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.
“To whatever,” he said, touching his glass to hers.
They sat at the kitchen table for another hour, drinking and talking. “Let’s take a day trip soon,” he said.
“Okay,” said Helen. “I’d like that. I’ve been getting kind of stir-crazy.”
“I can tell,” he said. “It’s a good sign.”
The humming stopped. Helen leaned back in her chair and craned her neck to see into the upstairs hallway. The light in Claire’s room was off, or else the door was closed—possibly both. The sherry had made Helen feel very tired and overheated. “Feel my face,” she said, taking Ray’s hand and placing it flat against her cheek.
“Hot,” he said.
They were sitting very close together at the table, and she could smell his aftershave—something with pine in it—and the sherry on his breath. The white overhead light was harsh, nothing was hidden. It was a light to cut food finely by, to read recipe print by. Now she could see his pores and all of the deep creases in his face. They shared responsibility, that was certain. They had been married a long time, she thought, leaning against him.
“Whoa,” he said, thinking she was a little bit tipsy and had lost her balance. He braced her shoulder, and then she turned her face up to his, expectant.
chapter fourteen
She saw them dancing from the top of the stairs. At first she did not know what they were doing. She saw a whirl of bodies and heard music blaring on the stereo, but she did not connect these things with dancing.
Claire walked down the stairs and stood in the entrance to the living room. It was then that she realized they were waltzing. Ray was holding his wife very close and twirling her around in circles. They were laughing as they moved. Every once in a while Helen would turn her head slightly to the side to make sure they weren’t about to tip something over, like the huge china vase in the corner or the antique end table which stood on thin nineteenth-century legs.
Claire was standing a few yards away from them, and they had no idea she was there. The music ended, and Ray went to change the record. He took a thick vintage disk from the stack next to the stereo and said to Helen, “Wait till you hear this.” It was a tango.
“Ray,” she said, “come on. I can’t do that.”
But he would not listen to her. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her close up to his body. Soon she was dancing with him in perfect tango form. Her left cheek was flush against his right as they moved in Claire’s direction, still not seeing her. Helen had an odd expression on her face, as though she were clenching an imaginary rose between her teeth.
Claire felt embarrassed, watching them. It was a very private moment, and there she was, standing in the doorway. Suddenly she felt as if everything were way over her head, far beyond her reach. During Orientation Week at Swarthmore she had sat next to two physics enthusiasts at breakfast, and when the conversation grew technical and incomprehensible, Claire felt herself being swallowed up. There had been no place for her there, so she had picked up her tray and left the cafeteria without eating.
Watching Helen and Ray dancing, she wondered if it was time for her to leave them. It was not a feeling of insecurity; it was something else, which she could not fully understand. It was the kind of sadness that comes when you realize something has come to a quiet end, and are surprised that it has. She thought of all the corny movies she had seen and books she had read in which the husband walks out on the family—just packs up a few of his belongings, touches the foreheads of his wife and young children as they lie sleeping, and then walks out the front door and down the long dirt road. You cannot hold people together if they do not belong together. It may work for a while, but then things begin to fall apart—there is silence and restlessness, and you know it is time for someone to leave.
Is death like that? she wondered. Do you get summoned—a light brush on your shoulder or a dimming of your vision, and do you calmly and sadly accept it? Does life leak from you gradually, so that you have time to watch it go?
She hadn’t been at the hospital the night Seth died. She had been at a movie by herself. Her father had given her some money and sent her off. “Take a break,” he said. “We’ll be with him.” And so she had gone to see a comedy, and sometime in the middle of it Seth had died. Her father wasn’t outside the theater to pick her up when the movie let out, as he was supposed to have been. She waited awhile, and all the cars left the parking lot. Then one of their neighbors pulled up to the curb. She saw him, and she suddenly knew. Her parents had sent him to pick her up; something had happened. “Claire,” said Mr. Getz, leaning across the seat and calling to her from the window. He did not say another word, and she opened the door and climbed in.
It saddened her that she hadn’t been there. Her parents told her it had been a quiet death; he had been sleeping, or had at least been in a sort of drug-sleep, and everything had finally given way. It was incomplete to her, though. There had to have been something more, some nuance her parents had missed. Maybe a shadow had passed over the room, or maybe there had been a breeze floating in through the window. She wished she had been there to see.
Now Claire stood and continued to look at Helen and Ray. They had their arms draped around each other in a way that indicated that they had been dancing partners for years. There was an ease to the way they moved. When they saw Claire they smiled awkwardly. “Just getting some exercise,” Ray called out to her. His voice was lost under the strains of the tango.
Claire went into the kitchen and began to work in time to the music. She sponged down the copper tiles which lined the wall above the sink. She knew that she could work as much or as little as she wished; it did not matter to Ray and Helen. They scarcely seemed to notice how often she cleaned anymore. They still watched her, but it was in a way that was different than it had been in the beginning.
The other evening, just after Claire had climbed under the covers to go to sleep, she heard a faint tapping at her door. “Come in,” she called out in the darkness, and Ray and Helen entered the room.
“We wanted to see . . . if you needed an extra blanket or anything,” Ray said.
“No,” Claire answered. “I’m fine.”
They did not leave for a few seconds. They loomed over the bed like angels, like parents. She could not make out their features; they appeared in silhouette, back-lighted against the brightness from the hallway. Claire felt very small as she lay there.
“Good night, sweetie,” Helen said. This startled Claire, but before she could even take it in fully, the Aschers had slipped from the room.
She had come to them when they needed her. Her timing could not have been better. There was a certain point during the course of extended grief when one had to have a change, something had to be filled in. She knew this from watching her own parents. It was roughly a year and a half after Seth died that her mother and father joined a local bridge club. The group met every Wednesday night at a different couple’s house. Claire remembered how her parents talked about nothing but bridge during the month they were in the club. Their conversation was fevered; they had worked themselves up to a state in which they believed they were being renewed. They felt that their lives were starting all over again, and the prospect was overwhelming.
“Well,” her father would say during dinner, squinting in concentration, “if declarer had tried to prevent a spade ruff, it wouldn’t have worked. He could return a trump, but it wouldn’t have done any good.”
&nb
sp; “Why not?” her mother asked, scribbling furiously on the pad of paper next to her glass. “It looks to me as if it would be all right.”
“Look, we’ll go over it again.” And then they would talk about it for the rest of the meal while Claire sat in silence.
Then one night her father got into an argument with one of the other players, a man who lived three blocks away. The group was meeting at the Danzigers’ house that night, and from upstairs Claire could smell coffee brewing and hear her father say, “Diamonds! I said diamonds!”
She heard her mother murmur something to him, but it didn’t seem to help. In a minute her father’s voice was loud and strident, and the bridge game broke up soon after. Her mother came upstairs to fetch the coats, which had been thrown onto the bed. She passed by Claire’s room with a pile of them slung over her arm and said, “Why aren’t you asleep?”
Claire could hear the sound of car engines being started. After the last couple drove away down the street, her parents began to have it out. Her mother lashed at her father, and he yelled back. Their voices volleyed back and forth. It seemed to be a prelude to something stronger—an exchange of slaps, maybe. Her father had hit her mother once. Claire remembered it very vividly. She and Seth were young—she even recalled that they were both wearing Dr. Dentons that night; they used to play ice skaters on the floor of the kitchen, gliding across the linoleum on their smooth plastic pajama-feet soles.
It had been a fight about money. Her father was accusing her mother of spending too much of it. Claire was not frightened—the subject was always raised on I Love Lucy. Lucy would spend more than they could afford, and Ricky would lower his head and flare his nostrils like a raging bull and say, “Looocy . . . ” Claire thought that this was just another facet of marriage. She thought all marriages were like this. It was only when she heard the slap that she was shaken. It was a clean sound, a punctuation. She and Seth looked at each other, afraid. There was a pause downstairs, an awful stillness, and then her mother said in a new, low voice, “Well, that’s just great. You should be really proud of yourself now.”