The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (9 page)

When Gerald was seven, Freya walked out of the kitchen one morning to answer the telephone, and her brother put his hand down on a lit kitchen burner. At the hospital, even Roberta, who had fought hardest to keep him home, agreed we could no longer care for him properly. After he recovered, we found a perfect school, and he has lived there since. He is both our sword of Damocles and our permanent reminder of how wonderful life can be if you are lucky.

“We all adjusted to him differently, Scott. I tried too hard to see him normal and gave him too much of the love I should have given the girls. You did what you could, but it
was
a terrible disappointment, and it ate you up. When it got too much, you retreated from all of us into your work. It makes sense. It’s both of our personalities perfectly. I wanted everyone to be happy; you wanted everyone to be exceptional. Neither of us had a chance of succeeding, so we both made mistakes. But you know, we couldn’t have been so bad, because the girls still love us. It’s clear in whatever they do.”

Yes, we’d had this discussion before, but having it again right after Norah’s comment hit me a KO punch to the heart. Had I really been so bad and negligent? Worse, had I known that all along, but spent years hiding it from myself? I knew life was a progressively more sophisticated game of hide-and-seek with ourselves, but could we really be unaware of something this momentous?

Further, if it were true, why would
I
rate to replace Beenie Rushforth as one of the thirty-six? A man who treated his family with such arrogance and disrespect? In her inimitable way, she’d told me that “it took all kinds”, but could such an appalling egoist be one of them?

So much at once. My life jumped, bounced, and floated like one of those astronauts walking in space. It had suddenly become almost weightless, because its own personal gravity had ceased to be. I tried repeatedly to call Beenie, but there was never an answer. Finally I realized she wanted me to think things over, and would answer my questions only when she came again to clean our house. How ridiculous yet correct that profession was for her. The ultimate cleaner. The ultimate bringer of order.

Needless to say, I galloped back and forth over the emotional gamut, waiting for her next visit. I cancelled my class for that day, and bribed Roberta out of the house with a gift of lunch and an afternoon movie with her best friend. Ten minutes after she left, the empty and quiet house made me so nervous that I got out the vacuum cleaner and did the floor in the kitchen before the bell rang.

I opened the door, and there was Annette Taugwalder.

“Beenie couldn’t come, so she sent me. I’m supposed to clean your house.” She brushed by me into the hall, throwing this last line over her shoulder. “Wow, I never thought I would be in
this
house. Vacuum cleaner’s all ready for me, eh? OK.”

I closed the door and looked at her. “Why didn’t she come?”

“Because she told me to. I’m a good
Putzfrau.
Don’t you remember the chapter in my book where the girl cleans houses in the summer for extra money? Don’t worry, Professor; your place will look nice when I’m done.” With that, she took off her coat, threw it on a chair, turned on the vacuum cleaner, and went right to work. I stood there feeling like a fool. She didn’t look at me again.

What was going on? There was nothing to do but retreat to my study and try again to call Beenie at home. The phone there rang and rang. She had to have done this for some reason, but
what
? She must have known I’d have a million questions. Why wasn’t she here to answer them? How could she drop this girl in my lap and walk away? Where the hell was she?

Luckily, there was a small television in my room. I switched it on to fill up some mental airspace. What was Annette doing out there? The idea of a dead woman cleaning the house was monstrous and monstrously funny. I couldn’t help smiling. A peculiar thought crossed my mind: she was the second dead person to be in this house. Our poor son, for all intents and purposes dead, had spent years here.

The person on television was talking about Gorgonzola cheese. I had once lived in the same universe as Gorgonzola cheese. Now I lived in one where dead students vacuumed my house and God wouldn’t answer Her phone.

I sat at my desk and pretended to work by pushing pencils and papers around, looking for nothing in an address book, reading a bank statement twice because even the numbers had no meaning.

I tiptoed to my door and put an ear to it. Only the “hoooosh” of the machine. Was she really here only to clean? Both the expression on her face and the tone of her voice had been so haughty and dismissive. She knew she held all the best cards, and I could do nothing till she made a first play. All because of a badly written, sophomoric, heavy-breathing, and pale copy of—There was a knock at the door. I forced myself not to run and open it. Count to five, rise slowly, turn the doorknob slowly. “Yes?”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I didn’t know if you wanted this or not?” It was the same relic finding that Beenie had done each time she cleaned. Had she instructed Annette to do this, too? The girl held out a beat-up green spiral notebook with the word “
CHARGERS
” printed in thick black letters across the top. That was the nickname of the local high school. I assumed the book belonged to one of our girls.

“I’ll take it. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She handed it to me and started to leave.

“Annette? Why
did
you come today?”

Her face was only innocence. “To clean your house. Beenie asked me to take her place. I told you.”

“Cleaning’s not important. Wouldn’t you rather talk about your—”

“No. She just told me to bring you things to see if you want them.” She left.

I didn’t know what to do. Follow her, grab her arm, sit her down and say, “Listen, dead person, you and I have to have it out. We have to talk about your bad novel.” No, that wouldn’t do.

I went back to my desk with the school notebook and, for want of anything better to do, opened it.

“Hey, Turd Bird!”

I whipped my head aside to see who had said it, but a hand went over my mouth. Scared, I looked at whose hand. I didn’t know the boy. I realized only then that we were face-to-face, very close. And I felt him. I felt him inside me down there.

“Quiet, ssh; he’ll go away!”

I looked at this boy. Who was he? There were three small pimples on his chin. What was he talking about? What was I doing here? We were inside a toilet stall. I was sitting on his lap. He was on the toilet seat. His trousers lay below his knees.

“Hey, man, come on, hurry up with her, willya?”

My lover started grinning at what his pal outside the stall had said. He pumped and pumped away inside me, that awkward position, trying to finish, trying to bring himself off, get it over with so he could go back to the class we were both missing.

I saw my daughter Freya. Quiet, dull Freya, who covered her bedroom walls with pictures of kittens and read seven-hundred-page books with titles like
Love’s Flame and Fury.
She received average grades in school and let her sister do most of the talking and arguing. She liked to take care of Gerald. She baked him cakes and fed them to him in slow forkfuls.

She was having sex on a high school toilet with a boy who was hurrying to finish so he could sneak back to class with his friend who waited on the other side of the stall door.

I
was
her. I could feel the boy, smell his heat and ugly cologne. The zip on his trousers cut into me.

“OK, OK, OK!” Coming, he flung his head back too hard and banged it against the wall. “Damn! Oh yeah, nice. Damn, that hurt! Thanks, Freebie; that was good.” Rubbing his head with one hand, he pushed me off gently with the other. I hovered above him on bended quivering knees. I wanted him to say something else. Hadn’t I come out here with him in the middle of my favourite class? Something nice I could hold to me when he was gone. But he was too busy pulling himself together.

“Come on, Dipwad! Five minutes left to class!”

“Right!” He zipped up quickly and reached behind me to open the door. “Seeya, Freebie. Thanks for the Freebie!”

His friend outside tipped his head around the door, checked me out, and said in a loud, long falsetto, “FREEEEEEEEEBIE!” The two of them snickered and were gone. I knew I should return to class, too, but, with five minutes left, what was the point? I’d use paper towels to clean off my legs, check my make-up in the mirror, and be looking OK again before the bell rang and anyone might see me walking out of the men’s room.

“I did that once when I was in high school. But the guy didn’t come. We were both too scared.”

Because my eyes were closed, I only heard Annette’s voice and felt when she pulled the notebook out of my hands.

“Hey, don’t worry, be happy! That’s all you get. You can open your eyes—you’re back home.”

She was squatting down in front of me, close by. Unsmiling, but I could tell she was pleased.

“Was that really Freya? Did she do that?”

“Frequently. Touch this notebook again, and you’ll see
many
things she did. She had two nicknames in high school. ‘Freebie’, as in, it’s free for anyone who wants it. And ‘Tunnel’. ‘The Silver Tunnel’. I have something else for you that I found.”

“I don’t want it! Go away!”

“Oh no, you
have
to have it, Perfesser. Them’s the rules. You told me the truth; now I tell you. Why do you think she brought me back! I’m your Medusa! I tell you nothin’ but the truth, and the
whole
truth about your life. Remember how Beenie started finding things here? I found more.”

“Beenie’s not evil!”

“This isn’t evil; this is the facts. I’m showing you your truth. What others thought of you, what really happened when you weren’t looking ... You like telling it to other people. Here’s some for you. Remember what Norah said: ‘You don’t have to approve of me, Dad.’ ”

“You don’t know Norah!”

“No, but I know the truth. Here’s treasure number two,
Dad
. Remember this? He loved these.”

She held something out, but I was so confused that I didn’t realize what it was at first.

“It’s a bagel! Don’t you remember how Gerald loved them? Used to walk around the house with one in his mouth? In the
good
old days, that is. Before you so thoughtfully shipped him away to the loony bin.”

When I didn’t take it, she tossed it into my lap. I didn’t want it. It felt heavy. A piece of bread.

The moment it touched me, I saw the world through his eyes. Through the eyes of Gerald/child/man/madman/animal. Colours roared and whispered. They had voices. Loud—everything was screamingly louder. Chairs weren’t chairs any more, because I didn’t understand what they were. Smells—the smallest nothing smell was an explosion a hundred times what I knew, good and bad. Chemicals, flowers, the bugs in the ground, breakfast dishes stewing in the sink. Things. I smelled them all.

My mouth. There was something in my mouth, and I liked it. I hummed around it. It was nice against my teeth. Soft.

I walked around wherever I could go. There were people sometimes. They smelled good, too. Sometimes they touched me or said things at me or pushed me to be in a place or not in a place. If I didn’t like the place, I’d yell. OK, OK, OK, they’d say. OK.

Everything was OK and tasted good, and I smelled the world and heard the people making noise. And then there was a BANG, and
he
came in, and I fell on the floor and yelled because here he was. He hurts me. He yells at me. He takes my arm and pulls it and yells at me. I hate him. I hate him. I hit him. I will hit and hit. That big thing will hurt. Pick it up and hit him, and he’ll fall down. He is bad. Sometimes he’s soft and puts me under his arm, but he’s bad. The others say things to him, but they are scared, too. He yells at them, too. He goes into the room and BAMS! the door. When he’s gone, people talk again and are nice. He is bad. I hate. Bad. Hate. Bad. BAM.

“Stop it!”

I don’t understand.

“Stop it, Annette! Take it away from him this minute.”

They yell. I don’t understand. The white one comes to me and takes away my mouth thing.

I came to again in my study and understood. For the last minutes, I knew the world through my son’s hideously shattered perception. The world through broken glass, fragments of beauty and terror and mystery that exceed all bounds. Disturbing beyond any bounds, truly Hell on earth, was one simple realization: my retarded son hated me. Of all the bizarre bits, scraps, slivers, pieces of our world he could grasp, the only thing he consciously knew was that he hated me. His only truth, the only genuine clearness he knew. I was bad. He wanted me dead.

“Get out of here. Go back to my place and wait for me.”

“You told me to clean their house!”

“Annette, go
back
!”

I sat on the floor blinking, a survivor of my own life. I watched the two of them bellow at each other. The grey woman and the young one who might have been her daughter.

“Why don’t you let me finish? Let me have him! He deserves it!”

“Get out, Annette. I am
not
going to tell you again!”

My son. His mind of stone, or air, clouds you would fall right through to the ground, but he knew how to despise me. Wanted me dead. Was I that bad? Had I been that evil?

“To him, you were, but he doesn’t understand things too good, Scott. Come on; let me help you up.”

I had no energy. It was fine to be sitting on the floor. I must have fallen there. I wouldn’t let her pull me. Annette left the room, screaming, “ASSHOLES!” And I
was
an asshole. I was a miserable beast.

“He hates me. He’s capable of doing that. It’s astonishing. We thought he had no clear idea of anything. But he’s clear enough to hate me.”

“I know the feeling, kid. When I told my daughter I had cancer, first thing she said, the very first, was had I made a will or not?” Beenie left the room and returned with two glasses of grapefruit juice. Handing one to me, she said drink first and we’ll talk in a minute. I was so empty and burned out of feeling that I’d have bitten the glass if she’d told me. I sipped, and the bitter, fresh taste of cold juice slid down my throat.