Past Perfect by Leila Sales Page A

said good-bye to my parents and reported to the 58

    PAST PERFECT
    burying ground, Linda explained to me that my job was to wander atmospherically amongst the gravestones and answer people’s questions if they had any.
    The morning got off to a brisk start with five different people asking me if I was hot in my costume. I said, “Who’s wearing a costume?” and, “Certainly not!” I wasn’t even totally lying, since it was early enough in the day that the tempera-ture hadn’t gone up to a hundred degrees, yet.
    A little girl in a floor-length gown, bonnet, and sneakers approached me. “Are you . . .” she asked, then trailed off, looking toward her mother for support. Her mom nodded encouragingly and snapped a couple photos with her expensive-looking camera.
    “Are you Felicity?” the girl finished bravely, squinting into the sunlight to see my face.
    “Nay,” I said. “My name is Elizabeth Connelly.” I curtsied.
    The girl looked confused. “I don’t have that doll.”
    “I am not a doll,” I said with a laugh. But this chick wasn’t laughing.
    “Mama, why don’t I have an Elizabeth Connelly doll?” she demanded with a scowl.
    “We’ll get you one at the gift shop,” her mother promised.
    “They do have those at Ye Olde Shoppe, right?” she asked me, pronouncing it like Ye Oldie Shoppie .
    I cleared my throat. “Well, Elizabeth Connelly isn’t a doll .
    She isn’t, er, an American Girl.”
    59

    LEILA SALES
    When I can’t think of what to say while reenacting, I say
    “er” instead of “um.” For some reason I believe that “er” sounds more authentically Colonial. I don’t know why. This is probably not true .
    “If you aren’t Felicity,” the girl said, yanking her bonnet back on her head, “and you aren’t even an American Girl at all , then where are the real American Girls?” I looked to the mother for help, but she just smiled and said, “We drove all the way down from New York to see the real-life American Girls. Jessica loves her American Girl dolls, don’t you, sweetie?”
    “I have all of them,” Jessica confirmed. “Only not Kirsten’s bed. I don’t have Kirsten’s bed.” She glared at her mother.
    “Er, you do know that the Colonial times actually happened, right?” I said, more to the grown woman than to her kid. “America was actually a bunch of Colonies that belonged to England. There was actually a Revolutionary War. A lot of people died. American Girl dolls are made-up.” They both stared at me blankly for a long moment.
    “Let me get a photo of the two of you,” the mother broke the silence. “Just go stand in front of that big grave so it looks real. Okay, say cheese!”
    A click of the camera, and they were off, the girl tripping over her long gown.
    It’s funny how little time it takes for kids to stop being cute and start being annoying.
    60

    PAST PERFECT
    I wondered how many photographs I appear in that belong to people who I don’t know, whom I will never see again.
    Thousands. It must be thousands. I imagined myself going to college and getting some boyfriend from really far away—like Oregon, or Ireland. And he’d take me home to meet his parents, and we would look through their old photo albums, and I’d come across a picture of myself, Miss Elizabeth Connelly, at the age of eleven, in full Colonial regalia.
    Assuming, of course, that I would someday fall in love with a guy who wasn’t Ezra Gorman. Which might or might not ever happen.
    “You just killed that darling child’s dream,” Linda said, walking over. “While you were at it, why didn’t you tell her that Santa Claus is fake, too?”
    I shrugged. “I was educating her. That’s what they come here for.”
    Linda is a tall, sturdy, maternal-looking Colonial who always speaks in a dry monotone, so I can never tell when she’s kidding, even though I’ve known her for years now. She couldn’t actually think that brat was darling. But I wasn’t positive.
    A family