The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart Page A

voice in my head kept insisting, “It’s a period,” but it grew increasingly uncertain. Maybe what I had thought was a period actually was a full stop. Maybe, more alarmingly, my mother was wrong. And now I had a folder full of words, but without full stops they’d never make sentences.
    As the day went on I found again and again that I didn’t know the names of things. In the line at the cafeteria, a lady asked me if I wanted pudding and then gave me something that looked more like pie. I had learned my lesson. I didn’t try to explain to her that it wasn’t pudding. I just went quietly to a table and sat.
    For a moment, I ate happily. This was uncomplicated—I was hungry, and the food was good. Then a lunch lady appeared at my side. She said, “Oh, no, that’s wrong.” She took my silverware from my hands and switched them, knife in the right, fork upside down in the left.
    I said, “But I don’t do it this way.”
    She said, “Now you do.”
    I said, “But I’m American.”
    She said, “Not here, you’re not.”
    She left me there at the table, clutching the silverware like a monkey at a dinner party. Even after she was gone I was afraid to switch the silverware back. She had been so plump and stern, so certain that I was wrong. I tried to go on eating, but my hands didn’t seem to work anymore. The whole process, which had been so natural only moments before, was now unwieldy, impossible. I began to cry, but quietly. Even at that age I was embarrassed by tears. They trickled down my cheeks as I struggled to push peas onto the back of my fork. The peas just rolled right off.
    Across the table a girl my age was watching me with interest. She had long brown hair, like mine, held back at her temples with two barrettes. Her cheeks were pink. “Do it like this,” she said. She pushed a few of her peas onto her fork, then, without removing the knife, she mushed the peas down. They stuck. She put them in her mouth, slid the fork out, and grinned at me as though she had done a magic trick. It must have been a pleasure to astonish with such a basic and common skill. Surely no one had ever found her ability to eat remarkable before.
    I sniffed and swallowed and tried to stop crying. My breath was still coming in little hiccups. I copied her movements. Some of the peas escaped but several made it into my mouth. I watched closely as she cut her meat. I imitated her. This was much easier.
    “You’re American, then?” she asked. “What’s that like?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. Just two weeks before, I had had nothing to compare it to. “I say Mommy, not Mummy.” I had noticed this difference at the corner shop, where my mother had given me fifty pence, my strange new allowance, and let me pick out an Enid Blyton book.
    “Well, that’s odd, isn’t it,” she said. “You’d better change that.”
    “Okay.” I was willing to make any number of accommodations for her. She had taught me to eat, and with that small triumph, a few little peas, it had become possible once more to negotiate the world.
     
     
    After that, every time we moved I was on the lookout for what changes in me would be required. Like the friends I’d had elsewhere, Sonia enjoyed teaching me about life in her town, everything she took for granted. She said showing me the ropes made her feel like she knew all there was to know about this life, like she’d already lived it a thousand times over and because of that would always know just what to do and say. She taught me that on weekend nights teenagers cruised Main, driving up and down in their pickups and El Caminos and red or silver Camaros, bouncing to the music that drifted out their open windows. She taught me that the high-school girls who dated airmen were called barracks bunnies, that the Future Farmers of America wore Wranglers and hung out behind the Ag building, that at the Trinity Church, a strange little box of a place downtown with no visible windows, people were