A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 14

  “But that’s all right. You should do whatever you want. God knows women hardly ever get to do that. They don’t even try.”

  “All right, Grandma.” By now Grace was anxious to be gone. “I promise, I’ll do whatever I want. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  But what was it she wanted to do, and how to live? And why did everybody seem to think it was easy? As if all she had to do was exert her will on the world, and declare herself one thing or another, an artist, or an inventor, and that would come to pass.

  All she could think of, driving home through the winter-bare streets, the everyday ugliness of traffic and billboards and power lines, was that she wanted to open her eyes in the morning and see something different.

  * * *

  Grace’s mother said, “I’m worried about your father.”

  It was nothing new to get such a call from her mother. Sometimes she was worried about Michael. Sometimes it was Evelyn. Grace assumed that at other times, different family members got calls announcing that her mother was worried about Grace. “What’s the matter, Mom?”

  “He’s so furious at your brother. Addiction is a disease. You can ask people to take responsibility, but you can’t blame them for it.”

  “So is being a drunk a disease,” Grace said, but her mother ignored this.

  “Your father starts in on him, then of course Michael feels he’s being attacked, because he is, and he retaliates. It’s horrible. Your father needs to make more of an effort. He’s supposed to be the parent. The adult.”

  “Well they’re both . . .” Whatever they were. Totally sick. “They both have problems, Mom. It’s probably inherited. Genetic.” She hesitated, charged ahead. “I worry sometimes about me. I try not to drink or, get carried away with anything. So I won’t be like them. Another famous screwed-up Arnold.”

  “Oh honey, I don’t worry about you one bit,” her mother said, which was just like her, to dismiss any of Grace’s little problems. You’d think you’d be used to it by now, but you weren’t and you never would be. So much for trying to tell her mother something actually important and personal. “But I wish you would come to the counseling sessions with us.”

  Fat chance. “How are those going?”

  “They’re very productive. Everyone has to sit and listen to everybody else.”

  “That would be nice.” And different.

  “The counselor would like you to attend. She says she gets an incomplete picture if all family members aren’t there.”

  Grace thought the counselor could get a pretty good picture from the fact of her absence. “Pass.”

  “I could really use some moral support from you. Somebody has to calm Michael and your father down when they get carried away.”

  Grace contemplated the exciting prospect of piling on in the family arguments, while a counselor took notes and kept score. “No, why does that have to be your job, or mine, or anybody else’s? You treat them like little boys, no wonder they keep having stupid, juvenile fights. What are you supposed to get out of counseling anyway, isn’t any of this for you?”

  “Oh, P—, Grace. Maybe one of these days you’ll have somebody who’s so precious to you, you won’t worry so much about yourself. Now I have to take Grandma to her doctor’s appointment. Unless that’s something you decide you want to help with.”

  * * *

  Evelyn’s funeral was more than a year later. She had been stubborn about her dying, and right up to the end she’d taken her time. Everyone said that Grace’s mother had done a wonderful job of caring for her. Had kept her out of a nursing home and out of the hospital so she could die at home. That was supposed to be important to people, even though by the end, Evelyn had been beyond knowing where she was, except, perhaps, that she was still tethered to the world.

  The family had attended the Presbyterian service and the graveside ceremony and had now gathered for lunch at a steakhouse. Grace ordered salad and a bowl of vegetable soup. It wasn’t a day to make waves. Her uncle Mark and aunt Brenda and her two silent teenage cousins, Dylan and Tracy, had come in from Massachusetts. They were her only other relatives, her father being an only child, and she wished they were more engaging. She liked Mark; he was a lawyer, but a nice one, and he was good at keeping up steady, cheerful conversation. Brenda was thin and sniffy and was always pulling Mark aside to talk to him privately about something that was not as it should be. The cousins might eventually grow up to be interesting, but right now they kept their faces in their phones and displayed all the personality of a couple of cabbages.

  Also at the luncheon were a few of Evelyn’s longtime neighbors and a few university people who had felt obliged to attend for her grandfather’s sake. Also two old, very old friends of Evelyn and her husband, the Radishes. That was not their actual name, but Grace and her brother had not been able to pronounce “Radisson” when they were younger, and so the Radishes they remained, although not to their faces. John Radish had begun as a junior member of her grandfather’s law firm, almost sixty years ago. They were people who went to a lot of funerals. They ate quietly and lifted their water glasses and coffee cups with care, and through most of the day’s events they had seemed not entirely present, as if preoccupied with mournful, mortal thoughts.

  Her mother had checked out. So Grace thought, watching her sitting at one end of the long table, her chin propped up with one hand. There were hard white lines around her mouth. At the grave site she’d cried a little, quietly, while the rest of the family had stayed self-consciously dry-eyed. Now she’d reached the end of her obligations and the end of her rope and she was only waiting for the day to be over so she could go to sleep. And if the day was not yet over, she would get a head start on sleeping right where she sat.

  Mark sat next to her mother and said what looked like encouraging things, although her mother did not seem to be paying him much attention. Losing Evelyn had been harder on her mother than on Mark; Grace knew this without entirely thinking through why. And Mark, who was a nice man, who probably felt some guilt for living out of town, for not being more of a help, was trying to make it up to her. Now that Laura’s dark hair and Mark’s red-blond had turned gray, they looked so much alike. Hansel and Gretel, grown old.

  Her father and Michael were down at the other end of the table with a cousin between them. They both wore unaccustomed suits and ties, and both of them had managed to squirm half out of their collars and rumple their jackets. They were looking off into opposite corners of the room, two different versions of the same morose, sandy-haired man, reluctantly present in the here and now.

  In fact, Grace realized, she was probably the only person at the table who was not somehow paired off.

  As if everyone else might be about to notice the same thing, and think how pitiful she was, Grace turned to John Radish on her right. “You must have known my grandparents back when they were practically newlyweds.”

  He took his time swallowing his food. He raised his napkin to his mouth and then returned it, still folded, to its place alongside his plate. “Arthur’s older than me.”

  “Well, yes, he was.”

  “That’s why I’m still kicking around and he’s not.”

  “Oh, hush, John, what’s the matter with you,” his wife said. Her name was Alice and she had skin as white and translucent as milk glass. “Nobody wants to hear something like that.”

  John didn’t answer. The restaurant window looked out onto a small pond with a fountain. He stared out at the rise and fall of the water’s spray as the wind tossed it. Alice went on. “You’ll have to excuse him. He has the tiniest little bit of fuzzy brain going on.”

  Grace murmured that she was sorry to hear it. “Oh he’s still a big sweetie,” Alice said cheerfully. “Anyway, it’s too late to get rid of him now. Oh poor Evelyn. I’m sorry to say we didn’t keep up as well as we might these last years. I sent her a card when I heard she was failing. I don’t know if it got through to her.”

  “I’m sure it got there and
my mom read it to her.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Alice said.

  Grace was distracted by her father and brother, who were having some terse conversation over the head of the preoccupied female cousin. She hadn’t had a real chance to talk to Michael lately, what with all the worry and exhaustion of Evelyn’s dying. He always said he was fine, things were fine. And maybe they were, though that depended on what you were willing to call fine.

  “When she lost that baby. Now God knows that’s a terrible thing.”

  “What?” Alice was still talking, but Grace hadn’t been listening. She tried to catch Michael’s eye. He was standing now, jamming his hands into his pockets and saying something to their father that their father did not wish to hear. “What baby?”

  “Their first. So sad. She went east to see her family and sent word to Arthur that she wasn’t coming back. Nobody was supposed to know. But of course we all did.”

  Michael had turned his back and was headed for the exit. Grace said, “Would you excuse me?” Or began to say it, when John gripped her arm above the elbow, hard enough so that it was difficult for her to dislodge it.

  “Arthur took care of the trees.”

  She managed to get her arm free. “Thank you. I wasn’t aware of that.” She looked at Alice, who only shook her head, as if to say, No accounting for him. Michael was out of sight by now. Her father was still at the table. He said something to a waiter. Grace guessed he was ordering another drink. “But she did come back. Obviously.”

  “Yes, I don’t know what Arthur told her or had to promise her. She was a pistol, Evelyn was. Times were different then. People stayed married.”

  John Radish said, “They planted trees around the parade ground. One for each soldier. Arthur was in charge.”

  “John, this is Arthur and Evelyn’s granddaughter. She doesn’t want to hear about any silly trees.”

  “You go look it up. Or you could ask Arthur.”

  “Now, John, you know very well that Arthur’s beyond asking. Anyway, it’s Evelyn we’re supposed to be remembering today.”

  Grace’s father appeared behind her chair. “So this is where the party’s really happening.”

  “Hi Dad.” Grace felt herself shrinking away from him, a familiar, involuntary recoiling. She hated everything about his drinking, especially his smiling, insouciant confidence that his drinking made no difference. “Where did Michael go?”

  “Who knows. Off to play music. A reggae version of ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ . . . John, Alice. You get everything you need? Enough to eat?” He leaned over them, an attentive host.

  Alice said, “It was all very good. Of course we’ve slowed down some, we don’t eat the way we used to.” A small section of her breast of chicken entrée looked as if it had been surgically removed.

  “How about you, John? What are you drinking? It’s on me.”

  “He’s not drinking anything, Dad.”

  “Well that’s because nobody asked him what he wanted. What say, John? You a beer man?”

  “Ha ha,” John said. “Now you’re talking.”

  The waiter came by then and replaced her father’s empty beer glass with a full one. “Thanks. Bring another for this gentleman, why don’t you.” The chair next to Grace was vacant and he sat. He said, “This has all been very hard on your mom.”

  “Yeah.” She waited to see if he had more to say, but he only nodded and looked up and down the length of the table at the rest of the guests, the old acquaintances and university people who were finishing up their desserts and coffee. Her mother had planned the whole menu. She hadn’t wanted anyone else to help.

  Her father lifted his beer glass. “Here’s to your grandmother. Wherever she is, I hope she’s happier now.”

  “Dad.” Grace couldn’t tell if anyone had heard him. It didn’t seem they had. “Cool it, OK?”

  “What? Simple truth. She was one of those women with a persecution complex. The whole world is out to get them.”

  You could make the case that the whole world actually was, in certain ways, and especially for women of Evelyn’s generation. But this wasn’t the time or place for a drunk argument. “Come on, Dad. Mom doesn’t need to hear that.”

  “She’d agree with me, a hundred percent.”

  “Fine. Let’s talk about it some other time.”

  Her father gave Grace an unfriendly look, but subsided. The waiter set a beer glass down in front of John Radish, who tried to pick it up without spilling it. He settled for leaning over it and slurping it direct from the glass.

  “Where’s Rich?”

  “Ray. He couldn’t get off work.”

  “Doesn’t he work in a bike shop?”

  “So?”

  “Just how vital to the national interest is his presence at work?”

  “That’s really snotty. Like other people’s jobs aren’t important.” In fact Ray hadn’t wanted to come with her to the funeral and they’d had a huge fight about it.

  “Snotty, I like that.” A trick her father had of saying something offensive, and then being the one who took offense. Grace hitched her chair away from him. She purely hated him.

  Grace’s mother got up from her chair and made her way around a corner to the restrooms. Grace’s uncle Mark got up too and came over to where Grace and her father were sitting. “Gabe. Gracie. How’s everybody holding up?”

  Grace murmured that she was fine. Maybe you were meant to be overcome with grief, but she wasn’t. Evelyn had been so old and so sick. It had been time. Her father said, “Where’s Laura? We need to wrap this up.”

  “She’ll be right back. She is what they call plumb tuckered out.”

  “Aren’t we all,” her father said, making a droll face. “I mean, not just with Evelyn. We’ve had our hands full at home. Maybe you heard.”

  “Ah,” Mark said, nodding in a noncommittal way that Grace thought of as lawyerly. “Has to be hard on everybody.”

  “You ask yourself where you went wrong. Feed them, provide for them, wipe their noses, tie their shoes, buy them whatever they want. Then they turn around and sink their teeth in your leg. I don’t mean you, Gracie. You’re a good girl.”

  “Thank you,” Grace said. Her phone chimed. She dug it out of her purse. It was a text from Michael:

  IS THE ASSHOLE STILL THERE?

  She texted back:

  YES.

  Mark said, “Hey, he’ll straighten himself out. Wait and see. He’s a smart kid.”

  “It’s not a kind of smart that’s doing him much good.”

  Her uncle allowed himself a glance at Grace, and Grace moved her shoulders ever so slightly. Meaning, Those two. What were you supposed to do?

  “This rehab business. Boy, do they ever have a scam going.”

  Shut up shut up shut up shut up.

  Mark said, “Come on, Gabe. It’s a process, not a quick fix.”

  “I’d like to own some stock in that process. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Mark’s wife, Brenda, was trying to get his attention. “Excuse me,” Mark said, navigating around the other guests to where Brenda sat at the far end of the table. Grace watched him bend over the back of Brenda’s chair, listening to whatever it was that Brenda wanted. They were flying back to Massachusetts this afternoon and there would be one or another thing that had to be packed or purchased. They would be anxious to be on their way. Everybody was. Where was her mother?

  “What a screwed-up situation.”

  She turned toward her father. “What?”

  “Is your brother coming back here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her father rubbed at his eyes and yawned. “We need to clear the air. Me and him.”

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “All his problems are my fault. For being a bad parent.”

  His eyes were bloodshot from the rubbing. Their expression was belligerent and challenging. Grace said, “I don’t know what he means by that.”

&nbs
p; Her father seemed suspicious of this answer. Then he waved a hand, dismissing it. “Nobody knows how hard having kids is until it’s their turn. It changes everything.”

  Wasn’t it supposed to? Should she apologize for her own existence? Or just keep up her usual silent, mutinous, and yes, snotty commentary.

  “I’d like to see them try. See your brother try. Earn a good living so you can keep the whole outfit chugging along. Let’s start with that. People take it for granted. Times I lost sleep, times I thought I was going to get fired. And I still could, you know? Stiff upper lip. Soldier on. He thinks that part’s not important.” Again the challenging look.

  “Of course it’s important,” Grace said. She hated having to be simple-minded and patient with him, agree the way you might agree with a baby, just to keep him from getting stupidly mad, often enough about something else entirely. “You do work hard, everybody knows that.” This happened to be true, but saying it as a way to placate him felt craven.

  John Radish spilled his beer glass into his lap then, and Grace jumped up to keep from getting wet herself. “I’m going to go find Mom, all right?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She got up and crossed the room and went into the small vestibule with the restrooms. The ladies’ was empty except for a woman at the sink, absorbed in tweezing her eyebrows. Grace went back out and scanned the restaurant. John Radish was being tended to by a couple of waiters with napkins. He allowed himself to be moved this way and that, like a horse being shod. Still not seeing her mother, Grace walked through the front door of the restaurant and a little ways into the parking lot.

  She found her sitting on the hood of a car, not her own, watching the fountain rise and fall back into its shallow pool. “Mom?”

  Her mother turned her head toward Grace in an unhurried movement. “Are you all right?” Grace asked.

  “Of course I am. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Did you . . .” She meant to ask, Did you want to be alone, then decided it was better if she was not left alone. The car her mother was sitting on was a Lexus in some power shade of dark charcoal. It was not the kind of car often used for sitting, and it might have an owner with strong feelings about people doing so. Screw it. Grace sat down on it also. The hood made a foreboding sound of metal giving way beneath her, then springing back. The afternoon was warm and the fountain teased with its promise of coolness.