It had not worked. She had cracked open one eye within a few minutes and said, “God, I need to stretch.” He had not given up, though. He tried to calm her, to soften her, by just being there. One night while he was reading in bed, she drowsed off next to him, her head on his hip. Soon she jerked from her sleep and moved over to her side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning away from him. He reached out to stroke her hair, to tell her he liked having her head there on his hip, that she could have kept it there all night—he wasn’t uncomfortable in the least. She could not seem to understand that it was okay just to lie close and be still. She was tense all the time. He could feel it when he held her, the way her back was rigid when he looped his arms all the way around her.
“Claire’s a true eccentric,” he said to Naomi.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
He looked for words. “She’s like a living paradox or something. I mean, she’s so stiff, and still she manages to be overpowering. She always knows exactly what she’s doing; she seems so self-contained, but at the same time it’s like she’s spilling out all over the place. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
But he didn’t need to. Naomi nodded in a way that made him think she understood what he was saying. They were sitting very close to each other now, cross-legged, on the bed. She no longer seemed to him like death itself. She seemed overtired. The sky was getting light, and his next-door neighbor, who worked longer and harder than anyone Julian knew, had stopped typing and gone to sleep. Julian didn’t look at the clock, but he knew it was very late. All of this over Claire Danziger. All of this worrying and missing sleep, and Claire wasn’t even aware of it.
“Julian,” said Naomi, “I don’t think I can just forget it, like you said when I asked what we should do. It would make life simpler, I guess, but I just don’t think I can do it. God knows what will happen. If she’s really slipping into this Lucy Ascher life, she might never come out of it. I can’t leave Claire like that.”
“Neither can I,” he admitted.
It was the Amish people who believed that when someone took your photograph, part of your soul was stolen away. He remembered the time his class at Dalton had taken a trip down to Pennsylvania Dutch Country and three young women in
long skirts and huge bonnets had skittered off in a flock when someone in his class started to unscrew the lens cap from his camera. Julian understood how the Amish felt; he felt similarly about making love. After you slept with someone, she took away with her a small hunk of you. It wasn’t bad, as long as the relationship went on. It was something you didn’t mind giving up, because it would always be close by. It was only when things ended that you really felt the loss.
Julian had run into his old girlfriend Cathy in the city when he was home for Columbus Day weekend. She was a junior at Princeton and was walking down Central Park West arm in arm with a very tall blond man. “Julian, this is Kirk,” she said.
Julian had muttered something about being glad to meet him and about how he hoped the rest of their year went well, and then he had pretended to be in a rush and hurried off down the street. It had embarrassed him to see Cathy. The first thing that had come to mind was their early, fumbling attempts at lovemaking. They had seen each other naked, exposed. They had told each other so many things—God, it embarrassed him even to think about it. Cathy had taken away with her a good many of his secrets, his most vulnerable moments. She had taken away a hunk of his soul.
He could picture her lying in Kirk’s bed at college, telling him everything about the relationship that she had had with Julian. “He was so young and so well-meaning,” she would say in that delicate voice of hers. “I was wide-eyed, too, I’ll admit, but Julian was much worse. He always insisted on helping me put in my diaphragm, as if he thought I couldn’t manage myself.”
Julian could hear Kirk’s deep, throaty, Princeton laugh. “Oh, that’s priceless,” Kirk would say.
Cathy had taken something of Julian away with her, and now, so had Claire. He knew that this would probably happen with all of the women he was ever involved with in his lifetime, but for some reason he felt that this time would probably be the most painful. He wanted it back—he wanted Claire back.
“We have to do something,” he said to Naomi, and she quickly agreed. “It’s really stupid to go on like this,” he told her. “There has to be something else we can do.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know. We’ll really have to work on it. Hard.”
They sat in silence for a long time. He was remembering the way Claire had felt close up against him, a confusion of balances, with her arms lightly touching his shoulders and her tongue resting heavy in his mouth.
“Listen, you should go get some sleep,” he said to Naomi.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “I
am
starting to fall on my face.”
They sat quietly for a few more minutes, and it struck him that this had been like one of the death girls’ marathon sessions. Now he had some idea of what it really felt like, of where the joy and pain was in spending a whole night thinking and talking about someone you love, someone who is absent. It had been a full night. It had exhausted him.
Naomi stood up and got into her coat. Julian opened the door and ushered her out into the morning.
She could tell the thaw was somewhere in the distance. There were signs of it every year at this time. It was still cold but the water had somehow changed, smoothed itself out. “You know, I actually feel better,” Helen said to Ray. It was odd to speak it, to acknowledge it. She had long ago given up the possibility of real change, and when it did come, it took her by surprise.
“I’m glad,” he answered. “We should celebrate or something.”
They were picking their way along the beach among snail skeletons, pebbles and worn-down shells. The water looked lighter than it had.
She turned and saw that Claire had lagged way behind them. Claire had opened and shut several times during the week. It was as though she wasn’t sure how to act. She would relax for a moment, would comment on something, and then
when Helen or Ray encouraged her to go on, she would catch herself and stop everything. It was as though she had to remind herself to keep a distance from them.
“Just leave her,” Ray said, guessing Helen’s thoughts.
“You can still read my mind,” she said. They smiled at each other, and he reached for her hand. They walked along like that for another ten minutes. Helen didn’t turn around, but even so, she could sense how listless Claire was. Every so often she could hear the plopping of small rocks that Claire was tossing into the water.
“Are you sure we should just leave her?” Helen asked. Ray nodded, and so they kept walking.
She was perplexed by Claire. Every day Claire stayed up in her bedroom—in Lucy’s old room—late into the morning. There wasn’t much work for her to do and Helen didn’t care, but it made her uneasy. When Claire finally wandered downstairs to rummage through the refrigerator for yogurt or juice, Helen was usually sitting out on the cold sun deck. She would hear Claire coming down the stairs and would turn to watch her through the glass as she moved around the kitchen.
What a force Claire was in her silence. And what a familiar feeling, to look at Ray over Claire’s head and shrug and have Ray shrug back. It sent something through Helen, the chill of déjà vu that can be instantly placed in time, in space. This was not one of those senses you have when you go somewhere new and think, I have been here before. I have stood on this hill, but I don’t know when.
The déjà vu that Helen felt was instantly resolved. It did not shock her. She recognized that when Claire came to the
house that day, something about her made Helen move to open the door and invite her in. Certainly she did not let in everyone who showed up outside. There had been those two giggling women once who wanted to know if Helen would talk to them about what Lucy was like as a baby, and there had been the serious, tailored woman who asked if Helen and Ray would like to be the keynote speakers at an annual dinner meeting of the Long Island Association of Bereaved Parents.
She didn’t let any of these people in. She had been startled and shook her head at them and then backed up, softly closing the door. After she did this, her heart pounded. She felt an anxiety attack coming on each time and leaned against the shut door until she heard the sound of footsteps giving up and going away, retreating along the flagstone walk that Ray had laid when they first moved in.
With Claire, something had touched Helen—the need, probably, the plain show of desperation. Helen had spent so many years responding to these things in Lucy, grappling with them, not understanding them. It had almost become her role in life to do this, and she could not turn Claire away. Claire was a child, a young scared girl with an oversized suitcase. She was the baby in the basket left on the doorstep with a note tagged to one wrist: “Take care of her for us, please. We know you can do it better than anyone else.”
At the very least, it was ironic. Helen and Ray had certainly proved themselves to be incompetent as parents, although their friend Len Deering had assured Helen that it was not as simple as all that. “You can’t just say, ‘I have failed as a mother,’” he told her. “There are so many other factors involved. Lucy
was a grown woman. It’s very hard, and you have a lot of exploring to do, but after a while you’re just going to have to let go.”
Letting go. It was such an easy phrase. It brought to mind a series of wonderful images: a dam bursting forth into a spill of clean, flowing water, a kite string being unraveled into the sky, or a couple arching their backs in the middle of making love, one of them looking up and calling out in rapture, “Now!”
It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days. In the supermarket one day the summer before, Helen had heard a woman saying to a friend as the two of them peered over the frozen-foods counter, “I’m taking a jazz dance class. It’s real therapy for me.”
What about the other side of letting go, the side that stuck closest to the words themselves? When you really let go, you were saying goodbye forever. No one ever wanted to talk about that aspect; it was universally considered too painful. It didn’t seem as if anyone came to terms with the real business of letting go. You just gradually loosened your grip, and after a while you simply forgot that you were holding on. That was what Helen had started to do with Lucy. Somehow, it had eventually happened. Helen had woken up and been too exhausted to think about her. She usually lost herself in such thoughts each morning.
She remembered as she lay in bed that Claire was fast asleep in Lucy’s old room. She wondered if she was warm enough. There were two blankets on the bed, but they were fairly thin. The night
before, when the temperature suddenly dropped, Claire had assured her that she would be fine, but still Helen worried. Claire’s stance made it seem as though she were constantly trying to prove that she needed no protection, and it was this that drew Helen to her. Lucy had done the same thing, had tried so hard to appear deadpan, and Helen had wanted to rush to her, to change her, to hold her.
Having Claire in the house brought out these feelings all over again. It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it
was
nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open, empty space.
When Lucy was alive, she couldn’t be figured out, no matter how hard Helen or Ray tried. She was solidly there, but she was made up of all smooth edges. You couldn’t hold her. So instead, Helen and Ray had held each other. In the old days, they made love after coming back from the lab, both of them stinking of shared chemicals. Helen knew that having each other did not compensate for their emptiness with Lucy, but it helped.
When Lucy died, Helen and Ray did not continue to move closer together. There was a point in life when you had to remain separate, when you could not share anything more. Helen bought an electric blanket at Sears for them that first winter after the death, and it had two individual heat controls. Ray would turn his side way up to High, and Helen would
keep hers on Low, so even their bodies were in different terrains, polar opposites.
Everything was unspoken. She thought of Lucy as a child, and she thought of her muteness that summer, such a long time ago. It had confounded Helen then and remained a mystery throughout the years. But now, with Claire in the house, she thought she finally understood what it was to be unable to speak but to want to desperately. That was how Claire was—always on the brink of saying something, then pulling back. Lucy had been the same, and Helen had done nothing about it. She had not yanked her depressive daughter by the collar and made her talk, made her unload all the secrets she had been storing up for a lifetime.
In the two years since Lucy’s death, Helen also had been unable to speak, unable to tell Ray how she felt. She had really not wanted to. What could he possibly have said? He would have nodded and stroked her shoulders and back with his huge, warm hands, and it would have actually felt
good
, and she would have hated herself for responding so dumbly to touch.
She heard Claire waking up. A couple of pronounced yawns, the rustle of covers, then the swing and thump of feet over the side of the bed. Helen felt the way she used to feel—she had an urge to get up and meet her daughter in the hallway, to watch the stagger of waking up, the sweetness of a child still drunk with sleep.
She made herself stay in bed. It would seem odd if she were to go out and stand in the hall, waiting. Claire would look at her with unblinking eyes, and Helen would be embarrassed.
She stayed under the blanket with Ray asleep in his warm patch next to her. “Ray?” she said, touching one finger to his chest.
It was the way she had always wakened him, ever since the beginning of their marriage. After a while he would feel the extra bit of pressure there and wake up. It took him several seconds this time, then he reached out in his sleep to brush her finger away. She did not move her finger, and soon he reached for it again, and this time he held it for a moment, trying to figure it out. It reminded her of the parable of the three blind men and the elephant. Ray moved from her finger to her hand and then up to her arm. He opened his eyes, and he was holding her elbow in a formal way, as though he were escorting her to a ball.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.”
He let go of her elbow and turned over onto his back. He stretched out his arms and legs—she could hear tiny bone explosions, as though he were cracking his knuckles. “Ray?” she said again.
“What?”
“I was wondering what you think of her.”
“Claire?” he said, yawning. “She’s all right.”
That was the end of it for the time being. They lay there together without moving. She could hear Claire walking around and doing morning things. There were the sounds of the window shade being whisked up, and a few seconds later, the shower being turned on.
It was ludicrous, all of it. Helen wanted very much to tell
Claire what was happening, just how she was feeling with her in the house. She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, stepping into the flattened green slippers that waited there on the floor each morning.
“You’re going?” Ray asked, his hand on her spine.
“I’m restless,” she said. “I want to get up.” She turned to look at him. She was aware of the way her breasts swung around as she turned; she could feel the shifting of their weight. Her nightgown was almost diaphanous. It had not looked that way in the store. It just seemed light and easy to wash, so she bought it. For years clothes had been covering, nothing more.
Ray regarded her breasts through the material. This deeply embarrassed her, as though she and Ray were teenagers all over again, sitting half naked on a grassy rise and looking at each other but pretending to be looking out at the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which formed a loose star chain in the night.
She had to go to Claire.
She walked down the hallway, and the shower was still running. She sat down on the carpeted step and waited. Soon the water was shut off, and she could hear a few last drops spattering down.
There was a squeal of curtain rings being shoved along the rod as Claire stepped out. The door opened a few minutes later, and the bathroom was like a tropical rain forest, steaming and lush with exotic plant smells. Herbal Essence shampoo, probably. Claire stood in the doorway with a thick yellow towel wrapped around her middle. She looked as though she had just forged her way through the rain forest and made it safely out into the dry sun, the forest still wet and alive behind her.
Helen thought that Claire must have been mystically sent to them. She had had that feeling with Lucy, the same bewilderment. Perhaps it was a naïveté—Helen was reminded of all those cases of women in Appalachia who go to the doctor because their stomachs hurt and then find out that their stomachs hurt because they’re really six months pregnant.
Helen did not wonder at the act of birth itself—that had always seemed too grueling and stark to be anything other than earthly. Everything in the delivery room had been hospital-green, and in the background a nurse was endlessly telling her to bear down harder. There was a painless snip of her skin, a tearing that eased the way, and after all the open-mouthed panting, she felt the baby’s head crowning. Crowning—it was such a wonderfully apt word for a baby who was going to be at the center of everyone’s life for years, sitting calmly each day in its highchair throne.
Helen could not understand how babies turned into whom they did; she did not see where any of it came from. Throughout the years, Helen and Ray had looked at seashells and tried to interest Lucy in them. She had remained impassive. When they held out a conch to her and invited her to come look, she would barely glance at it before turning and trotting back to whatever she was doing—drawing concentric circles with her finger in the sand or sitting in the shade of the porch reading a book. That was why it was startling when Lucy grew up and wrote poetry, and her poems were filled with references to shells, to the ocean. Had she been studying them on the sly all those years? In her first collection, there was a whole cycle
of poems devoted to sea anemones. Helen was surprised at the accurate, good detail in every line.
She telephoned Lucy after she read the manuscript and asked, “When did you learn all that?”
“When you weren’t looking,” Lucy answered stiffly.
It was the kind of response that you had to toy around with all day in order to understand. What did it really mean? Was Lucy implying that Helen hadn’t been a good mother, that she hadn’t been watching when she was supposed to? It upset Helen, but she did not broach the subject again. She did not want to disturb Lucy, not when her book was coming out. She seemed so shaky all the time, and Helen did not want to add to it. Lucy was living in New York, in a tiny, dim apartment in the West Village. Every time Helen and Ray came to visit they would bring with them a couple of potted plants. The apartment hardly got any light, and Lucy usually forgot to water the plants, so they soon died. She didn’t move the clay pots from their places on the sill, and crumbled brown leaves littered the floor underneath the window like spilled tobacco.