“Well, what is it then?”
“Why does it have to be anything?” Jess shrugged. “And wasn’t it you who told me anyway?” Clara asked. “What the frog foretold came true? It was only ever about sex.”
“I just don’t understand,” said Jess, “how you can love somebody and just quit. And the worst thing,” she said, “is just knowing that I got it all so wrong.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with being wrong,” said Clara. “As long as you finally figure it out.” There wasn’t even anything wrong with being wrong but going along with it anyway. She thought of Ferber asleep upstairs. She poured her own cup of tea and it was almost clear. Peering inside the teapot, she said, “I forgot the teabag.”
Jess said, “I thought something was off.”
“You should have said.”
Jess said, “Everything’s off. How am I supposed to know the difference?”
“Anybody who deserves to love you,” said Clara, “is going to know better than to quit. I’m not going to quit.”
“Even though I’m making it tempting.”
“A little bit,” said Clara.
She got up from her chair and got the tea box down from the cupboard. She tossed four bags into the pot and put the lid back on.
“That’s going to be strong,” said Jess.
“Well,” said Clara. “If it has to be one or the other…”
—
It was not to be a spring like either of them had planned, or a summer for that matter. Three weeks later, Jess learned that Clayton’s girlfriend had moved in with him, which seemed like the end of the world, until two days later when Clara’s father died, a drunk driver sailing through the stop sign at the top of their country road and T-boning his truck. The accident had happened at ten thirty in the morning, but Clara got the call around noon, while she was still in bed, readingA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Ferber had left three hours earlier to go to work, but she was meant to be studying for her exams. Textbooks were stacked beside her; she’d had to dig the phone out from underneath them.
After she hung up, having given her sister ample time to take back her words, to preserve life as it had been for just a little while longer, Clara went down to the kitchen to tell Jess, but she couldn’t.
“What?” Jess kept asking, and even once Clara could get words out, the only ones she could manage were, “My dad,” so that Jess had to extrapolate. The details really didn’t matter anyway. Clara felt the strength in her legs dissolve, and she slid down to the floor.
TEMPING
2002–2004
In the beginning, Clara had drawn Jess a map of the universe,theiruniverse, the campus and a few streets beyond, which was as far afield as they got back then. And in their second year when they moved just beyond the margin, off-campus into their apartment above the herb shop, there had been room for Clara to add a line for the street and a small square topped by a triangle standing in for their home. A home that was theirs no longer, because Clara’s dad was dead and she’d gone back to be with her mother. They’d given up their lease and at the beginning of May, Jess moved into Clayton’s old basement room at Lori’s, which was a less-than-ideal arrangement.
Jess had spent a night there years ago, right after Clayton moved in, and it had been so cold and damp that she’d never done it again. The room was dingy and low-ceilinged with just one tiny window sunlight never reached. The laundry room was right next door, where the ancient washing machine creaked and jumped across the floor anytime anyone used it, and somebody was always using it, because six other people lived upstairs.
Clayton had gone up north for another summer of tree planting, taking his new girlfriend with him, and too many of their friends seemed to think that Jess getting his room made up for what he’d done to her, that somehow they could call it even. Jess definitely couldn’t, but one good thing was that Clayton had spent so little time in the room that Jess wasn’t surrounded by memories of him now. Instead it was Clara she missed. Clara, whose friendship Jess had taken for granted, all the while staking her future on Clayton, naively imagining the life they’d build together. But it had turned out that Clayton was inconsequential, and Clara was the key to home.
And now Jess was supposed to learn to get along without her, which, in practical terms, was like learning how to walk on one leg or how to carry home the groceries with your hands tied behind your back. It was like arriving at a party unable to speak, but having to make oneself known all the same. And how could anybody know who Jess was without Clara? She didn’t know how to get along without her.
But she did get along—albeit awkwardly. Everything felt like the first few weeks at a new school; and it kind of was, the school of hard knocks, as though four years of education had prepared Jess for nothing.
She did her best to settle in, buying a lamp, trying to make the place familiar. She started unpacking her box of frogs—the posters, the figurines in pewter and wood—but the room was too subterranean for the effect to be charming. Plus, outside of her academic work the frogs made no sense, or at least not the sense she was aspiring to, so she put the frogs back in the box and left it in a corner with all the other things she didn’t have a place for—mismatched dishes,the dirty yellow tablecloth, her Norton anthology, and a collection of hooded sweatshirts with collegiate crests.
She found Clara’s map, however, and hung it up, bolstering the tattered edges with masking tape, but she didn’t bother to mark her new place because it didn’t matter, especially with Clara so far away. Jess traced a line with her finger, visualizing the highway ribboning far across the room, down the wall, and arriving in the corner where the plaster was cracked. A different universe altogether.
At first Clara’s return home was temporary, understandable. She had to be with her mother, she was home for the funeral. But then Clara’s mother wasn’t doing well. Her sisters were busy with their children and someone needed to stay with their mom, who’d never lived alone before. She’d had to be prescribed sedatives.
“Things aren’t good here,” Clara emailed after a couple of weeks. She came back to the city and wrote her final exams while they packed up their apartment. In a few short weeks Jess had lost everything—her boyfriend, her home, her best friend. But Clara had lost her dad, which trumped it all, even though she and her father had been estranged and he had been a tyrant. In fact, this only made it worse; it made his death a relief in some ways, and Clara felt guilty about that. She had to make it up to her mother, who had been devastated when Clara left home while still in high school.
“I’m going to be taking care of her for a while,” Clara wrote near the end of June. She also found a job in a flower shop, she told Jess. And Jess couldn’t imagine any of it, Clara a florist or Clara living with her mother. When friends asked her how Clara was doing, she didn’t feel qualified to answer.
Jess had spent the last three summers working at the university library, a position she was no longer eligible for as a graduate. And so, into the actual working world she was flung, equipped with a degree in English literature and library shelving her only work experience since McDonald’s in high school, which meant there were no responses to any of her job applications. Her parents had stepped in to pay the rent on her terrible basement room, but they weren’t willing to do it two months in a row.
