Remembering Claire

Two chapters from Marshall, the narrator of Remembering Claire. While much happens in this story–birth to a single mother, a father who flees, death by drowning, abandonment, and like a note of grace, sacrifice–the novel is as much about texture, color, and the space between things as it is about plot. Most of all, it is a story of two damaged people trying to create something whole, and the price of such a venture. And although it was not written as a polemic to present the voice of a good man in this Age of Child Men, the voice reminds us that such a thing exists.

I

Summer now. Last night the lightning burned the clouds and unspooled a long vein over the bay. A wind came. The rain stayed offshore. I watched through the night, and this morning the sea is glass and bright. On the slopes the beach plums stand motionless. From the hilltop I watch the figures climb to me from the small cove. They go slowly as I excavate.

I see Claire elsewhere, beside the big Midwestern river. The banks are strewn with debris. It’s winter. Her hands hide in the pockets of the pea coat, the collar up to shield her face from the ice wind. She looks into the distance and sees what no one else sees. The ghost barge hits the piling and swings in the current. Her father’s body hits the water; he drowns, or doesn’t. She carries the question with her. I hear her sing it with the quiet voice in the car. Pennsylvania and New York and New England fly outside the windows until we reach the northern ocean here. She looks away from me and mouths lyrics I will never hear.

She is gone now, beneath the ice, a lifetime ago. That day the light became suddenly too bright, the world glaring and screaming silently above the frozen cove. But there is more to remember than that day. The morning’s warmth leads me to other paths.

We met in spring. We were young, each eighteen, burdened but carrying hope. A warm inland evening far from here, in North Carolina. She looked like she was daydreaming. Children played ball in the street and yelled to each other, but she paid them no attention. They were an eddy at ground level, and she looked beyond them, to something above the houses and trees. I didn’t know what she saw. Something in the distance beyond my sight. It was the separateness that drew me. Each of us longed to be somewhere, as if we were not anywhere.

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.

II

The others have long departed: Joe, who gave me music; Annette, who gave me Claire. I miss Pres, the dog who gave her more understanding than any person could. And Alice, who came later. But their passings were not like hers, and I played no part of them. I was a character in only Claire’s.

After I had arranged two more encounters with Claire on the street, two weeks after our first, I met Annette, who gave us iced tea on the porch. The week after that she asked me to sit on the porch swing with her and asked Claire to return a mixing bowl to a neighbor. Annette wanted to know about me, and I wanted her to judge me well.

“You know I’m not Claire’s mother, don’t you?” she said as she curled both legs under her.

Annette was an aging angel of country songs, dark haired and defiantly seductive, wearing too much blue eye shadow. She had a deep and friendly calm to her. We sat facing the street, where the cars raised a veil of dust that would sheath everything until October. She fought it off by waving a magazine in front of her face. I nodded and rocked us with my foot.

“Has Claire told you much about herself?” she asked.

I shrugged. It sounded as if there was something extraordinary to know. I knew she gazed into the distance and was accompanied by an odd but languid dog. In her way, she was pretty. That was enough. “Not much,” I said.

Annette watched my face and nodded. “Claire’s daddy died when she was seven years old. Jack was lost in an accident on the Ohio River.” She turned to me to be sure I understood what she was going to say. “He’d been in some trouble.”

She was looking at me to see if I was trouble. She looked around my face for signs of it.

“Claire’s mother left Jack when Claire was a baby,” she said. “She wanted to be a country singer and ran off with some man who had a little band. I met her once, before I met Jack, in fact, just in passing. She was pretty. Thin like Claire and with big eyes. Jack never heard from her after she went off, and I guess she never made it in the music business, because we would have heard about it. She never called to see about her baby. Jack and I started living together when Claire was five.”

She looked at the road, not vaguely as Claire would have, but seeing the tar patches and oil spots and shimmer of heat and wishing, maybe, that her life had turned out different. “You play guitar, Marshall. Do you want to make your living that way?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. I just play.” I wished I had something better to tell her. I did want to make a life from music, but I had no idea how, and Joe, in his cramped duplex apartment, didn’t seem a model of success.

Annette fanned herself more. “Jack had two sisters in Cincinnati, but they didn’t want the girl after Jack died, so I brought her with me when I came here. My brother was living here then.”

She paused, and I thought she expected me to ask questions about her or about Claire, so I offered, “Haven’t you ever gotten married?”

She laughed aloud. “Oh lord,” she exclaimed. Then she fanned herself and stretched back her neck and arched her back. She was still a pretty woman. Her breasts pushed up against her white blouse, and I could not keep myself from staring and was not meant to stop myself.

“I could’ve gotten married a hundred and fifty times,” she said, “but I’ve already raised a child. What do I need another one for?”

I nodded, although it took me a moment to understand that by another child she meant a man. She spread open her magazine, began to read, and declared, “Looks like some people were born, some people died, and a lot of other people got into trouble.” Then she turned to me and said, “You’re all right, Marshall. Don’t believe them if they tell you otherwise.”

Then we rocked while she read, and soon Claire returned from the house next door. When I first saw her out of the corner of my eye, I saw something different in the way she carried herself. When I turned fully toward her, I saw that she held a baby in her arms. She held it awkwardly, like a little girl, awed by it and afraid of it. I wondered if this child was what Annette had meant when she’d asked if Claire had told me much about herself. Then a screen window went up at the house next door and a woman stuck her head out and called, “What do you think of little Pender?”

“Jesus,” muttered Annette. She turned to me and said in a hushed voice, “The baby’s just a week old. This woman hardly knows us.”

She got up, walked down the steps, and held out her arms. Claire delivered Pender to her, and the boy waved his pink hands and cried and squinted against the Southern sun.

“She made me take him,” Claire said. Then the two of them looked down at the boy, and Annette rubbed his cheek with her finger and examined his small hands. Claire stood with her arms hanging at her sides. Then she looked off down the street and pushed her hair behind her ear. Annette walked across the short grass to the neighbor’s house, and Claire and I sat on the porch steps. Pres, the dog, rose from the corner where he’d been sleeping and sat beside her. Cars passed and raised more dust, and the women’s voices and the baby’s cries floated to us. I looked off in the direction of Claire’s gaze, toward the end of the street. I felt the heat rising from the pavement and saw the leaves’ new green already hanging limp from the trees. Summer moved in as we sat there, with the drone of distant radios and lawn mowers settling on us. We sat together in silence and listened as the season came on.

Here beside the great ocean it’s summer also, but the sea breeze doesn’t suffer dust. It teases the leaves of the scrub and small trees that grasp the shore and won’t let them wear it. I see Claire with another child, knee high in the broomsedge and tall wild grass of a clearing, surrounded by hardwoods, and beyond them water. Always water. And she’s always alone.