Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Here’s the living room,” she said. He followed her. Small, silky Carly, her head covered by the boy’s cap. He felt like an about-to-be-retired greyhound being led by a jockey: big-nosed, cow-eyed, trying to be good despite his nerves. He might end up on a farm or destroyed, depending on which turn she took.

  Not a jockey, of course, jockeys didn’t ride greyhounds.

  “Fireplace,” said Carly. “Cable’s still hooked up. Maybe you’ll be lucky and they won’t notice.” A round-jawed teenager sat on a leather settee with a handheld video game, frowning at the screen like a Roman emperor impatient with the finickiness of his lions. “It’s a nice room. These old houses have such character. This one—do you believe it?—it’s a Sears, Roebuck kit. You picked it out of the catalog and it was delivered and assembled.”

  He could hear Pamela’s voice: This is not an old house. The barn in Normandy was eighteenth century, the apartment in Rome even older. The walls were lined with homemade bookshelves, filled with paperback books: Ionesco, the full complement of Roths—Henry, Philip, Joseph. “Fireplace work?”

  “There was a squirrel incident,” said Carly vaguely. She swished across the entryway. “Dining room. The lease, I’m sure you’ll remember, asks you to keep the corner cupboard locked.” The cupboard in question looked filled with eye cups and egg cups and mustache cups. In the corner, a broken Styrofoam cooler had been neatly aligned beneath a three-legged chair; a white melamine desk had papers stuck in its jaw. Kmart furniture, he thought. Well, he’d have the movers take it down to the basement. “Kitchen’s this way.” The kitchen reminded him of his 1970s childhood and the awful taste of tongue depressors at the back of the throat. It looked as though someone had taken a potting shed and turned it inside out. A pattern of faux shingles crowned the honey-colored cupboards; the countertop Formica was patterned like a hospital gown. A round fluorescent light fixture cupped and backlit a collection of dead bugs. High above everything, a terra-cotta sun smiled down from the shingles with no sense of irony, or shame, whatsoever.

  The smell of Febreze came down the stairs, wound around the smell of old cigarettes and something chemical, and worse. “Four bedrooms,” said Carly. She led him up the stairs into one of the front rooms, furnished with a double mattress on a brown wooden platform. It looked like the sort of thing you’d store a kidnapped teenage girl underneath. The café curtains on the windows were badly water-stained and lightly cigarette-burned. “Listen!” said Carly. “It’s a busy street, but you can’t even hear it! Bedclothes in the closets. I need to get going,” she said. “Tae kwon do. Settle in and let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you, all right?”

  He had not stood so close to a woman all summer, at least not while sober. He wanted to finger her ponytail, and then yank on it like a schoolyard bully. “Can I see the artist’s studio?” he asked.

  “Forgot!” she said. “Come along.”

  They walked through the scrubby backyard to a half-converted garage. “Lock sticks,” said Carly, jiggling a door with a rice paper cataract over its window. “Looks dark in here till you turn on the lights.”

  The art studio was to have been Pamela’s: she was a sometime jeweler and painter. Stony did not know whether it made things better or worse, that this space was the most depressing room he’d ever seen. The old blinds seemed stitched together of moth wings. A newsprint Picasso danced on a bulletin board. The smell of mildew was nearly physically painful. Along one wall a busted hollow-core door rested on sawhorses, and across the top, a series of shapes, huddled together as though for warmth. Pots, vases, bowls, all clearly part of the same family, the bluish gray of expensive cats. He expected them to turn and blink at him.

  “My father was a potter,” said Carly.

  It took him a moment. “Ah! Your parents own this place?”

  “My mom,” said Carly. “She’s an ob/gyn. Retired. You can’t go anywhere in this town without meeting kids my mother delivered. She’s like an institution. She’s in New York now. There’s a wheel, if you’re interested. Think it still works. Potter’s.”

  “No, thank you.”

  She sighed and snapped off the light.

  They went back to the house. “All right, Pumpkin,” she said, and the teenager stood up and revealed herself to be a girl, not a boy, with a few sharp, painful-looking pimples high on her cheeks and a long nose, and a smile that suggested that not everything was right with her. She shambled over to her little mother, and the two of them stood with their arms around each other.

  Was she awkward, just? Brain-damaged? Carly reached up and curled a piece of hair behind her daughter’s ear. It was possible, thought Stony, that all American teenagers might appear damaged to him these days, the way that all signs in front of fast-food restaurants—MAPLE CHEDDAR COMING SOON! MCRIB IS BACK—struck him as mysterious and threatening. “You OK?” Carly asked. The girl nodded and cuddled closer. The air in the Sears, Roebuck house—yes, he remembered now, that was something he would normally be intrigued by, a house built from a kit—felt tender and sad. My wife has died, he thought. He wondered whether Carly might say something. Wasn’t now the time? By the way, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, what happened to you. He had that thought sometimes these days. It wasn’t grief, which he could be subsumed in at any moment, which like water bent all straight lines and spun whatever navigational tools he owned into nonsense—but a rational, detached thought: Wasn’t that awful, what happened to me, one, two, three months ago. That was a terrible thing for a person to go through.

  Carly said, “Tae kwon do. Call if you need me.”

  An empty package of something called Teddy Grahams. A half-filled soda bottle. Q-tips strewn on the bathroom floor. Mrs. Butterworth’s, sticky, debased, a crime victim. Cigarette butts in one window well. Three condom wrappers behind the platform bed. Rubber bands in every drawer and braceleting every doorknob—why were old rubber bands so upsetting? The walls upstairs bristled with pushpins and the ghosts of pushpins and the square-shouldered shadows of missing posters. Someone had emptied several boxes of mothballs into the bedclothes that were stacked in the cupboards, and had thrown dirty bedclothes on top, and the idea of sorting through clean and dirty made him want to weep. The bath mat looked made of various flavors of old chewing gum. Grubby pencils lolled on desktops and in coffee mugs and snuggled along the baseboards. The dining-room tablecloth had been painted with scrambled egg and then scorched. The honey-colored kitchen was honey-sticky. The walls upstairs were bare and filthy; the walls downstairs covered in old art. The bookshelves were full. On the edges in front of the books were coffee rings and—there was no other word for it—detritus: part of a broken key ring, more pencils, half packs of cards. He had relatives like this. When he was a kid he loved their houses because of how nothing ever changed, how it could be 1971 outside and 1936 inside, and then he got a little older and realized that it was the same Vicks VapoRub on the bedside table, noticed how once a greeting card was stuck in a dresser mirror it would never be moved, understood that the jars of pennies did not represent possibility, as he’d imagined, but only jars and only pennies.

  The landlords had filled the house with all their worst belongings and said, This will be fine for other people. A huge snarled antique rocker sat under an Indian print; the TV cart was fake wood and missing a wheel. The art on the walls—posters, silkscreened canvases—had been faded by the sun, but that possibly was an improvement.

  The kitchen was objectively awful. Old bottles of oil with the merest skim at the bottom crowded the counters. Half-filled boxes of a particularly cheap brand of biscuit mix had been sealed shut with packing tape. The space beneath the sink was filled, back to front, with mostly empty plastic jugs for cleaning fluids. After he opened the kitchen garbage can and a cloud of flies flew out, he called Carly from his newly purchased cell phone. Her voice was cracked with disappointment.

  “Well, I can come back and pick up the garbage—”

  “The house,” sa
id Stony, “is dirty. It’s dirty. You need to get cleaners.”

  “I don’t think Mom will go for that. She paid someone to clean in May—”

  Pamela would have said, Walk out. Sue for the rent and the deposit. That is, he guessed she would. Then he was furious that he was conjuring up her voice to address this issue.

  “The point,” he said, “is not that it was clean in May. It’s not clean now. It’s a dirty house, and we need to straighten this out.”

  “I have things I have to do,” said Carly. “I’ll come over later.”

  Then the movers arrived, two men who looked like middle-aged yoga instructors. The boss exuded a strange calm that seemed possibly like the veneer over great rage. He whistled at the state of the house, and Stony wanted to hug him.

  “Don’t lose your cool,” said the mover. “Hire cleaners, take it out of the rent.” They unloaded all of Stony’s old things, the doctor’s table, the diner table, boxes of books, boxes of dishes, all the things he needed for his new life as a bourgeois widower. He really lived here. He felt pinned down by the weight of his belongings, and then decided it was not a terrible feeling. From the depths of his e-mail program he dug up a message from Carly that cc’d Sally Lasker, to whom he’d written the rent check. If he sat on the radiator at the back of the room and leaned, he could catch just a scrap of a wireless connection, and so he sat, and leaned, and sent what seemed to him a firm but sympathetic e-mail to Sally Lasker, detailing everything but her unfortunate taste in art.

  Sally wrote back.

  We cleaned the house in May, top to bottom, she wrote. It took me a long time to dust the books, I did it myself. I cleaned the coffee rings off the bookcase. We laundered all the bedclothes. I’m sorry that the house is not what you expected. I’m sorry that the summer people have caused so much damage, that can’t have been pleasant for you. But it seems that you are asking a great deal for a nine-month rental. We lived modestly all our lives, I’m afraid, and perhaps this is not what you pictured from Europe. I do feel as though we have bent over backwards for you so far.

  He went over this in a confused rage. What difference did it make that the house was clean in May? That there had been coffee rings before where coffee rings were now? He’d turned forty over the summer and it reminded him of turning eighteen. I am not a child! he wanted to yell. I do not sleep on homemade furniture! I do not hide filthy walls with posters and Indian hangings!

  What did she mean, bent over backwards?

  He stalked into the sweet Maine town and had two beers in a sports bar, and then stalked back. All the while he wrote to Sally in his head, and told her he was glad she’d found summer renters who’d made up the rent and maybe she had not heard what exactly had delayed his arrival.

  When he found the wireless again, there was a new e-mail.

  Hire the cleaners. Take the total out of the rent. I am sorry, and I hope this is the end of the problems. If you want to store anything precious, put it in the studio, not the basement. The basement floods.

  So he couldn’t even send his righteous e-mail.

  That night he boxed up Sally’s kitchen and took it to the basement, pulled the art from the walls and put it in the dank studio. He couldn’t decide on what was a more hostile act, packing the filthy bath mat or throwing it away. Packing it, he decided, and so he packed it. He tumbled the mothball-filled bedclothes into garbage bags. He moved out the platform bed and slept on the futon sofa and went the next day to the nearby mall to buy his very own bed. The following Monday the cleaners came, looking like a Girls in Prison movie (missing teeth, tattoos, denim shorts, cleavage) and declared without prodding that the house was disgusting, and he felt a surge of actual happiness: yes, disgusting, it was, anyone could see it. He was amazed at how hard they worked. They cleaned out every cupboard. They hauled all those bottles to the curb. He tipped them extravagantly. One of the house cleaners left her number on several pieces of paper around the house—PERSONAL HOUSECLEANING CALL JACKIE $75—and the owner of the cleaning service called the next day to say that she’d heard one of the girls was offering to clean privately, was that true, it wasn’t allowed, and Stony accidentally said yes, and was devastated that the perfect transaction of cleaning had been sullied. Then he called back and said he’d misunderstood, she hadn’t, everything had been by the book.

  That night he wrote Sally an e-mail explaining where he’d put things: kitchen goods boxed in basement, linens and art in the studio.

  He painted the upstairs walls and hung his own art. He boxed up some of the resident books. Slowly he moved half the furniture to the studio and replaced it with things bought at auction. The kindly archivist, his boss, came by the house. “My God!” he said. “This place! You’ve made it look great. You know, I tried to get you out of the lease last May, but Sally wouldn’t go for it. I tried to find you someplace nicer. But you’ve made it nice. Good for you.”

  At work he cataloged the underground collection, those beautiful daft objects of passion, pamphlets and buttons, broadsides. What would the founders of these publications make of him? What pleasure, to describe things that had been invented to defy description—but maybe he shouldn’t have. The inventors never imagined these things lasting forever, filling phase boxes, the phase boxes filling shelves. He was a cartographer, mapping the unmappable, putting catalog numbers and provenance where once had been only waves and the profiles of sea serpents. Surely some people grieved for those sea serpents.

  He didn’t care. He kept at it, constructing his little monument to impermanence.

  By March he was dating a sociology lecturer named Eileen, a no-nonsense young woman who made comforting, stodgy casseroles and gave him backrubs. He realized he would never know what his actual feelings for her were. She was not a girlfriend, she was a side effect of everything in the world that was Not Pamela. The house, too. Every now and then he thought, out of the blue, But what did that woman mean, she bent over backwards for me? And all day long, like a telegraph, he received the following message: My wife has died, my wife has died, my wife has died. Quieter than it had been: he could work over it now. He could act as though he were not an insane person with one single thought.

  In April he got a tattoo at the downtown parlor where the students got theirs, a piece of paper wafting as though windswept over his bicep with a single word in black script: Ephemera.

  Then it was May. His lease was over. Time to move again.

  Through some spiritual perversity, he’d become fond of the house, its Sears, Roebuck feng shui, its square squatness, the way it got light all day long. Sally sent him e-mails, dithering over move-out dates, and for a full week threatened to renew the lease for a year. Would he be interested? He consulted his heart and was astounded to discover that, yes, he would. Finally she decided she would move back to the house on the first of June to get it ready to sell. Did he want to buy it? No, ma’am. Well, then: May 31.

  He found an apartment with a bit of ocean view, a grown-up place with brand-new appliances and perfect arctic countertops that reminded him of no place: not the farmhouse in Normandy, or the beamed Roman apartment, or the thatched cottage near Odense. As he packed up the house he was relieved to see its former grubbiness assert itself, like cleaning an oil painting to find a murkier, uglier oil painting underneath. He noticed again the acoustic tiles on the upstairs ceilings and the blackness of the wooden floors. He took up the kilim in the living room and put down the old oriental; he packed his flat-screen TV, a splurge, into a box and found in the basement the old mammoth remoteless set and the hobbled particle-board cart. He cleaned the house as he’d never cleaned a rental before, because he was penitent and because he suspected Sally would use any opportunity to hold on to his security deposit; he washed walls and the insides of cupboards and baseboards and doorjambs. She had no idea how much work she had ahead of her, he thought. The old rocker was a pig to wrestle back into the house; he covered it with the Indian throw, so she would have someplace to sit, bu
t he left the art off the walls, and he did not restock the kitchen.

  And besides.

  Besides, why should he?

  Those boxes were time machines: if he even thought about them, all he could remember was the fury with which he packed them. These days he was pretending to be a nice, rational man.

  He bought a bunch of daffodils and left them in a pickle jar in the middle of the dining-room table with a note that reminded Sally of the location of her kitchenware and bed linens, and signed his name, and added his cell-phone number. Then he went away for the weekend, up the coast, so he could take a few days off from things, boxes, the fossil record of his life.

  In the morning, the first cell-phone message was Sally, who wanted to know where her dishcloths were.

  The second: bottom of the salad spinner.

  The third: her birth certificate. She’d left it in the white desk that had been in the dining room, and where was that?

  The fourth: what on earth had happened to the spices? Had he put them in a separate box?

  The reception in this part of the state was miserable. He clamped the phone over one ear and his hand over the other.

  “Sally?” he said.

  She said, “Who’s this?”

  “Stony Badower.”

  There was silence.

  “Your tenant—”

  “I know,” she said, in a grande dame voice. Then she sighed.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “It’s more daunting moving back in than I’d thought,” she said.

  “But you’re all right.”

  “I found the dishcloths,” she said. “And the desk.”

  “And the birth certificate?” he asked.

  “Yes.” More silence.

  “Why don’t I come over this evening when I get back,” he said, “and I can—”

  “Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.”

  He’d imagined a woman who looked spun on a potter’s wheel, round and glazed and built for neither beauty nor utility. Unbreakable till dropped from a height. Her daughter the small blonde gone to seed. But the door was answered by a woman as tall as him, 5′10", in her late sixties, more ironwork than pottery, with the dark hair and sharp nose of her granddaughter. She shook his hand. “Stony, hello.” Over a flowered T-shirt she wore the sort of babyish bright-blue overalls that Berlin workmen favored, that no American grown-up, he had thought, would submit to. They showed off the alarmingly beautiful curve of her back as she retreated to the kitchen. Already she’d dug out some of the old pottery, and found a new tablecloth to cover the cigarette-burned oilcloth on the dining-room table.