The ghost of Lucy Ascher would not go away. Claire did not want it to, but that was hardly the point. As the days passed she realized that Lucy, in her subtle way, managed to be everywhere. The house reeked of her presence. Since no one mentioned it, Claire wondered if perhaps she was the only one who was aware of this phenomenon, the only one who felt that Lucy was still very much a part of the household.
Ray and Helen barely spoke about their daughter, and when they did, it was in a quiet, off-hand manner. One night at dinner Helen murmured something about wanting to get rid of some boxes of old clothes that were taking up space in the garage.
“They were our daughter’s,” Ray said quietly to Claire.
“Oh,” she responded, looking down into her bowl of soup. “I see.”
After a few moments of the silence that accompanied most meals at the Aschers’, Claire offered in as casual a voice as she could muster to take care of the clothing. Helen Ascher waved her hand in careless agreement. Ray told her he thought it was a fine idea.
The next morning, her eighth day with the Aschers, she put on her coat and went out to the garage, which was separate from the house. The place smelled good; Claire had always loved the mingled odors of exhaust and gasoline. Whenever her parents drove to a gas station, Claire would roll down her window all the way and inhale the fumes. “Sicko,” her mother would call her whenever she did this.
The garage was truly a mess, unlike the house, which had a kind of shabby order to it. There were beach chairs with split canvas seats scattered around. In a corner was a coffee table whose surface someone had begun to finish and then had obviously abandoned. The partially shellacked table was surrounded by newspaper and hardened brushes crusted with lacquer. On the walls were garden tools hanging on hooks: a spade, a trowel, a rake with a cracked handle. Claire wondered why they were there, since there was obviously no garden to tend. Nothing grew in a bed of sand, or if it did, it would certainly have to choke its own way up into open sunlight without the aid of water.
There were old, bad oil paintings propped against the wall. There was an antique globe resting on its axis. Claire picked it up and spun it slowly. She saw that all of the countries and oceans and islands were written in German. Frankreich, she read. Atlantischer Ozean. There was a Miss Clairol electric hair curler set piled on top of a precarious stack of matching books. Claire moved the curlers and picked up the first book. Oceanography Abstracts it read on the spine, Vol. XII, 1962. The book felt damp and furred, as though a strain of bread mold had grown on its cover. She dropped it back onto the pile, and a small cloud of dust billowed up.
The entire garage was like this, a roomful of useless, senseless things just waiting to disintegrate over the course of time. She was freezing, and she was about to turn and leave when she remembered what she had gone there for in the first place. The boxes of clothing.
She found them easily enough; they were behind a folded card table, three cartons, all of them labeled “Lucy.” She dragged them out to the center of the floor, where there was a little square of cleared space. She opened the first box with trembling, cold hands. Inside was darkness, but the box was not empty. It was stuffed to the top with Lucy’s black and gray and navy-blue sweaters and dresses and shirts. Claire felt a sudden kinship, greater than she had ever felt before. She pulled out a turtleneck, ribbed and black, and held it up against her own chest and arms. The ghost of Lucy Ascher hovered overhead, smiling.
—
It was Ray who went to look for her, hours later. He came into the garage to see how she was making out, and he stopped in the doorway. She was modeling a dress, Lucy’s dress, before an imaginary mirror, holding it out in a fan shape at the sides. When she saw him she dropped her hands, embarrassed.
The dress was not a perfect fit—Lucy had been somewhat smaller than Claire—but it hung fairly well nonetheless. It was made of black crepe, and the material was creased into long, soft folds. Claire smoothed it down against her and looked up at Ray.
“You know about Lucy,” he said.
“Yes.” She could not have said anything else and gotten away with it. Naomi had been right, her face betrayed her. It wasn’t her mouth, it was her eyes. They widened, darkened. She had been wearing the clothes of Lucy Ascher, after all. She had trembled almost violently as she drew the dress over her head. She had taken off her own clothes, her jeans and turtleneck, in the freezing garage. Her skin had risen into gooseflesh from the excitement and from the cold. Her nipples stood out in hard, tight points. She could smell the scent of Lucy on the dress—something pungent and sad and wise. She wondered if later, when she took the dress off and put her own clothes back on, that smell would remain on her skin. She hoped it would.
Ray stood watching her from the doorway. He was wearing a cap with earflaps on it. She looked at him and she did not know what to say. He didn’t move, he just kept watching. “Are you angry?” she asked finally, for she could not tell what he was thinking.
“No,” he said. “Why should I be angry?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “I thought you’d think it was disrespectful of me.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t think that. I was surprised, that’s all. It really didn’t have too much to do with you.”
“What did it have to do with?” she asked, curious.
Ray sat down on the step that led into the garage. He crossed his arms over his chest and thought about it. “You looked like her,” he said softly. “Like Lucy, when she used to wear that dress. It startled me, that’s all.”
There were long pauses between each of their sentences. The conversation seemed suspended in the cold air. When either of them spoke, vapor came out first. It was a very uncomfortable talk. Claire tried to make herself appear relaxed. She leaned against the wall, her hand draped over a bicycle tire that hung there. She knew how stilted and oddly formal she must look. God, she was wearing a party dress, a dress that had been worn to receptions, to poetry readings, a dress that had absorbed the benign sweat of Lucy Ascher as she cleared her throat into a microphone behind some podium.
If there was ever a time to make a confession, this was it. “Listen,” Claire said at last. “I have something to tell you. I didn’t come here randomly. I knew what I was doing.”
She sought for more words, but he interrupted her. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter why you’re here, does it? Helen said it didn’t.”
It was the most awkward conversation Claire had ever had. She was choosing her words very carefully. “Helen knows?” she asked. “Knows that I know?”
“We’ve talked about you,” he admitted. “But we’ve never really said much. We’ve just mentioned you. I’ve wanted to say more to Helen, but . . . things are hard for her.”
Ray was looking at Claire more intently now, and it unnerved her. “Maybe I should leave,” she said. “I don’t know how good an idea this is.”
“No,” he said. “Why should you? Things will be okay here.” Then, as if on impulse, he said, “Tell me about yourself.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Claire answered quickly. “I just wanted to come here. I thought it would be a good experience.” She hated herself at once for minimizing her love for Lucy, but there was nothing else she could do. Her heart was beating rapidly, and she played her feelings down. “That’s about all,” she said, then she shrugged and tried to smile.
They left it at that. She could not say anything more, and soon he stood up and walked back to the house. “You should come inside too,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s a lot warmer.”
And so they had an unspoken relationship from then on. Ray still shuffled into the kitchen each morning for breakfast while she stood unloading the dishwasher. They exchanged the required hellos and nothing more. Everything that mattered was left unsaid. Claire didn’t think of this silence as mutual indifference; she thought of it as a kind of tacit communication. She was aware that Ray regarded her with interest now. One Sunday she was cooking breakfast for them, and when she handed him his plate of eggs, sunny side up and crisp around the edges, he looked up at her, eyes full of feeling, and said, “These are just perfect, Claire.”
Still the ghost was everywhere, its presence amplified by the fact that nobody ever mentioned it. How did that perfume commercial go—something like “If you want to catch someone’s attention, whisper.” Claire thought that this might well be true. She had just begun to realize that subtleties were everything. In bed at night at the Aschers’, she would feel the soft whoosh of fingers down her back, the slightest hint of breath, and it would be more than enough to carry her through the night. Claire certainly had not lived her life by this doctrine. She knew that everything she did was overboard—the way she dressed, or wore perfume, or carried an obsession to the hilt. She had never thought of subtlety as being effective. She needed immediate response, immediate gratification. People turned their heads and watched when she came into a classroom. Claire needed that rush of recognition; it let her know that she was still alive, still breathing. Without it, she feared she might fade into anonymity, into a walking death.
What was it, then, that made her a death girl? She certainly didn’t embrace death. In fact, she was very much frightened by it. Maybe it was this fear that had stunned her into a kind of obsessiveness. If you put yourself in a perpetual state of mourning, then nothing could come up from behind and surprise you. You were prepared for everything—telegrams, landslides, avalanches, apocalypse. When Seth died Claire had thought, I can’t go through this again. She knew she would have to, though. She knew that it was usual for children eventually to bury their parents. Chances were that she would not have to think about this for a couple of decades, and when she did she would not be alone; she would be flanked by other people—a husband and children. The way society worked, you replaced your family with a new one—a young, rock-strong husband and a newborn infant—so that when your first family gave way, there would be a buffer to the blow. You would hardly feel it; you would only sense something inside, a slight vibration of change, like a tuning fork being struck against a table edge. There would be new people standing on either side of you in the cemetery, holding an umbrella over your head, steadying you with their arms.
Some people were unlucky; they lived to see everything. When all of the relatives came back to the Danzigers’ house after Seth’s funeral, Claire made herself useful, carrying plates of food back and forth. On a trip into the kitchen she found her grandmother sitting at the table in one of the swivel chairs, moving it slowly from side to side. “Claire,” the woman said, “no grandmother should ever have to see this.”
What kind of sense could you make of death when you grew old? What could you make of the ritual of mourning? The mirrors in the house had all been draped with sheets. They looked like flattened ghosts or paintings about to be unveiled at an exhibition. Claire had asked Rabbi Krinsky what the significance of covering the mirrors was. He told her that she had asked a very important question and explained to her that the mirrors were covered so that there should be no vanity. Claire had nodded, moving away from him. The custom made perfect sense to her, and probably even more to her grandmother. There had to be something to keep you forging ahead in times of grief—some feeling of self. Of course the mirrors were covered. It might be tempting, she thought, to glance up in the mirror if it was left bare and catch a piece of your reflection for one brief moment, feeling a sudden rush of guilty pride, the vanity of just being alive.
To be a bereaved grandmother was terrible, a freak of nature, but to be a bereaved parent was even worse. Claire realized, with a little surprise, that her parents and the Aschers actually had something in common. It had never occurred to her before. The resemblance was confined to the fact that each couple had lost a child; it went no further than that. Grief had made her parents hard, and it had softened the Aschers.
What bewilderment the Aschers must be feeling in the middle of all that grief. After all, Lucy’s death was a kind of unsolved mystery. Her whole essence was a mystery, the eighth wonder of the world. Claire no longer knew how people’s personalities are shaped. Genetics could not begin to explain it; the twisted double helix of DNA didn’t have enough room to hold codes for despair or anger or alienation. Those traits were learned, and Lucy didn’t seem to have learned them from her parents. Helen and Ray had been happy once and hopeful about their world.
Maybe you have to give children more credit than that, Claire thought. Maybe they absorbed larger things, were sensitive to a woman crying in the street, an argument on television, the way light slants in through a window at a certain time of day.
Perhaps the Aschers just weren’t the right parents for Lucy. They were good people; they just weren’t right for their daughter. Lucy needed something else, but what? Claire didn’t know, and she never would. She realized then that she wouldn’t be able to find out too much about Lucy by living in the Aschers’ house. If someone moved into the Danzigers’ house now in the hope of learning about Claire, what would she find? Clues, but some of them would be red herrings. There was an Anne Sexton line that Laura often repeated—something about how every woman is her mother. Claire didn’t think she believed that; it was too easy, too pat. You have to take what you are given and then use it to move forward. You can’t remain static all your life.
There had been the slightest change in Helen lately, Claire noticed. She wondered if Ray had said anything to his wife after the conversation in the garage. Helen still had the same glazed expression on her face, and her eyes still moved as though she were watching a “follow the bouncing ball” cartoon, but every once in a while Claire could see a hint of recognition coming through. The first time she noticed it was one evening when she came downstairs to have dinner. Helen and Ray were already seated at the table, and as Claire came into the kitchen, Helen looked up at her and held her gaze. It startled Claire, but she tried not to show it. She sat in her chair as though she had not seen the change.
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.
—
She 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?”
“In this room.”
“Yes,” Claire said, guarded.
“I thought you might want to move in here. It’s bigger. You’d be more comfortable, I think.” Helen’s voice was subdued, and she was looking directly at Claire. She made her feel very tense.
A pulse jumped in Claire’s neck. She paused, then said, “Okay. I’ll get my stuff.”
Helen smiled. “Good,” she said, and she slipped out the door.
She was an odd woman, Claire thought. At first she had seemed aimless, but in the past two days she had been saying and doing things as though she had a purpose. Claire went down the hall to the guest room and got her things together. She didn’t have much with her. She carried her clothes into Lucy’s room and stood with them piled in her arms, not sure of where she should put them. She slid open the top dresser drawer and placed some of her shirts next to Lucy’s shirts. Side by side, the dark among the dark. She put everything away, and her own clothes took up exactly half of the dresser. She had some trouble closing the last drawer; it stuck on its runners for a second. She jammed it shut with the flat of her hand, and the whole room seemed to shudder at the vibration. The trinkets on the dresser top trembled.
“Lucy?” she said.
There was no answer. She was alone in the room; there was no other presence in there with her. The ghost seemed to have lifted from the house. She had felt it happening over the past few days, had felt it fading. She envisioned a showdown at dawn.
But that wouldn’t happen. Claire had replaced the ghost of Lucy Ascher, and there was no real reason for it to hover overhead any longer. She hadn’t even been aware of a competition until that moment. Now, alone in Lucy’s room, she felt that she could stay there for a long time. She felt superior. She was living, she breathed more than cold, underground death air. The pulse in her neck jumped once again. She placed her fingers over it lightly, as though it were a cricket she was cupping in the grass.