The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  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.”

  “Anything Adelaide says is interesting,” Josh said. “Because she’s a pretty girl who’s not my sister. She could have said blah blah blah and I would have listened with my mouth hanging open.”

  “Maybe a little drool,” Theo said.

  “Because the ladies love drool,” Josh said.

  “Did you ask her out?”

  “No. Maybe you could take care of that for me.”

  “Being such an expert at romance,” Theo said.

  “No one’s an expert,” Eloise said.

  “None of us are winning any prizes there,” Josh said.

  “Well,” Claire said. They all turned to look at her like a spotlight had clicked on above her head. Claire had had boyfriends. They’d all seen her starry-eyed, and then awash in grief, but these passions stormed hard and passed quickly. If she was involved with someone now, she’d given no indication of it, and that was a surprise to all three of them. It was often hard to say what Claire was thinking, but, unlike them, she never found it necessary to hide what she felt.

  After a moment Eloise said, “Well, what?”

  Claire smiled. “You should see your faces,” she said.

  “Are you seeing someone?” Theo asked.

  “Someone in New York?” Eloise asked. They both tried to keep any trace of the hurt and surprise they felt out of their voices. Stop being so dramatic, they told themselves.

  Claire’s smile widened. “Don’t you know all ballet dancers are gay?”

  They all laughed, but they were still uneasy. It wasn’t like Claire to joke in that fashion. She normally smiled indulgently as the rest of them teased and bantered and topped each other’s sarcastic quips. They waited for her to say something more, but she didn’t. As they watched she sat up and stretched. Was she aware of them watching her? Was that what made her move her arm just so? Theo suspected it, Josh didn’t consider it, Eloise didn’t care. Claire’s loveliness was all that mattered. Her death-defying grace. “I’m going to go practice,” she said.

  The rest of them waited to speak again until she was gone. Then Theo said, “That was weird, right?”

  Her brother nodded. She was relieved that he agreed. Lately he’d seemed determined to contradict nearly everything she said, especially if what she said was in any way negative. According to him, Eloise’s friend Heather was not underfoot and presumptuous but trying to help. He had, at moments, struck her as either self-righteous or oblivious or both. Self-righteously oblivious. She’d expected him to dismiss any concern she might have about their sister, but she should have known better. He’d always been particularly attuned to Claire. They all had. “Should we ask her what’s up?” Josh asked.

  “I think we just did,” Theo said.

  “It’s not like her to keep things from us,” Eloise said. “Let’s just assume . . . ” Her voice trailed off. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to assume. “She can’t hear us, can she?”

  “No,” Theo said. “I’m sure she’s lost in concentration, practicing in front of the mirror. You know, dedicating her life to its essential purpose.”

  “Ah,” Eloise said. “Sounds nice.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Theo said.

  There was a moment of silence, in which none of them looked at the others, and then Josh stood. “I’m going to spy on Claire for a second,” he said. “And then I’m going to bed.”

  “Good night,” Eloise said, and Theo said it, too, but didn’t move to go. These days Theo’s essential purpose was, like Eloise’s, the study of history. Specifically it was her dissertation, a study of historic
al concepts of distance. Focusing was hard, though, when she was so distracted by all the petty, minor stuff. How bad the job market was, and all the strange and faraway places her friends had ended up moving, those lucky enough to even get jobs. After her parents died, she was expected to be the good one. That had been easy. It had been a relief, in fact, to have such a pressing reason to keep herself in check, because like any child she’d had her outbursts of temper or unreasonable sorrow, and she hated to lose control, she really did. She hated how she felt afterward, the emotional hangover, the embarrassment and guilt. She needed to be good for Josh and Claire, for Francine, and for Eloise, who’d given up her whole life for them. Eloise had tried not to show any regret about that, but even at eleven Theo recognized how hard Eloise had to work at it. She’d see the look on her aunt’s face, quickly hidden, whenever Harvard or Boston came up. The look on her face that spoke of everything she’d surrendered. Theo felt guilty enough at being the cause for the radical shift in her aunt’s existence. She wouldn’t add to her burden. Besides, she needed to focus on Josh, Josh, who had come completely undone.

  How Josh had cried. It had been terrible to watch him. Even now the thought of it made Theo’s eyes fill with tears. When their parents died Josh had been the one who fell apart, while Theo had soldiered on, and yet now Josh could talk about their parents with a distant, nostalgic fondness, while Theo had clung to the ache of their absence as if it were her best, her imaginary, friend. Her parents, who had been good parents, had become in Theo’s memory ideal ones. She loved Eloise and was grateful to her. But she’d never found anything that could replace what she’d lost in them.

  “Do you ever wonder what would have happened . . . ” Theo stopped and looked at Eloise. She couldn’t say what she’d been about to say. But she had to say something. Eloise was waiting for her to speak. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if Claire hadn’t come to my dance class and the teacher hadn’t seen her?”

  “You mean, would she have become a dancer?”

  Theo nodded. “We knew about Josh because he could play piano by ear. But what if we hadn’t had a piano, and he’d never come across one? Would that talent have found another way to emerge?”

  Eloise considered the question. “It’s strange to imagine being made for something and not knowing it.”

  “Right. Like, what if you could have been a great painter, but no one ever gave you a brush?”

  “That’s a fascinating idea. Do you think you’d live your whole life knowing something was missing?”

  “I don’t know. Now I’m trying to think if I have that feeling.”

  “Hmmm,” Eloise said. “That’s a dangerous pursuit.”

  “What if you’d been a natural filmmaker born before the invention of film?”

  “You would have been a painter, I bet. Or a writer, depending on the nature of your gifts.”

  “Maybe,” Theo said.

  “You know, I’ve never asked what made you start taking ballet.”

  Theo shrugged. “Mom wanted me to. She said I was too much of a mind person and I needed to do something with my body.”

  “You were only five!”

  “I know. But she said all I wanted to do was read and whisper with my toys and be alone.”

  “That’s what I was like.” Eloise laughed. Then, struck, she said, “Oh. I see. She didn’t want you to be like me.”

  “Well, she didn’t have much luck with that, did she?” They both laughed, but neither one of them felt very amused. Theo missed her mother, and feared she’d have been a disappointment to her, and wondered why those feelings withdrew but refused to go away entirely. And Eloise—she felt tears pricking behind her eyes. She remembered being five years old, tossed out of Rachel’s room when she’d wanted to play with Rachel’s dolls. The door had slammed in her face, her big sister screaming, “I don’t want you! Go away!”

  This was not the sort of thing she wanted to remember. Instead: Christmas break her junior year of high school, the party Rachel took her to. They’d gone out during a winter storm warning, because their parents weren’t the sort to stop them, and then while the world outside whitened and froze, Eloise got drunk and stoned and made out with a twenty-two-year-old reject who drove a Camaro. “He drives a Camaro,” Rachel kept saying as she dragged Eloise out to the car.

  The roads were so slick they could feel the tires slipping beneath them, barely catching the pavement. “We’re going to die,” Eloise said and started laughing. “And my last kiss was with a guy who drives a Camaro!”

  Rachel ignored her, hands gripping the wheel, eyes fixed on the road. What was that she was whispering under her breath? “I’m going to get you home, I’m going to get you home, I’m going to get you home.”

  Five miles an hour, slipping and sliding the whole time. And when at last the car was parked in their driveway, Rachel turned to her, wearing a smile of triumphant relief. “I got you home,” she said.

  3

  Josh did not, after all, look in on Claire. She deserved her privacy, even if she used it to hide something from the rest of them, and maybe she wasn’t doing that anyway. Plus there were occasions when, seeing the intense and certain focus with which Claire practiced, he doubted his own choices. For the most part he managed to exist in a doubt-free zone. For him to second-guess even one decision he’d made was dangerous. Doubts could so easily multiply.

  A month or so after his return to Cincinnati, when the relief he’d first felt at being home had begun to fade and he hadn’t yet gotten a job, he’d begun to wake in the night with a new song in his head. He’d imagine playing it aloud, then imagine never playing it. His heartbeat and his breathing would quicken, as though in a race with one another, and he couldn’t slow them, couldn’t stop the waves of adrenaline that flooded through him, couldn’t tamp down the frantic desperation. He told himself he never had to play a song again, but that didn’t help. He told himself he could play anytime he wanted, but that, too, didn’t help. The music itself panicked him, the fact that no matter what he did it was still in his head, building to the chorus, insisting on passion, when what he wanted was peace. The next day he’d be drained and nauseous, as after a stomach flu, and Sabrina would be on his mind. He’d hear the scorn in her voice as she said, “What do you think, you’re a rock star?” and he’d insist that no, he didn’t think that at all. He’d come back to Cincinnati to prove he didn’t think that.

  He stayed away from doubt as a preventative against nights like that. He’d told Eloise, once, about the heartbeat and the rapid breathing, and she’d said, “Oh, honey, you had a panic attack.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “My heart just beat fast. I probably drank too much coffee.” Eloise gave him a look so full of love and pity that it was almost unbearable. After that he never mentioned these experiences again. To make it through your days intact, it was important not to name certain things. Not a panic attack but a caffeinated heart. Not anger but exasperation. Not regret but nostalgia. Not grief, not self-loathing, not the conviction that you were a weak-minded fool so desperate for love that you’d handed your whole life over to get it. Certainly none of that.

  His room was still a shrine to everything he’d left behind, the guitars that lined the walls, the framed posters Eloise had begun hanging not long after the band started playing gigs. On the top shelf of the closet, there were even more posters, rolled into neat cylinders and held with rubber bands. He no longer wanted to live with these things, but to get rid of them would be to face the fact that he needed to get rid of them. He preferred to go on telling himself he wasn’t affected by these reminders, that he had no feelings about them that couldn’t be expressed by a casual shrug. Those guitars—he’d bought every one with such a giddy sense of entitled pleasure. The year the band made money he’d hired an accountant who advised him to invest in tax write-offs. Thus his personal museum of expensive instruments, all purchased not just because he wanted them—God, how he’d wanted them—but
in the service of fiscal responsibility.

  The one he held right now had been the last he’d bought, so expensive he’d practically had to hold his breath and close his eyes when he handed over the credit card. He went to replace it on its waiting stand, which, without the guitar that had sat on it untouched for the last six months, looked empty-armed and sad. Without making a conscious decision, he held on to the guitar instead. He sat on his bed with it and strummed idly. As if to hide from himself what he was doing, he turned his thoughts to the party. Had he had fun? Sure, he’d had fun.

  He’d anticipated a good time, at least a mild one. He’d never dreaded social occasions like Theo and Eloise, who dreaded even social occasions they’d instigated, though for a while after moving home he’d found himself wanting to avoid them. The questions about what had happened with the band, why he was home, what he planned to do next. The confused and sometimes disappointed expressions his vague and ambivalent answers provoked. Given the way people like Marisa behaved as though there was a hierarchy of places to live, and you got into L.A. or New York or Boston the way you got into Harvard or Yale, you’d think they’d have just assumed coming back to Cincinnati was tantamount to saying he no longer had any ambitions. Most of these conversations had already been dispatched over the past year, and had grown easier since he’d gone to work for Ben, a high school friend whose company made apps for mobile devices. So now, unless he met a stranger who knew his history, he no longer had to dread his own limp explanations.

  With Noah, for instance, Josh could talk music, and never get a glimmer that the guy had any inkling of the stake Josh had once had in the subject. He’d actually felt a hurt surprise that Eloise had never told Noah about the band, but he’d vanquished the feeling by reminding himself he was glad Noah didn’t know. He was spared the awkwardness of the moment when it became clear that this avid music fan—this guy who read Pitchfork like it was his daily devotional and drove an hour and a half to Indianapolis to see an obscure band—had never heard of Josh, or Blind Robots. Or that he had heard of them but didn’t like them. Or that he’d loved them, and couldn’t quite forgive Josh for bringing an abrupt halt to their career. It was freeing, instead, to talk, as they had after Claire interrupted his conversation with Adelaide, about the latest album from the National and how their live show compared to their recorded sound.