Read Online Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer - Free Book Online

had been so lonely for her—the first of many. The neighborhood was deserted; all the other kids were away at camp. Only the sprinklers made noise—that rhythmic stuttering coming from every front lawn.
    She was getting real breasts—round swells under her blouse that she looked at for a long time each night. Seth got sick right in the middle of this. It was nearing the end of the season, and he was exhausted every day. One morning he came intothe kitchen, rolled up his pants leg and said, “Look.” There was a large green map of a bruise below his knee. It was painless, he said; he had just seen it there when he woke up.
    And when they found out that he had leukemia and probably would not live very long, Claire continued to bloom absurdly. She looked at herself as she undressed for showers, for bed, and knew how useless it was. Such elaborate machinery, and what was it all for? Coils of dark pubic hair, widening hips. Her parents did not notice any of it; they were too involved with Seth, too frantic. He noticed, though. She was visiting him in the hospital, and as he lay on his bed he looked her over well and then said in a sarcastic voice, “So little Claire is finally becoming a woman.”
    “Shut up,” she said, but she wasn’t even annoyed. She felt like crying, and by tightening her voice she found that she could keep it in. Her parents had taken her out to a Cantonese restaurant the night before and told her about Seth. Even before that night, she somehow knew. She knew with a definite beat inside her, a weight dropping down.
    Her father did the talking. He spoke in an even, gentle voice, and he sounded exhausted. Her mother just sat sipping tea, not saying anything. The restaurant was dark and empty; the only other people eating were two of the waiters on their dinner break.
    “Dr. Marks said it doesn’t look very good. He said we shouldn’t be hopeful,” her father said to her. She did not respond. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Claire?” he asked.
    She nodded but couldn’t speak. Her mother continued topour tea for herself, finding something soothing in the warmth and the bitterness, Claire supposed. It all came down to this, to three people alone in a dark restaurant, defeated. Still, they continued to move through their lives. They grew older and left Seth fixed in his adolescence forever. They would remember him as a kid, not as a real adult. He had just started to come out of it, too, out of that “teen-age trance,” as their mother liked to call it. He was waking up, thinking about life a bit more, sending away for college catalogues. And they had to leave him there, on the brink of everything.
    At the funeral, people tossed dirt onto his casket. Someone handed her the small tin shovel; it was her turn. She thought of the dirt as an absurd gift, a final offering. She understood that nothing she could give him now would mean anything. She had read about people being buried along with their favorite books, foods, paintings. In ancient Egypt the pharaohs were entombed with their living slaves. Would she have gone with him? Would she have stopped her breath, given in to the dark, shared it with him? She did not think so.
    There was no present you could give. She had always derived a good feeling from the act of giving, but she knew, really, that the act was twofold. A gift had to be received. Hands had to stretch out and take it, fumble with the ribbons and wrapping. Everyone was waiting for her now. She tossed a shovelful of earth down onto the coffin. It thudded and lightly dusted the surface.

chapter four
    The summer Lucy Ascher stopped talking, the summer the words wouldn’t come, she loved the crying and whispering of children in the night. She listened closely, the way an operagoer listens to a difficult aria: awed by those odd throat sounds she herself could not make. All around her there was noise—children choking on the bones of bad dreams, the girl a wall away who shouted