Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer Page A

barely manage to take care of himself, let alone her. She did not need what he wanted to give.
    “Please don’t touch me now,” she said once when he reached for her, because she knew he would make it seem like concern, but it was really only longing. He could get an erection inabout three seconds; once she kidded him about this and he became quiet and embarrassed, so she stopped.
    Although they made love quite often and were serious about most things, she felt especially young when she was with him. Perhaps this was because he reminded her of her childhood picture of Seth; she was not sure. She was confused about childhood now; there were wonderful memories left over, but they always made her sad when she started to recall them.
    Her childhood seemed especially brief—Seth sprouted upward and then weakened, and childhood was over for Claire. The games were gone, stored away forever. Claire invited no one home; the house was like a mausoleum. Whenever she went to a friend’s house, the girl’s mother would ply her with cookies and look at her nervously. “How are your parents doing?” she would ask in a hushed voice. “I’ve been meaning to call.” Claire would shrug and not know how to respond, and soon the woman would drift away.
    Claire stopped seeing friends after school. She rode the bus home and let herself into the quiet house. At dinnertime she and her parents would converge at the table and eat in complete silence.
    Sometimes Claire wondered if she was going crazy. How long could she stand the silence? she wondered. Wasn’t there a punishment for disgraced cadets at West Point called the silent treatment? At night, in her room, she would conduct small conversations with herself to review her thoughts of the day. She would lie on her back in bed, staring up at the ceiling, and ask herself in a whisper, “What’s new?”
    “Nothing.”
    “How do you feel?”
    “Terrible.”
    “Will it ever get any better?”
    “I have no idea.”
    Then she would sleep, a heavy sleep packed with dreams. Seth stretched out an inviting arm toward her, and they walked together through turnstiles, revolving doors, anything that moved. She woke up dizzy each morning. It was still dark when she went downstairs and made herself breakfast. Her junior high school was overcrowded and on a split-session program, so the ninth graders started their morning very early. As she rode the bus, the town was just waking up. Men like her father, who commuted into Manhattan every day, were warming up their cars for the long, solitary ride.
    At lunch Claire sat alone and thought of Seth. She thought of his fingers—the way he could flip-flop a coin quickly through them, a skill that a magician at a birthday party had taught him. She could not get used to the stillness; that was the hardest part. Moving fingers, now still. Blinking eyes, now still, pale lashes shading nothing. And that voice—the hoarse hesitance of male adolescence, never knowing if it would split and jump an octave in the middle of a word. All of that, now still.
    But then one night in bed she realized that it wasn’t simply a matter of stillness. That was sad enough, but it also contained an element of the romantic: a sleeping prince frozen forever by a witch’s spell. It wasn’t stillness, she knew, and she sat up in bed. It was nothingness. Seth didn’t even have a body anylonger. There was nothing left to be still—some bone dust, maybe, and a suit of unfilled clothing.
    Claire began to cry and could not make herself stop. It was the racking kind of sob; her body shook and she found herself gasping. She reached over and turned on the television set so that her parents wouldn’t hear her. Johnny Carson came on, all brightness—white hair, wide clean smile. His guest was a blond actress in a sequined dress. It’s as if our house is a private, sealed cave, Claire thought. Everything else goes on, even during this. The world did not stop for Seth’s death.