Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“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,” said 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 .