Sleepwalking

by Meg Wolitzer

  Sometimes Helen walked along the sand and rooted up clumps of dry beach grass and wove stiff, useless little mats and dolls’ brooms. This went on for a long time. It was more than two years after Lucy died that things began to turn.

  Helen was alone in the kitchen one morning, listening to the water breathe like a baby outside, when someone knocked at the door. The loose glass pane rattled and Helen went to see who was there. It was a girl, she saw, standing and shivering in the cold. The girl had dark, eager eyes. She opened her mouth to explain herself, and a puffball of vapor came out first. The wind blew up around her and she tucked the flapping end of her mohair scarf into the top of her jacket. Helen would not let her freeze out there like the little match girl in the fairy tale. She pushed open the door and let her inside. The girl carried a huge orange valise with her, and she put it down on the hallway floor with a heavy, confident thud.

  chapter seven

  The woman looked older than Claire had imagined she would. Claire had knocked, and the woman had answered; it had not been difficult. She felt that the actual getting in would prove to be the hardest part, but that, too, happened with ease. The woman stood in the warmth of the house and Claire stood out in the cold. They were separated by a thin sheet of glass, and the woman obviously felt sorry for her. She pushed open the door and let Claire inside at once. Claire dropped her suitcase to the floor and stood face to face with the mother of Lucy Ascher.

  She got herself in order before speaking; she brushed her hair out of her face and caught her breath. She had not been running, but she felt as though she had.

  “Yes?” Helen Ascher asked. “What can I do for you?”

  Claire had rehearsed what she would say, and when she spoke, the words came out woodenly. “I wondered if you needed an au pair girl,” she said. “You know, someone to clean up, and cook, and do things like that. I’m reliable.”

  “Well, now, I don’t think so,” Helen Ascher said after a moment. “The house isn’t very big, and there isn’t too much to clean . . . ” Her voice drifted off. She seemed to be thinking about something else. It was as though Claire had interrupted her stream of thoughts, and now she was returning to it.

  “Thank you,” Claire mumbled, picking up her suitcase. The handle was still freezing. She was very embarrassed; the whole idea suddenly seemed idiotic. She turned to leave, but the woman’s hand was on her shoulder.

  “Wait,” Helen Ascher said. “I didn’t mean to be so hasty. Come into the kitchen where it’s warmer, and we’ll talk about this.”

  Claire followed dumbly. In high school she had had a teacher who was involved in sensitivity training and had sent his class out on what he called a “trust walk.” The students were paired off—one was blindfolded, and the other one had to lead his partner around the grounds of the school. The idea was to gain trust in your peers. Claire’s guide was a wise-ass kid named Rick who walked her into a tree as a joke. Now she followed once again, for the first time in years. She usually preferred to go first, to forge ahead.

  The Aschers’ kitchen smelled of serious cooking—none of those odors that were easy to recognize, like coffee or bacon, but more subtle smells, spices. Coriander? Claire wondered. Marjoram? Sage? They both sat down at the table, and Claire realized that Lucy must have sat there a million times in the past. Eating breakfast, doing her homework, maybe even writing poems when she got older. As Claire thought about it she began to fill with feeling, and she tried to stop these thoughts. She used to play mental games when she was all alone and had nothing to do. Don’t think of the word “eggplant,” she would order herself, and would try to think of other things, but naturally “eggplant” floated ridiculously in the forefront, urged on by the mere power of suggestion.

  Don’t think about Lucy Ascher, she told herself, but of course that was absurd. Here she was, sitting in the house in which Lucy had grown up. When she spoke to Helen Ascher, she could barely contain herself. “I must seem really weird,” she said, “just showing up here like this. I mean, I guess I’m supposed to have references and things like that. I don’t really know how to go about this.”

  Mrs. Ascher was sitting right across from her, staring at her directly, but again her thoughts seemed somewhere else. “Yes,” she said in a distracted voice. “Why did you come here? This is a pretty out-of-the-way place.”

  Claire faltered for a second. “Just because,” she answered, then quickly added, “I tried other houses in the area, I wanted a quiet place by the water. That’s why I ended up here.”

  “I understand.”

  But she couldn’t understand, not really. She couldn’t know that Claire had left college, possibly for good, and traveled by train all day to get there. She couldn’t know that Claire was in love with her daughter.

  Mrs. Ascher was talking; she was saying yes, she would try Claire out, see how things worked. She would discuss wages with her husband when he came home that day. The house could use some cleaning, after all. The garage needed to be gone through, and she was glad to have someone else to do it this year. “By the way,” she said, “we don’t know each other’s name. Who are you?”

  “Claire Danziger,” she answered. She could not believe the simplicity of the situation. She was taken aback by it, startled.

  “I’m Helen Ascher,” the woman said, and as they shook hands Claire had difficulty keeping her expression from giving her away. Her mouth kept twitching up into a twisted version of a smile, the closest she had come to one in a long time.

  That night, as she lay shaking in the guest-room bed, she tried to make sense of things. Calm down, she ordered herself, and remembered an exercise she had read about in her mother’s Redbook magazine. It was in an article on relaxing, and one of the methods offered was to lie down on a bed and tell your body to relax, piece by piece. You were supposed to start with your head and work your way down to your feet. Neck, relax, you were supposed to say. Shoulders, relax. Ribcage, relax. By the time you reached your toes, you were supposed to be asleep. It did not work this night, but Claire was not even sure she really wanted it to. After all, here she was, lying in a bed in a house filled with history. Sleep was not necessary. In The Bell Jar, Plath’s heroine swears to the psychiatrist that she has not slept for days, that she has spent each night watching the hands of the clock creep around the dial. After reading the book in high school for the first time, Naomi said, she went through a similar crisis. She stayed up every night, she told Claire, and spent her days walking around in a kind of manic stupor. “Manic stupor?” Claire had said. “Isn’t that a paradox?”

  “No,” Naomi insisted. “I was all hyped up, but I didn’t do anything at all. I was like those wind-up toys that buzz around in useless circles until they wind themselves down.”

  At Swarthmore, the death girls’ marathon nights usually did not leave them depleted the next day. They all took naps in the afternoon and were revitalized for their next evening session. “Nobody says you have to sleep at night,” Claire said once, defending herself to Julian. “What’s wrong with sleeping in the daytime? In Alaska it’s light all summer, and they go to sleep eventually, don’t they?” Julian had said he thought they had black windowshades to keep out all the light when they wanted to go to bed.

  In the guest room of the Aschers’ house, the windows had white, airy curtains on them, and they hung unsashed. The room was plain and scrubbed. The walls were painted eggshell white, and the wooden floors had been polished to a high shine. The moon filled the window, and the sea rustled outside. Claire had a desire to walk along the beach in the cold, but she figured that there would be plenty of time to do things like that. Tonight, her first night, she should just lie still in bed and let everything seep slowly in. Down the hall Helen Ascher coughed. There was talking—hushed husband-and-wife talk, possibly about her.

  Ray Ascher had come home from work in the late afternoon and regarded Claire with a curious expression,
even after his wife had explained her presence. “I’ve hired Claire to do some work around the house,” she told him.

  “Oh,” he said, “very good,” but his voice was still inquisitive.

  Claire felt uncomfortable. Ray Ascher was big, almost overpowering. She had not expected this. When she really thought about it, though, she could not remember what she had expected. She had been in a sort of daze for the past few weeks. A manic stupor, perhaps. A death-girl stupor.

  Once she had made the decision to go to the house where Lucy Ascher had grown up, she packed and left Swarthmore, taking an Amtrak train from Philadelphia to New York. She tried to read during the ride—Ascher’s poetry, mostly—but found that she could not concentrate. She was too nervous and kept going to the café car for food she did not want. In Penn Station she nearly changed her mind, turned around and got back on another train for Philadelphia. She could have gone directly to Julian and asked that he forgive her. He would, she knew; that was not what worried her. The problem was that she did not really want to go back to him, at least not just yet. His embrace was oddly comforting—his soft mouth, his hands. But she did not need any of that now. She required a different sort of comfort entirely.

  She got out to the end of Long Island by late afternoon. The sky was overcast, and the wind was strong. Claire wandered into the local library and asked the woman behind the circulation desk for the telephone book. The place was deserted except for the librarian and an old man who was sitting at a table reading a world atlas for the longest time without turning the page. Claire wondered what part of the world could be so interesting.

  The Aschers were not listed. She was stunned; she looked again, moving her index finger frantically down the page. Ascerno, Asch, Aschberger, Asche, Aschenbach, Aschner. It was missing. Blood rushed to her head, and she closed the book slowly.

  “Can I help you?” the librarian asked.

  Claire looked up. “I’m trying to find the Aschers’ address,” she said. “You know, the poet Lucy Ascher’s parents. I understand they still live here. That’s what I read in the introduction to Lucy Ascher’s memoirs, anyway. I think they still live here. At least I hope they do. God, I came all the way out here.” She was babbling now, and she stopped speaking abruptly.

  The librarian smiled, showing bad teeth. “Oh yes,” she said. “They still live here. It’s not very far.” And she gave her directions.

  Claire muttered her thanks and was about to leave when the librarian added, “You may think you’re the first, but you’re not.”

  Claire turned away and hurried outside. She felt foolish; the librarian had figured out everything simply by looking at her. Am I a type? Claire wondered. In high school she had been considered a true original. There was no one else like her in the entire school, so she had naturally assumed there was no one else like her in the world. “You’re a misfit!” her mother had shrieked at her once, and Claire had allowed herself to fall further into the role, beginning to see its advantages. People left you alone if you were a misfit, and you were able to do and say as you pleased. Claire would sit at the back of the classroom, leaning her chair against the wall, never listening to the lesson, openly reading Lucy Ascher’s poetry or else writing some of her own. The teachers noticed but never said anything, because Claire performed stellarly on tests and papers. One day she was called into the school psychologist’s office. Apparently one of Claire’s teachers had requested the evaluation; she never found out which one it was, although she suspected her young male math teacher, who occasionally had a copy of Psychology Today on his desk to read during lunch hour. The meeting was short. Mrs. Melcher, a heavy, kindly woman, seemed delighted with Claire and ended up telling her she should not think of herself as “different”—she should think of herself as “special.” Somehow this advice did not carry her through life. She was still restless, still looking.

  Claire found the Aschers’ house easily. It was large and plain, and an old paneled station wagon was parked out front. She was very cold, and she wished she had remembered to bring a pair of gloves with her. Someone was moving around inside the house, she could see through the window. A couple of times she wanted to turn around, but the wind pushed her forward. Okay, she thought, this is really it. There was no doorbell, so she knocked. The glass pane shook at her touch, and she was afraid she had knocked too hard, that the glass would fall to the ground and splinter. But nothing happened and no one came to the door. She wondered then if perhaps she had not knocked hard enough.

  The wind blew up a small leaf-and-sand storm in her face, and as she put up her hand to protect her eyes, she could hear someone coming. She tucked in her scarf, and the wind immediately loosened it once again. The mother of Lucy Ascher was looking straight at her through the glass and then, after what seemed like a full minute of deliberation, she pushed open the door and let Claire inside where it was warm.

  —

  Her chores were minimal from the very start. “Oh,” Helen Ascher said, waving her hand vaguely, “just dust this area because Ray is pretty allergic.”

  Claire was given a cardboard box filled with cleaning supplies: a feather duster, a couple of aerosol cans, some old rags which had once been undershirts, and a few special attachments for the vacuum cleaner. She was looking forward to the idea of physical labor; it was something that she had not really done before. At home her responsibilities had been few. Her mother had always yelled at her to pitch in, to get moving, but then when Claire actually did help out, her mother shooed her away. She could not stand it when the house was not in perfect shape, and she did not trust anyone else to do the job. “I have to take care of everything around here,” she would say.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Claire would ask, but she already knew the answer.

  “Oh, you,” her mother would say, “you’d just create a bigger mess. You and your father are exactly alike. Go into the other room and make yourself scarce for a while.”

  Claire tried to think—had things always been that way? She could not remember. She certainly had had some fun when she was a child. There were photographs that served as fair proof: Claire and Seth at the Catskills Game Farm, petting a fat lamb with yellowed fleece, smiles on their faces, circa 1966. Claire and Seth and Dad huddling over a hibachi, their faces wavy in the heat at a backyard barbecue, circa 1968. Their mother had taken the picture; her thumb blotted out one third of it. When the roll of film came back from Kodak, they probably kidded her about being a “lousy shutterbug.” There must have been some close times; every family has them.

  She tried to get a sense of the Aschers’ family life, but it was very difficult to do. Both Helen and Ray were reserved people. Sometimes Ray offered comments about his classes during dinner, but even then his voice was low and inexpressive. In the second chapter of Sleepwalking, Lucy wrote that Ray was “a large, brooding father. There always seemed to be too much of him. His shoes were so huge that when I was a kid I used to hide all eight of my hamsters in a single Oxford, then lace it up, put my hand over it and listen to the muted squeals and thrashing inside.”

  To Claire, Ray Ascher appeared to be a hulking man who filled rooms with his oppressive sadness, like a buffalo knowing dimly that it is of a dying breed and nothing can be done to save it. But that part of him was probably something that surfaced only after his daughter’s death. Lucy could not have known what would happen after she died, although Claire thought she must have tried to imagine. Wasn’t that a universal fantasy—trying to guess what would happen after you died, how your loved ones would react? In a moment of thrilling self-pity, doesn’t everyone try to imagine solemn friends and family at graveside?

  When Claire took Driver’s Education in high school, her instructor handed everyone a pamphlet entitled Hey, I’m Too Young to Die! It was written in the first person. “What are you doing?” it began. “C’mon, you guys, let me out of here. It’s cold in this coffin.” It was suppo
sed to be told from the point of view of a careless teenage driver who had been killed in a collision. “Hey, Mom,” it read, “and Dad, and Sis, and Peewee, don’t look so sad, huh? Grandma, I can’t stand to see you cry. Please, just get it over with already. Reverend, finish up the prayers. I can’t take much more of this!”

  Claire thought that if a person were able to look into the future and take a quick peek at a videotape of his own funeral, he would enjoy the remainder of his life more fully. He would hear the extent of the moaning and the keening and would, perhaps for the first time ever, feel well and truly loved. Claire sometimes wondered if her parents really loved her. She supposed that they must, in that perfunctory, parental way that is taken for granted by children, but real love, in Claire’s mind, required something additional.

  Julian tried his hardest to love her. He was tender, certainly, and he was filled with passion. She thought of him, and as she did she realized that she did miss him. She felt oddly safe when they were together. Now she was out on the end of Long Island in this strange, rickety house, and she no longer felt safe. Claire believed in extremes, believed in carrying things as far as they would go, but now she wondered if she had overdone it. She suddenly wanted the easy peace of her own bedroom at Swarthmore, with Julian’s slim, warm body lying against hers. On the first night at the Aschers’, after the exercises did not work, she lay awake and rigid for a long time.

  In the very middle of the night, when the moon hesitated in the sky, Claire felt an odd sensation. It was as though someone were giving her the chills up and down her back. At summer camp she and her bunkmates used to give each other the chills all day long. There was even a chant you were supposed to repeat as you languidly grazed your fingers in various formations along a friend’s back. “X marks the spot,” the chant began, “with a dash and a dot, and a pinch and a squeeze, and a cool ocean breeze.” At the last words you were supposed to blow lightly on the other person’s neck, to heighten and finalize the “chill.”