Remembering Claire. More

The first post of Remembering Claire is read more than any other on the site. Odd for a piece I laid to rest years ago. But fitting, as it has lingered in memory more than any other. Long, slow, and tragic, with grace at the end, it does not fit the current era. For whoever has been following the memory posted earlier, here is more, in sequence with the first.

Her hair, tucked behind her ears, was the color of dry pine straw, and her body was thin and straight like the bole of a pine. Claire’s dog walked beside her: thin bowed legs, oversize head, and a stout mottled trunk. He walked unleashed, wishing to be nowhere but beside her. She paid him no attention, and he treated her likewise, two beings so perfectly attuned they appeared indifferent.

There was a small store down the street, a place where the shelves were always full of things that no one seemed to buy, and on two afternoons after leaving Joe’s I followed Claire and saw her leave the dog on the sidewalk and go inside. One evening, three weeks after I’d first seen her, I left Joe’s early to be at the store before she arrived. Surprised by my eagerness to finish, Joe thrust the sheet music at me as I left, and I folded it in one hand and shoved it into a pocket.

I didn’t normally smoke, but I’d bought a pack of cigarettes so that I would have something to do when I was near her. At the store I bought a soda, stood outside, and leaned back against a telephone pole, my guitar case, the symbol of my worthiness, I hoped, leaning beside me. I was serious about music, in the way that one can be when young, knowing it could save my life, but I’m sure that to passersby I looked an awkward boy trying too hard to look like something and knowing he did not.

She appeared as expected with the dog panting beside her. I looked up and off. The last of spring’s breezes was blowing, and I saw the leaves at the top of the willow oaks shudder. As she drew closer I decided to say nothing, to appear as though I just happened to be there watching spring end, and hope she would speak.

She gazed off with more experience than I did, her eyes half-squinted even though she looked away from the sun, and I knew the gaze must be focused on a distant vision more profound than anything I saw. Her lips spread in a thin determined line. She was serious about whatever she saw. When she came closer and softly told the strange dog to sit beside a traffic sign pole, however, it became difficult to know if her expression spoke of a distant engagement or was simply vague. She moved her thin body with indifference, the kind of indifference you adopt if you need to, when there are things that you need not to matter. She left the dog and went into the store. She stayed inside for a long time, and after fifteen minutes I was impatient. I could see her through the plate glass windows, walking slowly up one aisle and down the next, looking at foods and cleaners. I decided to leave. The next time I could say something as if we’d met before. But first I kneeled to pet the dog. Immediately the door opened and she was standing over me.

I stood and said, “Strange dog.”

She didn’t say anything. Her gaze was on something else even as she looked at me and lifted a soda bottle to her lips. I was that unimportant. I watched her mouth and neck work as she swallowed. The dog had risen when she came through the door and stood watching her face, his tongue out and his tail wagging slowly, not in eagerness but in a slow rhythm that measured the day.

“Do you live here?” I asked. I knew I’d made a fool of myself. There’s nothing else one can do. She would say, “People don’t live at stores, idiot.” I would be dismissed. But she kept the bottle to her lips and didn’t answer.

When she finally lowered her arm she nodded. We faced each other for a moment, then she turned and placed the emptied bottle in a bin beside the outdoor soda machine. I lighted a cigarette in the time it took her to return. She ignored me when she squatted to scratch the dog’s neck, a signal that it was time to leave. A breeze blew her thin hair around and swirled smoke into my face. It also blew over my guitar case, which landed with a cry. I knelt and turned the case over, unlatched and opened it, and ran my fingers over the wood. I tilted the instrument up by the neck and turned it, feeling around the tuning pegs with my fingers and caressing the back of the body. She watched me. I wasn’t worried about being a fool then. I lay the guitar gingerly into the deep blue of the case and shut it away. She smiled vaguely, as if she remembered smiling had once been a good thing to do.

“Cigarette?” I asked. I took the pack from my pocket and held it out to her. The dog thrust up his snout. I fumbled the box, and the cigarettes spilled out and dribbled to the ground. The dog sniffed at them as if they were uninteresting little animals. This was not a good beginning. She laughed. She first looked down at the cigarettes, then tilted her head to look at me, for the first time acknowledging I was worth attention, and she gave me a complicitous grin as if this was a confirming event in a strange life. Then she looked at the ground again, suddenly shy, and scratched her cheek with a finger. I smiled hopefully. We picked up the cigarettes together, and when we were done I told her my name and she told me hers.

Then it seemed to both of us that we were meant to do something more together, so I walked with her toward her home. I was much taller than she was; her eyes were at the level of my shoulders. We smoked, for the only time, the smoke getting in our eyes and neither of us knowing how to control it. My eyes were wet, and I worried she would turn to look at me and think I was crying. Fortunately, she didn’t turn toward me. I would learn that she rarely would. I flicked away my cigarette, almost hitting a boy as he flew past on a bicycle, and he swore at me with the passion of someone who has just learned to curse. Just what you want someone to do as you’re trying to meet a girl. But she acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Like Claire, I was paying no attention to the street, and it was a wonder we made it ten yards without being struck by a car. We said several words about school—it would be an exaggeration to say we talked about it. This work that had consumed most of our lives would end for both of us for good in several weeks. Claire was bussed to the other side of the city, which was why I’d never seen her except after I left Joe’s.

She lived in a single story white clapboard house that was small but neatly kept. Dwarf azaleas lined the brick foundation and early lilies were already up and had opened their mouths in the sunlight beside the porch. There were curtains at the windows and a porch swing by the door. The house was neater than most of the others on the street, where several cars on blocks rested at the curb, but it looked temporary. I could see from one window through another; there was little furniture, and only a couple of pictures hung on the walls. There were no objects spread around the lawn, either, no picnic table or benches, no lounges in what I could see of the backyard. As we approached, a middle-aged woman came outside, lifted a magazine from the porch swing and, without seeing us, went back inside through the screen door.

“That’s Annette,” Claire said.

I nodded and didn’t ask who Annette was, happy to have achieved what I had. I said, “I’ll see you again,” a half question, and she looked away, and half smiled, and we said goodbye simultaneously. As I walked away I didn’t look back.