“Sweetie,” Helen said the first time she came to visit after Lucy moved in, “why don’t you fix the place up a little?”
“It’s the way I like it,” Lucy answered, leaning back against the cold silver radiator. She stayed like that for several minutes, with her bare feet crossed in front of her, her head tilted up. It was as though she were challenging them.
Ray touched Helen’s arm. “Don’t,” he said to her in a soft voice, meaning: Don’t anguish over this.
He had done that sort of thing right from the start, when
things first began to go bad. The day Lucy stopped talking, Helen had called him up and had him come home in the middle of a class. He had said it to Helen as he stood next to her in Lucy’s bedroom. Lucy was crouched in a corner of the room, wedged between the bedstead and the wall. Helen stood there, stunned, shaking her head slowly back and forth.
“Don’t,” he said, his hand on her arm.
She had not known what to do when she found Lucy huddled there. She had started thinking about people going into shock, and how you weren’t supposed to move or even touch them. Maybe that was what had happened to Lucy: shock. You were supposed to call somebody—the doctor, an ambulance. But Helen had not wanted to do that; there was something, a kind of terrified look in Lucy’s eyes, that made Helen want to have Ray there with her. She had dialed the department. The secretary walked down the hall into Ray’s classroom and told him he was wanted at home. He had been about to administer a quiz on algae, and when he canceled it and packed up his briefcase hurriedly, all of his students had cheered.
Helen was always struck by the innocence of young girls. It really didn’t have much to do with experience, it was just a certain look that all of them had. When Helen went into the hospital one winter for a routine D&C, there had been a young girl in the next bed who was there for an abortion. When the nurses brought her back after it was over and made her sit up and get ready to leave, she had said in a tiny, sleepy voice, “Oh, couldn’t I stay in bed a little longer?” She was no older than fifteen, and Helen thought she sounded like a small child begging to sleep a few moments more before getting up for school.
The girl’s parents stood slope-shouldered in their overcoats in the doorway, silently waiting to take her home. Helen had turned to face the wall so she would not have to watch anymore.
It didn’t mean much to be a parent. All of those books—advice from Dr. Spock and the rest of them—could take you only so far. They told you how to make the baby stand and take its first steps like a little sleepwalker, arms stretched out in front for leverage. They told you the right way to mix up the food, to mash together the greens and oranges and yellows into a muddy paste and spoon it in so it got swallowed. Here comes the train, choo-choo, speeding around the tracks, clickety-clack, and into Lucy’s mouth. Open the tunnel wide and let the train through.
That’s
a good girl. They told you a few basic tenets of child psychology. They told you what was the right allowance to give a child at each age; there was even a chart. They told you how to make your child feel independent. How to give your child responsibility. A pet, perhaps, a small one at first. Lucy had overdone it with nine hamsters. She had gotten them from her third-grade class at school. The mother hamster that lived in a cage by the window had given birth once again, and there were too many animals in the classroom. The metal exercise wheels squeaked all the time and distracted the children from their lessons, so the teacher asked if anybody would like to take a couple of the hamsters home as pets. Lucy had somehow ended up with nine. She brought them into the house in a shoe box, and a couple managed to nudge their way out and run all over the place. Helen had to chase them around the kitchen, dropping a colander to the linoleum as a net. One of the hamsters disappeared completely,
and the whole family searched the house for an entire morning. Ray moved the sofa away from the wall and knelt with a flashlight in front of every open closet. Lucy searched the house with her parents, but she did it dispassionately, as though she were looking for something she did not want to find, like a poor report card that needed to be signed by a parent and brought back to school. The hunt ended when there were no obvious places left to look.
A few weeks later, when Helen was vacuuming in the living room, she found the lost hamster lodged in the bottom of the wall, where a small chunk of molding had come loose. It had crawled its way into the darkness and died in a nest of electrical wire. Helen took out the hard little body in some bunched-up newspaper and buried it in the sand. She never told Lucy about it, and Lucy never asked. She didn’t seem to care what had happened to it. As far as Lucy was concerned, the hamster had simply vanished. It might have sprouted little furry wings and flown away.
You couldn’t raise a child to love life. You just had to cross your fingers and hope that it would happen naturally.
Life is good
, you subtly had to drum into your child’s ears, bolstering the message by displays of love and affection. You had to hold your child, and you had to be unafraid of holding your spouse in front of your child. Helen and Ray were embracing once when Lucy came into the room. Ray started to break away, but Helen held him there for a few more seconds. She wanted Lucy to see the love that stirred between her parents, to see that it was a good thing. Lucy had barely been interested. She
looked up at them with a slightly annoyed expression. “Are you going to fix my lunch or not?” she asked.
When Lucy was eighteen, she had her first love affair. It was with a Columbia student who was in her English class. She told her parents about it calmly when she came home for a weekend. “I’ve been sleeping with someone,” she said over dinner.
So perhaps something had gotten through to her. Perhaps she had seen that she could not be autonomous in life, that she needed other people. Helen hoped the relationship would last. She told Lucy that she could bring the boy home any time she wished. But things ended quickly, and Lucy said she had never really liked him, anyway. She retreated into herself even more and barely finished her first year at Barnard. A couple of weeks into the summer she slit her wrists.
Do you love death more than you love life? Helen had wanted to ask as she stood at the foot of Lucy’s hospital bed. It was an inconceivable thought, and she could not even start to concentrate on it.
Helen always felt an odd drive when she saw young girls on the street. She wanted to stop them, to grasp them by the arms and give them a few words of sound, lifelong advice. But the thing was, as soon as the girls drew near enough so that Helen could see their faces, she realized that they looked as if they were doing all right without any outside help. Young girls came in packs these days, wearing skimpy sequined T-shirts and wedge heels. They had one another, they had their friends, their boyfriends. They had their own parents to give them advice, so Helen passed by quickly, not saying a word.
Claire wasn’t like that at all. There was no giddiness to her, none of that typical adolescent spark. Helen sat and looked at Claire, who was fresh from the shower. She had wanted to say something but had forgotten what it was. Helen wondered what kind of childhood Claire had had before her brother had died and how old she had been when it happened.
Helen had known from the beginning why Claire had come to the house. Claire was not much different from the women who wrote letters, who telephoned, who sent over baskets of fruit and preserves and smoked cheeses. This was what it was like, being the parent of someone famous and young, someone who was a suicide. How good a poet had Lucy actually been? Helen had no way of knowing. Lucy had received a lot of attention because she was so young. Her work was included in several anthologies, one of them a collection of contemporary poems written by women, entitled
I Hear My Sister Calling
. She would have hated that title, Helen thought. Lucy had always hated anything that involved a group, anything that involved real sharing.
“Mom, I don’t feel a kinship with anyone,” Lucy said to her once. She said it with a certain degree of pride in her voice, and Helen had felt sad.
Lucy had been poet-in-residence at Columbia when she was twenty-two. The only people who still remembered that year keenly were the unhappy ones. They were the people who felt that Lucy was speaking exclusively for them, the malcontents of the world in their dark, narrow rooms. Lucy had fueled the dreams of adolescents and those who had never grown out of adolescence. The whole thing was messy, and Helen wished
desperately that Len Deering was right, that there was a way of letting go. She was going to try to find one. You have to trick yourself, she thought, in order to make yourself believe it is possible.
She sat on the stairway and looked up at Claire. There was a good deal left unsaid and much meaning in that stern, hard face flushed from the steam of the shower. Yet this ungiving young woman, this stranger, actually made Helen feel better. She comforted her. Helen stood up and reached out her hand, touching Claire’s hair. Claire stared, then pulled away. Of course. What was it Helen had wanted to say? She remembered then, as she stood there. “Claire,” she said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Claire did her best to smile. She said something low, under her breath, that Helen could not hear. Then she turned and went into her room, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the hall carpet.
“You’ll start feeling better only when you’re ready to,” Len Deering had said, and now she thought that was probably valid. You could not begin to feel better unless you were prepared to take on the responsibilities that went along with becoming a social being. Helen and Ray would have to invite the Wassermans over to dinner one night. Somehow that didn’t seem like all that bad an idea. Jan Wasserman would lug along a huge kettle of fresh bouillabaisse, and it would be hot and good. They would sit around the Aschers’ dining-room table, eating and exclaiming over the food. They would put on some music and retreat to the living room and look out on the water, as though it were an entirely new landscape.
People always talked about the sea as unpredictable, always in flux. In graduate school one of Helen and Ray’s friends had said, “The reason I like studying the ocean is because it’s like doing something different every day.” The idea had thrilled Helen. She loved to think of things that way.
She had never been as quick to grasp scientific concepts as Ray. Certain things stayed with her, though. When she first began learning about the ocean, she had loved studying plate tectonics—continental drift. It was wonderful to think that huge land masses might be moving apart and shifting deep under the surface of the earth, even as she and Ray slept. Profound things happened when you weren’t looking, and there were times when you couldn’t look, when you had to close your eyes for a moment of private darkness.
When Lucy died, Helen could hardly force herself to go near the water. Lucy had jumped from a bridge, and a trawler had scraped along the bottom to drag her up. Her eyes were wide open, her eyelashes flecked with sand. The men covered her body with a bright orange emergency blanket.
Helen stayed in the bedroom with the shades pulled down so she could not see the water those first days when the death was new. She still heard it, though, and she put show music on the stereo to block out the sound of the waves.
But now she felt different—restless. She had needed solitude before, the comfort of a dark room and washcloths dipped in iced tea and placed over her eyes. Now Claire was here, and Helen wanted to talk to her, to do something for her. The other evening the three of them had played a long game of Scrabble. It had been Ray’s idea. He rummaged through the top of the
hall closet and retrieved the shabby maroon box. “Want to play?” he asked. He had to urge Claire to leave her room and join them.
They sat in the kitchen and played until very late. Helen won, after using all her letters to make “
CAVERNS”
on a triple-word square, and Claire came in second. Ray had never been very good with words. He couldn’t form them quickly; even when he was talking, he had difficulty. He could not express himself well—he mumbled and usually gave up. Helen knew that she had not been as good a listener as she could have been. She sometimes drifted off when Ray was talking, as though his words were the lyrics to some gentle lullaby. She could not help herself.
In the middle of the game, when it was Ray’s turn and he had been taking a long time to arrange his tiles, Helen looked up and realized that there was an ease to the room, the kind that is usually generated only after people have been living together for years and years. Claire had been with them for just two weeks, and yet she sat in the kitchen, hunched over the board, with the look of someone who had grown up in the house.
Everything was subtle, and that was why it did not seem as though it had happened quickly. Claire was here with them, sitting in Lucy’s old chair, and oddly enough, none of it was surprising. Ray had said it best, the first night Claire was in the house. “She fits,” he said, and while Helen pretended not to react, to be thinking about something else, she had known that he was right.
She thought about people who had no children. She had
known one such couple. When anyone questioned them on this subject, they would reply that they did not need a child, they had each other. Helen had been impressed by this sureness. How could you know that your marriage would not sour years later? How could you be positive that you would not need someone else in the house to keep you happy, someone small and warm to keep you sane?
It was Claire’s presence that made Helen feel rooted, grounded in her old life. After the Scrabble game ended that night, Claire went upstairs and Helen and Ray stayed in the kitchen for a while. Ray opened a bottle of sherry that had been standing untouched in the closet for months. He had come home with it one day, anticipating, Helen imagined, a time in the future when they would want to drink it. A time when they would lift their glasses by the stems and clink them gently together. Claire was humming upstairs, and Ray uncorked the dark bottle, and they drank.