Sleepwalking (15 page)

After dinner Ray pulled her aside in the kitchen alcove. Helen was washing pots. The water was rushing loudly, and she could not hear their talk. “You know, she seems happier tonight,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

She looked at him and saw that he was desperate. He was confiding in her only because he needed to talk and she was there. “Yes,” Claire said. “She does.”

Her confirmation of this seemed to put him in good spirits, and later that evening when the dishwasher had been put on and the three of them were sitting quietly in the living room, Ray said to Claire, “I want to show you something.” Helen looked up from the beach-grass place mat she was working on, inquisitive. “The telescope,” he explained to his wife.

“Oh,” she said, her eyes bright for a moment, and then went back to her weaving.

Ray went to the closet and took out a long, narrow box. “I got this for Lucy,” he said softly. “I think she only used it once.” He set it up in the bay window while Claire stood by, watching. She did not know how she should react. “Look,” Ray said, flipping through the booklet that came with the telescope. “Try to find Cygnus. The manual says: ‘Cygnus, a complex constellation, looks like a graceful swan spreading her wings against the night sky.’”

“I never knew astronomers had any imagination,” Claire said as she leaned over to look into the ocular. She adjusted it for a few seconds, but she could not see anything. In that socket where a cluster of stars should have been, Claire could make out blackness only.

“Have you found Cygnus?” Ray asked, but she hadn’t really been looking for it. She had begun to feel sad, for no apparent reason. It struck her how pathetic the whole situation was, this little makeshift group of people sitting in a faded living room. They were drawn together by a death, by shared, unspoken grief. Claire searched the night sky for any discernible movement. She thought of an oral report she had delivered in the fifth grade—or was it the sixth? It had been about comets, and she had drawn up an elaborate chart on oak tag for the occasion. Comets, she remembered, have been known to crack up into filaments when plunging earthward, with various particles landing in Ohio, in Wisconsin and on the soft floor of Lake Erie. She thought of this as she looked through the eyepiece, and the images moved her—it seemed that in the middle of
all that heat and fuss there always had to be a kind of dispersion, an eventual separating of the elements.

Ray put away the telescope soon after, and Helen went around the rooms, shutting off lights. She did this every night before bed, darkening the house bit by bit. Claire stood in the living room, looking out the window. Ray had tried to be close to her in his own fumbling way. She was touched by it, but she did not know how to respond. That sort of kindness was not something she was used to. Whenever her parents acted nice to her, when they gave her a compliment or an extravagant present, one of them would always ruin the moment. “Go on,
open
it,” her father had urged on Claire’s nineteenth birthday as she cradled the wrapped package in her arms. So she ripped through the Day-Glo paper, accidentally tearing the gold rosette that had been affixed to the center. “Could you be a little more careful?” her mother said. “That bow might have been used again, you know. You never stop to think about anyone but yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire mumbled, looking to her father for an ally. But he merely looked back silently, his eyes un-giving. The present was a beautiful solid-gold pendant, and when she wore it, it swung from her neck like a weight.

Her parents had lost all of their grace when Seth died. They were abrupt now, harsh. Claire did not really blame them; at least she understood where their fury came from, and she held back. They never tried to be close to her, but she excused them for that, too, thinking that such coldness could not last forever. One day, many years in the future, her parents would get lonely for their children and would reach out. Claire had no idea how
she would react. It amazed her that she could be such an optimist in the midst of everything. No one would believe that a death girl could consider herself an optimist, not even the other death girls.

“Come off it,” Laura would say, smirking. “What about Lucy Ascher’s death landscape and all that? You’ve always told us that that’s your world view, too, and now you want us to believe you’re an optimist?”

“Yes,” she would tell them, “I do live in a death landscape. But I never said I liked it, only that I had to live in it.” Human nature was an entirely different issue. Claire had to have put some faith in it or she would not have gone to the Aschers’. If she did not trust human nature, then there wouldn’t be much to go by. You could find only a limited number of things from old sepia photographs and diaries. You had to go beyond them, into the heart of things—into the sadness of Ray Ascher as he stooped to screw together the parts of the telescope. The need to be a parent was still in him. “See,” he had said in a father’s voice, “you fiddle with this to put things in focus. Try it.”

It had made her want to cry. She saw how alone he was, how alone all three of them were. In the first several days she was there, she had not seen this; she had only experienced a kind of disorientation, a perpetual wondering about what she was doing in these strangers’ home. The disorientation had eased a little when she fell into the routine of housecleaning. Each morning she made herself a light breakfast and unloaded the dishwasher. Ray would pad in when she was almost through, and she would heat up water for his coffee. Then she began work around the house, starting with the bedrooms
upstairs and making her way down to the basement. She was left alone for most of the day. Ray went off to the college in midmorning, and Helen sat quietly in her favorite chair by the living room window or out on the freezing porch. All was silent in the house.

Now Claire’s job had become ritual, and she moved through the rooms as though she had lived in them all her life. She knew where everything was kept, on which shelf Helen stored her compact sewing kit and the pincushion that looked like a strawberry, in which drawer of the hutch cabinet Ray had his magnifying glass and his shell collection. There was something touching about knowing the small particulars of other people’s lives. When she was changing the sheets in Ray and Helen’s bedroom, she noticed that Helen had left her wedding band on the night table. It was a thin gold ring, and Ray’s and Helen’s first initials were engraved on the inside. Helen wore the ring only every few days—Claire heard her tell Ray that she was afraid she might lose it. “After all, that almost happened once, remember?” Helen had said. She reminded him of the time her ring had slipped off her finger during some laboratory work at the college while she had her hand in the water of a draining tank.

Claire had not heard the beginning of this conversation, and she wondered what had prompted it. She could imagine Ray asking his wife why she hardly wore her wedding ring anymore. His ring was always on his finger. Perhaps, Claire thought, he could not get it off. She had read about cases like that—jewelry that had to be cut free from swollen-jointed fingers. Now
that
was real love, when your wedding ring was
so much a part of you that it had to be cut free. Claire liked to think of small things like that as metaphors for larger concerns. She had always gravitated toward things that lent themselves well to metaphor. The idea of simile especially pleased her; the fact that something could be compared to something else in a way that was far-fetched and yet
true
made her feel that there just had to be a certain connectedness among all the things in the world. If you didn’t believe that at all, then you were lost, left alone in the night to fend for yourself. This was one of the reasons that the death girls had so quickly banded together freshman year—each of them feared she could not go it alone. Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.

The death girls had a sort of buddy system going, like the kind used during free swim at Claire’s old summer camp. The head counselor would blow shrilly into the whistle she wore on a lanyard around her neck, and the pairs of buddies would join hands and count off as they stood shivering in the waist-deep water. The death girls counted off each night, making sure that everything was okay and that no one was missing, spiritually speaking.

Claire felt good knowing that she was being taken care of, that she could share some of her thoughts and feelings with Naomi and Laura, but she also knew that this togetherness could go only so far. In the end, she realized, you were always by yourself. She remembered the first time this idea had occurred to her. She had been very small, and her parents had taken her and Seth to see the Ice Capades. They had managed
to get front row seats and could see everything from up close. All of the skaters wore sequined costumes that shimmered two-tone under the lights, and colossal purple headdresses that looked like peacock tails at the Bronx Zoo. The skaters were just wonderful; they did cartwheels and back flips and leapt through ignited hoops. But the most exciting part of the evening was when they brought funny little cars out onto the ice and went around selecting children to ride in them.

All of a sudden one of the peacock ladies was standing in front of the Danzigers, holding out her electric arms, and Claire’s mother and father lifted Claire up and out onto the ice. It was not slippery, as she had been afraid it might be. Instead it felt coarse under her feet, like walking on the grainy sawdust that was always sprinkled on the floor of the butcher’s shop in Babylon. The lady helped Claire into the car, and they were off. They circled the rink in a blur three times, and at one point the lady lifted up Claire’s hand and made her wave at the audience. She wondered how she would ever find her family again—as the car sped past she frantically scanned the tiers of faces for her parents and brother. She could not locate them, and for the first time in her life Claire understood that she was vulnerable to all the elements of the world. As the funny car was whisked along the ice, she felt as though she were rushing to her fate.

The ride ended soon after, and Claire was easily deposited back in her seat. She could only sit there, stunned, for the rest of the show. When the house lights went up, she pretended to have fallen asleep, and her father had to gather her up in his arms and carry her out to the parking lot.

—

S
he knew she was making them happier. If not actually happier, then at least more hopeful. Helen’s pace seemed quicker; she walked around the house as though she had a definite purpose, a direction. She was getting bored with her weaving, and unused beach grass was scattered around the rooms. Claire heard Ray tell Helen, “It must be this young blood in the house that’s picking you up.”

“Possibly,” she answered.

You could hear so much in someone else’s house. Even if you had not intended to eavesdrop, the voices rose up and filtered through the walls and under doors. There was a certain new vigor at the Aschers’. One morning Helen actually sat down and wrote out a short list of the things she wanted Claire to do. The list read:

Defrost fridge.

Re-paper kitchen shelves.

Clean out Lucy’s room.

Claire was shaken when she read the last item. She had not spent any time in Lucy’s room before. She had been told it did not need cleaning, so there had been no real reason to go in. But once when Helen was in the bathroom, Claire went and stood in the doorway of Lucy’s bedroom, her heart pounding. She opened the door slowly, expecting to see some kind of ascetic, inspiring sight: a writing desk with an exposed bulb for a lamp, dark peeling walls and a latticework of cobwebs in all
the upper corners. But the room was an undistinguished girl’s room: powder-blue carpet, white uncracked walls and ceiling, and a Rousseau print hanging over the bed. She heard Helen flush the toilet down the hall, and she quickly stepped out, closing the door behind her.

Now she had a legitimate reason to be there. Item three: Clean out Lucy’s room. She could not imagine what the job included. She would save it for last, for the very end of the day. Only when she had defrosted the refrigerator and lined the kitchen shelves with clean new paper would she go upstairs to Lucy’s bedroom. It was no secret place; it was not one of those rooms that could be reached only through a hidden sliding panel at the back of a fireplace. It was her own obsession that made it seem that way. What did she expect to find there, after all—another notebook, a sequel to
Sleepwalking
?

When Claire went up to Lucy’s room at the end of the day, she sat down for a few minutes in the center of the carpet, getting her bearings. The room had obviously been gone through many times. It was also obvious that this was the room of someone who had died. Claire was an expert on this, having spent the last five years living in a house with such a room.

The bedroom of a dead child always had an artificial ambience. A selection of the child’s belongings was arranged in a kind of order that strained to appear casual and random. Representative objects were lined up on the shelf in loving tribute. It was as though the parents were trying desperately to piece together a life, using whatever was available.

There had been a family of sparrows living on the ledge outside Claire’s window at school freshman year, and she
remembered feeling the same kind of hopelessness each morning as she watched the mother bird fly back and forth building up the nest, scraps of twine and pencil shavings dangling from her beak.

Claire stood up and began to look for things to do. She ran a rag over the furniture, and dust came off in a thick layer on the cloth. She moved the four-poster away from the wall and began to vacuum. She did not hear Helen come in because of the noise, but when she turned around she was there, leaning against the door. Claire shut off the vacuum switch with her foot. Its groaning died away, and the room was quiet. The two women faced each other.

“Claire,” Helen said, “do you like it here?”

“Where?”