by Meg Wolitzer
I guess it’s pretty obvious that I’m not exactly the most experienced person in the world. I mean, I’ve had other girlfriends before you, and even other extended romances. It’s just that things were simpler then. I could bring a single rose to Cathy and she would think it was the most beautiful, original thought in the world. When we had sex for the first time, I had to swear I wouldn’t hurt her. I didn’t even know what that meant; I knew nothing about sex or about hurting anyone. I was just this excited kid, and I agreed to anything. I didn’t know what I was doing.
But now I think I do. When I was with you, I felt very overwhelmed, but I also felt as if I knew what was going on. I knew that when we slept together it wasn’t as good as it could or should have been. I was aware of that from the start. Sexual problems aren’t supposed to creep up until we’re in our forties—I’m supposed to become impotent then, and you’re supposed to have a headache all the time. Then we go to a marriage counselor and work everything out, and the sex becomes great again. But I’m only twenty, and you’re not even. What are we doing wrong? The more I think about it, the more I think we’re doing nothing wrong—it’s just the nature of our relationship. Somewhere in this letter I mentioned how we shouldn’t have gotten together in the first place. Maybe that’s why sex is so difficult. I can’t come up with any other reason. The first time you took off your turtleneck, and all that static made your hair fly out, I had this huge smile on my face—I don’t know if you saw. I was so wrapped up in watching you, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Claire, you have such a beautiful body. Why do you hide it in black all the time?
You’re so secretive about your history—have other people gone crazy over you before? Are you used to this kind of letter? You never told me anything about other boys/men in your past, and while I was very curious, I didn’t want to push. I’m always afraid something I say will alienate you, and sure enough, something did. I keep telling myself I have to be careful when dealing with you, but I don’t even know what that entails. It’s like walking across a mine field. Trial and error. If you could just give me an idea of what I can and can’t say, then things would be better between us. Incomplete, probably, but better, because I wouldn’t feel so tense whenever I said anything that was important to me, wondering if you would shut me out.
What goes on inside of you? Do you have some deep dark secret that you’re trying to hide? After spending so much time with “the boys,” I’ve started thinking of things in terms of TV trivia. This whole thing reminds me of an episode of Medical Center, in which this guy is deaf, and Chad Everett thinks it’s a case of hysterical deafness. He thinks something terrible happened to the guy when he was a kid and that he’s been repressing it all these years. He wants to explore the guy’s past to get at the heart of what he’s been repressing, but the family won’t let him. They start to take the guy out of the hospital, and as they’re wheeling him from the room, Chad Everett has to think fast, so he knocks over a huge tray of glasses. The guy, who’s already halfway out the door and his back is turned, jumps at the crash. The family realizes that deep inside, the guy really can hear, so they agree to let him stay for more tests. It ends with this flashback to when the guy was little and his father beat him up or something. When he remembers it, he can suddenly hear again. It was a stupid show, but pretty cool in a way. Maybe you have something like that that makes you so secretive and closed, something you want to hide. It’s just a thought.
I’ve been sitting here at my desk for hours and it’s just occurred to me how tired I am. I have a stiff neck from leaning over too long. Before I go to bed to dream about you, I’d like to make a request. Please tell me where you are. I promise I won’t do anything to embarrass you—I just want to know. It would give me a better perspective on the whole situation. If you are out with some man in the wilderness, eating grape nuts and having a wonderful, back to nature time and you tell me that the two of you are very much in love, then I’ll bow out as gracefully as I can. I want to know if I have a chance with you anymore and if you ever think about me. I hate to be repetitive, but I think this letter is going to end the same way my last one did: Please, Claire.
Julian
She sat on the bed with the pile of letters on her lap. All her life she had wished for mail—for anything, even a chain letter. She had always been the first one out the door at home when she heard the postman coming up the walk. There was hardly ever anything for her, but still she remained hopeful. At summer camp when the mail bell clanged she would race from her bunk. Her parents sent infrequent, chatty notes telling her what movies they had gone to see, whose barbecues they had been to, how the parakeet was doing. Claire could never get enough of those letters; they made her feel connected to something.
And now, just when she wanted it least, she received mail almost every day. “Here’s another one for you,” Helen would say, handing her an envelope. Naomi, Julian, her mother—three people who were concerned about her. Their letters were small reminders of her life outside the Aschers’ house, and she didn’t want to be reminded. Claire could not be angry with them, though; they meant well.
One thing in Naomi’s first letter had intrigued her. Did people at Swarthmore really think something might have happened to her since she left school? Did she come across as suicidal? It was strange; Claire had never given any serious thought to taking her own life. There were times when she fantasized about it, of course, but she knew she would never carry it through. In all her fantasies, she imagined herself being saved. She pictured herself waking up in a hospital bed, with a young woman psychiatrist peering down at her. Claire would spend a few weeks in the hospital, and she and the doctor would iron out all of her problems and become close friends. She would leave the place feeling refreshed, rejuvenated.
This wasn’t a death wish, Claire knew. She still held on to the frayed ends of life, and always would. That was what separated her from Lucy. It was not a matter of courage, of having the guts to complete the act. Like Lucy, Claire felt the darkness all around her, but unlike Lucy, she had no idea of what it meant to walk through that darkness, to move beyond it. Certain things pulled her back. She looked down at the pile of letters and wondered which of them she should answer first.
chapter ten
Claire was polishing the silverware. She was sitting alone at the kitchen table, rubbing each piece with silver paste and a soft felt cloth. Her hands were dark with tarnish. She seemed occupied, really occupied, as if she were doing something of an intellectual nature. She squinted to clean out the tiny rosette grooves that were notched into each handle. A wedding gift long ago, from Ray’s parents. The Aschers used it as both their everyday and their special-occasion silver. And now Claire was polishing it carefully, as though it would really matter—as though, when Helen held up a teaspoon now, her inverted reflection, clear as day for the first time in years, would change anything.
Helen went upstairs to the bedroom and sprawled out on the unmade bed. Lying there, the shades still pulled all the way down, she was reminded of the early days after the death, when she never knew what time it was, because the room stayed dark. Once Harriet Crane, wife of a dean, marched in and snapped open the window shade. The shade flew up on its roller, the light flooded in. “Come on, Helen,” Harriet said in a brisk voice, but then she faltered as she got a good look at Helen lying there in the stale room. “I’m sorry,” Harriet said, quickly pulling the shade back down and hurrying out.
Now Helen went and opened the shades herself. It was a mild morning, and cloudless. She began to make the bed; she didn’t want to wait until Claire got around to doing it. The sight of an unmade bed always gave her a sick feeling. She bent over and smoothed down the floral sheets, and that was when the telephone rang. It was a jarring sound to her because it was so infrequent. She reached across the bed and answered it. “Hello,” she said.
It was a woman, and her voice came on quickly. “Mrs. Ascher,” she said. “I wan
t to speak to Mrs. Ascher.”
“Speaking,” said Helen.
There was a wait. “Look,” said the woman, “I’ll get right to the point. It’s about my daughter.”
There had been a few calls like this before—parents saying that their daughters were depressed, were spending too much time alone in their rooms, were acting strange, were maybe suicidal. What should they do about it?
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I really can’t help you.”
“Please,” the woman said. “Just listen to me. I know my daughter is there. She told me herself. Please don’t pretend.”
Claire’s mother. The realization occurred to Helen all at once. “Mrs. Danziger,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what kind of a person you are,” said Claire’s mother, “but this whole thing is very troubling to my husband and me. Claire was a Dean’s List student every semester, you know. I told her we wouldn’t interfere, but I’m finding it very hard to just sit back and let this continue.”
Downstairs Claire was working, her shoes kicked off, at ease in this new house. What was her family life like? The voice of her mother was tight and strained. Am I a child stealer, Helen wondered—one of those pathetic women who pluck toddlers from their strollers? It had never occurred to her that Claire might really belong somewhere else and actually be missed. At once she saw that this had been a stupid oversight on her part.
“Mrs. Danziger,” she said, “I never imagined that this would cause any difficulties. I’d assumed Claire was, well, on her own, making decisions for herself. She never gave us a clue . . . If I had known this would have caused so many problems, I certainly wouldn’t have hired her. I hope you understand.”
The woman’s voice relaxed a little. “I was just worried,” she said, “when Claire told us she was doing this. It sounded so irrational, but she’s always been headstrong. What could I do?”
“Kids are that way,” Helen found herself saying, feeling as though this were slowly leading into a neighborly conversation—two women chatting over the backyard fence, laundry flapping in the afternoon breeze. Had she ever had a conversation like that before? She vaguely remembered a chat with another woman about how hard it was to be a parent in this day and age.
Helen had attended a PTA meeting once. Newsletters and invitations kept arriving in the mail, and she finally went, purely out of guilt. She sat in the back row of the dark auditorium while a panel on stage discussed drug abuse in the community.
“So remember,” the moderator said. “If you child starts staying out late, or asking for his allowance early, or spending time with children who are not familiar to you, be alert. And also watch out for the sweet, ropy odor of marijuana . . . ”
Helen drifted off. What was a ropy odor? Did rope really have a smell of its own? She became light-headed sitting there, stuffed into a wool dress she had bought years earlier for a nephew’s graduation from Cornell. There was nothing of relevance being said at the meeting. Lucy never went out in the evenings and never asked for money. On Fridays after school Ray gave her her allowance and she took it from him silently, usually spending it on used books of poetry—Roethke, Stevens, Lowell.
“You know, I took a poetry class when I was at Hunter,” Helen had said to Lucy once. Lucy waited for her to go on, to elaborate, but Helen could not think of anything else to say. She couldn’t even think of the names of any of the poems she had read. Abbey, Lines Written over something Abbey. A half-title rose and fell in her mind. She was sorry she had brought up the subject; she hadn’t liked the class and had not been a very good student. The professor was a snide man who used his students’ names like weapons. “Well, Miss Hertz,” he would say when asking a question, leaning over and closing in for the kill. He did not like women, Helen had heard; maybe he just did not like people in general. She had been relieved to retreat to the safety of the Chemistry lab when English ended each morning.
Kids are that way, Helen said to Claire’s mother, as though she had been saying it for years, commiserating with other mothers, sniffing gleefully around the house for that elusive ropy odor.
“Do you want to speak to Claire?” Helen asked. “She’s just downstairs.”
The woman hesitated. “No,” she said. “Not yet, not today. She would just resent me more. Please don’t tell her that I called. She wants a first taste of independence, she can have it. I guess that means cutting the apron strings, as they say.”
“Yes,” said Helen. “I guess it does. I’ve been through that.”
There was a pause. “Your daughter—your Lucy,” said Mrs. Danziger. “I think Claire could practically teach a course on her poetry, she knows it so well.”
Helen did not say anything. She felt blood rush to her head. She was always thrown off balance when she heard anyone else mention Lucy. Even the name was tragic—the two simple syllables, the name you would give to a pretty little baby.
“I’m sorry,” said Claire’s mother. “I should have been quiet. I mean, I don’t even know if this is something you talk about with other people. I know how it is.”
“You know how it is?” Helen asked. She didn’t mean it nastily; she was just curious.
“Yes,” the woman said in a new, soft voice. “We lost our child too.”
There was something moving over the line then; both women let out a small sound of relief. All the lost children, Helen thought, and her head filled with images. She thought of that passage in Lucy’s journal in which she wrote about being lost in a department store. Helen took this further; she imagined the whole world as a gigantic department store, and you could claim your lost child at the information desk. She would run through the crowd of shoppers, knocking over mannequins as she ran, and scoop up lost Lucy in her arms.
“I didn’t know that,” Helen said, awkward. “Claire never told us.”
“She doesn’t talk about it much,” said Mrs. Danziger. “She’s been very quiet about it. They were very close. They had a lot of private jokes. You wouldn’t think it, but Claire used to laugh at things with Seth. They used to tell knock-knock jokes over dinner . . . ” Her voice trailed off in the middle of the sentence, and she said, “I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I called up to insist that Claire come home, that I’d had enough of her games, but now I guess I’m just running off at the mouth.”
“It’s all right,” said Helen. “Please. You just get wrapped up in a thought and start talking. Everybody does that sometimes.”
“True,” said Mrs. Danziger.
“It’s like therapy—they say it’s good to talk,” Helen said. “Most of the time it’s hard for me.”
“My husband and I, we’ve tried to focus on other things,” said Claire’s mother. “He’s joined a gym now. Twice a week he goes with other men from work. It’s co-ed, ‘unisex,’ they call it, but I’d be embarrassed to go and have to show everybody how out of shape I am. I’ll find something else to do. You have to keep busy; that’s all there is.”
Keep busy. People had said this to Helen before. She imagined herself running around, trying to find new hobbies—learning to knit, perhaps, and knitting so rapidly that the needles clicked like a field of crickets. Or she could take up Evelyn Wood, the pages of all the classics flipping by in a great fan. But what was the rush, anyway? We are here for quite a while, she thought. If she and Ray sped through everything, they would eventually have nothing left. They would have to turn to each other then, and they would probably be like two aging virgins, two people alone and hesitant in a room, mouths waiting to press, buttons waiting to be sprung.
Helen had gone to the Brooklyn Public Library at eighteen and read everything she could find on sex. Libido. Multiple Orgasms. It was comforting to apply clinical terms to those feelings, to the way everything inside seemed to rise to the surface when Ray touched her—the flush of blood to her face, th
e little pebbles that rose to her nipples. All that was gone now.
The only thing that parents of lost children could do was turn to one another, as if in a huge square dance when you look your partner, a stranger, dead in the eye and cross your arms for a do-si-do, barely touching as you move to the music.
“Mrs. Danziger,” said Helen, “Claire will be all right. I’ll make sure of it; I promise you.”
“I just hope she can straighten herself out,” said Mrs. Danziger. “She hangs around with such odd girls at college, and she has some boyfriend who we’ve never met, but I’m sure he’s no better. I’ve been worrying about her for ages, and now all this.”
“Things need time,” Helen said.
“Time,” Claire’s mother echoed. “I know.”
The conversation did not really end; it just dissolved in the air. Each woman was moving further into herself, into her old grief. After Helen hung up the telephone she sat for a while longer on the bed. There had been something between the two of them. Downstairs was a child who did not belong to Helen and Ray, someone they were merely borrowing for a short time.
She told Ray late that night when they were undressing for bed. He slipped out of his boxer shorts and into a pair of creased cotton pajama bottoms. He sat up and breathed in his stomach, something she had noticed him doing a lot lately. She did not mention it. “I got an interesting phone call today,” she said.
“A weird one, you mean?”
“Not exactly. Claire’s mother.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What did she want?” he asked.
“I’m not altogether sure,” said Helen. “At first she was practically accusing us of kidnapping Claire, but then I think she realized that wasn’t what was going on. She talked to me about things. They had a child who died, you know.”