* * *
On those mornings when Minna had been at Don’s house the night before, Claire found her in the kitchen early, preparing breakfast, bruise-lipped, quiet and satisfied as a cat that has feasted enough to last for days.
“Aren’t you tired of taking care of an old, sick woman?” Claire pouted. “What can there be for you here?” Miserable at herself for being so whining. In her worst moments, not only did she resent Minna’s health, but also her youth, her beauty, even her previous night out. What she really resented was the unfairness of all those things ending in her own life.
“That’s why I need to be with Don,” Minna said, measuring coffee into a filter. “Do you never watch the mother bird fly away from the nest? The babies worry, but then she comes back with a big, fat worm for them to eat. If they all stayed in the nest, they would starve.”
* * *
Minna owned only a few dresses, rotating so regularly Claire knew which day it was by the choice. What to make of a girl not having more than three dresses and a pair of white jeans to her name? Perhaps it was some bohemianism in her, or an asceticism that rejected material things. Which begged the question of what she did with all the cash she was getting. As a favor, Claire asked her to pick among the girls’ old clothes and her own, explaining how the waste bothered her. Claire especially wanted her to try on a dress made of pale-green and pink silk. In her own opinion, she had reached the nadir of her attractiveness — hairless, unexercised, bloated, and pale — and was convinced she would never again do it justice.
Minna slipped it on. Underneath, she wore no bra, and her nipples were clearly outlined in the fabric as if the dress were designed expressly to accentuate her nakedness instead of clothe it, making her all the more alluring for both what it revealed and what it hid. She twirled on her bare feet, rising on tiptoe, and Claire clapped as the gauzy fabric fluttered out from Minna’s legs. Claire had not felt such childlike pleasure in a long time.
Minna went to her room and returned with a magenta printed scarf, which she wrapped around Claire’s head despite her protests. In the full-length mirror, Claire had to admit that it was a better solution than her alternative of patchy, sad molting-bird baldness.
“Now we are real sisters.” Minna laughed. “Exchanging skins. Why do you insist on making yourself ugly?”
The comment shocked, doubly so since it was her own complaint about Gwen. Was it true that children divided up and took the parents’ traits? Yet it was true she had lost the knack for the physical. “I can’t help it.”
“I see no men here for you. You never talk of anyone.”
“All that is in the past for me.”
“That’s ridiculous. No one is past the need for love.”
That night Claire watched as Minna in the pale-green and pink ex-dress disappeared down the driveway.
* * *
Paz was sorting laundry a few days later when she came across the dress. She brought it to Claire, chiding her that she should know better, that it required dry cleaning. What if the loca (as Paz referred to Minna) had got hold of it for washing, she continued, the ongoing feud between the two turning her bitter. Loca would ruin it. Claire took the dress and said nothing. After Paz left the room, Claire held the dress close and caught a whiff of Minna’s perfume, the patchouli Lucy had given her. She brought it closer to her nose, and there was also the unmistakable tang of sex.
Chapter 7
On those nights when she could neither control Minna’s nocturnal wanderings nor control her own mortal panic, Claire rose, turned on the lamp, and read the novel Minna had given her. Finishing the last page only to start at the beginning again so that the conclusion became beside the point; she craved only the journey. The novel did not abate her fears, but instead made her feel that she was not alone in that fear. Ever since the chemo started and her attending physical deterioration, the past had moved closer, taken up physical residence beside her. She would not admit that she was perhaps looking for meaning in her suffering — why had she been so afflicted, both before and now?
When the wind blew through the trees, Claire heard voices, as in the old days when workers slept overnight in the bunkhouses. A lone avocado falling down on the roof rang out like the crack of a gunshot, and she felt at her chest for a bullet that did not exist. Creakings of the worn boards in the house convinced her intruders had broken in; in the novel she read about creakings of bamboo outside Antoinette’s bedroom window. After a time she forgot which had actually happened and which had been imagined.
Having read it many times before, Claire now read the book as a proxy for Minna’s background, of which she was so stingy. Rhys’s earlier novels failed to interest Claire, but the last novel, set in Rhys’s native islands, spoke about the solace to be found on one’s own land. One always searched for one’s own story in a book no matter how exotic it might seem.
The imagined Minna flourished to the proportions of a romantic heroine, rushing down the crushed-shell driveway of her Coulibri into the arms of some moody island boy, or perhaps an Englishman’s son? Claire backed up, not wanting to turn it into some tawdry romance novel. From her privileged background, it was clear why Minna felt at home in the elite world of Cambridge, even girlfriend to a movie star, but at what price? Did her English suitor lust after her dusky beauty, but not love her for that same non-English blood, just as Antoinette’s Rochester failed to love her?
None of this seemed any more far-fetched than the reality of contemplating her own disease, reading the drug side effects, the survival rates, on pamphlets and disclosure forms. Reading her blood count before each treatment, to see if she was strong enough to endure more. Without the fiction of the Sargasso Sea to lose herself in, Claire would have gone mad. She prayed for metastasis, not of death, but of life, the spreading of an imagined world that would cover over the deficiencies in the real one.
* * *
One afternoon on her way to the garden, Claire found Minna sitting on a stone retaining wall, swinging her legs and humming in a voice so low, so mournful, it sounded more dirge than pleasure. Her face was swollen lumpy from crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s so beautiful here. But I’m still in a bad place.”
“Poor girl, you’re safe here!”
“I’m dead and drowned.”
Claire felt a catch in her throat at the possibility something treasured might be snatched away. She knew about the pernicious effects of nostalgia. Raisi had been plagued with just such longing, until Claire’s father saved up enough money to send her back for a visit, nearly twenty years after she had left. When she returned to California, she said little about the visit and never mentioned going back. Was it a great disappointment, the comparison between memory and always failing reality?
“What do you believe in?” Minna asked.
Claire, astonished at such a question, spread her arms to embrace the groves stretching out all around them. “Isn’t it obvious? This is all there is!”
Minna gave her a look she couldn’t read. “If I could just see the colors, you know? The smells. Just for a moment the sight of the ocean.”
It became clear that Minna made her brave way through life on her charm, but it was a cultivated thing, a thing put on like a piece of clothing. Here the mask dropped, and Claire realized Minna was without protection, helpless against the world.