by Dani Shapiro
“My mother—” she says quietly, more a statement than a question. She is angry, she realizes.
“She’s resting,” the girl says, looking at Clara curiously.
Clara has no idea what this means. Resting. Ruth never rested. She slept four, maybe five hours a night, tops. Clara remembers wandering into the kitchen once—it must have been three in the morning—looking for her mother. And there was Ruth, slumped over the kitchen table, her head resting on her folded arms. The only light in the room was the glow cast from the city outside the window. What are you doing? Why are you sleeping here? she asked her mother. The look in Ruth’s eye when she raised her head—it was as if she were staring straight through Clara, as if she were seeing someone else entirely.
“Is she in the studio?” she asks the girl.
“No. Her room.”
Why is the girl here? She’s acting like she knows things—important things. Ruth has always done this with all her little acolytes, these willing servants who think that somehow to be in the same room as greatness means they’ll absorb it.
“Listen, I—” the girl starts.
“What’s your name?” Clara interrupts.
“Peony.”
Peony. Of course. It couldn’t be a normal name.
“I guess you haven’t seen your mother in a while,” says Peony.
“You could say that.”
The girl keeps staring at Clara while pretending not to stare—another trait endemic to New Yorkers that Clara has forgotten over the years.
“I wouldn’t recognize you,” the girl finally says. “I mean, from the photographs.”
Clara feels this like a physical shock. Like someone has come up behind her, grabbed her around the waist, clamped a hand over her mouth. She waves a hand in the air, quickly trying to make the whole thing go away. Not that. Anything but that. The flood of images—she closes her eyes for a moment, a trick she learned a long time ago, and shuts them out.
“I’m going to see my mother now,” she says. Her voice is thick. She doesn’t sound like herself. She isn’t herself, here in this apartment.
Peony nods. As Clara starts down the hall to Ruth’s bedroom, she can feel Peony’s eyes on her back, watching her.
Clara knocks softly. Is Ruth sleeping? For so many years, she tried to turn the doorknob without a sound, little feet padding across the hardwood floor. Quiet as a mouse, Ruth would laugh in the morning, opening her dark eyes to find Clara curled into a ball, tucked against her.
“Wait a minute,” Ruth calls from the other side of the heavy door. Fourteen years, and these are her mother’s first words. Clara stands still. She is surrounded by all the ghosts of her former selves that have ever occupied this space. The toddler dragging a red crayon down the length of the freshly painted hallway molding; the first-grader racing around the apartment, desperate to find her mother; the teenager sneaking in, avoiding the floorboards that creaked on her way to her own room. She tests her memory now, pressing one foot down on a slightly warped piece of the parquet. It groans, a low, almost animal sound, just like it always did.
“Come in,” she hears Ruth say.
Clara’s stomach lurches. The last thing she ate was a protein bar at the airport. Her intestines squeeze and rumble in protest against the combination of too much anxiety and too little sustenance. She imagines herself perched on the edge of a high craggy cliff, like a diver she once saw in Portugal when she was a kid. Arms raised high, back arched, and then that moment—it looked to her like faith—of slicing purposefully, cleanly through the air. She pushes the door open.
Ruth is sitting in a wheelchair by the window. No lights have been turned on, not even a bedside lamp. In the fading purple-gray dusk she is in shadows.
“Hi, Mom,” Clara says. The word slips from her mouth, a lozenge, leaving behind the distinct taste of a young and bitter fruit.
“You’re here,” Ruth says. Even bundled into black sweatpants and a thick fleece sweatshirt, she is all bones. Her face, angular to begin with, looks sharply etched, like a pencil drawing. A brightly colored scarf is tied around her small head like a turban.
Clara’s eyes sting. She looks around the room at the medical paraphernalia: the dull aluminum gleam of a walker, an ivory-tipped cane propped against the wall, a portable commode on the floor near the bathroom. Orange plastic prescription bottles litter the bedside table. Robin was right. Clara couldn’t believe it until she saw it with her own eyes. Ruth is very sick. Ruth is—
She leans against the side of the bed. She isn’t sure what to do. She’s afraid to go near her mother, and she’s afraid to stand too far away. There isn’t anything in the self-help section for this, no Idiot’s Guide to Seeing Your Mother After Fourteen Years.
Ruth flips the brakes on her wheelchair and struggles to stand. She makes it to her feet, then sways to the left, catching herself against the window. Her face is the color of a blank sheet of paper.
“Sit down!” Clara says. “Please don’t get up for me—”
Ruth flashes Clara a look—there’s the old Ruth, those dark eyes capable of seeing through anything—as if to say, You silly child.
“Could you fetch me my walker? I can’t reach it.”
The walker. Of course. Clara goes to the far wall and grabs it, grateful for something to do. Then she takes it to Ruth, who doesn’t stop watching her—hungrily, possessively—a look that makes Clara feel smaller and smaller.
“Let’s sit in the living room,” says Ruth. “I can’t stand being in this depressing place.” She shuffles forward, using the walker, her feet barely leaving the floor. Her jaw clenches with the effort. One leg keeps turning inward, nearly tripping her with each step.
“Maybe if you just got back into the wheelchair, I could push you,” Clara starts. “It might be easier—”
“God, don’t tell me what to do,” Ruth says. Her voice is reedy with sudden rage. “I’m going to walk into the—”
She trips on the fringe of the carpet and goes down. Her body hardly makes a noise as it hits the floor. “I’m okay,” she says, even as she’s falling. “I’m okay. Help me up.”
Clara reaches down and grabs Ruth under both her arms. She hoists her back up—she is light as a child—and half drags, half carries her back to the wheelchair. She’s trying not to think, just to act. She can keep doing the next thing, whatever the next thing might be. Put one foot in front of the other. That, she can handle. Anything but talking. She just doesn’t want to talk.
“Thank you,” Ruth says. “That damn rug keeps getting in my way.”
Her head scarf has been dislodged. Her hair—that black, wavy, waist-length hair—is gone. She’s bald, the bony conical shape of her skull like something obscene, something not meant to be witnessed. Tufts of downy fuzz cover the top of her head. She looks new, like she has just been born. But no. The blue-black circles under her eyes, the skin so papery it might crumble to the touch. She is not new. She is—Clara does a quick calculation—fifty-seven years old. The last time they saw each other, Clara was eighteen and Ruth forty-three. She rests for a moment on the tide of numbers—infallible, controllable numbers—until the numbers start turning on her. Fourteen years: a lifetime. Samantha’s lifetime, and then some. So much has been lost. So much has always been lost.
“Well, don’t just stand there and stare.” Ruth waves her hand in the air—the same gesture Clara used just a few minutes ago with the girl, Peony.
“I’m sorry,” Clara says. “I just…”
“I know. I’m quite a sight.” Ruth tries to replace the head scarf.
“What’s happened to you?” Clara forces herself to ask. She leans against the bed again. She can just about make out the labels on some of the prescription bottles from here: morphine, lorazepam. She wants to reach over, grab a bottle, shake its contents into her open palm. Stop it. Oblivion is not an option. She can’t soften the edges of this thing—a pain beyond dulling.
“Didn’t Robin brief you? It app
ears that I have adenocarcinoma of the lung. Stage IIIB,” Ruth says. “Which is a bad thing. Very bad.” An attempt to keep her voice light. As if it hasn’t been more than a decade. As if the thirty-two-year-old woman standing before her is no different from the eighteen-year-old girl who left.
Peony has slipped into the room, carrying a tray with a cup of something steaming—soup, tea—and some toast.
“You two have met?” Ruth asks, as if they’re at a cocktail party. “Peony has been an absolute godsend.”
Of course, they’re all godsends, the girls and boys who worship at Ruth’s feet. And Clara—ungrateful, terrible disappointment that she is—had fled. She had broken every pact and even one of the Ten Commandments.
“It’s time for you to eat,” says Peony. She sets the tray down on a rolling table, a piece of hospital furniture. “Can I get you anything else?”
Clara bets this isn’t what she had in mind when she got the internship with Ruth Dunne.
“No, thanks,” says Ruth. “I just want to be left alone with my daughter.”
“Call if you need me,” says Peony. And just as quickly, she slips back out.
My daughter. The phrase is not lost on Clara. Ruth has always used Clara’s given name—the name Ruth gave her—sparingly. She’d much prefer to claim her as her own. My daughter. So many years since Clara has heard it, but still—it doesn’t matter. Her mother’s eyes are upon her. Boring into her. Darting back and forth, up and down. As a very little girl, Clara used to examine herself—each limb, every finger and toe—before going to sleep at night and again upon waking in the morning. She was deathly afraid that Ruth might have stolen away a piece of her. Once she knew about internal organs—heart, lungs, pancreas, liver—she searched herself all over for scars.
“Let me help you with your soup,” Clara says, swinging the arm of the hospital table across the wheelchair.
“I don’t want any soup,” says Ruth. “I don’t have time for soup.”
Clara has kept tabs on Ruth over the years, typing her mother’s name into search engines late at night, after Sam and Jonathan were asleep. She knew when Ruth switched from Castelli to Metro Pictures, and then from Metro Pictures to Matthew Marks. She knew about the retrospective at the Whitney last year, and in the weeks after the opening she bought the magazines in which postage-stamp-sized photos might appear. There was one, finally, in New York magazine, of Ruth, elegant in a black sweater and turquoise dangling earrings, her masses of hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Was she already sick then?
“Tell me something,” says Ruth.
“What do you want to know?”
Ruth sighs, slumping down in her seat. She looks like she might slide right off the wheelchair and back onto the floor. “What don’t I want to know,” she says. She looks at Clara’s left hand, her gold wedding ring no thicker than a wire. She scans Clara’s whole body, looking for clues and signs.
“You live up north,” Ruth says. More a statement than a question.
Clara nods. If she had to bet, she’d say that Ruth already knows quite a lot. Robin would have told her. Even though Clara and Robin have agreed, all these years, to stay off the subject of Ruth, nothing was stopping Robin from telling Ruth the little that she knew about her sister’s life.
“Children?”
“A daughter,” Clara answers. “She’s nine.”
Surely, Ruth already knows this. Even if Robin had tried to stay out of it, Ruth would have grilled her: Who is your sister married to? How many children does she have?
“Just one?” says Ruth dreamily. “You should have another. You should have two, like me.”
Clara clenches a fist, then releases it. She keeps doing this, opening and closing her hand, feeling her nails dig into her palm.
“And there’s a husband, I presume?”
Clara’s about to say something—she has to say something—but she doesn’t want even to utter Jonathan’s name—or Sam’s—in front of her mother.
Something crosses Ruth’s face.
“Can you send Peony in, darling?” she asks.
“Why do you need Peony?” Clara asks. Insane as it is, she feels hurt.
“Please.” Ruth’s eyes dart over to the commode in the corner.
Ah. This is something she can’t do. Thank goodness Ruth understands this. She doesn’t expect Clara to hoist up her nightgown and wedge the commode under her buttocks. Perhaps this is a daughterly duty, repayment for the early years of diapering, but not this daughter. Not this mother. Suddenly Clara feels as if she might throw up. In which case the commode would be useful.
“Clara!” Ruth’s voice snaps her out of it.
“Sorry,” Clara murmurs. She goes looking for Peony, quickly, quickly, remembering some old childhood helplessness—Mom! Mom, I’ve gotta go!—and finds her sitting at the kitchen table, resting her legs on a chair, leafing through the arts section of the Times.
“My mother needs you,” Clara says. It’s all wrong. An eighteen-year-old student should not be changing Ruth’s bedpan. Ruth shouldn’t need a goddamned bedpan. Fifty-seven is so young. Peony is already halfway down the hall, past the two closed doors to what were once Clara’s and Robin’s bedrooms. Clara pours herself a glass of water, then picks up the phone. Tacked to the wall is a list of emergency numbers: the super, the alarm company, the insurance broker, and Robin’s home, cell, office.
“Ms. Dunne’s office,” a male assistant answers.
“Is she in?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Her sister.”
An imperceptible pause. “Hold a moment.”
As she holds, Clara tries to breathe all the way in. Her lungs feel tight, as if they are closing up in sympathy for Ruth. She struggles for more air. Sitting in the kitchen of her childhood—the refrigerator, oven, even the microwave are the same as when she left, no Elle Decor remodeling for Ruth—Clara is drowning. She needs to talk to Jonathan. She needs to hear Samantha’s sweet, thin voice.
“You’re here.”
Robin’s voice. So familiar, yet so strange. No comfort to be found in it.
“I’m freaking out,” Clara says.
“Welcome home.”
“Please don’t keep saying that!”
“What? What am I saying?”
“Home. This isn’t my home!”
“Sorry—just a figure of speech.”
Clara hears papers rustling, the ding of e-mail being received. “She looks awful,” she says quietly.
“Cancer isn’t pretty.”
“Robin, will you stop talking like that?”
“Like what? I have no idea what you mean.”
“You’re talking to me in news flashes instead of like a human being.”
Robin sighs heavily into the phone. “It’s been stressful,” she says. “And now—I mean, I’m glad you’re here, and it takes some of the pressure off me, but you’ve got to admit it also creates a whole new set of problems.”
“Look—you called me.”
“I had to call,” Robin says. “I didn’t want it weighing on me for the rest of my life that you didn’t get a chance to—”
“To what?” Clara interrupts. “To make amends? To fix things? To say goodbye?”
The two sisters fall silent.
“Take your pick,” Robin says softly, after a while. And she hangs up the phone, so gently that it takes Clara a moment to realize she’s been disconnected.
Chapter Two
RUTH’S STUDIO is pitch-black and empty. Clara slowly walks inside, feeling like a trespasser. The office is to the right of the front door. She could do this with her eyes closed, even now. She feels for the edge of the massive oak desk, then gropes around for the switch on the cord of the desk lamp. A bright halogen light floods the office. It seems as if no one has set foot here in months. Surely the girl, Peony, has been taking care of Ruth’s business. Or Robin, stickler for all details. But the desk is piled with mail, most of it unopened.
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Beyond the office is the darkroom, still with its faint chemical smell. And past the darkroom, the cavernous studio itself, with arched windows, all fitted with blackout curtains, facing Broadway. It feels like a cave. Deep inside a life, or a mind—her mother’s mind—and far, far from the outside world. The walls are so thick in this old building that even the sounds of ambulances, fire trucks, and the occasional car alarm are muted. But Ruth, so easily distracted, had the studio professionally soundproofed. It’s absence of noise is complete. It has its own disconcerting sound: total blankness.
The studio had once been a two-bedroom apartment, which Ruth rented in the mid-1970s. She gutted it and turned it into a pristine, white space. An enormous luxury, really, since most of her work had been set outdoors, in nature. It was only in later years—after Clara left—that Ruth began to really use the studio. Clara had read somewhere, a few years back, that Ruth’s wall-sized commissioned portraits were selling for $100,000 apiece.
She sits on Ruth’s swivel chair, facing the desk, halfheartedly sifting through bills, magazine subscriptions, handwritten letters, probably from students and fans. Medical bills are stacked in their own wire basket. Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Mount Sinai, Columbia Presbyterian, Beth Israel. Clearly, Ruth has gone from doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital, in search of a cure.
Above the desk hangs a bulletin board covered with glossy invitations to gallery openings; the most recent is six months old. Some postcards of Ruth’s favorite photographs are tacked to the board: a Walker Evans, an Arnold Newman, a Man Ray of two women—his wife and her lover, if Clara remembers correctly. Now she sees the yellowed edge of a small piece of notepaper poking out from beneath the Man Ray. It occupies the same pushpin. Clara moves the postcard to the side and traces the fragile edge of the note with one finger.
Dear Ruth.
Her own handwriting, loopy and round, embarrassingly girlish.
