On my doorstep we kissed, urgently, for somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty minutes.
The next afternoon:
Linny: So you and your new boyfriend are unregenerate dweebs in exactly the same way. De-lovely.
Cornelia: De-fuck off.
But I took that word boyfriend, folded it right up, and tucked it into my back pocket to think about later.
Over Vietnamese food on our sixth date, I somehow hopscotched from describing the best Halloween costume I’d ever worn (Charlie Chaplin; I was the spitting image, same too-small jacket—not easy to find for a too-small someone like me—big shoes, big eyes, cane…all but maybe three people thought I was Hitler, but I knew, which is what truly matters, right?) to confessing what I suspect is my worst personality trait.
“Fearfulness,” I said. “I’m fearful. Fundamentally fearful, overly cautious, lacking an adventurous spirit. A fraidy-cat.”
“You’re not fearful, Cornelia,” said Martin.
“I bailed out of my junior year abroad three days before I was supposed to leave for Spain, even though I was dying to go. I don’t go in the ocean because I might get attacked by a great white shark. I’ve never owned a dog because those suckers can turn on you in the blink of an eye. I went to college in the town I grew up in. The same college in whose medical school my father teaches. I’m the only person I know who has never lived in New York City. And I turned down your offer to go to London.”
“Fearful’s not so bad. Fearful’s good, actually, in some ways,” said Martin, dunking a summer roll into the summer-roll sauce. I reached across the table and touched his cheek with my hand, ostensibly to thank him for the attempt at consolation, but really, secretly because I could and was relishing that fact. His skin was taut and warm under my fingers.
“My ex-wife used to tell me I was fearful,” he said, “but I had a pug named Puggy as a kid, so she must’ve been wrong.” I kept my hand on his cheek for another beat to demonstrate my coolness upon hearing the ex-wife news, then lifted it away with mothlike lightness. He bit into the summer roll. Not even the tiniest bit of vermicelli, not even the smallest drop of sauce fell; Martin was the tidiest eater I’d ever seen. I thanked my stars I’d neglected to include the fear of men with ex-wives on my fears list.
“So how long were you together?” I asked, examining a fragment of peanut on the tablecloth with my finger, casually, I hoped. Although, when I thought about it later, devoting any attention at all to a fragment of peanut is probably a dead giveaway that one is not feeling casual.
“Just over a year. She had that respiratory thing and breath like rotten cauliflower. I went camping for a week, came back, and she’d been disappeared.”
I looked up at him, finger on the peanut.
“She was also hopelessly incontinent.”
I kept looking.
“Four years,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing very interesting. We had a good run. Just weren’t meant for the long haul.” So gallant and good-natured, so feather-light and civilized, so Cary Grant. It was an answer I should have savored; instead, it gave rise to that moment. You know what I mean. The moment in a relationship in which at the same time you discover you’ve been floating in air for five and a half weeks, you also discover that your feet have dropped a little closer to the earth.
“You make her sound like a racehorse. Or like a play,” I said. Teasingly, I hoped.
“Now that you mention it, Viviana was a little of both. Leggy, over-bred, no shortage of drama, some of it melo-.”
I am leggy insofar as I have legs.
“Viviana. She’s Latin, then?” Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz. They began slinking around my head on endless legs. Cameron Diaz, too, although it’s unclear to me that she’s actually Latin, and if Natalie Wood in West Side Story made an appearance, well, all I can say is I was a little agitated.
“Viviana Hobbes. Her first name being one of those things Anglo-Saxon aristocrat families do to exoticize themselves.” And, instantly, there was Grace Kelly, shooing the Latin and pseudo-Latin lovelies away with one swipe of her Kelly bag.
That night, when I kissed Martin good-bye, over his shoulder (I was standing a few steps above him), I imagined I caught a glimpse of Grace Kelly as Viviana Hobbes looking at us. But her gaze, when it met mine, wasn’t the cool blue regard we all associate with Grace, not the gaze of To Catch a Thief or High Society. Instead those eyes were Georgie Eligin’s from The Country Girl, all rue, patience, and loneliness.
Over poached eggs on toast at Linny’s:
Linny: Can I ask just two questions?
Cornelia: No.
Linny: First, you hear “Anglo-Saxon aristocrat” and torture yourself with Grace Kelly. Why do you do that? Is Grace Kelly the only Anglo-Saxon aristocrat in the world? Did you ever consider Jackie Frigging Bouvier Kennedy? Did you ever consider that Viviana Hobbes just might have eyes on the sides of her head like an otter?
Cornelia: I’d have to say, no.
Linny: I didn’t think so.
Cornelia: Anyway, that wasn’t it, the Grace Kelly thing, that wasn’t what bothered me. It was the breeziness.
Linny: Breeziness?
Cornelia: His tone. Like marriage was a restaurant.
Linny: I need a little more.
Cornelia: Or tennis. Or two-button suits. Something he tried or used to do and just doesn’t do anymore.
Linny: Like, “I was married, but it was nothing personal.”
Cornelia: Like four years of marriage weighed nothing at all.
Linny: OK, but at least he wasn’t like that one guy in that one movie, the one you made me watch.
Cornelia:…
Linny: The guy obsessed with his dead wife.
Cornelia: True. Especially since he was obsessed with her because he’d drilled holes in her sailboat and sent her dead body to the bottom of the sea.
Linny: Question number two: Did someone pass a law against sex?
Six dates. I had to admit she had a point.
And then came date seven. A little date I like to call Date Seven or It Happened One Night.
6
Clare
For three days following her conversation with her father, Clare lived inside the storm—the black, spinning hurricane of her fear. At night, she lay down with its roaring in her ears, and if she slept, she heard it again before her eyes were even open. She didn’t read. She didn’t go to school. When the school secretary called, Clare heard her mother say into the phone that she, Clare, was sick, and the clarity and sureness of her mother’s voice made the storm around Clare grow blacker. That her mother could sound all right and be all, all wrong was as terrifying as the fact that her mother had never even taken Clare’s temperature, never brought her a blanket or a cup of tea, seemed almost not to notice she was there.
Clare’s skin felt wind-burned and prickly; her eyes and cheeks were hot all the time, but there were moments—especially moments when Clare imagined too far into the future—when her body was seized by a hard shivering. “I am sick with dread,” Clare told herself. “I am heartsick.” But while giving names to things that frightened and confused her had helped Clare in her old life, it didn’t help her now. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms to warm herself, feeling the bones underneath, then rolled her fingers over the knobby places on the sides of her elbows, pressing down until it hurt. “Underneath, I’m a skeleton,” she whispered to the daffodil-yellow walls of her room.
On the afternoon of the third day, Clare heard her mother step quickly and lightly up the stairs and go into her bedroom, heard the sound of drawers sliding open and shut. Her mother was half-singing half-murmuring a song, and Clare kept still, listening with her whole body. As she listened, almost shaking with effort, Clare felt something stirring in her chest, the tiny beginnings of anger. She slid off the bed, and her bare feet on the floor were surprising—faraway and strange, just shapes, yellow rug showing
in the little space between her first two toes.
Clare walked shakily down the hall to her mother’s room. The door was standing open, and Clare stopped just outside it, not looking in yet, holding her breath and listening to her mother sing. “Wild Is the Wind,” a song from the Nina Simone CD Clare and her mother used to love listening to in the car. “Wild Is the Wind” was song number ten. Number two was “Mississippi Goddamn,” and she and her mother adored that one, turned it up loud, and sang it, both of them, at the tops of their lungs, rolling the “god” around in their mouths, slinging the “damn” out with gusto. They could have been on the highway, cars zooming all around them, but they were in their own world, too, at those moments, it seemed to Clare, the interior of the car, that shared space of air, charged with their two voices, almost shimmering. Now, she listened to her mother sing one of their songs—hers and Clare’s—in a stranger’s voice, a voice that slid disturbingly back and forth between raspy and velvety and seemed so much to be sung to someone that Clare found herself stepping into the room to see who it was.
The room was empty, of course, except for her mother, who had just slipped a narrow summer dress over her head and was shimmying it into place, her hands running over her hips and down the sides of her legs. She didn’t look up as Clare entered.
“It’s December,” said Clare. Her voice was creaky and hoarse, an old woman’s voice.
Her mother seemed not to hear, but just kept singing in that new voice, as she sat down in her burgundy leather reading chair, “claret” is what she used to call the color, to put on a pair of high-heeled, strappy sandals. Clare saw that the shoes were precisely the same creamy color as her mother’s feet. A shopping bag and a shoebox lay on the floor, and Clare saw them with the same kind of distance with which she’d seen her own feet moments before. Uncomprehendingly, she stared at the two shapes, the crumpled shape of the bag, its heavy, matte, sage green plastic with darker green lettering on the side and the clean lines of the black rectangular shoe box. Clare stared, concentrating, needing to understand what the two shapes were. Months later, Clare would read the William Carlos Williams poem about the red wheelbarrow and the chickens and would remember those two shapes. So much depends on—what? Two ordinary objects. A shopping bag, a shoe box.
When Clare realized what they were, they stopped being what they were and simply became two things too many. Something inside Clare gave way. The anger that had uncurled like a tendril at the sound of her mother’s singing surged, filling her lungs, all the cells of her body, like smoke. Clare started screaming choked, clotted screams, a terrible sound in her own ears. She pitched herself—her thin, skin-covered bones, her wild hair and shaking head—into the room, kicking the shoe box, stomping on it, twisting the bag and trying to rip it to shreds. The plastic bit into her palms. “I hate you!” she screamed again and again. Then, “You’re killing me!” And finally, dismally, and without inflection, “You don’t even care, you don’t even care, you don’t even care.”
After a long time, Clare dropped onto the floor at the foot of her mother’s bed and pulled—clawed—at the edge of the duvet, yanking it off. It was weighty and full of feathers and covered with beautiful fabric—a Florentine pattern in dark corals and pinks and light greens. Clare wrapped it around herself, then sat inside it and looked at her mother, feeling almost shy.
Her mother had stopped singing and was looking back. Clare realized how long it had been since her mother had looked at her, right at her face. Her mother’s eyes weren’t shocked or afraid, and they did not seem to be the eyes of a woman who could go shoe shopping while her daughter lay in her room almost delirious with loss and fear. Her mother looked at her with a gaze full of kindness.
“Mommy,” said Clare, quietly. “Mommy. You can’t go outside in that. It’s winter. It’s cold.”
Clare’s mother smiled at her, a mother’s smile.
“Your new shoes,” whispered Clare, wonderingly, “they shouldn’t sell summer shoes in winter.”
Still surrounded by the duvet, Clare walked on her knees over to the claret-colored chair, paused for a second or two, then put her head in her mother’s lap. “Please stay here, please stay, please stay. Don’t leave. I miss you all the time,” pleaded Clare.
Her mother lifted Clare’s head from her lap gently, using both hands, as though Clare’s head were made of glass, and stood up, stepping around Clare, around the tumbled fabric that formed a kind of landscape on the floor. Clare looked up at her mother, waiting.
“Oh, Clarey,” said her mother, tenderly, patiently. “Resort. You remember.”
Clare shook her head.
“Resort wear. In stores. That’s how you can buy summer clothes in winter.”
Clare’s mother walked out, her heels loud on the oak plank floor of the hallway, then loud again on the stairs.
Clare sat on the floor, dazed. Her mind stayed empty for a while, and then she began remembering a slumber party she’d been to the previous spring, just before the end of school. Two popular girls had been there, twelve-year-olds with plucked eyebrows and long, swinging hair. They’d decided to play “makeover” on the plainest girl at the party, a girl with whom Clare had gone to school since she was four and whose dreadful shyness had, by first grade, stopped even the sternest teachers from calling on her. Her name was Candy, a name so wholly wrong for her it seemed cruel to say it, and hardly anyone did. The older girls covered Candy’s face with awful, garish makeup—an orange, pink, and blue mask—and curled and teased her thin blond hair into a knotty mane. “You look gorgeous, Candy! Just like a movie star, I swear to God,” the girls told Candy lovingly, looking around and nodding at the other girls at the party, prompting them to join in. Some of them did, crowding around Candy in a cooing, patting cluster as Candy, flushed and speechless, blinked her gummy eyelashes in happiness.
Exhausted on the floor of her mother’s room, Clare recalled her own shame at having watched Candy’s transformation without saying a word. When she finally spoke up, it was the disaster she’d known it would be. “Shut up, you guys. You know she looks terrible. Why don’t you leave her alone?”
All the girls glared at her, then one of the twelve-year-olds said, “Bitch! You must think you’re really hot. Look, you made her cry.” And that was the worst of it, the way Candy looked, desolation creeping over her face as she realized they’d been making fun of her all along. As Clare left the room to call her mother to pick her up, she saw one of the twelve-year-olds putting her arms around Candy to comfort her and Candy letting her do it.
Clare should have known better—had known better—but it was the way the girls had spoken to Candy, the texture of their voices. Such meanness served up in the sweetest tones, and to someone whose need for love was terrible in its completeness.
The worst thing, Clare thought now. Worse than hitting. The worst thing anyone can do. And then her body jumped, jerked like a person’s body who wakes up from a dream of falling. Again, her mother’s voice was saying, “Oh, Clarey,” tricking Clare into trust and hope, mocking her. There may have been a tiny piece of Clare that knew it wasn’t true, but the rest of her ached, pulsed with the idea of her mother as a bully, of her mother hating her.
Back in her room, lying on her bed, Clare heard the front door open and shut, and she looked out the window to see her mother setting off across the lawn, her step jaunty, almost dancing. Coatless, her mother swung her long, bare arms as though it were summer, a picnic basket in one hand, a thermos in the other, and entered the woods that separated their house from the house next door.
By the time she came back, it was late at night; Clare was in a thick, dull sleep, so the huge front door’s slamming was just a thud in her head, muffled—almost no sound at all.
And because Clare was eleven years old, alone, and in trouble she could not see her way out of, on the fourth day—a Sunday—Clare woke, breathed for a minute or two, got out of bed, and reentered her daily life.
“First a
shower, then breakfast,” she instructed herself firmly, as though she might refuse. As soon as she stepped into the shower, she realized she’d gotten it backward. Her head had been hurting for days, but under the falling water, the headache opened like a rose—bright red, layered, and complicated. The pain beat inside her face, her ears, down the back of her neck. Clare turned off the water and sat down on the edge of the tub, gasping, her ears ringing. Food. She needed food.
Downstairs in the kitchen, wrapped in her bathrobe, she grabbed the first thing she saw—a banana—wolfed it down, then threw up in the sink. Chocolate milk, next. Better. While she sipped it, she made herself two pieces of toast, buttered all the way to the edges and cut diagonally the way she liked, then sat down and ate with her eyes closed. It was one of those moments when eating is like prayer. Clare gathered her strength. She put her faith in the crunch of bread, in the saltiness of butter on her tongue; she took their goldenness into her body and, afterward, felt that her soul had been restored—at least enough so that she could mount the stairs, take a real shower, and put on her clothes. As she brushed her teeth, she examined her reflection in the mirror.
“Same old Clare. Same old face,” she told her face, reassuringly, and it was almost true. Skin pulled a little tightly across her cheekbones, faint purplish smudges under her eyes, but basically the same as ever.
“Same old Clare,” she said again and almost laughed with relief.
Clare put a notebook, two pencils, and, for company, a copy of Anne of Avonlea (the Anne book with the fewest sad events in it, apart from Anne of Ingleside, which Clare despised for its silliness and overuse of points of ellipsis and which she believed in her heart had not been written by L. M. Montgomery at all) into her backpack. Then she went downstairs to the library, where, for reasons unknown to Clare, her mother had started sleeping at night.