A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 7

  Her face felt frozen. The cold had turned her feet into hooves, scraping along on the uneven sidewalk. They had reached the low brick wall that surrounded the library. Evelyn sat down on it. “What’s the matter?” Andrew asked.

  “I want you to go get your car.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t walk any farther, this is stupid. I’m not dressed for it. I’ll look like a hobo by the time we get there.”

  “But we’re most of the way to the house.”

  “No we aren’t.”

  Andrew swung around to the empty street and sidewalk, as if wanting someone to witness how unreasonable she was being. “It would take me a lot longer to go get the car than to finish walking.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “I can’t just leave you sitting here on the street.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “Let’s at least walk a little farther so we can talk about this.”

  “Unless you go get the car,” Evelyn said, “I’m not going to marry you.”

  He stood there for a moment, his mouth opening, then closing, reconsidering whatever it was he had meant to say. Then he turned and walked off in the direction from which they’d come. As she watched, he began running.

  * * *

  You didn’t lose a baby. It wasn’t something you misplaced. The baby simply didn’t take hold. It was a failure of the body, a false start. She lay in bed for days afterward. From time to time she wept, but for the most part she stayed wrapped in a cottony numb fog. The church ladies sent casseroles. The doctor’s office sent a nurse. Andrew sat with her in the evenings and went up and down stairs to fetch things he thought she might want or need. He was allowed to be there, consoling and anxious, like a dog shoving its nose into your hand. After all, he was her husband.

  It had been explained to him that she was in mourning, it might take her time to come to terms with it and move on. And she was in mourning, not for any baby but for her only, her irreplaceable, her precious life, which she had mortgaged out of fear and now could not get back. Andrew would be her life, or at least he would take up most of the space in it. They were now each other’s life, even more so than before. A sealed contract, no longer subject to invalidation due to fraud.

  She would make an effort. He would make an effort. There would be arguments over who was making the greater effort. The children helped, when they finally came. She had not been unfortunate. She had enjoyed many advantages and comforts. Over time, her discontents became familiar and lost some of their sharp edge. What were you allowed to expect from life anyway? Not much. Nothing, when you came right down to it.

  That did not keep you from wanting all of it.

  But it was not so entirely strange, in the drifting, fitful process of dying, with so much that was misleading or uncertain, like a dream you might still wake from, that she would go back to the time when all possibilities were hers. Driving into the storm, all amazement, the rain hitting the glass like a volley of diamonds.

  IV. LAURA

  Syringa vulgaris was the Latin name for lilacs, the old-fashioned ones her mother had planted. Vulgaris, unfortunate word. Laura had looked it up after she found her mother’s handwritten notes. Evelyn had sketched out a plan for the yard on an oversized scroll of paper. Everything else was indicated with its common name, columbine or hydrangea or lily, but the lilacs had been given their proper designation and labeled according to variety: Madame Lemoine, Belle de Nancy, Charles Joly. Her mother’s handwriting was small and precise, unmistakable. She’d drawn tiny sketches of all the plants as well. Graceful branching stems, puffy bushes. She’d put in a crosshatched border, as if it was a needlework sampler. It was all quite lovely, a miniature landscape. One more thing Laura felt she ought to understand about her mother but did not.

  Dust balls might roll across the floors like tumbleweeds and the refrigerator might be home to many cheerless, half-empty jars of pickles and jam. But her mother’s yard was always kept in trim shape, at least until her mother aged. Once, when the house had been in its usual state of mild uproar—Laura and her brother bickering, their father stamping around like an old bull elephant, indignant about something no one else cared about—they had all looked around and registered her absence. “Mom? Mom?”

  They found her out back, sitting in the child-size chair under the grape arbor. “If you are all going to stay out here,” she said, “then I will go back in the house.”

  The garden plan was in a brown accordion file inside an old suitcase inside a closet inside a first-floor room that had once been a play space for Laura and her brother. There were a number of such files, filled with potentially important papers, although that had not yet proved to be the case. The closet also held some old toys meant as keepsakes: A cloth doll with one side of her face stained orange. Some of her brother’s fleet of miniature vehicles. Old board games and jigsaw puzzles, their cardboard boxes gone soft with wear. What was anyone meant to do with them now? Why keep a thing in the first place, what kind of power were you hoping it had?

  It was mid-June, a month since her mother’s death. Laura had taken more time off work to go through the house. (“No fair,” Becca said. “I miss you, there’s nobody here to help me make fun of my dates.”) There was pressure to get the place cleaned and sorted out, painted and patched and put on the market before the weather turned cold and people got out of the house-buying mood. The realtor had been through and had made suggestions. Some things, aesthetic things, could be deferred or done on the cheap, but the house had to be able to pass inspection. Workmen were already tackling the wiring. A number of unsatisfactory bids had come in for foundation and roof repairs.

  Mark was the executor of the estate and he would have to approve any expenditures. He had been here for the funeral but now he was back in Pennsylvania, being a lawyer like their father. (Or not like, since he mostly represented workers in lawsuits against employers.) There were many back-and-forth phone calls about what ought to be done and how much it should cost. There would be more conferences necessary once the house was, with any luck at all, sold off and all the legalities satisfied. Laura was beginning to appreciate ancient Egyptian funeral practices. Build a new house for the dead, lay them within it alongside their possessions, seal it up, and go on about your business.

  She heard a car pull up in the driveway, and then the front door opening. “Mom?”

  “In here.”

  Footsteps coming down the hallway. Even before she reached Laura, Grace was saying, “You shouldn’t leave the door unlocked. Anybody could walk right in on you.”

  “Go lock it, then.”

  “I already did.”

  Grace stood in the doorway, disapproving. “You should just get a dumpster.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d want any of this.” Laura nodded at the heap of old playthings and metal cookie tins and cockeyed lamps that she’d herded into a pile needing further consideration.

  “No one would. I brought us some lunch. Vegetarian vegetable soup and some beet and farro salad. You can’t keep eating cold cuts. They’re a bullet aimed at your heart. I’m going to go heat the soup, I’ll call you.”

  “All right,” Laura said, although her agreement hardly seemed necessary, and Grace was already gone. She was used to her daughter bullying her about one or another thing. She didn’t mind so much. At least it was a way they could talk.

  She heard Grace making exasperated noises in the kitchen. Cupboard doors slammed and pots rattled. Then Grace called her and Laura got up from the floor, stiff-legged, and went to wash her surprisingly filthy hands.

  Grace had set the kitchen table with soup bowls, plates, and the paper carton of salad. There was a stack of brown, recycled paper napkins and two bottles of whatever it was that Grace thought she should be drinking, probably some tonic made of green tea, ginseng, and celery. Grace worked at the healthy grocery in town that sold these things. “This looks nice,” Laura said, because Grace had made an effort, even if the
meal was somewhat severe, and you wanted to encourage Grace in making an effort. “Thank you.”

  “This kitchen should be towed out to sea and burned.”

  “We’re going to pull the appliances and repaint.”

  Grace looked around the room, her expression cool and unamused. She had streaky blonde hair she wore pulled up in a knot, and thin, restless features. She hadn’t turned out looking like anyone else in the family. You’re tall like your grandmother, Laura always said. “What are you going to do about this floor?”

  The floor was red and gray checkerboard tile, not quite old enough or clean enough to be considered vintage and desirable. “We’ll see how it goes,” Laura said.

  “I bet you had some mighty fine meals in this room.”

  “Well, Grandma wasn’t very interested in cooking,” Laura said, ignoring the sarcasm. Laura had been the one in her family who put her nose in the cookbook from an early age, figuring out what went into meat loaf and spaghetti sauce and layer cakes. Good plain cooking that people actually ate. You shouldn’t be surprised that each generation headed off in a different direction from the one before. Evelyn had no use for cooking; Laura baked her own bread. Grace cooked, but she always seemed to be trying to prove something with food.

  The vegetable soup was tasty, even if Laura thought it could have used less . . . texture, perhaps. Fewer beans and chunks of imperfectly peeled carrots. She didn’t get very far with the salad. The soda tasted like iced tea that had undergone some kind of religious conversion. Grace finished her own portion and got up to help herself to the rest of the soup on the stove. She never gained weight no matter what she ate, even growing up on Laura’s short ribs and mashed potatoes and desserts. There were times that her thinness seemed like a willed, an obstinate thing, although Laura knew that was silly.

  Grace had volunteered to spend the afternoon helping, and once they had finished eating, she asked where she should start. “How about right here,” Laura said. “Scrub the cabinets out and put down shelf paper. Try and make it look like a place people could imagine cooking a meal.”

  “Their last meal, maybe,” Grace said, then, “Sorry.” There had, in fact, been a couple of last meals prepared here, and rather too recently for jokes.

  Laura let it slide, which was her default mode with Grace. She pointed out the cleaning supplies, scrub brush, bucket, rubber gloves and left Grace standing at the sink, contemplating the unsatisfactory cupboards.

  Laura went into the dining room, where the table held stacks of dishes, cookware, silver, and serving pieces. She’d already set aside anything that she or anyone else might want—anyone else being Grace and Mark, neither of them enthusiastic—and the rest was going to be boxed up for donation or an estate sale. There were some jadeite pieces that would be of interest to people who collected such things, and a pair of clawlike salad forks that would not be. She filled one box for the Goodwill and started in on another. She heard Grace in the kitchen, scrubbing away, bumping into things, swearing under her breath.

  I have lived my life sandwiched between two angry women.

  She had not put it to herself in quite this way before. Yes, both her mother and her daughter had their angry, impatient moments, but that wasn’t the entirety of them, it wasn’t fair to reduce them to that. But she recognized the truth of it. Her mother had been happiest when she was away from them, teaching her part-timers classes or doing work for the League of Women Voters or some other project. She’d done what was required of her at home. She had joined Laura’s father and supported him in his many social and civic enterprises. Sometimes with better cheer than others, and determined to carry it off with style. Sometimes begrudging it all, holding back, saying sarcastic things, making everyone unhappy.

  There weren’t as many opportunities for women when her mother was growing up. That was certainly true, though once you started blaming other people for your unhappiness, as Evelyn had (mainly Laura’s father), it curdled something in you.

  And what about Grace, who had grown up with wide-open opportunities, who could be a doctor or an astronaut or any other goal she set herself? So far, it seemed, she wanted to be a part-time yoga instructor and a grocery clerk, with a series of drippy boyfriends. She was twenty-five years old. Weren’t you meant to have decided some things by then?

  It was hard not to have opinions about all this. It was also not allowed for Laura to express these opinions, but they tended to leak out anyway.

  A final, energetic burst of door slamming and water running in the kitchen sink, and Grace came in, looking grim and triumphant. “Done. Well, I didn’t put down shelf paper yet. You need to spray for bugs first.”

  Laura waved this away. Bugs could be put off for another day, once they’d finished clearing everything else and didn’t have to inhale poison. Grace said, “What do you want me to do next?”

  “How about you take all the pictures and mirrors down from the walls and bubble-wrap the ones we’re keeping.”

  “Which ones are those?”

  “You can help me decide.”

  Grace thought this would be an interesting chore, at least more interesting than kitchen cleaning. She said she’d bring everything downstairs so they could look them over. Laura heard her industrious feet on the steps, sounds of scraping and hauling. She was glad that her daughter was the one taking down the pictures, the photographs, the framed maps and mirrors. She didn’t want to see the walls made bare. It was one more too-sad thing.

  Grace arranged everything gallery style, propped up against the living room walls. There were a lot of mirrors, one in a twig frame, others in gilt or painted wood. Family photographs that would have to be kept, dutifully, even if no one looked at them again for another fifty years. Here were the grandmothers of grandmothers in black, antique clothes and hats, Evelyn in a graduation cap and gown. (High school? College?) Evelyn and Andrew dressed up to do battle at some university reception. Laura and her brother eating birthday cake and probably kicking each other underneath the table. Baby pictures of Grace, of Michael, of Mark’s kids. Laura had put a number of these around her mother’s sickbed, although that was probably more for her own comfort than Evelyn’s.

  “What’s this?” Grace asked, lifting a framed picture from the pile. It was a print of the idealized, highly colored sort, popular eighty years or more ago. A storm at sea, with a three-masted schooner tossed by violent waves. On a cliff in the background, a lighthouse sent out a narrow yellow beam.

  “Your grandfather had that in his study. I always liked looking at it. You could tell yourself that the ship was going to make it to shore, with the lighthouse showing the way.”

  “Or they only came close and shipwrecked on the rocks with all hands lost.”

  “Honestly, Grace.” As usual, her daughter enjoyed being a smart-ass. And as usual, Laura felt she had to respond with disapproval. A pattern that had been going on since Grace’s teenage years, at least.

  Grace rummaged around in the frames and came up with another. “And this?”

  It was a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, with its stylized, shocking violence: dying horse, dismembered soldier, broken sword, mother grieving her dead child. “Grandma’s,” Laura said.

  They regarded the picture for a time. Laura said, “She was a different kind of person. Your grandmother. I never felt we had that much in common.”

  “Different, how so?” Grace asked. Laura could tell, from her casual tone, that she was paying attention.

  “She was always restless. Always wishing she was somewhere else.” She had wanted to be alone. But Laura didn’t say that; it would have been too hurtful to admit it even to herself. “She would have liked to be more independent. And she never liked living in the Midwest. She thought it was provincial. She would have liked to go back east, where things were more civilized. Her opinion.”

  “She really did a lot, though. Her and Granddad. They were like, famous around here. All the fund-raising and speeches and newspaper arti
cles. They went on all those alumni association trips. They went to Greece. They went to India!”

  “She had a full life,” Laura said, but that was the kind of rubbishy thing you said about people, and anyway there was a difference between full and long.

  “She could get pretty snippy at Granddad.”

  “They always managed to work things out,” Laura said shortly. She did not wish to get into a discussion of whether or not her parents had been mismated, any more than she wished to discuss the dynamics of her own marriage, or why Grace couldn’t seem to pair up with anyone who had much lifetime earning potential.

  They didn’t make a lot of headway with the pictures. There was no reason to keep most of them. The too-pretty landscape paintings, the many renderings of university landmarks. They would need to be thrown away, but Laura could not yet bring herself to do it, and so they were set aside to wait for her to harden her heart.

  Grace said she had to get back to work. “How’s Dad and Michael?”

  “You know, you’re welcome to come over and see for yourself.”

  “I will, OK?”

  “Come for dinner.” Her daughter gave her a pained look. “You can bring your own food if you want.”

  “Yeah. So is Michael home for dinner a lot?”

  “If you say you’re coming, I’ll make sure he is. We’ll make a plan.”

  “Maybe it’s better if I try to run into him downtown, when he’s working.”

  “Better than coming to see us?”

  “Come on, Mom. It’s miserable being in the same room with him and Dad. They can’t go five minutes without screaming at each other.”

  “We’re all trying to get along better.”

  “Those guys aren’t.”

  Laura said, “You don’t know that if you haven’t been around at all. Besides, your father would like to see you.”

  “He knows where I live. I’m sorry, Mom. I want to see you guys, I do. I’ll call Dad, I promise. But I don’t want you to knock yourself out cooking some big meal and then have it turn into a drunken brawl.”