Black & White

by Dani Shapiro

  “Oh my God, isn’t that illegal? There’s no way can I do that,” one of her Brearley friends says.

  “That’s okay,” says Clara. “I will.”

  In the tattoo parlor’s waiting area—separated from the room in back by a bright orange curtain—Clara looks over a wall-sized display of designs: birds, flowers, flames, Sanskrit mandalas. It’s more expensive than she thought—two hundred dollars cash—but her friends all help her out, pooling their money. The girls are all hyped up, hysterically giggling, but Clara—Clara is calm as can be, just as she was a few months ago, when she walked into her bathroom at home and hacked her hair into an uneven chin-length bob. What have you done to yourself? Ruth shrieked when she saw her.

  Soon she will dye her hair jet-black. She will pierce her nose. She will try to gain weight, adding heft to her skinny frame.

  “This one.” She points to a delicate winding vine. “We’ll do this around my arm.”

  “Maybe you should do something smaller,” one of her friends says.

  “No, this is good.”

  Her arm. There’s pretty much no way to photograph her without her arm being in the picture. This is what she’s thinking about as she lies down on the cold hard table covered by white tissue paper. You sure you’re old enough to be doing this? the guy asks. He knows she’s not—but after all, they’re talking about degrees of breaking the law. As the thin needle pokes her skin a thousand times, like being stung by a swarm of bees, she concentrates on what Ruth will say.

  You aren’t my daughter.

  I don’t recognize you anymore.

  How could you do this to your beautiful body?

  Clara focuses on the ceiling of the tattoo parlor. The spot where the incongruously floral wallpaper is peeling away from its seams. The framed safety instructions about washing the area with antibacterial soap.

  By the time she is finished, her whole arm is aching and her friends have left, bored and anxious to get home before dark. She walks slowly down Eighth Street toward the subway. Dusk settles around her. The rush-hour crowd streams past. She pictures the vine, its dark green leaves snaking around her bicep. A thing of permanence. A thing that no one—not even Ruth—can take away.

  WHERE IS EVERYBODY? Clara kneels at the side of the hospital bed, her face inches away from Ruth’s. She finds herself praying, a murmured jumble of words and phrases. Our father who art in heaven… then the Hebrew words of the Shema. She’s praying for her mother and she’s praying for herself, her very posture one of supplication.

  “I tried Rochelle on her mobile,” says Jonathan. “She must be underground.”

  Ruth’s breath rattles. She’s choking—she can’t get enough air—but her face is peaceful, as if her brain has disconnected from her physical self. Or so Clara hopes. The sound is awful, terrifying. Please, somebody get Sammy out of here.

  “Jonathan?” Clara jerks her head in Sam’s direction. “Could you—”

  “Don’t make me leave,” Sammy says. “Please don’t make me.”

  “Robin’s on the way,” Jonathan says. He’s pacing by the foot of Ruth’s bed. His face looks soft, open—vulnerable. He’s frightened, Clara realizes. They’ve been preparing and preparing, as if preparation is possible—as if this is a final exam, a tough test they have to pass. They’ve known Ruth was going to die, but is this it, actually? Is this what dying looks like? Clara has no idea. She reaches for her mother’s hand. Tries to remember everything she’s read: Sontag, Kübler-Ross, Stephen Mitchell.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers into Ruth’s ear. “Just let go.”

  Just let go. What a fucking hypocrite she is. Her head feels like it’s going to split open, even as everything around her slows down. Only what is essential remains: breath. A heartbeat. The weak, erratic pulse fluttering beneath Clara’s fingertips. I have hated you for so many years, she thinks. And then—like an overlay, a transparency on top of the thought—and I have loved you.

  She lowers the bed’s railing and moves even closer to Ruth. Stroking her papery forehead, etched with fine lines—the skin still warm, the blood still flowing—she runs her fingers along the sides of Ruth’s face. Her touch is maternal; this is how she touched Sammy as a newborn. With wonder, with an elemental disbelief.

  “We have to do something!” Peony’s voice, loud, slightly hysterical. She’s lurking just outside the bedroom door.

  “There’s nothing to do,” Jonathan says.

  But is there? Clara looks wildly around the room. The collection of prescription bottles on the bedside table, the walker, the wheelchair, the commode. I’m killing her—she seems to have no control over her thoughts—it’s my fault she’s dying.

  In the far distance, the sound of a door opening and closing. An efficient bustle down the hall.

  “What’s going on?” Rochelle asks, moving quickly to take Ruth’s blood pressure, which seems—given the circumstances—beside the point.

  “Her breathing,” says Jonathan. “It changed about half an hour ago.”

  Rochelle listens, watching Ruth carefully.

  “Can’t you help her?”

  The hysterical Peony.

  “She’s not in pain,” Rochelle says. She assesses the situation in Ruth’s bedroom, then says to Peony, “Come. Come with me.”

  “But—”

  “We need to leave these good folks alone,” says Rochelle.

  “Sam, go with Rochelle,” Clara says.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  “Come, Sam.”

  Rochelle quickly takes Sammy by the hand and leads both her and Peony out of the room. Clara can hear them as they move down the hall. Where are we going?

  “Am I doing the right thing?” Clara turns to Jonathan. “Should Sammy be with—”

  “There is no right thing,” Jonathan says quietly.

  “I don’t think Sam should—”

  “Then that’s your answer.”

  The choking sound worsens. There’s no break in it now, no pause between gulps of breath. Just that endless rattle, like nothing Clara has ever heard.

  “I’m here.” Robin bursts into the room: breathless, sweaty, her blouse hanging from the waistband of her skirt. “The traffic—I ran all the way from the Sixty-fifth Street transverse.”

  She walks to the foot of Ruth’s bed and looks down at her.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Come here.” Clara turns to her.

  Without another word, Robin kneels next to Clara on the floor. They hold hands the way they haven’t since they used to cross the street together as little girls. Quickly! The light is turning red! They feel the warmth of each other’s bodies as they watch their mother fight for air. Jonathan stands behind them, just outside this small closed circle of Dunne women.

  “I don’t know what to say, Clara,” Robin whispers.

  “Say goodbye,” Clara says softly.

  She wonders if her mother can hear her. There is no movement behind her eyes, no crease between her brows. The choking stops.

  “Goodbye,” Clara says, again and again.

  Chapter Eleven

  “IT’S BEEN TAKEN CARE OF,” says Kubovy.

  He paces the living room near the windows overlooking Broadway. He has not stopped moving since he walked through the door an hour ago: raking his fingers through his hair, folding and unfolding his arms, shrugging his shoulders. If he were to be still for a moment, he might fall apart. He pulls a pack of clove cigarettes out of his jacket pocket.

  “Do you mind?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Robin snaps. “Our mother just died of lung cancer, for God’s sake.”

  “These don’t cause cancer,” he says.

  “What do you mean, it’s been taken care of?” Clara asks. Can they just stay on one subject?

  “My dear,” says Kubovy, “I called the Times months ago.”

  “How—”

  “We want a proper obituary. They like to have a heads-up whenever possible. And the best news, really, is that
Roberta Smith wrote it—”

  “You called the paper in advance?” Clara asks. Everything is coming slowly to her, as if through a scrim. An obituary has been sitting in some drawer at The New York Times, just waiting for Ruth to die?

  “What’s an obituary?” asks Sammy. She’s curled up next to Clara on the sofa. She’s said very little since Robin, Clara, and Jonathan emerged from Ruth’s bedroom. Since the emergency medical technicians came and carried Ruth out in a zippered plastic body bag. Where are they taking her, Mom? Clara wanted to cover Sammy’s eyes with her hands. A nine-year-old shouldn’t be this close to death. A nine-year-old shouldn’t hear the squawk of emergency radios or see the impassive faces of the men who do this for a living. To the funeral home, darling.

  “It’s sort of a short biography,” Clara says.

  “Only very important people get written about in the Times when they die,” adds Jonathan.

  There it is, the fame thing again. Why does he do this? Frustration and incomprehension rise like a wave inside her, but just then Jonathan’s earlier words come floating back. Clara feels them with the force of a revelation: The worst thing you can do is keep her from knowing you—really knowing you. And Clara is—no matter how hard she has tried not to be—the famously photographed daughter of a famous mother. Of a famous dead mother. Her mother is dead.

  “That’s true,” she says softly. “Kubovy, do you know if they’re running a picture?”

  “I would imagine,” says Kubovy.

  “Which one?”

  “We have no control over that.”

  “She would want a good picture.”

  “We’ll see tomorrow,” he says. “It may even make that little box at the bottom of the front page—depending on who else died today.”

  “Frank Campbell’s?” Robin asks, holding her cell phone. “Have we agreed on Frank Campbell’s?”

  “It’s the only place that makes sense,” says Clara.

  “But Dad’s funeral was at Riverside. Don’t you think their funerals should be at the same place?”

  “Dad was Jewish.”

  “It just seems weird, that’s all.”

  Clara feels as if she’s floating. None of this seems real. It’s as if they’re all actors in a stage play, reciting the lines they’ve rehearsed. She gets up off the sofa, goes over to the windows, and cranks them open. The smells in the apartment are suddenly unbearable. The dizzying mixture of disinfectant, peroxide, plastic, metal, and the vaguest hint—perhaps she is imagining it—of decaying flesh.

  Below, an ambulance screams by, siren wailing.

  Kubovy stands by an open window now, lighting up.

  “I thought I asked you not to—” Robin starts, then stops. She closes her eyes for a moment, then shakes her head. A small smile crosses her lips. Clara knows what’s going through her sister’s mind: Who the fuck cares, really, at a time like this?

  “So what else needs to be done right now?” asks Jonathan. He moves behind Clara and hugs her. She very nearly collapses into him.

  They all want to do something. Anything but stand around here and stare at one another. If they just keep busy with their checklists and phone calls—Robin has already contacted the rental agency to pick up the hospital bed and wheelchair—then they won’t have to think. Much less feel.

  “I hope she wasn’t in pain at the end. I hope she didn’t know what was happening.”

  Peony—who can always be counted on to go straight into the black heart of the matter—has walked out of the kitchen, where she made herself a cup of tea. She blows into it, steam rising around her face.

  “I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” says Sammy from the sofa. She says it with a childish naïveté, as if talking about missing the good part of a movie.

  Kubovy clears his throat. “There is much to discuss,” he says. “The eulogies—we must call Matthew, and James Danziger, and the galleries in Europe—”

  “We’re not going to have that kind of funeral, Kubovy.” Robin’s voice is firm.

  “What do you mean?” Kubovy blows a thin stream of smoke out the window. “But we must—”

  “We’ll have a memorial service later on,” says Clara. She and Robin have discussed this and are in complete agreement. There will be no line of black town cars blocking traffic on Madison Avenue. No chic art-world crowd who barely knew Ruth using the funeral as a see-and-be-seen occasion. No air-kissing in the aisles.

  “Your mother would have wanted—”

  “Our mother isn’t here,” Robin says.

  “Didn’t you discuss—”

  “She never wanted to talk about it,” Clara says.

  “She didn’t think she was going to die,” says Robin.

  “Ah,” says Kubovy. He leans out the window and stubs out his cigarette on the newly pointed brick. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ruth discussed matters with me at great length,” says Kubovy.

  “Listen,” Robin snaps, “we’re not having a circus of a funeral, and that’s that!”

  Kubovy blinks at her slowly, like a sleepy reptile.

  “I wasn’t talking about the funeral, my dear.” He crosses the room and sinks into the wing chair by the fireplace, finally exhausted. “I was talking about the way your mother left things.”

  “Her will? She’s been dead for two hours, Kubovy,” Clara says. “Could we please just—”

  “What?” Robin interrupts. All attorney. “What were you going to say?”

  Kubovy colors slightly as he looks around the room at all of them—Peony, Jonathan, Robin, Clara, Sam—as if it has just occurred to him that perhaps this isn’t the moment to start talking business.

  “Never mind,” he says. “We have plenty of time.”

  “No, Kubovy. You can’t just come out with something like that and then drop it.”

  “Robin,” Clara says. “Robin, let’s not—”

  “I want to know,” Robin says. She stares at Kubovy, her chin quivering. “How badly did she screw us?”

  “Robin! Not in front of—”

  Kubovy shakes his head sadly, as if he’s observing this from a great distance and feels sorry for the whole lot of them.

  “With all due respect, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

  “Then tell us.”

  Clara feels a queasy embarrassment on Robin’s behalf. Why is she fixating on this? Why now, when their mother’s body isn’t even in the ground?

  “We will make an appointment to talk about it,” Kubovy says. “After the funeral.”

  THERE WAS A BEFORE, though she hardly remembers it: before Clara with the Lizard, before every breeze sounded like a whisper, before a strange harsh light descended upon the Dunne family, capturing them forever in its glare.

  An autumn weekend in Hillsdale. Clara is not quite three. Weekends are distinguished from the other days of the week, in her preschooler’s mind, by the fact that both parents are home from work. Nathan is not at the office until midnight, trying to make partner. Ruth is not racing out the door, her canvas tote bag heavy with equipment and books, late to catch the train to her teaching job at Bard. For these two short days, Clara and Robin have their parents all to themselves.

  But not today. Today, Clara is playing with her Legos—was she building a birdhouse?—when she hears her father say something about company coming over.

  “Oh, no, Nate!” her mother says. “Please, not another one of these goddamn business lunches.”

  A quick shared glance at Clara, playing there. Whoops. They’re not that kind of parents, the kind who curse in front of their children. Except Clara is so young. Clara doesn’t say much, and certainly any small household tensions are bound to go over her head. Ruth and Nathan are both in their twenties, practically still kids themselves. They can be forgiven for not understanding that Clara absorbs every word.

  “It’s not like that, Ruth.”

  Ruth’s hands are busy.
She has taken to baking on the weekends—pastries, breads, cookies, pies—and right now her palms are covered with flour as she kneads a piece of dough. She lets out a huge sigh. Clara doesn’t know how her mother can have that much air inside of her.

  “You don’t get it. You just don’t get it. I have nothing in common with these people.”

  “First of all, just because they’re lawyers doesn’t mean that you should dismiss them out of hand,” Nathan says. “And anyway, that’s not what—”

  Ruth stops kneading the dough. She slaps her hands against her apron, releasing a small cloud of flour.

  “How do you think it feels,” she says slowly, “to be asked if I’m still doing that photography thing. Like what I do is some sort of hobby that I might have moved on from. Like—I don’t know—needlepoint.”

  “That’s not what they mean, Ruth. They just don’t know what to say to you. They’re not used to talking to artists.”

  “Well, it makes me feel bad. All they care about is money—and since my work isn’t in some big gallery and they’ve never heard of me, they just dismiss me. You should see their eyes glaze over.”

  Ruth’s barrette has come undone. Her hair falls across her face, and she swipes it away.

  “Listen, this is silly,” says Nate. He walks over to Ruth and rubs her shoulders from behind. “I invited a new client for lunch. I know it’s last-minute, but this is someone I think you’ll really like.”

  “No lawyers?” Ruth asks hopefully.

  “No lawyers.”

  Robin comes into the kitchen now, dragging a Raggedy Ann doll behind her on the floor.

  “Hello, darling,” Ruth exclaims. “You were playing so quietly by yourself, I almost forgot you!”

  She’s kidding, of course. Of course she’s kidding, but Clara sees a little cloud drift across her five-year-old sister’s face, then disappear.

  “Come, girls. You can be my helpers,” Ruth says. She hoists them both up on the kitchen counter and gives each child a small piece of dough to work with. She begins chopping apples, her movements quick, careless.