Sleepwalking

  “So there’s more to Claire,” Ray said, bringing his feet up onto the bed and reaching to shut off the light.

  Helen was feeling very talkative that night. She placed her hand gently over his, so he wouldn’t switch off the lamp. “Keep it on,” she said. “I don’t think I could sleep just yet. I feel all wired up.”

  “About Claire?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve kind of latched on to this fact, about her parents having had another child, and Claire being the survivor and all that.”

  “She doesn’t look too much like a survivor,” Ray said.

  Helen had to agree that that was true. “Most of us don’t,” she added.

  “Well, most of us have good reasons,” said Ray.

  This was their old banter now. It was odd how easily they could drop back into it. People living together developed patterns that held forever, it seemed.

  Claire was asleep already. Ray said her light had been off when he passed her room. She had worked steadily all day, then gone upstairs to bed. At dinner she had eaten very little—a plate of soup, some broccoli, a glass of milk. “Some chicken?” Helen had asked, the platter poised in the air.

  “No thank you,” Claire said. “I’ve decided not to eat meat for a few days.”

  Lucy had had vegetarian leanings, too. Every few months, though, she would claim to need a steak, and so Helen and Ray would gladly take her out to a noisy, dark steakhouse. She ate her meat rare, digging into a thick London broil expertly. When she was done she would pat her mouth lightly with a napkin, and they would leave the restaurant. It was as though she had to be refueled every so often and would run for months at a time powered by the protein of one steak dinner.

  Claire ate like a bird. Helen wondered if she, too, had sudden cravings for red meat. Helen liked the delicate way Claire spooned up soup. Everything about her manner was careful, guarded. She sat straight in her chair, eating small mouthfuls, and swallowing milk silently. She was well-contained, this child.

  When dinner ended, Claire stood and began to clear the table. Ray went into the den to grade papers, and Helen stayed in her chair. As Claire worked, there was the sound of silver being piled—a shuffle of metal. The knives and forks glinted with a new light that evening; Claire had polished them well. Now she ran warm water over each piece and placed it in the dishwasher rack. Helen wasn’t needed in the kitchen, but she stayed anyway. She liked watching and listening; it lulled her. Claire handled things gently. Underneath all that hardness she was someone’s sister, lover, daughter.

  chapter eleven

  The ghost of Lucy Ascher would not go away. Claire did not want it to, but that was hardly the point. As the days passed she realized that Lucy, in her subtle way, managed to be everywhere. The house reeked of her presence. Since no one mentioned it, Claire wondered if perhaps she was the only one who was aware of this phenomenon, the only one who felt that Lucy was still very much a part of the household.

  Ray and Helen barely spoke about their daughter, and when they did, it was in a quiet, off-hand manner. One night at dinner Helen murmured something about wanting to get rid of some boxes of old clothes that were taking up space in the garage.

  “They were our daughter’s,” Ray said quietly to Claire.

  “Oh,” she responded, looking down into her bowl of soup. “I see.”

  After a few moments of the silence that accompanied most meals at the Aschers’, Claire offered in as casual a voice as she could muster to take care of the clothing. Helen Ascher waved her hand in careless agreement. Ray told her he thought it was a fine idea.

  The next morning, her eighth day with the Aschers, she put on her coat and went out to the garage, which was separate from the house. The place smelled good; Claire had always loved the mingled odors of exhaust and gasoline. Whenever her parents drove to a gas station, Claire would roll down her window all the way and inhale the fumes. “Sicko,” her mother would call her whenever she did this.

  The garage was truly a mess, unlike the house, which had a kind of shabby order to it. There were beach chairs with split canvas seats scattered around. In a corner was a coffee table whose surface someone had begun to finish and then had obviously abandoned. The partially shellacked table was surrounded by newspaper and hardened brushes crusted with lacquer. On the walls were garden tools hanging on hooks: a spade, a trowel, a rake with a cracked handle. Claire wondered why they were there, since there was obviously no garden to tend. Nothing grew in a bed of sand, or if it did, it would certainly have to choke its own way up into open sunlight without the aid of water.

  There were old, bad oil paintings propped against the wall. There was an antique globe resting on its axis. Claire picked it up and spun it slowly. She saw that all of the countries and oceans and islands were written in German. Frankreich, she read. Atlantischer Ozean. There was a Miss Clairol electric hair curler set piled on top of a precarious stack of matching books. Claire moved the curlers and picked up the first book. Oceanography Abstracts it read on the spine, Vol. XII, 1962. The book felt damp and furred, as though a strain of bread mold had grown on its cover. She dropped it back onto the pile, and a small cloud of dust billowed up.

  The entire garage was like this, a roomful of useless, senseless things just waiting to disintegrate over the course of time. She was freezing, and she was about to turn and leave when she remembered what she had gone there for in the first place. The boxes of clothing.

  She found them easily enough; they were behind a folded card table, three cartons, all of them labeled “Lucy.” She dragged them out to the center of the floor, where there was a little square of cleared space. She opened the first box with trembling, cold hands. Inside was darkness, but the box was not empty. It was stuffed to the top with Lucy’s black and gray and navy-blue sweaters and dresses and shirts. Claire felt a sudden kinship, greater than she had ever felt before. She pulled out a turtleneck, ribbed and black, and held it up against her own chest and arms. The ghost of Lucy Ascher hovered overhead, smiling.

  —

  It was Ray who went to look for her, hours later. He came into the garage to see how she was making out, and he stopped in the doorway. She was modeling a dress, Lucy’s dress, before an imaginary mirror, holding it out in a fan shape at the sides. When she saw him she dropped her hands, embarrassed.

  The dress was not a perfect fit—Lucy had been somewhat smaller than Claire—but it hung fairly well nonetheless. It was made of black crepe, and the material was creased into long, soft folds. Claire smoothed it down against her and looked up at Ray.

  “You know about Lucy,” he said.

  “Yes.” She could not have said anything else and gotten away with it. Naomi had been right, her face betrayed her. It wasn’t her mouth, it was her eyes. They widened, darkened. She had been wearing the clothes of Lucy Ascher, after all. She had trembled almost violently as she drew the dress over her head. She had taken off her own clothes, her jeans and turtleneck, in the freezing garage. Her skin had risen into gooseflesh from the excitement and from the cold. Her nipples stood out in hard, tight points. She could smell the scent of Lucy on the dress—something pungent and sad and wise. She wondered if later, when she took the dress off and put her own clothes back on, that smell would remain on her skin. She hoped it would.

  Ray stood watching her from the doorway. He was wearing a cap with earflaps on it. She looked at him and she did not know what to say. He didn’t move, he just kept watching. “Are you angry?” she asked finally, for she could not tell what he was thinking.

  “No,” he said. “Why should I be angry?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. “I thought you’d think it was disrespectful of me.”

  He shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t think that. I was surprised, that’s all. It really didn’t have too much to do with you.”

  “What did it have to do with?” she ask
ed, curious.

  Ray sat down on the step that led into the garage. He crossed his arms over his chest and thought about it. “You looked like her,” he said softly. “Like Lucy, when she used to wear that dress. It startled me, that’s all.”

  There were long pauses between each of their sentences. The conversation seemed suspended in the cold air. When either of them spoke, vapor came out first. It was a very uncomfortable talk. Claire tried to make herself appear relaxed. She leaned against the wall, her hand draped over a bicycle tire that hung there. She knew how stilted and oddly formal she must look. God, she was wearing a party dress, a dress that had been worn to receptions, to poetry readings, a dress that had absorbed the benign sweat of Lucy Ascher as she cleared her throat into a microphone behind some podium.

  If there was ever a time to make a confession, this was it. “Listen,” Claire said at last. “I have something to tell you. I didn’t come here randomly. I knew what I was doing.”

  She sought for more words, but he interrupted her. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter why you’re here, does it? Helen said it didn’t.”

  It was the most awkward conversation Claire had ever had. She was choosing her words very carefully. “Helen knows?” she asked. “Knows that I know?”

  “We’ve talked about you,” he admitted. “But we’ve never really said much. We’ve just mentioned you. I’ve wanted to say more to Helen, but . . . things are hard for her.”

  Ray was looking at Claire more intently now, and it unnerved her. “Maybe I should leave,” she said. “I don’t know how good an idea this is.”

  “No,” he said. “Why should you? Things will be okay here.” Then, as if on impulse, he said, “Tell me about yourself.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Claire answered quickly. “I just wanted to come here. I thought it would be a good experience.” She hated herself at once for minimizing her love for Lucy, but there was nothing else she could do. Her heart was beating rapidly, and she played her feelings down. “That’s about all,” she said, then she shrugged and tried to smile.

  They left it at that. She could not say anything more, and soon he stood up and walked back to the house. “You should come inside too,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s a lot warmer.”

  And so they had an unspoken relationship from then on. Ray still shuffled into the kitchen each morning for breakfast while she stood unloading the dishwasher. They exchanged the required hellos and nothing more. Everything that mattered was left unsaid. Claire didn’t think of this silence as mutual indifference; she thought of it as a kind of tacit communication. She was aware that Ray regarded her with interest now. One Sunday she was cooking breakfast for them, and when she handed him his plate of eggs, sunny side up and crisp around the edges, he looked up at her, eyes full of feeling, and said, “These are just perfect, Claire.”

  Still the ghost was everywhere, its presence amplified by the fact that nobody ever mentioned it. How did that perfume commercial go—something like “If you want to catch someone’s attention, whisper.” Claire thought that this might well be true. She had just begun to realize that subtleties were everything. In bed at night at the Aschers’, she would feel the soft whoosh of fingers down her back, the slightest hint of breath, and it would be more than enough to carry her through the night. Claire certainly had not lived her life by this doctrine. She knew that everything she did was overboard—the way she dressed, or wore perfume, or carried an obsession to the hilt. She had never thought of subtlety as being effective. She needed immediate response, immediate gratification. People turned their heads and watched when she came into a classroom. Claire needed that rush of recognition; it let her know that she was still alive, still breathing. Without it, she feared she might fade into anonymity, into a walking death.

  What was it, then, that made her a death girl? She certainly didn’t embrace death. In fact, she was very much frightened by it. Maybe it was this fear that had stunned her into a kind of obsessiveness. If you put yourself in a perpetual state of mourning, then nothing could come up from behind and surprise you. You were prepared for everything—telegrams, landslides, avalanches, apocalypse. When Seth died Claire had thought, I can’t go through this again. She knew she would have to, though. She knew that it was usual for children eventually to bury their parents. Chances were that she would not have to think about this for a couple of decades, and when she did she would not be alone; she would be flanked by other people—a husband and children. The way society worked, you replaced your family with a new one—a young, rock-strong husband and a newborn infant—so that when your first family gave way, there would be a buffer to the blow. You would hardly feel it; you would only sense something inside, a slight vibration of change, like a tuning fork being struck against a table edge. There would be new people standing on either side of you in the cemetery, holding an umbrella over your head, steadying you with their arms.

  Some people were unlucky; they lived to see everything. When all of the relatives came back to the Danzigers’ house after Seth’s funeral, Claire made herself useful, carrying plates of food back and forth. On a trip into the kitchen she found her grandmother sitting at the table in one of the swivel chairs, moving it slowly from side to side. “Claire,” the woman said, “no grandmother should ever have to see this.”

  What kind of sense could you make of death when you grew old? What could you make of the ritual of mourning? The mirrors in the house had all been draped with sheets. They looked like flattened ghosts or paintings about to be unveiled at an exhibition. Claire had asked Rabbi Krinsky what the significance of covering the mirrors was. He told her that she had asked a very important question and explained to her that the mirrors were covered so that there should be no vanity. Claire had nodded, moving away from him. The custom made perfect sense to her, and probably even more to her grandmother. There had to be something to keep you forging ahead in times of grief—some feeling of self. Of course the mirrors were covered. It might be tempting, she thought, to glance up in the mirror if it was left bare and catch a piece of your reflection for one brief moment, feeling a sudden rush of guilty pride, the vanity of just being alive.

  To be a bereaved grandmother was terrible, a freak of nature, but to be a bereaved parent was even worse. Claire realized, with a little surprise, that her parents and the Aschers actually had something in common. It had never occurred to her before. The resemblance was confined to the fact that each couple had lost a child; it went no further than that. Grief had made her parents hard, and it had softened the Aschers.

  What bewilderment the Aschers must be feeling in the middle of all that grief. After all, Lucy’s death was a kind of unsolved mystery. Her whole essence was a mystery, the eighth wonder of the world. Claire no longer knew how people’s personalities are shaped. Genetics could not begin to explain it; the twisted double helix of DNA didn’t have enough room to hold codes for despair or anger or alienation. Those traits were learned, and Lucy didn’t seem to have learned them from her parents. Helen and Ray had been happy once and hopeful about their world.

  Maybe you have to give children more credit than that, Claire thought. Maybe they absorbed larger things, were sensitive to a woman crying in the street, an argument on television, the way light slants in through a window at a certain time of day.

  Perhaps the Aschers just weren’t the right parents for Lucy. They were good people; they just weren’t right for their daughter. Lucy needed something else, but what? Claire didn’t know, and she never would. She realized then that she wouldn’t be able to find out too much about Lucy by living in the Aschers’ house. If someone moved into the Danzigers’ house now in the hope of learning about Claire, what would she find? Clues, but some of them would be red herrings. There was an Anne Sexton line that Laura often repeated—something about how every woman is her mother. Claire didn’t think she believed that; it was too
easy, too pat. You have to take what you are given and then use it to move forward. You can’t remain static all your life.

  There had been the slightest change in Helen lately, Claire noticed. She wondered if Ray had said anything to his wife after the conversation in the garage. Helen still had the same glazed expression on her face, and her eyes still moved as though she were watching a “follow the bouncing ball” cartoon, but every once in a while Claire could see a hint of recognition coming through. The first time she noticed it was one evening when she came downstairs to have dinner. Helen and Ray were already seated at the table, and as Claire came into the kitchen, Helen looked up at her and held her gaze. It startled Claire, but she tried not to show it. She sat in her chair as though she had not seen the change.

  After dinner Ray pulled her aside in the kitchen alcove. Helen was washing pots. The water was rushing loudly, and she could not hear their talk. “You know, she seems happier tonight,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  She looked at him and saw that he was desperate. He was confiding in her only because he needed to talk and she was there. “Yes,” Claire said. “She does.”

  Her confirmation of this seemed to put him in good spirits, and later that evening when the dishwasher had been put on and the three of them were sitting quietly in the living room, Ray said to Claire, “I want to show you something.” Helen looked up from the beach-grass place mat she was working on, inquisitive. “The telescope,” he explained to his wife.

  “Oh,” she said, her eyes bright for a moment, and then went back to her weaving.

  Ray went to the closet and took out a long, narrow box. “I got this for Lucy,” he said softly. “I think she only used it once.” He set it up in the bay window while Claire stood by, watching. She did not know how she should react. “Look,” Ray said, flipping through the booklet that came with the telescope. “Try to find Cygnus. The manual says: ‘Cygnus, a complex constellation, looks like a graceful swan spreading her wings against the night sky.’”