The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (5 page)

It was futile to argue that, even more than the basement, we never, ever went into the garage other than to park the car in the winter. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the fact that our small world would be shipshape in a week. Looking at what she’d done in the basement and attic silenced both Roberta’s and my protests. The places had been transformed from Grimesvilles to a lot of ordered space and certain interesting objects that, like the television set, evoked enjoyable memories and were thus fun to see again. A red sled we’d hauled the kids around on in both Minnesota and New Mexico, a doll that’d once meant the world to two little girls, and, to my own delight and astonishment, the paperback copies of
Pierre & Redburn
I’d used in graduate school and thought had been lost in a move aeons ago. Beenie just kept toting stuff in, looking grim and impatient at the same time. “How about this?” was her usual shorthand question for whether or not we wanted what she held. Although even that was abbreviated towards the end to “this?”. Roberta and I sat there waiting to see what would emerge next, what part of our history would return to the surface like a periscope up for a look round. It was hard to say goodbye to some of these things, although there was no earthly reason to keep them. Despite being broken or burned or obsolete, they were our past. Small pieces of a shared life that had worked and grown and found its place in the end.

A few days later, I went to the supermarket to do the shopping. It’s a chore I enjoy because the abundance of a market heartens me. I grew up the fourth of five children, and, although we had enough to eat, there was never
more
than enough. To walk into a store, see all that gorgeous stuff, and know you can buy anything you want or two of anything you want, is a pleasure for me even today. Roberta and I had our lean times, but since we came from similar backgrounds, food was something we never scrimped on. The car could be old and dying, the roof full of leaks, but meals at our house were always plentiful, and if the kids wanted to have a friend over for dinner, pull up a chair.

Because both of us enjoy cooking, we alternate nights in the kitchen, but the shopping is my job, and I’m glad to do it.

Surprisingly, the argument over what an author really meant in his work had flared again in my Hawthorne class, and the students divided down the middle into those who believed the artist had the final say about his product, and those who felt any interpretation was valid so long as it was appropriate and well supported. I took no sides, but followed the discussion closely after one earnest girl bit off more than she could chew by saying, “Look at God, assuming there
is
one. What did He mean by creating the world? We could say the separate religions are literary critics because each is convinced their interpretation is correct. But
are
any of them? Isn’t God the only one who knows?”

“Yes, but your ‘author’ is dead, or silent, and won’t tell us what He meant. So it’s up to us to figure it out, right?” scoffed another.

Smarty-pants theology. Wise guys sneering at the miraculous. I kept quiet, but it irritated me to hear these hermetic twenty-five-year-olds pontificating snidely about something both obvious and important.

Still preoccupied with discussion, I was automatically scanning the shopping list and taking things off the shelves, when, looking up, I saw Beenie Rushforth twenty feet away. My first impulse was to go up and say hello, but she seemed so content with what she was doing that I held back.

She had an open bag of cookies in her hand and was eating one. Nothing special there, except for the look on her face, which was pure bliss. She’d take a bite, close her eyes, and I could almost hear her groan of pleasure. Swallowing, the eyes would open again, look at the cookie as if it were telling her wonderful things, take a bite, et cetera. Either they were the best cookies ever, or she had something else going. Standing there watching, I realized with a shock that I was as bad as my students. I couldn’t simply think that here was someone enjoying a moment of her life. No, with all that happiness showing, she had to be a little daffy or strange or just plain
off.
Why are we so suspicious of the good?

“Hey, Beenie.”

She smiled at me, but her expression didn’t click recognition for a few beats. “Hey, Scott! How are you?”

“Fine. Those must be great. You look so happy eating them.”

“They’re good, but I’m not smiling at the cookies. It’s remembering something I did as a kid. We were poor, and I was usually hungry the whole day. Even during meals. There were a couple of markets in our town, and I did the shopping for my mother. Every time, I went to a different one, because I had a trick up my sleeve. I’d get everything she asked for, then I’d take a bag of cookies—it didn’t matter what kind, because they all tasted great to me. In every store, there was at least one blind corner where the people who ran it couldn’t see you. I knew where each one was. I’d get my cookies, step over there like I was browsing, and verrry carefully open the bag along the seams. You can do that if you watch what you’re doing. I was an expert! Now, when it was open, I’d take out two. Only two! And shove those babies into my mouth. Then, chewing really lightly so no one could see, I’d put the bags back on their shelf way in the back so they wouldn’t be found soon. I never got caught, and was very proud of it.”

“But it’s not so much fun, now that you can afford to buy the bag?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Scott. Five weeks ago the doctor told me I’m sick. Since then, just about everything tastes better than it used to.” She said it as fact. Not a trace of “pity me” in her voice.

“Beenie, I’m sorry. Is there anything we can do? Are there treatments—”

“It’s too far gone. I was feeling lousy for a long time, and kept telling myself to go have a check-up, but you know how those things are: you’re lazy, or down deep you’re scared and don’t want to know ... Anyway, you get more scared when you start feeling really bad. So you go when it’s impossible to get through a day, and you know pretty much by then it’s real trouble—” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Remember that word ‘folly’? You’re the English teacher. How come no one uses that word any more?

“Anyway, I decided I was going to take their medicine and treatments, but if they get in the way of the time I’ve got left, then the hell with it—I’m living my days the way I want. And you see this bag of cookies? I ate
three
of them, and I’m putting the bag back on the shelf, and I ain’t paying for it, like the old days. Once a thief, always a thief. But you can never make cookies taste as good as they did.”

“Would you like to go for a cup of coffee?”

“No, I’ve got to go clean a house now. That’s one thing I like doing very much. You go into a home, work hard all day getting everything right, then give it back to the owners and let them live in it for another week.”

“You’re certainly the best we’ve ever had.”

“Thank you, Scott. I’m glad you said that.”

Naturally, Roberta was shocked when I told her about the meeting. She asked the same question, sat in the same sad silence I had during the drive home from the market. My father used to call it “touching the razor”—you hear that someone you know is dead or dying, and the first impulse is to rear back as though you had touched a razor blade.

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Let her clean the house. She said that’s what she likes to do best now.”

“Put
all
her houses in order, huh?”

“I guess you could say that. She spoke so matter-of-factly. ‘I’m sick, and it’s too late to do anything.’ For some odd reason, it reminded me of her dead-rabbit story.”

I was about to enter the classroom, when I heard her voice behind me. “Scott?” I turned, and there was Beenie, an uncertain smile on her face, her hands clasping a small, shiny red purse.

“Beenie! Are you taking classes here?”

“No, I wanted to ask you if it was all right to come to one of yours. I called Roberta just after you’d left today, and she told me to come right down. I thought, why not? He can only say no.”

“Sure you can come. We’re doing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories. Do you know them?”

“No, but that’s OK. I want to sit in a class and watch what it does. The subject isn’t important.”

“Then, madam, please come in.”

The students were already in the room, and looked interestedly at her when we entered together. I introduced her as Dr Rushforth, and said she would be sitting in that day and observing. I had never brought anyone else to the class, so the kids were doubly interested in my colleague.

It was the first time I’d seen her in anything other than jogging clothes. She wore a bench-brown skirt and matching cardigan over a white blouse with a large bow at the neck. Somehow the outfit diminished her. In her sweatsuit, she was a grey package of energy. What she wore today made it look as though she were trying to fit in with a bunch of bores.

As class proceeded, I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She kept a smile on throughout that reminded me of the smile we create when we’re spoken to in a language we don’t understand, but don’t want to offend the speaker. A vaguely tuned-out look. It made me wonder more why she’d come in the first place.

When it was finished, she remained in her seat. I went over.

“They like you, don’t they? Your students.”

“It’s good if they do, but sometimes better if they don’t. Then they want to compete with me, so they put everything they’ve got into their work. Why did you come, Beenie?”

“To watch you in action, Scott. To see what you do outside that house. I see you only eating lunch and talking to Roberta. You’re a good teacher, and it shows in the way you do it. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s not my subject, but you make him interesting. And I learned what a ‘pathetic fallacy’ is today, too!” She patted my arm and stood up. Halfway up, she stopped for a second and winced. It could only have been from her pain. She smiled at me, seeing I’d caught the look. “My constant houseguest. You’ll do, Professor Silver. You’ll do. See you day after tomorrow.”

Roberta was at an aerobics class, and I was in my study, working on an article. Right in the middle of a superb thought, there was a thump thump on my door.

“Yes?”

“Scott, I got something here. Can you come out and look?”

I liked Beenie and admired her courage, but was it necessary to disturb me in the middle of work to see if we wanted an old tennis racquet? I made a face and went to the door. “Yes, Beenie, what is it?”

She held a cardboard box the colour of oatmeal. Wrapped around it was a piece of brown rawhide. Written across the top in large block letters was
THE KING OF TOMORROW.
I hadn’t seen the box in twenty years, but didn’t need to open it to know what was inside.

When I was a graduate student, besides my course work, I was required to teach a class in Freshman Composition. It was a pleasant chore, and—because I was young, idealistic, and full of energy—I taught it well.

One of the students in there was a serious young woman named Annette Taugwalder. She was smart and talented and wanted more than anything else in the world to be a writer. Annette cared so much about literature that she often read class assignments twice. I liked her, but was put off by her intensity. I loved books, too, but got the impression she ate them as well as read them. Also, she had an arrogance that said, Nobody is on my level here, folks, so stand back.

Halfway through the semester, she came to me after a class and asked if I would be willing to read the manuscript of her novel. I said yes, but also told her I would be totally honest if I didn’t like it. She said she knew that, and it was one of the reasons she was asking me and not another teacher.

Unfortunately, it was no good. Yet another twenty-year-old’s
bildungsroman
—there were good parts in it, but generally it was only old stuff trying to sound new. But I spent the better part of a weekend reading it carefully and making notes so Annette would know I had given it a fair shake.

On Monday we sat together after class, and, as cannily and diplomatically as I could, I told her what I thought was wrong with her book. There were strong things there, but they needed shaping up, better characterization, clearer perspective. She asked if I thought the manuscript was publishable, and I said no; I thought it had to be rewritten. She became defensive, and said she’d already submitted it to one publisher, who had written a very encouraging letter back. I congratulated her, and said I could very well be wrong. She seesawed back and forth between arrogance and pleas. I could see the discussion was getting nowhere, and after two hours—two hours!—I told her I’d said all I could about the book, and, in the end, it was her decision. Never once was I condescending or dismissive. I am sure of that. To make a terrible story short, Annette walked out of the room and left the manuscript in its box on the table. I thought it a bad dramatic gesture, and best not to follow. I’d wait till our next class and give it back then. I never saw her again. A week later she committed suicide.

Tell me you were connected to a suicide, but feel no guilt, and I will call you a liar. We start whole, but soon guilt begins to carve its insidious tunnels around and through our souls. By the time you are my age, much of the structure should be condemned as unsafe. I never got over this. I don’t know what influence our meeting had over her final decision, if any, but what difference does it make? I see myself as one of her accused. I talked to Roberta; I talked to an analyst; I tried talking to God. But nothing helped.

“Where did you find
that
?”

“Up way back on a shelf in the garage. What do you want to do with it?”

My first instinct was to say dump it. Instead, I told her to leave it with me. What was more troubling than seeing it again was knowing for sure I had left that box with the police the day I heard about her death. I walked into the police station and spoke to men I’d never had any real contact with, other than seeing them give parking tickets and chatting with store owners. Now two of these blue uniforms were asking me questions, and their faces were solemn, suspicious. One of them took the box and opened it. He looked inside, although I’d already described what was in there. What did he expect to find? I told them what I could, and left. The box looked strangely naked there, open in the middle of that wide oak desk. I left the police station empty-handed.