Thunderstruck & Other Stories (12 page)

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.”

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.

“Why don’t you do the speech for me?” Sylvia asked Lisa now. She sat down on the sofa, her hands clasped. “Then you can just enjoy the party.”

“No, thanks. Daddy says I should save it for the performance.”

“What performance?”

The girl shrugged. “He taught me Hamlet’s speech to his players, too. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you.’ ” Another grape. This one she tossed in the air: it bounced off her chin. “Oops. Anyhow, it was his idea, when I told him about the party. So I better.”

“He doesn’t understand—”

“Grandma,” the girl said seriously. “You have to do what sick people ask.”

In earlier years, Sylvia had been a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other person. When disasters happened (her mother had taught her) you strode firmly in the opposite direction, because calamity followed catastrophe followed disaster. People who believed things couldn’t get worse were the ones who were killed, by man or nature. You had to get away.

But the Bicentennial summer, all she could think was,
my fault
. She could hardly move for culpability. That’s what happened when you were the oldest surviving member of your family. You could not cast blame any further back: it was yours, like your spinster aunt’s diploma. Everyone else refused it, and the only way to hand it down was to die.

She’d fed that boy, her son, too well. That’s what Rena said: she’d starved the girl and stuffed the boy. Last Thanksgiving Rena had come with her steno notebook full of all the ways that Sylvia had damaged her, as though at the end she might present her mother with a bill.
Distrust of men
: $9,000.
Fear of living alone
: $15,000. “I need to do this,” said Rena, and she flipped page after page and listed injury: how Sylvia and Ben had always taken Aaron more seriously; how in the family you had to be careful about hurting men’s feelings but women didn’t matter; how they hadn’t bought her a piano when that was all she really wanted. Aaron wanted a dog, he got a dog. Aaron wanted a car, he got a car.

“I don’t remember you ever asking!” Sylvia had said.

“You knew,” said Rena darkly. Then she added, “You never loved me unconditionally. There were always strings.”

“What are you talking about? Darling, I absolutely loved you.
Love
you.”

“You didn’t love me the way you loved Aaron.”

What could Sylvia say? That was true. Not more nor less but differently. If one could measure love—but even then love was too various, one love would have to be measured by degrees Fahrenheit and one by atomic weight. First born, second, boy, girl: of course different loves. To compare was nonsense. What Rena wanted: scales with packages of maternal love, finally squared—but then she’d complain about something else.
You just gave me the same love you’d already given Aaron! You didn’t treat me like an individual!

A different love for grandchildren, too: unreserved. Gleeful. Greedy. Sylvia was allowed to rub Noxzema into Lisa’s sunburnt back after a day at the swimming pool. She let Lisa pick out expensive shampoo at the grocery store, something called Milk Plus that smelled like the 1930s baby soap she’d washed her children with. So what if Lisa’d fallen asleep with the bubble gum they got from the candy store, and it ended up in her hair and had to be cut out? They walked down to Sal’s salon, and now Lisa had her first real haircut from a professional. They cuddled on the orange guest bed and watched television and ate popcorn. Oh, if Rena ever found out how Sylvia loved the childish flub of her granddaughter, the dense bakery heat of her limbs, her neck like a loaf of bread—a voracious love, a
near starvation though here the girl was in front of her. That was what the love of children was like, in Sylvia’s experience, and she supposed it made sense that Rena was sad that such mother love had to end, to mellow. You couldn’t bite a grown-up. You couldn’t sniff at an adult woman’s neck. If she went to Rena’s therapist—that was who had insisted on the steno pad, the formal accusation—she surely would have hated to hear what it meant, her longing to bite children. To devour them. She nibbled, she tickled, she nuzzled, she inhaled. That was the real end of childhood, wasn’t it, when you looked at a stringy kid and loved her but didn’t want to bite.