The entirety of her parents’ two-hundred-square-foot marble bathroom had been covered with small foil packets of oxycodone. They were glued in meticulous rows to the walls and ceiling, to the floor, the door, even the venetian glass mirror (leaving only a four-by-four square of exposed glass at her father’s exact eye level, so that were he to stand in front of the mirror he would see himself framed against an art installation of his own culpability, his dead daughter visible slumped over in the red velvet chair she had dragged from her room onto the white bathroom tile, like a still from a Kubrick film).
She wore all white, our Claire, a satiny rope looped around her waist and tied in a bow at the back of the red chair. This was both gift wrapping and a practical means of keeping herself from tumbling to the floor as she lost consciousness. On her head sat a white tiara, pulling her hair back from her face and giving her corpse a sad princess air. The foil packets were white as well, a red O emblazoned in their center, so that the effect in the room was of hundreds of red Os staring in judgment at Claire’s father, who stood in the doorway, slump-shouldered in abject human defeat, unable to look away from the precious life he’d made who had finally and for all time had the last word.
What she couldn’t have counted on or predicted was that it would be Simon who found her, as historically their parents’ master suite was strictly verboten to the children. On penalty of death. But their mother had had a headache on the helicopter ride back to Manhattan, and upon entering the house, she had asked Simon to be a dear and run to her bathroom and get Mommy’s special pills. Which he’d done immediately, a fourteen-year-old boy whose mind was still deep inside the twelve-hundred-page Chinese science fiction tome he’d been devouring on his iPhone since they’d left for Southhampton.
He took the stairs two at a time and opened the door to his parents’ wing with trepidation, part of him worrying this whole thing was a trick and that his father would spring from the shadows, yelling, What did we tell you about going into our room! So, later Simon would have no memory of the state of the bedroom—was the bed made? Were there clothes thrown across the divan? His first real memory was of the bathroom door, how taped to it, dead center, was a small foil packet with a red O printed on it. It was a symbol he recognized vaguely without context, but he was moving quickly and didn’t even slow, worried that if he took too long his mother would yell out from the bottom of the stairs, her cutting annoyance ringing through the house. And so, without pausing to examine the packet, he pushed open the bathroom door.
His sister sat slumped in the center of the room, a marionette in white with her strings cut. The absurdity of the tiara cleaved her black hair, so that it fell in a waterfall around her face, which was ducked from sight, as if in a deep bow. She had vomited in her lap at some point before her death, and the smell—thirteen hours old—filled the room. All around her, dozens of red eyes glared down on Simon, unblinking, like the eyes of the damned. A sound rose inside the room, a kind of keening air-raid siren of grief that bounced off all the hard surfaces of the palatial bathroom—a sound that Simon would later understand came from him—and shot back through Simon’s body into the master suite like a sonic weapon.
Tucked into his sister’s shirt pocket, folded like a pocket square, was a handwritten note on monogrammed correspondence stock.
It read as follows:
Notes on the name Claire
or
What are we to do with this life we’re given?
The kay sound in modern phonetic speech remains the harshest of all consonants, both guttural and expressive. One could argue that all the best curse words begin with kay—Cunt, Kike, Cocksucker, to name just a few. At the same time, kay is known to be the funniest hard consonant, a favorite of comedians from Mel Brooks to Larry David.
As Neil Simon wrote in his play The Sunshine Boys:
Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say “Alka Seltzer” you get a laugh…Words with “k” in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that’s a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland… Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there’s chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny—not if you get ’em, only if you say ’em.
A 2015 study by the University of Alberta concluded that the effectiveness of verbal humor can be explained by whether or not the words used seem rude. Perhaps this is why the name Claire has always felt like both an insult and the punchline to a joke.
Taxonomy
Claire is a skinny girl’s name, some rigid blonde with pronounced cheekbones. It’s the name of the girl in your elementary algebra class who always gets an A, the name of the girl whose mother paid kids to go to her daughter’s birthday parties. You know Claire. She wears pearls and scallop-collared shirts. Her teeth are very white and extremely straight. At the same time, she has the kind of dark arm hair that comes from an eating disorder. Claire listens only to happy songs, so as to stave off the bottomless despair hidden deep within her psyche. What you don’t know is that 87 percent of girls named Claire keep a ruler by their beds and wake multiple times in the night to measure the distance from the edge of the blanket to the box spring.
Fact: No one in history has ever said the words oh, Claire, fuck me, Claire, in the heat of libidinal passion. And yet, once grown, Claire has fantasies of dating a boy whose penis is so large it can only be called a cock.
She is afraid to buy a vibrator and similarly terrified of pudding.
Claire is the girl in your PE class who had the heaviest period. She played field hockey. She had bangs. Claire sleeps in a flannel nightgown, even in summer. Her favorite candies are those colored sugar buttons that come on strips of waxed paper, because they are the only casual sweet arranged in perfectly symmetrical order.
Claire has always been too afraid to make a joke, because what if no one laughs?