The History of Us by Leah Stewart Page B

down Clifton to Ludlow, where the businesses were, the ice cream shop and the art-house theater and the New Age coffee shop that sold crystals and books about finding your inner Buddha. The stores had changed in the years since she’d been granted the right to walk down there by herself, but not all of them, not enough to make her feel the astonished discomfort of serious transformation. Theo had been twelve when Eloise first let her leave the house alone. She’d asked to go thinking Eloise would refuse, and she could still remember her nervous surprise when her aunt had said, “Sure, go ahead. I’ll see you later,” without even pausing to consider the question. Suddenly Theo’s sense of herself as mature, nearly autonomous, had melted, and all she’d wanted was for Eloise to pull her into her lap like a child. But she’d asked for permission and been granted it, so she had no choice but to set out alone, frightened and free. Now she was more than twice as old, and still her family retained their power over her. The power to wound, to disappoint, tomake her feel like a child, misjudged and abandoned, lost in the angry, sorrowful conviction that no one loved her, that she was alone in the world. She thought to call Claire, who would surely ratify her sense of betrayal, who would surely understand.
    Except Claire didn’t understand. She sounded distracted, preoccupied by New York City, by making it there, making it anywhere. She said, “I don’t know, Theo. Her reasons do make sense.”
    “How can you say that? We’re talking about the house .”
    “It’s not like she wants to sell you .”
    “Yes, it is,” Theo said, feeling both ridiculous and completely justified. “It’s like she wants to sell our childhood.”
    “You didn’t even live in that house until you were eleven.”
    Why did this statement of fact hit Theo like a slap? “I know that,” she said, her voice trembling. “That’s exactly the point.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Of course you don’t,” Theo said and got off the phone before Claire could press her to explain. The house was a map of her memories. In this room, I cut my finger with a bagel knife so badly I had to get stitches. In this room, I made out with a boy. In this room, I said goodbye to my parents for the last time. In truth she could barely remember what had happened in what room. Had she said goodbye to her parents in the kitchen? In the living room? On the stairs? Had she yelled goodbye from her bedroom, too absorbed in a book to come downstairs? She didn’t know. There was no one she could ask such a question. She had only the house to help her remember. If she lost it she’d be exiled from her history.
    She’d reached the business district. A family emerged from Graeter’s, licking ice cream cones. Theo turned away from their happy faces and called her grandmother. “It’s Theo,” she said.
    “Hello, Theodora.” Francine was the only person who ever called her that, out of perversity, Theo assumed, as she’d once overheard her grandmother say to Eloise that she still couldn’t understand why Rachel had saddled her with that name. “It’s like she wanted her to be from 1910,” Francine had said, and Eloise had snapped back, “I like it,” but there was no way to tell whether Eloise had meant that, or just instinctively contradicted her mother the way she always did. Theo’s own perversity was to be jealous that she had no mother to contradict, no mother to drive her crazy, no real-life woman to diminish the ideal one in her head, the one who would have always made her feel better, always known exactly what she should do.
    When Rachel had been alive she had been the dispenser of both justice and comfort. Few things had felt better to Theo than the moment she unburdened herself of a problem by telling her mother about it. Her mother, who would listen with her serious, sympathetic attention, pull her close, say, “Don’t worry, little worrier,