The History of Us
Authors: Leah Stewart
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For Eliza and Simon
The City is, indeed, justly styled the fair Queen of the West: distinguished for order, enterprise, public spirit, and liberality, she stands the wonder of an admiring world.
—B. Cooke, in the
Inquisitor and
Cincinnati Advertiser
, May 4, 1819
“Why has he not done more?” said Dorothea, interested now in all who had slipped below their own intention.
—George Eliot,
Middlemarch
1993
E
loise Hempel was running late. She was forever running late, addicted
to the last-minute arrival, the under-the-wire delivery, the thrill of urgency. That morning, unable to find a parking spot less than half a mile away, she’d jogged most of the way to campus in her painful high heels, slowing as her building came into sight in hopes that her breathing would normalize, the sweat at her hairline somehow recede, before she took her place at the front of the classroom. She was the professor. For two months now, she’d been the professor, and still she found it hard to believe that anybody believed that. Couldn’t they see, these shiny young people who filled her classroom, how nervous she was? Couldn’t they hear her heart’s demented flutter? Hadn’t they noticed the time she misspelled
hegemony
on the board? Didn’t they think twenty-eight was ridiculously young to be teaching them anything?
No, because she was the professor, the one imbued with the mysterious authority of knowledge, the power to humiliate the students whispering in the back row. As she climbed the stairs inside her building students broke around her like water around
a rock. Or maybe they were fish, spawning fish in casual but expensive clothes, and she was . . . what? She was the one trying to look older in a black blazer and a bun. Saying the word
professor
to herself made her smile in a way that people noticed, made them ask, “What are you thinking about?” and when that happened she had to concoct something amusing, something profound, because “I’m a professor at Harvard” would sound either arrogant or childish, depending on her audience.
She was hustling past the History Department office, her classroom visible, when she heard someone calling her name. She took a step back to stick her head inside the office door. Redhaired Kelly at the front desk was holding the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. “This is actually for you,” she said. “I was just about to transfer the call when I saw you go by.”
Eloise hesitated, glancing at the clock on the wall behind Kelly’s head. Only two minutes left before class.
“I think it’s family-related,” Kelly said, and Eloise sighed and approached with her hand out, prepared to tell her mother that not only could she not talk now but she had to stop calling her at school, for God’s sake. Eloise lived nearly nine hundred miles away and couldn’t help her mother with her grandchildren, who were staying with her while their parents were on an anniversary trip to Hawaii. It was no surprise that her mother, who was best suited to life in a sensory deprivation chamber, couldn’t handle the three kids, even for a few days. But what did she expect Eloise to do about it?
She took the phone and flashed a pained smile at Kelly, who lifted the phone cord over her computer, adding length to Eloise’s leash. “Mom,” Eloise said, skipping
hello,
“I’ve got two minutes.”
She rolled her eyes at Kelly. For some reason Kelly shook her head.
“Hi, Aunt Eloise,” a child’s voice said.
Surprised, and embarrassed by her mistake, Eloise raised her eyebrows at Kelly, who shrugged and then made a point of looking at her computer screen. “Theo?” Eloise asked. Theo—Theodora—was her sister Rachel’s oldest child.
“It’s me,” the girl said. “Francine asked me to call you.” Her voice was oddly flat.
Eloise frowned. It still irritated her that her mother had her grandchildren address her by her first name. Of course she didn’t want to be a grandmother; she’d barely wanted to be a mother. She was a woman for whom the word
overwhelmed
was equivalent to
abracadabra
. She said it, then she disappeared. “Why’d she have you call?” Eloise asked. “Not that I’m not happy to talk to you.” Theo was a remarkably adult eleven-year-old, but still it was a bit much to delegate the responsibility of complaining about the children to the children. Come on, Mom, Eloise thought. Keep it together for once in your life.
“My parents,” Theo said.
Eloise turned away from Kelly, hunching into the phone. Something in the child’s voice made her feel a need for privacy. “Your parents?”
“My parents,” Theo said again.
Eloise heard her swallow. “Theo?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Theo said. “I’m trying not to cry.”
“Why?”
“Francine’s in bed. Somebody has to look after Josh and Claire.”
“Theo, please,” Eloise said. “Tell me what’s happened.” Or don’t, she thought. Please don’t. The whole world had gone quiet. Her students were in her classroom. They waited in neat rows for her to arrive.
“My . . . ” Theo abandoned the phrase. She tried again. “They were in a crash. They were in a helicopter. It was a helicopter tour, and it crashed. It crashed into a cliff.”
In Eloise’s mind, a helicopter bounced off a cliff and kept on whirring. “Are they all right?”
“Aunt Eloise!” Theo’s voice was full of pained impatience. “They crashed into a cliff!”
The girl was trying not to say they were dead, that her parents were dead. Eloise understood that. But the fact that they were dead, that her sister, her sister—oh, Rachel! That she couldn’t understand. “What do you mean?” she asked.
Theo took a breath. “Francine wants you to come home,” she said.
Her sister was dead. No, no, no. Eloise couldn’t think about that. She would think about that later. Here was the thing to think about now: her mother, her selfish, helpless mother, and the burden she’d placed on this child. “How could she, Theo?” Eloise asked. “How could she make you be the one to call?”
Theo didn’t seem to understand the question. “Somebody had to,” she said.
Eloise closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. She gripped the phone hard. “All right, Theo,” she said. “Thank you for letting me know. I’ll be home as soon as I can get there.”
“Thanks, Aunt Eloise,” Theo said. Her voice shook just a little as she said goodbye.
Eloise hung up the phone. She tried to smile in the face of
Kelly’s curiosity like nothing was wrong. “Family stuff,” she said. Then she went to class. Her feet just took her there. She walked in and said, “Sorry I’m late,” as usual, and she arranged her books on the desk at the front of the room and her notes on the podium, and then she smiled at them, her students, and said, “So.” They waited for her to begin. What was she supposed to talk about? Their faces were blinding. She dropped her gaze to the podium and noticed with detachment the way her hands gripped it, as if the room was shaking. How odd—her hands were beginning to recede. Were her arms getting longer?
“Professor Hempel?” someone said, and she looked up, startled to be called by that name.
Rachel had always been good in a crisis. Rachel had always taken
care of her. Rachel would not have let her go to class. Rachel would not have chosen an eleven-year-old child to break the news, forcing Eloise to behave in this calm and unnatural way. Rachel would have let her go to pieces. Rachel would have expected her to. Instead Eloise taught her class, if not particularly well, and then when she got home she called the airline and booked a ticket for the last flight out that day, and then she packed. How long to pack for? She had no idea, so she took her biggest suitcase and stuffed it full. Then she made more calls—explaining, canceling classes. She used the phrase
family emergency
. All the while she watched herself with a bewildered combination of admiration and fear. She’d been possessed. Some other self controlled the movements of her body, the words that came out of her mouth, while her actual self trembled in a small and darkened corner of her mind. “You need to call a cab,” she said out loud to herself, and then she went to the phone and dialed.
Cincinnati sprang itself on you all at once. Eloise forgot that, in between trips home. As you headed up the interstate from the airport in Kentucky, the view was nothing but hills, and then you came around a bend and—ta da! There it was, place of your birth, past-its-prime Rust Belt queen of the Lower Midwest, with a skyline and everything, just like an actual city. And then the house—for a while it had looked smaller than she remembered, but now, coming straight from her tiny Cambridge apartment, she saw it as huge. Gargantuan. Obscene. She stood on the sidewalk with her bag for a few minutes after the cab pulled away, staring at the house,
her
house, feeling an old, familiar urge to flee. Her father was dead. Her mother was self-involved, self-justifying, selfish, any variation you could imagine of self, self, self. Her sister was the one she came home for. Her sister who’d married young, had children, bought her own house in her hometown. Her sister’s firm embrace, that shared look of amused recognition when their mother announced, after half an hour with the children, that she needed a drink. Her sister’s calm and soothing voice, her sister’s understanding and reassurance, her sister’s love of exotic skin products, her one real indulgence, the jars and bottles arrayed in her bathroom, the way she’d smooth cool, thick, sweetly scented cream over the circles under Eloise’s eyes.
There. That will fix everything.