“Everything’s not all right at home.” Ms. Packer stated it like a fact.
“Yes, it is,” said Clare automatically. She could feel her heart beating in her neck and the sides of her head, and she concentrated on keeping her breathing normal, pulling the air all the way down into her chest. Clare had seen Ms. Packer staring at her in the past few weeks. The same way she stares at the crossword puzzle during free time, Clare had written in her notebook, like I’m some problem she’s trying to figure out. But even as she wrote the words, she felt their injustice. Ms. Packer cared about her; she knew that. Ms. Packer believed there was something wrong in Clare’s home, and she was right.
But, although Clare would not have been able to say exactly why, the something wrong had become a secret, and keeping the secret had become the one clear goal of Clare’s life, the point of every single day. And the secret was not the small hard kind you could hide at the bottom of a pocket or in a closed fist. The secret was a living creature. It followed her everywhere, fluttering in the curtains, squatting in the corner of the room, or darting across the floor, and Clare’s hours were spent distracting people from the secret’s presence. It took all of her energy, but she was succeeding. She believed that.
She smiled a lot, laughed and gabbed with the girls in her class during lunch and in the courtyard before school started. She packed herself large, healthy lunches, completed every bit of her homework, and paid meticulous attention to her grooming, scrutinizing her full-length reflection every day before leaving the house. Clean, ironed clothes, neat ponytail, scarves, hats, and gloves in cold weather. She bathed and brushed her teeth more often and more thoroughly than she ever had before. In short, Clare became the picture-perfect child, obviously well-cared-for, obviously loved.
So when Ms. Packer started in with her questions, Clare was able to say with confidence, “Why would you think there’s anything wrong? I feel fine. I look fine. Don’t I?”
Ms. Packer puffed out a small sigh. “You look…” Then, she seemed to change her mind about something. “Yes, you look fine.” She smiled. “I didn’t mean to worry you, Clare. Go eat your lunch.”
Clare had this conversation with Ms. Packer three days before the start of winter break, and although she’d hated every second of it, the experience turned out to be good, in a way. In a way, helpful. Because Clare had been dreading the end of school with a terrible dread. Like a person dangling from an edge, Clare had held on to school’s familiar shape. School meant a pattern, an arranged life, a predictable amount of boredom. Winter break lurked like an enemy: almost a month at home, the loose hours, her mother—every day, her mother—the feeling that anything could happen, nothing was too bad to happen, and on top of it all, a Christmas that would not be a Christmas—a mean joke of a Christmas. Clare did her best to keep these thoughts away, but they could crowd around her in an instant, at any moment, a buzzing swarm from which she was never safe.
Then Ms. Packer said the words “Everything’s not all right at home” and turned school into the enemy. Suddenly, weeks at home meant relief; home gave Clare a fighting chance to keep the secret. She only had to make it through three more days.
On the third day, just before they went home, the kids in Clare’s class took the holiday gifts they’d made for their parents off the walls and out of the cases in which they’d been displayed. Clare took down “Annika and the Bears” and slid her palm lightly across the cover. A story is only words living inside a person’s head, she thought, floating and invisible. But she’d written the words down and made a book, an object that took its place in the world of objects. She was proud of the book’s weight. Never had a project turned out so precisely as she had envisioned it. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and started down the hallway, keeping the story in her two careful hands. Kids flowed by her, rushing and buoyant. Someone shouted, “Merry Christmas!” and then everyone was shouting, their voices wide-open and joyful. Clare listened.
Clare stopped walking and stepped to the side, out of the stream of children. She leaned back against the wall, bent one knee, and rested her backpack on her leg, yanking the zipper open. In one fast, angry motion, she folded the story over like it was nothing—a magazine you’d smack a fly with—and shoved it into her backpack, ruining the cover. “Good,” she said out loud. When Clare looked up, she saw Ms. Packer staring at her, and Clare took off down the hall, running.
Out in the air at last, breathing hard, Clare looked around for her friend Josie; she whisked her head from side to side, scanning the crowd like a frantic person in a movie. She was a frantic person. Clare forgot to care how she looked to other people; all she cared about was leaving. Then she saw the dark blue Volvo at the front of the pick-up line—Josie’s mother’s car, Clare’s ride home. She started running toward it, but before she even got close, the car started pulling away. Horrified, Clare waved her arms, and yelled, “Stop! You forgot me! You forgot me!” But the car was gone. Clare let her arms fall to her sides. She stood there. The crowd thinned as all the children got into cars and headed for home.
A horn started beeping. Beeping was not allowed during pick-up, but someone was beeping over and over again. The noise came from the teachers’ parking lot close to the school’s entrance. “Ms. Packer,” Clare whispered, and because she was sure the beeping would go on until she did it, she turned slowly around and looked.
Not Ms. Packer. Her mother. Not in their white Land Rover, but standing next to it. Her mother standing there, upright as a queen, with one hand through the open driver’s side window beeping and the other hand high in the air, waving at Clare. “Oh, no,” said Clare. “Oh, please, please, please, please.”
Clare ran toward the parking lot. “Oh, please, please, please, please.”
When her mother saw Clare coming, she stopped beeping, got in the Land Rover, and started the engine. “Please, please, please, please.” Clare was still saying it as she got in the car and slammed the door. She bent her head down and put both hands on her forehead, rocking a little.
“Please, what, Clare?” asked her mother in a normal voice, but Clare didn’t know. The word was connected to nothing specific or nameable, because that would make what was going on in Clare’s head hoping. Clare didn’t hope. In Clare’s mouth, “please” was pure wish.
Clare sat like that for a few minutes, holding her forehead, her knees pulled up, her elbows pressed tightly against her body, as though she were literally keeping herself together. When finally she unfolded and looked up, she didn’t recognize the road they were traveling, traveling fast—a narrow road with curves and dips and great brown blurs of trees on either side. Clare heard heavy thunks as objects in the back of the vehicle bounced and slid. Instinctively, Clare reached for her seat belt.
“Slow down,” she said, also instinctively, knowing her mother wouldn’t listen.
Her mother said something Clare didn’t understand, a string of meaningless sounds. Clare kept her eyes on the road. Clare’s mother said the sounds again, more loudly, and she seemed to be laughing. Out of the corner of her eye, Clare saw something blue waving back and forth.
“What are you saying?” she asked. “You’re not saying anything.” Clare took a breath and turned to look at her mother. Her mother was wearing a soft, thick, white turtleneck sweater, dark blue jeans, and diamond stud earrings. Her hair was tucked smoothly behind her ear. Clare hated her for looking like that, like a model or an actress on vacation. In her hand, her mother held two blue envelopes.
“Bon Nadal i un Bon Any Nou!” her mother sang out again, “Merry Christmas, in Catalan, darling. You didn’t forget?”
Plane tickets—two plane tickets in blue envelopes. Luggage thumping in the back. Barcelona. Clare’s throat released a high-pitched moan, and her mother turned to look at her.
“No, no, no, we can’t go to Barcelona, Mom. You’re sick. We can’t be on an airplane or in Spain or anyplace when you’re sick. Don’t you understand that there’s something wrong
with you? Stop the car, Mom. Please.” Clare spoke as though her mother were a child. She knew she couldn’t give in to panic. If she gave in, they would be lost. But as Clare spoke, it came to her that something was strange about her mother’s face: Her right eye was wide, black-lashed, her left eye was different, smaller, incomplete, almost erased-looking. The two sides didn’t match, and this imbalance broke Clare. The bottom dropped out of the moment and she fell. For the second time in her life, she was overtaken—possessed—by screaming, by rage she didn’t own. In the grip of this rage, she screamed the word “Stop!” and she kicked and she slammed her fists against the dashboard with all her strength.
Miraculously, her mother did stop, pulling to the side of the road and putting the car in park. It took some time for Clare’s anger to subside and for her to come back to herself. Even after her breathing slowed, her head and body shook with intermittent sobs, something Clare had only ever seen happen to babies. She felt like throwing up. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and looked at her mother.
To her amazement, her mother was weeping. Tears poured down her face, wetting her sweater. Her cheeks and the corners of her mouth trembled, and the trembling went on for a long time, and then her mother opened her mouth and cried long sounds, “Ahh, ahh, ahh,” over and over, like a machine.
“You’re right, Clarey, it has to stop. It has to stop. All of it. All of it. You’re right.” Her mother’s voice was the saddest voice Clare had ever heard.
Clare’s mother reached across and opened Clare’s door.
“I’m so sorry. How did everything go to hell? I don’t know. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m so sorry, Clare.” And she was, Clare could tell; her mother was sorry for everything in the world.
There was nothing else to do. Clare unbuckled her seat belt, pushed the car door wide open, and stepped down into the weeds and gravel. Clare’s mother was still crying, her head tilted back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “Mommy,” said Clare flatly, leaning forward in order to leave the word inside the car. Then she stepped back and pushed the door shut. It’s click was the most final sound Clare had ever heard.
The Land Rover pulled away. Clare watched it until the road curved and it was gone. The sky overhead and behind the treetops was an uninflected pale gray. “It’s over,” she told the trees and the sky. There was no relief in her voice. Clare slid her backpack over both shoulders and started to walk.
9
Cornelia
“What breaks your heart? Has your heart been broken? Tell me. When has your heart been broken?” I asked Martin. Because if you’re going to ask a stupid, graceless question, you may as well ask it three times in succession with very little variation. A rotten question. I knew that before I asked it, before it reverberated in the air around me like a wrong, wrong note, before I saw the “Oh, no; here we go” look flicker over his face then disappear. No way to make such a question sound nonchalant, particularly as I’d asked it in triplicate, more particularly as I’d asked it in bed—mine, not his, thus taking advantage of home court advantage—and most particularly as it came on the heels of yet another story of my own heartbreak. Another unsolicited story, if you insist upon accuracy, and I know that you do. I depend upon it.
Before I asked Martin that question—days before, as I contemplated asking it—I was already bored with myself, with how deeply unoriginal the question made me. Like a wicked fairy—poof—the question turned me into a first-name-only, hypothetical character in the pages of a self-help book. Exactly the kind of book we all disdain because it reduces to formulae our irreducible human selves, but which we at least think about buying (thus abetting the book’s piranhalike devouring of the New York Times bestseller list). That time we had a terrible cold and were listlessly switching channels on the tiny television we hardly ever watch and even forget we have, we happened upon Oprah discussing such a book and found that, as much as we hated to admit it, the book rang true—at least, some of it rang somewhat true, truer than we’d ever expected. “He doesn’t talk to me,” Cornelia whines and, looky there, she is not Cornelia but the universal, allegorical Whining Woman. Suddenly, Martin is from Mars, and Cornelia, God help her, is from Venus.
The only comfort I can take is in the fact that I put my own little spin on the whining, tinted the whining a vaguely Cornelia-like color. It’s not that Martin didn’t talk to me. He talked, he shared, he was forthcoming, regularly coming forth with loads of information about himself.
Apart from the facts about him you already know, I knew that he was born and raised in Rye, New York. I knew he’d been blond as a child. I knew that he’d gone to the University of Chicago and had gotten an MBA at Harvard. I knew the things he felt he should like but secretly did not: horses, Russian novels, recycled paper products, Langston Hughes poems, French cinema, the city of New Orleans, cheese for dessert. And the things he felt he shouldn’t like but secretly did: sports cars, those chalky orange circus peanuts, seersucker (never wore it, but wanted to), Olympic figure-skating, and the Jerry Lewis film Cinderfella. (I know, pretty tame as far as guilty pleasures go. You were expecting monster trucks and Japanimation?). I knew The Exorcist still gave him nightmares and that the only time he felt truly patriotic was when he heard instrumental versions of “America the Beautiful.” I knew that at age thirteen, he’d been airlifted out of the Maine wilderness after stumbling upon a bees’ nest on a summer camp nature hike. I knew he spent astronomical sums on custom-made shirts and felt guilty about it. I knew he found me funny and beautiful and smart.
He talked to me. I talked to him. Rarely, in fact, did we stop talking. Conversationally, we were Fred and Ginger—spin, slide, shuffle, bend. Giddy. Effortless. Tappity tappity tappity tappity boom boom slap, went I. Tappity tappity tappity tappity boom boom slap, returned Martin, and then he’d set me spinning like I’d never spun before, my dress flaring, my hair platinum blond and shining like the moon.
But I thought I’d figured it out, why our sex life wasn’t more spectacular; or to be specific, was several worlds away from spectacular. For all our talk, all our exchanges, we never handed over anything of real importance. We were all laughter and lightness and glow. We liked each other till the cows came home, but I never saw his broken places, nothing soft or stinging or half healed-over. He’d never seen mine, either. And I decided that truly stellar sex wasn’t possible without that kind of knowledge. Love either, although, at that point, I wasn’t ready to do more than give the subject of love a passing glance, a nod of acknowledgment. “Be patient,” I told love under my breath. “I’ll tackle you eventually.”
I didn’t take the clunky direct-question approach to begin with. He’ll reveal himself if I reveal myself, is what I thought. So, I waited for an opening, the slightest invitation. But the invitation didn’t come, which is when I started the aforementioned unsolicited storytelling. One afternoon, I told him about my best friend Andie who died of leukemia at the start of fifth grade. After the funeral, her mother gave me the new winter coat Andie never got a chance to wear—a purple parka with fur around the hood that I hung, tags and all, in the coat closet of every place I’d ever lived, including my current apartment.
I told him about having dropped out of graduate school after half a semester, which wasn’t in itself so hard because I hated all my classes and believed if I stayed another minute, I’d never love another book. Afterward, though, I lived inside the four grim walls of my failure, my first huge failure, for weeks, unable to tell anyone.
I told him about my sister Ollie, two years older than I am, and how passionately we’d loved each other as kids, but that somehow we didn’t seem to anymore. It wasn’t even a story, really, because there was no drama, no plot, no climactic falling-out I could put my finger on, which was maybe the worst part about it. We just stopped being sisters. I was making a salad while I told him this, and when I started to cry, I blamed it on the onions and dumped the salad in the trash.
It wasn’t easy, since I don’t
like being vulnerable any more than the next guy, possibly less than the next guy, and also since all the above events and conditions are among the few topics the importance of which I am unable to undermine with jokes and a mocking tone. Which shows you how much I wanted Martin. I just wanted him.
Not that he made any of it any easier. Each time I began to give him one of my heartbreaks—and I was straightforward, not dramatic, used as few words as possible, only cried the one time—I could almost see him deliberately settle the parts of his body, one by one, into an attitude of what was meant to be interest but ended up as something more like patience, forbearance. He forbore, I think, and looked tender and handsome enough while doing it. And afterward, each time, he’d give a rueful little smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and he’d touch my cheek or run a hand along my forearm. Nothing wrong with that—entirely appropriate and above reproach, except that the touches ended up feeling to me like pats on the head.
Just before I came out with “What breaks your heart?” et al., I was telling Martin about Mrs. Goldberg—Suzette Goldberg. I’d arrived at Suzette’s story more or less naturally, although, once I got started, I had no qualms about incorporating it into Project Drawing-Martin-Out. Which would have been just fine with Mrs. Goldberg, of that I was sure.
As I told you, Martin and I were in bed, propped up on pillows, my head leaning against his shoulder; we were being quiet, for once, and I broke the silence by saying, “Mousquetaire.”
“Musketeer or Mouseketeer?” asked Martin.
“Mousquetaire.” I pointed to the far wall of my bedroom. “Opera glove,” I said. “They used to call them that.”
They were framed, the opera gloves. Late nineteenth-century, white kid with pearl buttons. I’d lined the back of the frame with lavender velvet. If my apartment ever caught fire, the gloves in their frame would be the first thing I grabbed.