by Leah Stewart
“So what did you get me?” she asked when Heather joined her at the table.
“The Yeehaw Barbecue.”
“I’ve never had that.”
“You’ll like it. I know you will.”
Eloise smiled at her. “I’m glad you suggested this. I was having a crappy day.”
“The book?”
Eloise nodded. Eloise’s first book, about the history of marriage, had been published when she was only twenty-seven, and made her a star in the field. Unlike most first books by historians, Eloise’s was not a hairsplitting examination of a small sub-subject—divorce in 1950s Mississippi, say—but a book lauded for its ability to be both general and enormously detailed, its ability to appeal to both experts and undergrads. On the strength of it she’d been hired at Harvard. A few times, when a famous marriage went awry or divorce statistics were released, she was interviewed on morning talk shows. She could very easily picture the words prominent historian beside her name in The New York Times. Now, seventeen years later, she was a department chair at a small school with only a few more articles to her name and fifty-seven bureaucratic emails to answer. She’d taught at a midrung school without producing a second book for so long that her chances at ever moving to a better school were minuscule. She was trying to write a second book now, about location and identity, even though she’d have better luck publishing something else on her original topic. But what did she care, anymore, about marriage? Unless a number of things changed, that particular event was never going to happen to her. “I was just starting to write,” she said, “when Noah came by.”
“What did he want?”
“Oh, he was having a crisis of confidence and he wanted a pep talk. He’s doubting the whole research-and-writing process, feeling like it’s presumptuous to guess what people felt or thought a hundred and fifty years ago. He said what you’re writing is a historical artifact that may be more useful for understanding your own moment than the moment before you, because you probably, in his words, fucking got it all wrong. He feels dishonest.” She smiled. “Super dishonest.”
“Do you ever feel like that?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly. Maybe I worried about that in the past, but all I could think today was that he seemed so young, like I had Holden Caulfield in my office complaining about the world being full of phonies. I didn’t say that, of course. I said it was natural to have doubts, he had to trust himself, I knew a good person at Duke University Press to pass his manuscript to.” She spun the saltshaker around on the table. “I did my whole mommy-slash-coach thing. But then I was totally derailed from my own work. I started watching videos of flash mobs.”
Heather laughed. “You need to go to rehab for those.”
“But first I’d have to admit I have a problem,” Eloise said. She had lately developed a bit of an addiction to YouTube. She watched staged public outbreaks of dance and cried. She sat in her office with the door closed, smiling and weeping, while Belgians danced in a train station to “Do-Re-Mi,” Austenites zombie-stomped to “Thriller,” or Cincinnatians shimmied in the rain. What was it about these events that created this particular sensation of overwrought pleasure? The communion of the dancers, the gentle conspiracy. The expressions of the baffled witnesses, whose faces morphed from openmouthed surprise to childlike delight. The pure satisfaction of watching multiple bodies move as one through time. Because there was no reason for the dance! No tickets sold, no careers at stake. No reason beyond the aesthetic. It was a purposeless, beautiful thing.
“Did I tell you Josh and Noah have been hanging out?” Eloise said. “I’m glad. Noah needs more friends here. I don’t want him to leave.”
“Okay, but I think you’re worrying a little too much about Noah. I feel like he enters into every conversation we have.”
“Really?”
“Since Claire left anyway. If we’re not talking about whether Josh is stuck because he hasn’t really dealt with what happened with Sabrina, or whether Theo will ever live up to her potential, we’re talking about Noah.”
Eloise spun the saltshaker again. “It hasn’t been that long since Claire left.”
“So?”
“So I feel like you’re like, Claire’s gone! Forget the kids! Change your whole life!”
Heather sighed. “But that’s what you said you were going to do.”
“I know,” Eloise said.
“I assumed you meant it.”
“I did,” Eloise said. “I’m still bracing myself for the necessary conversations.”
“With the kids?”
“Yes, of course, because basically I’m kicking them out of the house. But I think I’m dreading the call to Francine even more. You know how I hate going to her as a supplicant.”
“So don’t,” Heather said. “Let her deal with the house for once. Just move in with me.”
“But then . . . ”
“I know, I know, I know.” Heather waved her hands in the air. “Stop telling me about the money.”
“Do you know how hard it’s been to make it on my salary with three kids and that house? I have no savings at all.”
“I know that, Eloise,” Heather said. “But I also know you always have some reason.”
“Money is a pretty damn good reason,” Eloise said. “I don’t want to be dependent on you.”
“No,” Heather said. “You’d rather have other people dependent on you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re so used to taking care of people you don’t know how to stop doing it. I mean, if you were trying to write, why did you let Noah in? Why didn’t you tell him to come back later?”
Eloise frowned. That had never even occurred to her, and it should have occurred to her, dammit. It would have certainly occurred to an earlier incarnation of Eloise. Somewhere along the way she’d lost the necessary selfishness to be a real scholar. “Maybe I just don’t want to write the stupid thing,” she said.
“I know this will make you mad,” Heather said, “but you don’t have to write it.”
“I have to write something.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to,” Eloise said. “But I have no idea what I want to say about location and identity. It seems like I conceived of this topic as some kind of excuse for living here.”
“You don’t need an excuse.”
“You know what I mean. A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.” Heather didn’t answer. Eloise watched her deciding not to speak and, impatient, spoke for her. “You’re going to say I’m the one who sees it that way.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You wanted to.”
Heather shrugged. “Why say it again?”
“If I give up on this book, what excuse will I have to bore you with this topic?”
“None,” Heather said emphatically.
“Better keep at it then,” Eloise said. Their food arrived, and for a few silent minutes they busied themselves with eating it. Then Eloise said, “What about this? And just hear me out. What if instead of me moving in with you, we both just moved away from here?”
Heather practically flinched, but once she washed down the bite she was chewing and spoke, her face and voice were calm. “Where would we go?”
“Boston?” Eloise said.
“You just said money was important,” Heather said. “What would we do for money?”
“We’d have to get jobs. I don’t know. Maybe I could pick up a class or two. They need midwives everywhere, right?”
“Sure,” Heather said. “But they probably have plenty there already. And I have a practice here. You have a job. We have friends. The cost of living is probably twice as high in Boston as it is here. I own a house, and I’d take a loss if I sold right now.”
Eloise sighed.
“You know I love you,” Heather said. “If moving to Bosto
n was what it took to be with you, I’d do it. But, Eloise, you won’t even tell your kids about us. You can’t bring yourself to move one neighborhood over. It seems extreme to go from that to moving halfway across the country.”
“I didn’t really mean it.”
“But I think you kind of do mean it,” Heather said. “I think you’ve had in your head all these years that once the kids were grown your life could go back to what it was, and you’re afraid that once you really commit to me it never will.”
“My life can never go back to what it was,” Eloise said.
“Yeah, but is that what you’re wishing for? If you could snap your fingers, would you rather have that than me?”
Before Eloise could think about it, she leaned across the table and kissed Heather full on the mouth. Then she fell back in her chair, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed. Heather watched her with an amused and rueful expression. “That would have been a bolder statement if I hadn’t gotten nervous after,” Eloise said.
“Close enough,” Heather said.
“I’m going to tell the kids,” Eloise said, and not for the first time.
“I hope you do,” Heather said. “They’re grown-ups. It’s been seventeen years.”
“What does that mean?”
“Their parents left them. They didn’t want to but they did. And you have to stop feeling like you failed them by not being the person their mother would have been. You have to stop trying to make up for their parents dying by refusing to live your own life.”
“There’s no way to make up for their parents dying.”
“I know, honey. That’s why you have to stop trying.”
“I know you want me to be different,” Eloise said.
“All I want,” Heather said, “is for you to embrace the life you’re living, and stop wishing it was something else.”
Eloise smiled, though without the effort she was making she might have cried. “That’s a lot to want,” she said.
“If you can’t do this for me, Eloise . . . ” Heather shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Heather pressed her lips together and shook her head again. Eloise saw tears in Heather’s eyes and felt alarm. She counted on Heather’s perseverance. She had the freedom to be wishy-washy only because Heather was sure. “Don’t talk like that,” Eloise said. “I surrender. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
7
Waking from an unintentional nap, Theo opened her eyes to the crack in the ceiling that had greeted her since she was eleven and moved into this room. She had a fondness for that crack, which looked to her like a rabbit. Unlike her aunt, Theo liked the fact of the house’s age, and the evidence of it: the crack in the ceiling, the creaky floorboards, the stained glass, the panel in the front hall with buttons for calling the servants, the cushioned window seats on either side of the front door, where ladies could sit and wait for their carriages to arrive. She’d always loved the house, even when it had been her grandparents’ house and not hers. In a room on the third floor Francine had kept old toys—artifacts not just from her children’s childhood but from her own and even her parents’—and to Theo the door to that room had been as close as she came to the magical doors in her favorite books. So many mysteries, so much bewildering evidence of the childhoods of people who seemed impossibly old. The ancient rocking horse, the wooden dollhouse, the doll loved so long she was nearly bald—Theo wasn’t sure where these things had gone, or when they’d disappeared.
At least in decor, the house looked nothing now like it had when her grandparents owned it. Francine had favored a style appropriate to the era when the house was built, lots of spindly-legged tables and chests with carved crowns and animal feet. “Let’s get rid of this junk,” Eloise had said, nearly as soon as her mother headed south. They’d sold most of it, and used the proceeds to fund purchases of midcentury modern. Theo had never argued with Eloise’s passion for disposal, but even these many years later she still regretted the elaborate vanity that had once been in her grandmother’s room and the four-poster bed that had belonged to her mother. She would have liked to spend her girlhood beneath the canopy of that four-poster, imagining the girls who might have slept in her room before her, wearing long white nightgowns and their hair in a braid. She had ended up a historian, after all.
Instead she’d always slept in one of two sleek metal twin beds, and ever since she’d moved out of a crib, Claire had slept in the other. Claire had had her own room, but she’d always wanted to be with Theo. She’d wanted Theo to sing to her until she closed her eyes. She’d wanted Theo to comfort her after bad dreams in the middle of the night. Many mornings Theo woke to find Claire curled against her, her small, warm back pressed firmly against Theo’s. Even when she was a teenager and Claire a child of six, seven, eight, Claire had clung to these rituals. Or Theo had. Sometimes, looking back, she wasn’t sure which.
Theo missed her sister. She’d been having trouble working. She knew what she was feeling—aimless, depressed, adrift—but she failed to connect these feelings to Claire’s absence. Like a lot of reliable people, Theo didn’t realize how much she’d come to depend on being depended on. Growing up, she’d had Claire and Josh, of course, and though she’d often resented the expectations that she’d drive Josh to music lessons and Claire to the ballet, that she’d help them with their homework, that she’d be their therapist, those expectations had given purpose to her life. In college she’d been the still, calm center of a group of people experimenting with various versions of craziness—she was the designated driver, the one who gave tough-love advice, who heard late-night confessions of frightening drunkenness and weird sexual encounters with inappropriately older men. By the time she got to grad school, she’d lost some of her taste for crazy, exhausting friends, but still she had her professors and her classmates and her students, all of whom needed her energy and her attention and her best, most sincere effort, which she tried at all times to give. Now Claire was gone, Josh might as well be, and she had no one else’s needs to give shape to her days.
She sat up, yawning, and resolved for the thousandth time to accomplish something with the remaining hours of the day. If she couldn’t make progress on the dissertation, she could finally update her CV. She could send out emails asking for letters of recommendation. She could start writing a cover letter and a teaching philosophy. Sure, all that could be done. But first, she needed to make some coffee, and maybe rummage through the pantry after something sweet.
She walked into the kitchen, yawning hugely again, and heard Josh saying to Eloise, “I have a date tonight, but I’m not leaving for a while.” They were leaning on the counter near the coffeepot, but it didn’t look like anyone had made coffee, or had any intention of doing so.
“You have a date tonight?” Theo said. “With who?”
“Adelaide,” Josh said stiffly, looking away.
“That’s nice,” Theo said, stung by his tone.
“What about you?” Eloise asked. “Do you have a few minutes right now?”
Theo hesitated, not because she didn’t have a few minutes but because she didn’t like the serious note in her aunt’s voice. “I’m writing,” she said, which maybe didn’t express the facts but captured her intentions. “I just came down for coffee.”
“I don’t want to interrupt you,” Eloise said. “We can talk later.”
“Now’s okay,” Theo said. “I don’t like suspense.”
Eloise didn’t respond to this, didn’t make a joke or say there was nothing to worry about. She sat down at the kitchen table and waited for the other two to join her. Then she said, “I’m not sure how aware you two are of my arrangement with your grandmother about the house.” She paused as though waiting for them to jump in, but neither did. Theo had no idea what was in Josh’s mind, but she was filled with a dread that kept her silent. “It was her idea that we sell your parents’ house and move in here, and then of course she le
ft for Sewanee. When she moved she promised to sign this house over to me, but she’s put that off over the years. A couple of years ago we agreed she’d do it once Claire was out of the house, and today she told me she was ready.”
“Okay,” Josh said, but warily, Theo noticed. He, too, must have sensed something bad coming.
“So,” said Eloise, “why am I telling you this? Well, guys, the thing is, once Francine does finally make the house mine, I want to try to sell it.”
“No,” Theo said, before she could think. “You can’t do that to us.”
For a moment Eloise looked stunned, as though a student at the back of the class had risen to denounce her. But then her look of surprise slid toward anger. “I’m not doing anything to you,” she said. “I’m hardly throwing you out today.”
“No, you’re throwing us out later,” Theo said.
Josh looked at his sister. “It might take a while for the house to sell,” he said.
“It might,” Theo said. “Or it might not. Josh and I still live here.”
Eloise made a visible effort at self-control. “But that’s temporary,” she said. “You’re adults. You weren’t going to live with me forever, and then I’ll have this enormous house I may or may not be able to unload. Josh is right. It might take a while—it might take a year or two or more in this market—and I can’t afford to wait much longer.”
“Is that all the house is to you?” Theo asked. “Just something you have to unload?”
“Theo,” Eloise said. “This is a very expensive house to maintain. I’ve put a great deal of money into it, and as a result I have almost nothing in the way of savings.”
“What about the money from my parents’ house? What about their life insurance?”
Eloise made an incredulous sound. “You think I kept that money for myself? It went into your college funds. It’s where I got Claire’s start-up money for New York.”
