A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl

by Jean Thompson

  “His car’s gone,” Michael pointed out. “Maybe he had to go out for something.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Grace looked at Michael, a question, and he stared back. Who cared where their father had gone? his look said. Les seemed as if he was trying to stay within sight of the front door, in case he had to make a quick exit. Grace went back into the kitchen. She opened the oven. It was filled by a roasting pan and a still-pale turkey, doing its best to cook.

  Investigating further, she saw other evidence of meal planning. A gravy boat, next to a jar of premade gravy. A foil pan of dinner rolls. In the refrigerator, some quivering cranberry sauce in a dish. She missed all the other things they were accustomed to eat at Thanksgiving. Deviled eggs, celery sticks. Different kinds of potatoes. Last year, her mother had been well enough to do the cooking. This year’s meal was already threatening to go off track.

  “I’m going to call him,” Grace said to the others, getting out her phone. Les and Michael were in the den by now, watching a football game. Making the best of things. They kept their eyes on the television as she dialed.

  She was surprised when he answered. Her father didn’t much like cell phones and often enough turned his off or left it at home “Hello, Dad? Where are you, we’re all here at the house.”

  “Ah, I forgot the ice cream. For the pie. I forgot the pies too.”

  “All right, no problem. Where are you now?”

  “Some store that has a bakery. I just wound up here. I should’ve planned ahead more.”

  “Looks like. How about you get those pies and come on home. How about I get started on the rest of the food.”

  “That would be great,” her father said expansively. “You know what to do. It’s Thanksgiving. We need all kinds of goodies.”

  “Good-bye,” Grace said, ending the call before he could say any more. “He went to the grocery,” she told her brother and Les. “Dinner’s going to be a while. If you’re hungry, there’s things like chips.”

  Neither of them made any response to this, as if watching football was a task requiring skill and concentration. Grace returned to the kitchen and rummaged around. There were potatoes. An entire acorn squash, perhaps meant for her own dinner. A head of lettuce. She put half a dozen eggs in a pot, ran water, and set them to boil.

  Les came in, holding up his pack of Marlboros. “Smoke break.”

  Grace watched him through the kitchen window, exhaling smoke. She’d told him that her mother had died of lung cancer and he’d said that he was hoping the heart attack got him first. When he came back inside he said, “So where’s your dad?”

  “If I had to guess? Drinking in the parking lot of the Safeway.”

  “This is a weird-ass type of situation.”

  “You think? Here.” She handed him a potato peeler and pointed at the bin she’d set on the counter. “I figured this would be messed up or bad. I just didn’t know exactly how.”

  He came up behind her, put a hand beneath her elbow, and tried to turn her toward him. “Don’t,” Grace said.

  “Just trying to offer, you know, aid and comfort.”

  “Then peel some potatoes.” She moved away from his hand. It was setting off unwelcome sensations in her skin, which felt, absurdly, like popcorn popping.

  “Want the fruit basket? Would that cheer you up at all?”

  Her father arrived an hour later, in too good a mood and with an apple pie in a foil pie pan. “Would you believe, I went all over town, and this is the best I could do.” He held out the pie, as if willing it to testify for him. The pie was undersized, with a crumb topping. It looked slightly shopworn, as if it had been passed over for a day or two, or perhaps someone had briefly sat on it.

  “It’s OK, Dad. We got it under control. This is my friend Les.”

  Her father and Les shook hands. She saw her father register Les’s cheap rings and ponytail. Her father must have forgotten that she was bringing a guest, although the table was set with four places. Her father nodded and his face assumed an all-purpose, serious expression. Les said, “Hey, thanks for having me,” and her father said sure, sure. He looked suspiciously at Grace.

  “Dad? When did you put the turkey in the oven? Do you remember?”

  “You don’t even eat turkey.” A chemical smell wafted from him. Scotch, Grace figured. Why couldn’t he just drink at home?

  “Is it the kind where the thermometer pops out? Never mind. Do you want to go watch the football game? I don’t know who’s playing.”

  “Kentucky and Louisville,” Les said. “That’s the one we’ve got going.”

  “Yeah, OK. Give me a minute.” Her father planted himself in the center of the room, waiting. Les tilted his head at Grace and raised his eyebrows, as in, What the hell. He stayed in the doorway until Grace nodded: It’s all right, I can handle him. Then he walked out. Grace heard the television in the distance, the bright noise of a commercial.

  “Where did you get that character?”

  “He’s a friend. I told you.”

  “He’s too . . .” Her father appeared to be struggling with exactly what was objectionable about Les. “. . . old for you,” he managed.

  “He’s a friend and anyway it’s none of your business.”

  “Baby girl,” her father said, opening his arms as if to embrace her. He was both earnest and ridiculous, red-faced, his mouth hanging open. Grace dodged him. “Baby girl, there’s so much in life that you don’t understand. A guy like that—”

  “Like what?”

  “Did he even go to college?”

  Grace moved to put the kitchen table between them. “Go on,” she said. “Leave me alone, you’re drunk. No, he did not go to college and since when do you care what I do or who I do it with? Since when did you even notice?” She was furious with him for insisting on this fiasco of a dinner and then screwing it up. She opened a cupboard, took out a bag of potato chips, and shook them into a bowl. “Here, take these out to the den. Les is a guest and I expect you to have some manners. Go on, get out.”

  “If your mother was here, she’d be very concerned.”

  “Leave.”

  “I bet she’d have dinner on the table by now.”

  “Get,” Grace said, pointing. To her surprise, he left the room without saying anything more, though he gave her a bitter look.

  She put on her mother’s striped apron, hoping it might convey some of her mother’s domestic expertise. In a funny way it did, or else it was just her mother’s kitchen, the long habit of being in her mother’s kitchen. It would always be her mother’s, with its pretty dishes and the stoneware canisters that had been there as long as Grace could remember.

  The room calmed her and allowed her to move from task to task. She quartered the acorn squash and set it to bake. She found the dish in which her mother had served pickles and olives, she even found pickles and olives. She peeled the eggs, riced the yolks, and dressed them with mayonnaise, mustard, and paprika. She washed the lettuce and made salad dressing. The turkey was doing its thing. She’d forgotten, all you had to do was let it roast long enough. The hard part was the physics of it, hoisting it up and getting it to come apart into serving portions.

  She put the stuffed mushrooms under the broiler and took them out to the den, where the three men were watching the football game in silence. She couldn’t tell if that was because they were comfortably engrossed in the game, or because they were sunk in silent loathing. At least her father and brother weren’t slugging each other. “Who’s winning?” Grace asked.

  After a moment, her brother said, “Kentucky.”

  “Go team,” Grace said, hoping to sound ironic, or sprightly, or something, and when no one said anything else, she went back to the kitchen.

  Her brother followed her a minute later. “How about I help?”

  “Maybe later, thanks. What, you’re not having fun in there?”

  “I keep waiting for Dad to light into me.”

  “He’s ignoring you. Be thankful. You
know what would really help? Go back in there and keep him from picking a fight with Les. Or Les from spouting off.”

  “He’s kind of weird, that guy.”

  “Then he’ll fit right in. Go.”

  Grace didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits, at least she didn’t think she did. But it was hard not to think of her mother as she moved from the sink to the oven and back again, tasting and chopping and doing her best impersonation of her mother. She felt, not a presence, exactly. Something more earthbound, a better understanding, perhaps, of her mother and the life she had lived. The endless small chores, the worries, never enough time, and always the barely movable obstacles of her husband and children.

  Grace knew how difficult she herself had been, how impatient and judgmental, how often she had turned tail and run the other way when she might have stayed. Her father and her brother had been worse only because they were louder, as well as more insistent and destructive.

  Although perhaps as her mother’s daughter, she had been the bigger disappointment.

  Her mother’s illness and death had brought them together, if only for a time. Had made the three of them better. Her mother’s last, ultimate sacrifice.

  “Stop,” Grace said out loud. It made her unhappy to be thinking such things.

  The little red nipple of the turkey thermometer popped out, and Grace called into the den for someone to help. After a minute, Michael appeared. “Yeah?”

  “Can you lift the roaster out of the oven and onto the counter?”

  He did so, awkwardly. The roaster spit grease and it was hard to maneuver the pan without getting burned. The bird had browned and with the built-in thermometer, Grace was pretty sure it was cooked through as it was supposed to be. She was a little nervous. She’d never been in charge of a Thanksgiving turkey before, plus she was squeamish about all things carnivorous. “Can you lift the turkey onto the cutting board? Here, use these string things.”

  “Now what,” Michael said, straightening up.

  “It has to cool off for a while before we carve it.” She remembered that much. She poked at the thing. It looked distressingly dead, or rather, too much like it was recently walking around on these fat, glistening drumsticks. It appeared to be full of stuffing, which she’d have to extract somehow. “How’s it going in the den?”

  “I guess Dad doesn’t like your friend much.”

  “Why, what is he doing?”

  “Just kind of making faces.”

  “Fine, he can do that. Help me with the food, let’s get this over with.”

  The potatoes needed to be brought to a boil, the dinner rolls heated through. She dressed the salad and put it onto plates, which Michael carried out. Grace scooped the stuffing out of the turkey, put it in a casserole dish, and set it in the oven to keep warm. She didn’t trust the supermarket gravy but used some of the pan drippings to give it a boost. Michael said he didn’t know how to carve. Grace imagined going into the den and asking either her father or Les to do it. She was pretty sure it was a chore right up Les’s alley, but her father would probably insist on doing it, and waving the knife around and doing some sort of damage.

  In the end Grace overcame her distaste and carved the bird herself. The white meat wasn’t that hard, but she struggled to joint the thighs and drumsticks, as if performing some hideous surgery. Finally she sent Michael into the den to tell the others that dinner was ready.

  Les ducked out the kitchen door for another smoke break. He was being uncharacteristically quiet, which didn’t seem like a good sign, but she couldn’t worry about him right now. She’d filled glasses with ice water, and brought out the peculiar soda pop, but her father went to the pantry and came out with two bottles of red wine, which he uncorked. Grace said, “I thought we weren’t going to . . . Never mind.”

  Les came back inside. They took their seats. Her mother’s empty place and empty chair gave the table an unbalanced look and crowded the rest of them in together. Her father and Les were drinking the wine. Grace settled for water, and she was glad to see that Michael was also. Her brother’s expression was closed off and grim, the silent version of I told you so. She didn’t want to think what her own face looked like. Her father hitched his chair closer. “This all looks great, Gracie.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to the cook.”

  The others did the same, in an embarrassed, halfhearted way. Grace acknowledged them, attempting a proper irony. “And,” her father went on, “to your mother, who . . .” He waved his free hand at the expanse of empty table that had been her mother’s place. “Ah, God. There’s some things, they’re tough.”

  “Let’s just eat, Dad,” Grace said.

  “Yes,” her father said, recovering himself, speaking briskly. “Let’s everybody dig in. Because life goes idiotically on.”

  No one said anything. Grace knew that her father was unhappy, that was genuine enough, but why did he have to be so histrionic and messy about it? Why did he act like he was the only one who missed her mother? Les, sitting next to her, was careful not to meet Grace’s eye. She had the sense he was practicing the kind of manners that meant not saying anything. Then her father roused himself once more. “Everything looks great,” he said again. “Let’s eat.”

  They filled their plates. It always took a long time to do this at Thanksgiving, and even today, with the food being pulled together at the last minute, there was a lot of it to pass around and load up. Then there would be an interval of eating, always disappointingly brief, given the preparation time. Then plates passed around for second helpings. Then Grace supposed she’d have to at least get the cleanup under way. Then they could go home.

  Her father put his fork down, taking a rest. “Did you guys like the stuffing? You didn’t say.”

  Grace said, “It’s good, Dad.” Michael also said it was good. Les kept on eating. He gauged, correctly, that his opinion was not required.

  “I was trying to remember how your mother fixed it. I thought she put apple in it, so that’s what I did.”

  “Yeah, you got it. It’s a lot like hers.”

  “She wasn’t the fanciest cook, but everything she made always tasted just right.”

  No one answered, or rather, no one carried the thought forward. Her father drank some of his wine. If he’d begun on the bright, hectic edge of drunkenness, and then had passed into melancholy, now he had slowed down and considered everything with weighty attention. He noticed Les, who was doing his best not to be noticed, working away at his plate with his head down. “You getting enough to eat?”

  “Yes, sir. My compliments to the chef.” Les turned and gave Grace a smile that he managed to make look suggestive, as if the two of them spent their time feeding each other pomegranate seeds in bed.

  This too had the effect of halting conversation. Grace felt her insides coiling and tightening. She said, “Les comes into the store for lunch sometimes.”

  “Huh,” Grace’s father said. “You a health food guy?”

  “Absolutely. Can’t get enough of it.”

  “Huh,” her father said again. He turned to Grace with another of his dark, suspicious glances. “You’re not all of a sudden selling burgers and fries over there, are you? Some kind of fried healthy stuff?”

  She let that pass and bent her head over her food again. They would eat all the food, and then the meal, and the day, would come to an end. “Michael,” her father said. Leave him alone, Grace prayed, but it was no use. “Tell me something about your music. What you’re doing nowadays.”

  “I don’t talk about it, I play it.”

  “What, you took some vow of silence? I want to know. Help me understand what it is you play. It’s not jazz. It’s not classical. Not that old-time rock and roll.” Her father held up a hand and counted off on his fingers. “Not the blues. Not rap.”

  “It has influences of rap and blues,” Michael said. He gave Grace a glance that indicated how patient and tolerant he was being in the face of their father’s bullheaded questions. “It
’s like the product of everything you’ve heard and take in, then you try to make it into something new and original.”

  That seemed to Grace to be a sound and appropriate answer, under the circumstances, Art for the Simple-Minded, maybe, but their father started over, wiggling his fingers. “It’s not country and western. Not folk music. Not, what else is there.”

  Les said, “You know who was a really great band? Black Sabbath.”

  “I guess I don’t know them very well,” Grace said.

  Her father said, “I like a song you can sing along to. One with real words.”

  “I saw one of their concerts out in Denver. It kicked ass.” Les was getting over his unnatural silence. Maybe it was the wine.

  Michael said, “How about I write a song about you, Dad? With real words and everything.”

  “No. I don’t think I’d like that.”

  “I’m all kinds of inspired.”

  “I said, Don’t.”

  “It could be this great song. We’d play it everywhere and you couldn’t stop us.”

  “The hell you will.”

  “Like Neil Young, ‘old man take a look at my life.’ I just have to find something that rhymes with ‘bullshit.’ ” Michael grinned and mugged, playing air guitar.

  “You do that and I will beat your punk ass.”

  “Neil Young is a righteous dude,” Les said reflectively.

  “Oh, big talker. Who was the one who ended up on the floor?”

  “Stop it,” Grace said. “Just stop it. Both of you, what are you fighting about? A song nobody wrote yet?”

  “You heard him. He’s going to beat my punk ass.”

  “I’ll do more than that, sport. Don’t push your luck.”

  “Big talker,” Michael said again. “But I’m the one who can sing.”

  “Are you both crazy?” Grace demanded. “Am I related to crazy people?”

  They subsided then. Her father mumbled something. “Didn’t quite catch that. Was that an apology?” Grace asked. Her father said that he guess he got carried away sometimes. Michael was even more reluctant, but he managed to come up with a sorry. “Thank you,” Grace said. They exhausted her. There was something wrong with them. Something wrong with her whole family that could not be fixed, like original sin.