by Meg Wolitzer
Claire had once seen a woman die. She was nine and spending the day in the city with her mother. They were buying Italian ices from a vendor on Seventh Avenue when it happened. The woman who had been before them on line took one lick of her cherry ice, then walked out into the afternoon traffic. For weeks afterward Claire would think, I could have told her to be careful. I could have offered to help her across the street. I could have done something.
In the core of the bystander there is always a false sense of power, of responsibility. There was nothing she could do—not a laying on of hands, nothing. She lay in her brother’s arms, his heartbeat frantic, his frame like a kite, and she eased away from him gently, thinking, I cannot save you.
—
Claire did not tell Julian that he reminded her of her brother. In fact, she did not even tell him that she had ever had a brother. She told very few people, not because it especially pained her to talk about Seth, but because such confessions were always responded to with lowered eyes, murmured words and quick, sharp hand squeezes, all of which made Claire feel like a faker. In truth, she did not grieve for Seth. He had been dead for five years, and she could not even picture his face. No one in her family ever talked about him, so it was, she kept telling herself, as if she had made him up.
After the funeral that August, all of the relatives returned to the house. Someone had pushed back the furniture in the living room and replaced it with a circle of hard-backed bridge chairs. Claire had forgotten those chairs existed; the last time they had been used was when her mother had held a PTA meeting in the house several years before. The family was forced to weep sitting up straight; they were no longer allowed the spineless posturing of grief.
Claire could not remember what it felt like to mourn. One time when she was home on Long Island for Christmas vacation freshman year, she stopped by the local King Kullen to see an old friend who worked there as a checker. Claire and Joanne had been friends the year Seth died. It was a mindless friendship, really; they passed notes back and forth during Social Studies and spent Friday nights at Burger King, giggling at people in other booths. The one remarkable trait that Joanne possessed was her ability to remember details, no matter how slight. Nothing went past her.
After Claire left for Swarthmore, she and Joanne saw each other only once or twice a year, and when they did it was only because Claire had some questions she knew Joanne could answer.
“What can I do for you this time?” Joanne asked her as she packed up an old man’s groceries. Claire watched as each item was hurried into the brown bag: a tin of cat food, a package of luncheon meat, a single can of Diet Sprite—the man lived alone.
It must be depressing, Claire thought, to work in a supermarket. The foods people selected told a great deal about their lives, about the emptiness of their lives. This probably never occurred to Joanne, though. “It’s just a job,” she said once. “I never think when I’m at the supermarket.” She smiled at all of her customers, and she sometimes hummed as she worked.
Claire sat down on the edge of the express counter. “I want to know what I wore to my brother’s funeral,” she said, running her hand along the conveyor belt. “I thought you might remember.”
Joanne thought about this as she rang up a woman’s purchases. “Twelve forty-nine,” she said. “You wore that maroon dress with the little flowers around the edge.” She did not appear to find the question at all odd. She was very proud of her ability to remember things.
“Did I cry a lot that day?” Claire asked.
“No,” Joanne said. “You were pretty quiet. You didn’t cry half as much as your parents did. That aunt of yours, I think her name was Maddy, or something with an M, whispered to one of your other relatives that you were probably in shock.”
Claire had hoped that such details would help her recall what it felt like to be in mourning for Seth, but they didn’t. She questioned Joanne for half an hour. When she could think of nothing more to ask, she thanked her, wished her a merry Christmas and walked out through the magically parting doors of the supermarket.
The only kind of grief Claire could remember feeling was her grief for Lucy Ascher. She had mourned the poet’s death for months; in fact, she had never completely stopped mourning. Every day when Claire woke up, she thought of her. Ascher’s face appeared out of nowhere, mouthing the words to one of her poems. Claire had tried to explain the whole phenomenon to Julian that evening in the stacks of the library. She told him more than she had planned to, and he listened intently. But he could not possibly have understood, she thought later that night as she climbed under the covers of her bed. Even Naomi and Laura did not really understand, although they certainly came closer.
There had been a split between the three death girls lately. “It’s because of that Julian person you spend all your time with,” Laura said one day. “He’s responsible for the way you’ve been drifting away from us. You never come to our late-night meetings anymore.”
“We miss you,” Naomi chimed in.
“I know, and I’m sorry,” she said to them. “Things will change soon; don’t worry.”
Claire missed the frenzy of their nighttime meetings. She had not been thoroughly honest when she told Julian about them. It was surely a lot more than just candles and notebooks and conversations about poetry. It was not a literary salon, the way she had made it out to be. It was, she decided, nearly a spiritual experience. She had seen documentary films of Southern Baptist revival meetings and had been awed by the passion of the people—the way they shook, trembled, could barely contain their love for Jesus. That was exactly how she felt when she thought about Lucy Ascher.
She would close her eyes, sitting cross-legged on the hard floor of Naomi’s room, and think, Lucy, Lucy, blotting out all else. Soon there would come an odd lifting feeling in her stomach, and she would begin to recite the lines of one of Ascher’s poems. Claire’s favorite was “Of Gravity and Light,” which was from Ascher’s first collection. Naomi and Laura would respectfully wait for her to finish, and then they would each take a turn.
Claire barely listened when the other poetry was being read. She had no real affinity for the works of either Sexton or Plath. They were too common, she felt, too accessible, too whiny. Ascher was more complex, more difficult to take, because her pain was up front. She emphasized the fact that simple existence was filled with nightmare, as if this were already generally understood. When she could no longer stand the pain of it, she took her life.
A year after Lucy Ascher died, her notebook was published under the title Sleepwalking, from the name of one of her early poems. The book received much attention; critics called it deadly and devastating and apocalyptic. Claire thought it was merely realistic. It chronicled a life far more truthfully and painfully than anything else Claire had read. It gradually became a cult book, as Plath’s Letters Home had been. Unlike Plath, Lucy Ascher never planned to have her words read by anyone, and that, Claire thought, gave them a stark, exposed quality. The notebook had been fished up from the very back of the poet’s dresser drawer, underneath piles of underwear and little sachet pillows. The original notebook had, her mother wrote in the introduction to the book, smelled of gardenias.
Claire often pictured Lucy sitting curled up in a corner of her room, scribbling in her notebook until the early hours of the morning. She wished she could have been there with her, peering over her shoulder, fetching her a brand-new pencil when the old one wore down into a tiny yellow wood chip from overuse.
She could not voice her feelings to Julian; he would not be able to follow them. He was so simple—it seemed that he required almost nothing to sate him. “What do you need in life?” she asked him once when they were together in her bed.
“Just you,” he replied, cupping her breast for emphasis. She was not amused.
Julian stopped by her room every day for two weeks after the time she saw him from the window and inv
ited him up. In the beginning they studied together, sitting close and not talking for long stretches. Sometimes they played endless rounds of Botticelli, a game in which one player has to guess the famous person the other player is thinking of. Julian gave her difficult ones: Judge Crater, Mrs. O’Leary, and once, to be witty, Roy G. Biv.
In the middle of studying one afternoon, Julian leaned over and lightly bumped into her. His forehead knocked against hers—he drew in a long breath and then kissed her. Claire was not surprised. She moved away from him, annoyed, and said, “Just wait a minute, will you?”
He apologized to her, blushing as he spoke, and picking once again at the widening tear in his pants leg. Neither of them said anything for a few minutes. She knew that he was waiting for her to do something—to speak, to breathe, to light a new cigarette. It was her turn. His mouth looked very soft, and she was moved by him. She wanted him to touch her; she knew that. With a slight sigh, Claire stood up in front of Julian, placing both hands on his shoulders. He was up in the next second, as if his shoulders were points of reflex, like the knees. They kissed, and she brought him closer to her, gathered him in.
When they slept together that evening, she wondered if his initial awkwardness had been an act. After all, hadn’t he seemed just a shade too quivery to be real? When she ran her hands up his long thighs, he said in a voice rich with feeling, “Oh, Claire, you are just too much.” He looked as if he were about to falter, to pass out beneath her, and yet at the same time a smile was spreading on his face. Julian was clearly enjoying himself.
In the morning she woke to find him lying flat on his back, his mouth dropped open—a remnant, he told her when she questioned him, of mild childhood asthma. She was once again reminded of Seth. Was it some hidden, protective instinct that attracted her to Julian? The men Claire had been involved with in the past were always older, coarser.
In the twelfth grade she had met a twenty-four-year-old man in Washington Square Park. She had been sitting by herself one Saturday on the lip of the fountain when someone slid over next to her. She looked up. The man was large and bearded and dark.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Rufus.”
She introduced herself, to be polite, and he began to talk. He was a graduate film student at NYU, he said, and his favorite filmmaker was Jean-Luc Godard. Had she seen Breathless? Did she like to go to the movies?
Claire answered his questions shyly, then told him that she had things to do. “Oh, come on,” he said, tilting his head to one side. “You don’t really have to go if you don’t want to. Come back to my apartment and I’ll put on some good albums.”
She went with him because she was feeling depressed and wanted a change, and also because the day was becoming cold and she couldn’t bear the thought of going home just yet. Her father would pick her up at the station and they would sit in silence during the ride. He was unable to communicate with anyone; he sat at the breakfast table each day with the newspaper in front of his face. It had been like that for years.
Rufus lived in a tiny studio apartment near the park, way up on the seventh floor. As they climbed the last flight she told him, “This is the first real exercise I’ve had in weeks.” He laughed excessively, as if she had just told him some terrific new joke, but actually she had been serious. She spent most of her days sitting cross-legged on her bed, reading Lucy Ascher’s poems. She could not even remember the last time she had walked up a real flight of stairs. Her family’s house was a split-level, but that didn’t count. It was just four short steps to the safety and darkness of her bedroom.
“You’re really funny, you know that?” he said, punching her softly on the arm.
The apartment was very messy, with cat hair on all the furniture, although there was no cat in evidence. Maybe, she thought giddily, he’s the one who sheds. He did indeed have a lot of hair. After putting on a record, he confessed to her that he was not really a film student, that he had once been a film student but had been thrown out of graduate school for poor grades. “I had to hold down a job at Ray’s Pizza, to pay my rent. I just couldn’t do two things at once. Maybe someday I’ll go back to school; I don’t know. I still work at Ray’s, but I think of myself as a student, you know? That’s why I told you I was in school. It just popped out of my mouth.”
After a while he asked her if she would like to drop a little acid. She paused, thinking she should say no and then get up and leave. She should thank him for his good music and for all the free cat hair which she would be taking home with her on her clothing. “I have to go,” she said at last, walking toward the door.
“Oh, come on,” he said once again.
She remembered a time when her parents were away and she came into Seth’s room to find him and two friends sprawled out on the floor, laughing. “What’s so funny?” Claire asked.
“We can’t tell you,” one of the friends said. “It’s a secret.” This brought forth more laughter.
“No, it’s not a secret,” Seth finally said. “Claire’s okay.” He looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Aren’t you, Claire?”
“What’s this all about?” she asked. “Be serious.”
“We did some potent acid—Windowpane—and it’s just starting to work. The walls are beginning to breathe; it’s incredible,” he said.
Seth had done a fair amount of hallucinogens in high school. He said that he was inspired by Carlos Castaneda. He and his friends went to see the movie Fantasia while on mescaline, and he told Claire that it was an absolutely amazing experience. “You know that part where they do ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’?” he said. “It really freaked me out. I felt like my mind was being waked up for the very first time, each brain cell individually—like a million little alarm clocks were going off at once.”
Claire had never tripped, although she had been curious about it. Rufus held a tab of acid in the palm of his hand, and after a moment she took it from him, and he smiled broadly. She stayed there the entire day, tripping like mad. The acid was called Blotter; it was a tiny snip of white paper with a greasy teardrop stain in the center, and she swallowed it at once so she would not have much time to think about it. It tasted like nothing, like a spitball.
She sat on his couch all afternoon, barely moving. The window shade slapped against the window, and a dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood. She fanned her hand before her eyes, looking calmly at the trails her fingers left in the air. Rufus put on the television set, and they both watched Gilligan’s Island intently, as though it were a wonderful, important show on public television. When it grew dark outside, when the sky trembled into black, she left his apartment to catch the Long Island Railroad back home.
“Meet me in the park next Saturday,” Rufus called after her. On the street, she had to blink several times to get her bearings, as though she had walked out of a dark movie theater into broad daylight.
Claire returned the next week, because she knew he would be excited to see her. She could tell he was very lonely, and she felt a kind of kinship with him. Two misfits. He was thrilled when she showed up, and as they walked to his apartment building he held her hand in his own huge, callused one. He seemed to have sprouted even more hair since the week before. He was wolflike—what was the word . . . lupine?—and this both repelled and excited her.
That afternoon Claire went to bed with him. She had never slept with anyone before, she told him as he opened up the couch. There were long, dark ovals of sweat underneath his arms, right where the seams of his shirt joined. He smelled of flour, she noticed, from working in the pizzeria. In bed Rufus was loud and rough, and when it was over, she was surprised that he had not hurt her in any way. She pressed her fingers gingerly against her thighs and abdomen, searching for tender areas, but she found none. I am a hardened woman, she thought.
Rufus brought over two flip-top cans of orange soda and lay back on the rumpled bed. He began to talk to her about a film he someday h
oped to make. It would be a surrealistic Western, he explained, with all of the actors wearing white, featureless masks. “I’m positive I can get backers for it,” he said. “Big money.”
Claire took one sip of her soda and then said to him, “I’ve got to leave now.” It was as though she had just realized where she was and whom she was with. She put the can down on the night table and looked around her. The sheets no longer felt clean. They had the worn, rubbed-thin feel of cloth that might have been tangled through the arms and legs of scores of lovers. After the lovemaking was through, all of those couples might well have eaten boxes of cookies in bed, dropping little flurries of crumbs onto the sheets.
Claire gathered up her things, left the apartment and did not see him again. She stayed away from Washington Square Park.
There was one more after Rufus and before Julian. He was a swimming coach at the Y who always came to her right from the water, blue-lipped and eager. He had seemed to her amphibious. She wondered what it was she really wanted. All three of these men had looked bewildered when she left their beds, or rather, in the case of Julian, when she left her own bed. “I have to go now,” she would say to each of them, shooing them away or fleeing herself. “Please.”
Claire put on her make-up in front of Julian every morning. He was fascinated by the process and always sat up in bed to watch. She turned it into an elaborate routine for him, waving her stick of kohl in the air like a magic wand, and Julian was transfixed.
In bed he had said, “Tell me what you like,” and while Claire was pleased by this, she had not known what to answer, because she had not especially liked anything in the past. When she first slept with Julian, their lovemaking was slow and painstaking. They reached for each other laboriously, as if through a fog. When Julian called out to her, insisted she was overwhelming him, Claire could not understand it. She felt annoyed, left out of the great secret. Julian touched her everywhere, slid his mouth down gently between her legs, and she thought to herself, This is fine, but that was the extent of it. She felt a welling up somewhere inside of her, but it was too far away, and she could not locate it. She did not know what was the matter.