by Meg Wolitzer
It felt good to leave the hospital. I am a terrible mother, Helen thought. I have walked right out of there, just glided out the door. I didn’t even ask her why or how or any of the vital questions. I didn’t even sit there and just hold her hand.
Helen got on the subway, and with an extra bit of bravado sat down next to a man of questionable character. He was absently fingering his fly, as if it were a banjo and he were plucking out some rambling, distant tune.
She was able to get in touch with Ray later that day. The Coast Guard radioed him in, said it was an emergency. She met him at the dock, and he fell into her arms, still wearing half a wet suit. “What is it?” he asked. “What is it?” She told him and she hugged him hard, until they both smelled of brine and kelp.
Years later they were plagued by people—writers, lonelies, crazies. Helen had the phone number changed and their listing plucked from the directory when Lucy died, but even so, people got through, as if by sheer will alone. They called late at night mostly, when their need was at its strongest. “Hello?” they usually whispered or shrieked, asking it like a question, not believing they had connected. “Are you the mother of Lucy Ascher?”
They would swallow down their sobs and tell how much they loved Lucy’s work and ask how Helen and Ray went on with their day-to-day existence. What had Lucy actually been like? they asked with urgency. Had Helen and Ray gotten over it yet? Would they ever?
There was a journalist sent on assignment from a slick news magazine who, when the interview ended, hung around, clearly not wanting to leave. This was just after the publication of Sleepwalking, and Helen and Ray sat on the couch stiffly while the woman toyed with her pad and pencil and the light meter on her Pentax for too long a time.
“Well,” Helen said, exhaling a soft whoosh of air, trying to finalize things.
The journalist looked up from her camera, eyes suddenly desperate. “I can’t tell you,” she said, “how much this has meant to me. I’ve been begging my department head for this article for weeks.” She touched Helen’s and Ray’s hands, as if performing a benediction. “Thank you,” she said, “for spawning Lucy Ascher.”
Spawning. Wasn’t that word usually associated with fish—mother guppies spawning hundreds of little translucent babies, only to eat most of them minutes after birth. In a moment of cockeyed philosophy Helen thought, Maybe we all eat our children. When they are born we press them to ourselves with an air of propriety, searching their faces for shared features, thrilled when we think we see a familiar cast to the eyes. Your nose. My mouth. The baby is born with a set of hand-me-downs.
Helen stood up and said to the woman, “I think you’d better go.” Realizing how this must sound, she added, “It’s supposed to rain, and these roads can get pretty bad.”
After the woman left, Ray and Helen stood facing each other in the living room. Ray had been a wrestler in college, and his shoulders and chest, though long unworked, still made him look hulking. He was big all over, and he had trouble pulling sweaters over his head. She had to help him sometimes as he fumbled like a large, unformed animal trying to slip into a more finished skin.
Now his largeness filled the living room and she felt sorry for him, for them both. Not exactly sorry, more embarrassed as they loomed over the furniture in their living room, helpless in their house by the water.
—
It would be naïve to have been completely surprised by Lucy’s death, to choke into a reporter’s thrust-out microphone, “My God, we had no idea, no idea at all.” There wasn’t anything that particularly surprised Helen. She understood none of it, and never had. When Lucy was hospitalized for not speaking at the age of twelve, her doctor had said to Helen and Ray, “You are going to have your hands full with your child.”
Helen had not agreed with this statement. She took all things literally. Maybe, she was to think years later, that was why she had no ear for poetry. We are not going to have our hands full with Lucy, she knew; we are going to have them empty. Lucy never permitted real touching of any kind. If Helen reached out to stroke down the fine dark hair of her daughter, Lucy ducked away like a hand-shy dog. “Mo-om,” she would say, annoyed, “cut it out.” Lucy allowed her no closeness, nothing to hold on to. When she was little they took her out on the boat every Sunday, but she had no makings of a good sailor. She steered rigidly, not letting the boat ride with the wind, always fighting a natural current.
They took her to the marine biology laboratory at the college and let her look at plankton under a powerful microscope. She spent an hour peering at different slides, and Helen and Ray sat together at the other end of the long, narrow room, happy that they had gotten through to her. Finally Lucy rose and walked over to them. There was a faint half-moon under her eye from pressing it to the ocular. “Well,” said Helen, “you seemed to be really enjoying yourself. I’m glad.”
“It was boring,” Lucy said. “Can we go home now?”
So their arms were empty with her, a paradox that seemed to contain the stuff of a Zen koan: When can one’s arms be both full and empty? The solution, after years of traveling the road to higher consciousness, comes easily: when they are embracing Lucy Ascher.
Yes, Helen thought, we spawned her, that is all.
—
There were various signs along the way that clearly showed something was out of kilter. One night when Lucy was sixteen, Helen was wakened out of a thick sleep by the strains of the national anthem. In the dead-serious logic applied by dreamers and people in the throes of delirium, Helen figured that she must be a truly patriotic person at heart—the kind of person who dreams the whole of the national anthem, a version complete with woodwinds, percussion, brass, strings, and even the sporadic ping of a triangle asserting its delicate presence.
Helen blinked herself fully awake and realized she had not been dreaming. Ray slept next to her on his stomach, the blanket a tent over his head. Helen stepped into her green slippers and padded into the living room, from where the music seemed to come. There she saw Lucy sitting on the couch, the national anthem blaring from the television set. The music stopped abruptly, and an announcer said in a wilting voice, “This is WNEW, Channel Five, ending our programing day.”
“Lucy?” Helen asked.
Lucy gasped, turning. “Oh, you surprised me, Mom,” she said.
“I heard the music and thought it was a dream,” said Helen. “What are you doing up at this hour?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I never can,” Lucy answered. She turned her face to the ceiling and stretched her arms out at her sides.
It was there, in that early-morning confrontation, that Helen took in the completeness of the pain that her daughter held out to her, palms up, like an offering. Helen did not know from where the pain sprang, and she could not even begin to guess its source. She saw it the way a tourist might see an impressive landmark geyser—focusing only on the arrow-beam of water spouting upward, never thinking about its origin, that hot, dark lake that must lie like the Styx underground. It was that simple vision that stayed with Helen long after.
She came and sat down on the couch next to Lucy. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I never can tell whether you’re very unhappy or just overly serious for a sixteen-year-old.”
In the early days of Helen’s relationship with Ray (their courtship, they used to call it, snickering), Helen often thought he was very depressed. When she questioned him, he seemed shocked. “I’m not in the least depressed,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”
Both of their families lived in Brooklyn then, but it was on the beach in Rockaway in 1941 that they first met. Ray was a freshman at City College, and he told her that he had convinced his parents to let the family go to the beach for the vacation rather than to the same small kosher hotel in the Catskills where they had gone for the past ten years. Ray had taken an oceanography course that spring semester and had fallen in love with ocea
ns—with the idea of them, at least.
They met right in front of the water where he was looking in the sand for interesting shells and she was sunning herself with a three-sided aluminum foil reflector. Ray loomed over her and peered down. Her eyes were closed, of course, so he coughed lightly to attract her attention. She opened her eyes and saw the crinkled reflection of a boy in the foil. He was big and pale—had obviously not been in the sun much.
“God, you’re tan,” he said, and it was true. Although her family had been at the beach for only two days, she and her sister had been sunning themselves on the blacktop roof of their apartment building in Bensonhurst for two weeks, and Helen knew she looked good. She was wearing her white bathing suit with the vertical stripes, a choice that would, the salesgirl had assured her, show off both her tan and her svelte figure.
Ray was pale but muscular—a combination, she quickly assessed, of the pensive student and the good athlete. Some indoor sport, probably. He brought his shell collection over to her chair and knelt in the warm sand alongside her, explaining things and letting her look through his pocket shell-identification handbook.
“See,” he said, pointing to a color illustration, “this is the wedding cake Venus, really called Callanatis disjecta. You can only find it in Australian waters. I’d like to go there someday. And this is the lion’s paw, the Lyropectan nodosus. This one’s easier; you only have to go down to Florida to find it.”
She and Ray were wearing different suntan lotions that day, she noticed. Hers was a sweet coconut oil for skin that tanned easily, his was a medicinal lotion for people who burned. It seemed to Helen that these smells were distinctly male and female—counterparts, almost. The bitter and the sweet. He leaned across to point out an illustration of a conch he especially liked, and their shoulders made accidental contact. They skidded against each other from the grease, and both laughed nervously. That gliding—she thought of it months later in bed with Ray, when he parted her legs and then moved between them as if by accident, as if he were performing some mindless act. They had laughed nervously then, too, surprised at feeling no friction.
Their families lived in adjacent pastel bungalows that summer. They were tiny, cheaply constructed houses with rooms that tumbled into one another. The vertical and horizontal frame parts around the windows and doors met unevenly, like the back seams of a man’s poorly sewn suit jacket. Still, each house offered an ocean view—a small square window in the kitchen that opened out onto the beach.
Helen’s mother stayed in there most of the day, not doing any genuine cooking but listening to her favorite radio programs and fixing box lunches for her husband and daughters to eat on the beach. She kept an electric fan on at all times, but all it did was whip up the old bungalow air that smelled of previous tenants. One especially muggy afternoon Helen’s father came into the house, scooped her up in his arms and carried her outside. “You’re going to get some sun on your face, Bella,” he said in a loud voice. Everyone on the beach looked up from their foil reflectors for a second. “And you’re going to get some sand between your toes.” She laughed and gave in without resistance, but the very next morning she was back in the kitchen. She never went out on the beach again.
Helen knew her mother could see her from her post at the kitchen window, so she and Ray were discreet on the beach throughout the summer. They mostly talked, ate Eskimo pies, examined seaweed and shells, and swam. Once she rubbed lotion in expanding circles onto his back, and once he kept his hand flat on her thigh under a towel. They would wait until they got back to Brooklyn.
It was Ray who convinced her to go to Hunter College. She majored in biology because of him, and her greatest joy was when they studied together in the evenings. They planned to be famous marine biologists, a husband-and-wife team, and write a book together like Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind. They planned to live on the beach all year round someday.
Ray came and picked her up at night at her family’s apartment. If she was not quite ready, she would send her little sister Miriam down to tell him to wait, and would watch from the window. Ray did not like sitting in the apartment with her parents, so he would stand under the streetlight at the corner, his head tucked into his broad chest, his hat tilted low on his head like a gangster’s, smoking a Lucky Strike.
They were married in April of her freshman year at Hunter. He was a junior at CCNY then, and they moved into a basement apartment in her parents’ building. Her mother was close friends with the landlord’s wife and was able to get them a very good price. It was amazing, Helen thought, how different life was without sunlight. Ray worked in an office after classes and would come home in the evening, and they would make love on the fold-out bed. Even with the lights on, things were dim. They liked to look at each other. Before they were married they made love until their bodies were streamlined with sweat, under the trees in Prospect Park. It was the most daring thing Helen had ever done in her life. The second most daring thing (which actually didn’t count, Ray claimed, because it was related) was going to her cousin Felice’s gynecologist for a contraceptive. Felice, a senior at Hunter, had admittedly been having sex for years.
So Helen came home on the subway with a diaphragm nestled deep in her purse. That night, in the darkness of the copse of trees, the diaphragm glowed on the grass. Dusty with cornstarch, it looked otherworldly—a miniature spaceship that had just gently landed. She ran her hand along the side of Ray’s body. Dark-brown hair fanned out in a funnel shape up from his navel and across his broad chest. This was it—the sound of her own zipper being undone along the back of her dress gave her a strange, wonderful feeling like the tug of a parachute’s rip cord, possibly one that has been packed wrong, so that during the descent no cloth comes mushrooming out. Like most things, there was always that chance. Helen let herself drop.
—
She had been cleaning out Lucy’s room—someone had to do it—when she found the notebook. Way at the bottom of her underwear drawer beneath a neat white pile of clothes which Lucy had folded as meticulously as a flag at sundown. A plain, blue, three-section spiral notebook. Lucy had been dead a week and a half, and Helen went through her things with care. She considered getting rid of the book, unread, but changed her mind. When a person dies, Helen thought, she leaves her secrets to the world as a kind of legacy.
Helen had a great-aunt who left the family the confidential recipe for her dish, “Minnie’s Lighter-Than-Air Egg Kichel,” when she died. As far as Helen knew, none of the relatives had yet remembered to try it out. So much for secrets. Helen opened the notebook at once. On the inside of the front cover Lucy had penned: “These are notes to myself, so I will never, never lose anything in the clutter of growing older.”
The handwriting was tiny and difficult to read. Every line of every page was filled with it. Ray came into the room while Helen was reading. She heard him and glanced up. “Look,” she said softly. It was as if she were pointing out an exotic bird or small animal that had found its way onto the porch, her voice low so as not to frighten it off. Ray came and sat Indian style beside her, and they read their daughter’s notebook together.
It did not change anything. When they closed the book three hours later, they looked at each other, unsure. “I understand that she was in pain,” Helen said, “but I don’t understand why. I never will.”
“Maybe we can’t because we’re too close to it all,” Ray offered. “Maybe we need some objectivity.”
The next morning Helen and Ray took the train into New York. It was the first day they had been outside in over a week. Were all noises somehow louder? They had been sitting in the still cocoon of their house for nine days, with people moving quietly in and out of the front door every few hours. Now Helen and Ray rode the subway up to Lucy’s agent’s office, unannounced. They had come to this decision the night before.
Vivian greeted them with quiet surprise. She had been out to the house the previous
week, and they had not mentioned anything to her about coming to the office. She took their hands in her own firm grip. “Come in,” she said. “I’ve just been doing some boring paperwork.”
Her office was sunny and small. Helen and Ray sat and drank coffee. “How can I help you?” Vivian asked at last, leaning across the glass desktop.
They told her, their voices interrupting each other, chiming in, amending things, about the notebook. Helen drew it from her purse and handed it across the desk. “We thought this should be looked at, and maybe something should be done with it,” she said.
In a little less than a year, Sleepwalking was published. The book evoked a strong current of sorrow and attention, and the Aschers received letters each morning, phone calls each night. This was the way things would go on until the end, it seemed. At the funeral, when Len Deering, friend and psychiatrist, had leaned over and gently asked if Helen “wanted anything,” she quickly nodded. She took the Elavil faithfully each day, letting herself blur into passivity. It was a change of pace, anyway.
On the beach, that constant white strip, there was also a change. Vacationers left the area to go back to their other lives; the summer had ended. The air cooled and the water followed. Helen and Ray dragged in the chaise longues from their back porch, scraping them across the redwood planks, and put up the storm windows. They worked together in the house, side by side. They made love occasionally, even though Helen felt no real pull of sexual feeling.
People came and went quietly, on the balls of their feet, it seemed, in a continuation of the condolence ritual of constant guests. The theory was loosely that the mourning family should never be left alone. Friends from the marine biology department came and sat on the edge of their chairs, drumming out small rhythms on the living-room table. They drank the Earl Grey tea that Helen brewed, and the cup would rock in its saucer. No one knew what to do in the presence of such untapped grief. A silent hysteria hovered over the beach house like a cartoon storm cloud that rains only on chosen people.