To Claire, Ray Ascher appeared to be a hulking man who filled rooms with his oppressive sadness, like a buffalo knowing dimly that it is of a dying breed and nothing can be done to save it. But that part of him was probably something that surfaced only after his daughter’s death. Lucy could not have known what would happen after she died, although Claire thought she must have tried to imagine. Wasn’t that a universal fantasy—trying to guess what would happen after you died, how your loved ones would react? In a moment of thrilling self-pity, doesn’t everyone try to imagine solemn friends and family at graveside?
When Claire took Driver’s Education in high school, her instructor handed everyone a pamphlet entitled
Hey, I’m Too Young to Die!
It was written in the first person. “What are you doing?” it began. “C’mon, you guys, let me out of here. It’s cold in this coffin.” It was supposed to be told from the point of view of a careless teenage driver who had been killed in a collision. “Hey, Mom,” it read, “and Dad, and Sis, and Peewee, don’t look so sad, huh? Grandma, I can’t stand to see you cry. Please, just get it over with already. Reverend, finish up the prayers. I can’t take much more of this!”
Claire thought that if a person were able to look into the future and take a quick peek at a videotape of his own funeral, he would enjoy the remainder of his life more fully. He would hear the extent of the moaning and the keening and would, perhaps for the first time ever, feel well and truly loved. Claire sometimes wondered if her parents really loved her. She supposed that they must, in that perfunctory, parental way that is taken for granted by children, but real love, in Claire’s mind, required something additional.
Julian tried his hardest to love her. He was tender, certainly, and he was filled with passion. She thought of him, and as she did she realized that she did miss him. She felt oddly safe when they were together. Now she was out on the end of Long Island in this strange, rickety house, and she no longer felt safe. Claire believed in extremes, believed in carrying things as far as they would go, but now she wondered if she had overdone it. She suddenly wanted the easy peace of her own bedroom at Swarthmore, with Julian’s slim, warm body lying against hers. On
the first night at the Aschers’, after the exercises did not work, she lay awake and rigid for a long time.
In the very middle of the night, when the moon hesitated in the sky, Claire felt an odd sensation. It was as though someone were giving her the chills up and down her back. At summer camp she and her bunkmates used to give each other the chills all day long. There was even a chant you were supposed to repeat as you languidly grazed your fingers in various formations along a friend’s back. “X marks the spot,” the chant began, “with a dash and a dot, and a pinch and a squeeze, and a cool ocean breeze.” At the last words you were supposed to blow lightly on the other person’s neck, to heighten and finalize the “chill.”
Claire felt it as she lay there—the brushing of fingers, all along her back and across her shoulders. She shivered and sat up in bed. There seemed to be a definite presence in the room, a form of some kind. Surprisingly, it was not an unpleasant feeling. Claire did not turn on the light or move. She looked around her, barely turning her head; the door was still shut all the way, as she had left it, and so was the window. The closet had not been opened, and nothing stirred under the bed. Helen and Ray Ascher had stopped talking hours earlier, and there was no noise anywhere in the house. Claire was not dreaming, and she knew her feeling was real: It occurred to her, after several minutes of pure stillness, what it must be. The presence in the room, voiceless and shapeless, was obviously the ghost of Lucy Ascher.
“Hello?” Claire said into the darkness. The sound of her
own voice usually embarrassed her when she was alone. She hated talking into those telephone-answering machines. On this night, though, her voice pleased her. She spoke into the darkness once again. “Lucy?” she said, and she did not feel at all self-conscious. Maybe, she thought, that was because she did not feel alone. She felt as if Lucy Ascher were sitting across the room in the wicker rocker, keeping vigil like a night nurse. Just sitting by herself, asking for nothing, like a solid friend. “I know you’re there,” Claire said. The chill draped over her grandly now. She felt herself becoming drowsy underneath it, as if it were an anesthetic. The last thing she remembered seeing that night was the outline of the rocking chair. She was not positive, but before she fell asleep she thought she saw it rock lightly forward and then back again, all by itself.
—
B
ecause Helen Ascher had no real idea of what had to be done in the house, Claire wandered around on her own the next day, looking for things that needed cleaning or fixing. She walked through the rooms like a visitor in a museum, touching furniture as though it were illegal to do so. When she was younger she liked to run her hand surreptitiously along the edges of certain paintings in the Metropolitan so she could have the satisfaction of thinking, I touched where Picasso touched. Years later she thought this childhood desire had larger implications: maybe she had really been trying to make some contact, to feel a kinship with a person who moved her. In the museum her father would stand, flicking out his wrist to stare at his watch and tapping his foot against the smooth
floor of the gallery. Claire would take in as many colors as she could before her parents whisked her away.
The Aschers’ house looked as if people had enjoyed living there once, a long time ago. Claire sensed that many parties had been held—marine biology department parties, perhaps. There was a neat oval wine stain on one corner of the beige living-room rug, but it was very faded. Claire played paleontologist; she estimated that the stain was at least ten years old. She could feel the thrust of that ancient party, could see a professor let his glass slip from his hand in the midst of an overly spirited conversation. Everyone must automatically have hunched over to look, murmuring things, offering different wine-stain remedies—a dab of glycerine, a teaspoon of white wine to counteract the red. The professor’s wife probably hurried into the kitchen to gather a ball of paper towels. The husband and wife most likely left the party early that night.
There was a cigarette burn on the surface of the rock-maple coffee table—a perfect circle, like a bullet hole. The guests at the Aschers’ parties must have been very wrapped up in their talk. There had been an energy in the house years ago, of that Claire was sure. Ray and Helen had sat downstairs with their friends at a lively, noisy party while upstairs in their daughter’s room something brewed, and they knew nothing about it.
Claire’s parents never entertained anymore. There had often been parties when Claire and Seth were small children. Claire had loved the hum and festivity in the house. Her mother would give each of them a plateful of pigs-in-blankets to take back upstairs. The television set would be left on for them to watch as late as they liked, but there was never anything good
on Saturday nights, and she and Seth spent the evening running back and forth between their rooms and the party. One of her father’s friends, a man she had never liked, would invariably catch her up in his arms as she ran past. “Aha, gotcha!” he would say, as if he had made a conquest. One time he and his wife had just returned from a tour of Europe, and he told Claire to ask him anything about Europe she wished. Claire had learned about foreign countries in school that year, but her family had not yet been any farther away than Williamsburg, Virginia.
“Come on,” the man prodded in front of everyone. “Ask me something, or I won’t let you go.”
He smelled of hair tonic, a sweetness made foul by the excess of it, and Claire wanted to get away. “Okay,” she finally said. “Do animals in Europe make the same sounds as the ones here?” It was a question she had seriously wondered about.
Her parents’ friends broke up over this. “Where did you
get
her?” the man asked, placing his large hand flat on the top of Claire’s head. She ducked and squirmed away from him.
Years later the parties came to an eternal halt when her parents found out Seth had leukemia. Or maybe it was even earlier than that, when Seth was tired all the time, and they sensed instinctively that something was wrong. Everyone else in the family became tired, too. When Seth said good night at nine, said that he was beat, it was not long before her mother began to yawn and stretch, and then her father did the same. “Might as well all turn in early,” her father would say, as if in explanation. Claire would stay up for a few minutes longer, sitting by herself in the dim kitchen.
From the time Seth got sick until a week before he died, there was a feeling of solemn quiet in the Danzigers’ house. It was a terrible hush that to an outsider might have appeared tranquil. An artist would have been very happy working and living in the house; it was quiet and painstakingly clean and the back windows offered northern exposure.
But there was no real peace to be had. Inside her parents, little storms waited to rage, in each heart a thunderclap. When the family left for Italy, Claire could feel it all beginning to surface on the airplane. Her father refused to let her rent a set of earphones so she could listen to the movie; he said it was a waste of money. She sat in her usual spot by the window. The plane was lifting up over the airport and Queens, and Claire felt the widening space between herself and the roofs below.
Her father ordered some Scotch, and when the stewardess did not bring it for several minutes, he became impatient, then nasty. “Jesus,” he said aloud, “this is pretty crappy service around here, even if it is only tourist class.” Claire pressed her face closer to the window, her mouth open on the glass, as if for air.
During the flight her mother switched seats a lot, looking for better leg room, and her father took occasional swigs from a bottle of Maalox he had brought with him in his flight bag. His lips were rimmed in white. The family ate dinner in complete silence, and after the meal was over, her father switched off all three of the overhead reading lights.
On the screen, the movie had just begun. Passengers watched and listened with their earphones looped docilely under their chins. Claire looked at the screen for a while,
trying to read lips, but she soon grew bored with this. She was going out of the country for the very first time; the airplane was at that moment rushing over the Atlantic Ocean. She felt as though it did not matter where she was headed. It was understood that her family was traveling to Europe not for the purpose of seeing anything new, but rather to get away from the old. Claire decided she would make her body go limp and let herself be freely transported anywhere—to Europe, to a distant planet, or right back to her living room to stare at the little dents that had been left in the carpet after the furniture had been moved during the shiva period. She wasn’t positive, but she didn’t think anyone had remembered to move it back. Claire would let herself be taken along without asking questions. She had absolutely no preference of place. When it came time to choose a college, it did not really matter to her where she went. She had been offered financial aid by Swarthmore, Duke, Cornell and Stanford. It was her mother who had looked through all of the catalogues and decided for her. “You want a small school,” she said, “where you’re not just a number in a computer.”
That was why it was odd for Claire to find herself, two years later, in the house of Helen and Ray Ascher. It was
she
who had decided to go there,
she
who had realized it was the place she needed to be. Claire stood alone in the center of the Aschers’ sloping den with a feather duster in her hand, its plumage sprouting upward like a thriving plant.
True or false: A mollusk is an invertebrate animal with a soft, unsegmented body that is usually contained in a calcareous shell.
Oh, true.
He had come home from giving a quiz to a large, vacant-looking group of freshmen that afternoon, and she had been there, sitting at the kitchen table. Helen looked up at him pointedly, as though to transmit the message:
I’ll explain later
. Ray sat down in the chair across from Claire and studied her. She blinked a few times and tapped her fingers in a rhythmless pattern on the tabletop. He wondered if it was remotely possible that he made her nervous. Ray was fairly sure that he had never made anyone nervous before in his life.
He listened patiently as Helen explained that they would be trying out Claire as a live-in maid for a while. Things needed
to be done around the house, she said, and she herself did not have the energy to do them. It would be nice to have a little spring cleaning done, to have the place in order once again, didn’t he think? Ray nodded in agreement, and thought that the three of them certainly made a motley crew. They looked like people sitting in the waiting room of a pain clinic, each person’s pain manifesting itself in a different way, but the message being driven home all the same.
Helen showed it in her constant distractedness. You could sustain a conversation with her for only a limited time. Despair had enclosed her completely over the past few years. She was distracted in everything she did. Sometimes she forgot to shut off the flame under boiling soups, under macaroni, filling the kitchen with rich, rolling smoke and blackening the bottoms of pots. He wondered what had held them together since Lucy’s death. Maybe it would have been easier if they had separated and lived alone, or if each had lived with someone new, someone hopeful and life-giving.
Ray often wondered what kept people together as couples, as lovers. Was it the sharing of so many burdens—growing old, unpaid mortgages, concern over a child’s fever? Or was it simply the endless slapping together of bellies in the night, the routine of practiced lovemaking? He knew he was not the best of lovers. “There is too much of you,” Helen had said to him once. “I can’t even put my arms all the way around you.” She had laughed while saying it, but occasionally he wondered if she saw him as only a floating hunk of driftwood that took up three quarters of their king-sized bed. Such a big, strong brute, and he couldn’t manage to set things right again. He tried over and over to
console her, but the attempts were always awkward and forced and useless. Even a Saint Bernard, as dumb and as big, a flask of brandy strapped to its neck, had better instincts.
There was something to be said for self-preservation, though. Ray had to keep himself from real depression however best he could. He stayed long hours at the lab, even longer than Stan Bergman, the most dedicated and neurotic person in the entire department. Sometimes in the late evening the two men would be the only ones left working in the building. Even the janitor would have gone home for the night, whistling as he wheeled his rumbling trash barrel down the hallway. Once in a while Stan would suggest that he and Ray go out for a drink after they were each through with their work, but Ray always put it off and they never got around to it.
He had long ago forgotten the dynamics of one-to-one conversation. With Helen, he did most of the talking, as well as most of the listening, too, he believed. He declined to teach a small senior seminar on early forms of aquatic life because he knew that such a course would require hours of private conferences with students, and he did not think he could handle that. He had no idea of what to say to them when they came to him with particular problems. He stuck with teaching huge lecture classes with spot quizzes and little interaction with students. He kept infrequent office hours and sometimes didn’t even answer the door when someone knocked. He would sit completely still, pretending he was not there, and soon a note would be nudged under the door and the person would go away.
Ray’s pain showed itself in his immutable stiffness, and also
lately in his bulk. He ate a lot more, choosing foods he did not even especially like. In the faculty cafeteria he ordered plates of baked ziti and squash, and yellow and green Jello-O jewels for dessert. He drank several cups of coffee with each meal, thinking it would step things up inside him, but all it did was make him climb the stairs to the third-floor men’s toilet more often than usual.
His colleagues left him alone. They knew, and they did not want to delve, sensing it would be an intrusion. They smiled at him and slapped him lightly on the back when they passed him in the hall. He was invited to all of the faculty sherry hours, but he never went. He preferred to stay in the laboratory, where things were bright and noiseless and smelled of the chemicals he had been inhaling in that very room for years.
Unlike Helen, he was not in the least distracted; he could easily spend hours with his head dipped over the microscope, observing a specimen he especially liked. He was fascinated by detail—he increased the magnification of the lens and closely studied the little rows of ridges on a starfish’s arm. He enjoyed toying with the focus so that what he saw became clear and then clouded, then clear once again. It reminded him of the tiny, dark room at the Museum of Modern Art where you could sit all day and watch a screen on which colors blend and then are clarified.
One of the things Ray had liked best about his marriage was the fact that he and Helen were involved in the same field. They would lie in bed at night, turning the pages of an oversized glossy book on the ocean. That was all over now; Helen’s interest in marine biology had, he thought wryly, ebbed. It was
funny how many of the phrases that came to mind when thinking of his own life were somehow sea-related.
Her interest had ebbed. They were both drowning in their sorrow. He had sunk lower than ever before
. The vocabulary of the ocean seemed tailored to loss.
It was no longer their work that bound them, but still, he and Helen were somehow oddly joined. They were drawn together by a shared sadness, and that was as good a reason to stay together as any Ray could think of. They did small things for each other. Late at night they would take turns giving back rubs. Helen was good at this—she would press her fingers and knuckles deep into the areas of tension she had isolated in his neck and shoulders. He sometimes wondered if there was a certain amount of anger behind such a stern, almost vicious rubdown, but he never questioned it, because it felt nice. When it was his turn to massage Helen, he would open his large hands flat and move them slowly up and down her back, applying just a little pressure and some sweet-smelling body pomade. He could not bear the thought of causing her any pain.
On Saturdays they worked around the house, doing odd jobs. They cleaned out the small guest bathroom together, barely both fitting into such a small space. Helen would bend down over the tub while Ray wiped the countertops. They were constantly bumping into each other by accident—elbows, thighs, even heads. Once when this happened he thought sadly that it was one of the only times they had touched each other spontaneously for a long time. They still made love—not very often, but occasionally, when the dinner was fine, and the night was cold, and they had not taken any interesting books out of
the library that week. “Do you want to?” he would ask, and she would respond simply by beginning to unbutton her blouse and turning back the covers on the bed. He wanted to stop her, to tell her she should not sleep with him for his benefit, but he could not bring himself to. He was not really sure how she felt about it.
Helen was quite beautiful at fifty-five, and he thought she would probably remain that way for several more years. She was thin and held herself well, as she always had. She wore casual clothing every day—soft flannel shirts and slacks. Over the years she had let her hair grow very long, but she always kept it tied up in a loose knot at the back of her head. There was a good deal of gray laced in with the blond now. When Lucy was very little and had been especially trying, Helen would roll her eyes and say to Ray, “This is why parents get gray.” He would laugh, but now he realized that there had been some truth to this explanation.
It
was
children who did it, who drained the life from you, who made you run around the room playing piggyback until you were out of breath. It was children who scared you as no other people could. The first time Lucy had tried to kill herself and Ray had been called ashore by the local Coast Guard, he had seen Helen standing all alone on the dock, clutching herself tightly, and he had known without any doubt that it was about Lucy. He had been able to tell from the urgency of the way Helen stood, and when he got off the boat he had slipped into her arms and wanted to stay there forever.
They were a pair now, when once they had been part of a trio, if you could really have called it that. People came to visit
them, but it was clear that no one else fit into the setting. The Wassermans, a cheerful young couple from down the road, sometimes came over with a huge pot of bouillabaisse and sat mooning at each other all evening. They had been married for just under a year, and they were very much in love. As they sat in the Aschers’ living room, smiling and looking incongruously radiant in the midst of the gloom, Ray thought that the scene should have been captioned:
What is wrong with this picture?
The day he came home from the laboratory and saw the girl sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, dressed in a black turtleneck, her face pale, looking as though she were about to blow apart, the first thing that occurred to him was how well she
fit
. It was as though she really belonged there. He did not know who she was, but it was clear that she was in very great pain. He put down his briefcase and took off his mittens with his teeth, the way he had done since he was a child. A last remnant of the cold took hold of him, and he said a perfunctory “Brrr” and rubbed his palms together.
Helen explained the girl’s presence, and he quickly agreed that she should stay. He stared at Claire, watched as her dark eyes blinked and she sat upright and tense in her chair. He wondered, then, if she was possibly one of the lonelies, the crazies. One of the groupies.
That night in bed, he confronted Helen. She was lying on her back in a thin pink nightgown—a little out of season, he thought. He could see her breasts through the fabric. “Helen,” he said to her, “why is she really here, do you think?”
She turned to him. “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” she said.
“You know,” he said. “Do you think she knows about things?”
Helen sighed. “I guess,” she said. “It doesn’t matter too much, does it? She seems responsible.”
Ray paused, then he asked, “Does the house really need extra cleaning?”
“I wouldn’t hire her if it didn’t,” Helen said. “What are you getting at?”
“She seems troubled, and sad, in a way. I just thought you might have felt sorry for her or something . . . I don’t know what I mean. Forget it; it’s very late.”
She did not say anything in response. She had probably begun to think of other things already. They kissed, and her lips were dry and warm. Afterward she turned away from him, positioned for sleep. Ray thought about the girl Claire as he lay next to his wife. He kept envisioning her large, frightened eyes, her death mask of a face. There was something compelling about her. It all seemed logical to him when he thought about it. She had come to the door, and Helen had let her in. She probably was one of the lonelies, one of those who telephoned late and sobbed into the receiver, but if so, she was of a different sort than any he had seen or spoken to before. She had come to the house not to gawk, not to interview anyone, but because, he supposed, she had recognized it as a kind of sanctuary. Actually, the house
was
a sanctuary, even to him. He felt comfortable nowhere else.
The winter before, he and Helen had decided to go away for a weekend. They made reservations at an inn in New Hampshire that dated back to 1770. The room they were given
was spacious and quiet, with a working fireplace and a very high antique canopy bed. The wallpaper was peppered all over with tiny blue cornflowers. Everything was beautiful and peaceful, but an hour after they arrived, Ray began to feel anxious. Where was the sea? There was no water anywhere for miles and miles. He began to panic. He opened the window shades in the room and saw that the views from all three oversized windows were dominated by mountains—solid, oppressive snowcaps. He sat down on the bed, under the shade of its canopy. Helen was unpacking toiletries in the bathroom. He heard her slide the medicine chest open and then try the hot and cold faucets to make sure they didn’t run rust.
“Come see the bathtub,” she called. “It has those wonderful curlicue feet on it.” When he did not respond, she poked her head out of the doorway. She saw him sitting on the bed, sweating. He put his hand up to his head. “Are you sick, sweetie?” Helen asked, and he realized that those were the very words she had said the day Lucy stopped talking, more than ten years earlier. Or at least it was the way Lucy had remembered and recounted them in her journal.
“I feel really dizzy,” he said. He knew it was pure anxiety; he had experienced the same sort of feeling two other times in his life. The first time was when he was locked for too long a time in a tight hold during wrestling practice in college and thought he was about to suffocate. The second time was right after he saw the Holocaust documentary film
Night and Fog
.
This was the worst, though. The other two times he had actually derived a little thrill from hearing people say, “Give him air,” as they pressed his head down into the space between
his knees. There was something different about a fat man fainting. It was the unexpected—obese people were like those delicately weighted little toys that are designed never to topple. When the elephant in the circus gets to its great wrinkled knees, everyone cranes to look.
They left the inn that very evening; he said he could not bear to stay any longer. Helen drove them home, and he apologized profusely throughout the ride. They got back to Southampton seven hours later, in the middle of the night. He simply could not leave his natural habitat. He felt like those children who are born without resistance to germs and have to spend their whole lives in the controlled environment of a plastic tent, and whose visitors have to wear beekeeper outfits.