The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart

like her father used to. “He was ninety-two. How could you possibly?” She handed me the bottle of wine and urged me to drink it, like it was medicine. When I had choked some down, she patted my shoulder. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do now?” she asked, brisk as a career counselor. Her thin lips were stained purple. “You must be qualified for any number of jobs. You could work in the bookstore. I assume you’re planning to stay in town. Where else would you go?”
    I shrugged, too weary to bristle. That was Ruth, managing to insult you even when she was trying to be kind. I looked at a picture of myself striking a conqueror’s pose on the side of a mountain, both hands on my hips. “When do you need me to be out?” I asked.
    Ruth clicked her tongue against her teeth. “My dear, that’s not what I meant. For God’s sake, you make me feel like a foreclosing bank. This is your home, and you belong here. You can stay here as long as you need to.” She looked around the attic. “I don’t know quite what to do with the place, anyway. Maybe you could be the caretaker for a while.”
    I wanted to say yes. It would have been so easy to stay up there in the attic and become a ghost. But hearing Ruth say that I belonged, I knew that I didn’t. My name penciled in on the family tree didn’t make me family. Once, Oliver told me I was lucky not to have the kind of past embodied in this vast, treasure-filled attic, where for more than a hundred years his family had stored their memories. He said, “You make your own history.”
    Now he was dead, and the history I’d made fit in a single cardboard box. It hadn’t rooted me in anything, just brought me to a place where there was nothing guiding me, nothing telling me which way to go. I shut the photo album on Sonia’s face and told myself that in a way Oliver was right about my luck. To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.

 
    6
     
    W hen I was a child, my father encouraged me to belong nowhere, to immerse myself in the culture of each new place and then just as easily leave it behind. I learned not to complain about moving, about the friends I’d lose, because he’d just shake his head, amazed and disappointed by my cowardice, and ask, “My God, are you going to cry about it?” He didn’t believe in living on base; he said there was no point in moving if every place we lived was essentially the same. In England this meant that we rented a house in a village complete with real British people and a village green. The kitchen had a tiny British refrigerator that my mother never stopped complaining about for three years. It was the one adjustment she couldn’t make.
    We had been in England for two weeks when I started all-day school at Stanton Primary. I was four and a half. I had a bad first day. In the morning the lesson involved reading aloud words printed on little plastic rectangles. Each word we could read, each punctuation mark we could identify, we could put inside folders marked with our names. The teacher said that the words in our folders were the only ones we would be allowed to use when we wrote stories. I wanted them all.
    When it was my turn I read everything without hesitation until I came to a square with a black dot in the center. “That’s a period,” I said.
    “No, it’s not,” the teacher said.
    “Yes, it is,” I insisted. My mother had taught me to read six months before, and I was very proud of my knowledge. In Idaho I had been well ahead of the other children in my preschool. The teacher there had said, “Oh, very good,” and “Aren’t you smart?” She had been pretty and young and quick to smile. This teacher was square-jawed and gray-haired. Her accent made everything she said seem clipped and disdainful.
    “That’s a period,” I said again.
    “No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s a full stop. Read the next one.”
    I went on, but I couldn’t recover my confidence. A