Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

The internship cut into Clara’s shopping time, which was just as well, since the apartment was now coming to resemble the junk shops from which all the stuff had originated, so much so that Emily, on a cool Sunday evening, after Clara’s friends had departed for their various homes, and the two sisters sat on the couch contentedly, drinking cooling mugs of cocoa, gently suggested getting rid of some of it. Did they really need three Fiesta ware pitchers? Maybe they could sell a couple on eBay? Clara balked, saying the stuff was valuable and she and Emily could pass it on to their daughters when the time came. “I’m about as far as you can get from marrying, Clara.” Emily laughed. “I can’t really think about my hypothetical daughter’s legacy.”

“Well, you should,” said Clara, puffing out her lower lip and snatching a Milky Way from a bowl on the coffee table. Over Halloween, she’d stocked the house with sweets, but not one trick-or-treater had come by. “You really should ,” she repeated, in a tone that alarmed Emily, a glint in her bright eyes that Emily hadn’t seen since Clara’s arrival. “You really should. Since, you know, we’re not going to get anything from Mom and Dad. We have to make our own heirlooms.”

“What do you mean?” asked Emily, her heart racing. She knew, she knew that nothing good was going to come of this conversation, for she was angry, angry at Clara for speaking of their parents in such a mercenary way, when they’d supported Clara for ages and ages, and when—this was it, really—Clara had played such a vital role in wrecking their finances. Was it possible she didn’t realize the latter? No, no, it wasn’t. Clara was smart.

“Mom sold Nana Dorrie’s crystal,” said Clara, compressing her mouth into a grim line, which gave her, strangely, the aspect of a lizard.

“Crystal what ?” There had been, hadn’t there, a massive chandelier in the foyer of their paternal grandmother’s house in Beaumont. Their uncle Darren lived there now with his horrible second wife and the unremarkable fruits of both marriages.

“Crystal everything . Nana’s set of crystal. Service for eighteen. Water goblets. Wineglasses. Cordial glasses. Three decanters. A punch bowl and ladle and glasses—”

“You mean the stuff we used at Passover? Those big glasses?”

Clara nodded vigorously. “She got something like fifteen thousand dollars for them.”

“Fifteen thousand!” This was more money than Emily could imagine receiving all at once. “For glasses?”

“Yeah. They’re Baccarat.”

Baccarat. Emily had often walked by that shop on Madison without slowing her pace—one of a zillion stupidly expensive shops for who knew who: tourists, the future wives of bankers, social strivers—without thinking its icy, boring goods had any significance for her, just as she’d gulped water from those huge, medieval goblets, with their rows of bulbous drops striping from base to rim, countless times, laughing overheartily at her pink-faced cousins’ repellent jokes, without considering the value of the heavy glass in her hand. But Clara had.

But this was not the most pressing thing, the most dire thing, was it? Their parents were dismantling their house to pay for Clara’s care. When her mother said the well had run dry, Emily had not thought she’d meant it, not really.

“Why?” she asked Clara, as though they were normal sisters and she, the younger, could ask Clara, the older, for explanations of the mystifying adults around them, instead of vice versa. She knew the answer to the question, of course. They’d sold the glasses to pay for Brattleboro.

“Because she hates me,” said Clara, her face turning grotesque, witchlike, the point of her chin thrusting forward, her mouth curling into a grim scythe, the bright points of her eyes nearly eclipsed by the swelling folds of skin above and below them.

“No, no, Clara, that’s not true and—”

“No, it is true,” she insisted, in the singsongy tone of a wounded child. Emily had been right. The storm was rising. She braced herself. “ I was supposed to inherit the crystal. And she couldn’t stand the thought of me having it. She thought I would wreck it and that you should have it, because you take care of things. But she knew she couldn’t give you everything .” Emily turned her face away sharply, as if she’d been hit. She had forgotten—How had she forgotten, or allowed herself to forget?—how much Clara, when it came down to it, seemed to hate her. She had, if she thought about it, spent her whole life trying to make up for whatever injury—her existence?—had caused this strange, groundless resentment, through the murk of which she still managed (why, why?) to love her sister.

“Clara,” she said softly. “They need money. Things have been hard for them for a long time.” She couldn’t bring herself to say because of you , though she knew Sadie, and Lil, too, probably, would have told her that she should have, that Clara needed to understand the consequences of her behavior; but they didn’t understand that Clara couldn’t control her behavior.

“What kind of person does that?” Clara was saying now, spittle rising to the corners of her lips. “What kind of person sells a family heirloom? It didn’t even really belong to her. It was from Dad’s family.” Though it was really all the same: her parents were second cousins.

“I’m sure Dad was okay with it—”

“No, you never let me be angry about anything, Emily,” she screamed, fumbling furiously for her packet of cigarettes, which, once secured, she clutched to her chest like a doll. “You always tell me to calm down. I don’t want to calm down . I’m sorry I can’t be fucking perfect like you.”

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the storm broke. Tears popped into Clara’s eyes and her face went slack with sadness. “I’m so sorry, Em,” she said, leaning over and pulling Emily to her. “It’s not your fault. I’ve just made such a mess of my life.”

“No, you haven’t,” said Emily, though this was so patently untrue that she loathed herself for saying it. “You haven’t.” She could go no further, could not embellish the lie, so she walked over to the stove and put the kettle on. They would have tea, no matter that their cocoa mugs still sat on the table, not even half empty.

“I’m so selfish, I’m so selfish,” she moaned, and Emily felt her heart crack open inside her chest, leaving a dark wound, worse than anything inflicted by Curtis, worse because the things Clara said were true. Clara was selfish. She was manipulative. And cruel, even. And Emily, just maybe, had not loved her enough, because of it, even as she’d told herself—as did her parents—that the illness, not Clara, was to blame for her behaviors.

But now Clara was better, wasn’t she? The volts—who knew how many—had altered her brain chemistry, allowing her to smile and laugh, to knock down walls and sand floors, to cook dinner and make new friends, to care about Nicaragua (albeit Nicaragua of twenty years prior) and the families of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks and the world in general, to say “I’m selfish” and understand that she should not be. All of the things Emily had proudly (why proudly? What had she done to facilitate such progress?) related to her mother.

But she had been a fool—again—for Clara was clearly still ill and she had known it, hadn’t she? It was, Emily thought, as though Clara wore a veneer, a thin veneer, of health that was beginning, slowly, to crack.

The next morning at work, Emily Googled “borderline personality disorder” and found, really, too much, some of which she remembered, dimly, from her undergrad years, and all of which both corresponded to her mother’s laments—“does not respond to medication”; “needs long-term treatment”—and described Clara almost too perfectly. “These individuals may suddenly change from the role of needy supplicant,” intoned the DSM-IV , “to righteous avenger of past mistreatment.”