The History of Us (4 page)

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.

W
hen 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.

At her aunt’s touch, Theo wanted to cry. She felt as though Eloise had known her thoughts and wanted to comfort her, but of course no one knew her thoughts, and no one could comfort her. No one had noticed her absence from the party the half hour she spent hiding in the guest room on the third floor, before she steeled herself to face the happy couple. She didn’t want anyone to notice, her absence or anything else, but sometimes she wondered why she’d never taken Claire, at least, into her confidence, so that one person would understand the effort it took to hide her longing, and maybe help her admire herself for that effort, even as she hated herself for the feelings that made the effort necessary. Theo did not want to want what she wanted. Noah.

Fantastic!
he’d written in the email saying he would come.
Marisa will be in town.

Great!
she’d written back. She’d considered adding a second exclamation point, to emphasize how very much she meant it, but decided in the end that enthusiasm too overt might reveal the extent of her disappointment.

Her disappointment was ridiculous and embarrassing. She knew damn well that Noah was devoted to his girlfriend, as he brought Marisa up practically every time Theo saw him, which, toward the end of the last school year, had been a little too often, as Theo had taken to dropping by his office on the pretext of looking for Eloise. She’d sworn off this habit sometime in April, after going by and finding his office door closed and locked. She hated how bereft this made her feel, how not seeing him when
she’d hoped to see him ruined the rest of her day. Theo worked very hard to suppress her doomed romantic notions. She was successful enough in these efforts to have gained a reputation among her friends for a sharp-tongued, hilarious cynicism about love. Oh, she was tough. She was so tough that every time Noah spoke to her she had to fight a melting urge to giggle. Instead she would lean away, make wisecracks in a lower than usual voice. If only she smoked, those would be the perfect moments to light a cigarette. She was as smooth as a femme fatale, so cool she should have been filmed in black and white.

Noah, he was an excitable guy. The first time she met him, when Eloise had him over for a welcome dinner, he’d talked with such passion about the lifestyles of the ancient Americans that Theo had been as jazzed as you were after a good concert. He preached and she wanted to shout
Amen!
He made her want to clap and whoop, to give full rein to her enthusiasms. It made little sense to try to attract a guy like that with withdrawal and sarcasm, but she wasn’t trying to attract him, not at all. He had a girlfriend. Theo simply liked being around him. Or rather she just wanted to be around him. She didn’t exactly
like
it. Feeling jittery, and manic, and under pressure to utter the world’s most interesting remark—those weren’t things she liked. The whole thing was exhausting. She was an idiot.

Before the party she’d managed to focus on her to-do list rather than the fact that Noah would be coming, and that he was bringing his girlfriend. She threw herself into cleaning the house, because she’d told Eloise she would, and she had to buy wine and beer, because she’d taken that chore from Josh, and she had to make hors d’oeuvres, because she’d taken that one from Claire. She’d spent hours and hours on the photo album.
She needed distractions, and she also felt guilty because she’d been the one insisting on the party, which no one else wanted to have, and like anyone used to being thought of as the good one, the capable one, the responsible one, she preferred feeling overwhelmed and overworked to feeling guilty. And in the end had they had a good time? She hoped they had all had a good time.

“I saw you talking to Adelaide, Josh,” she said. “You looked pretty happy.”

“Oh yeah.” Claire lifted herself up on her elbows to look at Josh. “What was going on there?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“She is my teacher.”

“Was your teacher,” Eloise said. “Now she’s very nearly your peer.”

“She’s miles beyond me,” Claire said. Then, to Josh, “What were you talking about?”

“I was asking her about the ballet,” Josh said.

Theo laughed. “Whether the men are gay?”

“Yes, Theo, because that’s uppermost in my mind. No—stuff you’ve never told me, C, like how many pairs of pointe shoes each dancer goes through in a year.”

“I never thought to tell you that,” Claire said.

“Even if you had,” Theo said, “I bet it’s more interesting coming from Adelaide.”