The Myth of You and Me (6 page)

I threaded my way through the crowd, avoiding Ruth. I passed through the library, swallowing the urge to tell the couple pawing Oliver’s precious books that he didn’t like people to touch his things, and found myself in the Hall of Ancestors. I looked at my name on Oliver’s family tree. “I just pretend to be a weak old man,” Oliver had said. “So you’ll let me lean on you a while.”

I lifted my wineglass and remembered it was empty.

“Do you have a cigarette?” somebody behind me said.

I glanced down to see a kid, no more than nineteen, looking up at me. He was not especially attractive, but I had a sudden, fierce urge to take him upstairs and remove his clothes. “No,” I said.

“You look like you smoke,” he said. “Do you?” He opened his palm to show me two dented cigarettes.

I shrugged. “Okay.” I set down my glass and followed him outside, where he led me around to the side garden, like we were guilty children, and lit both cigarettes in his mouth. When he handed me mine, I let my fingers linger a moment against his. I had never been a smoker, and hadn’t had even a casual cigarette in years, but I inhaled like a professional.

“What were you doing in there?” the kid asked.

“Trying to escape the deviled eggs,” I said. “Why?”

“You looked like you were thinking about something really cool,” he said. “I saw you earlier, at the funeral. There’s something about you. You really stand out.”

“I’m six foot two,” I said. “All I have to do is stand up.”

He laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “I’ve never seen a girl as tall as you.”

I blew out smoke and raised my eyebrows. “No?”

He shook his head. “I wonder how much taller you are than me.”

I took a step closer to him. “Turn around,” I said. He obeyed, and I turned, too, so that we stood back to back. I felt the heat of his skin through his shirt, felt him move to press his back more firmly against mine. I reached around and touched his head, then lifted my hand to my own. “Four inches,” I said, with total authority. I stepped away, disappointed that the warmth of his body offered no comfort. I licked my fingers and pinched the lit end of my cigarette until it went out, dimly aware through my wine-induced haze that I was burning myself.

The boy looked up at me like he was about to run up a mountain, then darted in for a kiss. He had to reach up to pull my head closer, and when he did I stepped back and slapped his face so hard that tears popped into his eyes.

“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He pressed a hand to his reddened cheek. A plume of smoke rose from his cigarette, which he must have dropped when I hit him. I stepped on it, bent to pick it up, and said apologetically, “Oliver doesn’t like litter in his garden.”

“Fuck,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips. “That hurt.” He sounded plaintive as a child.

“Good Lord,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

I felt unhinged—drunk and flirting with teenagers like a character in a Tennessee Williams play. “Is this really happening?” I asked the boy. “Am I really standing here?”

He dropped his hands and treated me to a disillusioned stare. “You seemed so cool.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good at that.”

Back inside,
I waited until Ruth’s son wasn’t looking to snatch a bottle of red wine from the box behind his bar. I stopped in the kitchen for a corkscrew on my way up to my room, where I found the box of photo albums I had been hauling, unopened, from town to town for years. I hefted all of this up the attic stairs. The attic was my favorite place in Oliver’s house. Up there, on the other side of that door, I couldn’t hear anything that went on below—no small talk, no platitudes, no come-ons from teenagers.

I set down my box and my bottle and stood for a moment in the dusty silence. The attic was vast, stretching so far ahead of me that it seemed to grow fuzzy at the outermost edge, like a far horizon. In the dim light everything looked brown, each mysterious shape a rumor of itself, not an object so much as a possibility. I was reluctant to turn on the light. For a moment I allowed myself to live in the mystery. Then I pulled a chain and the world brightened. Things were things again.

I’d been exploring the attic for years, and yet every time I climbed those stairs I stumbled upon a treasure I’d never seen before. There were pieces of furniture—a child’s armoire containing one black shoe, a cedar washstand, an old rocking chair for a very small adult. There were hardback suitcases, copper kettles, an enormous piece of stoneware with two handles on the lid. There were boxes—packing boxes, old liquor boxes, boxes for vacuums and fans and televisions. There were wooden crates stamped with pictures of fruit or the name Coca-Cola in swirly script. There was a wicker chest, a blanket chest, a steamer trunk, a footlocker in army green. Inside one box were telegrams announcing the combat deaths of sons, love letters between husbands and wives, a diary kept by Oliver’s grandmother that contained the entry,
Henry is dead. I am utterly alone.
Her grief lived in the attic, that single line on an otherwise white page as stark and sad as the day she wrote it.

In many of the other boxes were pictures—daguerreotypes and tintypes of unsmiling men with mustaches, unsmiling women with their hair in tight buns centered atop their heads. And there was my favorite—the tinted photograph of Billie, Oliver’s girl. Now I wondered how he’d left her behind, and why, and how it changed his life. Now I would never know.

I sat down next to the dollhouse, nearly as tall as my waist, a perfect replica of Oliver’s house. I had the stupid thought that if I opened it I would find a tiny version of him, not dead, but asleep in his blue recliner. I resisted the urge to check, muttering, “Stupid, stupid,” to myself as I wrested the cork from my wine bottle. I should have thought to bring a glass; straight from the bottle, the wine went down harsh and left me spluttering. From my own box of photos, I selected the album from the final trip I took with Sonia, a long, meandering drive from Tennessee to New Mexico after college graduation.

It amazed me that I’d made this album, considering how the trip ended, and I tried to remember, but couldn’t, if I was angry or sad when I arranged the photos on the pages, smoothed the wrinkles out of each plastic sheet. The last picture was of Sonia, in the motel room in Big Bend, wearing a green clay mask. I remembered how pores were her latest beauty obsession, how I had been threatening to take her women’s magazines away if she didn’t stop talking about cleansing and tightening, how I raised the camera to freeze her there, half laughing, half annoyed, her hand flying up to conceal her strange green face. After that there was a blank page.

One night, late in that trip, Sonia had lined up all my exposed film in a row on the motel-room dresser and made me count the rolls. There were twenty-six. After that, whenever we stopped to admire something beautiful—the red mountains of New Mexico, a river winding deep between canyons in Big Bend—I tried to resist the urge to reach for my camera. I tried to look, really look, as though this took a kind of effort far greater than the movement of my eyes. You are here, I would say to myself, no part of this moment melting into the future. You are only here and nowhere else. But I could never believe it. So I would take a photo, to stop the world, so that I could keep moving. The photo was just an approximation, the world flattened and made small. But I could paste it in an album, put that album in a box, pack the box in my car, and drive. The best I could do was record where I had been before I kept on going.

Of the two of us, Sonia had the gift for photography, but she’d just stand there, arms on the guardrail, and gaze at the landscape like it didn’t matter what her memory lost.

I’d never answered her letter. I wondered how long she’d waited for a reply before she stopped hoping, whether she was married by now.

“I saw you slap my nephew,” Ruth said, startling me. I hadn’t heard her come up. I looked up from Sonia’s face to hers. “I went outside for a breath of fresh air, came around the corner, and pow.”

“He’s your nephew?”

“Well, grandnephew,” she said. “My husband’s, really. I don’t claim him.” She groaned, lowering herself to sit beside me. “It’s okay. I’ve no doubt he deserved it.” I saw her eyes go to the opal ring on my left hand, and moved it out of her line of sight. No doubt she’d think I wheedled a family heirloom from an old man.

“That’s a beautiful ring,” she said in a neutral voice. “Opals, right?”

“Oliver gave it to me.”

“Oh?” She reached for my hand, and reluctantly I showed it to her. She touched the ring. “Looks antique.”

“It belonged to his aunt. Your great-aunt. The one who lived here. You don’t recognize it?”

“No, and I’m surprised.”

“Surprised he gave it to me?”

She sighed. “Surprised she wore it. She was a superstitious woman, and her birthday was in June.”

“Oh.” I looked at the wine, wanting to drink it, wishing she would leave so I could. “I guess I’m braving the bad luck.”

“I guess so.” One corner of her mouth lifted in a rueful smile. She ran her hand down the roof of the dollhouse. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m looking at photos.” I flipped back a few pages, to a picture of Sonia leaning on an old-fashioned gas pump, somewhere on Route 66.

“Daddy’s?” Ruth asked.

I shook my head. “Mine.”

She leaned in. “Who is that?”

“An old friend.”

“She’s right pretty,” Ruth said. “As somebody used to say. Can you pass me that wine?”

Surprised, I handed it to her and watched her throat work as she drank. “My God, those people,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “They’re never going to leave.” She looked around the attic. “I haven’t been up here in a long time,” she said. “I’m not surprised you like it up here. Daddy always did. You and he are a lot alike.”

This disarmed me, although I wasn’t sure she meant it as a compliment.

“I was sorry we didn’t hear from you at the funeral,” she said.

“What do you mean? No one asked me to speak.”

She looked puzzled. “Didn’t you hear me at the beginning? It was an open mic.”

“Oh,” I said, chastened. “I came in late.”

“That explains it.” She smiled. “I’m glad to know that. I was rather offended.”

“I guess I was rather offended, too.”

Ruth sighed. “You always assume the worst of me, don’t you,” she said gently, and then she patted me on the leg. “Daddy always said you like to say no first.”

I was stung. “He said that?”

“He didn’t mean it as an insult,” Ruth said. “Although I’m not sure how it’s not. Oh, hell.” She took another swig of the wine. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not trying to insult you. I know you took good care of my father, and that he adored you. I’m grateful.”

I was staring at the photo album, blinking and blinking. Sonia’s face swam in and out of focus. “I was up here when he died,” I said.

She looked at me.

“I was reading your uncle’s letters from the war. I didn’t hear a thing,” I said. “He might have called out, I don’t know.”

Ruth picked at the label on the wine bottle with her thumbnail. She had a French manicure.

“I found him at the bottom of the stairs.” I swallowed. I could see him there, sprawled out, facedown, one hand on the bottom step, like he was trying to reach me. “I ran down the stairs so fast I stepped on his hand.”

Ruth flinched.

“I feel like I killed him, Ruth.”

“He was already dead,” she said.

I swallowed again. That didn’t matter. “I thought I could keep him from dying.”

Now she gave me a sympathetic look. “Oh, my dear,” she said, just like her father used to. “He was ninety-two. How could you possibly?” She handed me the bottle of wine and urged me to drink it, like it was medicine. When I had choked some down, she patted my shoulder. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do now?” she asked, brisk as a career counselor. Her thin lips were stained purple. “You must be qualified for any number of jobs. You could work in the bookstore. I assume you’re planning to stay in town. Where else would you go?”

I shrugged, too weary to bristle. That was Ruth, managing to insult you even when she was trying to be kind. I looked at a picture of myself striking a conqueror’s pose on the side of a mountain, both hands on my hips. “When do you need me to be out?” I asked.