chapter ten

Claire was polishing the silverware. She was sitting alone at the kitchen table, rubbing each piece with silver paste and a soft felt cloth. Her hands were dark with tarnish. She seemed occupied, really occupied, as if she were doing something of an intellectual nature. She squinted to clean out the tiny rosette grooves that were notched into each handle. A wedding gift long ago, from Ray’s parents. The Aschers used it as both their everyday and their special-occasion silver. And now Claire was polishing it carefully, as though it would really matter—as though, when Helen held up a teaspoon now, her inverted reflection, clear as day for the first time in years, would change anything.

Helen went upstairs to the bedroom and sprawled out on the unmade bed. Lying there, the shades still pulled all the way down, she was reminded of the early days after the death, when she never knew what time it was, because the room stayed dark. Once Harriet Crane, wife of a dean, marched in and snapped open the window shade. The shade flew up on its roller, the light flooded in. “Come on, Helen,” Harriet said in a brisk voice, but then she faltered as she got a good look at Helen lying there in the stale room. “I’m sorry,” Harriet said, quickly pulling the shade back down and hurrying out.

Now Helen went and opened the shades herself. It was a mild morning, and cloudless. She began to make the bed; she didn’t want to wait until Claire got around to doing it. The sight of an unmade bed always gave her a sick feeling. She bent over and smoothed down the floral sheets, and that was when the telephone rang. It was a jarring sound to her because it was so infrequent. She reached across the bed and answered it. “Hello,” she said.

It was a woman, and her voice came on quickly. “Mrs. Ascher,” she said. “I want to speak to Mrs. Ascher.”

“Speaking,” said Helen.

There was a wait. “Look,” said the woman, “I’ll get right to the point. It’s about my daughter.”

There had been a few calls like this before—parents saying that their daughters were depressed, were spending too much time alone in their rooms, were acting strange, were maybe suicidal. What should they do about it?

“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I really can’t help you.”

“Please,” the woman said. “Just listen to me. I know my daughter is there. She told me herself. Please don’t pretend.”

Claire’s mother. The realization occurred to Helen all at once. “Mrs. Danziger,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what kind of a person you are,” said Claire’s mother, “but this whole thing is very troubling to my husband and me. Claire was a Dean’s List student every semester, you know. I told her we wouldn’t interfere, but I’m finding it very hard to just sit back and let this continue.”

Downstairs Claire was working, her shoes kicked off, at ease in this new house. What was her family life like? The voice of her mother was tight and strained. Am I a child stealer, Helen wondered—one of those pathetic women who pluck toddlers from their strollers? It had never occurred to her that Claire might really belong somewhere else and actually be missed. At once she saw that this had been a stupid oversight on her part.

“Mrs. Danziger,” she said, “I never imagined that this would cause any difficulties. I’d assumed Claire was, well, on her own, making decisions for herself. She never gave us a clue . . . If I had known this would have caused so many problems, I certainly wouldn’t have hired her. I hope you understand.”

The woman’s voice relaxed a little. “I was just worried,” she said, “when Claire told us she was doing this. It sounded so irrational, but she’s always been headstrong. What could I do?”

“Kids are that way,” Helen found herself saying, feeling as though this were slowly leading into a neighborly conversation—two women chatting over the backyard fence, laundry flapping in the afternoon breeze. Had she ever had a conversation like that before? She vaguely remembered a chat with another woman about how hard it was to be a parent in this day and age.

Helen had attended a PTA meeting once. Newsletters and invitations kept arriving in the mail, and she finally went, purely out of guilt. She sat in the back row of the dark auditorium while a panel on stage discussed drug abuse in the community.

“So remember,” the moderator said. “If you child starts staying out late, or asking for his allowance early, or spending time with children who are not familiar to you, be alert. And also watch out for the sweet, ropy odor of marijuana . . . ”

Helen drifted off. What was a ropy odor? Did rope really have a smell of its own? She became light-headed sitting there, stuffed into a wool dress she had bought years earlier for a nephew’s graduation from Cornell. There was nothing of relevance being said at the meeting. Lucy never went out in the evenings and never asked for money. On Fridays after school Ray gave her her allowance and she took it from him silently, usually spending it on used books of poetry—Roethke, Stevens, Lowell.

“You know, I took a poetry class when I was at Hunter,” Helen had said to Lucy once. Lucy waited for her to go on, to elaborate, but Helen could not think of anything else to say. She couldn’t even think of the names of any of the poems she had read. Abbey, Lines Written over something Abbey. A half-title rose and fell in her mind. She was sorry she had brought up the subject; she hadn’t liked the class and had not been a very good student. The professor was a snide man who used his students’ names like weapons. “Well, Miss Hertz,” he would say when asking a question, leaning over and closing in for the kill. He did not like women, Helen had heard; maybe he just did not like people in general. She had been relieved to retreat to the safety of the Chemistry lab when English ended each morning.

Kids are that way, Helen said to Claire’s mother, as though she had been saying it for years, commiserating with other mothers, sniffing gleefully around the house for that elusive ropy odor.

“Do you want to speak to Claire?” Helen asked. “She’s just downstairs.”

The woman hesitated. “No,” she said. “Not yet, not today. She would just resent me more. Please don’t tell her that I called. She wants a first taste of independence, she can have it. I guess that means cutting the apron strings, as they say.”

“Yes,” said Helen. “I guess it does. I’ve been through that.”

There was a pause. “Your daughter—your Lucy,” said Mrs. Danziger. “I think Claire could practically teach a course on her poetry, she knows it so well.”

Helen did not say anything. She felt blood rush to her head. She was always thrown off balance when she heard anyone else mention Lucy. Even the name was tragic—the two simple syllables, the name you would give to a pretty little baby.

“I’m sorry,” said Claire’s mother. “I should have been quiet. I mean, I don’t even know if this is something you talk about with other people. I know how it is.”

“You know how it is?” Helen asked. She didn’t mean it nastily; she was just curious.

“Yes,” the woman said in a new, soft voice. “We lost our child too.”

There was something moving over the line then; both women let out a small sound of relief. All the lost children, Helen thought, and her head filled with images. She thought of that passage in Lucy’s journal in which she wrote about being lost in a department store. Helen took this further; she imagined the whole world as a gigantic department store, and you could claim your lost child at the information desk. She would run through the crowd of shoppers, knocking over mannequins as she ran, and scoop up lost Lucy in her arms.

“I didn’t know that,” Helen said, awkward. “Claire never told us.”

“She doesn’t talk about it much,” said Mrs. Danziger. “She’s been very quiet about it. They were very close. They had a lot of private jokes. You wouldn’t think it, but Claire used to laugh at things with Seth. They used to tell knock-knock jokes over dinner . . . ” Her voice trailed off in the middle of the sentence, and she said, “I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I called up to insist that Claire come home, that I’d had enough of her games, but now I guess I’m just running off at the mouth.”

“It’s all right,” said Helen. “Please. You just get wrapped up in a thought and start talking. Everybody does that sometimes.”

“True,” said Mrs. Danziger.

“It’s like therapy—they say it’s good to talk,” Helen said. “Most of the time it’s hard for me.”

“My husband and I, we’ve tried to focus on other things,” said Claire’s mother. “He’s joined a gym now. Twice a week he goes with other men from work. It’s co-ed, ‘unisex,’ they call it, but I’d be embarrassed to go and have to show everybody how out of shape I am. I’ll find something else to do. You have to keep busy; that’s all there is.”

Keep busy. People had said this to Helen before. She imagined herself running around, trying to find new hobbies—learning to knit, perhaps, and knitting so rapidly that the needles clicked like a field of crickets. Or she could take up Evelyn Wood, the pages of all the classics flipping by in a great fan. But what was the rush, anyway? We are here for quite a while, she thought. If she and Ray sped through everything, they would eventually have nothing left. They would have to turn to each other then, and they would probably be like two aging virgins, two people alone and hesitant in a room, mouths waiting to press, buttons waiting to be sprung.

Helen had gone to the Brooklyn Public Library at eighteen and read everything she could find on sex. Libido. Multiple Orgasms. It was comforting to apply clinical terms to those feelings, to the way everything inside seemed to rise to the surface when Ray touched her—the flush of blood to her face, the little pebbles that rose to her nipples. All that was gone now.

The only thing that parents of lost children could do was turn to one another, as if in a huge square dance when you look your partner, a stranger, dead in the eye and cross your arms for a do-si-do, barely touching as you move to the music.

“Mrs. Danziger,” said Helen, “Claire will be all right. I’ll make sure of it; I promise you.”

“I just hope she can straighten herself out,” said Mrs. Danziger. “She hangs around with such odd girls at college, and she has some boyfriend who we’ve never met, but I’m sure he’s no better. I’ve been worrying about her for ages, and now all this.”

“Things need time,” Helen said.

“Time,” Claire’s mother echoed. “I know.”

The conversation did not really end; it just dissolved in the air. Each woman was moving further into herself, into her old grief. After Helen hung up the telephone she sat for a while longer on the bed. There had been something between the two of them. Downstairs was a child who did not belong to Helen and Ray, someone they were merely borrowing for a short time.

She told Ray late that night when they were undressing for bed. He slipped out of his boxer shorts and into a pair of creased cotton pajama bottoms. He sat up and breathed in his stomach, something she had noticed him doing a lot lately. She did not mention it. “I got an interesting phone call today,” she said.

“A weird one, you mean?”

“Not exactly. Claire’s mother.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What did she want?” he asked.

“I’m not altogether sure,” said Helen. “At first she was practically accusing us of kidnapping Claire, but then I think she realized that wasn’t what was going on. She talked to me about things. They had a child who died, you know.”

“So there’s more to Claire,” Ray said, bringing his feet up onto the bed and reaching to shut off the light.

Helen was feeling very talkative that night. She placed her hand gently over his, so he wouldn’t switch off the lamp. “Keep it on,” she said. “I don’t think I could sleep just yet. I feel all wired up.”

“About Claire?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve kind of latched on to this fact, about her parents having had another child, and Claire being the survivor and all that.”

“She doesn’t look too much like a survivor,” Ray said.

Helen had to agree that that was true. “Most of us don’t,” she added.

“Well, most of us have good reasons,” said Ray.

This was their old banter now. It was odd how easily they could drop back into it. People living together developed patterns that held forever, it seemed.

Claire was asleep already. Ray said her light had been off when he passed her room. She had worked steadily all day, then gone upstairs to bed. At dinner she had eaten very little—a plate of soup, some broccoli, a glass of milk. “Some chicken?” Helen had asked, the platter poised in the air.

“No thank you,” Claire said. “I’ve decided not to eat meat for a few days.”

Lucy had had vegetarian leanings, too. Every few months, though, she would claim to need a steak, and so Helen and Ray would gladly take her out to a noisy, dark steakhouse. She ate her meat rare, digging into a thick London broil expertly. When she was done she would pat her mouth lightly with a napkin, and they would leave the restaurant. It was as though she had to be refueled every so often and would run for months at a time powered by the protein of one steak dinner.

Claire ate like a bird. Helen wondered if she, too, had sudden cravings for red meat. Helen liked the delicate way Claire spooned up soup. Everything about her manner was careful, guarded. She sat straight in her chair, eating small mouthfuls, and swallowing milk silently. She was well-contained, this child.

When dinner ended, Claire stood and began to clear the table. Ray went into the den to grade papers, and Helen stayed in her chair. As Claire worked, there was the sound of silver being piled—a shuffle of metal. The knives and forks glinted with a new light that evening; Claire had polished them well. Now she ran warm water over each piece and placed it in the dishwasher rack. Helen wasn’t needed in the kitchen, but she stayed anyway. She liked watching and listening; it lulled her. Claire handled things gently. Underneath all that hardness she was someone’s sister, lover, daughter.