They talked about death as if it were a country in Europe. They made it seem that, after a brief vacation there, you could simply fly home bearing rolls of color film and tourist anecdotes. The three of them stayed up every night, usually until five o’clock, with the shade up and the window propped wide open, partly so the constant rush of air would keep them awake, and partly so they could observe the first paling of the sky, and pride themselves on how Spartan they were for requiring so little sleep.
Anyone who passed by the room very late on the way to the toilet would notice the slit of light under the door, would hear the thrum of voices from inside, sounding like a long, elaborate incantation, and would think, The death girls are still at it.
They had not always been thought of as the death girls, but
no one could seem to remember who had initially made up the term. They were famous on the Swarthmore campus, and any one of them could easily be identified from several yards away by the clash of a winter-white face with a perennial black turtleneck. As freshmen they had banded together, apparently drawn to each other by the lure of some secret signal as unintelligible to everyone else as the pitch of a dog whistle is to human beings.
They themselves thought it odd that three people with such similar sensibilities could meet at one college. They became friends during Orientation week. Naomi was in the library early one morning, browsing through the modern poetry section. Laura showed up a few minutes later. The two of them just stood in the aisle and looked at each other, startled. They were dressed exactly alike. Both of them were reading volumes of criticism and taking notes. Finally Laura said, “Wow, you’re really hardcore.”
Naomi answered, “So are you.”
Claire joined them the next day. She lived in Naomi’s dormitory, but they had not yet spoken. At breakfast Naomi heard a few people talking about Claire—how her shelf was crammed with books of depressing women’s poetry and how she spent all her time by herself, off in some dream world. One boy made a tasteless joke about dead women poets, but Naomi ignored him.
She met Claire later that afternoon in the bathroom. They were washing their faces at adjacent sinks, and they began to talk over the rushing of water. They spoke about how they liked to write and about how lonely they had felt the last few
days. Laura sat with them at dinner that evening, and the three of them got along exceptionally well. There was an immediate rhythm to their conversation, a natural fast pace. They talked about poetry and suicide, each a little bewildered to see that other people shared her deepest feelings.
Soon they were spending all of their time together. At meals in the cafeteria they huddled over one of the round, sticky tables in the corner. If some aerial footage had been taken of the three of them at breakfast, the result would have been starfish-symmetrical, like the June Taylor Dancers in top form. They appeared to function only as a unit, completely inseparable, but that, it turned out, was not the case.
Each of the three death girls had her own special poet. Laura’s was Anne Sexton, and Naomi’s was Sylvia Plath. Each girl actually looked like her chosen poet, or at least tried to. There was Naomi, that tall, lean girl with bleached blond hair and charm bracelets and a green leather-bound journal that she carried with her everywhere. She was of average height, but it seemed as though she liked to pretend she was taller, as tall as Plath had been. She always looked down at a person during a conversation, as if she were towering above. And Laura, graceful, cool Laura with her whiskey voice and decidedly suburban air, she looked like Anne Sexton in the photograph on the flap of one of her books—Sexton lounging gracefully in a chair in someone’s backyard, lightly holding a cigarette between two fingers.
But Claire carried out the most convincing imitation of them all. There had been many photographs of the poet Lucy Ascher printed in the newspaper when she died two years
earlier. In every one she looked like a raccoon in the jaws of a trap, a pale, startled young woman with made-up eyes. This was the exact look Claire strove for. Every morning she ringed her eyes heavily with kohl, then she darkened her mouth with gloss from a tiny pot, and finally she put on her perfume. She wore ambergris only, swabbing it liberally from a vial onto her wrists, onto the plane between her breasts and down the front of her neck as she threw her head back in front of the mirror. She was the only one of the death girls who wore perfume, and it was almost a basic part of her. Next to Claire, Naomi and Laura seemed to be missing a dimension.
One Wednesday in September they decided they would meet late that night and conduct a kind of informal poetry session. That was the way the marathon nights began. When the dark darkened, they convened in Naomi’s room. Her roommate, an outgoing girl from Nevada, had met a boy at a mixer and was spending her nights with him, so the death girls had complete privacy.
“I brought this,” said Laura, holding out a bayberry candle. “I thought it would add atmosphere.” Naomi found matches and lit it, then turned off the bright overhead light. She placed the candle on the floor in the middle of the room, and the three of them sat down in an awkward circle.
“Well, who wants to start?” Naomi asked.
“I do,” said Claire in a soft voice. She opened her copy of Lucy Ascher’s
Dreams and Other Living Things
and smoothed down the page. She was nervous, and her voice quavered during the first several lines she read. The room was dim and warm, and after a while she seemed to relax. Her voice rose
up, sure of itself and of the words to the poem. Naomi and Laura had their eyes closed and were swaying slightly, as though they were being lulled into an easy trance.
This went on every evening. The death girls rushed through their days, impatient. They went to classes out of guilt only; the work hardly interested them. It was the nights that were exciting. The sun came down over the trees and the death girls started to wake, to come to life. “We’re like vampires,” Naomi said.
“Vampirellas,” Laura corrected, and the three of them laughed a conspiratorial laugh, joyless.
Sometimes they indulged in a shared fantasy. They talked about the spirits of their poets communing in some special poets’ heaven—they imagined their poets sitting on a dark, rolling bank of clouds, leading their own marathon session. None of the death girls seriously believed in the afterlife of the spirit; they just kidded about it. They all agreed that when you died, that was it, total stoppage. The thought of death swelled in them night after night.
There was a point that autumn when it got to be too much, when the thickness in the room was painful. By then it was a real habit, though, and it hurt to take a respite from it. Thanksgiving vacation came around—three days’ release. In their separate homes the death girls sat in dining rooms with carved turkey slices on their plates and relatives crowding around, but they were restless. The world of their parents held nothing for them anymore, and they returned to Swarthmore eager and needful.
Once again they continued with their nighttime meetings.
Each evening was nearly a religious experience. The death girls would close their eyes and think of the suicides of their poets, of the sadness that filled every inch of space. Soon there would come that familiar odd rising feeling in each of them, and whoever’s turn it was that particular night would begin to read the lines of a poem. Laura would always choose a different Sexton poem, but Naomi stuck with her favorite of Plath’s, “Lady Lazarus.” Claire usually read Lucy Ascher’s “Of Gravity and Light,” and although it was quite long, she knew the whole thing by heart. The air of the room was always rich with something new and inexplicable.
When it became light in the early hours of the morning, they would bring the meeting to a close. They would leave the dormitory and walk across the sleeping campus in a flock, feeling a unity they had never thought was possible. Death, usually such a divider, was the thing that held them together.
He had heard she was unapproachable. “Talking to her is like talking to the Ice Queen,” someone said, and he had no reason to doubt this, until the morning he actually did talk to her. It wasn’t even a real conversation, but it was enough for him. Julian was standing at the water fountain in the library. He pressed his thumb down on the smooth metal button, then leaned over and curved his lips to catch the water that sprang up. It quickly filled his mouth and it was warm, disappointing. He swallowed, feeling a vague reminder of his elementary school days, when fountains were white and as low to the ground as urinals.
He stood and wiped spattered water from his chin. He realized, as he was about to turn, that there was someone behind him. He turned and walked away, barely looking. It was a woman in black; that was all he took in. Then something
made him stop and watch her. He could see her shoulder blades as she stooped. With her arms jutted out and her head dipped she looked like a large, graceless bird about to attempt flight. He suddenly knew—she was one of the death girls.
It was strange to see her all alone. Where were the other two? he wondered. She had finished drinking now, and when she turned around he was still staring intently at her.
“Yes?” she said, in a small voice that surprised him. Somehow he had expected her voice to be deeper, more formidable. “Did you want something?” she asked him.
“No,” said Julian quickly. “It was nothing.”
“Oh,” she said, blinked, looked uncertain and hurried away. She had been caught off-guard, and he, Julian, had done it. For the rest of the day he had visions of her large, dark eyes and the way they had blinked as though she were coming to the surface after a long sleep. She might well have been the Ice Queen, but at that moment she had looked bewildered. She needed to be in her trio; without the other two death girls she lost some of her grimness. He realized then that he wanted to touch her, and the newness of this idea excited him. Imagine: touching Claire Danziger, the deadliest of the death girls. He wondered if there was a softness to her somewhere underneath. If there was, he wanted to find it.
The next time he saw her, it was on the college green. While everyone else was lying in the sun, the death girls were crowded together, trying to fit into a single patch of shade cast by the bell tower. Julian was feeling brave; he left his game of Frisbee and sprinted lightly across the lawn. “Hey,” he said, standing
over the three of them. “Why are you in the shade? This is probably the last warm day until spring.”
Claire’s two friends barely looked at him. One of them was writing ardently in a green journal, and the other was reading a thick novel. Claire lifted her head, made a visor with the side of her hand and answered, “We hate the sun. We’re mushrooms.”
He smiled at her—his crooked smile that Cathy, his first lover, had told him was appealing. When Claire did not smile in return, it occurred to him suddenly that the death girls were probably without humor. After all, had he ever actually seen one of them smile? Their faces just weren’t cut out for it. Claire’s mouth, that fixed line, hardly moved when she spoke. It seemed as though it had been locked into her face that way for centuries, a fossil etched onto rock.
What she lacked in humor, though, she certainly made up for in drama. Two weeks later he lay in her bed for the first time and watched closely as she got ready for her morning lecture. He had awakened and forgotten where he was. Then he saw her sitting on the floor in the lotus position, already dressed for the day. He had spent the night with her; he could not get over it. He had pursued her, had asked people about her, and somehow things had fallen into place.
She stood up and stretched her arms out to the ceiling so that all her joints made little cracking noises. Then she shook her head back and forth and her dark hair fanned out and her long, hanging earrings swung against her cheeks.
She was late, and she left the room in a hurry, closing the
door hard behind her. Wind chimes collided lightly above the bed, exotic body lotions (avocado, sassafras) lined the surface of her bureau, and books were scattered about the room as if someone had broken in. As Julian lay there alone, swathed in leaky down comforters, he realized that he felt absolutely lost in her room, lost in her presence. Everything about Claire was an exaggeration, an indulgence. Whenever he was near her he wanted to lean into her, wanted to breathe her in. The evening before, when he was undressing in front of her, his penis sprang free like a joke snake in a can. After making love, he felt as though he hadn’t climaxed, which he had. It was a vague irritation, like being at the beach and spending the day with loose crumbs of sand inside your bathing trunks. Claire was simply too much.
That night he tried to explain how overwhelmed he was. “You know,” he said, “being with you is like being in a pie-eating contest.”
He thought she would appreciate the cleverness and flattery in the metaphor, but instead she propped herself up on one elbow and said, “What’s that supposed to mean? Sometimes you try and act so
sensitive
about everything, as if you’re this innocent, earnest creature and everyone else out there is much stronger than you and much more prepared for life or something. You really enjoy striking poses, Julian. Who do you think you are—Young Werther?”
He was startled by her speech. He had never heard Claire sound angry before. “Talk about striking poses,” he countered in a small voice, but he could not go on from there; he had nothing more to say. Whatever the battle was, she had won.
—
H
e often wondered what might entice someone into becoming a death girl. He knew that the three of them, Claire, Naomi and Laura, were not the only ones of their kind in the world. He had known girls who showed early warning signs in high school, at least at Dalton, which was the high school he went to—thin, faded girls who stayed once a week for meetings of the Metaphysics Club and who occasionally made comments in English class about the fine line between ecstasy and pain.
But this was different, far more serious, and he wanted to ask Claire about it, to find out everything. During the three weeks they had been together, Julian constantly feared he was drowning. Claire had come in and taken over everything. When he studied with her, he felt the need to look up from his work and watch her. She filled up rooms with her darkness, like a wave. Somehow it was a feeling he liked—gradually he was letting himself be carried along. He had learned to keep this feeling private. He was immensely careful when he was with Claire, not because she seemed breakable to him, the way his first lover had, but because he was afraid of disturbing anything, of irritating her. He moved slowly, cautious at all times, and each day he learned a bit more about what pleased her, and when to leave her alone.
One night they were sitting in the stacks of the library, way up in a remote wing on the top floor. The aisle lights had automatic timers, and every three minutes he had to stand up and turn the switch back on. There seemed to be no one else
in this part of the building. He bet they could sleep there, right on the cool floor in the 800s, and no one would ever know. Claire was leaning back against a metal shelf, a book open in her lap. They had come to the library for its solitude only; neither of them needed any reference books. She had been underlining concepts in her reading with a yellow highlighter, and her fingers were dotted with color. Julian faced her across the aisle, and the stillness was awesome. It made him feel a need to whisper, as if they were sitting in a synagogue. “Claire,” he said, “how did it start?” He did not have to explain himself; she would know what he meant. He wondered if he had done the wrong thing, if this would make her close up to him.
Instead Claire paused, shutting her eyes. “It’s hard for me,” she began. Her voice had dropped to the level of a whisper too.
“I know,” Julian said, excited at seeing her uncertain, a little vulnerable. Suddenly the light shut itself off again. He started to get up and stopped himself. He found the dark comforting for some reason, and he knew that she thrived in it.
As they sat there, he could barely see the outline of her face, her hair, but their hands still touched; she was with him. “I don’t know how it started,” she said finally. “I guess I just sort of fell into it or something. Naomi and Laura, they say that it filled up their lives completely. I don’t know if I feel that way. It just sort of happened; I wasn’t looking for it or anything. High school was rough. The yearbook voted me ‘Most Creative,’ which was a polite way of saying they thought I was really weird.”
Her voice was thickening, taking on a new texture. Julian could feel how painful all this was for her. Most people he had
met at college spoke of their adolescence as a troubled time. Julian could not relate to this, although he often pretended to in conversation. It seemed somewhat inhuman for him to have actually loved those years, to have had an easy time of them. He had been good at most things, and what he was not good at, he faked. He was popular in the nonathletic way permitted only at small private schools. His family lived in New York in a brownstone on Seventy-first Street, and when his older brothers, Michael and Gabe, both left for college, he had the entire top floor to himself. Late at night he would lie on his bed, a book splayed open on his chest, listening to the Grateful Dead with his headphones on. Sometimes, he knew, his parents would come and stand in the doorway when they thought he had fallen asleep, marveling quietly at their gentle son. His mother and father loved him to the fullest, and he supposed that their love allowed him to live life easily, slowly. He was in no rush.
Claire had none of that quiet aura around her. Even when she slept, her hands were clenched into fists. This was one of the only times he had heard her speak in a soft voice, and it seemed ironic that there was no light, so that he could not see her face.
“I started with Woolf,” she said, “which is what most people do, I think. She’s an easy one to start with, because when you’re fifteen or so you have this kind of romantic outlook on the world. I remember how neat I used to think it was—the whole idea of her death. I realize that sounds callous and horrible now, but I used to have this vivid picture of her in my head, a real pastoral scene. You know, this beautiful, tragic
woman walking slowly through the English countryside and down to the water. She just keeps walking, picking up stones from the side of the road and dropping them into the deep pockets in her skirt. I used to spend hours imagining the scene.
“When I got a little older, I somehow had the idea that poetry was better than prose. Maybe it’s because I only had the patience to write poetry. Really bad stuff, of course. I was editor of my high school literary magazine,
Kaleidoscope
. I think every high school literary magazine is named
Kaleidoscope
. Anyway, I wrote poems about swelling tears of rain and a couple of haiku about Vietnam, even though the war had already been over for a few years, and I took myself very seriously.”
Her voice was even lower now, and she told him how her aunt had given her a collection of Lucy Ascher’s poetry for her sixteenth birthday, and how the poems were the most moving she had ever read. She spent several hours each day with the book, and her parents began to worry. They wanted her to get out more, to do things. It was summer, and she should be at the beach, they said, not sitting indoors in front of the air conditioner reading those depressing poems. It was not a question of wanting to stop, Claire explained. At that point it was already too late, she simply could not close the book; she was drawn to it with a pull she had never felt before. The poetry dealt with being young and feeling separate from the world and dreaming about death.
“Lucy Ascher wrote about everything I had ever thought about,” Claire said, “and she voiced these thoughts in an entirely new way. I can’t really explain it to you. Instead of being a boring realist, like those poets who write about gray
afternoons with lukewarm tea on a shabby table and two people sitting there who were once lovers but now have nothing left to say to each other, she did the most incredible thing—she made death an actual landscape. I used to read those poems the minute I woke up. The night before, I would select a poem to be read in the morning, and I would put the book on my night table with a leather bookmark tucked into the right place. When I woke up I would slowly remember the poem waiting for me, and I would open the book and read it lying there in my bed, barely awake. I didn’t even get up to brush my teeth or pee or anything but just read the poem through, and it really made me feel good.
“Then my parents decided that if I wasn’t going to get out and have fun, I would have to get out and go to work. First they wanted me to get a job at a place like Burger King, but I absolutely refused. So they arranged for me to be a senior counselor at a local day camp that a friend of theirs ran. It was the most hideous place—no pool or anything, just a giant sprinkler for the kids to run under, and the crappiest equipment you ever saw. There was a volleyball net that sagged to the ground in the middle, and even the real uncoordinated kids could manage to get the ball over to the other side. The whole setup was awful. I got fired after a week, because I just sat and read
Dreams and Other Living Things
to the kids in my group, when they wanted to be playing Spud. After I got fired, there was a lot of yelling going on in my house. My mother said I was the laziest daughter she had ever seen, but I really didn’t care what she thought. I had the book; that was all that mattered.”
Claire took a breath and said, “This is the part that’s pretty hard for me to talk about, so bear with me, okay?”
Julian nodded in the dark. He didn’t want to interrupt her in any way. He listened as she told him of waking up on July 18, 1977, when she was sixteen, and going downstairs for breakfast, already fortified by her morning poetry ritual. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, waiting. There was the smell of cooking in the air—eggs and coffee and some kind of batter. Her mother had the
New York Times
spread open in front of her on the table. She looked up at Claire and said in an expressionless voice, “That poet of yours died yesterday morning. She drowned herself.”