“Stop,” Grace ordered, waving her hands. “Why do you think I want to hear things like that?”
“Begging your pardon. I keep forgetting, you’re kind of a sissy.”
She had heard this before from him. She made a particular kind of face, meant to express forbearance.
“How about, you come home with me sometime?”
“No. What brought that on?”
“What, you think you’re too good for me?”
“That’s not it.” That was exactly it.
“You need a real man.”
“Thanks, I’ll go find one.”
“I will make you howl like a dog. Promise.”
“Stop it.” She tried to be angry but she was laughing, he was so ridiculous. Skinny and undersized and totally full of himself.
“Why not? You got something better to do?”
“Yes. Yoga.”
“Well you can teach me some of the, what do you call them, poses. Then I can teach you some I know.”
She shouldn’t let him talk to her that way. It wasn’t always funny, and he didn’t always seem to be kidding. Grace didn’t know why she went along with it. It was such a strange time in her life. She had lost a parent, but that happened to people all the time, and people moved forward with their lives, as she was doing. And if there was now a piece of her missing, how could you hope to see the shape of something that was not there? And how was this empty place filled by allowing a goofy-looking guy, a goofy-looking old guy, to talk dirty to her? “Life is strange,” she took to telling people, and they agreed with her, though they had to be thinking about their own kinds of strangeness.
She told Les about her father and her brother not getting along. She had already told everyone else she knew. They’d said, Oh man, that really sucks. Les said he’d been on one side of that fight, the son side, and it was just something guys did, a power struggle thing. “It’s completely stupid,” Grace said. “My dad won’t cut him any slack, and my brother eggs him on by acting like a punk.”
“It’s biology. The young buck and the old buck smash into each other with their antlers to see who’s boss. The winner gets the females.”
“That’s stupid too.”
“It’s the way nature intended. See, men—”
“And gross,” Grace said, before he could start talking about yin and yang again. “Women don’t want to be fought over.”
“If you say so.”
“Not fought over so they get carried off to be part of some harem, come on.”
“The man always makes the moves. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Oh give me a break.” He had a lot of such notions on human affairs that she disagreed with, although she didn’t always do a good job of arguing against them. The weather was colder now and they were back in the community room. Grace wore a heavy sweater and jeans, but Les still wore T-shirts, or today, an open-necked knit shirt that showed a patch of chest hair and some kind of gold charm on a chain.
He saw her looking at it. “Go ahead, here.” He leaned forward and she took the charm between her fingertips, feeling self-conscious. The charm was a small twist of gold, like a teardrop bent around itself. “You like it? I got it off a guy at the plant in a pinochle game. He threw in a couple of squaws to go along with it.”
“Don’t say squaws, it’s racially insensitive.” She let the charm fall back.
“Lighten up. I said it to bug you. I wouldn’t have, if there was any squaws around.”
Grace ignored that one. There were times he tried to be funny and missed by a mile.
“Hey, don’t be mad. Why’re you always getting mad at me? You know something I regret about not growing up with my boy? Well there’s lots of things. I could have been the exception to the rule. The kind of dad who doesn’t beat the crap out of his son. Like I got beat.”
Grace murmured that she was sorry, and she was. There were times she needed to be taken out of her own boo-hoo problems and realize that other people had it rough too.
After that she had a dream that she touched his chest right where the gold charm hung and put her hand on the springy, gray-dark hair beneath it. Cool it, she told herself soberly when she woke. Down, girl. She must have been lonelier than she thought. She needed to get out more, make herself take up the misery that was dating again.
Ten days before Thanksgiving, Grace’s father called the police and said that his son was assaulting him. Two squad cars came and spent some time in the driveway, their red-blue lights whirling, then left without taking anyone into custody. Grace did not witness this; she first heard about it from a neighbor who called her, pretending solicitousness, but who was avid for details. “Everything’s fine,” Grace said, trying to get off the phone. “Just a misunderstanding. Thanks for your concern.” Nosy old bitch hag. But were either her father or brother going to tell her?
She called her brother, who said, unconvincingly, that he’d been about to call her himself. “It was one of those idiotic Dad things, where he gets in your face and starts screaming and spitting.”
“About what?”
“The usual. How I’m doing everything wrong.”
“Did you hit him?”
“Excuse me, you mean, did I assault him? Hell yes. He was shoving me and I shoved back. He lost his balance because he was shit-faced, and wound up on the floor, that’s all. Am I sorry? No.”
“What else happened, did either of you get hurt?”
“No, I only—”
“What did you do to him?”
“Jesus, nothing. He kept trying to get up and I had to—”
“What?”
“I had to kick him back down so he wouldn’t come at me again.”
Grace let this settle for a minute. Then she said, “What did the police tell you?”
“They said we should give each other some time to cool off and they gave me a ride to Jonesy’s, I’m staying over there again for a while.”
“All right. But how did the whole thing start?”
“He said Mom would be ashamed of me.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“It’s a fucked-up situation.”
Her father didn’t want to talk about it when she called. Grace thought that meant he’d probably gotten the worst of the fight. Neither of them were the fighting type, she would have said, at least they hadn’t been. They weren’t the kind of guys who went around flexing their biceps. Now here they were, going at it like two small, vicious animals, was it minks or voles who were supposed to be so bloodthirsty? It was a fucked-up situation.
Her father said, “If I have to get a restraining order, I will.”
“Come on, Dad.”
“He’s a drug user. That’s documented. And now the police have been involved.”
“All right, you’re mad, I get it. But don’t turn it into a war. How is this supposed to end up, are you going to fight with each other forever? You’re both acting like ten-year-olds. Are you going to put a sign on the front door, Secret Clubhouse?”
Her father was not in the mood to be coaxed or teased. “I have applied for a firearms permit. I think you ought to know that things have gotten to that point.”
“You can’t be serious.” Exasperated. He carried everything too far.
Her father said nothing, meaning that he was being serious. She felt her own helplessness and failure. He carried things too far and she couldn’t drag him back from the brink. Only her mother had been able to do that. She said, “You’re scaring me. Is that what you want? Scare me and Michael so you don’t ever see us again?”
“I only said I got a permit,” her father said, sounding sulky now. “Don’t make it some big deal. I have some safety concerns. Your brother tried to extort money from me.”
“Extort.”
“He wanted money.”
This hardly came as a surprise, although Michael had not mentioned it. “Is that what started everything?”
“He’s a legal adult. I’m not obligated t
o provide for him. I’m certainly not obligated to pay for his drugs.”
Grace gave up on him. The two of them could carry on all they wanted and leave her out of it. Easy enough to say. You could announce yourself emancipated from your family and its wars and scars, but you weren’t, not really. She was right in the stupid middle of everything. The gun talk was stupid. Her father disapproved of guns. He’d said so often enough. He was being a jerk. They both were. She wasn’t going to take up her mother’s anxious work of trying to smooth things over. If she had to live with the guilt of that, so be it.
Then a week later their father announced that he wanted them both, Grace and Michael, to come over for Thanksgiving dinner. This was unexpected. He said that he had been thinking about it and it was what their mother would have wanted. How could they say no? Although they considered it.
“I don’t trust him,” Michael told Grace. “He’s got some notion in his head about getting back at me.”
“Like what, poisoning the mashed potatoes? Come on, maybe he’s sorry and this is the only way he can bring himself to say so. Were you planning on doing anything else? Maybe he doesn’t want to try and get through the holidays alone.”
“Alone doesn’t sound so bad to me.”
But they agreed to go. Their father said he would cook the turkey and dressing and gravy and all that. He would prepare a vegetarian stuffed-squash dish for Grace. He would supply the apple and pumpkin pies they always had, though he would not promise to bake them himself. They could bring things if they wanted. Appetizers. Beverages. “No alcohol,” their father announced, which was every bit as surprising as the invitation itself. “Nobody needs it, right?”
Grace imagined he meant Michael. She had the uncharitable suspicion that her father would engage in what the literature of alcoholism called predrinking, that is, getting himself liquored up before the guests arrived for the sober feast.
Nevertheless, she went shopping for nonalcoholic beer and wine and some fancy bottled soft drinks, Green River and Sarsaparilla and cream soda, things that nobody would really want to drink, but that could be the subject of harmless conversation. NuGrape, strawberry soda. One of the other groceries in town stocked such things. She filled a cardboard holder with them. One more, Orange Crush.
“You really drink that stuff?”
It was Les Moore, grinning at her. He had his own six-pack under his arm, Budweiser Light. Grace was unaccustomed to seeing him anywhere other than the health food store, and for a moment she gawked at him. “Oh, hey. They’re for Thanksgiving dinner. But I’m not going to drink them. I don’t think anybody is. Never mind. It was just this idea I had.”
“Sure,” Les said, nodding with elaborate encouragement. “Great idea. Awesome. What’s the main course, hot dogs and chips?”
She was so used to regarding him from her position of enlightened understanding, tolerating his amusing peculiarities. And here she was, dithering over peculiar soda products while he looked on with raised eyebrows. A solid citizen, a respectable working man who knew what people drank and what they did not. Or perhaps she had just grown so used to him that she experienced one of those shifts of perception, where the idea of him became more plausible. She set the carton of sodas in her shopping cart. She said, “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
When Grace told her father and brother she would be bringing a guest for dinner, of course they thought, boyfriend. She found ways to tell them that this was not the case. He was just a friend who didn’t have anywhere else to eat the holiday meal. She knew him from the store. That made it sound as if they worked together, which was good enough for now.
She explained things to Les this way: “We’ll all behave better if somebody else is there, somebody who isn’t family. And it’ll be more festive, you know, having a guest.”
“I don’t think anybody’s ever before told me I was festive.” Les was getting a kick out of the whole thing. He wanted to know if he should dress up.
“No,” Grace said. “Nobody else will. But I’d love to see your dress-up wardrobe.”
“I’d rather show you my undressed wardrobe.”
Grace ignored this. She told him about the nonalcohol pact and Les said he was cool with that, he could drink anytime.
What was he going to wear, anyway? And what were they all going to talk about, what kind of intersection was there between forklifts, computers, and indie music? She asked him if he wasn’t turning down some other invitation, one he’d enjoy. She was beginning to have second thoughts.
“Who says I’m not going to enjoy this? A real old-fashioned family Thanksgiving.”
Grace felt a headache coming on, pushing its way behind her eyes. “We’re not exactly a real old-fashioned type of family.”
“You want to know something, cutie? Nobody’s really is. Not nobody’s.”
Grace said she would pick him up at noon on Thanksgiving, then they would swing over to give Michael a ride. Les lived in an apartment building not that far from the health food store, an ordinary brick cube with narrow, utilitarian windows. She pulled up to the front door and waited, and a few minutes later, Les emerged, a skinny figure walking with his usual jauntiness, and came around to the passenger side.
“Don’t you want to come up?” he asked, leaning in the open window.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Why thank you.”
He was carrying one of those cellophane-wrapped fruit baskets the groceries sold. This one had a whole pineapple, some oranges, an apple, and a stiff red bow on the handle. “Hostess gift,” he said, hoisting it. “Well, host.” He was wearing a clean pair of blue jeans and a shirt with a collar. Also a coat she hadn’t seen before, a black wool peacoat with an elderly look. His hair in the ponytail still showed damp comb tracks. There was a whiff of aftershave.
He saw her examining him. “What, I don’t look good enough for you?”
“You look very nice.” The effort he’d made seemed both endearing and misplaced to her, like the generic fruit basket. “Thanks for coming.”
“I don’t guess I can smoke there, huh. I’ll just go outside.”
Michael shook hands with Les once he was settled in the backseat, then occupied himself with staring out the window. At least he didn’t seem to find Les especially odd or remarkable, but maybe he was preoccupied with his own problems, and the coming trial by holiday with their father. The two of them had not seen each other since the police call. Grace eyed Michael in the rearview mirror. Nothing visibly worrisome, certainly not the weight loss or twitchiness she remembered from the worst of his worst days. Instead he was glum and quiet. He was there under protest.
“I brought some stuff to drink,” Grace said, attempting small talk. “I got some Sierra Mist, you like that, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, what kind of carbonated beverage goes with turkey? There must be guidelines. You like white meat, right? We’re definitely talking lemon-lime.”
Silence. Grace looked over at Les: What did I tell you about them? Les shrugged and turned on the radio. He punched the buttons and fiddled with the dial until he found the classic rock station. The Allman Brothers were playing “Sweet Melissa.” Les sat back and sang along under his breath in a wheezy voice.
Michael stirred. “Could we maybe—”
Grace gave him a savage look in the mirror. Les half turned toward the backseat, waiting. “Nothing,” Michael said. Les turned around again. Grace sent another meaning glance behind her, willing her brother to behave. She knew that among the many things he was particular about in music were his dislike of southern rock bands and of people who sang along to the radio. Here she’d thought it was only her father who was going to be a problem.
They reached the house. Her father’s house, although Grace still thought of it as her parents’. She watched Les take it in and decide to remain visibly unimpressed. And really, it wasn’t any grand or extravagant piece of re
al estate. She’d grown up there but it had not been built to inspire sentimental attachments. It was enough like all the other houses in the neighborhood to seem entirely unimaginative, a house that had always been at war with the imagination and determined to impose its functionality on those who lived there, to impress them with its hierarchies of closets and bathrooms. Nevertheless, she saw Les appraise it and she could see, as clearly as if it were written on a screen, his thought: And these people think they have problems?
Grace opened the trunk and took out the tray of stuffed mushrooms she’d fixed that morning. Les carried his fruit basket and one of the bags of drinks, and after she called it to his attention, Michael took the other one. They walked up the driveway to the side door. “Hello,” Grace called, stepping inside. The kitchen had a good smell, a good Thanksgiving smell, of onion and sage and celery. The oven was on and throwing waves of heat. “Dad?”
They crowded into the kitchen and put down the things they carried. “Dad?” Grace went further into the house, calling him. The dining room table was set with the harvest-themed plates that her mother had used for Thanksgiving, along with some fancy cut glass serving dishes that had also been part of the holiday. But the place where her mother had sat was left empty. This sight stopped her cold. She could not have said what she was feeling, except that it sent her stomach into a slow, slow revolving orbit, like certain restaurants on top of skyscrapers. She went into the den and then called him at the foot of the stairs and finally went up to look for him.
He wasn’t anywhere. It looked as if he was still sleeping in the guest room. The bed was made up and one of his shirts lay across it. His plaid bathrobe was on a hook behind the door.
Grace went back downstairs. Her brother and Les had come out of the kitchen and were standing in the living room, still wearing their coats. “I don’t know where he is,” Grace said. She wondered if they should check unlikely places, like the basement.
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 24