A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Read online

  He called to tell her the car needed an alignment, and he walked her through what that meant, and how much it would cost. Gabe wouldn’t be happy about spending the money. Laura said she’d have to talk to her husband and maybe bring the car in some other time, and he said he could run the car over to her and she could drop him off back at the garage, all right?

  By the time Laura took the car back in for alignment they chatted away like old pals, which she guessed they were in some sense. Laura said she’d wait for the car, it was just as easy as going back and forth. She settled into the waiting room with a cup of garage coffee and a word puzzle. Through the big window into the shop she saw Bob Malloy and two other mechanics working in the bays. Bursts of shrieking, pneumatic noise came from the power tools. People came and went. They had starter problems, dead batteries, worn timing belts. For every problem, there was a fix. It was all so businesslike and logical and reassuring. If it hadn’t been costing her money, and if there weren’t whole lists of things she ought to be doing at work and at home, she would have been happy to spend her time there.

  When the car was finished, Laura paid, and Bob brought it around to the front and held the door open for her. She thanked him and said it was nice to see him again and catch up, and he said, “You really don’t remember, do you.”

  “Remember . . . I guess not.”

  “The party Mark had where we all ended up in the basement.”

  “He had a few parties. They were always . . . Oh my God!”

  She stared at him, stricken, and he grinned back. “Oh my God,” Laura said again. Their parents had been absent, off on a trip? Mark and his friends had gotten famously drunk, and Laura had helped herself to the flavored vodka, was it strawberry? Cherry? Some kind of red. And helped herself again, and after a while you lost track, lost any sense of how one thing might have led to another. People were in the basement and the lights were off and Laura was off in a corner with some boy, whoever it was that had pulled her down onto his lap, and they weren’t having sex, not exactly, but they were having some teenage approximation of it, involving hands, mostly, and clothing shoved aside. At some point they had fallen asleep or passed out, and she woke up alone in the predawn dark and made it to the bathroom, where she got sick and fell asleep again on the floor.

  Laura sat down on the edge of the car’s front seat. Her body was overcome by roaring heat, as if she had stepped into a furnace. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I guess you don’t have to.”

  “Did anybody else . . .”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. And it’s not like there’s pictures or—”

  She held up her hand to stop him. “I’m trying to think this is funny. Why didn’t you say something? Back then, I mean. Come up to me in the hall and . . . I don’t know, made dirty jokes?”

  “I guess it was kind of awkward. And after all, you were this hot older woman—”

  “I was not hot.”

  “—hot older woman, and I was this skinny little knucklehead. Anyway . . .” He seemed to have embarrassed himself at this point. He shrugged and looked away.

  “We didn’t really do anything,” Laura said severely.

  “Nope.”

  “And even if we had . . .”

  “We were just kids.”

  She found it difficult to look at him now, or rather, she found it difficult not to look at him. He was still thin to the point of skinny, but work had put some muscle on him, and the open collar of his shirt showed the workings of his throat and collarbone. Fair-haired, blue-eyed looks, pleasant, servicable, good-humored good looks. Again, hot humiliation overcame her. There were things she thought she remembered.

  Abruptly she said, “I have to get home.” Swung her legs around, shut the door, put the car in gear, and drove off.

  When Gabe asked if the car was all right now, if they’d fixed whatever it was, she said it seemed that they had.

  The next week she went back to the garage. She didn’t go inside, but pulled up outside and waited for him to notice and come out to her. She kept the car running and he leaned against the door, bending down to talk to her. Laura said, “I want to know why you told me. Why you said something, after all this time.”

  “I guess it was like, now or never.” He shrugged. Not wanting to meet her eye.

  “Never would have been just fine.”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to embarrass you. But here you showed up after all this time, and it was, funny, I don’t mean, hilarious, but kind of amazing, really, to think of all those years ago and then see how life turned out for you. Turned out for me too.”

  “I don’t want to be finished yet with the turning-out part,” Laura said.

  She might have tried to blame Gabe for what happened after that, might have summoned up times he was indifferent or inattentive. Or it would have been easier to justify if he had committed some new offense of anger or cruelty. But he had not. What she did over the next month with Bob Malloy she did for her own self and her own reasons, namely, she had too much unhappiness to keep to herself.

  They spent parts of evenings, parts of weekends, at Bob’s rented house twenty miles outside of town. No one was going to see them there, north of the bridge over the interstate, on a turnoff down the road from the red and yellow Big Mart and a Citgo station, past endless flat fields of corn and soybeans, here and there a farmstead built up new next to the old collapsed barn. Cows in a pasture, a pair of horses in someone’s muddy back lot. The directions involved unnamed roads like 1050E, and tenth-of-a-mile increments. No one followed her. No one ever knew. Not Gabe, Laura was certain. There were any number of things he was not in the habit of noticing.

  The first time she went to see Bob Malloy, he drove them out even farther into the country, to a little cemetery, a pioneer cemetery, he said, a dozen or more graves surrounded by a rail fence. They walked among the old, softening stones, trying to read them. There were dates from the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s. Bob said there was a county historical society that did research and handled the upkeep.

  BRUMLEY, Laura read, and RIEFSTECK, and one that said only DAUGHTER, which she found disquieting. There was a single oak tree in one corner and they sat in its shade and drank the two beers that Bob had brought from home. It was September and hot. Locusts shrilled around them. The cemetery was on a little rise and they could see the grid of roads in the near and far distance, here and there a car kicking up dust. The sky was blue and piled high with clouds. They had not yet made love and she wasn’t yet sure it was going to happen. It seemed like something you already should have decided, but she didn’t think she had.

  “Nice day,” Bob said, and Laura said that it was, glad to have something that easy to say. She was too full of confusion and heat and nerves to come up with any real conversation. They were close enough to touch, although they did not do so.

  “See that cloud? Looks sort of like an alligator, don’t you think?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Come on, you have to use your imagination. That one there? It’s a . . . race car. Sure it is. Those are wheels. Your turn.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  She looked away to try and keep herself from any stupid crying. She said, “I can’t see the sense of anything anymore. It’s all just a big mess.”

  He put one hand under her chin to raise it up. “You see that cloud way up there, the one with the sun lighting up the edges? You know what that looks like to me? A pretty, pretty girl.”

  Bob’s house was a two-story white frame, with some green-painted cinder blocks shoring up the foundation. There was a cement cover over the old cistern, a detached garage, and a couple of sheds that had outlived their usefulness. His landlord, a farmer, was his nearest neighbor, a quarter mile away. “Why do you live in the middle of nowhere, what’s that about?” Laura asked him a week later.

  “It’s cheap.”

  “Gas back and forth to town must cost you. And the driving must take forever.”


  “Ah, I fly that left-lane airplane. Anyway, it’s peaceful out here. Quiet.” They were in the upstairs bedroom. The window next to them was open and the curtains belled in and out with the breeze. The landlord was harvesting corn in the field across the road and there was the steady, droning noise of his tractor, which was not exactly peace and quiet but was pleasant to hear.

  “Besides,” he went on, “I’m a hick. Born and bred. My folks didn’t move into town until me and my brother started junior high.”

  Laura said she hadn’t known that. Just as she hadn’t known much of anything else about him. The room was warm and she felt drowsy, her skin damp and hot. They had been going at each other like the teenagers they once had been. She put her head against his chest and felt his voice reverberate, like an organ playing chords. He said that his grandparents had farmed. And went broke doing it, like a lot of other people. They’d sold out to one of the big operators. He didn’t remember much about the place. A smell of hogs and cows. A barn. A ride on a tractor.

  Laura roused herself. “You could have been a farmer.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or you could have gone on to college. You’re an intelligent person. Sure you are.”

  He raised one hand and rubbed the fingers together, the universal sign for lack of money.

  “OK. But you could have—”

  “I’m a pretty good mechanic,” he said. “And I’m not likely to turn into anything else.”

  She was quiet then. She knew what he was saying. He wasn’t going to be part of her world, nor was she going to be part of his. There was only this little space of now, however long that lasted. This moment and this one and this one. To keep from feeling melancholy, she drew herself closer to him and his arms went around her.

  Some time later he said, “So what is it that you could have been?”

  “What?”

  “Since you don’t seem too real sold on your present situation.” Laura didn’t answer. “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I don’t mind. But, I don’t want to talk about my husband.”

  “Sure.”

  “OK. In my family, we went to college. I mean, you knew my folks. No way we weren’t going. I majored in speech com.”

  “What’s that, exactly?”

  “The study of communication. One of those majors that doesn’t get any respect. I use my communication skills to write memos and press releases. It’s a job, I don’t expect that much from it.”

  Although she might have expected more from herself. She wasn’t ambitious like Evelyn, never aimed herself at any remarkable, prestigious career. What had she thought would become of her? She said, “I guess I didn’t think I’d still be living in the same place I grew up. I went to Europe for a couple of weeks after I graduated, and Gabe and I went to San Francisco for our honeymoon. But I never took any big road trips. I didn’t move to Chicago or New York City like some of the kids I went to school with. I don’t know why not. I guess I’m not the brave and bold type.”

  “This isn’t such a bad place to live. Come on.”

  “But I always thought I’d have some great . . . adventure, some totally unexpected, transforming thing happen, like in the movies, I know, silly . . .”

  “Well what do you think this is?” he asked, and Laura felt their two hearts beating next to each other, keeping pace.

  She told him about Gabe and Ian’s fight, and the horrible things Jeanine had said, and her humiliation at the library. “Jeanine Waller? That Jeanine?”

  Laura said it was, and he started laughing, long and hard, while she waited, a little offended, for him to tell her what was so funny. “Good old Jeanine,” he said, shaking his head, out of breath from laughing.

  “Yes, she’s a hoot.”

  “You know, her family’s kind of sketchy. Her dad’s roofing company got charged with fraud, you remember that? The neighbors used to call the sheriff when him and Jeanine’s mom got drunk and started throwing things. No wonder she gives you a hard time, her sketchy self is jealous.”

  She was silent, trying to puzzle this out. It seemed she might have gotten things wrong, or at least there were other ways to look at her past besides through the lens of her own adolescent misery. Other layers to her hometown, people who lived different, more complicated lives. She’d always known that, but she hadn’t paid enough attention. Bob said, “Want to hear a story?”

  Laura wasn’t sure if she did or not, but he didn’t wait for her to say. “I had a girlfriend for a while who lived in the same house as Jeanine. Candy Tucker. You know her? Old Dandy Candy—”

  “Never mind that, what about Jeanine?”

  “It was a party-time house. Everybody’s first place after graduation. Jeanine’s boyfriend lived there too, from time to time. One or another boyfriend. I forget who. And some other characters. So one day Candy and I are up in her room and we’ve just finished, well, you know, just fallen back on the sheets, and the door opens and in walks Jeanine. She sits right down on the bed with us and asks if she can join in.”

  Laura gaped at him. “What happened?” It was so purely awful. She didn’t want to know, but she had to.

  He put his hands behind his head, pretending tiredness. “Some other time, maybe I’ll tell you.”

  Laura punched him in the arm.

  “Nothing happened. It was gross, you know? Listen at doors much, Jeanine? Ever think about knocking, Jeanine? Jesus H. Christ. Come right on in and make yourself at home.”

  He sounded angry, disgusted. As if he’d been the victim of a violation. You didn’t expect it, not when you’d been told that men regarded sex the same way they did pizza. Sex was sex, pizza was pizza, both good things and it didn’t much matter whom with or what kind. One more thing she seemed to have gotten wrong. “So you didn’t . . .”

  “She didn’t take it real well. If you ever want to get up in her face, tell her Bob Malloy said hello.”

  “You turned her down.” Jeanine, with her pretty, sulky face, her green eyes, and her breasts that the boys all visited in their dirty dreams.

  “Girls like her, they think they can get anything they want. Well, not my fine white ass.”

  “But I did,” Laura said. Happy now. She couldn’t stop giggling.

  “That’s right. You sure did.”

  Laura let her laughter trail away. “Why do you think Jeanine did that?”

  “Ah.” Shrugging. “Cheap thrills.”

  “That’s not me.” She raised up on one elbow. “Look at me. That’s not me. I needed this. I needed somebody to talk to.”

  “Somebody to talk to naked.”

  Laura hid her face again, and she felt him stroking her hair. “I know, girl. I know.”

  * * *

  She and Gabe had decided to delay starting a family until their jobs and their savings were a little further along, but it was the very next month that Laura determined she was pregnant.

  By then she and Bob Malloy had parted company, a clean break, both agreeing that was best. She had no wish to seek him out and tell him all the embarrassing reasons (having to do with contraception, having to do with, well, what one did in bed) that she was 99 percent certain the baby was his. There was worry, and guilty shock, and what if there were problems with blood type or inherited diseases, the same kind of thing you mocked when it came up on the soap operas. But it was so much easier to go ahead and have a baby than not to have it. And as time went on, and it seemed likely she would get away with everything, it began to feel like a happy accident. Because who knew when, or if, Gabe would decide they were sufficiently financially secure, sufficiently well-established, for a baby? It was something that might steer their marriage onto a better, less lonesome path. And Laura discovered that perhaps what she had imagined and expected and wanted of herself all along was to have a child.

  part two

  SACRIFICE

  Ours was the privilege of sacrifice . . .

  Our willing selves the offering />
  The price demanded to make fierce the cleansing fire.

  Richard Dennys

  1884–1916

  I. GRACE

  Grace was awake but she was pretending she was still asleep. The night before they’d had, if not quite an argument, an impatient, sharp-edged discussion. Or not even a discussion, because that implied two people exchanging views, rather than one of them staring at a computer streaming episodes of Fear the Walking Dead. This nondiscussion had been about the future, which Grace believed they should give some thought to, and which Ray believed would take care of itself. And maybe it would, but you might want to give it a nudge, and you might want to determine if your needs and goals were sufficiently aligned to make a mutual future possible and desirable, and that required words. Talking. She was tired of being made to feel she was some needy hyperemotional desperate controlling etc. etc. female for wishing to have such a conversation.

  So this morning she kept her face turned to the wall and tried not to be too artistic or complicated with her breathing, which was always a dead giveaway. Ray ran the shower and dressed, being quiet about it, then he drank his protein shake and rinsed the glass. He probably didn’t want to deal with her this morning, all right, but it would have been nice if he’d kissed her or touched her or woken her up to say any stupid little thing that wouldn’t mean anything in itself except that everything was fine between them, the two of them were fine.

  There was the click of wheels as he walked his bicycle down the hallway, then the door opening and closing quietly.

  They were not fine. Perhaps they had never been.

  Grace got out of bed, did her sun salutation, and made coffee the way she liked it, strong, with milk and sugar, her secret vice. The water heater was still thumping, so she waited to take her shower. They were trying not to run the air conditioner any more than was absolutely necessary, and the apartment was stuffy. Heat lurked in the corners, ready to regroup and attack. The place needed cleaning. It always needed cleaning, it was too small for the two of them and everything they had jammed into it. You were supposed to be so goo-goo in love that you didn’t notice such things. Or they weren’t supposed to matter. Or you got past them. None of these applied or were helpful.