When the wine came, she drank deeply. The warmth that spread through her head and limbs was thrilling—she was strong, invincible, she could do anything, fight anyone for anything, she could. The room slowly came into sharp focus and she saw that she was the only lone woman. The only lone woman and there she sat, drinking, alone. “Oh my God,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it of thoughts. She pulled out her wallet, extracted a ten, slipped it under the wineglass, got back on the subway, and went directly home, where she found her apartment a bit less haunted than she’d imagined. The red light on her answering machine blinked angrily. Suddenly, she was tired, exhausted, but she would not go to bed, not without doing something, something to show she was not defeated, so she watered her plants—the African violet in the north window (a gift from her boss), the ivy in the bedroom, the spider plant in the south window—and knelt by the bathtub to wash the dishes. She made the bed, put her clothing away, changed out of her work dress and into her kimono, then sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her answering machine, which itself sat on a small tile table, a gift from Curtis, who had given it to her soon after they met, when he noticed that she kept the machine on the floor. This was the sort of person Curtis was, she thought, biting her lip again: he didn’t mind living in a pup tent and eating beans, but he thought it barbaric that she didn’t own a phone table.
Gathering a pad and pen, she pressed play and listened to Sadie, Lil, Dave, and Beth ask her if she wanted to head to Dave’s place together (Sadie, Lil), what time she might arrive (Dave, Beth), and why she wasn’t there (Dave again). The sixth, seventh, and eighth messages were from her mother, pinched and impatient (“Emily, if you’re there, pick up—Please, Emily—now”), increasingly angry (“Emily, where are you? your cell is off; call me back”). The ninth caller she couldn’t place at first: “Hi, Em, just calling to say hello and, um, see how you’re doing. I guess you’re out.” The voice was high, sweet, female, slightly nervous, slightly shy, hesitant, apologetic. Her stomach twitched: Clara. She stopped the message midway and replayed it.
“Hi, Emily, just calling to say hello, and um, see how you’re doing. I guess you’re out. I kind of need to talk to you and there’s no way for you to call me here, really, so I guess I’ll try you later. Or maybe, well, I guess I’ll just tell you why I’m calling. I don’t know if Mom told you or not, but they’re letting me out of here on the tenth. Um, next Monday. And I—” Here her voice wavered. “I don’t really have anywhere to go. I can’t go back and stay with Mom and Dad. I just can’t. I thought, well, I talked about it with Mom and with my doctor, and I thought, well, I’m really okay now. I feel like, I think, I finally understand things. You’re going to be amazed, Em. For the first time, I feel like I can think clearly. And if it’s okay, I thought, well, I thought I would come live with you.”
twelve
Bad luck came in threes, Emily supposed. Her play, Curtis, and now Clara. If everything went well with Clara, Emily thought herself surely due for a dramatic change of fate. Yet, all these things—the play, Curtis, Clara—struck her as thoroughly interlinked, incapable of existing without the others. Had she not been tossed out of the play, and subsequently sunk into a depression or crisis of identity or whatever it was, then things with Curtis might not have fallen apart. And had she not freed Curtis to return to Amy, then Emily might not have allowed Clara to come stay with her.
Her friends were appalled by this latest turn of events. “How long is she going to stay?” asked Lil. “Is she going to sleep on the couch? What if you meet someone? You’ll have no privacy.” This was true; Emily’s small bedroom had no door, just an archway that led directly into the living room. “Is she going to get a job?” Sadie, ever practical, wanted to know. “You can’t support her forever. It’ll kill you. You can’t.”
But she wouldn’t have to. While Clara was at Brattleboro, her parents had completed the paperwork—mountains of it, according to her mom—necessary to get Clara on SSI, which was, Emily found out, disability for crazy people. The payments, her mom said, should start soon after Clara’s arrival, along with a lump sum representing compensation from the date the Kaplans had filed. Emily thought they could use the money to find a larger apartment. “It’s not going to be that much,” Sadie told her. “There’s no way. She’s going to have to get a job.”
“Yeah,” said Emily doubtfully. “I guess so.”
“You know, you don’t have to do this, Em,” Sadie insisted, her straight brows moving closer together, Jack sleeping on her chest in a pale blue sling. Ed had left for Toronto the previous day but she still, to Emily, seemed perfectly at ease, as if she’d always had an infant curled up on her like a pea pod. They were sitting in the new café on Bedford, where a mall, of sorts, had been installed in the shell of the old girdle factory, and everyone around them seemed younger and in pursuit of a level of hipness that made Emily deeply anxious. On their faces, aviator glasses. On their feet, brightly colored Pumas, Nikes, Adidas. On their legs, shredded jeans of recent vintage. On their heads, the sorts of billed caps worn by truckers and convenience-store attendants, emblazoned with embroidered patches advertising obsolete products or brands of interest to the ironically inclined: CAT, John Deere, U-Haul, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Caldor. The guy sitting next to Sadie wore his whiskers in an elaborate handlebar shape. “He’s styling the Marc Jacobs show,” he told his companion, an overweight girl with a bowl cut. “I’m so jealous.”
“I do,” said Emily.
“Why?” asked Sadie, sighing with exasperation.
“She’s my sister,” said Emily. Sadie, Lil, and Dave were all only children. Which, Emily thought, explained a lot. Tal would have understood, but Tal was gone. She hadn’t heard from him in almost a year.
“She’s mentally ill,” countered Sadie.
Now that Clara was coming, she regretted ever telling her friends the extent of her sister’s woes. They looked at Clara’s situation too clinically, as though she were a character in an after-school speciaclass="underline" the shaggy-haired girl getting high in her elementary school bathroom; the cinematic junkie, gorgeous and emaciated, lying comatose in a squat, dirty needles stuck in her arm. They didn’t understand that Clara was just a normal person, like any of them. At Chapel Hill, before her first big breakdown, she’d studied painting. After she came out of Holly Hill, with a fat prescription for Prozac, which no one had heard of at that point, she refused to go back to school, saying she was embarrassed (“I just can’t face them”). And so she stayed home and took classes at Greensboro, but something was changed, broken, wrong. She couldn’t finish a painting—her little studio in Gatewood was filled with eerie portraits, complete except for the subjects’ blank, flat faces—much less a class. And yet somehow, despite the drugs and the feuds with professors and the classes failed due to lack of attendance, she managed, after eight-odd years, to put on a cap and gown, march across the sneaker-scarred floor of the Coliseum, and snatch her degree from Dean Garfield, known to Emily and Clara as Uncle Bo (he’d been a new history hire the same year their mother started in women’s studies). Along the way, she’d learned to weld and solder and build things with wood and sew and weave fabric and rewire a lamp and knit, the result of trading painting for sculpture. And she’d learned to cook, too, and bake bread, during the years she’d waitressed at Liberty Oak. Those were good years, as were the ones in which she’d worked at a local architecture firm—she’d talked about going back to school, becoming an architect herself—but they were outnumbered by the bad ones. And they had been long ago. The Clara of recent memory had flung a heavy ball of dough at Emily when she’d argued that no, their parents didn’t actually favor her, and no, she didn’t think Clara’s ex-husband was sneaking into her apartment and adding rat poison to her coffee.