Levin raised his head, surprised but not completely startled. “You really talked, didn’t you?” he asked.
Yes, she answered, yes, yes, her voice clearing and refining with each new word.
“I guess that had to happen eventually,” he said, and he drew his long arms and legs in close to his body, folding up like a bridge chair.
—
T
he man she was involved with ten years later never knew about her childhood. It was not embarrassment or pain that kept Lucy from telling him; it just seemed fitting that she should be silent about her silence. Richard was a graduate student at the university, and Lucy was poet-in-residence for the semester. It bothered him that she was so reticent. His last lover, he said, was a full, loud, horsy woman. During lovemaking she would usually cry out, or chuckle low in her throat, or
say, “Here. No, here.” But Lucy was quiet, and she prided herself on it. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “I even matched my breathing to his, so that when I was there, circling on the fine, quivering mercury of an orgasm, he would not hear a thing.”
His old lover had accidentally left her hairbrush in the top dresser drawer when she moved out, and sometimes Lucy picked it up and examined it. It was a weighty mother-of-pearl affair with metal prongs. A good deal of the woman’s hair was still woven around those prongs like string art, and Lucy imagined her standing before the mirror each evening, “brushing her coarse red hair with one hundred savage strokes, summoning up a fury of electricity.”
Richard missed his old lover; Lucy could tell. One night she heard him speaking on the telephone in the kitchen, his voice low and conspiratorial. Lucy knew that he was talking to her.
She stayed up for a long time that night, thinking about Levin. She pictured the two of them meeting once again on the summer lawn of the hospital. “The grass would be heavy and wet with morning,” she wrote, “and we would walk toward each other slowly, pulling two chairs out of the sun and into the vast, spreading shade of a cigarette tree.”
Claire liked to imagine that she was conceived amid gritty, damp sand and ice-cream wrappers on the shore of some anonymous beach at midnight. Her parents, mistakenly thinking themselves possessors of a new sort of freedom, most likely made love with abandon that night, unaware that behind every other dune, other couples were reveling in this very same, false phenomenon. The beach at midnight is nothing more than a series of open-air cubicles, a flea market for lovers who do not have much time or pride.
Claire’s feelings about her parents worsened after Seth died. Two weeks after his death they decided the family needed to get away for a while, to be free of all the phone calls, the letters of condolence, the looks. They took Claire to Italy for a week. Claire remembered the vacation only in terms of speed. “Come on, we’re late,” her mother would say to her any time she lingered
in a museum, and there would be a yank at her sleeve. They rushed her, relay-race fashion, from one end of the Sistine Chapel to the other. It was not the kind of vacation scene Claire had imagined, in which a young girl, bored within the confines of a museum, tugs at the fabric of her mother’s dress. The mother stands casually before each painting and sculpture, ignoring the tugs, feeling very much at home.
But it would never be that way. Claire’s parents pulled her, yanked her through her adolescence at breakneck speed. Museums were to be dashed through, dinners at restaurants to be choked down, clothes to be outgrown as quickly as possible and donated immediately to the Mt. Calvary people when they telephoned for contributions. “If you are coming at all, come now,” her mother said over and over.
And now, home from college for Christmas five years later, things were no different. Nothing had slowed down at all. Claire walked out of the den, where her parents were arguing over whether or not they should renew their subscription to cable TV. She went into Seth’s old room where everything was still in its proper place—the books, including
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine
, which had been his childhood favorite, the oiled leather baseball glove, the slender glass bong way up on the top shelf. Claire sat down on the bed, where the clean sheets, she realized with a start, had probably not been changed in five years.
Her mother walked past, storming out of her fight. She saw Claire sitting in the room and poked her head in. “What are you doing in here?” she asked. Her face was pink, the way it
was when she sat under the hair dryer for too long at the beauty parlor.
“I was just sitting here. Thinking. Is there something wrong with that?”
“No. But that’s what you do all year at school. Isn’t that why we send you to Swarthmore—so you can think? Now that you’re home for a while, why don’t you make yourself useful for a change? Come in and help me with dinner.”
In the kitchen her mother talked rapidly, snapping green beans with each syllable. Claire dumped the snapped beans into a colander and ran cold water over them. Whenever she and her mother had a conversation, it was while doing some kind of busywork, preferably something that made a good deal of noise so that the gaps between their sentences could be gracefully filled.
“Well, Claire,” her mother said. “What do you plan to do with this expensive education you’re getting? Are you planning on doing nothing and going out to save the Indians, like your sister?”
Joan had stayed out in Arizona to live and work on a Walapai reservation. She saw the family once every few years, usually only for deaths or celebrations. Claire remembered her as being very tan and lean, her arms heavy with turquoise bracelets. When the two sisters embraced the last time Joan came East, Claire thought Joan smelled of the desert.
“I don’t know what I plan on doing,” Claire answered. “I’m only a sophomore. I have a little time to think about it.”
“You sound just like your sister,” her mother said. “She
always told me, ‘Leave me alone, I have plenty of time, don’t hassle me.’ Then when she got out of school, she had no career plans at all. No skills, either. Nothing. You may major in English or whatever, Claire, but you’re going to need something to fall back on.” She began to scrape celery, the pale green threads flying into the garbage pail.
“Why are you so bitter?” Claire asked softly.
Her mother turned. “Bitter,” she said after a moment. “You think I’m bitter? Wait until you turn fifty; you’ll see that there’s nothing to tap-dance about.” She resumed her scraping.
Claire flicked on the blender, crushing some pineapple for dessert, and the kitchen became a battleground of noises. In a few minutes, with nothing left for either of them to do, there was quiet once again. “I’m sick of this,” Claire said. “You’re so nasty about everything. And Daddy is no better. He doesn’t
do
anything; he just sits in the den all day.”
“He has things on his mind,” her mother said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“A real smart-ass you turned out to be.”
“Why aren’t you ever nice to me?” Claire asked.
Her mother came close, waving the celery scraper in the air. “Look, Claire,” she said, “I don’t know what you want from me. You come home on vacation and give everybody a hard time. Things are difficult for all of us, you know. Why don’t you try to accept things a little more? There’s really nothing else we can do. Just stop questioning everything for a while, criticizing everything. We’re all doing our best. Please, Claire, for me, okay? It gives me such a headache.” As though to
illustrate, she put down the scraper and lifted her hands to her head, forming a steeple that covered her eyes.
It was an awkward moment. Claire wondered if her mother was about to cry, if she should leave the room or possibly even apologize. But what would she apologize
for
?
In a second her mother dropped her hands, and her eyes were as clear and hard as ever. She had been nowhere near the point of tears. It seemed to Claire that all important confrontations between the two of them took place in the kitchen. She was reminded of something she had learned in high school Social Studies—about the high incidence of an army winning a war when it is fought on its own turf. Her mother was certainly the one in her element here, surrounded by gleaming copper and Formica, in the room where she had spent countless hours over the years.
Claire could not stay in the kitchen any longer. She went to the hall closet and put on her down jacket. “Where are you going?” her mother called as the front door closed.
It did not feel much better to be outside, although that was no surprise. Everything reminded her of childhood: the orange basketball hoop over the garage which was missing its net, and the hump in the driveway which she had stumbled over once, chipping a baby tooth. On the Danzigers’ street, the split-level houses stood one after the other in rows a few yards back from the gutter, like attentive parade watchers.
Every evening the very last child on the block wheeled his bicycle home while it was still light, baseball cards flicking gently through the spokes, and the eight or so feet that
separated the identical houses were just enough to keep sound insulated, just enough to keep family troubles within the family.
It began to do something—sleet, drizzle, hail, she couldn’t tell which. She could feel wet chunks falling into her hair, and she made her way back home. Inside, dinner was already on the table, and her parents sat in their chairs, their forks poised in the air.
“We would have waited,” her mother said, “but I had no idea of where you ran off to, and the food started to get cold. Sit down and join us. It’s meat loaf.”
It was as if nothing had happened. And really, Claire had to admit, nothing had.
Later that evening Julian called. “Hello,” he said when she answered. “I miss you madly.”
Claire unlooped the cord from where it was caught around a plastic plant and carried the phone halfway down the basement stairs. She liked to talk there; it was dark and silent. “I miss you too,” she said.
“Have things been so terrible at your house?”
“Yes,” she said. “They have.”
“Oh,” Julian said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What have you been doing?” Claire asked.
“Reading, mostly. Just one book. Guess what it is.”
“I have no idea.”
“Just guess.”
“I hate guessing games. If you’re going to tell me, tell me.”
“Okay,” Julian said. “I was planning on waiting until we got back to school. I’ve been reading
Sleepwalking
.” His voice
was hushed. “You know, Claire, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. Lucy Ascher is really fine. You have good taste.” He paused. “And besides, you taste good.”
Claire did not laugh. He should know by now, she thought, that most things did not strike her as funny. Maybe that was the reason he said silly things to her, to try to change that. One night, during sex, he whispered, “You know something, Claire? There’s a
vas deferens
between us.” She had not even smiled, but he didn’t seem to mind. It was as though he were keeping himself amused.
“Are you still there?” Julian asked on the phone. “Hello, Claire?”
“I’m still here,” she answered. “I just don’t know what you expect me to say or think. I mean, am I supposed to congratulate you for reading Lucy Ascher’s book? Is it supposed to be some great feat?” Claire felt an obscure resentment. She wanted Lucy Ascher to herself. She did not want Julian snuggling up, trying to join in, as if it were a great game. Claire wanted to be the only one in the world who loved Lucy Ascher. She knew this was impossible and even silly, but she enjoyed pretending that she was Lucy Ascher’s disciple, the only one in the world who felt such far-reaching sorrow and joy when thinking about her. A passion of that sort is not something you share with another person. It would create a threesome—an ungainly, cumbersome triangle. Claire suddenly felt protective, as though something were about to be taken from her.
This time it was Julian who did not say anything for a while, although she could hear him breathe. Through his mouth. “You know,” he said at last, “I thought you would like it. I figured it
would bring us closer together. I never know what’s going on inside your mind, so I counted on the book helping me to understand a little better.”
“Well,” Claire said, “you were wrong. I’m sorry, you were just wrong. That’s all there is to it.” Then she hung up on him.
She had never done that to anyone and had always thought it very rude when she heard of other people doing it. She pictured Julian on the phone in his family’s library, or whatever room he was in, somewhere deep inside his plush brownstone. There would be corking on the walls, she imagined, and the whole room would be done up in soft beiges and browns. He would be sitting on the edge of a deep corduroy couch, holding his touch-tone receiver a few inches from his ear, bewildered as he listened to the dead line.
Claire crouched on the stair in the darkness, holding herself tightly, and rocked back and forth. She had done this when she was very small, and it had always made her feel better. But now she suddenly became aware of how foolish it all was. She should calm herself down and call Julian back, ask his forgiveness and say she did not know what had come over her—it was just one of those things. But she did not want to. She wanted to stay in the basement forever, a kind of subterranean Mrs. Rochester.
“Oh, yes,” her parents would say whenever they had company, “we have a daughter. She lives in the basement, and we have not seen her for a few years. We send her meals down on a pulley. Still, it’s better than nothing, wouldn’t you agree? Our two other children are no longer with us. Our son died
and our elder daughter has gone off with the Indians. Claire is all we have.”
Claire stood and walked upstairs, bumping the telephone over the steps behind her. Nothing made her happy except Lucy Ascher—that was what it all came down to. All of the squabbling with her parents and with Julian had no bearing on anything; she was just marking time. School meant nothing to her—she read all of the texts assigned and she diligently typed up her term papers, but she never paid close attention. She knew many college students felt a kind of apathy; she had overheard a couple of students having a conversation one day on the lunch line. One of them told the other that he was depressed, that he felt disinterested, alienated from the rest of the world, that he saw no point in going on with anything. His friend had smiled and told him in a sure voice that he was suffering from existentialism, the adolescent disease.
All around her, people complained of having a void within them that could not be filled. The difference between her and them was that she
had
something to fill her void. The only problem was that she did not have enough time in which to do it. There was course work to contend with, and Julian, and her family. Her head buzzed with trivial chores and responsibilities.
She did not speak to Julian for the remainder of the vacation. She refused to phone, and she knew that he had too much pride to call her again. She spent almost all of her time in her bedroom, reading Lucy Ascher’s poetry, slowly regressing into the routine she had followed in high school. Each evening she
selected a poem to be read first thing in the morning. She slept fitfully; her nights were filled with broken-up, puzzling dreams that made her call out in her sleep. She woke very early, with the birds screaming outside, and read poetry in the dim light of her room. Her parents ignored her.
She went back to Swarthmore on a Sunday, arriving in the evening. The campus was covered with snow and looked quite beautiful. Everything was still; many students had not yet returned. Claire dropped her orange valise in her room and walked across the green. The snow was up to her shins, but she liked the feel of coldness seeping in over the tops of her boots. She knocked on the door of Naomi’s room. She had not been there in a long while, and she wanted to talk to her.
“Come in,” Naomi called. She and Laura were sitting on the floor, drinking tea they had brewed in an illegal hot pot.
“Well, hello,” Laura said. “Fancy seeing you here.” Her voice was cool.