chapter thirteen

She could tell the thaw was somewhere in the distance. There were signs of it every year at this time. It was still cold but the water had somehow changed, smoothed itself out. “You know, I actually feel better,” Helen said to Ray. It was odd to speak it, to acknowledge it. She had long ago given up the possibility of real change, and when it did come, it took her by surprise.

“I’m glad,” he answered. “We should celebrate or something.”

They were picking their way along the beach among snail skeletons, pebbles and worn-down shells. The water looked lighter than it had.

She turned and saw that Claire had lagged way behind them. Claire had opened and shut several times during the week. It was as though she wasn’t sure how to act. She would relax for a moment, would comment on something, and then when Helen or Ray encouraged her to go on, she would catch herself and stop everything. It was as though she had to remind herself to keep a distance from them.

“Just leave her,” Ray said, guessing Helen’s thoughts.

“You can still read my mind,” she said. They smiled at each other, and he reached for her hand. They walked along like that for another ten minutes. Helen didn’t turn around, but even so, she could sense how listless Claire was. Every so often she could hear the plopping of small rocks that Claire was tossing into the water.

“Are you sure we should just leave her?” Helen asked. Ray nodded, and so they kept walking.

She was perplexed by Claire. Every day Claire stayed up in her bedroom—in Lucy’s old room—late into the morning. There wasn’t much work for her to do and Helen didn’t care, but it made her uneasy. When Claire finally wandered downstairs to rummage through the refrigerator for yogurt or juice, Helen was usually sitting out on the cold sun deck. She would hear Claire coming down the stairs and would turn to watch her through the glass as she moved around the kitchen.

What a force Claire was in her silence. And what a familiar feeling, to look at Ray over Claire’s head and shrug and have Ray shrug back. It sent something through Helen, the chill of déjà vu that can be instantly placed in time, in space. This was not one of those senses you have when you go somewhere new and think, I have been here before. I have stood on this hill, but I don’t know when.

The déjà vu that Helen felt was instantly resolved. It did not shock her. She recognized that when Claire came to the house that day, something about her made Helen move to open the door and invite her in. Certainly she did not let in everyone who showed up outside. There had been those two giggling women once who wanted to know if Helen would talk to them about what Lucy was like as a baby, and there had been the serious, tailored woman who asked if Helen and Ray would like to be the keynote speakers at an annual dinner meeting of the Long Island Association of Bereaved Parents.

She didn’t let any of these people in. She had been startled and shook her head at them and then backed up, softly closing the door. After she did this, her heart pounded. She felt an anxiety attack coming on each time and leaned against the shut door until she heard the sound of footsteps giving up and going away, retreating along the flagstone walk that Ray had laid when they first moved in.

With Claire, something had touched Helen—the need, probably, the plain show of desperation. Helen had spent so many years responding to these things in Lucy, grappling with them, not understanding them. It had almost become her role in life to do this, and she could not turn Claire away. Claire was a child, a young scared girl with an oversized suitcase. She was the baby in the basket left on the doorstep with a note tagged to one wrist: “Take care of her for us, please. We know you can do it better than anyone else.”

At the very least, it was ironic. Helen and Ray had certainly proved themselves to be incompetent as parents, although their friend Len Deering had assured Helen that it was not as simple as all that. “You can’t just say, ‘I have failed as a mother,’” he told her. “There are so many other factors involved. Lucy was a grown woman. It’s very hard, and you have a lot of exploring to do, but after a while you’re just going to have to let go.”

Letting go. It was such an easy phrase. It brought to mind a series of wonderful images: a dam bursting forth into a spill of clean, flowing water, a kite string being unraveled into the sky, or a couple arching their backs in the middle of making love, one of them looking up and calling out in rapture, “Now!”

It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days. In the supermarket one day the summer before, Helen had heard a woman saying to a friend as the two of them peered over the frozen-foods counter, “I’m taking a jazz dance class. It’s real therapy for me.”

What about the other side of letting go, the side that stuck closest to the words themselves? When you really let go, you were saying goodbye forever. No one ever wanted to talk about that aspect; it was universally considered too painful. It didn’t seem as if anyone came to terms with the real business of letting go. You just gradually loosened your grip, and after a while you simply forgot that you were holding on. That was what Helen had started to do with Lucy. Somehow, it had eventually happened. Helen had woken up and been too exhausted to think about her. She usually lost herself in such thoughts each morning.

She remembered as she lay in bed that Claire was fast asleep in Lucy’s old room. She wondered if she was warm enough. There were two blankets on the bed, but they were fairly thin. The night before, when the temperature suddenly dropped, Claire had assured her that she would be fine, but still Helen worried. Claire’s stance made it seem as though she were constantly trying to prove that she needed no protection, and it was this that drew Helen to her. Lucy had done the same thing, had tried so hard to appear deadpan, and Helen had wanted to rush to her, to change her, to hold her.

Having Claire in the house brought out these feelings all over again. It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open, empty space.

When Lucy was alive, she couldn’t be figured out, no matter how hard Helen or Ray tried. She was solidly there, but she was made up of all smooth edges. You couldn’t hold her. So instead, Helen and Ray had held each other. In the old days, they made love after coming back from the lab, both of them stinking of shared chemicals. Helen knew that having each other did not compensate for their emptiness with Lucy, but it helped.

When Lucy died, Helen and Ray did not continue to move closer together. There was a point in life when you had to remain separate, when you could not share anything more. Helen bought an electric blanket at Sears for them that first winter after the death, and it had two individual heat controls. Ray would turn his side way up to High, and Helen would keep hers on Low, so even their bodies were in different terrains, polar opposites.

Everything was unspoken. She thought of Lucy as a child, and she thought of her muteness that summer, such a long time ago. It had confounded Helen then and remained a mystery throughout the years. But now, with Claire in the house, she thought she finally understood what it was to be unable to speak but to want to desperately. That was how Claire was—always on the brink of saying something, then pulling back. Lucy had been the same, and Helen had done nothing about it. She had not yanked her depressive daughter by the collar and made her talk, made her unload all the secrets she had been storing up for a lifetime.

In the two years since Lucy’s death, Helen also had been unable to speak, unable to tell Ray how she felt. She had really not wanted to. What could he possibly have said? He would have nodded and stroked her shoulders and back with his huge, warm hands, and it would have actually felt good, and she would have hated herself for responding so dumbly to touch.

She heard Claire waking up. A couple of pronounced yawns, the rustle of covers, then the swing and thump of feet over the side of the bed. Helen felt the way she used to feel—she had an urge to get up and meet her daughter in the hallway, to watch the stagger of waking up, the sweetness of a child still drunk with sleep.

She made herself stay in bed. It would seem odd if she were to go out and stand in the hall, waiting. Claire would look at her with unblinking eyes, and Helen would be embarrassed. She stayed under the blanket with Ray asleep in his warm patch next to her. “Ray?” she said, touching one finger to his chest.

It was the way she had always wakened him, ever since the beginning of their marriage. After a while he would feel the extra bit of pressure there and wake up. It took him several seconds this time, then he reached out in his sleep to brush her finger away. She did not move her finger, and soon he reached for it again, and this time he held it for a moment, trying to figure it out. It reminded her of the parable of the three blind men and the elephant. Ray moved from her finger to her hand and then up to her arm. He opened his eyes, and he was holding her elbow in a formal way, as though he were escorting her to a ball.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning.”

He let go of her elbow and turned over onto his back. He stretched out his arms and legs—she could hear tiny bone explosions, as though he were cracking his knuckles. “Ray?” she said again.

“What?”

“I was wondering what you think of her.”

“Claire?” he said, yawning. “She’s all right.”

That was the end of it for the time being. They lay there together without moving. She could hear Claire walking around and doing morning things. There were the sounds of the window shade being whisked up, and a few seconds later, the shower being turned on.

It was ludicrous, all of it. Helen wanted very much to tell Claire what was happening, just how she was feeling with her in the house. She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, stepping into the flattened green slippers that waited there on the floor each morning.

“You’re going?” Ray asked, his hand on her spine.

“I’m restless,” she said. “I want to get up.” She turned to look at him. She was aware of the way her breasts swung around as she turned; she could feel the shifting of their weight. Her nightgown was almost diaphanous. It had not looked that way in the store. It just seemed light and easy to wash, so she bought it. For years clothes had been covering, nothing more.

Ray regarded her breasts through the material. This deeply embarrassed her, as though she and Ray were teenagers all over again, sitting half naked on a grassy rise and looking at each other but pretending to be looking out at the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which formed a loose star chain in the night.

She had to go to Claire.

She walked down the hallway, and the shower was still running. She sat down on the carpeted step and waited. Soon the water was shut off, and she could hear a few last drops spattering down.

There was a squeal of curtain rings being shoved along the rod as Claire stepped out. The door opened a few minutes later, and the bathroom was like a tropical rain forest, steaming and lush with exotic plant smells. Herbal Essence shampoo, probably. Claire stood in the doorway with a thick yellow towel wrapped around her middle. She looked as though she had just forged her way through the rain forest and made it safely out into the dry sun, the forest still wet and alive behind her.

Helen thought that Claire must have been mystically sent to them. She had had that feeling with Lucy, the same bewilderment. Perhaps it was a naïveté—Helen was reminded of all those cases of women in Appalachia who go to the doctor because their stomachs hurt and then find out that their stomachs hurt because they’re really six months pregnant.

Helen did not wonder at the act of birth itself—that had always seemed too grueling and stark to be anything other than earthly. Everything in the delivery room had been hospital-green, and in the background a nurse was endlessly telling her to bear down harder. There was a painless snip of her skin, a tearing that eased the way, and after all the open-mouthed panting, she felt the baby’s head crowning. Crowning—it was such a wonderfully apt word for a baby who was going to be at the center of everyone’s life for years, sitting calmly each day in its highchair throne.

Helen could not understand how babies turned into whom they did; she did not see where any of it came from. Throughout the years, Helen and Ray had looked at seashells and tried to interest Lucy in them. She had remained impassive. When they held out a conch to her and invited her to come look, she would barely glance at it before turning and trotting back to whatever she was doing—drawing concentric circles with her finger in the sand or sitting in the shade of the porch reading a book. That was why it was startling when Lucy grew up and wrote poetry, and her poems were filled with references to shells, to the ocean. Had she been studying them on the sly all those years? In her first collection, there was a whole cycle of poems devoted to sea anemones. Helen was surprised at the accurate, good detail in every line.

She telephoned Lucy after she read the manuscript and asked, “When did you learn all that?”

“When you weren’t looking,” Lucy answered stiffly.

It was the kind of response that you had to toy around with all day in order to understand. What did it really mean? Was Lucy implying that Helen hadn’t been a good mother, that she hadn’t been watching when she was supposed to? It upset Helen, but she did not broach the subject again. She did not want to disturb Lucy, not when her book was coming out. She seemed so shaky all the time, and Helen did not want to add to it. Lucy was living in New York, in a tiny, dim apartment in the West Village. Every time Helen and Ray came to visit they would bring with them a couple of potted plants. The apartment hardly got any light, and Lucy usually forgot to water the plants, so they soon died. She didn’t move the clay pots from their places on the sill, and crumbled brown leaves littered the floor underneath the window like spilled tobacco.

“Sweetie,” Helen said the first time she came to visit after Lucy moved in, “why don’t you fix the place up a little?”

“It’s the way I like it,” Lucy answered, leaning back against the cold silver radiator. She stayed like that for several minutes, with her bare feet crossed in front of her, her head tilted up. It was as though she were challenging them.

Ray touched Helen’s arm. “Don’t,” he said to her in a soft voice, meaning: Don’t anguish over this.

He had done that sort of thing right from the start, when things first began to go bad. The day Lucy stopped talking, Helen had called him up and had him come home in the middle of a class. He had said it to Helen as he stood next to her in Lucy’s bedroom. Lucy was crouched in a corner of the room, wedged between the bedstead and the wall. Helen stood there, stunned, shaking her head slowly back and forth.

“Don’t,” he said, his hand on her arm.

She had not known what to do when she found Lucy huddled there. She had started thinking about people going into shock, and how you weren’t supposed to move or even touch them. Maybe that was what had happened to Lucy: shock. You were supposed to call somebody—the doctor, an ambulance. But Helen had not wanted to do that; there was something, a kind of terrified look in Lucy’s eyes, that made Helen want to have Ray there with her. She had dialed the department. The secretary walked down the hall into Ray’s classroom and told him he was wanted at home. He had been about to administer a quiz on algae, and when he canceled it and packed up his briefcase hurriedly, all of his students had cheered.

Helen was always struck by the innocence of young girls. It really didn’t have much to do with experience, it was just a certain look that all of them had. When Helen went into the hospital one winter for a routine D&C, there had been a young girl in the next bed who was there for an abortion. When the nurses brought her back after it was over and made her sit up and get ready to leave, she had said in a tiny, sleepy voice, “Oh, couldn’t I stay in bed a little longer?” She was no older than fifteen, and Helen thought she sounded like a small child begging to sleep a few moments more before getting up for school. The girl’s parents stood slope-shouldered in their overcoats in the doorway, silently waiting to take her home. Helen had turned to face the wall so she would not have to watch anymore.

It didn’t mean much to be a parent. All of those books—advice from Dr. Spock and the rest of them—could take you only so far. They told you how to make the baby stand and take its first steps like a little sleepwalker, arms stretched out in front for leverage. They told you the right way to mix up the food, to mash together the greens and oranges and yellows into a muddy paste and spoon it in so it got swallowed. Here comes the train, choo-choo, speeding around the tracks, clickety-clack, and into Lucy’s mouth. Open the tunnel wide and let the train through. That’s a good girl. They told you a few basic tenets of child psychology. They told you what was the right allowance to give a child at each age; there was even a chart. They told you how to make your child feel independent. How to give your child responsibility. A pet, perhaps, a small one at first. Lucy had overdone it with nine hamsters. She had gotten them from her third-grade class at school. The mother hamster that lived in a cage by the window had given birth once again, and there were too many animals in the classroom. The metal exercise wheels squeaked all the time and distracted the children from their lessons, so the teacher asked if anybody would like to take a couple of the hamsters home as pets. Lucy had somehow ended up with nine. She brought them into the house in a shoe box, and a couple managed to nudge their way out and run all over the place. Helen had to chase them around the kitchen, dropping a colander to the linoleum as a net. One of the hamsters disappeared completely, and the whole family searched the house for an entire morning. Ray moved the sofa away from the wall and knelt with a flashlight in front of every open closet. Lucy searched the house with her parents, but she did it dispassionately, as though she were looking for something she did not want to find, like a poor report card that needed to be signed by a parent and brought back to school. The hunt ended when there were no obvious places left to look.

A few weeks later, when Helen was vacuuming in the living room, she found the lost hamster lodged in the bottom of the wall, where a small chunk of molding had come loose. It had crawled its way into the darkness and died in a nest of electrical wire. Helen took out the hard little body in some bunched-up newspaper and buried it in the sand. She never told Lucy about it, and Lucy never asked. She didn’t seem to care what had happened to it. As far as Lucy was concerned, the hamster had simply vanished. It might have sprouted little furry wings and flown away.

You couldn’t raise a child to love life. You just had to cross your fingers and hope that it would happen naturally. Life is good, you subtly had to drum into your child’s ears, bolstering the message by displays of love and affection. You had to hold your child, and you had to be unafraid of holding your spouse in front of your child. Helen and Ray were embracing once when Lucy came into the room. Ray started to break away, but Helen held him there for a few more seconds. She wanted Lucy to see the love that stirred between her parents, to see that it was a good thing. Lucy had barely been interested. She looked up at them with a slightly annoyed expression. “Are you going to fix my lunch or not?” she asked.

When Lucy was eighteen, she had her first love affair. It was with a Columbia student who was in her English class. She told her parents about it calmly when she came home for a weekend. “I’ve been sleeping with someone,” she said over dinner.

So perhaps something had gotten through to her. Perhaps she had seen that she could not be autonomous in life, that she needed other people. Helen hoped the relationship would last. She told Lucy that she could bring the boy home any time she wished. But things ended quickly, and Lucy said she had never really liked him, anyway. She retreated into herself even more and barely finished her first year at Barnard. A couple of weeks into the summer she slit her wrists.

Do you love death more than you love life? Helen had wanted to ask as she stood at the foot of Lucy’s hospital bed. It was an inconceivable thought, and she could not even start to concentrate on it.

Helen always felt an odd drive when she saw young girls on the street. She wanted to stop them, to grasp them by the arms and give them a few words of sound, lifelong advice. But the thing was, as soon as the girls drew near enough so that Helen could see their faces, she realized that they looked as if they were doing all right without any outside help. Young girls came in packs these days, wearing skimpy sequined T-shirts and wedge heels. They had one another, they had their friends, their boyfriends. They had their own parents to give them advice, so Helen passed by quickly, not saying a word.

Claire wasn’t like that at all. There was no giddiness to her, none of that typical adolescent spark. Helen sat and looked at Claire, who was fresh from the shower. She had wanted to say something but had forgotten what it was. Helen wondered what kind of childhood Claire had had before her brother had died and how old she had been when it happened.

Helen had known from the beginning why Claire had come to the house. Claire was not much different from the women who wrote letters, who telephoned, who sent over baskets of fruit and preserves and smoked cheeses. This was what it was like, being the parent of someone famous and young, someone who was a suicide. How good a poet had Lucy actually been? Helen had no way of knowing. Lucy had received a lot of attention because she was so young. Her work was included in several anthologies, one of them a collection of contemporary poems written by women, entitled I Hear My Sister Calling. She would have hated that title, Helen thought. Lucy had always hated anything that involved a group, anything that involved real sharing.

“Mom, I don’t feel a kinship with anyone,” Lucy said to her once. She said it with a certain degree of pride in her voice, and Helen had felt sad.

Lucy had been poet-in-residence at Columbia when she was twenty-two. The only people who still remembered that year keenly were the unhappy ones. They were the people who felt that Lucy was speaking exclusively for them, the malcontents of the world in their dark, narrow rooms. Lucy had fueled the dreams of adolescents and those who had never grown out of adolescence. The whole thing was messy, and Helen wished desperately that Len Deering was right, that there was a way of letting go. She was going to try to find one. You have to trick yourself, she thought, in order to make yourself believe it is possible.

She sat on the stairway and looked up at Claire. There was a good deal left unsaid and much meaning in that stern, hard face flushed from the steam of the shower. Yet this ungiving young woman, this stranger, actually made Helen feel better. She comforted her. Helen stood up and reached out her hand, touching Claire’s hair. Claire stared, then pulled away. Of course. What was it Helen had wanted to say? She remembered then, as she stood there. “Claire,” she said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Claire did her best to smile. She said something low, under her breath, that Helen could not hear. Then she turned and went into her room, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the hall carpet.

“You’ll start feeling better only when you’re ready to,” Len Deering had said, and now she thought that was probably valid. You could not begin to feel better unless you were prepared to take on the responsibilities that went along with becoming a social being. Helen and Ray would have to invite the Wassermans over to dinner one night. Somehow that didn’t seem like all that bad an idea. Jan Wasserman would lug along a huge kettle of fresh bouillabaisse, and it would be hot and good. They would sit around the Aschers’ dining-room table, eating and exclaiming over the food. They would put on some music and retreat to the living room and look out on the water, as though it were an entirely new landscape.

People always talked about the sea as unpredictable, always in flux. In graduate school one of Helen and Ray’s friends had said, “The reason I like studying the ocean is because it’s like doing something different every day.” The idea had thrilled Helen. She loved to think of things that way.

She had never been as quick to grasp scientific concepts as Ray. Certain things stayed with her, though. When she first began learning about the ocean, she had loved studying plate tectonics—continental drift. It was wonderful to think that huge land masses might be moving apart and shifting deep under the surface of the earth, even as she and Ray slept. Profound things happened when you weren’t looking, and there were times when you couldn’t look, when you had to close your eyes for a moment of private darkness.

When Lucy died, Helen could hardly force herself to go near the water. Lucy had jumped from a bridge, and a trawler had scraped along the bottom to drag her up. Her eyes were wide open, her eyelashes flecked with sand. The men covered her body with a bright orange emergency blanket.

Helen stayed in the bedroom with the shades pulled down so she could not see the water those first days when the death was new. She still heard it, though, and she put show music on the stereo to block out the sound of the waves.

But now she felt different—restless. She had needed solitude before, the comfort of a dark room and washcloths dipped in iced tea and placed over her eyes. Now Claire was here, and Helen wanted to talk to her, to do something for her. The other evening the three of them had played a long game of Scrabble. It had been Ray’s idea. He rummaged through the top of the hall closet and retrieved the shabby maroon box. “Want to play?” he asked. He had to urge Claire to leave her room and join them.

They sat in the kitchen and played until very late. Helen won, after using all her letters to make “CAVERNS” on a triple-word square, and Claire came in second. Ray had never been very good with words. He couldn’t form them quickly; even when he was talking, he had difficulty. He could not express himself well—he mumbled and usually gave up. Helen knew that she had not been as good a listener as she could have been. She sometimes drifted off when Ray was talking, as though his words were the lyrics to some gentle lullaby. She could not help herself.

In the middle of the game, when it was Ray’s turn and he had been taking a long time to arrange his tiles, Helen looked up and realized that there was an ease to the room, the kind that is usually generated only after people have been living together for years and years. Claire had been with them for just two weeks, and yet she sat in the kitchen, hunched over the board, with the look of someone who had grown up in the house.

Everything was subtle, and that was why it did not seem as though it had happened quickly. Claire was here with them, sitting in Lucy’s old chair, and oddly enough, none of it was surprising. Ray had said it best, the first night Claire was in the house. “She fits,” he said, and while Helen pretended not to react, to be thinking about something else, she had known that he was right.

She thought about people who had no children. She had known one such couple. When anyone questioned them on this subject, they would reply that they did not need a child, they had each other. Helen had been impressed by this sureness. How could you know that your marriage would not sour years later? How could you be positive that you would not need someone else in the house to keep you happy, someone small and warm to keep you sane?

It was Claire’s presence that made Helen feel rooted, grounded in her old life. After the Scrabble game ended that night, Claire went upstairs and Helen and Ray stayed in the kitchen for a while. Ray opened a bottle of sherry that had been standing untouched in the closet for months. He had come home with it one day, anticipating, Helen imagined, a time in the future when they would want to drink it. A time when they would lift their glasses by the stems and clink them gently together. Claire was humming upstairs, and Ray uncorked the dark bottle, and they drank.

“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.