The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  PRAISE FOR THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

  This is Lipson’s classless utopia, in which even fools are suffered gladly so long as they are lively and authentic fools. Her language is clean, her observations clever and sure, and her protagonists generous of spirit. This wise, compassionate book is also a lot of fun to read.

  —BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

  Mimi Lipson writes in a plainsong, just-the-facts style that somehow delivers her footage in high definition. Her characters inhabit a world that is beneath them, a world in which they are stuck, with a lot of grace and stupidity. She is a master of making you very comfortable and secure, warm and cozy while she throws your shoes under the house and drives off in your car.

  —GARY PANTER

  “A scintillating collection of stories, full of well observed details. Mimi Lipson is a fabulous stylist.”

  —HA JIN

  © 2014 Mimi Lipson

  All rights reserved

  YETI books are published by Yeti Publishing LLC and distributed to the trade by Verse Chorus Press

  PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293 | yetipublishing.com

  Versions of these stories have appeared in the following magazines: “Lou Schultz” in Joyland; “Moscow, 1968” in Witness; “The Cloud of Unknowing” in BOMB; “The Breakfast Shift,” “Catch of the Day,” and “Garbage Head” in YETI; “The Smockey Bar” and “Safe, Reliable, Courteous” in Contrappasso; “The Minivan” in Chronogram; “Mothra” in The Brooklyn Rail; “the_lettuce” in Harvard Review.

  ISBN 978-1-891241-95-6 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lipson, Mimi.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The cloud of unknowing / stories by Mimi Lipson.

  pages cm

  1. Short stories, American. I. Title.

  PS3612.I675C56 2014

  813'.6--dc23

  2013049085

  For Luc

  Contents

  THE SCHULTZ FAMILY

  Lou Schultz

  The Endless Mountains

  Moscow, 1968

  The Cloud of Unknowing

  The Searchlite

  FOOD & BEVERAGE

  The Breakfast Shift

  The Smockey Bar

  Tomack

  Catch of the Day

  KITTY AND ISAAC STORIES

  Safe, Reliable, Courteous

  Garbage Head

  The Minivan

  Mothra

  the_lettuce

  THE SCHULTZ FAMILY

  Lou Schultz

  When Lou Schultz got to the Avis desk at the Orlando airport, the compact car he’d reserved was not available, nor was there a midsized left on the lot. They’d had no choice but to upgrade him straight to the top: a brand-new 1973 Chrysler Imperial, white with cream interior. He decided to let the kids believe that he’d splurged and was kicking off their holiday in style. Jonathan, ten, was splayed out in the backseat with a map he’d gotten at the rental desk, and seven-year-old Kitty, winner of the coin toss, sat up front next to Lou playing with the radio dial. The three of them were cruising under a pale Florida sky, en route to Villa Serena, a real estate development in Winter Haven. Lou had planned their vacation around the coupons and discounts he’d been promised in return for touring one of the model homes.

  “Doesn’t it sound grand, kids? Vee-ya Serena.”

  The driver’s seat of the Imperial was like an overstuffed recliner, so preposterously plush that he could bury his fist in the armrest, and the steering and brakes responded to his slightest touch. Looking down at the imitation-burl instrument panel, he saw that he was going fifteen miles over the speed limit without even trying. On the subway ride to the airport and all during the flight, Lou had felt a mounting irritation at the thought of five days in Florida—and particularly the two days at Disney World he had promised the kids—but his mood was lifting now that they were on the road. The week’s theme, he decided, would be unapologetic leisure: motels, swimming pools, sunshine and Donald Duck. He’d brought along a mycology guide, and he even hoped to get in a little mushroom hunting.

  Kitty at last found a station. A lugubrious male voice crooned over a bed of strings: “I remember all my life / Raining down as cold as ice.”

  “Aaah! Barry Manilow!” Jonathan shouted. “Turn it off!”

  “Ba-ree Ma-nee-loff. A Polish singer?”

  “Dad!”

  “I want to hear this Polish singer, this Maniloff.” Unforgivable schmaltz, but having committed to the joke, he made them listen to the entire song.

  Lou taught Slavic languages at Harvard, and every summer he took groups of tourists around the Balkans and the Soviet Union, ditching their Intourist guide and leading by improvisation. They drove all day in rented VW Microbuses and slept in army surplus tents. When Lou and his wife, Helena, separated a year earlier, one of her chief complaints was that she’d been left at home with the children for eight summers in a row. Lou hadn’t taken her protests seriously until it was, perhaps, too late, but since she’d moved out, he’d discovered that he enjoyed spending time with his family.

  Kitty leaned out her window watching the furniture showrooms and car lots roll past. “A Gilligan’s Island tree! And another. Andanotherandanotherandanother,” she chanted.

  “It’s like Ohio, only with palm trees,” Jonathan said, looking up from his map.

  “Sohio. You mean it looks like Sohio,” Kitty said.

  “Sorlando,” he answered, picking up the thread. “Sorlando, Sflorida.”

  “Spine Hills,” Kitty said. “Scocoa Beach. Daddy, are we going to Scocoa Beach?”

  This was the Sohio Game, which Lou had regretted inventing ever since their trip to his sister’s house in Akron a few years earlier. The game was named after the Sohio gas station chain, and there was only one moronically simple rule: add an ‘s’ to any place name. Smassachussetts. Snew Hampshire. Scambridge, Smedford, Spittsburgh, on and on, ad nauseam.

  “Let’s play Three Thirds of a Ghost,” he said, hoping to nip it in the bud. “I’m thinking of a word that starts with ‘h’.”

  “‘h’ . . . ‘a’,” Jonathan said. “Kitty, it’s your turn.”

  “‘h’, ‘a’, ‘p’,” Kitty said.

  “‘h’, ‘a’, ‘p’ . . . ‘a’.”

  Jonathan thought for a moment. “I challenge.”

  “Hapax!” Lou said, smiling into the rearview mirror. “One third of a ghost for Jonathan.”

  His son slumped angrily in his seat. “What’s a hapax?”

  “As in hapax legomenon. Remember, we were talking about hapax legomena yesterday?”

  “Forget it,” Jonathan said, picking up the map again. “I don’t want to play.”

  After turning into a golf course by mistake, Lou found the entrance to Villa Serena. A prim decorative fence edged either side of the driveway, and a sign planted in the bright green lawn announced “Model Home Information.” The only landscaping was a stand of date palms off to one side, shading nothing in particular. A cluster of low ranch houses ringed the parking lot, each with its own white gravel yard. Lou moored the Imperial in a space between two golf carts.

  “Who’s coming on the tour?” he asked. Kitty got out of the car, but the boy was still sulking.

  The agent, an attractive woman in a white pantsuit, met them outside the sales office with a ring of keys. “Mr. Schultz?” She held out her hand. “Welcome to Villa Serena. I’m Marjorie Dale.” Her smile stayed fixed as her eyes moved to Kitty and then back to Lou. “There are not a lot of children here, Mr. Schultz. In fact, most of the residents are retired. I think that’s mentioned in our brochure?”

  “You’re never too young to retire!”

  Th
ey followed Mrs. Dale around the model home, tactfully admiring the drapes and wall-to-wall carpets as she pointed them out. The living room was divided into two levels separated by a wrought iron railing. The “his and hers closets” in the “master bedroom,” to which Mrs. Dale drew Lou’s particular attention, had plastic bi-fold doors. In the kitchen, a florescent light fixture hummed over the no-wax floor.

  “Mrs. Schultz would certainly appreciate the trash compactor, wouldn’t she?” Lou winked at Kitty. “And she’s been pestering me for a dishwasher, too.”

  Back at the office, Lou went over next week’s lesson plan in his head, on Russian palatal mutations in the conjugation of –at stemmed verbs, while Mrs. Dale yammered on about “customization options.” When she’d stopped talking, he filled out a travel voucher and collected his coupons, and they were back on the road in under an hour. He cocked his elbow out the window and relaxed into his pillowy seat, taking in the Cine-scope view of shopping plazas and country clubs through the Imperial’s wide windshield.

  “So, what do you think of this car?” he asked Jonathan, who had switched places with his sister and was now up front. “Like riding on a cloud, isn’t it?”

  “Like floating on a marshmallow,” Jonathan said, bouncing.

  “What say we keep it?”

  “Yeah!”

  “How about you, Kit? What do you think of Daddy’s new car?”

  She was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know.”

  “And what about that house, hah?” he said, warming up to the bit. “How would you like to live in a gracious new home at Villa Serena? We can all take up golf!”

  Kitty turned her back to him and leaned on the package shelf. “Can we call Mommy?”

  “You just saw her this morning. Wouldn’t you rather wait and call her when you have something to tell her?” Was it possible, he thought irritably, that she was already homesick?

  Lou had a coupon for the El Morocco Motel. The sun was already low when they checked in and the day hadn’t been warm, but Jonathan and Kitty were in the pool by the time Lou got out of his shower. He went outside and sat on a lounge chair in the astroturfed courtyard with a newspaper he’d taken from the lobby. First Jonathan, then Kitty climbed out and stood on the lip of the pool holding their noses. Jonathan counted one-two-three and they jumped, upright and stiff-legged, back into the water, then climbed out and jumped in again. The sun sank below the cement wall and the underwater lights came on, casting the children’s faces in a cathode glow as they paddled back and forth.

  Lou wished now that he’d tried harder to convince Helena to come with them to Florida, but she’d said she was too busy—substitute teaching, waitressing at a coffee shop. That was Helena: serious and self-sufficient. She’d refused his financial help when she moved out. Well, he hadn’t explicitly offered any, but only because he knew she would refuse. And perhaps, a little, because he’d hoped she would become discouraged. Even exhausted, Helena was beautiful—as desirable as ever to him, perhaps more so. He had coaxed her into his—their—bed a few times over the past year, and he hadn’t abandoned the idea that he might persuade her to give up her apartment and move back in.

  The sky was completely dark when Kitty and Jonathan got out of the pool. They were shivering and their lips were blue, so he made them get into a hot shower. They ate dinner at the coffee shop next to the motel and went back to their room and played a few hands of gin rummy. Lou supervised the flossing and brushing, tucked the kids in, and turned off all the lights but the one on the nightstand between the two big beds.

  “We’re going to Disney World tomorrow, right?” asked Jonathan.

  “Yes, tomorrow,” Lou said. “Probably tomorrow. If not, then certainly the day after. Now, who is in the mood for a Comrade Borodin story?” he asked, removing his shoes and lying down on the other bed, arms folded behind his head. His mind was already working, and he didn’t wait for a reply. “It seems that Comrade Borodin’s wife, the beautiful Grushenka—”

  “The countess?” interrupted Kitty. “The one who liked to catch flies in her mouth?”

  “The former countess,” Lou said, remembering that he’d used the name before. “She’d renounced her title, as Comrade Borodin considered the aristocracy to be decadent.”

  “Is there a hedgehog in the story?”

  “As it happens, yes, there is a hedgehog. Borodin’s best friend was a hedgehog named Chauncey. But more of that later. As you will recall, Comrade Borodin worked at the F. Gladkov Main Moscow State Institute of Physical Culture, which is sometimes called simply—”

  “Glavmosgosfizkult,” Jonathan said.

  “Precisely. Glavmosgosfizkult. One summer, Comrade Borodin’s brigade went to the Ural Mountains to construct a hydroelectric power station. In fact, Borodin’s brigade had been called away every summer for eight years to some eastern province: a cement factory in Kamchatka one year, the next year a magnesium processing plant on Lake Baikal, and so forth.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Jonathan?

  “Next time you go to Russia, can I go with you?”

  “Maybe so. Could be.”

  “Dad, what about Chauncey?” mumbled Kitty, already half asleep.

  “That was what Grushenka wanted to know—what about Chauncey? Because during these summers, it fell to Grushenka to change Chauncey’s litter box and take him for walks.

  “‘Dearest Chauncey,’ Grushenka would say while they walked, for indeed they had become very close, ‘why does Borodin prefer the companionship of his brigade?’

  “‘Ah, but you are wrong, Grushenka,’ said the hedgehog. ‘He thinks of you day and night, and even keeps your picture on his footlocker. It is well known that he gazes tenderly at your yellow hair and red cheeks before he falls asleep, so that he may dream of you, and that every day, as he mixes concrete for the foundation of the hydroelectric power station, he whispers the name Grushenka.’”

  The sheets rustled as Jonathan turned on his side. Lou saw that they were both asleep now. They looked so much alike: the same sharp chins and messy, shoulder-length hair—as dark as his, but straight and fine as corn silk, like Helena’s. Kitty had on her brother’s old tiger-striped pajamas, the ones she’d worn for Halloween last fall. She’d invented a mythological creature with the pajamas and a rabbit-fur hat and a face mask of a mouse that she’d picked out at the drug store. As Lou undressed, switched out the light, and lay down again on his own bed, he thought about another story.

  She was nineteen years old when they met, and already a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where she’d enrolled in the college at age fifteen. He was studying on the GI Bill. She’d been looking for a Russian tutor, and they’d given her his name at the department. She came to his basement apartment on Drexel Avenue—shy and quiet, a sylph in a peasant skirt. He told her to memorize Tatiana’s letter to Onegin. When she returned the next week, they sat on orange crates in his room, and she recited for him in halting Russian:

  I write this to you—what would one want?

  What else is there that I could say?

  ’Tis now, I know, within your will

  To punish me with scorn.

  But you, for my unhappy lot

  Keeping at least one drop of pity,

  You’ll not abandon me.

  In the morning they spread out Jonathan’s map on the table in the coffee shop. “Look at this,” Lou said, “we’re only ten miles from Cypress Gardens!”

  “But that’s the opposite direction from Disney World,” Jonathan said.

  “I think we have a coupon for Cypress Gardens.” He looked through his billfold. “Indeed we do; two free passes. We can leave Kitty in the car.”

  “Daddy!”

  “All right, I guess I can pick this one up. You got the hockey tickets.” Lou had been saying this for years. “You got the hockey tickets,” he’d say as he put a dime in the turnstile or paid for their pizza or handed over their tickets at the movie theater.

>   “It’s a garden, Daddy?” Kitty asked. “A flower garden?”

  “Flowers of every hue. And Spanish moss.”

  “I don’t want to look at moss!” Jonathan protested. “I thought we were going to Disney World today.”

  “Well, I don’t think we should be too rigid. Let the wind take us where it will, right? Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”

  They spent all morning at Cypress Gardens. Actresses in antebellum dresses fanned themselves on rustic footbridges. They saw a waterskiing exhibition, and then Lou took a picture of the kids sitting on a bench on a carpet-covered platform in front of a painted plywood backdrop that said “Citrus Royalty.” It all reminded Lou a bit of strolling the grounds in a faded European spa town: Marienbad, with an overlay of all-American bunkum.

  Lou hoped they could find a cheap place for lunch, perhaps a roadside hamburger stand. But after driving for an hour, he gave up and pulled into the parking lot of the Seminole Diner, a sprawling new building clad in sheet metal and pebbled stone-face. Out of habit, he steered them to a booth that hadn’t been cleared off yet and swiped a few onion rings off a plate before a scowling waitress snatched it away.

  “Who’s in the mood for a tuna sandwich?” he said.

  Jonathan leaned his elbows on the table and scrutinized the menu. “I want a Monte Cristo.”

  “I don’t think you’d like it,” Lou said, hoping to redirect him to something less expensive. “They’re usually made with tongue. Fried pig’s tongue.”

  “That’s not what it says here. ‘Danish ham and cheese, served on French toast and dusted with powdered sugar.’”

  “We could go back and forth on this all day. How about a tuna sandwich? That’s what I’m having. What about you, Kitty? What looks good?”

  “When can we call Mommy?” she asked.

  “Why don’t we wait a day or two and then call her when we have something interesting to tell her? Or you could write her a postcard. I’ll bet she’d love that. Now, what do you want to eat?”