Once when she had not responded to the swimming coach’s ardent, chlorinated kisses, he had accused her of being without passion. She had believed his accusation without question. He was, after all, quite experienced sexually and had once made love underwater with a champion woman swimmer. They had gone through foreplay and intercourse, he swore, without ever having to come up for air.
Claire longed for real passion, the kind she had read about in romantic novels. She wanted to clasp Julian to her, to have their lovemaking be something new and exotic each time. She had seen that look on the faces of lovers in restaurants, on the street: a secret, meaningful glance exchanged between two people. There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.
To her, she had to admit, it was not much more than an abstract idea. The word conjured up images of fierceness: two lovers locked together as though they might never be pulled apart. She was fierce—she had that in her favor—but somehow she could not connect this quality in her with anything at all sexual.
The first day in seventh-grade hygiene class the teacher stood up and said, “We are all animals.” Everyone had laughed at this. The idea was new then, and it had seemed odd, embarrassing. Now it depressed Claire. On visits home she would occasionally run into people she had gone to school with, and she could see it in their eyes. Many of them were in love, or lust, and in that young-couple flush of desire and expectancy.
But Claire did not feel like an animal. When she slept with Julian her body was cool, straight, efficient. Smells and tastes did not lure her from sleep in the middle of the night. She had no fur, she had no heat.
chapter three
On Julian’s birthday she bought him a red scarf. It was very long, and he wound it around the both of them. They stood in her room with their faces pressing hard against each other. He kissed her, and she could feel heat and dampness against the wool of the scarf. She was reminded of walking to school in winter, all wrapped up by her mother against the cold, breathing open-mouthed into cloth.
Claire liked giving presents. A year before Seth died she gave him an Etch-a-Sketch, a toy they had loved when they were little and had misplaced long ago. Somehow their coordination was off now, and they couldn’t make any interesting designs. The box showed elaborate pictures of flowers and animals and sailboats. They turned the knobs for an hour, then gave up. “We were better at this when we were eight,” Seth said. They put the toy away, and never used it again. It was still sitting in an old chest in the playroom.
No one had touched the toy chest since Seth died. It was big and made of stiff cardboard, with bright blue stars pasted all over it. Claire knew the contents without having to look inside. Every game stayed with her, and so did the memory of afternoons of play. There was benign Candyland with no words, just pictures of jaunty peppermint sticks and chocolate bars, and you moved your marker blithely around the game board, knowing that nothing really bad could happen to you. There was Go to the Head of the Class, which only lasted a few months because the reams of questions got used up. Somewhere at the bottom there was Twister, and this offered the most focused memory of all. Their father had brought home the big flat Twister box one evening for no particular reason, but just as a surprise. This was uncharacteristic of him, but Claire did not say anything. She watched as her father spread out the vinyl mat on the living-room rug. It had a vaguely unpleasant odor to it, like a bed-wetter’s rubber sheet. Still, she was excited. Even their mother agreed to play, in the capacity of referee and spinner. Left hand red, right foot green. Directions were called, and soon they were a family tangled up. Claire wrapped her arms around her father’s waist to touch a distant green circle. She was on all fours, and Seth was wedged beneath her, squirming. Her mother gave the spinner a good flick and called out, “Left foot yellow!”
The three of them slowly toppled in a heap, like the fall of an ancient, crumbling building. Claire lay there, breathing hard, her arms and legs mixed up with everyone else’s. She had wondered how she would ever be able to grow up and move away from home, like her sister Joan, who went to college in Arizona. There was so much to connect people in a family; even if you weren’t close, you still had shared histories. How could you ever leave?
“I can’t bear to come East,” Joan said over the telephone. “I’m doing such good work here, and I have a whole new life.” But there had been one time when Claire had felt very close to her. Joan was home for a rare Christmas-vacation visit. The two sisters sat in the bathroom, in front of the big wall mirror, and Joan set Claire’s hair with pink curlers. “Wait until Mom sees,” Joan said. “She won’t even recognize you.”
Claire giggled at the excitement of this new allegiance and then sat quietly as her sister’s hands, damp with setting gel, moved slowly through her hair, parting it and rolling it close to her head. Claire felt a swell of love for Joan, and she knew why: you love the people who take care of you. She closed her eyes and felt like a patient dog being petted over and over on its sleek, waiting head.
No one had really taken care of her since then. Julian tried, but it just wasn’t right. She felt his bewilderment and inexperience, and she thought that he could barely manage to take care of himself, let alone her. She did not need what he wanted to give.
“Please don’t touch me now,” she said once when he reached for her, because she knew he would make it seem like concern, but it was really only longing. He could get an erection in about three seconds; once she kidded him about this and he became quiet and embarrassed, so she stopped.
Although they made love quite often and were serious about most things, she felt especially young when she was with him. Perhaps this was because he reminded her of her childhood picture of Seth; she was not sure. She was confused about childhood now; there were wonderful memories left over, but they always made her sad when she started to recall them.
Her childhood seemed especially brief—Seth sprouted upward and then weakened, and childhood was over for Claire. The games were gone, stored away forever. Claire invited no one home; the house was like a mausoleum. Whenever she went to a friend’s house, the girl’s mother would ply her with cookies and look at her nervously. “How are your parents doing?” she would ask in a hushed voice. “I’ve been meaning to call.” Claire would shrug and not know how to respond, and soon the woman would drift away.
Claire stopped seeing friends after school. She rode the bus home and let herself into the quiet house. At dinnertime she and her parents would converge at the table and eat in complete silence.
Sometimes Claire wondered if she was going crazy. How long could she stand the silence? she wondered. Wasn’t there a punishment for disgraced cadets at West Point called the silent treatment? At night, in her room, she would conduct small conversations with herself to review her thoughts of the day. She would lie on her back in bed, staring up at the ceiling, and ask herself in a whisper, “What’s new?”
“Nothing.”
“How do you feel?”
“Terrible.”
“Will it ever get any better?”
“I have no idea.”
Then she would sleep, a heavy sleep packed with dreams. Seth stretched out an inviting arm toward her, and they walked together through turnstiles, revolving doors, anything that moved. She woke up dizzy each morning. It was still dark when she went downstairs and made herself breakfast. Her junior high school was overcrowded and on a split-session program, so the ninth graders started their morning very early. As she rode the bus, the town was just waking up. Men like her father, who commuted into Manhattan every day, were warming up their cars for the long, solitary ride.
At lunch Claire sat alone and thought of Seth. She thought of his fingers—the way he could flip-flop a coin quickly through them, a skill that a magician at a birthday party had taught him. She could not get used to the stillness; that was the hardest part. Moving fingers, now still. Blinking eyes, now still, pale lashes sha
ding nothing. And that voice—the hoarse hesitance of male adolescence, never knowing if it would split and jump an octave in the middle of a word. All of that, now still.
But then one night in bed she realized that it wasn’t simply a matter of stillness. That was sad enough, but it also contained an element of the romantic: a sleeping prince frozen forever by a witch’s spell. It wasn’t stillness, she knew, and she sat up in bed. It was nothingness. Seth didn’t even have a body any longer. There was nothing left to be still—some bone dust, maybe, and a suit of unfilled clothing.
Claire began to cry and could not make herself stop. It was the racking kind of sob; her body shook and she found herself gasping. She reached over and turned on the television set so that her parents wouldn’t hear her. Johnny Carson came on, all brightness—white hair, wide clean smile. His guest was a blond actress in a sequined dress. It’s as if our house is a private, sealed cave, Claire thought. Everything else goes on, even during this. The world did not stop for Seth’s death. Traffic moved, school remained open. There were years of school ahead of her, years of waiting on long cafeteria lines and of getting picked for volleyball teams in gym class. How would she get through it all? she wondered. What would propel her?
Numbness would, it turned out. She found that through real concentration she could close out certain thoughts and focus only on the practical things. Parting her hair before the bathroom mirror, all she thought about was evenness, getting it just right. In geometry class she held her compass and swiveled it carefully over the page. A perfect arc formed, a useless bridge.
Then there was the Lucy Ascher thing. At least, that was what her mother called it. “What’s this thing you have for that woman poet?” she asked Claire. It is not a thing! Claire wanted to scream. It is everything; it is my life. The earth split apart for Claire when she first read Lucy Ascher. Lucy Ascher seemed to say that we have a right to feel the sadness we feel. The world is bleak; the air is cold. Her poems were set in quiet places—the corners of dark rooms, the tops of lighthouses, empty bus stations late at night.
And then, after Claire knew it was all right to be depressed, to feel alone, she looked forward to the morning, to a new day of Lucy Ascher’s poetry. Her parents stayed in the dim house and Claire rose above them, above it all.
It did not mean that she wasn’t sad; she often was. The sadness stayed with her at college—at her side, a constant companion. Lately, since Julian, she had vivid flashes of Seth. He would be at the kitchen sink rinsing off an apple or sprawled out under a Japanese maple in the backyard, smoking a fat joint. Once she thought about Seth’s bar mitzvah and pictured him standing up on the bema, embarrassed, the tallith draped around his neck as casually as a locker-room towel.
“Today, Seth Michael Danziger is a man,” the rabbi had said; her parents made a recording of the whole ceremony. Claire remembered the words, and they were painful now that Seth was dead, and ironic, since he never really got to be a man, even though the rabbi said he did.
Claire found her father playing the tape once in the den, weeks after Seth died. She heard the high squeal of rewinding and then Seth’s voice, muffled and slightly warped by the recording: “V’nat tan lanuh et torah to . . . ”
She wanted to ask her father why he was doing this to himself, torturing himself in this way, but she was silent. He had the right to do what he wanted, to do anything he could to get by. It wasn’t easy to stay in the present; Claire also had urges to move backward, to grasp things that weren’t there any longer. She thought of it as time-tripping, what Billy Pilgrim did in Slaughterhouse-Five; her past would forge ahead by itself and she wouldn’t even be stunned by it but would let it take over. Images poked up from their hiding places.
Oh, Seth. He had traveled around the country the summer before his death, sleeping out in campsites with his best friend, Mitchell, hitching rides from truckers. One night, he said, the truckdriver had been very tired and had asked Seth if he would drive for a few hours. Along Route 80, Seth steered the frozen-meat truck while Mitchell and the driver, a black man named Ramsay, slept soundly.
“It was really scary being so high up,” Seth had told Claire. “Above everything, like God almost. I turned on the CB and all of these crazy people were talking, saying ‘Breaker, breaker,’ and everything. I drove until the sun came up. Then we stopped for breakfast at a Bob’s Big Boy, and I just fell right to sleep with my head practically in my plate. Mitchell still teases me about it.”
He had come home with a peeling sunburn and long hair. Claire ripped the thin scrolls of skin from his shoulders while he lay on his bed, electric guitar blasting from the stereo. She sat with him and made him tell her all about his trip. The summer had been so lonely for her—the first of many. The neighborhood was deserted; all the other kids were away at camp. Only the sprinklers made noise—that rhythmic stuttering coming from every front lawn.
She was getting real breasts—round swells under her blouse that she looked at for a long time each night. Seth got sick right in the middle of this. It was nearing the end of the season, and he was exhausted every day. One morning he came into the kitchen, rolled up his pants leg and said, “Look.” There was a large green map of a bruise below his knee. It was painless, he said; he had just seen it there when he woke up.
And when they found out that he had leukemia and probably would not live very long, Claire continued to bloom absurdly. She looked at herself as she undressed for showers, for bed, and knew how useless it was. Such elaborate machinery, and what was it all for? Coils of dark pubic hair, widening hips. Her parents did not notice any of it; they were too involved with Seth, too frantic. He noticed, though. She was visiting him in the hospital, and as he lay on his bed he looked her over well and then said in a sarcastic voice, “So little Claire is finally becoming a woman.”
“Shut up,” she said, but she wasn’t even annoyed. She felt like crying, and by tightening her voice she found that she could keep it in. Her parents had taken her out to a Cantonese restaurant the night before and told her about Seth. Even before that night, she somehow knew. She knew with a definite beat inside her, a weight dropping down.
Her father did the talking. He spoke in an even, gentle voice, and he sounded exhausted. Her mother just sat sipping tea, not saying anything. The restaurant was dark and empty; the only other people eating were two of the waiters on their dinner break.
“Dr. Marks said it doesn’t look very good. He said we shouldn’t be hopeful,” her father said to her. She did not respond. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Claire?” he asked.
She nodded but couldn’t speak. Her mother continued to pour tea for herself, finding something soothing in the warmth and the bitterness, Claire supposed. It all came down to this, to three people alone in a dark restaurant, defeated. Still, they continued to move through their lives. They grew older and left Seth fixed in his adolescence forever. They would remember him as a kid, not as a real adult. He had just started to come out of it, too, out of that “teen-age trance,” as their mother liked to call it. He was waking up, thinking about life a bit more, sending away for college catalogues. And they had to leave him there, on the brink of everything.
At the funeral, people tossed dirt onto his casket. Someone handed her the small tin shovel; it was her turn. She thought of the dirt as an absurd gift, a final offering. She understood that nothing she could give him now would mean anything. She had read about people being buried along with their favorite books, foods, paintings. In ancient Egypt the pharaohs were entombed with their living slaves. Would she have gone with him? Would she have stopped her breath, given in to the dark, shared it with him? She did not think so.
There was no present you could give. She had always derived a good feeling from the act of giving, but she knew, really, that the act was twofold. A gift had to be received. Hands had to stretch out and take it, fumble with the ribbons and wrapping. Everyone was waiting
for her now. She tossed a shovelful of earth down onto the coffin. It thudded and lightly dusted the surface.
chapter four
The summer Lucy Ascher stopped talking, the summer the words wouldn’t come, she loved the crying and whispering of children in the night. She listened closely, the way an operagoer listens to a difficult aria: awed by those odd throat sounds she herself could not make. All around her there was noise—children choking on the bones of bad dreams, the girl a wall away who shouted “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” long into the night. In the background, like an accompaniment, there was the soft squeak of nurses’ rubber heels on the aqua tiled floor, the clicking on of lights, the rush of tap water in a dented tin basin. It was all these noises, moving skyward like the smoke from many small fires and fusing together, that lullabied her nightly.
At the private psychiatric hospital where Lucy Ascher stayed one summer of her childhood, the grounds were tended as carefully as any historical tourist attraction—like the kind of mansion third graders are taken to on class trips, she wrote in her notebook. It was like the kind of place that rents out tiny tape recorders and earplugs so that you can wander around and hear a deep voice tell you about how Mrs. Roosevelt picked out the hummingbird wallpaper pattern herself, the kind of place where a curator leaves the train sets and chipped porcelain dolls of the President’s children scattered randomly about the nursery as though the children had just abandoned their toys when called to the table for lunch. While her classmates, Lucy wrote, would be impressed by the high, lumpy beds and the heads of moose and deer that seemed to poke through the walls, she would be looking at Mrs. Roosevelt’s wallpaper and realizing how yellow it had turned over the decades, like milk gone sour. “I would focus on decay rather than history,” Lucy explained.