The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (3 page)

I kissed his fingers. “
That
part I like. Would you ever consider moving in with me?”

He kissed my hand. “I would love to consider that, but I have to tell you I don’t think I’ll be around very much longer. But if you’d like, I’ll stay with you until I, uh, have to go.”

I sat up. “What are you talking about?”

He put his hand close to my face. “Look hard and you’ll see.”

It took a moment but then there it was; from certain angles I could see right through the hand. It had become vaguely transparent.

“Lenna’s happy again. It’s the old story—when she’s down she needs me and calls.” He shrugged. “When she’s happy again, I’m not needed, so she sends me away. Not consciously, but ... Look, we all know I’m her little Frankenstein monster. She can do what she
wants
with me. Even dream up that I like to eat fucking plum stones.”

“It’s so wrong!”

Sighing, he sat up and started pulling on his shirt. “It’s wrong, but it’s life, sweet girl. Not much we can do about it, you know.”

“Yes we can. We can do something.”

His back was to me. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him. His back was to me then too. The long red hair falling over his collar.

When I didn’t say anything more, he turned and looked at me over his shoulder, smiling.

“We can do something? What can we do?” His eyes were gentle and loving, eyes I wanted to see for the rest of my life.

“We can make her sad. We can make her need you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said, Fiddy. When she’s sad she needs you. We have to decide what would make her sad a long time. Maybe something to do with Michael. Or their children.”

His fingers had stopped moving over the buttons. Thin, artistic fingers. Freckles.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity ...

In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

A
LL RIGHT, LOOK AT
it this way. If her name had been Codruta or Glenyus or Heulwen, it would have been easier to accept. Some exotic name from the Urals or Druid country, places where strange events are as common as grass. But no, her name was Beenie. Beenie Rushforth. Doesn’t that sound like a fifty-year-old golfing “gal” from the local country club! It does to me. A woman with too loud a voice, too deep a tan, and too much bourbon in her glass at eleven in the morning. Beenie Rushforth, Wellesley, class of ’65.

Even the way she arrived was no big deal, either. Our last cleaning woman decided to marry her boyfriend and move to Chicago. No great loss. She wasn’t the world’s best worker. She was the kind who swept around a rug rather than under it. My wife, Roberta, is also convinced this woman was taking nips from our liquor bottles, but that didn’t bother me. What
does
get on my nerves is paying good money for a clean house, but getting instead secret corners of dust, and streaked windows in the guest room.

She gave notice, and Roberta put a file card on the bulletin board outside the supermarket. You know, along with the “lawns mowed/German lessons/portable typewriter barely used ... signs. The place you check when you’re either in need, or only bored.

We can clean our house well enough, but since the kids left and I was given a chair at the university, there is more money now than ever before. I want to use some of it to make life nicer for us. Roberta deserves it.

Throughout my adult life, I have had an uncanny talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I specifically chose the U. of Michigan graduate programme so that I could study with Ellroy, the greatest Melville scholar around. Who just happened to die six weeks after I began there. Roberta was pregnant with our first daughter, Norah, and was having her own tough time. But she was magnificent. Told me I had a full fellowship to a great school, and, Ellroy or not, a PhD from the place meant something; so shut up and get to work. I did. Three very lean years later, we walked out of there with a doctorate and two babies in hand. For the next decade, we lived your typical academic vagabond’s life, loading up the VW bus every couple of years and driving from one end of the country to the other to new jobs. The students liked me, but my colleagues were jealous. I was writing fast and well then, and had already knocked out the monograph on Melville’s Gnosticism that sent a lot of people running to their copies of
Moby Dick
to see what they’d missed. Then came “Moonlight marines—a study of the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Herman Melville”, which should have made me a famous man, but did not. I didn’t complain. I knew it was good, we were young, had our love, healthy babies, promise ... what else do you need when you’re that age! In Minnesota, we bought our first house and first dog. The Sixties were starting to flex their muscles, so once again I chose the wrong place at the wrong time. Norah started kindergarten in New Mexico. We liked it there. The dry winters and long views to the mountains made us happy. The college was disgracefully conservative, but we had friends there, and life was comfortable.

Everyone was passionate in the Sixties; everyone had something “important” to say about the state of the world. Me, too. I was one of those idiots who let their hair grow too long and demonstrated loudly against the war. That would have been fine if we’d lived in New England or California, where it was fashionable, but the Southwest was full of blind patriots and armament factories. Besides, the university was a state school, and thus tied umbilically to the government. Suffice it to say, when I came up for well-deserved tenure, it wasn’t granted.

Desperate, I looked around for another job, but the only one available was at an agricultural college in Hale, Texas. God forbid you should ever spend time in Hale. We were there for four of the worst years of our lives. Pay was miserable, the kids went to a lousy school, and the other people in my department were Cro-Magnon both in their approach to education and the social graces. I almost went out of my mind. Single-handedly, I came close to ruining our marriage with my unforgivable behaviour. One horrendous night, Roberta and I stared at each other across the dining room table. She said, “I never thought it would come to this.” I said, “That’s what happens when you marry a loser with a big mouth.” She said, “I always knew you had a big mouth, but not that you were a loser. Not till now. And a mean one, too.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there, and only because of my wife’s patience and goodwill did we survive. By then I was at wit’s end, and the kids were so scared of my moods that they wouldn’t come close unless I ordered them over. A life that had once been as interesting and rich as a good novel was turning into a railroad timetable.

Out of the blue, I was offered a position here. The department chairman was an old acquaintance from Michigan I’d kept in touch with over the years because we worked in the same field. I will never forget turning to Roberta after his phone call and saying, “Toots, pack the bags. We’re goin’ North.”

The transition was not easy. Norah was happy in her school, things were far more expensive in the new town (partially because we never did anything in Texas, because there was nothing to do), and my teaching load was greater. But despite things like that, after six months I felt like all my veins and arteries had come unclogged. We were back in the race.

What followed was twenty years of mostly interesting days, some horrendous ones, and a general contentment that is rare. I’ve noticed few people say, “I have a good life.” It is as if they are embarrassed or ashamed of their lucky lot, ashamed God permitted them to travel a smooth road. Not I. Five years ago I realized how blessed I was, and thought it time I began attending church. I looked around and chose one as simple as could be; a place where one could give thanks but not get choked in velvet robes and oblique ceremonies that missed the point. I am fifty-five years old, and believe God is willing to listen if we speak clearly and to the point. His responses are manifested, not in immediate answers or results, but in dots everywhere around us that need to be connected intelligently. I feel that even more strongly now because of Beenie. Despite Beenie. Bless her. Damn her.

I answered the phone the first time she called. Certain people’s voices fit their looks. Big man, deep voice—that sort of thing. My first impression of Mrs Rushforth was middle-aged, hearty, good-natured. She said she’d seen our notice on the board and was interested in the “position”. I smiled at the word. Since when had housecleaner become a position? However, we live in a time when garbage collectors are “sanitary engineers”, so if she wanted it to be a position, OK. She told me more about herself than I needed to know: she had grown children, had lost a husband, didn’t need the money, but liked to keep active. I wondered if that was the truth; who cleans houses to keep their muscles toned? Why not join a gym instead and sculpt a body on gleaming silver machines? I invited her over to the house the next morning, and she readily accepted. I added another word to my list of her qualities via the sound of her voice—lonely. She sounded so eager to come. Before hanging up, she gave me her telephone number in case something went wrong and I had to cancel the meeting. As soon as I got off the phone, I went to the telephone book and looked up Rushforth. I do things like that—look people up in phone books, read the small print on contest offers and cereal boxes. Equal parts curiosity, nosiness, and scholarship. I am used to gathering as much information as I can on a subject, then culling what I need from it. I didn’t go to the phone book because I was particularly suspicious of this Mrs Rushforth. Only curious.

To my great surprise, the only B. Rushforth lived on Plum Hill, a charming and prestigious neighbourhood down near the lake. A cleaning woman who lived there? Now I was thoroughly intrigued, and so was Roberta after hearing about the call and my little research.

“Oh Scott, maybe she’ll be like Auntie Mame. Rich and eccentric. We’ll have Rosalind Russell cleaning our house!”

Early the next morning, I got a call from a colleague who needed my help immediately, so I had to leave and miss the meeting with the mysterious Beenie.

When I returned at lunchtime, Roberta filled me in.

“What does she look like?”

“Middle-age, middle-size, a little round, short grey hair. She looks like a masseuse.”

“I thought so. How’d she dress!”

“In one of those bright running suits and complicated sneakers. She’s very friendly, but also very take-charge. Know what I mean? She asked if she could look around the house before I even offered her the job. Checking out the work load.”

“You did offer it?”

“Yes. Sweetie, she’s nice and looks dependable. Any person who lives on Plum Hill but wants to clean houses to keep
busy
has got to be at least interesting, right? And if she turns out to be a good cleaner, too, all the better.”

“True. Bring on the Beenie.”

“She starts tomorrow.”

My seminar in Hawthorne took up most of the next morning. It’s a good class, full of intelligent students who appear to have a genuine interest in the work. Generally I come out of there feeling invigorated and happy to be a teacher. That day a rather heated discussion arose over certain imagery in the short story “Young Goodman Brown”. In the middle of it, one fellow asked another, “Do you think you’d say all these things if you knew Hawthorne was sitting at the back of the room? You should hear yourself. Would you be so confident if you knew the guy who’d written it was listening?”

A good question I’d heard asked in a variety of ways over the years. I was thinking it over as I walked in our front door and was greeted by the familiar voice of our vacuum cleaner.

“Anyone home?”

The vacuum kept up its high roar.

“Helllllo?”

Nothing. Then a burst of familiar laughter from the living room. I walked in and saw Roberta hunched over on the couch, cackling. My wife is a dramatic laugher—she’ll smack a knee and rock back and forth if the joke’s good. It’s easy to amuse her, and a pleasure, too, because she’s so appreciative. I think part of the reason why I fell in love with her in the first place was that she was the first woman to genuinely laugh at my jokes. Sex is great, but making a woman laugh can be even more satisfying sometimes.

“You must be Scott. Roberta was giving me the lowdown on you.” She was all grey and silver. Grey hair, grey sweatshirt, grey sneakers. Hands on hips, she looked me over as though I were a used car. The vacuum was still on and stood humming by her side.

“Beenie?”

“It’s really Bernice, but if you call me that, I’ll quit. How do you do?”

“Very well. Looks like you two are doing OK.”

“I was telling Roberta about my son.”

My wife waved a hand in front of her face as if there were a fly too close. “You’ve got to hear these stories, Scott. Tell him the one about the rabbit. Please!”

Beenie looked both pleased and shy. “Aww, I’ll tell him some other time. I got to get this vacuuming done. I want to get to the windows today, but I’m still not half done with this.”

She unplugged the machine and pulled it behind her into the hall. A moment later it started up again in the dining room.

I looked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t near. “How’s she doing?”

“Terrific! She’s an atomic power plant. Have you seen the kitchen yet? Take a look. It’s like an ad for floor wax on TV—the whole room is one big
gleam.
You need sunglasses. I think we lucked out with her.”

“That would be nice. Why were you laughing so hard?”

“Oh, because she’s
funny.
The woman tells stories ... You’ve got to hear her talk.”

“I’ll be happy if she can clean.”

“That’s what’s great—she does both.”

New sounds filled our house that day. Pillows pounded and plumped; the vacuum cleaner hissed up against floorboards and walls that hadn’t been cleaned in years. She found a window in the bathroom that had probably never known full sunlight to pass through it since the house was built thirty years ago. The dog bowls shone; curtains were washed; Roberta couldn’t get over the fact that the area under the unused back bathroom sink was not only spotless, but also smelled wonderfully of an unknown new disinfectant. Beenie’s answer? “When it comes to cleaners, I bring my own.” My desk was dusted and the papers neatly arranged. Even the books on it were stacked alphabetically. I didn’t like anyone touching my desk—it was one of those great taboos in the family—but I was so impressed by the detail of her cleaning that I said nothing. Neither of us knew if this whirlwind stopped for lunch. Neither of us saw her even sit down. She accomplished so much in that eight-hour period that, after she was gone, the two of us walked around our still-glowing house, exclaiming about one find after another.