Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  I don’t have a choice, said Malcolm, and Izzy said, Of course you do, you make the choice to be a better person.

  But Tony understood, then and now. There was a small part of him that believed he’d sell out every single person he loved, too, if it allowed him to be rid of his obligations of love forever.

  He stared at the brown drapes Izzy kept drawn so the budgies wouldn’t fly into the window. That couldn’t be healthy, surely. Even a bird needed vitamin D. He couldn’t explain to Sid what Malcolm planned to do. He refused to believe in it. To believe in it was to yank at the one loose thread that would eventually, finally, unravel their entire lives. It was hot in the room, and Tony imagined a house-hunter asking about the heat. Gas? Oil? Wood?

  No, actually: budgies.

  Tony hoped. Izzy didn’t, and she was the one who explained it all to Sid.

  When she’d finished, Sid began to sink. He sank as though the vital architecture of his skeleton were being dismantled, as though, in a moment, like a tent the gossamer bulk of him would billow to the ground. Shit, Tony thought. If Sid is appalled, it’s serious.

  “No,” Sid said. “Malcolm? No.”

  “Malcolm,” said Izzy. “That beautiful kid.”

  “When?”

  She laughed. “He says the place needs to be fixed up first, so.”

  Sid got up. He pointed the kitten at Tony like a gun. “You need a lawyer. Someone French, who knows those laws, because they’re set up to fuck you every way they can. They will betray you!” The kitten curled its sleeping body around Sid’s hand. “Izzy, listen to me. Do you know a lawyer?”

  Izzy shrugged her entire body infinitesimally, to illustrate the impossibility of this.

  “Money,” said Sid, nodding. “I know a bloke looking for a car.” He turned to Tony. “All right, Knight Rider. You’re selling the Ford.”

  “What Ford?” said Izzy.

  Tony shook his head.

  “You say it’s for Malcolm. For Malcolm,” said Sid, disgusted. “I say, sell all his Christmas presents.”

  “That’s the only one,” said Tony.

  Izzy rubbed her head and her hair bristled. He hated that haircut. “You bought him a car?”

  “A crap car,” said Tony. “Twenty-five euro.” Actually it had been a hundred. The Italian had been desperate.

  “Malcolm is in England,” said Sid; and Izzy repeated, in a wondering sorrowful voice, “Malcolm is in England?”

  “What’s Malcolm doing in England?” Tony asked.

  Sid sat back down on the sofa. “You didn’t know Malcolm was in England?”

  “What’s he doing there?” said Tony.

  “I don’t know. But he’s gone. Christmas with his mother? Said he was going, hasn’t been at the Commerce, and if Malcolm hasn’t been at the Commerce then he’s not in the country. I know someone looking for a car. This Englishman who married an American. The fool. How much do you want for it? They have a budget. It’s not much. Three hundred euro.”

  “It’s not worth—”

  “Sell it,” said Izzy. “If that’s their budget, that’s what it’s worth.”

  Three hundred euro seemed simultaneously an enormous sum of money and so little it wasn’t even worth thinking about.

  “It’s Malcolm’s,” said Tony again.

  “Who cares!” Sid pulled a cell phone from his pocket, looked at the screen, and shook it.

  “No reception,” said Izzy. “End of the driveway.”

  “Fuck it. I’ll go get them. They’re staying with Little Aussie Peter. Back in a tick. I’ll try to talk them up. All right, Tony? Pay attention. Action stations. The car runs?” He stood up and suddenly noticed he was still holding a kitten. “Hello, moggy. Let’s go. The car?”

  “Those old diesels run forever.”

  “That’s all they need. Cash in hand, I’ll tell them. Bye, Izzy darling.”

  “Bye, Sidney,” she said. “Take that parrot with you.”

  “She’s my parrot,” said Tony. “Her name’s Clothilde.”

  “Clothilde!” said Izzy, as though the name itself were an argument against the bird.

  This was finally how their marriage would drift apart: Tony didn’t understand loving fifty birds at a time, and Izzy didn’t understand loving only one. Tony followed Sid down the hallway. “He might change his mind.”

  “He won’t change his mind. What have you done with my clothing?” Sid asked the kitten, who meowed in an incensed, kittenish way. “Ah, here.”

  In the front room, Clothilde knocked her beak on her cage and said, “Aye-aye-aye.” Somehow Sid managed to pull on the fleece top while still holding the kitten, though his head spent some time investigating first one armhole and then the other before at last finding the neck. “When was its last contrôle technique?”

  “Not too long ago.”

  “Aye, aye,” said Clothilde.

  “More than six months? Because otherwise you’ll have to do it again, and will it pass?”

  “Aye!” Clothilde said.

  “It’ll pass,” said Tony, who hadn’t checked the date. “Listen. He’s not that bad. When it comes down to doing the worst thing—”

  Sid had his hand on the door. He smelled sweet and winey, and his eyes looked like the back end of a globe, some place where the Earth was mostly oceans and unpronounceable islands, some place to fear cannibals. Please, Tony thought, don’t tell me you know him better than I do.

  “The worst thing is saying,” said Sid.

  “What?”

  “The worst thing is he told you he would. He’s done the worst thing. Now he’s got that out of the way he can do anything. Believe me. I know.” Sid handed the kitten over and opened the door. “I’ll be right back. Anthony. Listen to me. It’s not too late. You have to decide what kind of man you want to be.”

  Clothilde said, “I love you!” as though she’d been teaching herself in their absence, an orphan hoping to ingratiate herself to foster parents.

  “I love you, too, my darling,” Sid said, and closed the door behind him.

  · · ·

  For a parrot, Clothilde seemed to have a poor sense of balance: she squawked and dug into Tony’s shoulder. It had stopped raining. The outdoor cats were edging out of the old barn and sniffing the wet air. Clothilde squawked again. “You’re a pretty girl,” said Tony, though even he could hear the lie in his voice. She ran her beak through his hair. He kicked the cats from the barn so they wouldn’t bother her, and closed the door.

  In the dim light the Escort looked seaworthy. It was black, with tinted windows, and on both sides the word LASER was painted in space-age lettering. It was an ’84, Malcolm’s birth year, and that had seemed like a sign. Malcolm took his bike to the Commerce, and came back wobbling drunk or not at all. Sometimes he slept in a ditch—an actual ditch. “It’s France, Daddy,” he said. “It’s not like a ditch somewhere else.”

  Tony had assumed Malcolm had been sleeping on sofas since he’d made his announcement, ashamed of himself. But he was in England.

  He lifted the passenger door handle, remembered it opened only from the inside, and went around. The paperwork was still in the glove box. The carte grise—the title—was in order, and the last contrôle technique had been, miraculously, five months and three weeks before. He could legally sell the car to the Americans without putting it through another inspection, just as the Italian had sold it to him. That was the reason the Italian hadn’t haggled, or held out for another offer.

  “Bah di donc!” said the parrot.

  His shoulder hurt. “All right, Clothilde,” he said, and set her on the passenger seat so he could get to work.

  For three hundred euro, could you expect a radio? He pulled it out, and then the safety kit: the reflective vest, the reflective triangle, the flares, all the things he’d bought for Malcolm to keep him safe and entertained. The old fuel pump had gone out and he’d replaced it with a rubber bulb: he had to open the bonnet and pump the fuel into the engine by
hand, but it worked all right and a new pump would cost a hundred euro. If the Americans wanted to replace it, let them. Now he opened and pumped and slammed.

  The car started. The fuel tank was full up. He got the tubing and another rubber bulb to siphon it out. He knew this was not quite decent, but the lawnmower ran on diesel, too, and fuel was expensive. He’d give the Americans directions to the Leclerc station.

  “Hello,” he said to Clothilde.

  She gave a half whistle.

  “Tell me a story,” he said to her. She chewed at the edge of the seat. “Tell me the story of your life. Tell me—tell me you love me.”

  The dashboard looked sad with the radio gone. The steering wheel had been put on crooked at some point, which made it difficult to read the speedometer, which reminded him that the dashboard light had gone out. They could get a bulb at the Leclerc, too.

  The engine stunk of oil once it heated up.

  The hatchback didn’t stay open. You needed a plank.

  “The plank’s gratis,” Tony said aloud. “No charge whatsoever for the plank.”

  The love of a young couple for a bad car took time: you had to drive it as it grew more eccentric, as each component failed or flickered or worsened. Tony had bought the car dazzled by the price, and then added each new oddity to the story he was telling himself: Malcolm’s First Car. They were going to tell that story forever. But that’s not how it worked, was it.

  You have to decide what kind of man you want to be, Sid had said; and what Tony wanted was not to be this man: the bad father. He was a bad enough father back when Malcolm simply had a drinking problem, and then a drug problem. “It’s my fault,” Tony had said at first. “It’s not your fault,” people kept telling him. But they didn’t know what Tony knew: after Malcolm had been living with them for a year, he broke his arm, and the doctor in Bergerac said, “This is an arm that has been broken often.” Tony was more surprised by the doctor’s anger than the sentence. The doctor turned to Malcolm, and said, “Who? Your father?” No, no, said Malcolm—of course his stepfather had done it, who else?—and Tony had said, Why didn’t you tell me? And Malcolm had answered, “I did. Daddy, I did.”

  His son was going to sell the house. No rotten gift of a car would ever have stopped it.

  Like Izzy, he was giving up hope. It was a physical process, the hope a sort of shrapnel working its way out of his skin. It hurt. He’d hoped Malcolm wouldn’t do this, but he would, and three hundred euro for a piece-of-shit car wouldn’t save them.

  He, Tony, was drunk. Was he drunk? He was dizzy.

  He was in the barn. The car was running. He’d meant to turn it off. The parrot: the parrot stood on the passenger seat, heavy-eyed and gray. Tony tried the door. The handle didn’t work. “Still!” said Tony. He rushed to the other side. By the time he had scooped her up, she seemed to be in a faint, if birds could faint. They stumbled out into the air together.

  “Clothilde,” he said, and then, longingly, “Birdie, birdie.” She was burrowing into his armpit. “Breathe. Breathe.”

  She was still alive. Maybe the air would revive her entirely. Maybe she’d be brain-damaged: she would have lost her English and most of her French, she would only be able to say, Olivier. Olivier. Je t’aime. He knew nothing about the neurology of parrots. She was alive. He would take her in any condition.

  Sid’s truck came flying around the corner, past the mailbox into the courtyard. They were sitting three abreast, and the woman, who sat by the window, looked appalled. The order seemed wrong to Tony. He wasn’t sexist, but with two men and a woman, the woman should sit in the middle, by the gearshift. Then he saw that she was driving. Of course: they were in Sid’s old English right-hand-drive truck. She’d told him he was too drunk to drive. An American would think so.

  Sid tumbled from the truck as though kicked. Then the woman got out the other side, and Tony saw that she was heavily pregnant. Her husband followed her. “Fucking horrible,” said the husband. That’s right: only the woman was American. The husband was English, and drunk as Sid. Well, if they were friends of Little Aussie Peter, of course he would be. The wife wore somebody else’s Wellington boots, a plaid skirt, and a striped sweater. She had red hair and no eyebrows and kept nearly losing the wellies in the mud. The man was wearing a denim jacket and blue jeans. He sat on the front bumper of Sid’s truck. He didn’t look at her. It hadn’t occurred to Tony until this moment that anyone willing to buy a three-hundred-euro car had to be as desperate and skint as he was. He wondered if it were even safe for a pregnant woman to ride in that car.

  They had some terrible story, too, or soon would. He wished he found this realization ennobling, but he didn’t: he was furious at them for whatever sadness they’d already experienced, whatever tragedy was just a headlight glow on the road ahead.

  They would buy the car. He would sell it to them. That would be part of the story, anyhow.

  Somewhere in England Malcolm was saying, I should never have come here.

  He was saying, It’s too expensive.

  He was saying, I wish it hadn’t come to this, but what else can I do?

  He was talking to strangers, hoping they would absolve him. They are the only ones who ever can.

  “Hi!” said the pregnant woman. “I hear you have a car?”

  “I love you,” said the parrot, and then, “Forgive me.”

  Hungry

  The grandmother was a bright, cellophane-wrapped hard candy of a person: sweet, but not necessarily what a child wanted. She knew it, too. That sad bicentennial summer, her son in the hospital recovering from surgery, she and her granddaughter looked for comfort all over Des Moines: at the country club, the dinner club, the miniature-golf-course snack bar, the popcorn stand at the shopping mall, the tea room at Younkers, every buffet, every branch of Bishop’s Cafeteria. What the girl liked best: to choose your own food, not just chocolate cream pie but a particular, considered wedge. To stand before the tall, toqued brunch chef, who minted Belgian waffle after Belgian waffle and rendered them unto you. The world of heat-lamped fried chicken and tall glasses of cubed Jell-O and dinner rolls with pats of butter so refrigerated you had to warm them in the palm of your hand before they’d spread. The girl had already split one pair of pants. It hadn’t seemed to bother her. “Oh, well,” she’d said, reaching around to verify the rend. “Never mind.”

  Now here was Lisa, aged ten, the morning of the Fourth of July, 1976, zaftig, darling, oblivious, dressed for the occasion as some founding father: navy polyester pants knickerbockerishly tucked into tube socks, a pair of red and white espadrilles that had run in the rain, a thin ruffled lavender shirt borrowed from Sylvia herself. The outfit showed every ounce the girl had put on in the past month. She’d come from Boston to be taken care of while her father was in the hospital. Instead, the two of them had eaten all the things Aaron—sweet Aaron, the grandmother’s oldest—could not.

  “Who are you, sweetheart?” Sylvia asked. “George Washington?”

  “Patrick Henry!” said Lisa. “I’m going to perform his Glorious Speech at the block party.”

  “You’re going to what?”

  The girl began to hunt through the fruit bowl in the middle of the dining-room table. “I have it memorized. I did it for the fourth-grade talent show.”

  “Did you win?”

  “Did I win?” Lisa thumbed a grape loose from its fellows and chewed it. “It wasn’t a contest,” she said at last. “People clapped.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Sylvia. “You want to say the speech at the party? You can’t just start shouting.”

  “I won’t shout.”

  “You can’t just make everything stop so people will look at you,” said Sylvia.

  “Oh,” said Lisa, “you’d be surprised.” She pinched off another grape and ate it.

  The fruit bowl was an attempt to offset the buffets. Aaron wouldn’t mind, probably, nor his wife, Marjorie, who was herself plump, but if Aaron’s sister found out that
their mother had overseen a noticeable weight gain—well, Rena had already suggested that Sylvia was responsible for Aaron’s bad heart, even though their father, Sylvia’s husband, had his first heart attack even earlier, at forty-two, and had died of his third twenty years later. According to Rena, their childhood had been one long period of Sylvia like a mad bomber installing explosives in the bodies and souls of her children, set to go off when they became adults. Sylvia wondered how long it might take to return Lisa to her original condition.

  Sylvia still filled the candy dish in Lisa’s room, but with dietetic caramels and sugar-free fake M&M’s. She bought a brand of soda pop called Kalorie Kounter, in cans festooned with tape measures that floated like banners in an old oil painting. For the block party this afternoon, she and Lisa together had made a lo-cal noodle kugel: low-fat cottage cheese, fat-free sour cream, margarine, a cornflake topping.

  Terrible, unutterable words: fattening, lo-cal, dietetic. And anyhow, every day Mrs. Tillman across the hall called Lisa over and fed her orange marshmallows shaped like enormous peanuts, and Pixy Stix. Lisa’s first day in Des Moines, Mrs. Tillman had knocked on the apartment door. “I have suckers,” she’d said. “You have what?” asked Sylvia. “Suckers, suckers,” said Mrs. Tillman, digging in the pockets of her housecoat. When she pulled out her hand, she’d caught a number of lollipops between her knuckles by the sticks. All yellow. Either they were cheaper to buy that way or she’d already eaten the good colors herself.

  Thereafter Lisa went to visit Mrs. Tillman every morning. “She loves it here,” Mrs. Tillman always said, a note of competition in her voice. Mrs. Tillman’s late husband had owned an appliance store, and she had retained an appliance-like air, functional, awkward, a woman to be moved around on a dolly. I am the grandmother, Sylvia thought but didn’t say. That is the winning hand. That beats all other old ladies, no matter what. Then she and Lisa would go out and flag the ice-cream truck. Fudgsicle for Lisa, Dreamsicle for her.