“Okay, imagine this, Em,” she said, standing at the center of the tiny living room, her round little arms raised conductor-style. “We knock down that wall.” She pointed to the flimsy back wall, behind which lay the ugly, carpeted stair to Mr. Kisliewski’s place. “We take the carpet off the stairs—it’s wood underneath, I checked—and put up a banister. It’ll open the whole place up. Then we build out the counter so that the kitchen extends across the room, under the window…” And so on.
“Clara, I don’t know how to do any of this stuff,” Emily told her peevishly. She was, again, feeling that same sense of truculence. People just didn’t renovate rental apartments. “I don’t have time to take on this kind of project.”
“Em,” Clara said, sitting down on the couch next to her. “You won’t have to do anything. I’ll do it all. Everything.”
“How can you do everything?” Emily asked, her voice growing louder. “You’re not a contractor. Or a carpenter.” She knew she should shut up or risk triggering one of Clara’s tantrums. But Clara remained stunningly calm.
“Emily, I know what I’m doing,” she said. “At Klopfeld Morgan”—this was the Greensboro architecture firm—“I was actually working on plans for interiors. I wasn’t just an admin. And, you know, any idiot can knock down a wall.”
A week later, Emily arrived home from work to find her belongings swathed in a fine white dust. The back wall was gone, revealing the staircase—its covering of brown-gray shag removed—and Clara was running a floor sander (“the guy at the hardware store just loaned it to me!”) up and down the living room floor.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing a mask or something?” shouted Emily, looking for a dust-free spot to drop the mail.
Clara shrugged. “It can’t be worse than smoking, right?” The sun from the stairwell window was turning her wiry hair an odd shade of yellow. “Isn’t this great?”
And it was, in the end. Bright and open, just as Clara had promised, with wide, gleaming, caramel-colored plank floorboards, pale aqua walls, and sweet, white kitchen cabinets that they purchased from the salvage yard by the Williamsburg Bridge and repainted. They found a red dinette set at a junk shop on Wythe and made the area adjoining the new kitchen—previously Emily’s living room—their eating place. Emily’s battered couch they pushed a few feet east, into what had recently been Emily’s bedroom—they would sleep upstairs now, in two square, sunny rooms, separated by a generous hallway—and Clara sewed a slipcover out of some red fabric she found in a bin at the Salvation Army shop on Bedford.
It was a dream apartment, really, particularly when compared with the squalid rooms from which it had sprung. Emily’s friends were amazed by the transformation—and told Clara she ought to work in interior design or architecture—but no more so than by Clara herself. “She’s so normal,” Lil told Emily. “I mean, she’s really nice and doesn’t seem crazy at all. She looks like she lives in the suburbs or something. Like someone’s mom.” This was true. In high school, Clara had dyed her long chestnut hair—shiny, shampoo-commercial hair that Emily had envied—pink and purple and green and blue, and worn short black skirts over black tights and high boots with thick soles, and Emily thought she was the coolest person in the world. Now she was plump and puffy, from years of medication and the starchy sanatorium food, and appeared to own no clothing other than the faded sweatpants and stained green tunic she wore every day. Her hair had turned an odd beige color, somewhere between mud and straw, and had taken on the coarse texture that comes from too many color changes in too short a time, and her face, which was round and small, had gone even rounder, with the peaked Kaplan chin jutting out from her jaw, like an afterthought. Like Emily, she had blue eyes. “Her best feature,” Emily’s mother carped, “now that she’s ruined her hair.” It was amazing, Emily thought, that this woman had been instrumental in the creation of women’s studies departments at Emory and Chapel Hill. But Emily, too, hated to think about Clara’s poor hair, once so extraordinary and luminous.
“Do you have to color it?” she asked Clara one Saturday, as they walked toward the shops on Wythe, chairs in mind.
“I’m so gray,” said her sister. “It makes me look old.”
And so, toward the end of October, the renovations done, she took Clara to a small salon, suggested by Sadie, for “corrective color” and a new cut. “What’s your natural color,” the hairdresser asked. “Damned if I know,” Clara told her, with a loud, too loud, laugh. One of Clara’s canine teeth was turning a dull gray color, Emily noticed, a sign that the tooth was dying. Could it be saved? No, probably not. And besides, Clara, at the moment, had no insurance. Perhaps Beth’s dad could see her pro bono, or at a reduced rate? Emily kept meaning to see whether she could put Clara on her own policy, as a dependent, but it was unlikely, until the SSI kicked in, certifying that, yes, Clara was officially dependent, in the truest sense of the term, but by that time the point would be moot, for she would be eligible for Medicaid (or was it Medicare?). Though, did Medicaid (Medicare?) cover dental? Had her mother mentioned this? She probably had. Why would Clara have a dying tooth? Had she stopped brushing her teeth? Of all Clara’s missteps, this one somehow seemed the most tragic, for it was so permanent, so unignorable. Teeth, once wrecked, could never be saved.
Three hours later—after Emily had read through a half dozen back issues of In Style—Clara emerged with a sleek brown pixie cut, which made her eyes look huge. “You look gorgeous,” Emily told her, though she worried that the new style also made Clara’s body look huge. Silently, the tiny blonde behind the salon’s register handed Clara a printout, which Clara immediately passed to Emily, who tried not to blanch when she saw the sum owed: $300—though the sign said a cut was only $65 and color was “from $85.” “Thanks so much,” she said to the blonde—who had done nothing, really, and didn’t need to be thanked, but it was either that or start screaming—and handed over her credit card, generally reserved for emergencies. It was worth it, she told herself, to see Clara smile at herself in the mirror and, later, when they met for dinner, to hear Lil and Beth tell her how great she looked. Clara needed to feel good about herself, to gain confidence, if she was going to fully piece herself back together.
Though the fact was that in some ways Clara appeared to be somewhat more together than Emily herself, an occurrence that after more than two months of living together, Emily was still unable to explain. There was new medication, she knew—she watched Clara take it each night, an antianxiety drug—but there had been new medication before. Her mother eventually supplied the answer.
“You need to promise not to get upset, Em.”
“Okay,” Emily agreed nervously.
“Clara had electrical treatments at Brattleboro. It was kind of a last resort—”
“You mean, like, electroshock therapy?” Emily asked, certain she had misheard her mother.
“They don’t actually use that term anymore—”
“Oh my God, Mom. You’re kidding.” Her mother sighed, which only served to infuriate Emily, as if she’d known that Emily would be prickly and uncompromising and judgmental, when that was not at all what was going on. “Didn’t that go out with, like, lobotomies and padded cells?”
“Okay, enough, Emily.” Her mother’s voice had gone sharp. “That’s enough, okay. Yes, you’re right, they didn’t use it for ages, but now it’s making a comeback. Apparently, it’s useful in treating certain types of cases—like Clara’s—in which the disease is preventing the patient from making progress. They were desperate, Emily. We were desperate.”