Black & White

by Dani Shapiro

  “Let me.” Clara comes around the side of the chair and sits next to Robin. She does a quick search for the publisher, and there it is, what she’s been childishly hoping she wouldn’t find. CLARA. It pops up instantly—the design she saw earlier in the day, the price in euros, the date of publication. December, nine months from now.

  “Mom?” Tucker calls from the kitchen. “Mom, I need some help with—”

  “Not now,” Robin calls back. “Go ask your father.”

  “But he—”

  “Just do it!”

  Robin folds her hands in her lap, but not before Clara notices that she’s shaking. Her whole body is taut. The tiny muscles in her arms twitch beneath the smooth surface of her skin.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, not looking at Clara.

  “You didn’t do anything,” Clara says.

  “I know. I know, but—”

  “Mom?” Another child’s voice pierces the moment. “I forgot that I need my guitar tomorrow, at school.”

  “I’m busy, Harrison,” Robin calls. “You’re going to have to wait a few minutes.”

  She turns now and looks directly at Clara.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  But Clara knows. She knows exactly what Robin means. She can hear Robin’s younger voice—fourteen years younger, to be exact—as if it has been trapped inside of Clara all these years. You’re leaving, aren’t you? You’re not coming back. How can you do this? It has never gone away. None of it has. The past is alive inside of them—it will die only when they do, and maybe not even then.

  “I haven’t thought about it—” she falters. And then she realizes that it is, in fact, all she’s been thinking about as she’s circled the city. A knowledge, just out of reach. She’s already gone, in fact. Back to Maine, back to the life she never should have left, not for a minute. She’s brought about Jonathan’s fury at her, Sammy’s sadness and confusion—for what? What had she been thinking, that it really could be different?

  “Come on, Clara.”

  “I’m not like you, Robin, I don’t just—”

  “You’re leaving.”

  A long pause, a free fall.

  “Yes.”

  Clara hadn’t noticed—hadn’t allowed herself to notice—how much Robin has grown to look like their father. She has Nathan’s gray-green eyes, Nathan’s strong jaw. Clara wishes she could wrap her arms around her sister and hold her.

  “Is that it, then?” Robin’s face tightens further.

  “Yes,” Clara says softly.

  Robin’s cheeks redden. “Please. I know this is bad,” she says. “And you have every right to be furious at Ruth—but I’ve been dealing with her for so goddamned long by myself—”

  “I just can’t,” Clara says. “Especially now, after I started to—”

  She breaks off, shaking her head.

  “What? Started to what?” Robin stands up now and moves a few steps back. As if she can’t bear to sit so close to Clara.

  “To let myself feel something for her again. To believe that maybe—”

  “She is who she is,” Robin says. “I’ve known that forever.”

  “Well, maybe it’s less complicated for you,” says Clara.

  Robin blinks hard.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “You think my relationship with Ruth has been—uncomplicated?”

  “No, that’s not what I—”

  “Fuck you,” Robin says, her tone improbably soft.

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” Robin says. “It’s all about you, Clara. It’s always been all about you.”

  “No, that’s not it!”

  Clara stands up. She can’t afford to be sitting down with Robin towering over her like this. Robin’s hands twitch at her sides, and for a split second Clara thinks her sister might slap her. But then all that rage seems to slide off—Clara can almost see it puddling on the floor around Robin—and what is left, instead, looks like grief.

  “I spent my whole life”—Robin’s mouth contorts—“by myself. Mom was always taking you away. You spent hours in the studio—”

  “I didn’t want to be doing that,” Clara interrupts. “I didn’t want—”

  “And then in the country,” Robin goes on. “You’d be gone all afternoon. What did you think I was doing, especially on the weekends when Dad was away? I was alone in that goddamned house—”

  “She was torturing me,” Clara says softly. “I hated it.”

  “She was paying attention to you.”

  “Mommy?”

  Elliot appears in the archway of the living room, rubbing her eyes. She’s holding a well-worn stuffed kitten, and her cheeks are creased from her pillow.

  “Oh, Ellie, would you ask Daddy or Edjinea to put you back to bed, honey? Mommy’s busy.”

  Elliot turns and pads back down the hall, looking for her father.

  “God, you’d think that for once I could have a little space.” Robin bites her cuticle, then stares at her fingernails. She’s trying hard not to cry. “Please, Clara. Stay a little while longer.”

  It costs Robin something to ask, and Clara knows it.

  “Listen,” Clara says. “I was trying to let go of it—trying to tell myself that it all happened a long time ago—”

  “And it did!” Robin interrupts.

  “But now she’s bringing it back,” Clara says. “It’s all coming back. Don’t you see?”

  “Please,” Robin repeats. Her mouth quivering.

  “I can’t.”

  Something shuts down in Robin’s eyes. Clara sees it happening—as if two tiny window shades have been pulled down. Her whole face becomes opaque. Robin gives a nod, then a small tight smile.

  “Okay, then,” she says. “When’s your flight?”

  Chapter Five

  THE TAXI from Bangor drops Clara off in front of the Bar Harbor YMCA. The trucks and SUVs in the parking lot are in their usual spots. Mary Ann Rowe’s metallic blue Toyota with its SUPPORT OUR TROOPS bumper sticker is next to Ali Mulvey’s white Land Cruiser, so caked with mud and snow that it appears gray. Susanna Haber’s Lexus—the only luxury SUV in the lot—is parked halfway into the yellow line of a handicapped space even though there’s plenty of room around it. If Clara bothered to look, she knows she would see keys dangling from the ignitions of most of the cars and open handbags resting on passenger seats. They all do this, the mothers. They even leave their engines running sometimes, as they dash into the Y to pick up their kids after swim practice.

  Four-thirty on a Wednesday, and everything is exactly as it was before Clara left. She can hear the sound of splashing, the shriek of the coach’s whistle as she walks past the front desk to the double doors leading to the Olympic-sized pool. She inhales sharply. The warm damp air stings the insides of her nostrils. The air around the pool smells slightly of chlorine.

  The last two and a half weeks close around her—constricting her movements—and for a moment she stops. Tries to calm down. You’re home now. You’re home now. You’re home. Fourteen years—what hubris, what staggering innocence—to think that those years would double and redouble, that she would live out her whole life as she intended. As if her past could be chopped away. She remembers once, at Sawyer’s Market, ordering a butterflied leg of lamb. She watched as the butcher carefully sliced away the fat, his knife as precise as a scalpel. When it came time for him to flatten the meat, he turned to Clara with a wink. Thinking of my mother, he said, as he grabbed a meat cleaver. He raised the cleaver high and started pounding on the meat, whacking it until it quivered under the thick metal blade. A vein popped out in his forehead from the effort.

  Thinking of my mother. As Clara pushes the doors open, the sound of splashing grows louder. The thin voices of girls (Sammy!) echo off the tile walls and ceiling. The humid air, usually oppressive, hits her not at all unpleasantly. Often she finds i
t hard to breathe in here, but today—after the taxi to LaGuardia, the hour-long flight to Bangor, the two-hour car service back to the island—her pores open up to the heat. She wants to sweat New York out of her system. Feel her mother and her sister—and the rest of them, Kubovy, even the hospice nurse—dripping out of her. Detoxified. Gone.

  Where’s Sammy? Clara’s need to see Sammy is frantic, physical. She scans the pool for Sammy’s small head in its bathing cap and goggles. There she is, poised to dive into the pool at the far end—the long muscles in her thighs tensed, arms angled perfectly over her head. It’s all Clara can do not to lurch toward her daughter, dive into the pool, and grab Sammy’s wiry little body, breathe into the back of her sweet wet neck.

  Two and a half weeks. A fucking eternity. And for what?

  The moms are sitting on the bleachers, surrounded by piles of towels, down jackets, snow boots, knapsacks, brown paper bags filled with snacks for the ride home: juice boxes, single-serving yogurts, and packages of peanut butter crackers. This group of women has been together for years, loosely formed by the fact that their daughters are swimmers. Clara has always thought of them as the moms. As if she herself were apart from them. As if she herself has not perched on these bleachers, year after year, making small talk about play dates, chorus, the need for a new tennis coach.

  Laurel Connolly spots her at the door and waves. Her daughter Emily has been swimming with Sam since kindergarten.

  “Hey there, stranger!” Laurel moves a pile of towels out of the way and makes room for Clara next to her on the bleacher. She leans over and gives Clara a hug. “How are you? I’ve been thinking about you so much.”

  “I’m fine,” Clara says. “Thanks for all the carpooling. It was a huge help.”

  “No problem.” Laurel is looking at Clara strangely. Too intensely. “Are you okay? I mean—really?”

  Inwardly, Clara bristles. She isn’t ready for this—the way people in Southwest know all about each other’s comings and goings. They know who’s sick, who’s having problems meeting their mortgage payments, whose child needs remedial help at school. They pass each other’s houses in their cars, and they notice who stays up late at night, the blue flickering lights of television visible from the street.

  “I just had to be in New York for a while,” she says. Hoping Laurel will leave it at that.

  “Well, thank God you were able to get to the best doctors,” says Laurel.

  Clara is watching Sam slice through the water in a graceful back-stroke. So determined, so purposeful. Sam has no idea Clara is here, and she won’t notice until practice is over—she’s in another world when she’s swimming.

  But then Laurel’s words sink in.

  “I’m sorry?” Clara turns to Laurel, whose dark curly hair has been made wild by the humidity, springing all around her soft, pretty face. In her sweat suit and sneakers, she could be mistaken for a high school kid.

  “The specialist,” Laurel repeats. “In New York.”

  Clara feels apprehensive—suddenly on guard—though she has no idea why.

  “Sammy told Emily that you were sick,” Laurel falters. “That you needed to be away because—”

  Clara looks at her, unable to hide her bewilderment.

  “You mean you’re not—”

  “No,” Clara says slowly. “I’m not sick.”

  “She told the whole class,” says Laurel. “I was going to call Jonathan, but he’s so private, and I thought—”

  Laurel breaks off. She looks down at her hands, embarrassed for Clara.

  Oh, Sammy. Clara’s stomach clenches. She can see it, of course, all too clearly. Sammy holding court with her friends as they stand by their open lockers. Flushed, eyes glittering. The tumble of words that seem to fall, on their own, from Sammy’s lips. The sweet, slightly sickening relief at having something—anything—to say about her mother.

  “Shit,” Clara says, under her breath. She keeps her eyes on Sam. Doing the butterfly now. Ahead of the pack. Her small curved back rising and falling through the water like a dolphin’s.

  “It’s okay.” Laurel tries to fix things, good mommy that she is. “Really—all our girls exaggerate sometimes.”

  Clara tries to steady her heartbeat, quiet the thumping against her rib cage as she watches Sammy climb out on the far edge of the pool. Sam pulls off her bathing cap, her long dark hair spilling over her shoulders, her body glistening. She stands with a gaggle of her girlfriends, laughing at something, their heads bent together. Sammy! she wants to shout. Over here! She wants to wrap Sam in a towel. Wrap her around and around and around—

  The shriek of the coach’s whistle, the splash of arms and legs scissoring through water, the high-pitched voices of the girls—it all becomes muffled, cottony. Be still, Clara. This is a very slow exposure. Don’t move…That’s it, darling. That’s beautiful. Try not to breathe. Clara digs her ragged fingernails into the fleshy part of her palms. Has that whispery voice—Ruth’s voice—been with her all along? Surrounding her throughout her whole adult life like a toxic gas, noxious and undetectable? Now she can’t seem to make any of it go away. Stay absolutely still, sweetheart. The moon is in the perfect spot.

  “Clara?”

  Laurel’s voice seems to be coming from a far-off place.

  “Clara, did you hear me?”

  “What?” Clara shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I was just—”

  “I was supposed to drive Sammy home,” Laurel says. “Did you come straight from the airport?”

  “Yes, actually.” Clara feels a rush of gratitude. “I had planned to call Jonathan, but it would be incredibly helpful if you could give us a lift home.”

  “No problem.”

  The girls are starting to move toward the bleachers. Shivering, smooth arms covered with goose bumps. Any minute now, Sammy will see her. Any minute now, Sam will look over to the bleachers and—

  Emily notices Clara first and points. Even from twenty yards away, Clara can see Emily saying, Look, there’s your mother. Sammy’s head jerks up. Her eyes quickly race over the dozen women standing there, towels in hand, until she lights on Clara. She stops absolutely still for a second—frozen in surprise—then defies the number one rule at the pool and sprints the rest of the way on the wet tile floor.

  “Mommy!”

  Sammy runs straight into her, dripping wet bathing suit and all. She wraps her arms around Clara’s waist and holds tight. Some of Sam’s friends have already stopped hugging their mothers in public. They’re too cool for school, these girls. Clara sees them sometimes at drop-off, shrugging off any gesture of affection, any acknowledgment of parenthood. They pretend they hardly know their mothers. And the mothers, smiling their brave, wavering smiles—not me, Clara thinks. Not yet. Not today.

  “I didn’t know you were coming!”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  Clara’s voice catches in her throat. Sammy’s face opens up to her like a flower. How could she have left this precious girl for more than two weeks? What could possibly have justified it? Tell me everything, darling. Tell me about your life in—where is it again? Northern Maine? How do you stand living in such a place? Is there culture there? Clara pushes Ruth away, mentally shoves her so hard that she goes careening off the planet. Limbs flailing. Mouth cartoonishly open into a scream. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

  “Hi, Clara,” says Emily, sidling up next to Sam. Is it Clara’s imagination, or is Emily looking at her funny? The girl is staring at her; she’s sure of it.

  “What’s the matter, Emily?” asks Clara, a bit too sharply. She gives a quick, sidelong glance at Sam.

  “Mom, let’s go,” says Sam, her voice thin and reedy. Anxious to get out of here. To avoid being caught in her big lie—and how big is it, anyway? How elaborate? Did she give Clara a particular disease? A number of months to live? Clara feels a wild surge of protectiveness toward Sam. If the other kids at school find out that Sammy has lied, she’ll have a hard time getting past it.
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br />   Sam pulls a huge navy-and-white Yale sweatshirt—one of Jonathan’s—over her head, then shimmies out of her Speedo, crouching down to remove the waterlogged bathing suit from around her ankles. She yanks up her jeans and stuffs her bare feet into her fleece-lined snow boots. Then she stands there expectantly, holding her knapsack.

  “Laurel and Emily are giving us a ride home, sweetheart.”

  Sam’s face falls. Clara sees the anxiety marching across it. Clara’s not used to seeing Sammy this way, tense and self-protective.

  Amid the goodbyes and see-you-tomorrows, the social dance of nine-year-old girls who spend almost every waking hour together, Sam and Clara follow Emily and Laurel out of the building and through the parking lot to Laurel’s truck. The girls have recently graduated from their booster seats—Sammy weighing in at just over sixty pounds—and they climb into the backseat, strapping themselves in with their seat belts.

  Laurel throws the truck into reverse and pulls out of the parking lot of the Bar Harbor Y with the ease of someone who does it nearly every day.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Clara says. She looks out the window. In the two and a half weeks since she’s been gone, the thin crust of snow and ice that covered the island—coating the lawns, the docks, the edges of the streets—has all seeped away, leaving in its wake a dirty, grungy brown. The icicles that hung from every windowsill and gutter have melted, taking with them chips of paint, shingles from rooftops. The town looks like a sad old lady with sagging skin and missing teeth. It’s mud season, the time of year when the year-rounders go a little crazy.

  “It’s not out of our way at all,” says Laurel.

  This isn’t strictly true—Laurel and her family live ten minutes inland from Clara’s house—but Clara lets it go. This neighborliness is a fact of life on the island, an unwritten code. It has taken Clara forever to get used to it, but in recent years—especially as Sam has gotten older—she’s grown to appreciate it. Carpooling and sleepovers, the ease with which people help each other out, the casseroles delivered to doorsteps when there’s an illness, a death, a new baby.