The first thing I know, when I see her, is that this is not a piece of advice I will ever pass on.
Except for her violet lips, Clem looks as if she has just come in from the cold, from skiing or skating, frost on her lashes. Unadorned, uncamouflaged, she is covered to the neck with a sheet—or, I suppose, the sheet has been folded back from over her face. There is a blackish clot beneath her left nostril. On top of her head, inconspicuous because of her dark hair, there appears to be more of the same dull black substance. Blood, of course, though it looks more like tar. (The way she killed herself was bloodless, but there has been, by law, an autopsy.) What’s wrong here, what shocks and dismays me, is that in fact she still looks so much like the self I knew. Her lips may be unnaturally dark, but they are Clem’s lips all right. Still an old familiar self, like the one I searched for while trying on wigs. Well, here you are! I exclaim silently when I look down at my sister. And to think I was so worried!
I look hard, I can’t say for what, but there’s something I’ve clearly missed. It’s as if, against all common sense, I need to memorize this image of Clem. As if this Clem is essential to the Clem who will inhabit only memories now. I begin to speak—babble, really (though quietly, conscious of the boy who waits in the driveway). I am beseeching, cursing, adoring, my vacillating passions more suited to a lover than a sister. I know that as soon as I stop looking at her, I’ll be looking at a void, not the transient void of the woman who captivated, who magnetized, the men—that void will be filled because, as Clem would say, indifferent nature gets her way—but the void left by the departure of my genetic alter ego. It’s like someone’s gone and severed my shadow.
I notice two things I never noticed before: as ever unlike me (even now, with my follicles corkscrewed by intravenous toxins), she has gray hairs. And under an eyebrow, there’s a tiny mole I don’t recall. I always wanted her beautiful eyebrows—her most elegant tease.
My parents look wan and spent, specters of exhaustion. I make the mistake of telling them I’ve been to see Clem; do they want to see her, too? I make this offer timidly. I say I’ll drive them.
The look my mother gives me is one I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. “Honey, I saw that girl in. She can bloody well see herself out.” Mom begins to walk through the terminal like a general toward war.
She’s always conflated grief with rage. “First you. You. Your damn disease. And now this. Now this. This! The whole way out here, your father said not a God damn word. What could he say? That he spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to educate this daughter, to turn her into the next Jane Goodall or whatever, that we gave her everything she could want, that … Well, until you have children you can’t imagine.” In other words, I will never imagine.
We arrive at the carousel as luggage begins to plummet down the chute.
My father, whom I can hardly bear to look at, says, “My daughter was Halley’s Comet.”
“That’s what you have to say? What kind of baloney is that?” snaps Mom.
He shakes his head swiftly, dismayed that Mom doesn’t get it. Clem’s life, he means, was a brief, beautiful arc. A rare drama, compressed in time. I see in an instant that he will romanticize her life. It will have been complete, a predetermined path. “Please show some respect,” he says to Mom.
“Well, did she?” Mom answers. “Did she?” To her, Clem’s life was far from complete, was made a travesty. My parents are not religious, and suddenly I see a different kind of destruction looming. I have that sick feeling you get when you switch on the news and can tell right away, before you hear so much as a phrase, that something just awful has happened in the world, is happening still.
“Will you excuse me a minute?” I say. “Wait right here. Please.”
At the pay phone, I say to Ray’s hotel voicemail, “I changed my mind. If you could still come, you’d save all our lives.” Except for Clem’s. I make myself dwell on the notion that letting him do this favor is somehow merciful. I see my mother from afar, pacing the circuit of the carousel, keeping her distance from Dad. I see my father, superfluous raincoat over one arm, an agony of stillness. My ex-husband, so well mannered, would have known what to say. But Ray—Ray will know what to do.
There is a brief, strained remembrance in the field outside Clem’s trailer. About two dozen people show up (the sled dogs go nuts as car after car bumps past the kennel). Sheldon and Clem’s fellow biologists come. I recognize several faces from the softball game, including the dung beetle from Cheyenne, my sister’s boss. Before anything begins, he gets a verbal pistol-whipping from Mom. How in God’s name could the man have an employee in such a state of mind and be utterly oblivious? What was going on at the office, for Pete’s sake, that Clem would feel so much despair? She has a mind to write his superiors in the government! He bows his head and nods. He keeps on mumbling how sorry he is, what a loss it is to everyone there. As my mother scolds him, my sister’s colleagues watch. Their passive approval is so pungent, you could distill a perfume.
But R.B. isn’t here. I ask Buzz if he’s coming. “Oh,” Buzz says, looking embarrassed, “he doesn’t work so closely with us. He shows up when we need him, but he’s not really a part of the team. I’m sure he liked Clem, yeah, I know he did, and it’s nothing personal he’s not here.”
That’s when I’m certain he was the scandalous affair. In my pocket, I have the copper bracelet; I was going to hand it to him, without comment, to see if it would make him tell me things he wouldn’t tell me yesterday. I keep looking toward the turnoff from the road. I can’t believe he won’t show up. But he doesn’t. While Buzz tells everyone how smart and funny Clem was, how she made them laugh, how much they’ll miss her, and while Vern reads from Edward Abbey, and while Dave tells everyone what a great dancer she was and how he’ll really miss her awesome margaritas (a soliloquy he would squelch if he could see my mother’s face), I squeeze the bracelet hard, until the soft metal begins to yield.
Ray is beside me: not touching me, but he’s here. He arrived late this morning, and already he’s gone through Clem’s belongings at the wildlife station. Other than a couple of snapshots, a folder of letters from old colleagues, all business, there’s nothing personal. Buzz went through the files related to the bears.
Clem’s boss, who’s clearly aimed at getting the last word, says, “She sure was smart, as everyone here’s been saying. And one thing she knew, maybe better than most of us, was the meaning of work. In the old-fashioned sense of the word.” He talks about her long hours and her dedication and her passion for wildlife, as if she’s there and he’s giving her a medal, and I think, You pathetic moron. What do you know? It’s my sister speaking, right there in my head. And she might as well be talking to me.
Clem had never heard of Eva Hesse, which wasn’t a surprise. Outside the museum, before we went in, she paused to look at the sculpture by Rodin. “Him I like,” she said. As we entered the show, I told her a bit about Hesse’s life and art. “No one before or since has ever made work like this,” I said. “No one could ever imitate this work.”
“Work,” said Clem. “Work.” She smiled a peculiar smile as we walked into the first room. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking what she saw.
I followed her. “You don’t see this as work?”
“I’m just thinking, okay, so it’s possible to be dead all these years like this woman’s been, but here’s her actual work, what she did, still here. People write about it in magazines, people pay to see it, under all these fancy lights. She’s long gone, but she made these things, she didn’t just think about them, and here they are, with a life of their own. So much work in the world is finished—I mean, kaput—the minute it’s done.”
“Work doesn’t have to be concrete to last.” Such an older-sister thing to say.
“Even if it is,” said Clem, “no guarantees there, either, right?”
“No.”
“You can’t predict what lasts.”
“Of course not,” I
said, irritated. I did not want her cynicism to intensify the dour palette of the show, its hues of duct tape, barbed wire, old snow, gunmetal, creosote, ash. “Just look. Stop talking for a minute and look.”
“Fair enough,” she said. And she walked with me through that show, silent, for over an hour. I’m the one who didn’t look; who didn’t listen.
After the boss finishes his little speech, an appalling silence sets in. Some people glance at my mother, wondering if she’s going to stand for Conehead’s absurd commemoration. Finally, Dad says to everyone, “Thank you for coming. Thank you for honoring our daughter.” No one’s organized a reception of any kind; there are no casseroles or brownies or free jugs of wine. Some people shake my parents’ hands. Some of them hug me. They drive away, and the dogs go through their commotion all over again.
“Take your parents back to the hotel,” says Ray. “I’ll start in here.” He goes into the trailer.
My parents have already walked around inside. My mother opened the two closets, every drawer, even peered under the bed. “She cleaned up all the evidence, whatever it might’ve been,” Mom said tersely. “Well, I always knew she was gifted at whatever she chose to do.”
For the first time in an hour, my father breaks his silence. “We’re going to go now, back to our room, May. We’re going to let this young man clean up our daughter’s belongings. He’ll have them shipped to our house, the ones worth saving. I’ve had enough for today.” He takes Mom’s arm, and for once, he’s in charge.
They sit together in the backseat of the borrowed station wagon as I drive back to Dubois. This is when they cry. I say not a word. It’s as if I’m a stranger, a hired driver, until my mother squeezes my shoulders from behind, once I’ve stopped the car in front of the antler archway. I don’t even turn off the engine. They get out, and I head back to Clem’s place.
Ray has boxed up her books and emptied her clothes into a pair of black garbage bags.
“Wait!” I cry. “I have to look!”
“You take the kitchen,” he says firmly. “The jewelry, the things on her bureau, I’ve put them in a box you can take back to the hotel. You can go through those things later.” He walks over to me and holds me as if to restrain me, though I’m more or less paralyzed. “This is just the worst thing, the very worst thing.”
“Yes, it is,” I say. He rocks me a little.
“I miss you so much,” I say.
“I miss you, too,” he says.
I feel crushed and buoyed all at once. “But I guess …”
“Yes,” he says quickly before I finish. “That’s part of what makes this so bad. She’s drawn me back, the little bitch.”
I’m suddenly seized with the panicky delusion that this was why she did it, that she wanted me back with Ray … or that she did it because she thought that if she died, I couldn’t have a recurrence, I’d have to be cured. It was an elaborate scheme to make me happy, to fix my fate. It was all about me. And if this was true, shouldn’t I make it so? Shouldn’t I be happy? Otherwise, what’s left? Will nothing remain of her life?
“Tomorrow you can go,” I say. “You should.”
We’re standing apart now.
“I may have no choice.” I know he means that the movie may start shooting, but still I feel hurt. It’s as if someone else is controlling all my reactions to everything around me. Clem, I think. That’s who.
At the hotel, a package waits for me at the desk, one of those padded brown mailing envelopes. For Louisa Jardine. No return address or name. I take it up to my room. Ray is driving the bags of clothing and boxes of books to my sister’s office. Buzz will take care of them.
I listen at my parents’ door, across the hall. I hear the TV, the din of a sports event. No voices. I open and close my own door as quietly as I can. In the envelope is a sheet of paper bearing my sister’s handwriting, a Fauna team T-shirt, and a note to me in a clumsy masculine hand. Louisa: I figured this note wasn’t mine to keep secret. The T-shirt was hers. I don’t like funerals, even for people I liked as much as I liked her. I really did. Sorry. It was from R.B. This was what Clem had written:
This is where I tell you the obvious. That it had nothing to do with you. It had nothing to do with anyone, that’s the problem. No one mattered that much, I finally understood. Not that they didn’t deserve to matter a whole lot. Especially you. But (you know the rest). I think I made the mistake of expecting people to contain me. A myth. People can’t do that. Just the way rock cannot contain water, water cannot contain air, air cannot contain fire. It’s elemental.
The things I will miss are predictable: laughing, fucking, champagne, dancing, first shower after camping, first sunset of real winter, first dawn of honest-to-god (whoever he thinks he is) summer. Go on here and I could dissuade myself. Dissuasion (a real word?) is not the business at hand. I’ve been through that a few times before. It’s getting old. I know the dreams I should be wanting. Should: again, the problem.
All day today I’ve been looking at graphs. My life is a graph where ambition levels off, desire spikes, and passion plummets.
I’m sorry for the mess. But I imagine you can stay outside of it. Please do that. Please don’t get all confessional with everyone. If you meet my parents (I hope you don’t but what does it matter?) don’t tell them about us. My mother thought there were too many men in my life already. She thought the right one would “steady me.” (Like I was a horse in need of a little dressage.) Talk about me to anyone who cares to talk about me as if I led a wild, never boring life. (True!) Pain is a detached thing, like an outbuilding, the constant dullness of it irrelevant to the overall estate of pleasure but bringing down property values all over the place. No. It’s like the bass in a good song. At first you don’t feel it, but in the end it’s what you’re dancing to. But we talked about this. I don’t (quite) believe I was never loved. It’s not about that. I feel sorry for my parents in that respect but what would be the point of telling them? I don’t think anyone needs me however. Those poor bears do not need me, no more meddling from me. Too bad for them I’m replaceable. Karma, though I hate the hare krishna aspect, had a lot to do with it too. This body (you’d argue, and thanks) just never seemed right (habitable). A mistake on the assembly line. Work (mine) put an exclamation point on that discomfort, the way nothing ever seemed to fit. Seeing the bears close up convinced me. They know where they fit. I’d like to have been a bear instead. Even Danny. Poor little Danny. You knew that would happen. You were right. I gave you so little credit on so many things.
My thoughts closed into a circle. I need to break out of that circle. The other night I rented Hamlet. I did it to see Mel Gibson, see if he could cheer me up, that great ass of his in tights, but I got into Hamlet, the guy Shakespeare created. Good questions lead to a bad end. Did I have 33 years too many? No way. But it was high time, and 33, that’s a mystical number if you’re so inclined.
Shel’s just left the lab: my next to last goodbye. I’ve always liked this place when it’s all mine. So here I go. You go too, wherever you belong. I love the way you roam and it seems so easy. I wish I’d been made that way too.
That was it. No sign-off, not even her name.
And there was no mention of me. No reference at all. “You worm,” I say out loud. “You monster.” My hands are shaking. I throw the letter down on the bed, as if it’s scorching hot.
An hour later, Ray comes in. He is carrying the box of Clem’s personal belongings for me to comb through. I have the urge to carry it out onto the balcony and throw it over the edge. I let Ray set it on the dresser.
He sees my swollen face. He sees the letter on the floor, where it’s fallen. He sits beside me on the bed and reads it.
“It’s like I didn’t even exist,” I say.
“What would you like to have seen?” Ray asks. “That she knew you wanted her to stay but it didn’t matter? Like, fuck Louisa, who gives a damn what becomes of her? Wouldn’t that hurt just as much?” The bottom line, he points
out, is that nothing and no one were indispensable to Clem.
Funny how Sheldon was right about the karma. Clem would not have been pleased about that.
By FedEx, Clem’s ashes arrive at our parents’ house ten days after her death. Mom calls me at work. “Well, I signed for her ‘cremains’ this morning. I said to the guy, ‘You know what’s in this box? My dead daughter.’ I thought he was going to vaporize from shock right there on my doorstep.” Her laughter is pure contempt. “ ‘Welcome to the modern world, young man,’ I said. ‘Death by Federal Express.’ He could not get out of our driveway fast enough.”
My mother’s weakness is her scorn, but her strength is her practicality. She’s the one who decided right away on cremation, and she’s the one who decides what to do with the ashes. “To hell with the family plot,” she says. “The last place your sister was happy—if she ever was happy, that girl!—was the ocean. I’m putting her there.”
Once more, Ray flies east. His shoot is over; he insists. He volunteers to drive the boat, and we head straight out into Narragansett Bay. The weather is sunny, the water calm. The surface of the bay glitters like an eye. He guides us between all the Saturday sailors: the stately sloops, the flashy speedboats, the lasers, whalers, and dinghies. The skippers and passengers greet us with waves and entitled smiles, the shared good fortune of those who ride the waves for sheer amusement. A few people recognize my father and hail him by name.
“For God’s sake, can we get any privacy out here?” says Mom.
Dad has no comment. He rides in the bow, ignoring us all, Napoleon en route to Elba. Just before we stepped into the boat, he told Mom that he thinks touching the ashes is unspeakably obscene. “Then you don’t have to,” she said. “The rest of us will do it.”