A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

by Jean Thompson

  “Don’t go, man. Stay another day.”

  “Got to get back to work. You know how it is.”

  They shook hands, though her father did not get out of his chair. His face was red and he gave an impression, somehow, of having been beaten up. Grace hoped he’d fall asleep before she came back. She took his car keys from their hook in the kitchen and she and Mark went out to the driveway. “Have you seen Michael?” she asked him.

  “No, you’ll have to tell him good-bye for us.”

  “Sure.” Goddamn him. “Half a sec.” Mark got in the passenger side and Grace got out her phone to send her brother a text:

  ARE YOU COMING HOME?

  What was wrong with him? With her father? Couldn’t either of them keep it together for one day?

  It wasn’t a long drive to the hotel; nothing in town was a long drive. Grace said, “Thanks for babysitting Dad. I’m worried about him.”

  “Yes, well . . .” Her uncle seemed to want to come up with something reassuring to say, but gave up. “I’ll call. I’ll call whenever I can. Besides, there’s your mother’s estate to sort out. I’m the executor.”

  “I hadn’t thought about any of that.” And she hadn’t. Money, the machinery and enterprise of money, that took up so much of people’s time and imagination, didn’t have much claim over her. It wasn’t that she was so much purer than other people; she just lost interest in it. “I guess you or somebody else will tell me if I need to do anything.”

  “They will. We will.” They’d reached the hotel. Grace pulled into the drive and Mark got out. “Thanks for the ride. Hey did you get a chance to meet Bob Malloy? Since you were asking about him. He was there today.”

  “He was? No, I didn’t.”

  “I guess he was only around for a little while. Tall guy. Skinny. Gray hair. No? It was early on. I had my hands full with your dad. We said hello, but when I looked around for him again, he was gone.”

  Not that she would have known what to say to him. It would have been too weird. Oh well. “Tell Aunt Brenda and the kids good-bye for me.” She was too tired to pretend she wanted to see them again.

  “Sure.” He leaned in through the car window and kissed her on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Gracie girl. Make it job one. Call me if you need anything.”

  Grace said that she would, and when she drove off, she saw him in the rearview mirror, waving, and she had a passing wish that he could have been her father, although that wasn’t a logical thought when you considered that he was her mom’s brother.

  She drove back to the house and parked her father’s car in the drive and before she went inside she texted Michael again.

  ARE YOU HOME?

  No answer. He wasn’t here, she knew it. She went in through the kitchen and put her father’s car key on its hook. Next to it was the key to her mother’s car. What would they do with the car now? And her mother’s clothes, her books, her framed flower prints, her box of old Christmas cards, her magazine subscriptions, cookbooks, jewelry, flower seed catalogs, demitasse set, and more? She’d hardly let herself think about everything that remained to be done, probably because she would have to be the one to do it all.

  “Dad?” He wasn’t in the den. The television had been turned off. He might have gone upstairs to sleep. There was no sign of her brother.

  She went back into the kitchen and wrote a note that she propped up on the kitchen table. She wrote that there was a casserole of lasagna in the freezer and he could have it for dinner, just put it in the microwave on defrost setting for ten minutes, then in a 350-degree oven for forty minutes. She said that she would call him tomorrow.

  She climbed the stairs and listened at the landing. The door to the guest room was closed and everything was quiet. She set her bags out in the hall and went through the bathroom for her toothbrush and shampoo and anything else she’d brought with her. She packed these up in a plastic grocery bag and unzipped her duffel to put the bag inside. Then she took the bags downstairs one at a time.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her father stood on the landing, looking down at her. He still wore his sweatshirt but he had removed his pants. He had on shrunken-looking white briefs.

  They were not a family who walked around the house in their underwear. Grace’s heart bumped and skidded. She looked away from the lumpy pouch and the pale territory of his bare legs. “I’m going back to my place.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “I’m going in to work tomorrow, early, and I want to get settled.”

  “Honey, nobody expects you to go to work. Your mother just died.”

  “No, I want to. I want to get back to my normal routine.” Did he even know he didn’t have pants on? Was he still drunk? She kept talking to tamp down her rising panic. “I left you a note, there’s some frozen lasagna you can defrost and heat up for supper.”

  “Lasagna. Great.”

  “Or you could—”

  “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Dad, I’ll come back and help clear out Mom’s stuff, and we can talk about, maybe there are things we need to talk—”

  “You can’t leave me like this. My little girl.”

  He started down the stairs. Grace picked up one of her bags and pushed the other ahead of her to the front door. She scrambled with the latch, then swung it open and got herself and the bags outside. Her car was parked on the street. She managed to get everything down the porch stairs, then out to the sidewalk. She thought he might come after her, underpants and all, in full view of God and the neighbors. But the front door stayed closed.

  She found space for the bags among the flower vases and started the car. One of the bouquets toppled forward and lay against the back of her neck, the stalks feeling damp and unclean. She yelped and shook it off and hit the accelerator and she didn’t care about anyone’s death as long as it was not hers.

  V. GRACE

  There were weeks when she did not see or speak to either her father or her brother. They had not been in the same room together, all three of them, since the funeral.

  Grace went back to the house while her father was at work and cleared out her mother’s clothing, putting most of it aside in plastic bags for Goodwill, though she couldn’t yet bring herself to drop them off. It depressed her that there was so little—next to nothing, really—of her mother’s that she wanted for her own. A couple of pairs of earrings that she might or might not end up wearing. Her mother’s wardrobe had been sturdy and serviceable. Oxford button-down shirts, cardigans, elastic-waist pants. Her dress-up clothes on their hangers had a disappointed look; they had never lived up to their promise. Grace chose two pullover sweaters in Nordic patterns to take with her. They were heavy, expensive sweaters. They had most likely been Christmas presents. Perhaps her father had bought them? She couldn’t remember. Anyway, they were too good to give away, although it was hard for Grace to imagine herself skiing or drinking cocoa by a fireplace or any other such winter wonderland fantasy.

  Tubes of lipstick worn down to waxy nubs. A dresser drawer filled with tangled panty hose. The contents of her purse, a collection of Kleenex scraps, receipts, breath mints, and many cheap ballpoint pens from the credit union. Tube of hand cream, small nonworking flashlight. Matchbook. A loose Band-Aid in a soiled wrapper. Anyone’s life could be reduced to this impersonal compost.

  Some things stayed as they were. In the kitchen, the small blue teapot on its shelf. Her striped apron hung on the pantry door. Mail addressed to her still arrived, advertisements, catalogs, appeals from charities. Over time, such things would be moved or changed, disappear by increments, like chalk on a sidewalk. Less and less of her presence.

  She took her mother’s house plants home with her, and waited for her father to notice, but if he did, he said nothing.

  Michael had moved out to stay with friends who had couch space. He didn’t earn enough from any of his jobs to get his own apartment. Grace knew he was broke, or mostly broke. She was pr
etty sure their mother had given him money when he needed it, and now that was at an end. Was he still going to his classes at the community college? Grace asked, and the answer was vague. She guessed that meant he wasn’t.

  “Are you drinking and drugging? Don’t bullshit me.”

  They were talking on the phone, and Grace listened to the humming, clicking space of silence. Finally Michael said, “How about you stop asking me that.”

  “Crap.”

  “Step Five: rigorous honesty. Ha ha.”

  “Are you at least still going to your counselor? Come on, do you think Mom would want you to trash yourself to prove how unhappy you are that she died? Huh?”

  Another space of silence. “No and no,” Michael said.

  “Well . . .” What came next? What was she meant to say? Channel her mother’s anxious fussing concern, keep nagging him? She didn’t want to and what good would it do anyway. She said, “I’m worried about you. Try not to be stupid.”

  “I’m not drinking.”

  What came next? A conversation about Don’t. She heard him exhale, waiting. “I love you,” Grace said.

  “I love you too,” he said after an uncertain beat.

  “All right, talk to you later.” Grace hung up quickly. There wasn’t anywhere else to go from there.

  Her father often called in the evenings, once he was home from work and settled into his chair in front of the television. “I should get a dog,” he told her.

  “How about an aquarium instead. You’re not home enough to take care of a dog.”

  “No. ‘Sitting home with just me and the fish’ doesn’t have the same resonance as ‘Sitting home with just me and the dog.’ ”

  “Don’t get a dog.” Grace had the phone pressed to her ear and was trying to fold laundry. It was easier to talk to him if she was engaged in doing something else. “A cat, maybe.”

  “I don’t like cats.”

  “Fine, don’t get one.” She could just about gauge his alcohol consumption by: the time of night, the normal (or dragging) pace of his words, and whatever degree of belligerence or plaintiveness came through the receiver. It was a totally awful skill and she was sorry she’d ever developed it.

  “Your mother,” he began, and Grace considered putting the phone down while she tried to get the edges of the sheets straight. The Your Mother portions of the conversations were the hardest to deal with. Your Mother would have wanted you, Grace, to do one or another thing, nearly all of them burdensome or unpleaswant. Your Mother would have wanted you to call the HVAC guy and have the air-conditioning serviced, tell your brother to move his crap out of the bathroom if he wasn’t going to live here, come over and keep your old dad company once in a while, why didn’t she ever do that?

  This last request was the one that went along with his worst and sloppiest drinking, and it made her skin start a slow, creeped-out dance. So she met him for dinner at a casual barbecue restaurant. She visited the house when her mother’s friend Susie and her husband were expected. She called his office and offered to meet him for coffee, though that never came to pass. And then she stopped making such efforts.

  She could feel sorry for him. She did feel sorry for him, but she also felt sorry for herself, and for her brother, and she had no idea of how any of them might be helped. Her mother’s death had sent each of them into some private space of hurt. None of the rituals of mourning eased them. Her mother’s cremated remains were deposited in a grave site, or so she understood. She refused to accompany her father when he went to the cemetery. She had a healthy understanding of all things bodily, including the body’s end and the spirit’s release. You understood such things, but that did not mean that you wished to bear witness to what was left of a body, packaged in a metal cylinder and lowered into a cement-lined space.

  Her father moped and drank, her brother did whatever he did with his drugs of choice. Grace slept badly and had a series of dreams in which she was lost, trapped, smothered, struggling, all of them variations on a theme. How much of it was missing her mother, how much was the profound shock of death itself? Some friend of her mother’s had sent a condolence card, a Catholic one with saints and sacred bleeding hearts and a verse Grace did not recognize: Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Was that meant to be comforting? Our Sister Bodily Death. Grace could imagine Sister Bodily Death, the family member you didn’t want showing up, a black-gummed vampire with oily, stinking skin.

  She guessed that things got better over time. Time dragged its feet and now it was summer, and if Grace was no longer preoccupied, every waking and sleeping minute, with death and loss, there were still days when her head was filled with static, like a bad television channel, moments her familiar routines slid sideways and turned strange.

  The summer heat descended, humid and glassy. You got used to squinting, to the painful look and feel of car hoods, concrete, windows. Grace let her hair grow long and pulled it up into a waterfall on top of her head. She wore halter dresses that left her thin, tan arms and collarbones bare. She was used to men trying to flirt with her or attract her attention as they went through the checkout at the health food store, though most of these were earnest, awkward guys who gave the impression they wanted to engage her in a serious conversation about their recent reading material. It was easy to smile at them and move them along harmlessly while they fumbled their dairy-free frozen dessert and fair trade coffee into cloth bags. Men were so dumb. She was glad to be through with them.

  Grace was taking her lunch break in the community room, as it was called, which was off to one side of the store and was furnished with wooden tables, mismatched chairs, and a bulletin board with advertisements for chicken coops, art therapy, and handmade soaps. She finished her salad and gathered up her plate and silverware and tray to stow them in the right bins for recycling or trash or the dishwasher. The only other person in the room was a man in a far corner, sitting by himself with a cup of coffee. As Grace watched, he took out a pack of cigarettes, extracted one, and tapped it against the table’s surface.

  “Excuse me, sir? Sir? There’s no smoking in the store.”

  He looked up at her. He might have been one of the homeless men who found their way inside and were tolerated for long enough to buy food or use the bathroom before they were eased out again. Or no; he was only odd-looking, in a rough sort of way, like a biker, maybe. Not much taller than she was, she guessed, and skinny, with a narrow chest and a long face. A graying mustache. The top of his head was balding and the long blond-gray hair around the crown was pulled back into a ponytail. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt with a yin-yang symbol in the center.

  “Right,” he said, putting the cigarette carefully back into its pack. “Forgot where I was.” He tilted his head back to smile up at her. He seemed to find her amusing.

  “I don’t know why anybody smokes,” Grace said. She was annoyed by him.

  “What else don’t you know. Grace.” He leaned forward to read her name tag.

  She didn’t answer, and took her tray to the row of recycling bins. She thought he was a creep.

  She saw him again a few days later. He was sitting outside the store this time, at one of the picnic tables set on the concrete terrace at the entrance. He sat on the edge of the farthest table and he had a cigarette going, which might be technically permitted but was still bad form. “Uh-oh,” he said. “The smoking police.”

  “Why do you want to hang around a health food store smoking? Why don’t you go somewhere that makes more sense, like, a pool hall?”

  “Pool hall. Funny. I wanted to show you something.”

  “I have to start work now.” How old was he? Not old old. Forty? His face was younger than the gray ponytail, but you wouldn’t have called him good-looking, not at any age. One of those small guys who was all mouth.

  “Won’t take but a minute. See?” He was wearing the same black T-shirt with the yin-yang symbol. The symbol was made up
of some intricate design she couldn’t make out. “This side here is heaven. The other’s hell.”

  Grace looked and saw that one side, the white part of the design, had pictures of sunbeams, hummingbirds, twining vines. The black portion had a skull, a lightning bolt, some sort of unwholesome-looking flower. “All right,” she said. “Now I’ve seen it.”

  “But you don’t get it. It’s the yin and the yang. Opposites. They balance each other out. No hell, no heaven.”

  “That’s deep.”

  He inhaled and sent the smoke out the side of his mouth. “All right, Miss College. I guess nobody can teach you anything.”

  “I’m not in school anymore.”

  “My mistake.”

  “Anyway, I don’t expect to learn a lot from a T-shirt.” Somehow she’d gotten herself trapped in this false, sneering voice that was not really hers. “And everybody’s heard about yin and yang, it’s one of those popularized concepts.”

  He raised his eyebrows at this. “Well shit. Never mind, then. The meaning of the universe has already been all scoped out.”

  “I meant, if you can put it on a T-shirt, it’s common knowledge. I have to go in now, my shift’s starting.”

  “Hey.” He threw the cigarette down and put it out beneath his foot. “You’re pretty.”

  Grace started to say something like, Oh really, gee, thanks, when he said, “I’m not.” And laughed. “See? Yin and yang.”

  He grabbed her hand in both of his, too quick for her to stop him. “You feel that? That’s the energy balance between us.”

  Grace snatched her hand away and walked off. She heard him say, “Now don’t be mad,” and then the automatic doors whooshed open and shut and she was inside.

  Although she kept an eye out for him, he didn’t come into the store, and later when she looked out at the picnic tables, he had gone.

  She wished she could sort things out in her mind the same way you could the recycling: trash, cans only, and so on. Here was a space for work, here was one for yoga, one for money, one for the worries about her father, another for the worries about her brother. And there would be a different kind of space, with soft edges like a mouth, where she could put everything else that was bitter and wrong, everything broken or unquiet. She no longer pretended to be a wild woman.