by Dani Shapiro
It’s the middle of the morning, a strange time for a bath. But it’s so rare that Clara gets to spend alone-time with her mother, she doesn’t complain. She sets aside her Barbies and allows Ruth to hoist her into the tub. The lizard is there, along with the toy sailboat, the rubber duck.
“Okay, Clara. We’re going to do a little work now,” says Ruth. “I want you to help me. You’re my model.”
Clara has vaguely heard of models. They’re the beautiful older girls on the pages of the magazines that are always lying around the house. She feels proud that she’s a model—her mother’s model.
“Lie back. Let your hair get wet,” says Ruth.
Clara dunks her head in the water. She lets her whole face get wet. When she emerges, she has tiny drops of water on her eyelashes.
Ruth bends over the tub, then holds a light meter near Clara’s chin, just above the surface of the water.
“That’s perfect. Now put the lizard in your mouth,” says Ruth.
“But it tastes yucky.”
“Just for a minute—I promise.”
Clara does as Ruth asks. She strains to remember what she did yesterday. She puts one bare foot up along the porcelain side of the tub, just like Ruth wanted her to do before. She puts the lizard in her mouth and tries to ignore the taste. It isn’t so bad, really. Kind of like the soft fat-free yogurt that her dad let her try one day when he was pushing her in her stroller down Broadway.
Ruth is completely still, except for the movement of her hands as she focuses and shoots. Time disappears. Five minutes go by, or fifty. Clara feels warm, even as the water starts to cool off. She has never had her mother look at her for so long.
“We’re done,” murmurs Ruth. She lowers the camera, places it on a dry spot on the bath mat. “Come on out, sweetheart.” She wraps Clara in a big fluffy towel, then holds her close. Clara can feel both of their hearts beating.
“Thank you,” Ruth whispers into the top of her soaking-wet head. “You’re such a good girl.”
Ruth made only sixteen prints of Clara with the Lizard. Not too long ago, Clara read on the Internet that the sixteenth had set a record at Sotheby’s for Ruth Dunne’s work, selling for $240,000. Even though it was work from very early in Ruth’s career, the image was seen as iconic. It was the moment she had found her true subject matter.
Clara could picture the quiet frenzy of the auction, of course: the well-dressed crowd in their folding chairs, their suited legs crossed, hands fidgeting on their paddles. And in the front of the room, on an easel—as well as projected on a twelve-foot screen—there she was. Her mouth around the lizard, her eyes huge and glistening, her leg raised on the edge of the tub, her private parts, as Ruth liked to call them, splayed open. The soft smell of the summer day, the innocence of a three-year-old girl, who wanted to please her mother so much she would do whatever was asked of her.
THE DIGITAL CLOCK reads 8:53 in the morning. For a long disorienting moment, Clara has no idea where she is. She hasn’t slept this late since before Sam was born. The venetian blinds almost, but not quite, block the harsh light filtering in through the south-facing window. The ornate brass ceiling fan is motionless above her head. The walls are an improbable pink, so bright they look like a mistake. She sits up in bed, the fog lifting, then swings her legs around, her toes meeting the thick ply of the cream-colored wall-to-wall. Robin’s apartment. The guest room. Never before in Clara’s life has she felt like such a guest.
They’re all gone for the day, just as Robin said. The three kids are off to their three different schools. Ed, Robin’s husband, left at six for the gym, to get his workout in before arriving at his law firm. Robin’s personal yoga trainer has come and gone by now—Robin mentioned that he comes daily at seven—and Robin herself is undoubtedly into her second cup of coffee (her yang to the yin of yoga) and cycling through her morning call sheet. The housekeeper is here. Somewhere, on the other side of the apartment, Clara hears the faint sound of a vacuum running.
How has Robin gotten so rich? Or is this simply how upper-middle-class dual-career Manhattan lawyers now live? She has no idea. She may as well have spent the past fourteen years in the Sahara. That’s how little she knows about this universe—the world she left behind. Her eyes fall on the bureau, wood and orange Formica, a piece of fifties kitsch. On top of the bureau there is a framed color snapshot of the four of them—Robin and Clara, Ruth and Nathan Dunne. They’re walking in Central Park: Clara and Robin in a double stroller, Ruth and Nathan looking young and disheveled. A young family out for a Saturday-morning walk.
Last night—Ruth sound asleep in a morphine haze—Clara called Robin and asked if she could sleep over. She didn’t feel capable of checking into a hotel. It was too scary, too lonely. And besides, too expensive.
“The guest room is already made up for you,” Robin said. She had just been waiting for Clara to ask.
Clara had hailed a taxi on Broadway, then given the driver Robin’s address on 75th and Park. The meter started at a dollar fifty and clicked up in fifteen-cent increments every few blocks. The Plexiglas partition, so close to her face, made her nauseated. The park was barren, empty except for the taxis and cars speeding through the transverse. The taxi turned down Park, the oxidized green roof of the Helmsley building framed by the MetLife skyscraper in the downtown distance.
She wasn’t nervous about seeing Robin—not really. Robin was incapable of surprising her. If Clara had been asked, as a teenager, what she’d imagine her sister’s future to be, she would have pretty much predicted this. The three kids, bing, bing, bing. The stable attorney husband. The partnership in the law firm, no mommy track for her. The Park Avenue address. The country house in Hillsdale that had once belonged to Ruth.
As the taxi pulled up to the green awning just north of 75th Street, Clara thought about the last time she saw Robin, six years earlier. They had arranged to meet at the upstate New York cemetery, near Hillsdale, where their father had been buried ten years before. Clara was twenty-six, mother of a three-year-old. Robin was twenty-eight and already had her three kids, the youngest of whom was still an infant.
They didn’t talk much that day, not really. They were both a little bit afraid of each other. Afraid of what would happen if all of it—the betrayal, the hurt, the abandonment—started tumbling out. Instead, they exchanged photos of their children as they sat on the low stone bench in the country cemetery, next to their father’s grave. Robin’s hair was streaked blond, and she was wearing a trench coat and high-heeled city boots. Even puffy from having recently given birth, she looked beautiful and sophisticated, like a creature from a glossy magazine. They each had brought flowers—Robin’s city roses, Clara’s a country mix of wildflowers—and they each had realized, at the same moment, that flowers were inappropriate. Their father had been Jewish, their mother Episcopalian. They had been raised as neither—as nothing.
So what do we do now? Robin asked, clutching her fancy city flowers in her lap like a bridal bouquet.
I have no idea, Clara said. Jews don’t believe in flowers, do they?
And then suddenly—as had occasionally happened in their childhood—the two sisters started to laugh at the same time. The sound, ricocheting through the empty cemetery, might have sounded to a passerby suspiciously like weeping.
Stones, Clara finally remembered. Jews leave stones on graves.
Stones, Robin repeated, setting off new peals of laughter.
Stop! Clara gasped. I can’t—my stomach hurts—
They pulled themselves together, gathered small rocks and pebbles from the damp, early spring earth, and placed them on their father’s headstone. Then—their business finished—they stood there awkwardly, shivering in the cool breeze, wondering what to do next. Robin didn’t invite Clara back to the house—now her house—for lunch. Clara didn’t suggest grabbing a quick coffee before hitting the road. Instead, the two sisters touched cheeks goodbye, barely a kiss, the space between their bodies like its own separate perso
n.
The housekeeper is now vacuuming the hall just outside the guest room, the edge of the vacuum cleaner banging against the bottom of the door. You’re going to stay awhile, aren’t you? Robin asked last night. Clara thought of what she’d said to Sam: I don’t know, exactly. She could almost see the bewilderment cross Sam’s small, delicate face. Too painful to even contemplate—that she would cause her daughter any harm. She’ll stay for today. Only for today. She throws on the corduroys and black wool sweater she’s been wearing since yesterday morning. She’ll stop and buy a toothbrush at the Duane Reade on Broadway and grab a Starbucks coffee on her way back to Ruth’s.
But first she calls Jonathan at the shop. They never ended up speaking last night. He must have been busy with his Indonesian suppliers. The time difference was a killer. But surely he got Sam off to school this morning, even if her socks weren’t matching or she was wearing last night’s underwear. And Sam could pack her own lunchbox—though God knows what she’d put in it, left to her own devices. Twelve packages of Fruit Roll-Ups and some piña-colada-flavored gourmet jelly beans for good measure.
“Jonathan Brodeur Jewelry,” he answers, on the first ring.
“Hey,” she says, relieved to hear his voice, her life—her real life—pulling her back. Jonathan, sitting at his wide old desk in his workroom behind the shop, small mountains of tiny plastic bags filled with semiprecious stones—watermelon tourmaline, fire opal, onyx, topaz—spread all around him.
“Sorry about last night,” he says.
“Yeah, what happened?” She isn’t angry, exactly, just off-balance. She can’t afford to be angry. She needs everything to be normal. For her husband and daughter to be where they’re supposed to be. She opens the guest-room door and walks into the hallway, cradling the portable phone. The walls of the long corridor are covered with family photos. Robin, Ed, and kids frolicking in the autumn leaves in Central Park. Robin, Ed, and kids posed in front of an elaborate Christmas tree. Each child—two boys and a girl—smiling against a white studio backdrop. No Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for Robin. Not even a Jill Krementz. These are not commissions or favors from any of Ruth’s friends.
“Oh, Charlie called from Bali. Minor crisis with one of the suppliers.”
“And you couldn’t deal with it from home?”
A pause. She usually didn’t speak sharply to Jonathan. A gentleness existed between them—it had since the beginning. Key to their marriage was the sense that they always had each other’s best interests at heart.
“No,” Jonathan finally says. Keeping his voice light. “I couldn’t.”
“Okay.” She lets it go. “Sorry.”
“So where are you? What’s going on?” Jonathan changes the subject.
“Robin’s apartment.”
“Wow—that’s so bizarre.”
“I can’t even begin to tell you.”
“How’s your mother?”
A question he has never once—in all their years together—had reason to ask her.
“Really sick, Jonathan.”
“Like—”
“She has lung cancer. I looked it up on the Internet last night. The stage she told me she has—people don’t get better.”
“She’s so young,” says Jonathan. “She smoked, right?”
“Still does, I’m assuming.” The smell of tobacco clings to the drapes in her mother’s apartment. Possibly a lingering scent, left over from the decades of cigarettes at bedtime, cigarettes with morning coffee, cigarettes left burning in ashtrays, their orange tips glowing.
“She’s so frail,” she says. “It’s unbelievably weird to see her so frail.”
He’s quiet on the other end. Waiting. Giving her the space to say whatever it is she wants to say.
“Or to see her at all,” she says.
“Of course it is.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean?”
Clara walks across the foyer toward the kitchen. Her lips are parched and her stomach is rumbling. She never ate dinner last night.
“Staying, going. I’m just—” She passes a huge gilded mirror in the foyer and jumps at her own reflection. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
She needs a bowl of cereal, but first some juice. She looks around for the refrigerator. How hard can it be to find a refrigerator? The kitchen is the size of the whole ground floor of her house in Maine, an enormous marble island at its center. Finally, she spots the fridge. The front is covered with a painted wood panel, designed to seamlessly match the cabinetry.
“Do you want me to fly down there? I can be there in—”
“I wish you could.”
“Nothing’s stopping me. I can close the shop, pick Sam up early from school—”
“God, no.”
“Listen, Clara, you can’t—”
“Yes, I can.” Her body suddenly shivers in the warm apartment. “I can and I will.”
“Let us be with you. Let us, for once and for all—”
Here they were again. If every marriage—even the most solid marriage—has fault lines running through it, this was theirs: Jonathan believed that secrets were a bad idea. There were no exceptions, no rationalizations. Sam’s old enough to make sense of this, he’s said to Clara more than once. And she’s also old enough to find out by accident. Is that what you want?
“Can we not do this now?” Clara asks. “I’m barely holding myself together here.”
“But—”
“I’m going to grab something to eat and head over to Ruth’s,” Clara says.
“She’s asking when you’re coming home,” Jonathan says.
“I know. She asked me last night.”
“What am I supposed to tell her?”
She listens to the sound of Jonathan breathing on the other end of the phone.
“Tell her, Soon.”
“That’s not good enough. She wants to know why you’re gone.”
“Say I’m working.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Clara. Listen—I know this is hard—”
“We’re just going to have to wing it.”
He sighs into the phone.
“Okay.”
“I have to see how it goes.”
What does she even mean by that? It’s going to go all in one direction: Ruth will get sicker and sicker. What is Clara supposed to do? What’s the right thing—and for whom? For the first time in many years, her mother’s needs and her own feel all knotted up. On Robin’s kitchen counter, a beautiful white spray of orchids curves from a delicate blue vase. Clara runs a finger softly over an orchid petal. Fake. She never would have known.
When Clara arrives back at the Apthorp, last night’s doorman is back on duty. He gives her a brief nod of recognition as she walks past him, through the courtyard to the elevator. She has now registered for him. She is Ruth Dunne’s daughter—Clara Dunne once more.
As she makes her way slowly to her mother’s apartment, Clara wonders what’s become of their neighbors. Mr. Lipsky, the old German piano teacher who lived next door, must be long gone by now. He had been in his late seventies when Clara left. She often passed him in the hallway on her way to school, when he was just back from his morning constitutional. He always inclined his head slightly, as he walked by her, and never said a word. And then there was Steven Hanson, the playwright. He had written one of the first plays about AIDS, which had run off-off-Broadway for a couple of years in the eighties. Clara notices his door, now festooned with bright Thomas the Tank Engine stickers, two small pairs of snow boots lined up on the mat. Clara would have heard if Steven had died, wouldn’t she? It would have been news. Surely she wasn’t that completely out of touch?
The door to Ruth’s apartment is ajar, and as Clara pushes it open she hears voices.
“Ruth, I understand your point, of course—”
“Don’t patronize me, Kubovy. You know how I can’t stand—”
“My dear, I was hardly—”
“Peony, would you be a dear and bring us some tea?”
Clara closes the door quietly behind her. She moves through the foyer, her sneakers padding silently against the threadbare oriental. She resists the urge to flee, recognizing it as a constant fact of her time in this place. She can’t bear it; she can’t bear not bearing it.
Ruth’s empty wheelchair is parked in the center of the living room, facing the fireplace. Ruth herself is precariously vertical, leaning on a handsome ivory-tipped cane. She’s dressed in old jeans that look three sizes too large for her shrunken frame, and a striped shirt that Clara recognizes, with a start, as having belonged to her father. A Yankees cap covers her head.
Kubovy Weiss, Ruth’s first art dealer, is standing in profile by the window, ostensibly taking in the view over Broadway. Kubovy is the only one among them who hasn’t aged, though he must be sixty by now. His skin is golden in the dead of winter, his long mane of gray hair pulled back into an elegant ponytail. He’s wearing a beautifully cut wool suit and orange-and-white striped sneakers. The only discernible concession to age are his green-tinted wireless spectacles. They remind Clara of the green spectacles that came with a pop-up book of The Wizard of Oz that she used to read to Sammy. The better with which to see the Emerald City.
“There she is!” Ruth turns and beams at her, as if Clara were her loving and devoted daughter who had, perhaps, just been away for a long weekend. “Look, Kubovy—it’s Clara.”
Kubovy crosses the living room in four long strides. He takes Clara’s hands in both of his, his eyes moist behind the green lenses.
“My darling Clara,” he says. “How amazing to see you.”
He crushes her to his chest. She can feel his heart beating. He releases her, then gazes at her carefully, as if appraising a work of art.
“You’ve hardly changed a bit,” he says. “Still so beautiful.”