A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 8

  “Michael isn’t drinking.”

  “I didn’t mean Michael.”

  “That’s about enough of that.”

  Grace closed her mouth then and gave her mother the benefit of her most irritating expression, a look of cool, detached pity. Fine. Clearly, you possess superior insight and strength of character and would never allow yourself to be inconvenienced and unappreciated, certainly not by your own family.

  They let it rest after that. Laura thanked Grace for coming over to help, and Grace said that she’d have more time this weekend if her mother wanted her to come back, and they half hugged good-bye.

  Well, she had helped. That was something. Neither Michael nor Gabe had, not really.

  But why not come for dinner? Why argue about it? Just when you thought you already knew all the ways your children could be hurtful.

  Surely they weren’t as bad as all that, her family, not as bad as Grace seemed to think. Everybody had their difficulties. Everybody managed as best they could. Grace was just being her usual hardheaded self.

  She finished filling the last kitchenware box, checked to make sure all the lights were off and the house secure. She was going to have to get used to the fact that the house would change hands and other people would live here. The process had already begun. People who had known her parents had sent realtors around to make discreet inquiries. Laura was helping it all come about. She ought to be over any soppy, boo-hoo feelings by now, but she wasn’t.

  When she got home and opened the back door, a murky wave of sound greeted her. Michael was in residence. Laura climbed the stairs and knocked on his closed door. No response. Knocked louder. “Honey?”

  He opened the door without turning the music down. Laura had to pantomime: Too loud!

  Michael retreated back into his room, adjusted the volume down but not off, and presented himself again at the door, which he held closed behind him. His parents had access to his room and the ability to make regular searches of it, that was part of the postrehab deal. In practice, it was a lot harder to barge in on him.

  “Hello,” Laura said in a meaning-to-be-ironic voice. “Just checking in.”

  “Yeah, hi.” Michael not having one of his better days. She could tell. Requests for information would be taken under consideration. His face had a blurred, muzzy look to it. Old alarms seized her, the fear that he was using again, the conditioned response that you couldn’t shake yourself loose from. But no.

  “Were you asleep?” He nodded. Often enough he fell asleep to the racket of his music. “Sorry. Are you working tonight? Will you want some dinner?” No point, she knew, in trying to coax anything nonfactual out of him.

  “Yeah, I have to go in to Rocco’s. I’ll get something to eat there.” Rocco’s was the restaurant where he worked as a server and was, by all accounts, charming and attentive to his customers. Perhaps they should consider having him work for tips at home.

  “All right. I saw your sister today.”

  “Yeah?”

  Three yeahs in a row. “She says hello.” She had not, literally, but she might have, if urged to do so.

  “Uh-huh.” Michael yawned. “I need to catch a little more sleep before I go in. Can you get me up in an hour?”

  Laura said she would. “Michael? Turn the music off.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, maybe, but Laura kept her eyebrows raised, her half-stern, half-mocking, you’re-being-ridiculous face, and after a moment Michael ducked his head and smiled and once he closed his door the music went blessedly silent.

  Back in the kitchen she thought about sitting down, thought the better of it, and started in on supper. Pork cutlets pounded thin, dredged in fine crumbs, pan-fried and served with lemon. A simple pasta with cheese and garlic. Salad. Reasonably healthy stuff. She’d make enough for Michael too, no matter what he said. It was a mom thing.

  You could measure your life out in meals. Too depressing.

  Gabe got home while she was cutting up tomatoes and celery for the salad. “Chop chop,” he said, clapping his hands together. There were some jokes you were so tired of, they didn’t even register anymore.

  Gabe fixed his drink and went in to watch the news until it was time to eat. Laura cooked up a portion of the meat and pasta and put them on a plate for Michael, along with some salad. It was time for him to wake up for work. She put the plate on a tray, added silverware and a napkin and a can of Coke.

  Gabe raised his head as she carried the tray on her way upstairs. “What’s that?”

  “It’s for Michael.”

  “He’s home?”

  “Yes, but he’s going in to work.”

  Gabe said something she couldn’t hear. Laura knocked on Michael’s door. Knocked again until she heard him answer. “I’m coming in,” Laura said, and balanced the tray to work the doorknob. Michael was sitting on the edge of the bed, awake but not very. Laura set the tray down on the clearest available surface, his desk. “Here. In case you decide you’re hungry.”

  “Oh, sure. Thanks.” He rubbed his eyes and his T-shirt rode up, showing his meager stomach. He was still way too thin. “Yeah, thanks, Mom. Looks good.”

  When Laura went downstairs, Gabe said, “What was that about?”

  “I took him some dinner.”

  “Why can’t he come downstairs and eat?”

  “He has to get ready for work.”

  “What’s so complicated about putting on a white shirt and black pants? He doesn’t need his food delivered to him.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Laura said, heading into the kitchen. She knew Michael wouldn’t sit down to eat with them. There was no point in going into it.

  She and Gabe ate at the kitchen table. Gabe worked through his food as if he had some grievance against it. Should she ask him how was his day, what was wrong, or any other kind of useless wifely noise? He could talk if he wanted to. She said, “I saw Grace today. She came and helped me at Mom’s house.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She said to say hello.”

  They heard Michael bumping around overhead, then his feet on the stairs, descending. He had to ride his bike in to work—his driver’s license was long gone—and he came through the kitchen in a rush. “Bye Mom. Dad. See you later.”

  Gabe said, “Bring those dishes down from your room.”

  Michael paused and tilted his head, as if he might not have heard. “Your mother took the time to bring you your dinner, you can take the time to bring the dishes back to the kitchen.”

  Laura kept silent, but she nodded to Michael: Just do it. Hoping he’d go along without it turning into a stupid fight about nothing. Gabe looked peevish, ready to start in. Just do it. Please, no power struggle. And of course Michael ought to take care of the dishes, and Gabe was not wrong to say so, although he could have done so less unpleasantly, and here they were again, she, Laura, the enabler, and he, Gabe, the unsympathetic hard-ass, everything that had come out in the counseling sessions, everything they’d said they understood now, as if that ever changed anything.

  Michael shrugged, headed back upstairs, came down with the tray of dishes. He rinsed them and set them in the sink. “It was all real tasty, Mom, thanks.” Then, in his best waiter’s manner, he presented himself at his father’s chair. “Freshen your drink for you?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Bye guys.” And then he was gone out the back door, his bike tires crunching on the gravel of the driveway.

  “What’s with his hair?” Gabe asked.

  “It’s a kid thing. It’s how they’re all wearing it.” The sides of Michael’s head were shaved close, and the top was a fluff of curls.

  “It looks half-witted.”

  Laura didn’t disagree. She was just glad when there was something as trivial as hair to worry about. Gabe got up to fix himself another drink. He said, “Who’s going to hire him for a real job, looking like that? I wouldn’t. He’d get laughed out of the office.”

  “He’s still
in school.”

  Gabe made a particular kind of face, meaning, school was an excuse for their son to not do much of anything else with himself, anything adult and well paying. He’d said it all before. She’d heard it all before. He said, “How’s the house coming?”

  It wasn’t entirely a change of subject. Selling the house would mean money for them, though how much depended on things that had not yet happened. Michael’s treatment in rehab, Michael’s legal fees, Michael’s work-in-progress counseling had put them deep in the hole. Insurance only paid so much. “It’s getting there,” Laura said.

  “What’s the big holdup? It’s been a month.”

  “That’s not a long time.” She meant, not a long time for your mother to be dead. He could try harder to understand these things. He could try a lot harder.

  “What’s your brother waiting on? Doesn’t he want to get the estate settled?”

  “Of course he does.” It was her family, not his. She hated when he was like this, greedy and angry, his lower lip pushed out like a baby’s. A crabbed and aging baby with his scalp showing through the thin spots in his hair. There was no talking to him. “It’s going to take as long as it takes. Call Mark yourself if you think he’s dragging his feet.”

  Gabe started in about the particulars of the roofing companies and other contractors who had been consulted, or who should not have been consulted, and how they were gumming up the works, and what should have been done instead. Laura let him run on without further comment. She’d long ago made her own peace with his drinking. Let him run on, let him exercise his grievances and fall asleep in front of the television and come to bed in the small hours and wake up in the morning convinced that everything was stacked against him. Meanwhile, Laura got up to start the dishes. She could have asked Gabe to do them, there had been times she’d made a point of it and turned it into an argument, but really, it was just easier to do them herself. As it was easier to let some things go. You got used to them. You could get used to almost anything.

  After a bad spell, a bad evening, he felt guilty and tried to make it up to her. Then things would be fine between them for a while. They would be fond and easy with each other, a reminder of their best times.

  They both made an effort these days. He only drank at home, in the evenings. He allowed himself two or maybe three drinks, and if he didn’t pour them especially light, Laura made no mention of it. This was the bargain they had come to over the years, although there had been no such thing as a discussion of terms. He could drink, and she would allow it, at least as long as he did not become mean or stupid or soggy. And she would not use a certain tone of voice.

  She thought they still loved each other, sure. But it was a worn-down kind of love by now, like an old silver spoon polished thin.

  Back in their first married years, the drinking had almost been the end of them. Laura had seen Gabe drink a lot before, of course. She drank herself, all of their friends did, at bars and parties. They were all young and no one had yet got themselves into bad trouble over it. They made jokes about hangovers, they made liquor runs at parties when they ran out of supplies. They were in their twenties, single or coupled up, and none of the married ones had children yet. Gabe was still in grad school, earning a teaching assistant’s salary. Laura worked at the city’s development office, helping to coax commerce and industry into relocating. They and all their friends had jobs like that, good enough for now. No one was looking very far ahead, because the present was so effortless, and so much fun.

  One night they had gathered at someone’s house, late in the evening, after drinks and dinner and then more drinks. A few people had gone home already. Some of those remaining were watching a horror movie in the den, others a basketball game in the kitchen. Laura was on a couch in the horror-movie room. She was falling asleep, she would have liked to go home, but there was still a lot of rowdy noise coming from the kitchen, where Gabe and his buddies were carrying on. The movie was one of the killer-in-a-mask ones. They had all seen it before and had their favorite death scenes. Laura tried to keep up but really, it was just a lot of annoying screaming.

  She was asleep. And then she wasn’t, because the noise of the movie had grown so much louder. She opened her eyes to see Gabe and another man, the man whose house it was, pushing and swinging at each other, clumsy, red-faced, clinching and breaking apart, breathing hard, neither of them doing a good job of keeping their feet underneath them. “Hey,” somebody else said, but they were all too confused to do anything, and anyway it didn’t last long. Gabe fell over the coffee table and the other man landed on top of him and there was a noise of things breaking, things broken: wood, metal, glass.

  Gabe tried to kick his way free. “Get offa me. Fuckin’ . . . asshole!” The other man was bigger and heavier. Gabe rolled from side to side, trying to get some purchase to right himself. Their clothes were disarrayed from grappling with each other and their eyes were streaming and when they finally disengaged, both of them were making huh-huh sounds, very unwarrior-like. They didn’t seem to have hurt each other, at least, nobody was bleeding. They got to their feet, swayed, feinted. Finally other people got between them.

  Not Laura. She was still on the couch with her feet tucked underneath her. One of those times when your life takes a turn and you’re too stupefied to catch up to it.

  “Get outta here, fuckhead.”

  “Oh yah, don’t worry, fuckhead, I’m going.”

  “The Battle of the Fuckheads,” said someone else conversationally. It wasn’t as if any of them were sober.

  They took a few swings at each other, wild ones that didn’t have any chance of connecting. That part of things was over. Gabe said, “Pussy,” one last stupid insult, then, to Laura, “You coming?”

  She felt the others watching her. She got up, looking for her shoes, her purse. Gabe was already on his way out the door and she had to hurry to follow. Once they were outside she said, “What was . . .”

  Again he didn’t wait for her, but set off down the street to the car. “Do you want me to drive?”

  He ignored her, opened the driver’s door, got in, and revved the engine. Laura barely got herself inside before he took off, punching the accelerator and getting as much noise as possible out of the tires. He took off down the street, the car well over the center line. “Stop that,” Laura said. “Do you want to lose your license?”

  That at least made him slow down, and when they came to a red light, he stopped for it. “Tell me what happened back there.”

  “He kept getting in my face. About Iran-Contra.”

  “What?”

  “He said the Contras weren’t terrorists. You believe that shit?”

  “You got into a fistfight over Iran-Contra?”

  “Ah, he’s . . . a dick.” The light changed but Gabe only sat there. His chin drooped to his chest.

  “Gabe!”

  He shook his head to rouse himself, accelerated, and ran the car hard into the curb.

  They got home eventually and fell into bed. The next day they both came down with the flu, the actual flu, not the drinking variety, though the drinking surely hadn’t helped. It was a while before they could think about anything except bodily misery. The fight was something that had happened in the receding past before they got sick, a bad time before the more recent bad time. It was almost a week later that Laura said, “Are you going to talk to Ian?” Ian being the host and combatant of that evening.

  “Talk about what?”

  “About what happened.” They were eating grilled cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, the first real food they’d managed in a while.

  Gabe finished his sandwich and started in on a bag of potato chips. “There’s nothing to say.”

  “Come on. You guys have to make it up.”

  “No we don’t.”

  “It was a dumb fight, you were both drinking. Everybody’s cooled down now. Just talk to him.”

  “Not going to happen.” He had the chip bag propped up and
was reading the list of ingredients and promotional copy. The flu had hollowed him out. He looked even thinner than usual, the knobs of his backbone visible through his shirt.

  “Well . . .” She didn’t yet imagine it was anything more than pride and stubbornness and his needing her to coax him out of it. “What’s going to happen when we go out with those guys again, or see them at the bars? Don’t you think that’s going to be awkward?”

  “Yeah, I won’t be anywhere they are, so that’s gonna make it a lot less awkward.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Laura said. Although she was beginning to sense the shape of some other obstacle, like a rock surfacing in seawater. Maybe he did mean it. “Those are our friends.”

  “Your friends, maybe. I’m not having anything to do with them.”

  “Because of Iran-Contra,” she stated, hoping that if she said it out loud, he’d hear how ridiculous it was.

  “What? Sure. It was a last-straw kind of thing.”

  “You’re being childish.” He was still engrossed in the bag of chips. “What is the matter with you? You’re in some totally stupid fight and you’re too stuck up to apologize so you’re turning it into this huge grudge.”

  Gabe finished eating and wadded up his napkin. “You know what I finally figured out? None of those people are especially bright. They’re OK if you want to watch SportsCenter in a bar and throw peanut shells at the screen. That’s all they’re good for. Adios. We can do better.”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said, because she really didn’t, and perhaps she didn’t want to understand this part of him. “That’s not fair to them. Or to me. What am I supposed to do, tell everybody I know they’re not smart enough for us? I didn’t get into any fights.”

  “Do whatever you want,” Gabe said, getting up from the table. The bread and cheese were still out on the counter. He put a slice of each together, then doubled them over into an unappealing sandwich and ate it standing up.