The Visibles (3 page)

In July, our mothers signed us up to be junior counselors at the town’s day camp. Claire was the only person I spoke to and who spoke to me. Everyone loved Claire, though. She could play the guitar, beat anyone in a race across the sand, and she petitioned the camp to let us build a twenty-person ice-cream sundae, exhausting the kitchen’s supplies. Three different junior counselor boys had a crush on her, and kids followed her around as if she were made of cake icing.

That fall, I switched from St. Martha’s, a private Catholic school in Brooklyn Heights, to Peninsula Upper School, where Claire went. Claire was the only person I knew who went there, but I certainly didn’t know who Claire
was.
If I had, I wouldn’t have acted so juvenile around her, stealing stacks of orange-yellow 500s from the bank when we played Monopoly, constantly playing the beach house’s Nintendo even though I barely touched our console at home. And I
certainly
wouldn’t have done that dance when I won the Mega Man Six tournament, the finale of which involved flashing Claire my pink bubble-printed underwear.

On September 3, I barely noticed a tall, beautiful blond girl climb aboard the school bus. “Get your butt over here!” a guy at the back of the bus screamed at her. Other guys made
whoo
ing noises. “Where’ve you been all summer, Claire?” a girl cried.

Claire?
I started up, alarmed. The blond girl in the pink shirt and form-fitted jeans took off her pale sunglasses. There were those familiar blue-green eyes, that lush, pink mouth, but her hair was so smooth, her clothes so brand-new. She whipped her head around, as if looking for someone. I slumped down in the seat and pretended to be fascinated by my lunch, a cold can of Coke that had sweated through the brown
paper lunch bag, a smushed PB&J crammed into a Ziploc. Finally, Claire walked to the back and fell into a seat with one of the girls.

“Anyone sitting here?” asked an Indian boy who I would later learn was named Vishal. My hand was still saving the empty seat next to the aisle for Claire. I curled it away into my lap and squeezed myself as close to the window as I could.

When the bus pulled up to our school on Lincoln Street, I stood up, but Vishal grabbed my sleeve. “I think we’re supposed to let them off first,” he said, in his loopy I-didn’t-grow-up-here accent. And there they came, Claire among them, shoving each other and laughing, all of them with clear skin and hiking backpacks even though there was nowhere around to hike.

Claire noticed me cowering behind Vishal. “Summer!” She stopped short, holding up the line in back of her. “When did you get on?”

“I was here,” I said quietly. “I got on before you.”

“Claire, c’mon!” A girl behind her shoved her playfully.

But Claire didn’t move. “I didn’t see you.” She seemed honestly sad.

“I was here.” My voice sounded pathetic. Claire noticed, too; her lip stuck out in a pout.

The next day, she made a big point to sit with me on the bus. The day after that, too. The whole time, she was up on her knees facing the back of the bus, laughing with them. “Just go back there,” I said on the third day, pressing my body against the cold, drafty window, my knees curled up to my stomach because I’d stupidly chosen the bus seat above the wheel.

“No, it’s okay.” Claire moved her knees to the front. “So what’s been going on with you? Are you liking school? Wasn’t I right—isn’t it easy to find your way around?”

“I’m busy reading this,” I snapped, staring at the oral report schedule for my American history class. I was to give a report about the Gettysburg Address on November 14, more than two months away.

“Summer.” Claire wore shiny lip gloss. Her earrings were dangling silver pears.

“Just go.”

Claire shrugged, then monkey-barred from seat to seat, listing side
ways when the bus went over bumps. Maybe I should’ve told her to stay and sit with me. Maybe I should’ve asked why she hadn’t suggested that we
both
go back and sit with them. But I was afraid what the answer might be—what fatal flaw of mine prevented her from introducing me around. I told myself I was being charitable, a real friend, letting her go off there alone. I’d given her a gift.

By the time the end of the year rolled around, if Claire and I passed each other in an empty hall, all she might say was, “Steal any Monopoly money lately?” I hated her by then. I’d begun to blame Claire for everything that was going wrong: That, two weeks before, I had woken up and realized I’d peed in the bed. That a window in our front room had been broken, and my father asked my mother to call to have it replaced but she argued that
he
had fingers,
he
could call to have it replaced, and it
still
wasn’t replaced because they were at some sort of standoff, and there was still a huge crack in the window, sloppily sealed up with duct tape. That I would probably die an old maid without ever kissing a boy. That my father had begun to spend whole Saturdays in bed, and that my mother didn’t take me shopping anymore.

One late May afternoon, I was in keyboarding class, typing line after line of
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog.
Two girls in the front row leaned close together. “Claire Ryan is moving to France,” one whispered to the other. “They’re taking the Concorde.”

I typed a whole line of nonsense so it seemed like I wasn’t listening.
France?

I found out later—not from Claire—that her father had taken a position at his company’s Paris office. They had rented a three-bedroom apartment in someplace called Montmartre. I wanted to ask Claire about it, or wish her well, or tell her good riddance, but so many people always surrounded her, all the way up to the very end, that I never had the chance.

The excited chatter that Claire was returning from France started a few weeks ago. Claire hadn’t told anyone the news herself, but someone’s father worked with Mr. Ryan and had found out the details. Claire would be attending Peninsula again, but she would be in tenth grade with me, not eleventh. People nudged Devon Reyes, Claire’s old boy
friend, saying that Claire had probably learned a few tricks, living in a country that was so obsessed and open about sex. And me? I didn’t have any reaction to the news, and no one asked me for comment. The time we were friends felt as far away as my birth.

But it surprised me that Mr. and Mrs. Ryan were getting a divorce—Claire had never seemed worried about her parents’ marriage. After Mrs. Ryan and Claire left our apartment, I followed my father into the kitchen. “Perhaps Mrs. Ryan just needs a private vacation,” I called out to him, as if we’d been dissecting the Ryans’ divorce for hours. “You know, some time to herself. And then, after a while, she’ll move back into the Pineapple Street apartment, and everything will be fine. It’s probably what all couples need, I bet.”

My father looked at me for a long time. His eyes were watery. “Maybe,” he said, eating from a bag of pretzels, letting loose salt fall to the floor. He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a sniffle.

T
he following
night after Claire came over, my father declared we had nothing to eat in the house, which wasn’t an exaggeration. We hadn’t gotten the hang of shopping for ourselves yet. But now that we were on our own, we could go out to dinner wherever we wanted, which usually meant Grimaldi’s.

Grimaldi’s was this pizza place down under the Brooklyn Bridge. The pizza was so good that people lined up on the streets for a table. My mother hated eating there because the tablecloths were checkerboard, there were too many children, and they only served pizza for dinner. She hated that all the tables had wobbly legs, and that the wine specials were on a little card stand next to a pot of fake flowers. As my father, brother, and I piled into the little dining room, I tried to see Grimaldi’s imperfections through her eyes; I scoffed at the place’s paltry selection of sodas, offering Pepsi instead of Coke. I sneered at the paper napkins. That awkward autumn when Claire was pretending she was still my friend, she came here with my family. Just as we were sitting down in a booth, Claire spotted some of the girls from the bus across the room, sans parents, sharing a basket of mozzarella sticks. Claire waved at them enthusiastically, but I shrank down in my seat. “Why aren’t you waving?” my mother hissed. I shrugged; Claire pretended not to hear. Later, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. “Summer should have more girlfriends,” my mother said in a low voice. “Does it matter?” my father answered. My mother murmured something I couldn’t hear.

I caught a glimpse of Claire this morning in the courtyard at school, just as I was dashing outside to the breakfast cart to get coffees for the popular girls in my first-period French class. Claire was talking to Melissa Green, one of her old friends. Melissa had a frozen, terrified smile on her face, trying to focus only on Claire’s eyes and not the rest of her body. When Claire said goodbye and turned away, Melissa’s expression twisted. She ran back to a gaggle of waiting girls and they started whispering.

“So what do you think Mom’s doing right now?” I asked my father as our Grimaldi’s waitress took our order and trudged away.

“I don’t know, honey,” my father said wearily.

“You should try and call her,” I suggested.

“She’ll call when she’s ready.”

“Mom probably wants
you
to call,” I said. “She could be surrounded by younger guys, wherever she is. She could get tempted, just like Mrs. Ryan was tempted by that younger Frenchman.”

My father set down his fork. Even Steven, who had been poring over advanced calculus problem sets—he was a freshman at New York University, but lived in our apartment instead of the dorms—looked up with mild interest. “Excuse me?” my father sputtered.

I repeated what I’d heard from the girls in French class. “She had an affair with a younger Frenchman from their local
boulangerie.
Claire caught them. And that’s why she’s so fat: she ate to console herself. It makes perfect sense.”

“That’s ridiculous.” My father looked aghast. “And Claire’s not
fat.
She looks fine.”

“Fine?” I echoed.
“Fine?”

He sighed wearily and excused himself to the bathroom, squeezing down the narrow hall next to the brick oven, which was covered almost entirely with black-and-white snapshots of scowling old women in aprons. My mother once remarked that it was disgusting how many people in New York City—in the whole of America, really—were getting so fat. My father retorted that obesity sometimes wasn’t someone’s fault. What about genetics? What about depression? And my mother sighed and said, “Honestly, Richard, what would
you do without me? You can’t go telling Summer being fat is okay!”

I wanted to call my mother now and tell her that I would never, ever believe being fat was okay. And if only she’d seen me doling out coffees to the French class girls in the courtyard this morning—there were such grateful smiles on their faces, and we’d all walked to French class together in a happy, laughing clump. She could’ve dropped by the school; other parents did it all the time.
That’s my daughter,
she would’ve thought, if she’d have seen me. And maybe her mind would’ve changed about us—about everything—just like that.

When I came home from school the next day, my brother was sitting at the kitchen table. He was always parked at the table doing math, even though he could’ve used NYU’s facilities instead. His glasses made his eyes look enormous.

“Did anyone call?” I asked.

“Nope.” He didn’t raise his head.

My smile drooped a little. I continued to stare at Steven until he finally looked up.
“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Then go somewhere else!” Steven had my mother’s angular face, but we both shared my dad’s oversized nose. When we were little—when Steven and I were sort of friends—we started a secret club called The Schnoz. Our father mystified us both back then, with his brilliant white lab coat and all his tics—the specific pastries for breakfast, the long runs often at night, the dark, dreary moods that would come over him like a thick wool blanket. We decided that he was secretly a superhero, a mix between a mad scientist and a stealthy G.I. Joe—Steven was obsessed with the military. Our club mostly consisted of spying on my father while he watched television in the den, looking for superhero clues. But then Steven turned ten and announced that if he didn’t win a Nobel Prize by twenty, he was going to enlist in the Special Forces. My father laughed and reminded Steven how clumsy he was—he’d probably shoot himself in the hand while trying to clean his gun. The Schnoz disbanded pretty much after that.

When he got older, Steven went to Stuyvesant High, the smart math and science school in the city. My mother didn’t ask if I wanted to take the test to go to Stuyvesant. My parents had a huge argument about it—my father said Stuyvesant was the best place for me, but my mother insisted that Peninsula was better because it encouraged the liberal arts. “But she’s not interested in liberal arts!” my father bellowed. “She likes science! She won three elementary and middle school science fairs at St. Martha’s!” My mother rolled her eyes. “We should let Summer choose for herself,” my father bargained. “She’s going to Peninsula,” my mother said. “End of story.”

Even though my father was right—I wasn’t that into art or history or English—I liked Peninsula fine. And anyway, girls who went to Stuyvesant were nerds who never got boyfriends. Everyone knew that.

“Do you want a soda?” I asked Steven, turning for the fridge.

“No.”

“We still have the orange stuff Mom bought for you.”

“Mmm.” His pencil made soft scratching sounds against the paper.

“It looks like you’re running out, though. But Mom will probably be back in time to buy a new case.”

He kept writing. Steven had hardly said a word about her since she’d left, so I didn’t know what I thought I was going to achieve, fishing. Steven had hardly spoken to her anyway, except to ask if she could wash a load of his whites. He probably didn’t even care that she was gone. Although, was that possible? Yes, she and Steven were very different—she was so
glamorous
—but Steven had to have some thoughts about it. Just one teensy feeling, somewhere.

“Summer, there you are.” My father appeared in the doorway. “I have a favor to ask you.”

He led me to the living room, and we sat down on the couch. “Mrs. Ryan just called. She wanted to know if I could tutor Claire in biology.”

I stiffened, surprised. I’d looked for Claire at school today but hadn’t seen her anywhere. “You said no, right?”

“I said I was too busy.”

I tried not to laugh. Lately, my father’s version of busy was piling
magazines for recycling and watching the home shopping channels—he liked the old people that called in. He probably hadn’t even gone to the lab all week.

My father picked up one of the little plastic figurines from the toy ski slope he’d bought on a trip to Switzerland. It came with four little Swiss skiers, each with a blanked-out, stoic Swiss expression. Steven had been obsessed with the ski slope when my parents brought it home, but it had become more of a Christmas decoration. Last night, on the walk home from dinner, there were suddenly fairy lights on our neighbors’ banisters and Christmas trees in their front windows. It made our naked, untended-to tree in the living room seem so obviously neglected, so I went down to our basement storage space, found the Christmas box, and brought everything up myself—the ornaments, the Santa knickknacks, the ski slope, even old holiday photos of all of us unwrapping Christmas gifts, my father inevitably wearing a gift-wrap bow on the top of his head. The stuff wasn’t that heavy. And it was sort of fun to decorate on my own.

“Perhaps you’d like to tutor Claire instead,” my father suggested.

I shook my head. “I’m kind of busy, too.”

He rubbed his hand over his smooth chin. “Busy with what?”

I didn’t answer.

“Well, I’ve already set it up,” he breezed on. “She’s coming over in ten minutes.”

“Dad.”

He placed the plastic skier at the top of the hill and let go. The skier zipped down. My father caught him at the bottom, tweezed his little plastic head between his thumb and pointer finger, and guided him back up the side of the slope, simulating a chairlift. He made a
brrr
motor sound with his lips, impersonating a motor.

When I was down in the basement getting all the ornaments and stuff, an invitation fluttered out from a box. It was for a Christmas party at Claire’s house from that first year I’d attended Peninsula. The night of the party, my mother asked why I wasn’t getting ready. When I said I’d rather watch the Christmas marathon on TV—they were playing
Rudolph, Frosty,
and
The Year Without a Santa Claus
back-to-back, a
stellar lineup—my mother blew her bangs off her face. “It’s not a crime Claire has other friends,” she chided. “It wouldn’t kill you to be friends with them, too.”

As if it had been my decision. As if I’d orchestrated things that way.

The doorbell rang. Mrs. Ryan stood in the hall. “Claire’s down at the deli,” she said, walking right in. “Thank you so much for doing this, sweetie. It’s a huge help.”

I grumbled tonelessly.

“Is your dad home?” She looked around. “He invited me over for coffee, but I wasn’t sure if he was mixed up, since it’s so early. I didn’t think he’d be back from work yet.”

I felt a flush of embarrassment. “He had a half day.”

Mrs. Ryan walked into the foyer, smiling at our family pictures on the wall, many of them over ten years old. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a disposable camera. It was covered in green paper, and there was a picture of a woman and a little kid, probably meant to be her daughter, sitting on the edge of a motorboat, smiling so blissfully their teeth gleamed blue-white.
Fun Saver,
the camera was called.

I pointed at it. “My mother uses those, too. But she also has a Nikon. That’s probably what she’s using for her trip.”

Mrs. Ryan advanced the camera slowly. “How are you holding up, Summer?”

“I’m great. Really excited for Christmas.”

“Your mother…” Mrs. Ryan shook her head. “It’s so unexpected. I mean, I just talked to her a month or so ago. She gave no indication…”

I stared her down. “She’s on a trip. No big deal.”

Mrs. Ryan blinked hard, as if she’d just run smack into a wall without noticing it was there.

“I mean, it’s not even worth talking about,” I went on. “Like, not to Claire or anything. She probably has enough on her mind anyway, right?”

Mrs. Ryan shifted her weight. Then she peered into the hall. “Oh. Here we are, honey.” She gestured Claire inside.

Claire wore a heavy blue polo shirt and a long black crinkle skirt.
The elastic band stretched hard against her waist. There was a blossom of acne around her mouth. Before she left, Claire’s skin had been clear and glowing. Maybe France had poisoned her.

“How about I get a picture of you two?” Mrs. Ryan suggested, holding the Fun Saver to her face. “The friends reunited.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “God, Mom. No.”

“Come on. Just one. Stand together.”

There was a frozen beat. Finally, I took a step to Claire. We used to pose for pictures with our arms thrown around each other, our tongues stuck out. Now it felt like the corners of my mouth were being held down by lead weights. Claire gave off a heated radiance, as if shame had a temperature. There was a fluttering sound. When the flash went off, bright burnt spots appeared in front of my eyes.

“Beautiful.” Mrs. Ryan advanced the film and placed the camera on the little table in the hall. Claire and I shot apart fast.

My father emerged, saying,
Hi, Liz,
and that he’d put a pot of coffee on. The adults migrated toward the kitchen. Suddenly I didn’t want my father hanging around Mrs. Ryan. Sometimes he gave up too much of himself. And Mrs. Ryan was tainted with marital strife. Some of it might somehow rub off on him, like a grass stain.

Claire disappeared down the hall to the bathroom, but I stayed where I was, glowering at the Fun Saver on the hall table. I wanted to tear off the wrapping and rip it into thousands of pieces. I slid the camera into my pocket. If Mrs. Ryan asked, I would tell her I had no idea where it went.

I found Claire standing in my bedroom doorway. Her eyes swept over the piles of clothes in the corner and the holiday trees and singing Santa Clauses on my dresser—I had Christmasized my room as well. “I forgot how big your room was,” she said after a pause. “My room on Avenue A is so small. And my room in Paris was even smaller.”

There was a flowered bra on the floor, the kind that hooked in the front. I noticed a gray flannel nightgown, too, the one with the kitten silkscreened across the chest. A speech bubble above the kitten said “I love to sleep.” I stood on top of it.

“So,” I muttered. “Biology?”

Claire shrugged. “Sure, if you want.”

“So what’s the deal? Didn’t you take it last year?”