Sleepwalking (19 page)

“To whatever,” he said, touching his glass to hers.

They sat at the kitchen table for another hour, drinking and talking. “Let’s take a day trip soon,” he said.

“Okay,” said Helen. “I’d like that. I’ve been getting kind of stir-crazy.”

“I can tell,” he said. “It’s a good sign.”

The humming stopped. Helen leaned back in her chair and craned her neck to see into the upstairs hallway. The light in Claire’s room was off, or else the door was closed—possibly both. The sherry had made Helen feel very tired and overheated. “Feel my face,” she said, taking Ray’s hand and placing it flat against her cheek.

“Hot,” he said.

They were sitting very close together at the table, and she could smell his aftershave—something with pine in it—and the sherry on his breath. The white overhead light was harsh, nothing was hidden. It was a light to cut food finely by, to read recipe print by. Now she could see his pores and all of the deep creases in his face. They shared responsibility, that was certain. They had been married a long time, she thought, leaning against him.

“Whoa,” he said, thinking she was a little bit tipsy and had lost her balance. He braced her shoulder, and then she turned her face up to his, expectant.

She saw them dancing from the top of the stairs. At first she did not know what they were doing. She saw a whirl of bodies and heard music blaring on the stereo, but she did not connect these things with dancing.

Claire walked down the stairs and stood in the entrance to the living room. It was then that she realized they were waltzing. Ray was holding his wife very close and twirling her around in circles. They were laughing as they moved. Every once in a while Helen would turn her head slightly to the side to make sure they weren’t about to tip something over, like the huge china vase in the corner or the antique end table which stood on thin nineteenth-century legs.

Claire was standing a few yards away from them, and they had no idea she was there. The music ended, and Ray went to change the record. He took a thick vintage disk from the stack
next to the stereo and said to Helen, “Wait till you hear this.” It was a tango.

“Ray,” she said, “come on. I can’t do that.”

But he would not listen to her. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her close up to his body. Soon she was dancing with him in perfect tango form. Her left cheek was flush against his right as they moved in Claire’s direction, still not seeing her. Helen had an odd expression on her face, as though she were clenching an imaginary rose between her teeth.

Claire felt embarrassed, watching them. It was a very private moment, and there she was, standing in the doorway. Suddenly she felt as if everything were way over her head, far beyond her reach. During Orientation Week at Swarthmore she had sat next to two physics enthusiasts at breakfast, and when the conversation grew technical and incomprehensible, Claire felt herself being swallowed up. There had been no place for her there, so she had picked up her tray and left the cafeteria without eating.

Watching Helen and Ray dancing, she wondered if it was time for her to leave them. It was not a feeling of insecurity; it was something else, which she could not fully understand. It was the kind of sadness that comes when you realize something has come to a quiet end, and are surprised that it has. She thought of all the corny movies she had seen and books she had read in which the husband walks out on the family—just packs up a few of his belongings, touches the foreheads of his wife and young children as they lie sleeping, and then walks out the front door and down the long dirt road. You cannot hold people together if they do not belong
together. It may work for a while, but then things begin to fall apart—there is silence and restlessness, and you know it is time for someone to leave.

Is death like that? she wondered. Do you get summoned—a light brush on your shoulder or a dimming of your vision, and do you calmly and sadly accept it? Does life leak from you gradually, so that you have time to watch it go?

She hadn’t been at the hospital the night Seth died. She had been at a movie by herself. Her father had given her some money and sent her off. “Take a break,” he said. “We’ll be with him.” And so she had gone to see a comedy, and sometime in the middle of it Seth had died. Her father wasn’t outside the theater to pick her up when the movie let out, as he was supposed to have been. She waited awhile, and all the cars left the parking lot. Then one of their neighbors pulled up to the curb. She saw him, and she suddenly knew. Her parents had sent him to pick her up; something had happened. “Claire,” said Mr. Getz, leaning across the seat and calling to her from the window. He did not say another word, and she opened the door and climbed in.

It saddened her that she hadn’t been there. Her parents told her it had been a quiet death; he had been sleeping, or had at least been in a sort of drug-sleep, and everything had finally given way. It was incomplete to her, though. There had to have been something more, some nuance her parents had missed. Maybe a shadow had passed over the room, or maybe there had been a breeze floating in through the window. She wished she had been there to see.

Now Claire stood and continued to look at Helen and Ray.
They had their arms draped around each other in a way that indicated that they had been dancing partners for years. There was an ease to the way they moved. When they saw Claire they smiled awkwardly. “Just getting some exercise,” Ray called out to her. His voice was lost under the strains of the tango.

Claire went into the kitchen and began to work in time to the music. She sponged down the copper tiles which lined the wall above the sink. She knew that she could work as much or as little as she wished; it did not matter to Ray and Helen. They scarcely seemed to notice how often she cleaned anymore. They still watched her, but it was in a way that was different than it had been in the beginning.

The other evening, just after Claire had climbed under the covers to go to sleep, she heard a faint tapping at her door. “Come in,” she called out in the darkness, and Ray and Helen entered the room.

“We wanted to see . . . if you needed an extra blanket or anything,” Ray said.

“No,” Claire answered. “I’m fine.”

They did not leave for a few seconds. They loomed over the bed like angels, like parents. She could not make out their features; they appeared in silhouette, back-lighted against the brightness from the hallway. Claire felt very small as she lay there.

“Good night, sweetie,” Helen said. This startled Claire, but before she could even take it in fully, the Aschers had slipped from the room.

She had come to them when they needed her. Her timing could not have been better. There was a certain point during
the course of extended grief when one had to have a change, something had to be filled in. She knew this from watching her own parents. It was roughly a year and a half after Seth died that her mother and father joined a local bridge club. The group met every Wednesday night at a different couple’s house. Claire remembered how her parents talked about nothing but bridge during the month they were in the club. Their conversation was fevered; they had worked themselves up to a state in which they believed they were being renewed. They felt that their lives were starting all over again, and the prospect was overwhelming.

“Well,” her father would say during dinner, squinting in concentration, “if declarer had tried to prevent a spade ruff, it wouldn’t have worked. He could return a trump, but it wouldn’t have done any good.”

“Why not?” her mother asked, scribbling furiously on the pad of paper next to her glass. “It looks to me as if it would be all right.”

“Look, we’ll go over it again.” And then they would talk about it for the rest of the meal while Claire sat in silence.

Then one night her father got into an argument with one of the other players, a man who lived three blocks away. The group was meeting at the Danzigers’ house that night, and from upstairs Claire could smell coffee brewing and hear her father say, “Diamonds! I
said
diamonds!”

She heard her mother murmur something to him, but it didn’t seem to help. In a minute her father’s voice was loud and strident, and the bridge game broke up soon after. Her mother came upstairs to fetch the coats, which had been
thrown onto the bed. She passed by Claire’s room with a pile of them slung over her arm and said, “Why aren’t you asleep?”

Claire could hear the sound of car engines being started. After the last couple drove away down the street, her parents began to have it out. Her mother lashed at her father, and he yelled back. Their voices volleyed back and forth. It seemed to be a prelude to something stronger—an exchange of slaps, maybe. Her father had hit her mother once. Claire remembered it very vividly. She and Seth were young—she even recalled that they were both wearing Dr. Dentons that night; they used to play ice skaters on the floor of the kitchen, gliding across the linoleum on their smooth plastic pajama-feet soles.

It had been a fight about money. Her father was accusing her mother of spending too much of it. Claire was not frightened—the subject was always raised on
I Love Lucy
. Lucy would spend more than they could afford, and Ricky would lower his head and flare his nostrils like a raging bull and say, “Looocy . . . ” Claire thought that this was just another facet of marriage. She thought all marriages were like this. It was only when she heard the slap that she was shaken. It was a clean sound, a punctuation. She and Seth looked at each other, afraid. There was a pause downstairs, an awful stillness, and then her mother said in a new, low voice, “Well, that’s just great. You should be really proud of yourself now.”

Things ended there. Her mother walked slowly upstairs, her palm pressed to the side of her face. She went silently past Claire and Seth. Downstairs her father went into the kitchen and got out a tray of ice cubes from the freezer. She could hear the dry cracking as he bent back the plastic spine. He carried
the ice upstairs to his wife. As he passed by Claire and Seth, he too was silent. There was no more noise that night.

After the bridge game, the argument was short and ended without resolution. There was no slapping this time, no throwing of objects. Claire imagined that her parents must have faced each other in the living room and suddenly thought,
My God, what are we doing?
There was such rage inside them—only when it surfaced could anyone know the extent of it. They were furious because they realized that trumps and dummies and contracts could not change anything, could not take away their sadness. Release did not come from diversion.

Did it come from replacement, though? That was what Claire was at the Aschers’ house. She was a substitute—if you squinted hard and did not listen too closely, she could almost pass for Lucy Ascher. She knew it. She sat huddled in the chair in the corner of the den. This was her morning break from cleaning the house—sitting in the easy chair where Lucy must have sat countless times. The sea played shadows on the wall that faced the windows. Claire sat underneath these shadows, letting them pour over her. Helen and Ray Ascher went out on a day trip that morning. “We’ll be back by three,” they said to her. “See you later.”

“See you,” she said, turning away.

The Aschers were springing slowly to life like those crumpled crepe-paper balls you drop into water and watch as they open into flowers. Paper flowers.

Claire was not sure she trusted this change in Helen and Ray, this new bloom. It was too quick, she thought. Helen and Ray had come together, had collided, it seemed, surprised at
finding themselves so close. She sensed that they had not really talked to each other in a long time. She wondered if they ever made love anymore.

As they left the house for their drive they laughed softly, sharing some private joke. What was funny, Claire wanted to know. She looked around her and she saw darkness, all the trappings of a dark world, another death landscape.

Before, she had felt sorry for the Aschers because of their grief. Now she felt sorry for them because of their twinges of hope. Claire knew it was wrong to deny anyone hope. Hope was everything. Hope pulled the most hopeless cases up and out of their deathbeds. That was what people had said about Seth. “Have hope, have faith.” This was uttered so often that it was like a litany, a jump-rope song. Claire could not go through that another time. It had taken too much out of her; it had sapped her completely. The antidote lay in becoming a part of what frightened you most, so that you would not be discernibly affected by it.

A few months after Seth’s death Claire had found herself walking in a seedy part of New York City. She had not been paying attention to where she was going. She had walked without stopping for an hour, and it was then that she realized she was no longer in a good part of the city. The block was empty except for a few men walking toward her from across the street. There was something strange about them; they were making weird noises and calling out things to her. Claire was frightened. The day was growing dark, and there was no one around she could call to for help. As the group approached her, she simply pretended to be one of them, twitching and muttering
and looking for trouble, and so they left her alone. She had never forgotten the lesson.

—

T
he Aschers were gone for most of the day. In the middle of the afternoon, when she had finished a load of laundry and was stretched out on the living-room rug, floating in and out of a light sleep, she heard footsteps coming up the front path and assumed the Aschers had returned. But there was a knocking on the glass instead of a key turning in the door. Claire sat up and shook herself awake. “Who is it?” she called, but there was no answer.

She had not been alone in the house for a significant length of time before. Helen usually went out of the house only when she had to. Today was the first time she had decided to go out for no real reason. Ray had been elated. At breakfast that morning he had asked her where she would like to go. “We could take the ferry to Shelter Island,” he said. “Or we could go to Montauk. Whatever you like.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “I just want to get out; that’s all I care about. It’ll feel good to be somewhere else.”

The only other place Helen had gone to recently was the supermarket. She did her grocery shopping on Tuesday afternoons, and she had asked Claire to accompany her the previous week. They did not say a word to each other during the drive to the store. Helen switched on the radio, and a concerto came in faintly. They both sat and listened to classical static. At the supermarket Helen seemed at ease. She wheeled her cart gently up and down the aisles, and she plucked things off the
shelves without thinking about it. Claire tagged along behind her like a child. Helen hadn’t really needed her there, Claire knew. Helen was lonely, and she wanted company. She wanted Claire’s company.

Claire had come to the Aschers’ house so that she could have the time and place to reflect on things. On the train out to Southampton the first day, she had let herself branch off into some crazy thoughts. She imagined Lucy’s dreams hanging in the air of the house like old laundry, waiting for someone to come along and dream them all over again. She imagined that she would be able to enter into Lucy’s thoughts, into the heart of her fears.