A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Read online

  There was a banner hanging on one wall, something she’d had for years. It read: WILD WOMEN DON’T HAVE THE BLUES. It was from an old blues song with lyrics about getting full of good liquor and putting your man out if he didn’t act right. If you let things keep going along and going along, and brooding about your own low-grade unhappiness, it was just another amusing item to put on a wall.

  She worked until six and then she taught classes at the yoga center, so she didn’t get home until almost nine. Ray had not called or texted her all day, nor had she tried to reach him. When she walked in, Ray was sitting in front of the television with his laptop open. He was playing World of Warcraft and watching SportsCenter. Incredible. When had men decided to stop growing up?

  Ray didn’t move his gaze from his screen when Grace came in, stowed her bags in the bedroom, and went to the refrigerator for water. Was he ignoring her? Or just engrossed in his game? Did it matter?

  She drank her water and walked behind the couch so that she could see the small figures on his computer screen and his fingers busy on the keyboard. “I think one of us should move out.”

  There was the sound of an on-screen explosion and a burst of vivid colors, some episode of simulated violence coming to an end. Ray turned around to look at her, blinking, trying to refocus his eyes. “Did you say something?”

  * * *

  Ray was the one who moved out, two weeks later. He was disbelieving at first, and then angry. He said great, if that was the way she wanted it. Grace was calm as he emptied out the closet and stuffed his clothes into black plastic garbage bags and made trips up and down the stairs and out to the car and back again. He’d had to borrow a car, as Grace would not let him use hers, even to move. No more free rides. Money was one more thing piled on the heap of reasons.

  She watched him wrestle with the plastic crates that held his books and his many varieties of sports equipment: bats, rackets, mitts, balls. She guessed she was meant to feel sorry for him or guilty or regretful and she did, a little. They had breakup sex and Grace thought that even then it might not be too late if he would only try harder, or promise to try harder. Or say or do anything at all, anything besides sitting in a puddle of his own entitled feelings. She was tired of trying to claim his attention. Boys began by ignoring their mothers, then they moved on to ignoring the other women in their lives.

  Although she had promised herself never to do so, she had ended up with a man who was just like her father, at least in all the ways that counted.

  Grace’s friends all said, “Wow, I thought you guys were doing so great,” and Grace said it was just one of those things. They had a lot of the same friends and it was better not to tell tales or give people too much gossip fuel. She went out for drinks and dinner with two girlfriends, an occasion that was meant to cheer her up as needed, and to welcome her back to the world of exciting singlehood.

  One of the friends said, “There’s so much pressure on relationships these days because they’re so optional. Just about anything they provide, women can do on their own. Like the economic motive. We can support ourselves.”

  “You can have kids and raise them by yourself. Well, with a donor.”

  “How about sex?”

  “There’s an app for that.”

  “I mean good sex.”

  “No guarantees. Not anywhere.”

  “What if you’re lonesome? If you just want to love somebody?”

  “Get a dog.”

  This struck them as funny, in a potentially lewd sort of way, and they began to giggle and snort into their drinks.

  Grace had not thought she needed any cheering up, but in the middle of all the giggling, melancholy crept up on her, like ink dropped into water. Talk it up all you liked, nobody really wanted to spend the rest of their life alone.

  But for now she had her pride to consider, and she was a Wild Woman, not some fragile bruised flower, and so when some guys in the bar started talking and joking around with them, Grace made barking noises behind her hand and sent them all into laughing fits.

  The next time her mother called her, Grace let the conversation go on for a while, mostly her mother talking about the problems with Grandma’s house—the roofers had discovered an unexpected layer of rot—and complaining that she was tired these days, more tired than she ought to be.

  “You could do some meditation,” Grace told her. “And cut back on sugar and caffeine. They jack you up and then they wear off and you end up feeling worse.” As if her mother ever listened, or changed anything about her lifestyle to deal with stress. “Let Dad and Michael clean up after themselves for a change, or cook a meal for themselves. Go on strike.”

  Her mother laughed, or rather, made a small, explosive noise meant to signify amusement. “Oh yes, I’d like to see how that goes over. Your father and your brother, planning a menu.”

  “Well, why not? They aren’t handicapped. Just spoiled.”

  “Honestly, honey, it’s easier if I do things myself. It saves on wear and tear.”

  Grace kept silent. She had shared her opinion on this topic a number of times already. Her mother chose to martyr herself to some domestic-goddess routine that everybody else in the world had wised up to long ago. “Well anyway,” her mother went on, “I’d better get back to it. Love you, honey. Say hi to Ray.”

  “Ray and I broke up.”

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “Oh dear.” Her mother was trying to avoid saying the wrong thing, whatever that might be. Or voice too much false sympathy. She had never been a big Ray fan. “How are you?”

  “I’m good. It was for the best. We had irreconcilable differences,” Grace said, trying to talk without really saying anything, or at least anything that could be used against her later. “It’s just one of those things.”

  “If you’re sure . . .” her mother began, another effort at tactful consolation. “I mean, if you think it’s the right decision for you.”

  “I do.” No equivocation. She couldn’t stand her mother feeling sorry for her.

  “I know that if you just hang in there, you’re going to find a new boyfriend—”

  “Partner, Mom. Nobody says ‘boyfriend’ anymore.”

  “They don’t? All right, sorry, partner, anyway, somebody new who can make you happy,” her mother finished, and Grace let that pass, because it was one of those reassuring mom things to say, like, you would certainly outgrow your bad complexion and once you were older your feet wouldn’t seem so big.

  “Okay, well, thanks,” Grace said, in a hurry now to get off the phone.

  “I’ll tell your father you said hello.”

  “Sure.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too,” Grace said. It depressed her to think that another part of her mother’s martyrdom was worrying about her children much more than the children worried about her.

  There were other things, other worries that her mother did not bring up on this occasion, although they hung over all their conversations. How Grace, despite having been given every advantage, every enrichment and opportunity, having been encouraged, supported, counseled, despite having been provided an excellent four-year liberal arts education and the resources to pursue further study if she chose, was still living an unserious, financially precarious existence that failed to live up to her potential. And she was doing so just to be difficult. Just like when she’d tried out different names. She was never going to live that one down, was she. It had been one of those teenage things, like the time she dyed her hair pink. Now she was stuck with her parents’ notion of her as a willful and rebellious girl whose complaints did not have to be taken seriously.

  Her parents didn’t get it. Life was different now. The future, her future and that of everyone else her age, had blown up in slow motion. She lived the way she did because greed had sucked the juice out of the world and it was no longer possible to get one of those humble but promising jobs that led, with hard wo
rk and perseverance, to something that might be considered a career. Instead you competed with ambitious, underpaid people on the Indian subcontinent for the sucky customer service jobs, or you might choose to go the tech route and work as a coding slave, or sign noncompete and binding arbitration agreements with some major corporation that still required human bodies to do their dirty work for them.

  Yes, you could go to medical school, or business school, you could aim to be a big deal of one sort or another. You could try to be rich. She had not done so, or at least, she had not done so yet. All options remained open. She thought she might like to travel and see more of the world, teach English in Japan, perhaps, or volunteer with a world poverty organization. She thought she might like to open a restaurant, or even a coffee shop, a place that would promote healthy foods and products. These personal choices were all you had left in a world that seemed so intent on steamrolling you and chugging along to its own destruction. How depressing was it to try and plan a life in such times? Look at climate change, for God’s sake.

  And in spite of everything you could say about the unfairness of it all, the ongoing, escalating, flaming catastrophe of the world around you, there was no dismissing the lurking fear that perhaps you simply did not measure up, and it was your fault you could not afford your own vehicle, or health insurance, or real estate, and you would spend the rest of your life at the bottom of the heap, frantically promoting yourself and your ventures on social media just as everybody else was promoting themselves, and complaining about it all.

  Or, as her father had said, and kept saying: “What did you expect, being an English major? That’s like walking around with ‘Unemployable’ tattooed on your forehead.”

  Thanks. Thanks ever so much. She really really really did need to get out of this town. But she didn’t, she hadn’t. She suspected herself of cowardice and irresolution, for all her big talk. She was a townie through and through, and she had the townie’s comfortable familiarity and comfortable contempt, both at ease with and chafing against the place. Every block seemed to hold some of her history, her own personal bronze plaques: here she’d broken off a portion of a front tooth jumping from someone’s porch steps, here had lived the boy she’d had a crush on in sixth grade. The one in seventh, the one in eighth. And so on. Here had been parties, babysitting jobs, encounters with members of law enforcement while in possession of contraband. Here was the university, her alma mater, whether she wanted it to be or not, clasping her to its oversized bosom.

  When she was in high school, the university campus had been a playground for her and her friends, a place for them to hang out and try to get away with the same things the college kids did, sneaking into bars and parties, horsing around. There were summer nights when the school grounds had been a kind of giant hide-and-seek field, where they met up and ran away and met up again, climbing through unlocked windows, running down empty, echoing hallways, writing rude things on blackboards. Kids’ stuff. Grace had been up in the bell tower as well as down in the steam tunnels. She’d ridden a horse in the stock pavilion and climbed down into an empty and disused swimming pool. She and her friends drank beer on the playing field of the stadium, with its statue of the legendary football player from almost a hundred years ago, which was just about the last occasion when the school had a decent team.

  By the time she started college herself, as a freshman, she had trouble taking any of it very seriously. She lived in one of the dorms—she’d insisted on that—but she spent her free time much as she had before, with those of her friends who had not gone away to school. It was all fun and very absorbing, this new, emancipated life, and it wasn’t until she got the worst grades of her life at the end of her first semester that she had to stop and rethink things.

  Did she even want to be in school? Did she belong there in the first place? There was a series of unpleasant conversations with her parents. She made a new effort with her courses, even the required science and math ones she had no real liking for. She petitioned to have some of her worst grades dropped from her transcript. She declared herself an English major with a minor in ecology, which was not exactly a clear path to a career, but she did well enough in such courses. She was supposed to be intelligent, at least that was what everyone told her, in encouraging, bullying ways. But what if she was not, what if she was just getting by? There was so much knowledge in the world, an infinite vaulting structure, like a temple, and she hardly seemed able to pry off a little piece of it.

  Meanwhile, many of the people she met at school, people who came from all manner of different places, were often curious and disbelieving that Grace actually lived here in town. For them, the town only existed as a subset of the university, since you had to put the school somewhere.

  She got through the four years mostly because she realized that her classmates were not necessarily more brilliant than she was. She graduated and worked in one or another disappointing job, that is, disappointing to her parents, and it seemed that this would be the pattern and shape of her life, at least for now. Then the now of everything changed.

  * * *

  First, her brother took a magic carpet ride on drugs and crash-landed. Grace knew he had his wild and crazy moments and sometimes he went overboard, trashed himself having one or another kind of good time. But that surely wasn’t the same as their father’s life of sad, stupid drinking. Michael knew better than that, he and Grace both did. Although in hindsight Grace realized they had assumed a fallacy: that problem drinking or problem anything else was the exclusive territory of their father. And since neither of them was or ever could be him, they had no such problems of their own.

  But it took quite a while and many mistakes for Grace to unravel and sort out her own thinking. In the meantime, nothing Michael did seemed that different from what other guys his age did. They all experimented, they all had boozy nights and strung-out mornings and bragged about how wasted they got. It was sort of obnoxious, but, as Grace liked to remind him, he was still in his obnoxious phase. “Yeah, what phase are you in?” he said, pretending to slug her in the arm. “Overeducated?”

  Her hilarious, aggravating, pain-in-the-ass brother. The Kid. The Brat. He’d started out as a chubby, worshipful baby. As he got a little older, he discovered that the surefire way to get attention was to be annoying. He teased and mocked her and made up silly songs. If her friends came over to play, he lurked outside the door, elaborately spying. “Mom!” Grace would complain. “Michael’s bothering us!” And her mother would disappoint her by failing to dispense justice and telling them both to behave or else nobody would be allowed to play.

  Both her parents would have denied that they showed any favoritism, that they treated their children differently in terms of preference or behavior. Yet it seemed that Michael’s future, the promise of his future, was different from her own. Of more consequence; while Grace was only expected to find something to do with herself. Nowhere was this stated. Her mother would have made horrified denials. Michael shrugged off anything that suggested a hopeful and accomplished destiny. It seemed to annoy him. Grace kept any grievance to herself. It was undocumentable.

  But for all that, she and her brother were allies, coconspirators. They agreed on the impossibility of their parents, the wild unsuitability of their union, the awfulness of their lives, and how the first time the two of them met they should have turned and run in the other direction, except that would have left Grace and her brother unborn, which wasn’t really what you wanted. Still, what had possessed them? One more cautionary tale, one more mistake they themselves would never make.

  Michael’s troubles started when he was in his first year of college. He was a good but careless student, the kind who put off reading the textbook until the night before the exam, and then got the best score in the class. Grace had already graduated and gained a toehold on an adult life. Unlike his sister, Michael had chosen to live at home rather than on campus. Grace thought that had to do with their mother waiting on him all the time
, her baby boy. It wasn’t anything Grace held against him. It was just the way things were, and anyway, Grace wasn’t someone who wanted to be babied herself.

  She saw Michael more seldom now that she was out on her own. She was busy with work and with her yoga, and with trying out one or another idea of herself, and fighting off the feeling that nothing much had changed since she was in high school. She had a boyfriend, not Ray but the one before Ray, who was good enough company for now, and that too was the same as high school.

  Some nights they went out to their favorite bar. Grace had pretty much stopped drinking, as a part of her developing preoccupation with all things healthy, though she didn’t mind keeping company with people who did. One Saturday night with a crowd just beginning to pack the place, football on the television and a rowdy country song on the jukebox, they came in for cheeseburgers, or rather, cheeseburger for the boyfriend, veggie burger for Grace. They sat at the bar, eating. And here was her brother, swimming through the packed bodies to wave a hand in her face. “Hey, meathead.” He had a vodka and tonic in the other hand.

  “Meathead? Since when is that my name?” Grace pushed her plate toward Michael, who was already helping himself to her fries. “Please, have some. Brian, this is my brother, Michael.”

  Brian had been watching the football game. He said hello, waited a moment to see if his further attention was required, decided it wasn’t, and turned back to the television.

  “How did you get a drink here?” Grace asked him. “You’re way underaged.” Michael rolled his eyes. He might have been trying to look smug, or mock-innocent, or something else, but the effect was distorted by his bulging mouth full of french fries. “What, you have a fake ID?”