The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  Adelaide. She’d been a challenging one. He’d done okay with her, though. He had a special skill with difficult or quiet people, because of his persistent interest in them. If he was aware of the effect of this interest, did that mean he was insincere? He’d asked himself this question many times and never arrived at a clear answer, so once again he set it aside. He had a lot of faith in the idea that he was a good guy. People were always telling him so, though these days not with the admiration he’d heard in their voices when he’d been semifamous and therefore could have claimed his right to assholery. On tour you started to believe most of the world was comprised of drunk idiots who irrationally loved or irrationally hated your band. It was easy to acquire both superiority and bitterness. He was glad he’d stayed a good guy in the face of temptation to be otherwise. These days it was the main thing he had going for him.

  When he’d gone to greet Adelaide, he’d found her still standing near the front door, as if she wanted to have her escape route clear. Claire had really, really wanted her to come to the party. Adelaide had been Claire’s teacher in the local company’s summer program for three years, and the person who finally persuaded her to audition elsewhere, outside of Ohio. Josh had never seen Claire so eager to impress someone. Claire had been taken with Adelaide from the beginning, but her admiration for her had reached a fever pitch this year, after she saw Adelaide dance the lead in Swan Lake. Claire couldn’t stop talking about Adelaide’s “quality of movement,” which was a phrase Josh liked, even if he wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.

  Adelaide looked stricken when he spoke to her, but maybe that was just the effect of her big eyes in her small face. She said that it was nice to meet him like it was her name, rank, and serial number, and then clamped her mouth shut. She glanced at him once and then looked away. Where others might assume arrogance or lack of interest, he assumed shyness and dove in. “So tell me something I don’t know about the ballet,” he said.

  Adelaide stiffened. “Something you don’t know,” she repeated.

  “There’s probably a lot I don’t know,” Josh said. “Even though my sister’s a dancer.”

  “Probably,” Adelaide said.

  Josh arranged his face into an expression of pleasant expectation and went on waiting for her to talk. After a moment Adelaide shifted a little from her dancer’s stance, dropped her hands from her hips, surrendered just a bit. “What kind of something do you want to know?”

  “Something that will prove to my friends I met a professional ballet dancer,” he said. “Something only you would know.”

  “Why not ask Claire?”

  “Oh, she’s my sister.” He smiled. “You don’t talk to your sister.”

  Adelaide smiled back, and then let the smile fade, as though uncertain about whether he was kidding. “Something you don’t know,” she said again. She considered the question, and while she did he studied her appearance in a way he didn’t study Claire’s, because she was his sister, because he saw her all the time. He was struck by how small this woman was. Or small wasn’t really the word, because she was at least five foot eight. Skinny didn’t work either, the way it suggested scrawniness and pigtails, or anorexia. Slender, that was it. Small-breasted, long-necked, long-fingered. Was it the slenderness of her arms that made her hands seem outsize? Josh had an urge to hold his palm against hers to compare.

  Finally she said, “Every season we go through a hundred pairs of pointe shoes.”

  “The whole company?”

  She shook her head. “Each of us.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head again. “I’m in charge of the shoe ordering.”

  “What’s it like having those on, anyway?”

  “It’s . . . Well, we joke that dancers must be masochists.”

  “That bad?”

  “A little bit. There are days when by four o’clock I want to scream. All I want to do in the world is take those shoes off. You’re watching the clock. Ten more minutes, nine more minutes.”

  “You’re making my feet hurt just talking about it,” Josh said. “Is it like that all the time?”

  “No. And not when you’re performing. You don’t think about your feet at all then. You get onstage, and life comes alive.” All of her shyness, if that’s what it had been, was gone. She had a glowing look of conviction on her face.

  Josh understood. He understood profoundly, and he both wanted to tell her this and to flee, because something seemed momentarily to be wrong with him. There was a glitch in the system. His social easiness was gone. Life comes alive. Was he about to touch her? Was he about to say the wrong thing? “Oh, shit,” he said. “Nobody offered you a drink.”

  “Oh.” She blinked. “Hey, you’re right.”

  “What would you like? My skills are limited but I can do a gin and tonic.”

  “That sounds good,” she said. She smiled at him in a way he recognized, a way that said she found herself inclining toward him. This, too, made him feel torn between embracing her and hitting the road. “Be right back,” he said.

  He passed Theo on his way to fix the drink, and caught her looking at Noah and Marisa with a funny expression on her face. “You okay?” he asked.

  She ignored the question, lifting her chin in the direction of Adelaide. “You going to ask her out?”

  “What?”

  “You have that look about you,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that look?”

  She made an exaggerated expression of interest, leaning in close. He couldn’t tell whether she was being hostile or just trying to tease him, but either way it pissed him off. “I’m not going to ask her out,” he said in lieu of fuck off, and then he brushed past his sister in the direction of the bar.

  Theo hadn’t been entirely wrong, though. Maybe he’d like to ask Adelaide out, he thought now, alone in his room, but he’d had to work a little too hard with her, in a way that reminded him of Sabrina. He’d told himself his next girlfriend wouldn’t make him work quite so hard, though he had to admit the last couple girls he’d dated had been so easygoing he’d found himself bored. Theo liked to imagine that his romantic life started and stopped with Sabrina. In fact, there had been girls before and after. Hell, he’d been in a band. And why, having argued so relentlessly in favor of his breakup with Sabrina, did Theo want to give him a hard time about considering someone new? Theo had always been such a good big sister, supportive and protective and reliable. Despite the depths of his resentment of the way she’d behaved about Sabrina, part of him understood she’d acted out of love. So he was baffled and stung by her recent prickliness. Ever since he’d quit the band, she seemed disappointed in him, disappointed by everything about him. Lots of people disapproved, but she was the only person whose opinion mattered enough to make him feel like a failure. He found himself retreating behind a wall when he was with her, which was not unlike how he’d felt with Sabrina toward the end. He tried to keep all of this out of his tone, to answer in the light, bantering way that was their usual style, because his approach to conflict was to behave like everything was fine in the hopes that it eventually would be. Like pretending you’re asleep until you are, Theo had said to him, in one of her many speeches about his relationship with Sabrina.

  He registered the notes he was playing on the guitar and stopped. The last few days he’d had a riff on repeat in his head. He’d done his best to ignore it, this nascent song, but now he was playing it aloud. The part of his brain that wrote songs refused to get the memo about quitting from the rest of him.

  The door to his room swung slowly open and he saw Theo there, hands in her pockets, nudging the door with her foot. “Heard you playing,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He stood and crossed the room, put the guitar back in the stand, where it belonged.

  “Sounded good,” Theo said.

  “Thanks.” He didn’t want to be so guarded, so brusque, so braced for argument. To counteract his tone he turned to his big sister and
smiled.

  But she was frowning. “Do you think we should be worried about Claire?”

  “I don’t know, T,” he said. “You’re basing an awful lot on one weird moment.”

  Now she flashed her smile. “I overthink things,” she said.

  “That you do.”

  She nodded. “It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that she’s leaving,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Do you think you’ll stay here?”

  “I don’t know.” Josh frowned. “I don’t think any decision has to be made.”

  “No, I guess not,” she said. “It’s different for me. I’ll have to go somewhere else, if I want to get a job. In fact everyone wants me to send out applications in the fall. The dissertation would be done by the time I started somewhere. At least I hope it would.”

  “So are you going to do that?”

  “Eloise thinks I should.” She drew a half circle on the floor with her toes. “One of my friends is about to start at the University of North Dakota.”

  “That’s far,” Josh said.

  “It’s really far,” she said. She seemed about to say something else, then didn’t.

  “The party was fun,” Josh offered.

  She nodded again. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I’m glad.”

  “Good job with it.”

  “Oh, thanks. Thanks for helping.”

  “I didn’t really do much.”

  “You talked to people,” she said, and he wondered why she sounded so unhappy. He thought about asking. If she had been anyone else, he knew he would have asked. “Anyway,” she said. “Good night.” And then she backed away, and pulled the door until it shut.

  4

  In the car on the way to the airport three days later, Josh and Theo fought about what to do once they got there. Claire sat in the front seat, and she and Eloise both kept their eyes on the road ahead while in the backseat the other two squabbled like children. “She doesn’t have a lot of time before her flight,” Theo said. “It’ll be faster to just drop her at the curb.”

  “We should park and go in,” Josh said. “This isn’t just any other trip.”

  “It’s not like we can go with her to the gate,” Theo said.

  “I miss going with people to the gate,” Eloise said. “Picking people up at the gate. It was much nicer that way.” No one responded.

  “But we can go with her to security, and say goodbye where you can actually hug,” Josh said. “If we’re not going to do that, why did we all come?”

  “To see her off,” Theo said.

  “Right,” he said. “Dumping her at the curb like a piece of luggage isn’t seeing her off.”

  “I didn’t say anything about dumping her,” Theo said. “That was your word.”

  “But it was your idea.”

  Theo folded her arms and blew out air. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  “Great,” Josh said. “That makes a nice change.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, just shut up,” Eloise said. She glanced at Claire, whose expression was pained. “Shut up, both of you.” They did, thank God, because Eloise was on the verge of threatening to ground them. When she wanted them to be children again, this was not what she meant. She glanced at Claire again, testing her own feeling of calm acceptance. She’d expected to feel sadder when Claire left. And maybe she still would, maybe she’d collapse in tears outside airport security. But maybe she wouldn’t, because it was right for Claire to go. Of all the kids she’d always been on the clearest path.

  Eloise had done one sentimental thing this morning, and that was to pull from the top shelf of her closet the small, ornate mirror she kept up there. The mirror had been her mother’s, but unlike most of her mother’s things she’d kept it. She’d not only kept it but laid it carefully in a high back corner, where it would never be disturbed. This was because of the handprint three-year-old Claire had left on it, white and a little smudged, souvenir of a day when she’d insisted on applying her own sunscreen and had gotten it everywhere. Eloise had yelled at her. She’d been furious. They’d been late for swim lessons, and this was early in Eloise’s mothering years, when getting all three children out the door often seemed like an insurmountable task. Not only had Claire coated her hands and face and some of the floor with a gloppy layer of sunscreen but she’d run away from Eloise when she tried to catch her to clean it up. She’d scrambled up the stairs, leaving a white trail all the way to the third floor, where she’d found this mirror and put her hand on it. Eloise had finally caught her gazing with intense concentration at her own face, and when she scooped her up and away Claire fought her, screaming, “I want to see it! I want to see it!” Two or three years later Eloise had gone to take the mirror down and found the handprint. In all that time no one had cleaned it. Well, who would have? Every day Eloise fought a rising tide of papers and pencils and clothes and toys on the first two floors. She could barely summon the energy to get up the stairs to the third. But the handprint didn’t make her feel guilt at this negligence. She felt—well, what had she felt? By then Claire was five or six. Still little, yes, but not this little. Eloise felt awed, that was it. Awed and moved by this evidence from an earlier age, like an explorer discovering drawings in a cave. She’d put the mirror away, but it was the handprint she’d wanted to keep.

  “I want to see it!” Claire had cried. What had the it been? The sunscreen? The mirror? Or just her own image? Certainly Claire had spent a large portion of her life staring at herself in the mirror, evaluating what was right, correcting what was wrong. But Eloise didn’t think of Claire as vain. Or rather, she saw vanity as a dancer’s necessary attribute. “I’ll miss you, Claire.” She said it quietly, for some reason not wanting the two in the back to hear her.

  Claire looked so unhappy. Really, wasn’t she excited at all? “I’ll miss you, too,” she said. Then she nearly whispered, “I love you. You’ve been a good mom.”

  “Oh,” Eloise said, and suddenly her calm was gone, replaced by barely held-back tears. She didn’t think any of them had ever used the word mom or mother or another one like it to describe her or anything she did. “Thank you,” she said. She wondered what Rachel would think. She hoped Theo and Josh hadn’t heard.

  Theo had heard, though, and was absorbing not just what Claire had said but her own hurt and angry reaction. She shouldn’t blame Claire for thinking of Eloise as her mother. Claire remembered nothing of their parents, or their deaths. It still amazed Theo that they’d all lived through a life-changing event only three of them recalled. In Claire’s world her parents’ death had essentially never happened, which left Theo both envious and glad. Claire didn’t know what she’d lost. She didn’t share Theo and Josh’s memory—passed back and forth so often they no longer knew who’d originated it—of the warmth of their mother’s skin when she came in from working in the garden, the way all summer her nails had dirt under them because she gardened in old, frayed gloves with holes in the fingertips, the way she wore her headphones outside while she weeded and from time to time sang along to the music so loudly she must have forgotten she was the only one who could hear it. How delighted their mother had been each year when the first emergent fruits and vegetables appeared, as if the plants had done a magic trick. She’d drag Theo away from whatever book she was reading and insist she marvel at the world. Eloise was not that kind of mother. She was the kind who looked up distractedly from her computer when you asked her for help with your homework and said, “Oh. Can’t you figure that out by yourself?”

  At the airport Eloise dropped the three siblings off and went to park the car. Josh hefted Claire’s duffel bag through the automatic doors while Theo and Claire followed. Theo wanted to hook her arm through Claire’s, but something made her hesitate, even slow her pace, so that she fell a little behind her sister. Claire was really exagger
ating her dancer walk, Theo noticed. Usually she did that only with her dancer friends, all of whom dressed in the same tunic-and-leggings style and walked with their feet turned out, their legs leaping one at a time to the front. Look at us, that walk said. We know who we are. We know you admire what we do.

  Look at her baby sister: so secure, so sure-footed. Theo envied Claire her passion for dancing. She envied Claire all her passions. Claire was in so many ways so much more practical than Theo. Or if practical wasn’t the word, with her ballet-dancing ambitions, maybe grounded, or reasonable, or focused. And yet Claire’s life was the one with the all-consuming romances, the one with the overwhelming griefs. “You feel what you feel,” she’d said once. “And then you get over it.” In her voice had been the verbal shrug with which she often answered Theo’s questions about her nature, about how she lived her life.

  Without glancing back Josh went ahead to the line for automated check-in. Theo followed Claire over to the display of arrivals and departures, and they both confirmed that her flight was still on time. Then Claire turned, gave her an uncertain smile, and went on standing there. “Don’t you need to go with Josh?” Theo asked.

  Claire shook her head. “He can check me in,” she said. “I used his credit card to charge the flight.”