A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

by Jean Thompson

  “Ah,” her mother said, nodding at the screen, where the happy couple were getting ready to exchange vows. “Two perfectly good young lives, ruined.”

  “Ha ha,” Laura said, wanting it to be a joke.

  “They’ll be fine until they start having children.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Can I have some more Oreos?”

  Her mother said, “No, you’ve had about enough for tonight.” She shut the television off and the picture faded to a point of light and winked out. She said, “I never planned on getting married. Even back when everybody felt sorry for you if you didn’t and called you an old maid. I was going to go on and get my doctorate and be a real professor.”

  “But then you met Dad, right?”

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “Saved by the bell. Now it’s time for you to get ready for bed.”

  Why had her mother said such a thing? Perhaps she had been drinking wine, as she liked to do in the evening. Or she’d felt injured, resentful at something Laura’s father had done, or failed to do. Laura was aware that her parents were not always as harmoniously aligned as they appeared to others, when they hosted get-togethers or official university functions, and Laura and her brother sneaked sips of liquor and marveled at the unfathomable boredom of adult events.

  Her father was used to running things: classrooms, meetings, departments, committees, and to having people pay attention when he spoke. His life had been a steady progression of goals achieved and victorious struggles. He seemed to grow more and more solidly righteous as he grew older, more and more certain in his pronouncements. Laura was still a child during the Vietnam War, when the streets turned angry, when protests and peace signs broke over the country, and the campus, in a cresting wave, when her parents sent her out of the room during certain portions of the television news. When stoned kids played stoned music and talked about the system, and feeding your head, and the doors of perception. How alarmed people were, and how outraged, at so much ridiculous, dangerous, gleefully obscene behavior! Some of it was just fashion, the hair and beads and hippie finery, but it signaled something much worse to people like Laura’s father, perhaps Communists egging the whole enterprise on for purposes of creating moral rot. He was quoted in the campus newspaper, in his capacity as head of the student honor court, as urging swift and certain discipline for antiwar demonstrators and other transgressors: “We seem to have become so broad-minded that our brains are falling out.”

  At home their father threatened his young children with punishment if they committed certain terrible but unspecified offenses. “If I ever catch you doing drugs, I will personally call the police and have you arrested.”

  “Oh you will not,” their mother said. “Why are you trying to scare them?”

  “I’m keeping them from ruining their lives.”

  “Children, don’t take illegal drugs. They’re bad for your father.”

  “I suppose you’ll think it’s funny when they end up in jail, or in a mental institution.”

  More than forty years later, taking her own son to his first stint in rehab, Laura would look back on this memory with grim amusement.

  “Pity’s sake, Andrew, they’re nine and seven. Where do you think they’re going to get their hands on drugs?”

  “They are actually dirty. It’s not just a figure of speech.”

  “Who’s dirty? The students?” Their mother now both exasperated and mocking. “I don’t imagine you get close enough to them to tell. This is such a silly fit you’re having. You don’t like to have a bunch of pip-squeak students standing up to you. That’s what you’re really so upset about.”

  Her father muttered something and left the room. Laura understood that her mother had won the argument, worn him down with her words. The argument between them continued, in one form or another, throughout their marriage. Her father issued opinions and pronouncements, and her mother undercut them. She did not always win, or ever win completely, since her father was still so unshakably himself, so armored with his importance in the world and the deference it paid him. But her mother sniped and shrugged and rolled her eyes often enough to unsettle him.

  There was an imbalance between them. Her mother chafed against it. Had she always been so discontented? To which of them, her mother or her father, did Laura owe allegiance and sympathy? Her father might be more remote, difficult to entirely understand, but he was at least always the same. Her mother might go from happy, or at least her unremarkable everyday self, to sarcastic and resentful.

  Why had they married? Why had they stayed married? Even people of their parents’ generation divorced, it wasn’t unheard of. When they were both older, Laura and her brother maintained the attitude that both of their parents were crazy, in their own ways. But that was glibness, and was only a way of not thinking about them.

  Most marriages had their share of bad spells, or of just bumping along. Laura knew that now. Knew that most people stayed married in spite of the unhappy parts. They hung on and waited for things to get better, or they walled themselves off from each other, or built their enmity for each other into a solid and enduring structure.

  Laura had never asked her mother for marriage advice. Maybe this was the deathbed speech she was waiting for. Her mother would rise up, clutch at her failing, fading heart, and deliver herself of some undoubted truth. And what would that be? I thought I loved him but I was wrong. Or, You do the best you can. Then you run out of patience. Or nothing at all. Words forgotten, wisdom canceled out.

  * * *

  If you lived in a small-to-medium city, like this one, for some number of years, or almost all your life, as Laura had, there were circles of people you knew, from the different layers of your life, different strata, like an archaeological dig. Fallen-away friends from middle school, old rivals, old sweethearts. Your brother’s old friends, rivals, sweethearts, etc. People you’d forgotten all about, until they appeared at your door, selling lawn care services or running for city council.

  Of course the circles might overlap. Someone you knew from high school worked with the wife of your kids’ former soccer coach. Your waitress at lunch was the daughter of your parents’ lawyer. It was not unusual for Laura to make a trip to the grocery, or the library, and encounter one or two or more acquaintances. She liked having this network of known, interlocking people, this seemingly inexhaustible supply of connections. Even if you left town for a long time, when you came back there would still be some old neighbor, or your doctor’s receptionist, to bump into at Walgreens and share some agreeable conversation. People remembered you, asked after your family, told you who to call if you needed a plumber or an HVAC guy. It was a comfort, feeling that you knew a place and that it knew you.

  But Laura was aware that there were other circles of people she did not know and did not care to know: the impoverished, the criminal, the casually dangerous young men cruising the bad neighborhoods in cars that throbbed and shook with music. Nor did she know the men in Hi-Viz shirts who worked on road crews, or the women you saw buying cigarettes and oversize plastic cups of soda at gas stations first thing in the morning, or the kids who drove in from the little towns organized around grain elevators and railroad tracks so they could party in the bars, or the Mexicans bicycling to work at the paper bag factory, or the half-grown girls at the mall with their looking-for-trouble clothes and makeup. She could not say she knew any of them. There was no occasion to do so.

  Laura’s town, the one she’d always considered hers, contained the university, of course, its grandly shabby old buildings and the newer, more utilitarian structures of hulking brick, its lawns and statuary, athletic fields, frat houses, its rowdy district of bars and student apartment buildings. There were monuments, inscriptions, dedications that bore witness to the traditions of the place and those who had left their mark. The town had grown up around and away from this campus center, so that civic life was no longer entirely shaped by it. Although most peopl
e still had passionate opinions about the sports teams.

  Some things about the university itself had also changed since her parents’ era, architecture and most everything else. One college summer Laura had a job moving old files from the dean’s office. She and her fellow workers spent a lot of their time plucking out the handwritten records of problem students who had been called in for stern conferences, among them young women who had been discovered in compromising situations and then had to divulge the details to the maiden ladies who served as their deans. Laura still remembered the best one: “Says she could not have had intercourse with girdle on.” They had all roared with glee.

  Just beyond the university were districts of modest wooden houses with couches set out on the front porches, gravel driveways, shade trees in need of trimming. Students lived there, or older homeowners who’d had the students crowd in around them, or young families who had chosen the slightly eccentric over newer, pricier real estate.

  Nowadays more and more of these houses were being knocked down and replaced with large and profitable apartment buildings. But when she was a kid, Laura used to ride her bicycle through blocks and blocks of such streets, which adjoined her parents’ grander neighborhood. She could not have said, then or now, why the little houses sided with old-fashioned green or white shingles, their blowsy yards planted with daylilies and phlox, their uneven porch steps spoke to her so strongly of mystery and possibility. It was as if someone might come out of such a house, or she herself enter one, and everything about her life would change forever.

  When did you reach the point when you began counting up losses, rather than looking forward to adventures?

  The downtown that people were always trying to revive, although so much business had moved out to the mall. Around the refurbished courthouse, a number of hopeful, short-lived shops and restaurants tried to take root. If you knew where to look, a second-story window still held an electric sign indicating the meeting room for the Knights of Pythias.

  And past downtown, depending on the direction, were either districts of small houses that were not intended as anything other than inexpensive shelter, or else grand neighborhoods where the streets curved and circled and were called Something or Other Trace, or Way, or Court. And past these—or perhaps right up against their back lot line—were the farm fields of monotonous beans and corn, the few hedgerows that had not been turned into acreage. Here and there a stream running beneath a road through a concrete culvert. At the east edge of the county, a small, meandering river with its belt of woods, where people built getaway cabins. Habitat for fish, beaver, fox, deer, raccoons, coyotes, possums, hawks, wild turkeys.

  Politics: Laura’s father voted Republican, her mother Democratic. The town divided up pretty much the same way, older business interests versus different varieties of center-left. Both sides found plenty of things in the local news coverage to infuriate them.

  Weather you could complain about most of the time. Winters that made people say, “If hell was cold, it would be like this.” Sleet in spring, summers that didn’t let up, rain at harvest. And in between these, many days of ordinary beauty.

  This was the place where Laura had been born and where she still lived, and she knew it too well to see anything remarkable in it.

  In March, before the air had any hint of spring in it, Laura and her friend Becca went out for happy hour so that Becca could find a new boyfriend. They were work pals from their jobs at the university’s alumni association. Becca wasn’t a townie. She’d moved here from Chicago because she had wanted to put some distance between herself and her ex-husband, who she referred to as Popeye. Anyway, after the divorce she couldn’t afford the Chicago cost of living. She missed the city and her life there, or parts of her life, the parts that had involved money. She was trying to make the best of things in this new place. She was trying to have a good attitude.

  She and Laura were the same age, although Becca made more of an effort with hair and makeup, so that she looked, if not younger, at least less resigned. She had a pretty mouth, a round little chin, and short, curly hair that she tinted different shades of honey or butterscotch. Every couple of weeks she talked Laura into one of these after-work excursions. She liked to say that she was through with men, but that seemed to mean men she had already met.

  Laura didn’t mind being the wingman to Becca’s bomber pilot. It had its amusing moments, as when the men who approached them or offered to buy them drinks were people Laura recognized, people she knew a thing or two about, maybe knew they had someone waiting for them at home.

  As did Laura. She nursed her one glass of wine through Becca’s two, then said, “I have to get back.”

  “Aw.”

  “Michael’s home with a cold, and if I’m not there, he and his father will kill each other.”

  It was just something you said. You didn’t really mean it.

  “Aw,” Becca said again. “They can’t be that bad.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “How’s it going lately?”

  “OK. It’s like one of those signs they put up in factories: NO ACCIDENTS IN EIGHTY DAYS.”

  “You’re amazing. An amazing mom. I hope somebody tells you that once in a while. I couldn’t cope the way you do.” Becca didn’t have kids, either from Popeye or the husband before him. It just hadn’t happened, she said, but she also volunteered that they hadn’t tried very hard, whatever that meant.

  “Coping means I get out of bed in the morning.”

  “Call home and tell them we’re going out for dinner and they can fix their own.”

  “Sorry. I just can’t.”

  “They’ll be the sorry ones when you get tired of doing things for them and they have to take care of themselves.”

  Laura thought that was probably true. These days her family spun in a centrifuge while she tried to pull them back into the center. Michael, at twenty-one, was in college, or this time around junior college, trying to get through the basic courses. It was a start, or rather, a restart. A kind of probation, with all of them acting as if things were better (they were) and would stay better (perhaps). Michael was living at home, paying rent—one of the ground rules—and working the only kinds of jobs he could find. Convenience store clerk, waiter. His schedule kept him out late and made for the irritating sight of him eating breakfast cereal at noon in front of the television. He liked music, he wanted to do something with music. It was not the sort of career path that inspired confidence in his parents, but they had learned to pick their battles. Whenever Michael was home, smothered, amplified bass chords shook the house like the soundtrack of doom.

  He was cheerful, creative, kindhearted, smart. A mischevious kid, sure, but in a lovable way, unlike his sister’s prickly brooding. And for an escalating period of eighteen months, he had ingested Adderall and Vicodin and cocaine and whatever else he could get his hands on—a polydrug user, it was called in the language of addiction—all of it washed down with alcohol. He had stolen checks from his mother’s purse, wrecked his own car and one of his parents’, lied about being high, lied about being sober, passed out on the front lawn in January, thrown up blood, needed IV fluids, B12 shots, legal representation.

  They hadn’t seen any of it coming. How could you? There had been some of what was considered normal adolescent screwup trouble, then episodes of careless, sullen, evasive behavior. Then the all-out catastrophes, the confrontations, the promises made and immediately tossed aside. Who was he, or who had he always been, so practiced at lying, at anger, at horrible talk? Laura’s nerves were still shredded from all the emergencies and panics, and the effort of forgiving her son again and again. One night they woke to the noise of cupboard doors slamming over and over and found him barefoot and shirtless in the kitchen, his nose running and his hair standing up in wild, stiff patches from days of lying in his own sweat.

  “Michael? What in the world?”

  “I can’t sleep.” His upper lip was raw and crusted with snot. His cr
azy hair looked like it belonged on something dead.

  She and Gabe glanced at each other. He had never been this bad before. Laura said, “Honey? How about we take you to see a doctor.” She was light-headed with fear. She had been sound asleep and the overbright kitchen had the quality of a dream or a nightmare.

  “I don’t need a . . .” He trailed off, rubbing at his nose. His pants sagged from his skinny hips and his bare chest was too naked, starved looking.

  Gabe said, “Come on, Michael. Let’s go get you fixed up.” He reached out to take hold of his arm and Michael spun around and threw him off.

  “Let me go!”

  “Come on. Get some clothes on.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That kind of talk isn’t going to fly, Michael.” Laura could see Gabe losing patience. Once he got angry, things never went well. He seethed and wound himself up and wouldn’t back down.

  “Yeah, OK, screw you. How’s that. Both of you. You and your shitty, shitty, totally bogus . . .” He doubled over, in some kind of pain. Laura started toward him but Gabe blocked her way.

  “Apologize to your mother.”

  “It’s all right, Gabe. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “Oh I think he does.” Her husband nodded, agreeing with himself. “How much are we supposed to put up with?”

  “He’s sick, you can see that.”

  “He wants to be sick. Michael, I’m waiting for you to apologize.”

  Michael straightened himself, took a step closer. He smelled sharp, unpleasant, spoiled. “Make me.”

  “I’ll make you sorry if you don’t.”

  “All right,” Laura said. “This isn’t helping anything.” She wanted to move away from her son but made herself stay still, as she would with a dog she didn’t know. She could see Gabe stiffen also. “Watch yourself,” he said warningly, but she couldn’t tell if he meant her or Michael.