Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“What I don’t understand,” she said. In each hand as she turned was a piece of a salad spinner: the lid with the cord that spun it like a gyroscope, the basket that turned. Her look described the anguish of the missing plastic bowl with the point at the bottom. His own salad spinner was waiting in a box in the new apartment. It worked by a crank.

“Who packed the kitchen?” she asked.

“I did,” he said.

“What I don’t understand,” she said again, “was that these were in separate boxes. And the bottom? Gone.”

“Oh,” he said.

She gestured to the wooden shelf — Murphy-Oil-Soaped and bare — by the window. “What about the spices?”

“That’s my fault,” he said, though before he’d come over he’d Googled how long keep spices and was gratified by the answer. He could see them still, sticky, dusty, greenish brown grocery-store spice jars, the stubby plastic kind with the red tops. He’d thrown them out with everything else that had been half used. “I got rid of them. They were dirty. Everything in the kitchen was.”

She shook her head sadly. “I wiped them all down in May.”

“Sally,” he said. “Really, I promise, the kitchen was dirty. It was so, so filthy.” Was it? He tried to remember, envisioned the garbage can of flies, took heart. “Everything. It’s possible that I didn’t take time to pick out exactly what was clean and what wasn’t, but that was how bad things were.”

She sighed. “It’s just — I thought I was moving back home.”

“Oh,” he said. “So — when did you move out?”

“Four years ago. When I retired. Sure. Carly grew up here, she didn’t tell you? I was always very happy in this house.”

“No,” he said. He’d thought they’d moved ten years ago. Twenty.

“Listen, I have some favors to ask you. If you could help me move some furniture back in.”

“Of course,” he said.

“There’s an armchair in the studio I’d like upstairs. So I have something to sit on. I was looking for my bed, you know. That really shouldn’t have been moved.”

“I said, I think—”

“It’s all right. Amos made it. He made a lot of the furniture here — the shelves, the desks. He was a potter.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry . Meaning, Yes, that happened . You couldn’t believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn’t mention — as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.

“That asshole,” she said. “ Is a potter, I should say.” She looked around the kitchen. “It’s just,” she said. “The bareness. I wasn’t expecting that.”

She turned before his eyes from an iron widow into an abandoned wife. “I figured you were selling the house,” he said.

She scratched the back of her neck. “Yes. Come,” she said in the voice of a preschool teacher. “Studio.”

It was raining, and so she put on a clear raincoat, another childish piece of clothing. She even belted it. They went out the back door that Stony had almost never used. In the rainy dusk, the transparent coat over the blue, she looked alternately like an art deco music box and a suburban sofa wrapped against spills.

The doorknob stuck. She pushed it with her hip. “Can you?” she asked, and he manhandled it open and flicked on the light.

Here it was again: the table covered with pots, Picasso dancing, though now Picasso was covered up to his waist in mold. The smell was terrible. He saw the art he’d brought out nine months before, which he’d stacked carefully but no doubt had been destroyed by the damp anyhow. He felt the first flickers of guilt and tried to cover them with a few spadesful of anger: if it hadn’t happened to her things, it would have happened to his.

“Here everything is,” she said. She pointed in the corner. “Oh, I love that table. It was my mother’s.”

“Well, you said not the basement.”

“You were here for only nine months,” she said. She touched the edge of the desk that the blue pots sat on, and then turned and looked at him. “It’s a lot to have done, for only nine months.”

She was smiling then, beautifully. Raindrops ran tearfully down her plastic-covered bosom. She stroked them away and said, “When I walked in, it just felt as though the twenty-five years of our residency here had been erased.”

O lady , he wanted to say, you rented me a house, a house, not a museum devoted to you and to Laskeriana and the happiness and failure of your marriage. You charged me market rent, and I paid it so I could live somewhere . But he realized he’d gotten everything wrong. She had not left her worst things behind four years ago, but her best things, her beloved things, she’d left the art hoping it brought beauty into the lives of the students and summer renters and wayward other subletters, all those people unfortunate enough not to have made a home yet. She loved the terra-cotta sun that he’d taken down from the kitchen the first day. She loved the bed made for her in the 1970s by that clever, wretched man, her husband. She bought herself a cheap salad spinner so her tenants could use this one that worked so well. If Pamela had been with him that day nine months ago, she would have known. She would have seen the pieces of key chain and clucked over the dirty rug and told him the whole story. This was a house abandoned by sadness, not a war or epidemic but the end of a marriage, and kept in place to commemorate both the marriage and its ruin.

“It was such a strange feeling, to see everything gone,” she said. “As though ransacked. You know?”

He’d never even called the French landlord to ask about Trudy the lusterware duck, and right now that seemed like the biggest lack in his life, worse than Pamela, who he knew to be no longer on this earth. He should have carried the duck to America, though he’d scattered Pamela’s ashes on the broads in Norfolk. He should have flown to Bremen, where she was from, to startle her mother and sisters, demanded to see her childhood bed, tracked it down if it was gone to whatever thrift store or relative it had been sent to — Pamela was the one who taught him that a bed on display is never just furniture, it is a spirit portrait of everyone who has ever slept in it, been born in it, had sex in it, died in it. Look , she said. You can see them if you look . He had done everything wrong.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then, “It was already broken.”

1.

There’s a handsaw hanging on the wall of my living room, a house key from a giant’s pocket. It’s been there a long time. “What’s your saw for?” people ask, and I say, “It’s not my saw. I never owned a saw.”

“But what’s it for ?”

“Hanging,” I answer.

By now if you took it down you’d see the ghost of the saw behind. Or — no, not the ghost, because the blue wallpaper would be dark where the saw had protected it from the sun. Ghosts are pale. So the room is the ghost. The saw is the only thing that’s real.

These days, though it grieves me to say it, that sounds about right.

2.

Here’s how I became a singer. Forty years ago I walked past the Washington Monument in Baltimore and thought, I’ll climb that . It was first thing in the morning. They’d just opened up. As I climbed I sang with my eyes closed—“Summertime,” I think it was. Yes, of course it was. “Summertime.” I kept my hand on the iron banister. My feet found the stairs. In my head I saw myself at a party, leaning on a piano, singing in front of a small audience. I climbed, I sang. I never could remember the words, largely because of a spoonerized version my friend Fred liked to sing— Tummersime, and the iving is leazy / jif are fumping, and the hiver is rye …