Rising, slightly, from the low, square chair in which she sat, Clara took a deep breath. “We do—” she said.
“We are doing things—” said Tuck, his wide mouth swollen with anger.
“I know what you mean,” Emily jumped in. But Lil wasn’t paying attention to her, or to Tuck—she was staring, openmouthed, at the television. Emily, Clara, and Tuck followed her gaze and saw people—miniaturized in relation to the huge building—jumping out of the windows of the top floor of one of the towers.
“Oh my God,” said Lil, her hand rising to cover her mouth. “Why would they show that? Oh my God.”
“Because,” said Tuck, drawing his wife back into his arms, a gesture that filled Emily, on the one hand, with relief, and on the other with a sort of knee-jerk revulsion, which she was helpless to explain. “Because,” he said, his cheek against her glossy hair, “it’s the truth.”
Her company called her—called everyone—back to work on Thursday the thirteenth, which she thought callous and strange. Even in midtown, the air had an awful, poisonous scent and the few people she passed on the street had the appearance of ghosts, their eyes empty and lost, unsure where to look. Half her coworkers didn’t show—including Emily’s boss, who lived on Long Island—and she found herself wandering around the chilly, fluorescent-lit warren of empty cubicles and dark offices, looking for someone, anyone, with whom she might speak in some sort of normal, human manner. But everyone had their heads down, earphones in, fingers flying across the keyboard, mouths moving against the dull black plastic of the phone’s receiver. Business as usual. She knew, then, that she must quit, soon, not because she was ill-treated (though, if she thought about it, she was) or the company shamed her (though it did), but because Lil was right: it was time—time to stop spinning her wheels and find something to do with herself, something that meant something, that contributed something to the world, even if only in the smallest way, something that mattered to her, something that was vaguely in accordance with the moral, the political, the ethical stakes she’d once felt so integral to her person. She would quit, she decided, by the end of the year, which gave her nearly three months to figure out a new course of action.
But as the days passed, her resolve weakened, because she was, for the first time in ages, happy. As promised, Clara was tending to the housekeeping in exchange for staying with Emily, rent free, and living off Emily’s salary, since the SSI money had not yet come. She went to Tops every afternoon and came home with food Emily knew nothing about—baccalà, kielbasa, lamb shank—and made elaborate stews and puddings and casseroles, then explained them to Emily as they ate, or told stories Emily had never heard, how she’d jumped off the roof of the art building and landed on the college president’s beloved Mercedes; or how she’d snuck into the local post office and stole a stanchion. (“Isn’t that a federal offense?” Emily asked. “Probably!” cried Clara.) She cleaned, too, with the kind of manic fury and focus Emily remembered from high school, when she’d often happened on Clara in the basement, painting with such intensity that she didn’t hear the door open. The apartment looked better than it had when Emily moved in: the stove shone, the counter glistened, the windows sparkled.
Mornings, when Emily rose to go to work, Clara still lay on the sofa, in a deep, stonelike sleep; and at night, when Emily went off to bed, Clara waved good-bye and picked up her sketchpad. “It’s so good that she’s drawing,” she told her mother, who called Emily’s office each afternoon for updates on Clara’s state of mind. “I suppose,” Mrs. Kaplan said sourly. “But she shouldn’t be staying up so late. She should be keeping normal hours. The doctors all said so. And Daddy agrees.” Some nights, after dinner, Emily tried to help Clara go through her finances—she was in terrible debt—and sort through the stacks and stacks of mail—three months’ worth—that the post office had delivered soon after her arrival. “We’ll do it slowly,” Emily coaxed. “We’ll just look at a little bit every night until we’re done.” “Okay,” Clara agreed, but after five minutes, she picked up a magazine. In the end, Emily sorted through it herself and, from her cubicle, called credit card companies and Verizon and various Southern department stores and explained that her sister had lost her mind and would be resuming her payments in a short while, and could they please reduce the interest and so on.
These negotiations proved, not surprisingly, more satisfying to Emily than to Clara, and Clara’s lack of enthusiasm for Emily’s little triumphs began to grate on her. “I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time on this,” Clara told her, one evening toward the beginning of October, as they sat on Emily’s small gray couch.
“It’s not that much time,” Emily countered. “And your credit is completely ruined. We have to restore it.”
“Why?” asked Clara.
And Emily realized she wasn’t sure why, which annoyed her, though not as much as Clara’s question. Clara was older than she, she should know why it was important to have good credit. At such moments, she felt cheated. Why could she not have a normal older sister, who bossily offered advice, rather than staring at her, openmouthed—as Clara was now—seeking explanation for the basic tenets of modern life. “Because we do, Clara,” she whined, unable to suppress this little surge of anger. Rising from the couch, leaving behind her half-eaten bowl of pesto-coated spaghetti, she flounced through the arched doorway into her bedroom and threw herself facedown on her bed. “That’s what normal people do,” she called, wishing that Clara might somehow disappear for an hour or so, leaving Emily completely alone. Lil and Sadie and Beth were right. The apartment was too small for two people. Once the back payments came in from Social Security—it should be, Mrs. Kaplan promised, any day now—they could look for a new apartment, with two bedrooms, bedrooms with actual doors.
As it turned out, Emily was spared this particular agony, for Clara made friends with the landlady—a peroxide-blonde Pole, Krystyna, who’d never uttered a kind word to Emily—and discovered that she was evicting the upstairs tenant, Mr. Kisliewski. “He’s a drunk,” explained Clara gleefully. “Em, you wouldn’t believe it. He completely trashed the apartment! It’ll cost thousands for Krystyna to fix it up!” Clara convinced the landlady not only to give the sisters the second apartment—“You are good girls; nice girls,” she said, “You pay your rent on time, no trouble, like the Poles”—but also to keep the same rent Mr. Kisliewski had paid, a rent even lower than Emily’s.
“But—” Emily stammered. “How?”
“September eleventh.” Clara nodded grimly. “Everyone’s going home to, like, Kansas. She says she’d rather have reliable tenants—and make less.”
“Oh, right,” said Emily. “Right.”
The trade-off, Clara revealed triumphantly, was that she, Clara, would renovate both apartments, making them into a duplex. Which, she said, shouldn’t be difficult, considering the house had originally been a single unit, the conversion cheap and shabby.