Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer Page B

Traffic moved, school remained open. There were years of school ahead of her, years of waiting on long cafeteria lines and of getting picked for volleyball teams in gym class. How would she get through it all? she wondered. What would propel her?
    Numbness would, it turned out. She found that through real concentration she could close out certain thoughts and focus only on the practical things. Parting her hair before the bathroom mirror, all she thought about was evenness, getting it just right. In geometry class she held her compass and swiveled it carefully over the page. A perfect arc formed, a useless bridge.
    Then there was the Lucy Ascher thing. At least, that was what her mother called it. “What’s this thing you have for that woman poet?” she asked Claire.
It is not a thing!
Claire wanted to scream.
It is everything; it is my life
. The earth split apart for Claire when she first read Lucy Ascher. Lucy Ascher seemed to say that we have a right to feel the sadness we feel. The world is bleak; the air is cold. Her poems were set in quiet places—the corners of dark rooms, the tops of lighthouses, empty bus stations late at night.
    And then, after Claire knew it was all right to be depressed, to feel alone, she looked forward to the morning, to a new day of Lucy Ascher’s poetry. Her parents stayed in the dim house and Claire rose above them, above it all.
    It did not mean that she wasn’t sad; she often was. The sadness stayed with her at college—at her side, a constant companion. Lately, since Julian, she had vivid flashes of Seth. He would be at the kitchen sink rinsing off an apple or sprawled out under a Japanese maple in the backyard, smoking a fat joint. Once she thought about Seth’s bar mitzvah and pictured him standing up on the bema, embarrassed, the tallith draped around his neck as casually as a locker-room towel.
    “Today, Seth Michael Danziger is a man,” the rabbi had said; her parents made a recording of the whole ceremony. Claire remembered the words, and they were painful now that Seth was dead, and ironic, since he never really got to be a man, even though the rabbi said he did.
    Claire found her father playing the tape once in the den, weeks after Seth died. She heard the high squeal of rewinding and then Seth’s voice, muffled and slightly warped by the recording: “
V’nat tan lanuh et torah to
 . . . ”
    She wanted to ask her father why he was doing this to himself, torturing himself in this way, but she was silent. He had the right to do what he wanted, to do anything he could to get by. It wasn’t easy to stay in the present; Claire also had urges to move backward, to grasp things that weren’t there any longer. She thought of it as time-tripping, what Billy Pilgrim did in
Slaughterhouse-Five
; her past would forge ahead by itself andshe wouldn’t even be stunned by it but would let it take over. Images poked up from their hiding places.
    Oh, Seth
. He had traveled around the country the summer before his death, sleeping out in campsites with his best friend, Mitchell, hitching rides from truckers. One night, he said, the truckdriver had been very tired and had asked Seth if he would drive for a few hours. Along Route 80, Seth steered the frozen-meat truck while Mitchell and the driver, a black man named Ramsay, slept soundly.
    “It was really scary being so high up,” Seth had told Claire. “Above everything, like God almost. I turned on the CB and all of these crazy people were talking, saying ‘Breaker, breaker,’ and everything. I drove until the sun came up. Then we stopped for breakfast at a Bob’s Big Boy, and I just fell right to sleep with my head practically in my plate. Mitchell still teases me about it.”
    He had come home with a peeling sunburn and long hair. Claire ripped the thin scrolls of skin from his shoulders while he lay on his bed, electric guitar blasting from the stereo. She sat with him and made him tell her all about his trip. The summer