Sleepwalking

by Meg Wolitzer

  The day he came home from the laboratory and saw the girl sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, dressed in a black turtleneck, her face pale, looking as though she were about to blow apart, the first thing that occurred to him was how well she fit. It was as though she really belonged there. He did not know who she was, but it was clear that she was in very great pain. He put down his briefcase and took off his mittens with his teeth, the way he had done since he was a child. A last remnant of the cold took hold of him, and he said a perfunctory “Brrr” and rubbed his palms together.

  Helen explained the girl’s presence, and he quickly agreed that she should stay. He stared at Claire, watched as her dark eyes blinked and she sat upright and tense in her chair. He wondered, then, if she was possibly one of the lonelies, the crazies. One of the groupies.

  That night in bed, he confronted Helen. She was lying on her back in a thin pink nightgown—a little out of season, he thought. He could see her breasts through the fabric. “Helen,” he said to her, “why is she really here, do you think?”

  She turned to him. “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” she said.

  “You know,” he said. “Do you think she knows about things?”

  Helen sighed. “I guess,” she said. “It doesn’t matter too much, does it? She seems responsible.”

  Ray paused, then he asked, “Does the house really need extra cleaning?”

  “I wouldn’t hire her if it didn’t,” Helen said. “What are you getting at?”

  “She seems troubled, and sad, in a way. I just thought you might have felt sorry for her or something . . . I don’t know what I mean. Forget it; it’s very late.”

  She did not say anything in response. She had probably begun to think of other things already. They kissed, and her lips were dry and warm. Afterward she turned away from him, positioned for sleep. Ray thought about the girl Claire as he lay next to his wife. He kept envisioning her large, frightened eyes, her death mask of a face. There was something compelling about her. It all seemed logical to him when he thought about it. She had come to the door, and Helen had let her in. She probably was one of the lonelies, one of those who telephoned late and sobbed into the receiver, but if so, she was of a different sort than any he had seen or spoken to before. She had come to the house not to gawk, not to interview anyone, but because, he supposed, she had recognized it as a kind of sanctuary. Actually, the house was a sanctuary, even to him. He felt comfortable nowhere else.

  The winter before, he and Helen had decided to go away for a weekend. They made reservations at an inn in New Hampshire that dated back to 1770. The room they were given was spacious and quiet, with a working fireplace and a very high antique canopy bed. The wallpaper was peppered all over with tiny blue cornflowers. Everything was beautiful and peaceful, but an hour after they arrived, Ray began to feel anxious. Where was the sea? There was no water anywhere for miles and miles. He began to panic. He opened the window shades in the room and saw that the views from all three oversized windows were dominated by mountains—solid, oppressive snowcaps. He sat down on the bed, under the shade of its canopy. Helen was unpacking toiletries in the bathroom. He heard her slide the medicine chest open and then try the hot and cold faucets to make sure they didn’t run rust.

  “Come see the bathtub,” she called. “It has those wonderful curlicue feet on it.” When he did not respond, she poked her head out of the doorway. She saw him sitting on the bed, sweating. He put his hand up to his head. “Are you sick, sweetie?” Helen asked, and he realized that those were the very words she had said the day Lucy stopped talking, more than ten years earlier. Or at least it was the way Lucy had remembered and recounted them in her journal.

  “I feel really dizzy,” he said. He knew it was pure anxiety; he had experienced the same sort of feeling two other times in his life. The first time was when he was locked for too long a time in a tight hold during wrestling practice in college and thought he was about to suffocate. The second time was right after he saw the Holocaust documentary film Night and Fog.

  This was the worst, though. The other two times he had actually derived a little thrill from hearing people say, “Give him air,” as they pressed his head down into the space between his knees. There was something different about a fat man fainting. It was the unexpected—obese people were like those delicately weighted little toys that are designed never to topple. When the elephant in the circus gets to its great wrinkled knees, everyone cranes to look.

  They left the inn that very evening; he said he could not bear to stay any longer. Helen drove them home, and he apologized profusely throughout the ride. They got back to Southampton seven hours later, in the middle of the night. He simply could not leave his natural habitat. He felt like those children who are born without resistance to germs and have to spend their whole lives in the controlled environment of a plastic tent, and whose visitors have to wear beekeeper outfits.

  The idea of captivity was not a new one to Ray. He had read so many animal books when he was a kid in Brooklyn, and the plot was always roughly the same: boy finds wounded wild animal, nurses it back to health and keeps it as a household pet; soon the animal becomes unhappy and listless, and the boy’s father tells him, in a really intense father-son discourse, that the animal needs to go back to its natural habitat. So the boy tearfully sets “Bandit” free, and the book draws to a close.

  There was supposed to be nothing as good as freedom. But what if your natural environment was captivity to begin with? Where did that leave you? Certainly the small house on Cobb’s Lane was oppressive, with its peeling paint and leftover air of mourning. But even so, it served as a sanctuary. Ray could sit in the den with a glass of vodka and a plate of hot food, listening to the sounds of the ocean and not having to talk to anyone.

  Helen must feel that way about the house too, he thought, or else she wouldn’t spend all her time there. She went into town as infrequently as she could. Being recognized as the mother of Lucy Ascher was only a problem during the summer, when the season was in full swing. Then people often turned and looked at her when she went shopping in the local supermarket. They had seen the photographs in the middle of Lucy Ascher: Portrait of a Dreamer, the critical biography that had come out a few months before, and knew that the Aschers still lived in Southampton. There was a full-page picture in the book of Helen and Ray with Lucy sitting between them. It was taken the afternoon she had received a special award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the spring before her death. Helen and Ray were wearing light-colored clothing, and Lucy was wearing a heavy, dark dress. They made a striking group.

  Nobody ever actually bothered Helen or Ray when they went into town; they just looked, and nudged each other and whispered. After a while you got used to it. Even so, it was good to have a place of refuge, and the house provided that. Helen carried this to an extreme; she stayed indoors and did nothing all day. She had become useless. Lately she had taken to collecting supermarket coupons and to stringing leaves of dried beach grass into little ornaments that littered the mantelpiece. “Why don’t you get out more?” Ray suggested once. “Physical exercise feels good. I read somewhere that it can help make you less depressed.”

  They decided they would start jogging the very next morning. They woke at sunrise and dressed together in the dark room. “This had better be worth it,” she said in a groggy voice as she bent to tie the shoelace of her Nikes.

  They ran side by side along the beach, kicking up sand behind them. At first it was easy; the morning air was wet and cold, and Ray inhaled deeply, feeling as though he were slowly being purified. The house was set on a long strip of sand, and they decided they would jog until the beach ended. “How are you doing?” he called to her periodically over the screech of gulls.

  “Just fine,” she answered, looking straight ahead. She ran stiffly, barely moving her arms. Her breathing started to come with effort soon, although she seemed t
o be trying not to let it show. She breathed through her nose only, the proper way, but her nostrils flared with each new, labored intake of air. “Do you want to stop and rest awhile?” he asked her once when they were approaching a large piece of driftwood that would have served as a nice bench.

  She shook her head resolutely and did not say anything. Ray was barely winded at all. He was in fairly good shape for a man as heavy as he. It had something to do with his wrestling coach back at City College, who always insisted that team members get some sort of extra physical activity each day. It took Ray some time to decide what it was he should do. He immediately ruled out swimming because he was embarrassed by his paleness, and the harsh white lights over the pool made him feel all the more exposed. He ended up lifting weights, coming to the gym each day an hour before his first class, in order to work out. His arms became corded, and his chest began to feel more dense. After college he continued to lift heavy things, liking the way the veins in his arms became prominent when he strained to pick up a color TV, or a carton of textbooks for his class.

  As he ran with Helen he felt he could continue at the same pace for several miles. He almost wished the beach didn’t end after the yellow house. A feeling of confidence rushed through him, and he began to run faster. “Is this too much for you?” he yelled to Helen, and she shook her head, even though it was clear that she was having a hard time of it. As long as she didn’t complain, he would not stop. His legs moved with precision, like well-oiled machine parts. He could almost hear them make a whirring sound.

  It could not last. They were still going along well, at an even, quick trot, when Ray began to feel out of breath. He tried to ignore the feeling, but he couldn’t. Sometimes in the early morning he would wake with a full bladder but be too tired to get out of bed. He would fall back into sleep and dream that he had gotten up and urinated in a great arc. He would wake again seconds later and realize that his bladder was still full. You could not fool the body.

  He glanced at Helen and saw that she had begun to breathe through her mouth. It was wide open and she was gasping like a caught fish. They both slowed down at the same time, and their steps, without the aid of speed, turned clumsy. They began to kick up sand in huge, careless sprays. Ray knew he would have to stop, and just as he realized this, he caught sight of the young couple from down the road. The Wassermans were jogging gracefully toward Ray and Helen, wearing identical sweat suits, royal blue with gold racing stripes lining the sides. Their faces were vibrant and flushed, and they were ribbing each other playfully as they ran.

  “Ha!” she called to him. “You can’t do much more, Mike!”

  “Oh, yeah?” he called back. “Let’s see who sticks it out longer!”

  Then they laughed and hugged each other for a moment, still moving. They soon passed Ray and Helen and smiled and waved and called out “Good morning!” The Wassermans were thin and blond and graceful. Ray thought they looked like Hitler’s ideal of Aryan youth. As he watched the couple go by, he suddenly felt hopeless about his own life. He looked over at Helen and saw that she was openly wheezing. They were both moving at an embarrassingly slow pace now. “Oh,” he said at last, reaching for her arm, “let’s stop.”

  They collapsed on the beach, a few inches from the water. The Wassermans were almost completely out of sight now. The footprints they had left behind in the damp sand were delicate and unassuming, like the tracks birds leave. Ray felt heavy and awful and, most of all, old. When you reached your fifties, things moved faster but took a lot more effort. If your body didn’t slow you down, your thoughts did. Just the other night he had been brushing his teeth over the sink, and in the middle he had started to think about Lucy and the time when there were three Aschers and he and Helen had loved each other fiercely. He didn’t realize it, but he stopped brushing his teeth and began to daydream about the early years of his marriage. He was standing there motionless for several minutes, holding his dripping brush poised over the basin, his mouth still slathered with toothpaste, when Helen passed by the bathroom and saw him.

  “Ray,” she said. “What are you doing?” He had come instantly to life again when she spoke, back to the sorry life that was his own. He rinsed out his mouth and went to bed.

  He came to expect that as he got older there would be many more moments of this kind of stoppage. He experienced one of them as he lay sprawled out on the beach with Helen, trying to breathe. It was a long while until they were both recovered enough to get up and start back toward home. They walked slowly. Ray still faltered and wheezed, and Helen had a stitch in her side. They supported each other as they made their way to the house.

  People were always extolling the virtues of growing old alongside someone you love. If this was what it entailed, Ray wanted no part of it. He had too much pride to display his inertia to another person, even to Helen. He would rather grow old alone, in some seedy hotel. This was only another one of his many dismal fantasies; he knew that in reality he would never leave her. He loved Helen, and besides, he figured that an inert personality such as his could not make major changes. There would be no flux in Ray’s life other than the inevitable slow process of aging. He would stay where he was, alone with his wife, with the sea thundering outside.

  —

  Claire fit into this life of stagnation with ease. If she had been an average girl—a sweet, well-adjusted college kid looking to make a few dollars so she and a friend could go hear some rock concert—he would have pulled her aside and said, “Look, you don’t want to work for us. We’re not happy people.” But he understood at once that she wasn’t a happy person either, so he said nothing.

  As the days passed, Ray realized that he liked having Claire around. He would forget that she was there, and then, as he went into the kitchen to have his breakfast, he would see her at the sink, unloading the dishwasher from last night’s dinner. “Hello,” she would say to him, never “Good morning.” He sensed that she was one of those people who, when someone said “Good morning” to her, would reply, “What’s so good about it?” And she would mean it. At nineteen, Claire Danziger looked as though her life were over.

  Lucy had looked that way most of the time. Even in sleep her face had been tragic. He had come into Lucy’s room late one night because he thought he had left his reading glasses there, and he had seen her and known then that she never relaxed. Her mouth and eyes were screwed tight, dampness matted tendrils of hair to her neck. Ray had felt a kind of paternal ache, but he could not express it. Lucy would not allow it; she always kept herself at a safe distance from both her parents. She had learned early to be independent. Once when she was a very little girl, Ray had watched as she tried to teach herself to tie her shoes. Her small hands fumbled with the thick red laces, and finally she created some semblance of a bow. At the age of four she had showed a real desire to read. She would take down one of Ray and Helen’s books from the shelf in the den and pretend to read, whispering made-up words as she ran her finger along the page and squinted her eyes in a good imitation of concentration.

  So they pushed her ahead, indulging her with the independence she wanted. On her door was a glow-in-the-dark sign that read: “Keep Out! This Means You!” They smiled when they saw it and allowed her many hours of solitude. She had no social graces at all. She did not know how to talk with anyone, how to share things. “Leave me alone,” she would say whenever her parents touched her.

  Her aloofness was a constant state, but sometimes when her guard was down she let her parents see that she was in pain. She would sit and tremble and refuse to talk about what was troubling her. “What can the matter be?” Ray and Helen would ask each other. They telephoned Lucy’s fourth-grade teacher every few weeks to find out if perhaps something upsetting had happened in school to make Lucy miserable. No, the teacher always patiently reported, everything went smoothly that day. The children had learned how plants get the water they need in order to grow. They had dipped stalks of
celery into shallow dishes of red ink and had observed later in the morning how the ink had begun to climb up the pale veins in the stalk. Lucy had taken part in the experiment like all of the other children. She had not seemed troubled. The teacher told Ray and Helen not to worry, that Lucy was merely shy, that she would soon emerge from her shell.

  But the shell was hard—calcareous, Ray thought, like a mollusk’s. Such a tough, thick shell to protect such a soft, slight interior. You could dissect a mollusk; you could splay it open on a slide and look at it for hours. You could delve into the very heart of its softness and see what was there. It would make life easier if people were like that, if you could try to figure them out while they were in an open, yielding state. Most people were born with self-protection devices that didn’t allow you to go near, to explore. It had been that way with Lucy. It seemed to be that way with the girl Claire. She was completely closed off, snug inside her shell. She stood in the kitchen early each morning, putting away plates and glasses and silver, wordless except for a brief greeting. She would speak, he guessed, when she had something to say.

  But he did not want to wait. He was suddenly curious about her, without understanding why. Maybe it was the father in him—he had always been curious when Lucy brought a friend to the house, which was not very often. “So,” he would say, “you’re in Lucy’s class. Do you enjoy school? What’s your favorite subject?” The child would stare back blankly.

  Maybe it was the father in him, and maybe it was the scientist. As far as he was concerned, everything unfolded back to that little mollusk. What a wonderful cracking sound when your thumbs dug in to pull back the flaps of the opaque shell like a tiny curtain—the sound of discovery.

  chapter nine

  Dear Claire,

  Where are you when we need you? It’s getting to be that time of year again—the heart of winter, when, as you once said, “the lemming inside me” takes over. I really do feel depressed these days. Life at Swarthmore is as grim as ever. None of my classes are worth my time, with the possible exception of modern dance, which I’m not even getting credit for. For some reason, I actually like being around those snot-nosed danseuses, the ones with the really long braids and sucked-in cheeks and rosin all over their hands from hours spent gripping the barre. Do you remember that girl Francesca who lived on my floor last year, the one who drank liquid protein all the time and went around freshman week telling everyone how she’d gotten accepted to the Joffrey but had decided to go to Swarthmore instead, so she could be a more “whole person”? She’s in this class, and she’s been whispering to everyone how weird I am, and how weird you and Laura are, too. It seems that everyone knows you’ve left school. It’s the great mystery on campus, what happened to you. Everyone expects us to be in threes all the time.