THOUGH SHE'S FRITZ'S age, eighteen, Claire is already in college. She graduated from Peabody High School a year early and enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. She rents an apartment with money she’s been saving for years, earned baby-sitting and working at her father’s landscaping business. She also works part time at the university’s day care. She left home mainly to get away from her father, a squat, powerful, overprotective immigrant who slapped his wife and daughters in the name of old-world propriety. When he fell into a rage, he would break furniture and put his fists through walls. After Claire moved out, he disowned her, but she finds opportunities to visit her mother and sisters when he’s not around.

“He’s an animal,” Claire says.

Fritz has seen Claire’s father watering the Raffos’ tiny lawn in the early evening, his thick, naked torso matted in dark hair, a cigar hanging out of his mouth, his red pickup packed with lawn mowers and muddy tools parked at the curb.

Claire has a boyfriend named Allen Compton. He’s not really her boyfriend, she explains; she’s finished with him, but he refuses to acknowledge that it’s over. She was emphatic: told Allen that he turns her stomach, that he desperately needs help, that she never wants to lay eyes on him again. But Allen didn’t want to hear about it. He went to her bookshelf and started tearing books in half one by one, looking at her the entire time, smiling. She pleaded with him to stop but was afraid to protest too much, afraid he’d hit her. Once, her cat jumped on the table while he was eating, and Allen ripped a curtain rod off a window and chased the cat around her apartment. He ended up smashing her fishbowl, the Siamese fighting fish thrashing rhythmically on the hardwood floor, slower and slower, until it died. When she threatened to call the police, he yanked the phone out of the wall.

Fritz went to school with Compton and knows all about him: a little guy who lifts weights. You can see it in the vein that pulses along his biceps like a garter snake, the bulging jaw muscle like a walnut as he chews gum. One of those guys who take pride in being a hood. Black leather jacket, black pants, black T-shirt, pointy black shoes that tie on the side, slick black hair slanted over his eyes. The practiced sneer. He drives a lime green four-barrel 442, jacked up in the rear, with mags and a Hurst shift. He’s the kind of guy, if you crossed him — and you wouldn’t even know you had crossed him — it would be like a curse. He’d pick the time and place. Everything might be fine for months, even a year. And then there he is. You’ve just finished a game of two-on-two, and you’re sitting on the steps of the schoolyard, drinking Fanta grape and smoking cigarettes, your gray T-shirt dark with sweat, when up the block grinds the 442, petulant as a wild horse. Compton jerks it across a side street toward the school. That half-smiling face above the dashboard, Maltese cross dangling from the rearview. You drop the pop can and run back into the schoolyard, but Compton brings the car over the curb and up the first concrete step, then gears down and rides that 442 all the way up, the front bumper sparking off the lip of each stair.

Fritz clears his head. There’s no point in thinking about Compton. As far as he’s concerned, there is no Compton.

CLAIRE'S BED IS a mattress on the floor surrounded by candles and covered in a blue batik spread, white doves outlined with gold sequins swooping across it. Huge, silky gold pillows fringed with tassels. Painted on the ceiling above the bed, in smoking red calligraphy, is “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” — lines from a poem written by Sylvia Plath not long before her suicide. Fritz has never heard of Plath, and those hovering red words unnerve him as he lies in bed with Claire. He’d like to erase them.
Claire has read a few of Plath’s poems to him. He doesn’t entirely get them, but he understands enough to be scared. When Claire shows him a picture of the poet, though, he finds her lovely, not terribly unlike Claire: the soft, feminine looks; the contentment on her face; the snug cardigan about her shoulders; the long, girlish hair.

One vicious winter morning in London, Plath deposited outside her small children’s bedrooms toast and mugs of milk, then stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas. Claire tells Fritz this as if he’ll understand the inevitability of it, as if there were a moral to this story so plain that it needn’t be explained. Fritz feels for a moment the frigidity of that London flat, the unfathomable will of the woman who buttered the warm bread and poured the milk. If he allows himself another moment of introspection, he will see what Claire is trying to tell him. But he waves it away. It is a warm summer night, and he is, for the moment, blessedly safe.

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