Klara was real. She was prickly, desperate. Furious. Lost.
Clare, her namesake, lived ordinary days. A stack of novels wobbled on her nightstand. There were two bags of spinach in her refrigerator, a half-gallon of soy milk, and some questionable grapes. Seven boxes of cereal in the pantry, ice cream in the freezer. Her favorite blue glass bowl in the center of her little round kitchen table refracted the morning sunlight. She came home after work to the blinking light of her answering machine: “Sweetheart, it’s Mom. Just calling to say hi.”
Without telling her mother, who was too sad for it, Clare paid to have the letters translated. The translator mailed them back to her in a thick envelope. She sat on the lumpy green futon couch in her little apartment on a Sunday and read them, start to finish, 1938 to 1941.
The day passed, long light to purple dusk to dark. When she looked up, her coffee was cold, and she saw her own living room reflected in the window. She looked around and was surprised to be alone.
She loved living by herself, knowing that the way she left the apartment in the morning would be the same way she found it in the evening: her slippers in the hallway, robe hanging on the bathroom hook, small bag of licorice on the kitchen counter. She loved waking up on a weekend morning in her quiet bedroom, coming into her thoughts slowly, beholden to no one. There was a softness to her life. But there was also a quietly pulsing heartache, sad and mystifying, a constant companion.
Did the letters answer a looming question she didn’t know she had, or were they an excuse, psychic landfill?
They were scraps of someone she couldn’t have known, a woman who died twenty-eight years before Clare was born. But Klara was familiar, familial. Clare heard her voice in the clutch of her own childhood, the engulfing worry, the protective spells.
But maybe that was just life.
A siren screamed past her apartment building. A man on the street below yelled something, and a woman called back to him, a greeting or possibly an obscenity. A dog barked.
She was porous. Her skin was the thinnest scrim between her delicate, pulpy self and the world with its sharp teeth.
She got up and closed the curtains, then sat back down on the futon. The overhead light was on, although she didn’t remember flicking the switch. One of her neighbors was cooking a garlicky dinner. She remembered that she was almost out of shampoo.
She wasn’t sure what to do next. She looked around at all of her comforting objects and understood that they were not anchors.
The translated letters, a one-sided lament, lay in a neat pile next to her.
She gave the letters to her mother and then, for two weeks, Ruth didn’t mention them, not once. Finally, on the phone one night, Clare said, “Mom, aren’t you going to read them?”
“Well,” Ruth said, chewing, “I haven’t had time.”
“What are you eating?” It sounded like raw carrots. “Please stop chewing in my ear.” Clare took a bite of her own pretzel, but she chewed very softly. “And what do you mean, you haven’t had time?”
“Almonds. And I mean I haven’t had time.” She munched, irritatingly. “Your father needs new glasses.”
Clare closed her eyes.
“Aaaaand.” She drew out the word. “I’m considering redoing the living room. And of course I’m always behind on my magazine subscriptions.”
Clare snorted.
“I don’t see why that’s funny,” Ruth said.
Two more weeks passed. She wasn’t sure why she cared so much.
“I read a couple of them,” Ruth said, on the phone again. “But you know, sweetheart, I don’t think I need to keep reading. I already know what happened.”