Free Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer Page B

to his, so that when I was there, circling on the fine, quivering mercury of an orgasm, he would not hear a thing.”
    His old lover had accidentally left her hairbrush in the top dresser drawer when she moved out, and sometimes Lucy picked it up and examined it. It was a weighty mother-of-pearl affair with metal prongs. A good deal of the woman’s hair was still woven around those prongs like string art, and Lucy imagined her standing before the mirror each evening, “brushing her coarse red hair with one hundred savage strokes, summoning up a fury of electricity.”
    Richard missed his old lover; Lucy could tell. One night she heard him speaking on the telephone in the kitchen, his voice low and conspiratorial. Lucy knew that he was talking to her.
    She stayed up for a long time that night, thinking about Levin. She pictured the two of them meeting once again on the summer lawn of the hospital. “The grass would be heavy and wet with morning,” she wrote, “and we would walk toward each other slowly, pulling two chairs out of the sun and into the vast, spreading shade of a cigarette tree.”

chapter five
    Claire liked to imagine that she was conceived amid gritty, damp sand and ice-cream wrappers on the shore of some anonymous beach at midnight. Her parents, mistakenly thinking themselves possessors of a new sort of freedom, most likely made love with abandon that night, unaware that behind every other dune, other couples were reveling in this very same, false phenomenon. The beach at midnight is nothing more than a series of open-air cubicles, a flea market for lovers who do not have much time or pride.
    Claire’s feelings about her parents worsened after Seth died. Two weeks after his death they decided the family needed to get away for a while, to be free of all the phone calls, the letters of condolence, the looks. They took Claire to Italy for a week. Claire remembered the vacation only in terms of speed. “Come on, we’re late,” her mother would say to her any time she lingeredin a museum, and there would be a yank at her sleeve. They rushed her, relay-race fashion, from one end of the Sistine Chapel to the other. It was not the kind of vacation scene Claire had imagined, in which a young girl, bored within the confines of a museum, tugs at the fabric of her mother’s dress. The mother stands casually before each painting and sculpture, ignoring the tugs, feeling very much at home.
    But it would never be that way. Claire’s parents pulled her, yanked her through her adolescence at breakneck speed. Museums were to be dashed through, dinners at restaurants to be choked down, clothes to be outgrown as quickly as possible and donated immediately to the Mt. Calvary people when they telephoned for contributions. “If you are coming at all, come now,” her mother said over and over.
    And now, home from college for Christmas five years later, things were no different. Nothing had slowed down at all. Claire walked out of the den, where her parents were arguing over whether or not they should renew their subscription to cable TV. She went into Seth’s old room where everything was still in its proper place—the books, including
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine
, which had been his childhood favorite, the oiled leather baseball glove, the slender glass bong way up on the top shelf. Claire sat down on the bed, where the clean sheets, she realized with a start, had probably not been changed in five years.
    Her mother walked past, storming out of her fight. She saw Claire sitting in the room and poked her head in. “What are you doing in here?” she asked. Her face was pink, the way itwas when she sat under the hair dryer for too long at the beauty parlor.
    “I was just sitting here. Thinking. Is there something wrong with that?”
    “No. But that’s what you do all year at school. Isn’t that why we send you to Swarthmore—so you can think? Now that you’re home for a while, why don’t you make yourself