was unpleasant. But it was the pain in her chest, which wasn’t bronchitis, that took longer to heal.
After surprising the car service driver with the outrageous tip Claire slept away all of the afternoon and most of the night. The next day she napped fitfully and was up until the small hours. She didn’t eat or bathe. When she woke she, mercifully, couldn’t remember the exact details of her dreams but she knew that in each one she had been humiliated. Michael Wainwright’s face had appeared at least once, but it had been twisted in malicious laughter. The evening of the second day, her mother brought her up a plate of meatloaf and macaroni and cheese – two of Jerry’s favorites – but Claire merely shook her head and her mother took it away. The act of going down to the kitchen and making toast and tea felt overwhelmingly difficult, and swallowing it was impossible. She couldn’t even manage to hold a book up to read. Claire went back to sleep.
When Claire woke at three that morning she took out her knitting. She was just binding off a waistcoat she had made for Tina’s dad. Tina had picked the yarn and the pattern. It was a variegated worsted, Claire’s least favorite yarn, in a profusion of browns and oranges, colors that Claire didn’t much care for either. She was grateful that the pattern was a one-piece so she didn’t have to sew it together. Finishing it wasn’t particularly satisfying, but neither was Claire’s life, she reflected.
At a little before four she put down the circular needle and got out of bed to lay out the garment on her bureau. She felt light-headed and empty, but it was the middle of the night so she didn’t want to go downstairs to the kitchen. She’d once run into Jerry, standing nude in front of the open refrigerator, illuminated by its light. Instead of taking the chance of letting that happen she opened the bottom drawer of her bureau and looked at the treasures inside.
Whenever Claire was sad or bored or lonely she made her way to one of the many knitting stores she knew and let herself be tempted by the beautiful colors, the delicious textures, and the promises that all the seductive yarn whispered to her. Now, spread in front of her, were the spoils from those frequent jaunts. Despite her misery Claire was moved, as she always was, by the colorful chaos. She took out her favorite, a costly and luxurious cashmere, in a color that was somewhere between blush and the inside of a shell. It was a very fine ply, and Claire had decided long ago to knit a sweater of it for herself in a tiny and complex cable pattern. She laid the skeins on her bed, then – after long consideration – fetched a pair of size three wooden needles from her knitting basket. She had saved the directions for the sweater though she thought she could do it without following the pattern.
With a cable sweater she only had to resort to the pattern for the first full cable. Once she’d cast that on and knew the number of rows in between the cable twists she very seldom needed the pattern again. She got back into bed. It was windy, and she could hear the bare tree branches being whipped against the house by the wind. She felt cozy, tucked under her blankets, the cashmere on her lap. As she began to work she found that she would have to be certain to check the position of the twist and not forget to alternate between the front and back with the cable holder. With her state of mind now, she knew she’d welcome the concentration this project would require. As her fingers manipulated the needles she was especially attentive to what she was doing.
She spent the next couple of days knitting, reading, sleeping, watching a few television programs and licking her wounds. She wished she had her own VCR so she could watch tapes up in her room because she didn’t want to go downstairs to her mother’s TV in the evenings. When Jerry came in he wanted to watch Cops or Junkyard Wars. Instead she stayed upstairs and finished the Jeanette Winterson book. Crying over it helped put things into perspective. Her life could be worse.
Tina was concerned. When she came over for a visit, Claire pretended to be truly ill and kept the visits short. But she knew the retreat couldn’t last forever.
Finally, on Sunday, she was over it. She had decided her silly idea that a man like Michael Wainwright could possibly have been interested in her – even for a moment – was not painful as much as ridiculous. She forced herself to remember who she was, where she lived and the small pleasures that she had. She would find more of them, go to some theater, buy her own VCR. She’d register at a gym. Since graduation her size kept creeping up and the desk job had helped her waist and hips spread. But a benefit of her illness was that she’d lost weight. She’d work out. Not, of course, that that was a pleasure nor that it was easy – she wasn’t comfortable in the expensive, high class gyms in lower Manhattan and she was tired from her commute when she came back to Tottenville. But she would do it and, she decided, she’d let Tina’s mother – a hairdresser – streak her hair.
But those things wouldn’t change much and the Worthington incident – as she was now calling it – had showed her the sheer smallness of her life. And Claire knew that reading, knitting and watching television, no matter how uplifting the program, would alter nothing.
Yet she couldn’t think of an alteration she could make. She wasn’t a badly cut pair of trousers. She was simply a rather timid young woman with solitary interests. She didn’t know if she read and knit because she had never been social, or if her social failures had driven her to her isolated life. And what could she do to change it? Go out with Tina’s cousins and in-laws and the brothers of her friends, all men she had nothing in common with and who saw her as a plain brown wren? What was the point?
Go back to school? How would she pay for it? Travel? Alone? And to where? Join a club? A book circle? Go online to find friends, or even a soul mate?
Claire cringed at the thought of all of it. She simply wasn’t a joiner. She crawled back into her bed. Even if she did put herself ‘out there’ the same thing would happen as always had. If a local hitter approached her she’d be bored, and if someone intelligent and attractive (by a miracle) spoke to her she’d freeze tighter than a jammed photocopier. No one would notice her and she would stand – or sit – on the fringes with nothing to do or say. She even considered, but only briefly, taking Tina up on her invitation to go on vacation but quickly – really quickly – got over that. She might have had a fever but she wasn’t delirious. What she did instead was call Tina and ask if her mom would do her hair. ‘Come right the fuck over,’ Tina said.
‘Tonight?’ Claire asked. ‘It’s late.’
‘Hey, you’re only about five years late. My mom figured we’d have to wait until you went gray before she could do you.’
So Claire dressed and went over. Tina and Annamarie, her mom, fussed over her. ‘Worst haircut I ever saw,’ Annamarie said. ‘It’s like three cuts on one head.’ So, mostly out of wounded pride, Claire let them cut and streak her hair.
She was surprised by the result. Instead of the brassy colors that Annamarie – the queen of Big Hair – usually favored, she used subtle honey blondes that blended with Claire’s natural light brown. And the feathering gave her fine hair some body. ‘The secret to this cut is Product,’ Annamarie told her as she held up a mirror. ‘You need a conditioner, a thickener, and a finishing gel.’ Claire couldn’t imagine putting more things on her head than she had members in her family but, looking in the mirror, she was pleased.
Monday morning she was dressed and composed when Tina came by to go to work.
‘You look much better. The haircut, and I think you lost a little weight in your face from the flu,’ Tina reported.
It was an unseasonably warm day, and the two of them were sitting in the sun on the benches on the side of the ferry protected from the wind. Claire had her knitting out but it lay, untouched, on her lap. She felt as weak as a convalescent and held her face up to the sun as if she needed to drink in vitamins.
‘Though
