and now we’re tired. Oh, who is gonna clean up the house tonight? Oh, Theo dear, this party was your idea. You’d better go and pick up the beer. You’d better go and pick up the beer.”
“Everybody better stop saying the party was my idea in that resentful way,” Theo said. “The house will hear you and think you don’t like her.” She reached out to pat the wall. Eloise could remember her father doing the exact same thing, a million years ago. He’d loved the house like Theo did, told everybody who would listen how old it was, how sound its structure. “I love this house,” Theo said, with a little too much feeling. Oh, baby, Eloise thought, out of sympathy and guilt, even as she wished—heartily wished—that Theo would stop saying she loved the house, and what’s more would stop loving it. She reached down, circled her niece’s wrist with her finger and thumb. It was warm and bony, and though Eloise couldn’t have said what she meant by this, it felt much, much too small.
