As it turned out, Emily was spared this particular agony, for Clara made friends with the landlady—a peroxide-blonde Pole, Krystyna, who’d never uttered a kind word to Emily—and discovered that she was evicting the upstairs tenant, Mr. Kisliewski. “He’s a drunk,” explained Clara gleefully. “Em, you wouldn’t believe it. He completely trashed the apartment! It’ll cost thousands for Krystyna to fix it up!” Clara convinced the landlady not only to give the sisters the second apartment—“You are good girls; nice girls,” she said, “You pay your rent on time, no trouble, like the Poles”—but also to keep the same rent Mr. Kisliewski had paid, a rent even lower than Emily’s.
“But—” Emily stammered. “How?”
“September eleventh.” Clara nodded grimly. “Everyone’s going home to, like, Kansas. She says she’d rather have reliable tenants—and make less.”
“Oh, right,” said Emily. “Right.”
The trade-off, Clara revealed triumphantly, was that she, Clara, would renovate both apartments, making them into a duplex. Which, she said, shouldn’t be difficult, considering the house had originally been a single unit, the conversion cheap and shabby.
“Okay, imagine this, Em,” she said, standing at the center of the tiny living room, her round little arms raised conductor-style. “We knock down that wall.” She pointed to the flimsy back wall, behind which lay the ugly, carpeted stair to Mr. Kisliewski’s place. “We take the carpet off the stairs—it’s wood underneath, I checked—and put up a banister. It’ll open the whole place up. Then we build out the counter so that the kitchen extends across the room, under the window . . .” And so on.
“Clara, I don’t know how to do any of this stuff,” Emily told her peevishly. She was, again, feeling that same sense of truculence. People just didn’t renovate rental apartments. “I don’t have time to take on this kind of project.”
“Em,” Clara said, sitting down on the couch next to her. “You won’t have to do anything. I’ll do it all. Everything.”
“How can you do everything?” Emily asked, her voice growing louder. “You’re not a contractor. Or a carpenter.” She knew she should shut up or risk triggering one of Clara’s tantrums. But Clara remained stunningly calm.
“Emily, I know what I’m doing,” she said. “At Klopfeld Morgan”—this was the Greensboro architecture firm—“I was actually working on plans for interiors. I wasn’t just an admin. And, you know, any idiot can knock down a wall.”
A week later, Emily arrived home from work to find her belongings swathed in a fine white dust. The back wall was gone, revealing the staircase—its covering of brown-gray shag removed—and Clara was running a floor sander (“the guy at the hardware store just loaned it to me!”) up and down the living room floor.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing a mask or something?” shouted Emily, looking for a dust-free spot to drop the mail.
Clara shrugged. “It can’t be worse than smoking, right?” The sun from the stairwell window was turning her wiry hair an odd shade of yellow. “Isn’t this great?”
And it was, in the end. Bright and open, just as Clara had promised, with wide, gleaming, caramel-colored plank floorboards, pale aqua walls, and sweet, white kitchen cabinets that they purchased from the salvage yard by the Williamsburg Bridge and repainted. They found a red dinette set at a junk shop on Wythe and made the area adjoining the new kitchen—previously Emily’s living room—their eating place. Emily’s battered couch they pushed a few feet east, into what had recently been Emily’s bedroom—they would sleep upstairs now, in two square, sunny rooms, separated by a generous hallway—and Clara sewed a slipcover out of some red fabric she found in a bin at the Salvation Army shop on Bedford.
It was a dream apartment, really, particularly when compared with the squalid rooms from which it had sprung. Emily’s friends were amazed by the transformation—and told Clara she ought to work in interior design or architecture—but no more so than by Clara herself. “She’s so normal,” Lil told Emily. “I mean, she’s really nice and doesn’t seem crazy at all. She looks like she lives in the suburbs or something. Like someone’s mom.” This was true. In high school, Clara had dyed her long chestnut hair—shiny, shampoo-commercial hair that Emily had envied—pink and purple and green and blue, and worn short black skirts over black tights and high boots with thick soles, and Emily thought she was the coolest person in the world. Now she was plump and puffy, from years of medication and the starchy sanatorium food, and appeared to own no clothing other than the faded sweatpants and stained green tunic she wore every day. Her hair had turned an odd beige color, somewhere between mud and straw, and had taken on the coarse texture that comes from too many color changes in too short a time, and her face, which was round and small, had gone even rounder, with the peaked Kaplan chin jutting out from her jaw, like an afterthought. Like Emily, she had blue eyes. “Her best feature,” Emily’s mother carped, “now that she’s ruined her hair.” It was amazing, Emily thought, that this woman had been instrumental in the creation of women’s studies departments at Emory and Chapel Hill. But Emily, too, hated to think about Clara’s poor hair, once so extraordinary and luminous.
“Do you have to color it?” she asked Clara one Saturday, as they walked toward the shops on Wythe, chairs in mind.
“I’m so gray,” said her sister. “It makes me look old.”
And so, toward the end of October, the renovations done, she took Clara to a small salon, suggested by Sadie, for “corrective color” and a new cut. “What’s your natural color,” the hairdresser asked. “Damned if I know,” Clara told her, with a loud, too loud, laugh. One of Clara’s canine teeth was turning a dull gray color, Emily noticed, a sign that the tooth was dying. Could it be saved? No, probably not. And besides, Clara, at the moment, had no insurance. Perhaps Beth’s dad could see her pro bono, or at a reduced rate? Emily kept meaning to see whether she could put Clara on her own policy, as a dependent, but it was unlikely, until the SSI kicked in, certifying that, yes, Clara was officially dependent, in the truest sense of the term, but by that time the point would be moot, for she would be eligible for Medicaid (or was it Medicare?). Though, did Medicaid (Medicare?) cover dental? Had her mother mentioned this? She probably had. Why would Clara have a dying tooth? Had she stopped brushing her teeth? Of all Clara’s missteps, this one somehow seemed the most tragic, for it was so permanent, so unignorable. Teeth, once wrecked, could never be saved.
Three hours later—after Emily had read through a half dozen back issues of In Style—Clara emerged with a sleek brown pixie cut, which made her eyes look huge. “You look gorgeous,” Emily told her, though she worried that the new style also made Clara’s body look huge. Silently, the tiny blonde behind the salon’s register handed Clara a printout, which Clara immediately passed to Emily, who tried not to blanch when she saw the sum owed: $300—though the sign said a cut was only $65 and color was “from $85.” “Thanks so much,” she said to the blonde—who had done nothing, really, and didn’t need to be thanked, but it was either that or start screaming—and handed over her credit card, generally reserved for emergencies. It was worth it, she told herself, to see Clara smile at herself in the mirror and, later, when they met for dinner, to hear Lil and Beth tell her how great she looked. Clara needed to feel good about herself, to gain confidence, if she was going to fully piece herself back together.
Though the fact was that in some ways Clara appeared to be somewhat more together than Emily herself, an occurrence that after more than two months of living together, Emily was still unable to explain. There was new medication, she knew—she watched Clara take it each night, an antianxiety drug—but there had been new medication before. Her mother eventually supplied the answer.
“You need to promise not to get upset, Em.”
“Okay,” Emily agreed nervously.
“Clara had electrical treatments at Brattleboro. It was kind of a last resort—”
“You mean, like, electroshock therapy?” Emily asked
, certain she had misheard her mother.
“They don’t actually use that term anymore—”
“Oh my God, Mom. You’re kidding.” Her mother sighed, which only served to infuriate Emily, as if she’d known that Emily would be prickly and uncompromising and judgmental, when that was not at all what was going on. “Didn’t that go out with, like, lobotomies and padded cells?”
“Okay, enough, Emily.” Her mother’s voice had gone sharp. “That’s enough, okay. Yes, you’re right, they didn’t use it for ages, but now it’s making a comeback. Apparently, it’s useful in treating certain types of cases—like Clara’s—in which the disease is preventing the patient from making progress. They were desperate, Emily. We were desperate.”
“But it’s the same thing,” Emily pressed. “Electroshock therapy. They’re just calling it something else.”
Again, her mother sighed. “Yes, Emily, that’s what it is. But it’s different than it was in the sixties, Em. It’s very high tech.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” She pictured the apparatus described in The Bell Jar: electrodes, wires, a leather pad that disallows a person from biting off her own tongue.
“We’re losing sight of the point here,” her mother said. “The point is that it worked, right? She seems good to you, right?”
“Yes,” Emily admitted. “Like a different person.”
This new Clara began venturing out into the neighborhood, making daily rounds of the neighborhood’s junk shops: Ugly Luggage, the Salvation Army on Bedford, the unnamed place on Driggs operated by a moody Hasid, the dingy furniture outfits over on Wythe with higher prices but better stuff, and various church shops on the south side that Emily had never noticed but Clara quickly discovered. She brought home an endless stream of treasures: mismatched Fiesta ware in the muted, sallow palette of the 1960s; a crystal chandelier, which she deftly installed in their entryway, previously lit by a bare bulb protruding from a chipped, grime-streaked socket; two overstuffed chairs; a new desk for Emily; a green enamel teakettle; vases of different shapes and colors and sizes (“You know how you never have the right size when someone brings you flowers?”); eight balloon wineglasses in Czech crystal; and new clothing for herself, none of it exactly right—a pair of stretch-velvet leggings, those awful rayon dresses, imprinted all over with tiny flowers, that everyone had worn in the early 1990s—but all of it better than her previous uniform. So clad and coiffed, she installed herself, afternoons, at the L, where she drank coffee and smoked Marlboro Light 100s (which she considered more elegant than their shorter brethren) with the regulars, among them the proprietors of not one but two radical book publishers (one socialist, the other anarchist), a tattooed couple who ran a local circus, a yoga teacher, a massage therapist, and a gay performance artist who sang show tunes in a bunny suit.
Now, in the evenings, Emily found an assortment of these local characters sitting on her couch or her glossy new floor, engaged in heated discussions of matters political (“Bush knew about the attacks; he and bin Laden are in cahoots”) or religious (“Buddhist meditation actually alters the chemistry of your brain”) or personal (“Clara, you just need to tell your mother to butt out of your life”), while smoking cigarettes, the ashes from which they deposited in Clara’s new collection of vintage ashtrays, culled from her daily junk rounds. “Hey, Red,” the socialist publisher called, annoyingly, the first time Emily walked in and discovered him sitting on her couch, eating a tofurkey sandwich from the health food store on the corner. “I’ve seen you around for years. How come we never became friends?” Because you’re creepy, Emily thought. But slowly, he grew on her, as did the others. The yoga teacher gave her a pass for a free class and clasped Emily’s hand warmly when she took her leave. The Ugly Luggage woman brought Emily a pair of kelly green cowboy boots—picked up on a buying trip in Dayton (“the vintage clothing capital of the country”)—which Emily adored. And the manager of the Salvation Army baked them muffins, studded with mysterious fruits, lopsided but delicious.
But the second publisher—the anarchist publisher—was the most frequent and friendly guest, inviting Emily to book parties and asking her gross, too-intimate questions (“What do you think is the most erogenous part of the male body?”). Soon, he’d made Clara an “intern” at his publishing house, which operated out of a giant loft down on South Eleventh Street. In exchange for lunch and cartons of cigarettes, she stuffed envelopes and sorted mail and read through the manuscripts and letters that poured into the office lately. “There’s so much stuff I didn’t know about the government. Like, do you remember in the eighties, all that stuff in Nicaragua, with the Sandinistas? Did you know that the CIA was really training the rebels?” Emily did indeed know. She’d gone to Oberlin, after all. But she said nothing. “I was so gullible before. It’s like I’ve opened my eyes and I see all this corruption around me. I guess I was so focused on my own problems that I couldn’t see what was going on in the world.”
Clara, it seemed, had become an anarchist. Emily knew she should be alarmed, or at least annoyed by the irony of it—boyfriend leaves her for an anarchist; sister comes to take his place, then becomes an anarchist, too—but, in truth, she found it both amusing and heartening, another sign that Clara, as she herself acknowledged, was awakening to the world. Each evening, her sister presented Emily with some new revelation and Emily nodded dutifully, trying not to argue or to correct her misconceptions, for, she thought, Clara would parse it all out in time, as Emily had herself, years and years ago, in her teens. Contemporary anarchists were not, Emily discovered, as she’d previously thought, a united, organized body, like Democrats or the Green Party. There were many different factions, though these factions didn’t think of themselves as holistic factions, per se, because anarchism is, by definition, against organization. The publisher, and, thus, Clara, believed in a rather different set of tenets than did Amy, it turned out.
“She’s one of those ecowarrior types,” Clara scoffed, when Emily mentioned that she had a “friend” who was also an anarchist and described some of the “friend’s” activities and beliefs and affiliations. She hadn’t told Clara anything about Curtis—she knew Clara to be incapable of keeping anything from their parents—but she couldn’t resist getting Clara’s take on Amy. “I mean, I bet she’s doing good stuff, but people like that are focused on the micro—keeping Citibank from destroying the rainforest or saving the whatever rare bird. You know what I mean?”
“Hmmm.” This dismissal somehow comforted Emily. “And what are you—your group—what are you focused on?”
“Well, we’re not a group, you know. We’re a network of like-minded individuals with a common goal.”
“Right.”
“But, anyway, we’re focused on the macro. Total revolution.”
Emily laughed. “What? You mean you want to overthrow the government.”
“Yeah, sort of,” said Clara, with a pained look that made Emily feel like a cretin. She could see that Emily wasn’t taking her seriously (though, okay, how could she?). But this, too, was a sign of her recovery, wasn’t it? She was somehow sharper, more aware of the minutiae of other’s reactions and emotions. And, Emily thought, maybe she was giving her sister the short shrift. She had become so cynical, so conservative. At sixteen, would she have responded to all this anarchy stuff with excitement? Maybe. “I mean, it’s like, permanent, systemic change. Clearly, democracy isn’t working. I mean, not that this is a democracy. Bush is essentially a dictator.”
The internship cut into Clara’s shopping time, which was just as well, since the apartment was now coming to resemble the junk shops from which all the stuff had originated, so much so that Emily, on a cool Sunday evening, after Clara’s friends had departed for their various homes, and the two sisters sat on the couch contentedly, drinking cooling mugs of cocoa, gently suggested getting rid of some of it. Did they really need three Fiesta ware pitchers? Maybe they could sell a couple on eBay? Clara balked, saying the stuff was valuable and she and Emily c
ould pass it on to their daughters when the time came. “I’m about as far as you can get from marrying, Clara.” Emily laughed. “I can’t really think about my hypothetical daughter’s legacy.”
“Well, you should,” said Clara, puffing out her lower lip and snatching a Milky Way from a bowl on the coffee table. Over Halloween, she’d stocked the house with sweets, but not one trick-or-treater had come by. “You really should,” she repeated, in a tone that alarmed Emily, a glint in her bright eyes that Emily hadn’t seen since Clara’s arrival. “You really should. Since, you know, we’re not going to get anything from Mom and Dad. We have to make our own heirlooms.”
“What do you mean?” asked Emily, her heart racing. She knew, she knew that nothing good was going to come of this conversation, for she was angry, angry at Clara for speaking of their parents in such a mercenary way, when they’d supported Clara for ages and ages, and when—this was it, really—Clara had played such a vital role in wrecking their finances. Was it possible she didn’t realize the latter? No, no, it wasn’t. Clara was smart.
“Mom sold Nana Dorrie’s crystal,” said Clara, compressing her mouth into a grim line, which gave her, strangely, the aspect of a lizard.
“Crystal what?” There had been, hadn’t there, a massive chandelier in the foyer of their paternal grandmother’s house in Beaumont. Their uncle Darren lived there now with his horrible second wife and the unremarkable fruits of both marriages.
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