A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Read online

  “Yeah, they need some new writers.” Grace let a beat pass. “So, are you clean and sober now?”

  “Oh, totally, I mean, I’m still an addict. It’s a disease, and the only cure is if you keep working your steps. You know, examine your motives and make amends and all.”

  “Amends?”

  “That’s when you apologize to everybody for being a giant pain in the ass. So. I’m sorry for all the times when I was a giant pain in the ass.”

  “All right, well, it’s all good. I’m glad you’ve got the lingo down.” He kept beaming at her in a way she found unsettling. “You’re looking sharp too.”

  “Thanks. Got tired of the just-puked look.”

  Michael did look better than he had in a while. He’d shaved his scruff of beard and either that or gaining weight made his face fuller, less gaunt. He wore a cotton shirt with a collar, and jeans that had been laundered in some not-too-distant past. Even his hair seemed a lighter shade of blond, wispy and floating around his forehead, not dark and slick as before. All positive things, but wasn’t there the faintest hint of a Communist reeducation camp? To suppress this unworthy thought she said, “It’s a new start for you.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I want to get back to my music. I want to see if I can do it straight. That was part of the problem. Being the crazy artist who romanticized self-destruction.”

  “You sound like Dad,” Grace said, to tease him.

  “Well, maybe he’s not all wrong.”

  This was unexpected enough to turn Grace quiet. She looked out the window to the parking lot beyond. Michael had picked this place, a franchise coffee shop in a strip mall, because it was away from the usual hangouts where he might run into people he knew. That is, the bad friends who might drag him back into the old lifestyle. How long could you keep avoiding everybody you knew? “This town,” she said, following her thought. “Nobody ever leaves, do they?”

  “Well, you haven’t.”

  “Yeah, not yet.” She wasn’t anxious to discuss this. “I have to get ahead of my bills, save a little more. I’m not going to move someplace and then have to sleep in my car.”

  “But you still want to move, right? What, to California or somewhere?”

  “Somewhere.” She should probably shut up about California. She’d been talking about it since she was thirteen, and she’d still never made it there.

  “There’s this thing in AA called ‘the geographic cure.’ When people think all they have to do to solve their problems is go somewhere else.”

  “Huh.” Grace wasn’t sure she liked this new, evangelizing version of her brother. “Except I don’t have AA-type problems.”

  “Why is it you want to leave anyway? What’s so bad about living here?”

  “How about, it’s a big world and I want to see some more of it. So you’re a lifestyle guru now. Wow, Mom and Dad really got their money’s worth.”

  “You don’t have to be so defensive. I’m just trying to get some insight here.”

  “It’s not some big mystery. I don’t want to be stuck here. I don’t want Mom and Dad constantly in my business.”

  Michael said, “You’re always mad at them. I don’t know why.”

  “Because they pass judgment.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “ ‘It’s so annoying that my children aren’t perfect.’ I believe I’ve heard that before.”

  “All right.” Grace waved a hand, dismissing him. “Fine. Moving on.”

  “I guess you think it’s weird to talk about stuff like this, you know, all the bad feelings and unhealthy expectations, but that’s what they had me do the whole while I was there, and you get to where you want to figure it all out, why we do the things we do and get into these destructive behavior patterns.”

  “Whatever floats your boat,” Grace said. She thought that Michael had taken too many bites of the rehab cheeseburger, and he was going to go on this way for a time until he settled down.

  “I’m happy now. I want everybody else to be happy too.”

  “I am happy,” Grace said. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m not bulletproof. I’m scared shitless I’m going to slip up and start using again.”

  “You better not.” She was alarmed at this. “I will personally beat your ass if you do.”

  “Yeah, if only threats worked. Did they tell Grandma?”

  “What do you think?”

  They were quiet then, watching the parking lot and the ordinary traffic, people coming and going with packages, errands, dry cleaning on hangers, coffee cups, people with their own problems.

  They got through Thanksgiving, a meal fussed over by their mother and prayed over by Michael, who volunteered to give a blessing. This was not their custom. Michael gave thanks for his sobriety and recited the Serenity Prayer, while the rest of them examined the tablecloth in shared embarrassment. They were not a family who was accustomed to overt declarations of gratitude. Grace contributed a stuffed acorn squash and a dairy-free pumpkin pie. Their father set the table without wineglasses. He wrestled with the carving of the turkey. Their mother worried about whether the breast meat was too dry. “It’s all great, Mom,” Michael said, and Grace and their father chimed in, yes, great, thank you.

  By Christmas the shine had worn off the rehab thing and there weren’t any more dinner-table blessings. Their mother insisted on the usual elaborate cookie project she undertook every year, rolling and frosting and decorating dozens of cookies with colored sugar and tiny sugar pearls. There were also Santa cookies with gumdrop hats and beards made of shredded coconut, and chocolate pinwheels topped with crushed peppermint, lemon squares, pecan bars, molasses crisps. As if all manner of distress might be warded off with enough cookies. Michael missed one of the family dinners, and was absent when the rest of them decorated the Christmas tree. He was trying to get his band started up again, it was explained. It was proving to be very time-consuming.

  In January there was a new crisis, or a series of crises, involving more damage to automobiles, more misappropriated funds, hospital stays, lies about lies, and Michael’s parents put him in the backseat of their remaining car and drove him north for what proved to be his last stay in rehab.

  II. GRACE

  Grace and her grandmother were not fond of each other, exactly; neither of them did fond. But they maintained a wary mutual respect, based on what they had in common: a lack of sentiment and an impatience for weakness. When Grace (Patti, back then) had been a small child she had taken a fall down Evelyn’s back steps and broken her arm. Evelyn made a splint out of towels and a kitchen cutting board and drove her to the emergency room, telling her that if she cried, the doctor would have to give her a shot. She didn’t cry all the way through X-rays and having the arm put in a cast. When Laura showed up at the hospital, full of fluttering maternal concern, Evelyn said, “Now don’t go getting her all upset. It’s just a little break and if it doesn’t heal well she can always learn to use her left hand.”

  While her parents were away writing more checks for Michael’s second round of rehab, and sitting in counseling sessions designed to elicit painful truths, Grace was tasked with checking up on her grandmother. She phoned and asked Evelyn if she could bring her some scones from the health food store’s bakery.

  “The kind they don’t put sugar in?” her grandmother asked, not sounding all that excited.

  “They use natural sweeteners and whole wheat flour.”

  “I don’t see why they bother.”

  “Come on, Grandma. People eat them all the time.”

  “You know what I have a taste for? Some plain glazed doughnuts. Why don’t you hunt up some doughnuts for me.”

  Grace bought a package of supermarket doughnuts and headed over. It was clear, cold January, with a steady wind going about its impersonal business of making everyone miserable. Grace rang the doorbell and waited on the big front porch, hugging herself against the cold. No one and nothing moved on the street. A crust of old snow turned everythi
ng untidy. There was nothing for the eye to take comfort in, nothing to make you feel that tomorrow might be better than today. She thought she was probably depressed. Well, this was the season for it. And she was worried about Michael, without feeling there was anything she could do about him, no way he’d allow her to help him. Even when he was a little kid with a skinned knee or a finger slammed in a car door, he’d howl and rage on his own, resisting consolation. He’d always had that side to him, volatile, unreasonable, bewildering. For the first time, she considered that there might not be any happy ending to his story.

  Evelyn was a long time getting to the door. Grace’s mother carried a key to the house with her for fear of all the things you saw on television commercials, old people lying helpless in bathtubs or at the foot of the stairs. But Evelyn didn’t like being barged in on, as she called it, and even if she did fall and hurt herself, it was easy to imagine her dismissing it as just a little hip fracture.

  Eventually Evelyn appeared and unlocked the door and swung it open. “Don’t let that cold in,” she ordered. Grace held out the doughnuts. “Now, those look good. I’ve had a taste for doughnuts lately, I don’t know why.” She was wearing one of her usual at-home outfits. Pull-on pants made out of shiny, heavy-duty acrylic, a cotton turtleneck, and a cardigan sweater with its pockets full of tissues.

  “Sugar is addictive,” Grace said. “They’ve done studies.” Then she wished she had not said “addictive.” Evelyn was not supposed to know about Michael’s problems, at least not while they were active and ongoing. She had been told that Grace’s parents were having a fun extended weekend, shopping and sightseeing in Chicago. “Do you want some coffee with these? How about I make coffee.”

  “Don’t make it too weak,” Evelyn said. She shared her granddaughter’s taste in this.

  They sat at a table in the sunroom, the doughnuts cut into quarters. “Go ahead, have some,” Evelyn said, and Grace cut an even smaller piece for herself. It was so sweet it made her tongue curdle. She flooded her mouth with coffee.

  Evelyn took her time eating. Everything she did nowadays was slow. How old was Evelyn? Somewhere north of eighty. In the old pictures in the albums, the pictures hung on the walls, she was a woman with a pretty if angular face, her hair pinned up in the fashionable rolls and bunches of the time, facing the camera with a what-do-you-want expression.

  There was no hint of this younger self now. It was as if the winds outside had blown her into tatters, like clothes left too long on a line. Her skin was crosshatched with wrinkles and her mouth was marked by deep hinges. Her hair was fine and white and disordered. Grace felt hopeless when she thought about getting older, like she was running out of time already, without yet having launched her life. Age was a catastrophe that overcame people. Maybe it was something you got used to. How else would you keep on living?

  But Evelyn still had a clear mind and a sharp tongue and no longer cared what anyone thought about her. She ate what she wanted of the doughnuts and set her coffee cup down in its saucer without any unsteadiness in her hands. “What is it I’m not supposed to know?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your mother pretending she had to go shoe shopping at Nordstrom’s in the middle of winter. You’d better tell me.”

  “She didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Too late for that.”

  “Michael got into trouble with drugs. They had to call the police a couple of times. He’s not in school anymore. They’re up in Chicago, the suburbs, I guess, putting him in a treatment place so he can get some help.”

  Grace stopped there. She watched Evelyn for some reaction, but her grandmother only said, “What kind of drugs, what does that mean?”

  “Different ones. Painkiller pills. Cocaine, I think.”

  “And what do those do for you?”

  “Ah, they do different things.” It was an odd conversation to be having with your grandmother. “Different kinds of getting you high.” She hoped she wasn’t going to have to try and explain “high.”

  “You take this stuff too?”

  She did and she didn’t. “Some. Not a lot.”

  Evelyn tightened her mouth and looked Grace up and down. “At least you have some sense. You don’t make yourself sick with it.”

  Grace didn’t answer. At this point it seemed like the less said, the better. “She’s spoiled that boy,” Evelyn said. “No wonder he thinks he can get away with anything.”

  “No, Grandma, you can’t make it Mom’s fault. Michael did it to himself.”

  “Can they get his head put back on straight? This place? What kind of treatment? Never mind. I don’t need to know.” Evelyn pulled a tissue from the pocket of her sweater and worked at her nose with it.

  Grace kept quiet. She figured she was already in some kind of trouble, or would be, for blabbing. It was so easy to be in trouble in her family. All you really had to do was speak up.

  Evelyn raised her head and regarded the brilliant, painful winter sunlight that lit the glass in almost liquid streaks. “This room gives me such a chill lately.”

  “Really?” The entire house was overheated. The thermostat was set to Bake. You could have grown orchids in the sunroom. “It feels warm enough to me.”

  “The windows aren’t glazed right. Even when the sun’s out, the radiators can’t keep up.”

  “You need a new furnace, Grandma.”

  “The old one works fine. It’s the windows that let the drafts in.”

  “Then get somebody out to work on the windows. Not in the middle of winter. Later, when they can take the glass out and replace it.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” Evelyn said, but she wouldn’t. She wasn’t somebody who spent money on a house. Grace’s mother was always trying to get her to repair or replace one thing or another: The balky water heater that made noises like it was tumbling rocks. The yellowing kitchen sink and the bathroom tile that resembled that in a 1940s public washroom. The sunroom was furnished with white wicker armchairs and love seats and floral cushions so old that it seemed spiteful to keep using them. Everywhere you looked, something needed more or less urgent attention.

  It wasn’t that Evelyn couldn’t afford to do such projects. It was Grace’s understanding that she was modestly wealthy, although she couldn’t have said what that meant in terms of dollars, or where the money was meant to go once Evelyn passed away. Money was like certain forms of misbehavior, not considered suitable for conversation.

  Although there was the time that Grace’s mother said the problem was that Evelyn was afraid of outliving her money. Like a lot of other old people. “And if they start spending it, it’s like admitting they’re going to die. That’s one problem I guess your father and I won’t have. Since there’s no money to begin with.”

  Grace wasn’t sure how she was meant to respond to this information. Everybody she knew worried about money and she didn’t think her family was any worse off than most. But her parents always made it sound as if an injustice had been committed against them.

  “Grace,” Evelyn said out loud, startling her from her thoughts. “You through changing names for a while?”

  “I thought we were done talking about this.” Her grandmother had not been enthusiastic about her decision.

  “Still trying to get used to it. You one of those who won’t change your name when you get married?”

  “I haven’t thought about getting married.” That is, she had, but she and Ray agreed that marriage was an intrusive legal construction.

  “We didn’t have a choice. You got married, you were Mrs. So-and-So. It was the way things were. I’d have liked to hear what your grandfather would have said if I’d told him I wanted to stay a Miss or a Miz or whatever. He was not a forward-thinking man. You probably don’t remember that much about him.”

  “Not a lot.” He’d been so old. Like one of those dried-up spider bodies you came across in the corner of a window frame, ready to crumble at a touch.

  “He fought in the w
ar. He was in France and in Germany. He saw terrible things.”

  Anytime someone attempted to summon the past, the past she had not been a part of, Grace was impatient, not wanting to pay it any attention, since it had nothing to do with her. But there was also the thing she shied away from, her fright at how the world swallowed up everything you were and everything you knew and then you too became a boring story to somebody else.

  “Yes,” she said now. “I saw the pictures of him in uniform.”

  She waited, but Evelyn was done talking. Sometimes there were these silences, as if she might be carrying on a conversation by herself and no longer had need of you.

  Grace gathered up the plates and coffee cups and took them into the kitchen to wash up. Evelyn was ready for her to leave, she could tell, so that she could fall asleep in front of her afternoon television programs. “All right, do you need any other groceries? Anything from the drugstore?”

  “Everybody thinks I can’t use a telephone if I have to. You call and they bring anything you want, right to the door.”

  “I can go to the store for you too, it’s no problem.”

  “Don’t knock yourself out.”

  “Come on, Grandma.”

  “No, I mean, don’t fuss like your mother. She’s always telling me I need one or another thing and then making a production out of it.”

  Grace got her coat and put it on in the entryway. “She likes to be useful.”

  “She likes to fret and worry and wear herself out for everybody else and then you’re meant to feel bad for her.”

  “I guess.”

  “But that’s not you, is it. You’re not the suffering type.”

  Grace tried not to look as if she had an opinion one way or the other. Once Evelyn got on your case, she stayed on it.