“Why would you write yourself a letter?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t think I did.”
“This is delightful,” he said. “You have a secret identity. Hidden even from yourself. Maybe you’re another person.”
I rolled my eyes at this, but it did give me a strange feeling, to see my own name in my own handwriting like that, as though somewhere out there was indeed another me. Oliver pushed out a chair. “Sit down,” he said. “For God’s sake, open it.”
I sat down. I opened it. Of course I hadn’t written the letter, but I felt no less strange when I saw who had. The letter was from Sonia Gray. In high school we practiced until our handwriting was so similar even we couldn’t tell it apart. This made it easy for me to do her math homework for her, and for us to sometimes leave our names off our math tests, so that I could claim hers, and she mine, because my math grade could survive the occasional fifty, while hers could not. We called this “falling on the fifty,” and every time I did it I felt flushed with an exhilarated beneficence. Because I couldn’t imagine why Sonia was writing to me now, nearly eight years after we’d parted, it did seem to me that all times existed at once, that she’d mailed the letter from someplace years ago. That was why our handwriting was still identical, neither of us having altered at all the elaborate girlish loops in our
L
s and
Y
s.
“Well?” Oliver asked.
I ignored him, holding the letter away from his curious gaze.
Dear Cameron,
I had a dream about you tonight, and now I can’t sleep. I can’t even remember exactly what the dream was about—there was something about snow cones, though you and I never ate snow cones together, that I can recall. We did eat a lot of those Oreo shakes from the Taco Box. And remember how we used to stir syrup into milk and make those vanilla wafer sandwiches with peanut butter? It all sounds ridiculously disgusting now.
I’ve been thinking about you ever since I got engaged. My first impulse afterward was to call you with the news. Isn’t that odd? It was like I was a kid again, and we were planning our imaginary weddings, back when I was certain you’d be my maid of honor and I’d be yours. It took me a moment to remember we weren’t friends anymore. Ever since, I keep having this feeling I’m forgetting to do something. I look at my list—I’ve called the caterer and talked to the florist—and it takes me a while to realize, because it’s not on the list, that the only thing I haven’t done is talk to you.
I have that middle-of-the-night strangeness, when it feels like you’ve fallen out of your normal life, and maybe that’s why I’m writing to you now, as if we were friends like we used to be. Somewhere somebody’s playing Madonna, her first album, I think it is. Why do they have that on at three in the morning? Isn’t this traditionally a more melancholy time? Maybe they’re trying to counteract melancholy. Maybe “Borderline” is the only thing between them and suicide.
You and I used to make up dance routines to Madonna songs. Remember the playroom at my house? All those boxes along the wall, full of childhood discards—an old dollhouse, the Ewok village, a box of stuffed animals loved into ruin. You and I dancing in the middle, doing what we thought were sexy moves. Don’t you think that’s symbolic? Loved into ruin. I just invented that phrase. I like it. On occasion I’ve felt like that’s what’s happened to me. Remember the sock monkey with no mouth? I hated that thing. The bottom half of its face was just a blank. I think my mother still has it in the house, probably to spite me. Remember when we were walking across campus to take a final exam and a bird fell dead at our feet? It wasn’t some small brown finch, either, but a cardinal. A red splash. You poked it with a stick. It was truly dead. We were juniors in college but we held hands the rest of the way, we were that unnerved. Remember when we drove up to Sewanee to see that boy I was dating, I can’t even remember his name now, and the three of us went skinny-dipping in the reservoir? It was so black, and the stars were everywhere, and the boy was stupid and kept splashing around, but you and I floated away on our backs, and you said that floating there and looking up at the sky was like not existing in the best possible way. I said we should make up a myth about two maidens and the water, but we never did. I guess it’s a myth now anyway.
Maybe that’s the point of this letter. Is it a myth? Is all of this a myth, what it was like when we were best friends? What I’m wondering now, in the middle of the night, is did those things actually happen? Sometimes without you to confirm these memories I feel like I’ve invented them. It’s a little like being orphaned. That sounds really dramatic, I know, but since I’m a half-orphan I think it’s okay for me to say it. There are things about my life that no one else has ever understood.
I wonder about your life now. Do you think about any of this, the myth of you and me? Do you wonder why we were friends, why we aren’t anymore, why we made the choices we did? Do you wonder how things might be different if we hadn’t? You were never as enamored of this kind of thinking as I was, but even you must admit that parting was a turning point in both our lives. For a while we were practically the same person, you and I.
I don’t know what I want from you. I can imagine you dismissing this letter—I think that would be your first impulse, to consider it ridiculous of me to contact you after all this time, no matter what the reason, especially if the reason is this strange feeling I have that you should still be my maid of honor, that if you’re not, some part of my past is erased, something left unfinished. I think this even though I know if you were it would be terribly upsetting to Suzette. So I don’t know if I’ll even send this, though I did track down your address.
I don’t know how to sign this, so I’ll just put my name.
Sonia
Oliver was waiting for me to speak, but I couldn’t formulate a thought. Somehow it seemed even stranger that the letter had come from Sonia as she was in the present, a woman about to get married, than if it really had been mailed years ago by the girl I’d known. She’d gone on getting older, but my memory had frozen her in time, running after my car at that West Texas gas station. I suppose I’d imagined that if I went back, I’d find her still waiting there.
“Huh,” I said. I folded the letter, put it in the envelope, and set it back on the table. Then I returned to the counter. There were still sandwiches to make.
I tried to concentrate on the task at hand, peeling the plastic off a piece of cheese, but it was impossible not to think of the letter. I did want to dismiss it, but couldn’t, because Sonia had suggested that I would, and I was annoyed by the presumption that she still knew me that well. I remembered our dance routines, of course, and the sock monkey and the skinny-dipping. I remembered the bird, too—that bad omen—but I didn’t remember Sonia being there when it hit the ground. I saw only myself staring at it, a red splash, as Sonia said, next to a clod of dirt and someone’s lost earring. It unnerved me now, to picture her there with me. It called other memories into question. When were we together? When was I alone? Had I erased her from the picture, or had she added herself? I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that my past was imaginary, that I really had written the letter myself. Did I want to be her maid of honor? Wasn’t that stupid after all this time?
Behind me, I heard Oliver rising from his chair, but I didn’t move to help because I knew he hated to be seen struggling with a simple task. I listened to the shuffle of his feet, the soft thump of his cane as he approached. He stuck his finger in the jar of mayonnaise. As I turned to scold him, he put his finger in his mouth, licked off the mayo, and grinned. “So, my dear,” he said, “what is this great and terrible secret? My curiosity is piqued.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew. He’d read the letter, of course.
“I mean this girl. And how you parted. Why have you never mentioned her before?”
He reached for the mayonnaise jar again, and I snatched it back and replaced the lid, tightening it with unnecessary force. “That’s unsanitary,” I said. “And
that
”—I pointed at the letter—“is my personal mail.”
“You left it there on the table,” he said. “In full knowledge of my nature. You knew I’d read it.”
I recognized the expression on his face, the mixture of intensity and detachment. I’d seen it on other occasions when he caught a hint of something he didn’t know about me, some avenue he hadn’t yet explored. “I’m not a research subject,” I said.
“At this moment you are. If I tell you you’re far prettier and more interesting than any of my other subjects, will you tell me the story?”
“I’m prettier than William Faulkner?” I took the mayonnaise back to the refrigerator and got out the milk. “How flattering.” I didn’t look at Oliver, instead keeping my gaze on my hands as they lifted down two glasses, poured the milk. I was sorry to have a witness to my reaction to the letter, even Oliver. I was sorry to be pressed for details before I’d even decided what my reaction was.
Oliver followed me to the table, where I set down the glasses. He eased into his chair while I went back for the plates. I sat and reached for my sandwich, but he ignored his. He didn’t even turn toward the table, just sat watching me with both hands on his cane. “I think lunch is under control,” he said. “Now we can talk about this.” He nodded at the letter.
I took a big bite of my sandwich. The chewy white bread stuck to the roof of my mouth.
“Come now,” he said. “What’s the story? What happened?”
I swallowed. “What always happens,” I said. “She did something wrong. I did something wrong. The end.”
“And was that end a turning point?” he asked. “Is she right?”
I had wondered, in self-pitying moments, if Sonia had dismissed me, what she’d done, what I’d done, the instant I disappeared from view. I found that I was oddly gratified to learn that the end of our friendship had been a significant event in her life, even as I resented the suggestion that it had somehow shaped the course of mine.
Oliver thumped his cane against the floor. “Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening. But it’s an impossible question.”
“I don’t see why,” he said.
“Are you telling me there are moments in your life that you can pinpoint, you can look back on and say, ‘This is the turning point; this is where everything changed’?”
“Yes,” he said. “And there are some I would go back to if I could and make things turn another way.” He leaned toward me, his gaze intense. “I’ve often wondered why you’re living the way you are.”
“Because of you,” I said. “I wouldn’t eat bologna on my own.”
“No, no,” he said. “I’m asking you, of all possible versions of your life, why have you chosen this one?”
“What’s wrong with this one?” This line of questioning seemed like it might lead to one of Oliver’s attempts to plan my future. From time to time, he’d list potential husbands from among his distant relations. He’d begin letters to old friends at universities, trying to find my next job. These projects were always abandoned quickly. Neither of us wanted to consider what my future really meant. Oliver was no more reconciled to the idea of his death than I was.
“You know what’s wrong with this one,” he said. “You are too much alone.”
“I know everyone in town,” I said, and immediately felt ridiculous, though it was true—I knew a lot of people. I knew the curator at Rowan Oak. I had friends who taught in the English department, and there was a graduate student I slept with on occasion. I had had drinks at the City Grocery with a group that included the mayor. I resisted the urge to list my friends and acquaintances, trying to resist as well the feeling that I had to testify in my own defense.
He snorted. “Everyone in town,” he said, as though I’d just claimed a friendship with the rabbits in the garden. “You’re not close to any of those people. You don’t have a beau. You hardly ever talk to your parents. There’s a distance between you and the rest of the world.”
“But I’m never alone.” I got up from the table and took my unfinished sandwich to the counter. “I’m always with you. Don’t you count?”
He picked up the letter and waved it at me. “Are you going to write her back?”
“No,” I said, because it was the easiest answer.
“She’s getting married,” he said. “She misses you. You can’t ignore that.”
“Well, I’m going to.”
He still held the letter, extended toward me, but now he let it go slack in his hand. He let his face go slack, too, so that he didn’t look curious, or menacing, or handsome. He looked old and sad. He looked, for the first time that I could remember, defeated. “What will become of you?” he asked.
I knocked my plate into the sink, suddenly furious. “I don’t know,” I snapped. “What will become of
you
?” Before he could answer I stormed past him out of the kitchen and took the stairs two at a time, trying to outrun my anger and my shame. I knew the answer to the question I’d just asked. I’d seen on his face that he knew it, too.
3
M
y room was
the smallest in the house, and when I moved into it Oliver scolded me for my choice. He never went upstairs; he didn’t even really like to leave his part of the house—a bedroom, bath, and living-room suite added on when the house was more than a hundred years old. Oliver had been a traveler for most of his life, but as he aged, he told me, he found that he wanted less and less freedom. First he came home for good, and then he moved, gradually, into a smaller and smaller part of that home. “There’s a whole world back here,” he would say. “If you’re the dormouse, the world is a teacup.” But he said I was too young, and too tall, to live in a teacup, and it disturbed him that I limited myself to such a small portion of a completely uninhabited space.