The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (4 page)

“My God, she washed the dog, too?”

“No, just vacuumed and brushed him, but did you see your shoes? They’ve been polished.”

“And my underwear? I think she ironed it. No one’s ever ironed my underpants.”

“Are you trying to tell me something, dear husband?”

It was an Easter-egg hunt. Who would think of cleaning invisible things like light bulbs in table lamps or the top of the saltshaker? This latter cleaning I discovered days later at breakfast. I had often looked at that object and thought about wiping the glut of white crystals away and sticking a toothpick down the holes to free up the blockage. Now it had been done, along with so much else.

God knows, Roberta and I have enough to talk about. If it’s not the kids, it’s our life, or our separate lives, or books, or whatever. But Beenie Rushforth was a major topic of conversation over the next few days. Whether it was what she’d done or how she’d done it, somehow or other, she kept coming up. We discovered after the initial shock that not only had she cleaned, ironed, scrubbed, polished ... her way through the entire house, but she had also done a myriad of small things in most rooms to organize us better. The alphabetized books on my desk, for example. In the kitchen cupboard, the canned foods were ordered, the spices arranged in such a way that they were now all visible, rather than before, when they had been thrown together in a heap that needed sorting through any time one needed bay leaves or cinnamon. The ink bottle on Roberta’s desk had been wiped, and the envelopes next to it sorted and arranged by colour.

“This is too much.”

“What?”

“Look—the toothpaste tube’s been squeezed from the bottom so it’s all up in the top. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“Me? You’ve been yelling at me for thirty years to squeeze from the bottom.”

“I thought so. Roberta? Why are we so astonished by our cleaning lady?”

“Because she’s amazing. And costs the same as the last one, who didn’t lift a finger.”

“Tell me what else she told you. How does she work living on Plum Hill?”

“It’s not what you think. Apparently, it’s someone’s estate, but there’s a small gatehouse on the edge of the property, and that’s what she rents. She’s been there for years, and pays very little for it. Her husband died ten years ago. He was an executive for an insurance company in Kansas City.”

“I guess that explains why she said she didn’t need the money: whenever an insurance guy pops off, his family inevitably inherits a bundle because he held the best policy.”

“She did say she was comfortable.”

“I’ll bet. And she had a son?”

“Yes, and a daughter. He sounds like a card. Get her to tell you the story about the cigars.”

“OK. You know what I’ve been thinking? This sounds odd, but I’ve been wondering what is she going to clean when she comes next week? What is there left
to
do?”

The basement.

“Oh Beenie, that’s not necessary. It’s only the laundry room and storage. We’re never there.”

“I went down last week to have a look, and I think it’s got a lot of possibilities if you want to use them. I’ll need only a few hours, and we’ll have everything ready and right.”

Roberta said, for the rest of the morning until I came home for lunch, she heard the most disconcerting mix of sounds coming from that pit. Which is what it is, truth be told. The dark at the bottom of our stairs; the once-a-week-descent-with-a-basket-of-laundry-under-your-arm ordeal when there are so many other things you’d rather be doing.

In our house, there are two places to purposely misplace things—attic and basement, in that order. If you vaguely want to keep something, but have little desire to see it for a while, disappear it into the attic. If you don’t ever want to see it again, but have neither the heart nor guts to make the big break and toss it in the garbage, travel it to the basement. The land of damp shadows and dead suitcases. If it had been up to me, I would have detached that bottom part of our house like the first stage of a rocket once it’s reached a certain altitude. With the exception of the ten-year-old washing machine, the only function the basement served was as a momentary memory flash now and then of kids stomping around down there, yelling across hide-and-seek or monster games. Our children were grown and gone. When they came to visit, their own were still too young or uninterested to play there.

A house closes down on you as you grow older. Because you need less space, the rooms once filled with life accuse with their closed-door stillness: you gave me life, but now you’ve taken it away. Where are the kids, the parties, the noise and movement and things resting on the floor a moment? No one’s ever reflected in the mirrors anymore; there are no teenage-perfume or warm-chicken-dinner smells in the unused dining room. You have nothing for me? Then I damn you with my quiet, the objects that never move, the things that stay clean too long.

I call it the creeping-museum syndrome—everything we own becomes more museum-like the older one gets, including ourselves.

“Uh-Oh City!”

I forgot to mention this. The floorboards between the ground floor and basement in our house are not thick. The first time I heard that loud and strange exclamation coming from down below, I looked to my wife in her chair nearby for enlightenment. We were eating lunch, and, by coincidence, both of us happened to be holding potato chips in mid-air.

“What is ‘Uh-Oh City’?”

“That seems to be her war cry when she finds something interesting.”

“Oh. I take it that means I’ll be seeing her soon? The egg salad is very good today. There’s something new in it?”

“Horseradish. Beenie gave me the recipe. Isn’t it good?”

“Scott, you’re back! What are these?”

“Hello. They’re old
New Yorker
magazines, as you can see.”

“I saw, all right. You want to keep them, or what? I found ’em down the cellar, but half are so rotten they don’t even have print on them any more.”

She was right, but the scold in her voice reminded me of Miss Katsburg, my insufferable first-grade teacher. That was not a good memory.

“Beenie, you’re here to clean the house, not clean it out. Leave the magazines, OK.”

“Even the rotten ones? I could sort through ’em and—”

“Even the rotten ones. I like rotten. I turn the pages more carefully.”

“You’re an odd one, Scott.”

“Thank you, Beenie. Just leave the magazines.”

She reappeared several other times, holding mysterious or forgotten objects at arm’s length, wanting to know if they could be thrown out. On each occasion, Roberta and I enthusiastically agreed they could.

The last time she trudged up, the stairs sounded heavier, more weighed down. No wonder—she had a television on her head, and looked like an African woman carrying her pot to the well.

“My God, Beenie!”

“Oh Beenie, what are you doing?!”

“Bringing up treasure! Do you folks realize what you’ve got here? This’s a Brooker television. These things are collectors’ items! Some people say the Brooker was the best TV set ever made in America. Strong as a Model-T Ford.”

My wife and I exchanged smirks. “That was the first TV we bought, and it was terrible from the moment we got it.
Nothing
but trouble. How many times did it break down?”

Roberta looked at Beenie and shrugged as if the breakdowns were her fault. “At least five. Remember that terrible fat man who used to come and fix it?”

The memory of his Vandyke-bearded face came to me like a blastful of exhaust from a dirty truck. “Craig Tenney! I remember the name written in yellow on his blue overalls. The worst! The only pompous TV repairman in the world. Not to mention the fact that he was also a crook ... Beenie, put that thing down. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Nope, that’s not true. Once you get it up on the head, your neck’ll pretty much support anything. Waddya want to do with it? Don’t leave it downstairs. I’m telling you, whether it works or not, it’s worth a good chunk to a collector.”

“Well then, it’s yours if you’d like to have it.”

She looked at me appraisingly. “How come you kept it if you don’t want it?”

“Probably because I was too lazy to cart it to the dump. Really, if you want it, take it.”

“You’ve got a deal. I know a man who’d be interested.”

I hadn’t laid eyes on that set for years. It had lived so long in the basement that, even if I had seen it, I didn’t remember because it had grown invisible. Objects have a way of doing that when they are broken or serve no more function in our lives. Yet seeing it again like that in the light of day, returned once more to the middle of our living room where it had once owned the eyes of an entire family, I found myself remembering things about that set. Like the awful repairman who used to pontificate to me about the state of the world while purportedly fixing the damned machine.

There were also nice memories. Like the whole gang of us sitting around that tube after dinner, eating hot-fudge sundaes and watching “Laugh-In” or “Star Trek”. Unlike others, I’ve never had any real objection to television besides its basic silliness. When I was growing up, we listened religiously to silly shows on the radio, so what’s the difference? Our kids were always devoted readers and decent students. If they liked to plop down in front of the set for an hour or two after school or a football game on the weekend, OK. I was often there next to them, enjoying both the show and their company. It also came back to me that the first time any of the kids ever asked a question about sex came while watching that television. In the middle of the “Dick Van Dyke Show” one night, Norah informed us she’d heard from a girlfriend that babies were made when men and women went to a hospital, lay down on separate beds, were connected genital to genital by a long white rubber hose, et cetera. Was this true, Dad?

So, great things had happened in the presence of this now-departed pain in the ass. It almost made me want to ask for it back.

Apparently, Roberta had had much the same experience. Over dinner that night, she told me she’d been thinking about the television, too, and different memories connected with it.

“Remember switching it on, and, at
that
moment, Oswald was brought out and shot by Ruby! I remember it so well. The world was in mourning. We all walked around like we were drugged. No one thought something
else
was going to happen. But right there in front of us on that TV, it was like the first public killing ever televised!”

“We saw it on that one, the Brooker? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“My son, Dean, lives way out in the country. He and his wife, Gaby, have got this dachshund named Zip. It’s a nice little thing, but the problem is, their next-door neighbour had a rabbit for a pet that Zip was always trying to get. They let this rabbit run loose in their yard, and it drove the dog crazy. Every time he’d see the thing, he’d bark and scratch at the ground or throw himself at the fence separating them. It caused bad feeling between the two families, but what are you going to do?

“One night, Dean and Gaby were sitting in the kitchen after dinner, drinking coffee. Who comes in covered with dirt from head to toe, carrying the dead rabbit in his mouth and proud as General MacArthur? Zip. The little stinker’d finally figured a way under the fence and killed the poor thing. Well, you can imagine what happened! Gaby had a conniption fit and grabbed it away from the dog while there was still something left. Luckily, Zip hadn’t bitten into it. They guessed he’d killed it by shaking it and breaking its neck.

“But what were they going to do now? Both of them could just imagine what the neighbours would say in the morning when Dean and Gaby brought it over and explained what’d happened.

“They talked over all the possible ways out of this, and finally came up with a real long shot. Clever, but a long shot. Gaby took the rabbit and washed it real well. Shampoo and everything. Then she got out her blow-drier, if you can imagine that. Dried and
combed
the damned body till it looked brand-new and fluffy. Peter Cottontail-fresh. By this time, it was about ten at night, and part two of the plan.

“Dean took the beautiful dead lump, snuck into the neighbours’ backyard, where it’d lived in a hutch up on stilts, and put the body back in its home. Then he tiptoed back, and the two of them went to bed with crossed fingers. What they were hoping was, the neighbours’d see it dead out there, and think it’d died of a heart attack or something in the night. Natural causes. But next morning early, they heard this crazy, wild scream next door, and both of them thought the jig’s up. A little while later, the neighbour woman, who by the way was very religious, came banging on their door, looking like she had just seen a horror movie. White as a sheet and talking a million miles an hour, she kept saying, ‘A miracle! Honest to God, a miracle!’ Turns out, yesterday
morning
their poor little bunny died. So she and her husband dug a deep hole in their backyard and buried him. But when she came out this morning to hang laundry, she found it
back
in its hutch, clean as a cloud and looking like it hadn’t spent the night under a foot of dirt. Mr Resurrection Rabbit! He was still dead, of course, but hey, you take your miracles where you can find ’em!”

The three of us were sitting on the porch. Beenie had finished the attic and had been coaxed by Roberta into telling the story. I had the feeling she was happy to hang around and chat awhile rather than go home to her empty apartment. We knew about her children, her dead husband, a general description of what life had been like for her till now. From what I’d heard, it wasn’t a special life, but a good one. She was proud of her children, had her health, enough money to get by, and a sense of humour that buoyed her and made her the centre of attention when she wanted to be.

“Well, I gotta go now, but I’m warning you two: next week I’m tackling the garage and shaping
it
up. That’ll take me all day, so I won’t have time for much of the rest of the house. But once it’s done, the only thing we’ll have to do around here is maintenance.”