Sleepwalking (10 page)

“See,” he said, pointing to a color illustration, “this is the wedding cake Venus, really called
Callanatis disjecta
. You can only find it in Australian waters. I’d like to go there someday. And this is the lion’s paw, the
Lyropectan nodosus
. This one’s easier; you only have to go down to Florida to find it.”

She and Ray were wearing different suntan lotions that day, she noticed. Hers was a sweet coconut oil for skin that tanned easily, his was a medicinal lotion for people who burned. It seemed to Helen that these smells were distinctly male and female—counterparts, almost. The bitter and the sweet. He leaned across to point out an illustration of a conch he especially liked, and their shoulders made accidental contact. They skidded against each other from the grease, and both laughed
nervously. That gliding—she thought of it months later in bed with Ray, when he parted her legs and then moved between them as if by accident, as if he were performing some mindless act. They had laughed nervously then, too, surprised at feeling no friction.

Their families lived in adjacent pastel bungalows that summer. They were tiny, cheaply constructed houses with rooms that tumbled into one another. The vertical and horizontal frame parts around the windows and doors met unevenly, like the back seams of a man’s poorly sewn suit jacket. Still, each house offered an ocean view—a small square window in the kitchen that opened out onto the beach.

Helen’s mother stayed in there most of the day, not doing any genuine cooking but listening to her favorite radio programs and fixing box lunches for her husband and daughters to eat on the beach. She kept an electric fan on at all times, but all it did was whip up the old bungalow air that smelled of previous tenants. One especially muggy afternoon Helen’s father came into the house, scooped her up in his arms and carried her outside. “You’re going to get some sun on your face, Bella,” he said in a loud voice. Everyone on the beach looked up from their foil reflectors for a second. “And you’re going to get some sand between your toes.” She laughed and gave in without resistance, but the very next morning she was back in the kitchen. She never went out on the beach again.

Helen knew her mother could see her from her post at the kitchen window, so she and Ray were discreet on the beach throughout the summer. They mostly talked, ate Eskimo pies, examined seaweed and shells, and swam. Once she rubbed
lotion in expanding circles onto his back, and once he kept his hand flat on her thigh under a towel. They would wait until they got back to Brooklyn.

It was Ray who convinced her to go to Hunter College. She majored in biology because of him, and her greatest joy was when they studied together in the evenings. They planned to be famous marine biologists, a husband-and-wife team, and write a book together like Rachel Carson’s
Under the Sea Wind
. They planned to live on the beach all year round someday.

Ray came and picked her up at night at her family’s apartment. If she was not quite ready, she would send her little sister Miriam down to tell him to wait, and would watch from the window. Ray did not like sitting in the apartment with her parents, so he would stand under the streetlight at the corner, his head tucked into his broad chest, his hat tilted low on his head like a gangster’s, smoking a Lucky Strike.

They were married in April of her freshman year at Hunter. He was a junior at CCNY then, and they moved into a basement apartment in her parents’ building. Her mother was close friends with the landlord’s wife and was able to get them a very good price. It was amazing, Helen thought, how different life was without sunlight. Ray worked in an office after classes and would come home in the evening, and they would make love on the fold-out bed. Even with the lights on, things were dim. They liked to look at each other. Before they were married they made love until their bodies were streamlined with sweat, under the trees in Prospect Park. It was the most daring thing Helen had ever done in her life. The second most daring thing (which actually didn’t count, Ray claimed, because it
was related) was going to her cousin Felice’s gynecologist for a contraceptive. Felice, a senior at Hunter, had admittedly been having sex for years.

So Helen came home on the subway with a diaphragm nestled deep in her purse. That night, in the darkness of the copse of trees, the diaphragm glowed on the grass. Dusty with cornstarch, it looked otherworldly—a miniature spaceship that had just gently landed. She ran her hand along the side of Ray’s body. Dark-brown hair fanned out in a funnel shape up from his navel and across his broad chest. This was it—the sound of her own zipper being undone along the back of her dress gave her a strange, wonderful feeling like the tug of a parachute’s rip cord, possibly one that has been packed wrong, so that during the descent no cloth comes mushrooming out. Like most things, there was always that chance. Helen let herself drop.

—

S
he had been cleaning out Lucy’s room—someone had to do it—when she found the notebook. Way at the bottom of her underwear drawer beneath a neat white pile of clothes which Lucy had folded as meticulously as a flag at sundown. A plain, blue, three-section spiral notebook. Lucy had been dead a week and a half, and Helen went through her things with care. She considered getting rid of the book, unread, but changed her mind. When a person dies, Helen thought, she leaves her secrets to the world as a kind of legacy.

Helen had a great-aunt who left the family the confidential recipe for her dish, “Minnie’s Lighter-Than-Air Egg Kichel,”
when she died. As far as Helen knew, none of the relatives had yet remembered to try it out. So much for secrets. Helen opened the notebook at once. On the inside of the front cover Lucy had penned: “These are notes to myself, so I will never, never lose anything in the clutter of growing older.”

The handwriting was tiny and difficult to read. Every line of every page was filled with it. Ray came into the room while Helen was reading. She heard him and glanced up. “Look,” she said softly. It was as if she were pointing out an exotic bird or small animal that had found its way onto the porch, her voice low so as not to frighten it off. Ray came and sat Indian style beside her, and they read their daughter’s notebook together.

It did not change anything. When they closed the book three hours later, they looked at each other, unsure. “I understand that she was in pain,” Helen said, “but I don’t understand why. I never will.”

“Maybe we can’t because we’re too close to it all,” Ray offered. “Maybe we need some objectivity.”

The next morning Helen and Ray took the train into New York. It was the first day they had been outside in over a week. Were all noises somehow louder? They had been sitting in the still cocoon of their house for nine days, with people moving quietly in and out of the front door every few hours. Now Helen and Ray rode the subway up to Lucy’s agent’s office, unannounced. They had come to this decision the night before.

Vivian greeted them with quiet surprise. She had been out to the house the previous week, and they had not mentioned anything to her about coming to the office. She took their
hands in her own firm grip. “Come in,” she said. “I’ve just been doing some boring paperwork.”

Her office was sunny and small. Helen and Ray sat and drank coffee. “How can I help you?” Vivian asked at last, leaning across the glass desktop.

They told her, their voices interrupting each other, chiming in, amending things, about the notebook. Helen drew it from her purse and handed it across the desk. “We thought this should be looked at, and maybe something should be done with it,” she said.

In a little less than a year,
Sleepwalking
was published. The book evoked a strong current of sorrow and attention, and the Aschers received letters each morning, phone calls each night. This was the way things would go on until the end, it seemed. At the funeral, when Len Deering, friend and psychiatrist, had leaned over and gently asked if Helen “wanted anything,” she quickly nodded. She took the Elavil faithfully each day, letting herself blur into passivity. It was a change of pace, anyway.

On the beach, that constant white strip, there was also a change. Vacationers left the area to go back to their other lives; the summer had ended. The air cooled and the water followed. Helen and Ray dragged in the chaise longues from their back porch, scraping them across the redwood planks, and put up the storm windows. They worked together in the house, side by side. They made love occasionally, even though Helen felt no real pull of sexual feeling.

People came and went quietly, on the balls of their feet, it seemed, in a continuation of the condolence ritual of constant guests. The theory was loosely that the mourning family should
never be left alone. Friends from the marine biology department came and sat on the edge of their chairs, drumming out small rhythms on the living-room table. They drank the Earl Grey tea that Helen brewed, and the cup would rock in its saucer. No one knew what to do in the presence of such untapped grief. A silent hysteria hovered over the beach house like a cartoon storm cloud that rains only on chosen people.

Sometimes Helen walked along the sand and rooted up clumps of dry beach grass and wove stiff, useless little mats and dolls’ brooms. This went on for a long time. It was more than two years after Lucy died that things began to turn.

Helen was alone in the kitchen one morning, listening to the water breathe like a baby outside, when someone knocked at the door. The loose glass pane rattled and Helen went to see who was there. It was a girl, she saw, standing and shivering in the cold. The girl had dark, eager eyes. She opened her mouth to explain herself, and a puffball of vapor came out first. The wind blew up around her and she tucked the flapping end of her mohair scarf into the top of her jacket. Helen would not let her freeze out there like the little match girl in the fairy tale. She pushed open the door and let her inside. The girl carried a huge orange valise with her, and she put it down on the hallway floor with a heavy, confident thud.

The woman looked older than Claire had imagined she would. Claire had knocked, and the woman had answered; it had not been difficult. She felt that the actual getting in would prove to be the hardest part, but that, too, happened with ease. The woman stood in the warmth of the house and Claire stood out in the cold. They were separated by a thin sheet of glass, and the woman obviously felt sorry for her. She pushed open the door and let Claire inside at once. Claire dropped her suitcase to the floor and stood face to face with the mother of Lucy Ascher.

She got herself in order before speaking; she brushed her hair out of her face and caught her breath. She had not been running, but she felt as though she had.

“Yes?” Helen Ascher asked. “What can I do for you?”

Claire had rehearsed what she would say, and when she
spoke, the words came out woodenly. “I wondered if you needed an au pair girl,” she said. “You know, someone to clean up, and cook, and do things like that. I’m reliable.”

“Well, now, I don’t think so,” Helen Ascher said after a moment. “The house isn’t very big, and there isn’t too much to clean . . . ” Her voice drifted off. She seemed to be thinking about something else. It was as though Claire had interrupted her stream of thoughts, and now she was returning to it.

“Thank you,” Claire mumbled, picking up her suitcase. The handle was still freezing. She was very embarrassed; the whole idea suddenly seemed idiotic. She turned to leave, but the woman’s hand was on her shoulder.

“Wait,” Helen Ascher said. “I didn’t mean to be so hasty. Come into the kitchen where it’s warmer, and we’ll talk about this.”

Claire followed dumbly. In high school she had had a teacher who was involved in sensitivity training and had sent his class out on what he called a “trust walk.” The students were paired off—one was blindfolded, and the other one had to lead his partner around the grounds of the school. The idea was to gain trust in your peers. Claire’s guide was a wise-ass kid named Rick who walked her into a tree as a joke. Now she followed once again, for the first time in years. She usually preferred to go first, to forge ahead.

The Aschers’ kitchen smelled of serious cooking—none of those odors that were easy to recognize, like coffee or bacon, but more subtle smells, spices. Coriander? Claire wondered. Marjoram? Sage? They both sat down at the table, and Claire realized that Lucy must have sat there a million times in the
past. Eating breakfast, doing her homework, maybe even writing poems when she got older. As Claire thought about it she began to fill with feeling, and she tried to stop these thoughts. She used to play mental games when she was all alone and had nothing to do. Don’t think of the word “eggplant,” she would order herself, and would try to think of other things, but naturally “eggplant” floated ridiculously in the forefront, urged on by the mere power of suggestion.

Don’t think about Lucy Ascher, she told herself, but of course that was absurd. Here she was, sitting in the house in which Lucy had grown up. When she spoke to Helen Ascher, she could barely contain herself. “I must seem really weird,” she said, “just showing up here like this. I mean, I guess I’m supposed to have references and things like that. I don’t really know how to go about this.”

Mrs. Ascher was sitting right across from her, staring at her directly, but again her thoughts seemed somewhere else. “Yes,” she said in a distracted voice. “Why did you come here? This is a pretty out-of-the-way place.”

Claire faltered for a second. “Just because,” she answered, then quickly added, “I tried other houses in the area, I wanted a quiet place by the water. That’s why I ended up here.”

“I understand.”

But she couldn’t understand, not really. She couldn’t know that Claire had left college, possibly for good, and traveled by train all day to get there. She couldn’t know that Claire was in love with her daughter.

Mrs. Ascher was talking; she was saying yes, she would try
Claire out, see how things worked. She would discuss wages with her husband when he came home that day. The house could use some cleaning, after all. The garage needed to be gone through, and she was glad to have someone else to do it this year. “By the way,” she said, “we don’t know each other’s name. Who are you?”

“Claire Danziger,” she answered. She could not believe the simplicity of the situation. She was taken aback by it, startled.

“I’m Helen Ascher,” the woman said, and as they shook hands Claire had difficulty keeping her expression from giving her away. Her mouth kept twitching up into a twisted version of a smile, the closest she had come to one in a long time.

That night, as she lay shaking in the guest-room bed, she tried to make sense of things. Calm down, she ordered herself, and remembered an exercise she had read about in her mother’s
Redbook
magazine. It was in an article on relaxing, and one of the methods offered was to lie down on a bed and tell your body to relax, piece by piece. You were supposed to start with your head and work your way down to your feet. Neck, relax, you were supposed to say. Shoulders, relax. Ribcage, relax. By the time you reached your toes, you were supposed to be asleep. It did not work this night, but Claire was not even sure she really wanted it to. After all, here she was, lying in a bed in a house filled with history. Sleep was not necessary. In
The Bell Jar
, Plath’s heroine swears to the psychiatrist that she has not slept for days, that she has spent each night watching the hands of the clock creep around the dial. After reading the book in high school for the first time, Naomi said, she went
through a similar crisis. She stayed up every night, she told Claire, and spent her days walking around in a kind of manic stupor. “Manic stupor?” Claire had said. “Isn’t that a paradox?”

“No,” Naomi insisted. “I was all hyped up, but I didn’t
do
anything at all. I was like those wind-up toys that buzz around in useless circles until they wind themselves down.”

At Swarthmore, the death girls’ marathon nights usually did not leave them depleted the next day. They all took naps in the afternoon and were revitalized for their next evening session. “Nobody says you have to sleep at night,” Claire said once, defending herself to Julian. “What’s wrong with sleeping in the daytime? In Alaska it’s light all summer, and they go to sleep eventually, don’t they?” Julian had said he thought they had black windowshades to keep out all the light when they wanted to go to bed.

In the guest room of the Aschers’ house, the windows had white, airy curtains on them, and they hung unsashed. The room was plain and scrubbed. The walls were painted eggshell white, and the wooden floors had been polished to a high shine. The moon filled the window, and the sea rustled outside. Claire had a desire to walk along the beach in the cold, but she figured that there would be plenty of time to do things like that. Tonight, her first night, she should just lie still in bed and let everything seep slowly in. Down the hall Helen Ascher coughed. There was talking—hushed husband-and-wife talk, possibly about her.

Ray Ascher had come home from work in the late afternoon and regarded Claire with a curious expression, even after his
wife had explained her presence. “I’ve hired Claire to do some work around the house,” she told him.

“Oh,” he said, “very good,” but his voice was still inquisitive.

Claire felt uncomfortable. Ray Ascher was big, almost overpowering. She had not expected this. When she really thought about it, though, she could not remember what she
had
expected. She had been in a sort of daze for the past few weeks. A manic stupor, perhaps. A death-girl stupor.

Once she had made the decision to go to the house where Lucy Ascher had grown up, she packed and left Swarthmore, taking an Amtrak train from Philadelphia to New York. She tried to read during the ride—Ascher’s poetry, mostly—but found that she could not concentrate. She was too nervous and kept going to the café car for food she did not want. In Penn Station she nearly changed her mind, turned around and got back on another train for Philadelphia. She could have gone directly to Julian and asked that he forgive her. He would, she knew; that was not what worried her. The problem was that she did not really want to go back to him, at least not just yet. His embrace was oddly comforting—his soft mouth, his hands. But she did not need any of that now. She required a different sort of comfort entirely.

She got out to the end of Long Island by late afternoon. The sky was overcast, and the wind was strong. Claire wandered into the local library and asked the woman behind the circulation desk for the telephone book. The place was deserted except for the librarian and an old man who was sitting at a
table reading a world atlas for the longest time without turning the page. Claire wondered what part of the world could be so interesting.

The Aschers were not listed. She was stunned; she looked again, moving her index finger frantically down the page. Ascerno, Asch, Aschberger, Asche, Aschenbach, Aschner. It was missing. Blood rushed to her head, and she closed the book slowly.

“Can I help you?” the librarian asked.

Claire looked up. “I’m trying to find the Aschers’ address,” she said. “You know, the poet Lucy Ascher’s parents. I understand they still live here. That’s what I read in the introduction to Lucy Ascher’s memoirs, anyway. I think they still live here. At least I hope they do. God, I came all the way out here.” She was babbling now, and she stopped speaking abruptly.

The librarian smiled, showing bad teeth. “Oh yes,” she said. “They still live here. It’s not very far.” And she gave her directions.

Claire muttered her thanks and was about to leave when the librarian added, “You may think you’re the first, but you’re not.”

Claire turned away and hurried outside. She felt foolish; the librarian had figured out everything simply by looking at her. Am I a type? Claire wondered. In high school she had been considered a true original. There was no one else like her in the entire school, so she had naturally assumed there was no one else like her in the world. “You’re a misfit!” her mother had shrieked at her once, and Claire had allowed herself to fall further into the role, beginning to see its advantages. People
left you alone if you were a misfit, and you were able to do and say as you pleased. Claire would sit at the back of the classroom, leaning her chair against the wall, never listening to the lesson, openly reading Lucy Ascher’s poetry or else writing some of her own. The teachers noticed but never said anything, because Claire performed stellarly on tests and papers. One day she was called into the school psychologist’s office. Apparently one of Claire’s teachers had requested the evaluation; she never found out which one it was, although she suspected her young male math teacher, who occasionally had a copy of
Psychology Today
on his desk to read during lunch hour. The meeting was short. Mrs. Melcher, a heavy, kindly woman, seemed delighted with Claire and ended up telling her she should not think of herself as “different”—she should think of herself as “special.” Somehow this advice did not carry her through life. She was still restless, still looking.

Claire found the Aschers’ house easily. It was large and plain, and an old paneled station wagon was parked out front. She was very cold, and she wished she had remembered to bring a pair of gloves with her. Someone was moving around inside the house, she could see through the window. A couple of times she wanted to turn around, but the wind pushed her forward. Okay, she thought, this is really it. There was no doorbell, so she knocked. The glass pane shook at her touch, and she was afraid she had knocked too hard, that the glass would fall to the ground and splinter. But nothing happened and no one came to the door. She wondered then if perhaps she had not knocked hard enough.

The wind blew up a small leaf-and-sand storm in her face,
and as she put up her hand to protect her eyes, she could hear someone coming. She tucked in her scarf, and the wind immediately loosened it once again. The mother of Lucy Ascher was looking straight at her through the glass and then, after what seemed like a full minute of deliberation, she pushed open the door and let Claire inside where it was warm.

—

H
er chores were minimal from the very start. “Oh,” Helen Ascher said, waving her hand vaguely, “just dust this area because Ray is pretty allergic.”

Claire was given a cardboard box filled with cleaning supplies: a feather duster, a couple of aerosol cans, some old rags which had once been undershirts, and a few special attachments for the vacuum cleaner. She was looking forward to the idea of physical labor; it was something that she had not really done before. At home her responsibilities had been few. Her mother had always yelled at her to pitch in, to get moving, but then when Claire actually did help out, her mother shooed her away. She could not stand it when the house was not in perfect shape, and she did not trust anyone else to do the job. “I have to take care of everything around here,” she would say.

“Is there anything I can do?” Claire would ask, but she already knew the answer.

“Oh, you,” her mother would say, “you’d just create a bigger mess. You and your father are exactly alike. Go into the other room and make yourself scarce for a while.”

Claire tried to think—had things always been that way? She could not remember. She certainly had had some fun when
she was a child. There were photographs that served as fair proof: Claire and Seth at the Catskills Game Farm, petting a fat lamb with yellowed fleece, smiles on their faces, circa 1966. Claire and Seth and Dad huddling over a hibachi, their faces wavy in the heat at a backyard barbecue, circa 1968. Their mother had taken the picture; her thumb blotted out one third of it. When the roll of film came back from Kodak, they probably kidded her about being a “lousy shutterbug.” There must have been some close times; every family has them.

She tried to get a sense of the Aschers’ family life, but it was very difficult to do. Both Helen and Ray were reserved people. Sometimes Ray offered comments about his classes during dinner, but even then his voice was low and inexpressive. In the second chapter of
Sleepwalking
, Lucy wrote that Ray was “a large, brooding father. There always seemed to be too much of him. His shoes were so huge that when I was a kid I used to hide all eight of my hamsters in a single Oxford, then lace it up, put my hand over it and listen to the muted squeals and thrashing inside.”