It was easy enough to slip off Elsa’s quilted bathrobe with the zipper down the front, but quite another to force her arms into the meshy fabric, a half tissue still wadded in her clenched fist. Elsa’s skin was clammy and the transparent sleeves clung to her shoulders. The back zipper got stuck on Elsa’s underwear. Claire thought she heard her whimper but she couldn’t be sure. This was what Elsa wanted, to time travel within her own life. Claire was only giving Elsa what she wanted.
She sat her mother down on the edge of the bed and brought a dusty makeup bag from the dresser. Elsa had been silent since the living room.
“Tell me what play you’re going to see,” Claire said.
“It’s a play,” she said.
It was harder than Claire thought to apply lipstick to someone else, clumpy where the skin was dry. It didn’t look good.
“I’ll put a blue-gray eye shadow on you. To go with your dress.” Claire showed her.
But Elsa wouldn’t keep her eyes closed and some powder got in them. She kept blinking and rubbing her eyes so the makeup smeared into her temples. Claire caught her hand before she could make more of a mess.
“Where are your dinner reservations?” Claire asked.
But Elsa was distracted by something over Claire’s shoulder. She touched Elsa’s face to focus her attention, but Elsa wouldn’t look her in the eyes.
Claire stood up and looked dramatically at her empty wrist. “Come on or you’ll be late. Don’t you know you look beautiful?” She smoothed Elsa’s coarse white curls down with her palm. Her hair was a handful of twigs.
But she did look beautiful, if a little haphazard. Claire stood her in front of the mirror. “See? You’re beautiful.” Claire used a thumb to wipe away the excess eyeshadow, then pried open Elsa’s fingers and placed the torn tissue between her lips. “Press down,” Claire said, and Elsa pressed down. Elsa would let her do anything. It was like dressing up a doll. Claire looked at her mother’s stooped body in the mirror, how much smaller it was than her own.
Elsa stood there, shivering in the warm bedroom. “Ernest will be underdressed as always,” she said, nodding at her reflection. “I’m ready.”
Elsa shuffled out to the living room and down the hall, slowly, each step as precarious and difficult to land on as words. She stopped at the front door. She did not open it.
Now what? “We’ll wait here?” Claire asked.
Elsa pressed her head to the high window in the door, which she just barely reached, swiveling her forehead left then right, following the snowy road. She tried lifting herself to be as tall as she actually was, but her body wouldn’t unbend.
And Claire did nothing. She stood behind her mother, watching her wait, waiting for her to forget what she was waiting for. What had she done? Fairly pushed Elsa into the past and for what? To watch her wait for a dead man? When would it hurt least to be pulled back?
But when Elsa answered these questions herself by saying, “Put on the Marlene Dietrich, please,” Claire found she did not want to. They hadn’t finished the memory yet. Claire wanted to know what happened next.
“Don’t you want to go to the theater?” Claire found herself saying.
Elsa tried to turn back toward the living room, but Claire spun her to face the door again. She shushed her, though Elsa hadn’t made a sound. Claire held Elsa upright, as if she couldn’t stand on her own. You try to keep a moment that’s not yours to keep.
“Let’s wait here a moment longer,” Claire said, “I think I hear a car coming.” Was she trying to conjure her father back from the dead? But Elsa wouldn’t give her a moment longer and in the struggle, with Claire pointing at the window with one hand and holding her mother up with the other, Elsa yelped and her knees buckled and she was suddenly on the floor, yelling in German in her navy-blue dress.
Claire tried to help her up, but Elsa was dead weight. “Stand up, please.”
She wouldn’t stand. Elsa looked like she was about to cry, but instead Claire found her own face was wet. She had missed the moment of release and there she was crying and she couldn’t stop. “I’m sorry. Please, Mom, you have to get up.”
To know her mother as she was now, the way she’d never know her father—to know how her knees locked together when she stood, how she shuffled her feet when she couldn’t find the words. How her far-off smile was slightly raised on the right side and how she wanted to hear the same song over and over again. And how they shared a loss of memory, sometimes: Claire couldn’t remember how her father took his coffee. Or how he’d said goodnight to her at bedtime. What stories he told, or didn’t.
“Put on the Dietrich,” Elsa said, calmly.
Lifting her slowly, Claire brought Elsa back to the living room, sat her in the big chair. She dropped the needle on the record Elsa wanted, which never left the turntable. The phonograph crackled then gave way to Marlene Dietrich’s voice singing in German, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Without meaning to, she thought of the moment Nicolette arrived, that waiting-moment in her den. Perhaps, like Elsa, waiting was the only kind of moment she could return to. Perhaps Claire’s father was held late at the shop, or whatever job he had then, but had arrived home just in time—Claire imagined them rushing to their seats, the rain in their hair catching the light of the chandelier. Or maybe nothing happened next. Maybe Elsa was left waiting in her navy-blue dress, watching for him out the window, watching the cold move, and he failed to come home in time. Perhaps her mother was waiting for him still. The mind drifts to loss.
2.
Claire put on her best caregiver-Claire face as she prepared to give Elsa her meds—she could build a fortress out of Elsa’s weekly pill regimen. From the kitchen, Claire could hear the soft murmurs of a talk show coming from the living room. She found Elsa’s favorite blue cup and turned on the tap. Nothing but the tortured, out-of-breath sound of empty pipes. She tried the hot water. Nothing. She looked under the sink, though she didn’t know what she was looking for. What had her father done when the pipes froze?
With a large pot, Claire went outside and only then realized that if it was cold enough for the pipes to freeze, she ought to have put on a coat and something other than slippers. But it would only be a minute, and there was a break in the snowfall. The sky was all white. This was a blackberry winter, the weatherman said. A dogwood winter. It was midmorning, but it could have been any time. No horizon today.
She knelt close to the side porch, away from the animal tracks, which had faded since early morning but weren’t covered completely. As she scooped a pile of fresh snow into the pot, Claire wondered what time she would she return to, if she could go back like Elsa. If she could fit her life into a moment.
Most people, Claire suspected, would choose moments revolving around a spouse or children, or art, something created. But Claire had never made anything. She’d thought living with Mary, helping to raise Leo, would be a pinnacle. Mary was supposed to have been the person and point that all other moments and encounters had been building towards. But she was just another bread crumb in a row of bread crumbs leading Claire to where? The moment wasn’t hers to keep. Leo would be a handful of a teenager by now.
Somewhere, Claire still had the postcard Mary had sent, saying she and Leo were living with the politician in Arizona. Arizona. It could have been some fantastical land with harpies and dragons. Claire had written often those first months. Mary had been apologetic at first, but later she implied she feared for Claire’s mental health. Mary told her not to write again. Claire used to invent scenarios in which she sent anonymous letters to the press full of ammunition against the congressman.
No, Claire did not have a singular, all-powerful moment. She was not, after all, a character from a romance movie forever bound to some sunset kiss decades prior, the man allegedly killed in war, his body never found.
Her fingers sang with cold as she scooped the snow and she watched them turn a bright red. Then her hand scraped against something not-snow. S
he put the pot aside and dug a little more. Fabric. White cotton wet through. Elsa’s dirty clothes were spread and buried in the snow. A nightgown, several pairs of underwear, a blue housedress, nylons. When had she done that?
Claire imagined Elsa sneaking outside in the middle of the night with an armload of laundry. In her moonlight escapade, Elsa was accompanied by strange shapes floating around her feet—Elsa’s disembodied memories, dropping right out of her mind, entities of their own. They weren’t like film projections of her life; outside of Elsa, they became mere blobs, unable to take form and survive. They walked lightly over the layer of snowice, fluid as bird shadows.
She tried to imagine her own grief in the same way. She stayed crouched and cold in her wet slippers, her knees pushed up against her bra-less chest, glancing at the footprints circling the house, part of some constellation she couldn’t see from inside it. She shouldn’t have let herself think of Mary like she had been. Now she missed her. She missed her badly, and what was she supposed to do with that? When she missed Mary, she was as functional as the broken, wheezing pipe. If she could just eject it from herself, if she could will her grief out of her mind, it might hover nearby, insisting by its mere presence near the porch that it had once existed inside. But it would have no power otherwise—a filmy reminder of something once felt. Her and her mother’s memories, trotting side by side, midnight sentinels leaving tracks in their wake. No wonder she’d never seen what creature left those prints.
“Claire? What are you doing out here? And dressed like that?”
For one bizarre, frightening moment, she thought it was her father. But she knew it was Michael before the thought was complete. As if he could smell trouble, he’d arrived to help.
“You’ll catch your death,” he said.
Claire laughed—what could she say, caught outside in her night-gown?—and handed him the potful of snow. She let him put his arm around her and lead her inside, looking around as if to avoid stepping on the shadow-shapes.
As Michael tied burlap bags around the pipe under the sink, she told him about Elsa’s delusion, or most of it. He listened—he was good at that—and said there was no right or wrong, she had to feel out each situation. She used a hairdryer to warm the pipe.
Claire had begun looking forward to Michael’s visits. They provided structure. She always had him stay for a meal, and he complimented her cooking. He told her stories about the other unfortunate people he took care of, always worse off, and made Claire promise not to repeat a word or he’d be toast. She laughed at those other patients, and it was good to laugh.
He found other chores to do that day, like cleaning out the fireplace. When he was done, he kissed Claire on the cheek as if he’d been doing so for years, and whispered, “City girl,” in her ear. His face turned a shiny red when he pulled away, as if he realized what he’d done only then. Claire could not hold back an expression of amusement. Elsa was fidgeting in her armchair. When they turned their attention to her, she threw the box of Kleenex and hit Michael in the shoulder. Tissues flew, the biggest snowflakes. Claire laughed. Michael didn’t react at all.
As Claire picked up the tissues she said, “Did you know my parents when they were younger?” He’d lived in Ovid most of his life.
Michael bent to help. “I met them a few times. They used to come into the bookstore where I worked. Your mother was, back then, she was…” He trailed off and stalked around looking for more fallen tissues though there were none. But Claire knew what he wanted to say—something true and mean. Elsa had always been callous, especially to strangers (reserving a different kind of awful for Claire and her father). It had always made Claire love her father more, the way he loved Elsa without flinching. It never made him seem weak.
Michael was not that type of strong. When he left, Claire threw a couch cushion hard down the hallway and it hit the front door. The little bells chimed. She felt foolish—for the cushion and for him. She would never apologize for Elsa.
The sky was vein gray. The day had shaken off all pretense of beauty; now it was only wet and frightening, an uneven snow falling. There was a low light. Not yet sunset. But cooped up as they were, fresh air sometimes took precedence over the cold.
On the front porch, Claire ducked Elsa around the low-hanging icicles and marveled at the slow-growth weapons. The top of one was thicker in diameter than Claire’s own torso. Eventually they would fall, when the thaw came. They would hurt someone.
Here was everything: the dark-white sky; the yellow kitchen light thrown on the snow so that it looked, briefly, like sand; the wiry trees; the sound of their weight making the snow ache out a low groan. Walking down the road, they passed other lonely homes, no people in the windows.
“If you want to marry that man,” Elsa interrupted the quiet, “it won’t be under my roof.”
“Excuse me? What man am I marrying?”
“The turtle man. He’d have the run of things. I can’t have that.”
“I’m not marrying Michael,” Claire said. “Where did you get an idea like that?”
“Well you better marry someone or the whole town will think you’re loose.”
“Thank you. I’ll get right on it,” Claire said. Elsa only snorted in retort. “What do you want for dinner? It can’t be anything that needs much water. The pipe is still thawing.”
“Swordfish,” Elsa sounded out slowly.
They stopped in front of a meadow they passed often on their walks but never dared to enter: the trespassing signs, the decayed hunting stands. Stretches of blank white land reached out blindly, heaped like goose down. The sun was ending and from the edges of the meadow, lean tree shadows stretched endlessly across the snow.
Elsa was shivering now, but she didn’t complain. All Claire had to do was provide a stable, supportive environment. That’s what Michael coached her to do. And yet both of them knew she would fail.
A dark something darted in the corner of her eye. There—a rabbit, the size of her head. It bounded along the edge of the meadow.
“I suppose it wouldn’t kill us to have leftovers again,” Claire said. Elsa stared back at her blankly, perhaps a little frightened.
The thought took hold of her now that Elsa could be anyone. She knew so little about her own mother for certain. She knew Elsa was a widow, a mother of one, a retired seamstress, a housewife, a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s. She liked butter beans best, put them in everything when Claire was growing up. She had always been curt with people, which had embarrassed Claire. She was a Republican, and a fan of German music. She loved, for some God-awful reason, neon signs—even threatened to buy a personalized one for the kitchen—and yet she hated New York City. She preferred abridged Bible stories to the real thing. She used to yell. And now she hardly spoke and was a stasher of clothes in snow. It was not much to go off of, tallied like that.
Yet it could also very well be that Elsa had been a general in a war. She had lost the battle, the nation, the universe, all that had been was no longer, those histories and lands and peoples all wiped away, and Claire had walked in only minutes after defeat and Elsa could not speak of it, could not bring herself to remember. She could have been a famous painter, or someone’s mistress. She could have been a butcher.
Claire suddenly felt guilty for these thoughts, as if by thinking them she were the one stripping away Elsa’s individuality.
The rabbit took one more leap then froze. Claire squinted to see its tracks. This was it, she knew—the animal that circled their house every morning before they woke. Why would it do that?
Claire’s voice cracked when she spoke again. “Leftovers it has to be.” Elsa’s face was rigid. Then she let out a tiny, confused laugh.
Claire knew that laugh. She’d thought that Elsa was laughing at her, but that wasn’t it at all. Elsa was trying to join in. She seemed aware she was unaware, knew she was missing something vital; when she laughed she was pretending to get the joke, even if there was none. Her mother was laughing along
with Claire, no matter that Claire wasn’t laughing. Elsa wanted to fool her.
The rabbit was still in the middle of the meadow, staring at them with one eye in profile. This animal that made tracks around their home every day for no apparent reason now stood so still it could be dead. It must be so frightened of them. Too frightened to protect itself, to run.
Elsa coughed and mumbled at the meadow.
“I didn’t catch that,” Claire said.
“Did you make up Claire’s bed yet?” Elsa spoke so softly it was hard to hear. “I’m too tired to do it myself.”
“My bed?”
“The bed in Claire’s room,” Elsa said.
Claire took a step closer. “I’m Claire. It’s me.” Claire closed her eyes and nodded. This was bound to happen sooner or later, Michael had said. Elsa would only become more erased. Rather, Claire would. Eventually, Elsa would forget her completely. It was supposed to happen.
Claire didn’t know herself any better than Elsa did. At least Elsa and her father had had one another. In twenty years’ time, when Claire was old and sick like Elsa, who would take care of her?
“Yes,” Elsa said, and laughed that same disoriented laugh. Elsa, who had whole countries inside her. Burning empires.
She would like to live long enough to find out who would care for her. And to care back.
Without a sound, the rabbit dashed into the woods, out of sight forever, and the meadow was empty. She missed the rabbit then. The word vastly wrapped itself around Claire’s thoughts. I am vastly alone out here. Vastly. I could stretch out across the whole land and not disturb a thing. I am vast.
3.
Life in the house was organized by Sunday-to-Saturday pill containers and the old oven clock.
They watched icicles form, watched with wonder the slow falling of the snow, the slow rise of the surface of the snow. It was constant. Only the midsections of trees were exposed, branches moving up like veins. They watched the snow-shapes of deck furniture, foreign objects, the summer gone out of them. The pie tins on the garden gate no longer clanged their innocent percussion. They were buried now too. There were no more animal tracks.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 24