A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “Not a word to your father,” I said. “Do you promise? Do you swear?” For a moment I thought the marijuana had affected me after all. But it was just the flush of my own guilt.

  “I promise,” he said. “I swear.”

  Bobby said, “Mrs. Glover? This is really cool. You are…I don’t know. Really cool. Yow!”

  “Oh, call me Alice, for God’s sake,” I told him. And then I left them alone.

  A week or so later I tried dope again (it was called dope, not marijuana), and found that if you kept at it, it did have its effects. It made you giddy and pleasantly vague. It took the hard edge off your attention.

  On a Wednesday afternoon in February, when a frigid white hush lay over the world, I sat with Jonathan and Bobby sharing a joint. It was the fourth of my career, and I had by then acquired a certain expertise. I held the smoke, feeling its heaviness and herbal warmth inside my lungs. On the stereo, Bob Dylan sang “Girl from the North Country.” The lamp was lit against the afternoon dusk, and the paneled walls had taken on a rich, dark-honey color.

  “You know,” I said, “this should be legal. It’s just utterly sweet and harmless, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh,” Jonathan said.

  “Well, it should be legal,” I said. “If Nixon smoked a little, the world would be a better place.”

  Bobby laughed, and then looked at me self-consciously, to be sure I’d intended to make a joke. His expression was so hesitant—he agonized so elaborately over the simplest social transactions—that I started to laugh. My laughter inspired more laughter in him, and Jonathan joined in, laughing over some private joke of his own. This was one of the herb’s best qualities: under its influence you could start laughing at any little thing and, once you’d started, feed it just by letting your eyes wander. Everything seemed absurd and funny—the Buddha-shaped incense burner standing next to a spring-driven hula girl on Jonathan’s desktop; the domesticated, dog-like quality of Bobby’s tan suede shoes.

  Sometimes in those days I thought of Wendy from Peter Pan —an island mother to a troop of lost boys. I didn’t make an outright fool of myself. I didn’t buy gauzy skirts or Indian jewelry or sandals from Mexico. I didn’t let my hair grow long and wild. But there was a different feeling now. I had a new secret, a better one. Previously, my only secrets had been the facts that I feared sex and could not summon any interest in getting to know our neighbors. I’d felt frail and thin to the point of translucence, an insubstantial figure who got headaches from the cold and sinus infections from the heat. But this new secret was buoying, exhilarating—I would be the scandal of the neighborhood if I was found out. The secret warmed me as I passed along the aisles of the supermarket. I was a mother who got stoned with her son. The local women—big women loading their wire carts with marshmallows and ice cream, with bright pink luncheon meats and sugared cereals—would have considered me unfit, scandalous, degenerate. I felt young and slender, full of devious promise. There would be a life after Cleveland.

  And, perhaps best of all, I found that when I got stoned I could manage things with Ned. The dope loosened me, so that if he pressed his mouth onto mine or stroked me roughly I could go along with it in a lazy, liquid state that differed utterly from what I had once meant by arousal. Sex had always produced a queasy inner tightening that turned quickly from pleasure to panic and from panic to pain, so that as Ned worked his sweaty way toward conclusion I lay nervous and angry beneath him, saying silently, “Finish, finish, finish.” Now I could accommodate him with a languor that produced neither outright pleasure nor pain, but rather an unblemished ticklish sensation that struck me as slightly funny. Dope miniaturized sex; it reduced the act itself from a noisy obligation to a humorous, rather sweet little fleshly comedy. This was Ned, only Ned, bucking and groaning here; a boy grown big and ungainly. This was Ned and this was me, a woman capable of surprising herself.

  It lasted into the spring. In my new life I was foxy and unorthodox, liberal-minded and sexually generous—I was the character I wanted to be. That character lived through the thaw and the first green into April, when the pear tree in the back yard exploded in white blossoms. On the Saturday night before Easter, after I had finished dressing the ham, I walked out to look at the tree. It was nearly midnight, and I was alone in the house. Ned had added a late show on Fridays and Saturdays, to compete with the theater complexes that were opening in the malls. Bobby and Jonathan were off somewhere.

  I wore an old woolen shirt of Ned’s over my sweater. The air smelled of wet, raw earth, and the pear tree stood in the middle of our small yard as splendid and strange as a wedding dress, its blossoms emitting a faint white light. I stood for a while on the kitchen steps. It was a moonless night, clear enough for the band of the Milky Way to show itself among the multitudes of stars. That night, even our modest back yard looked ripe with nascent possibilities. If the future was a nation, this would be its flag: a blooming tree on a field of stars.

  I stepped onto the lawn, though my shoes were too thin for the weather. I wanted to feel the frosty crunch of the grass. I strolled under the tree’s branches, past the beds where my tulips were already pushing their way up. By the time the tree had lost its flowers, the lilacs would be in bloom. Someday we would live in a house with a view of the water. I ran my fingers over the scaly bark of a low branch, shook a few loose blossoms onto my hair.

  I’d been out there some time before I noticed that the boys were sitting in my car. It was parked in the graveled space between the garage and the house proper, shadowed by an aluminum overhang, in a pocket of darkness so deep I could not have seen them at all if I hadn’t stood in exactly the right position, so that their heads showed in silhouette between the rear and front windshields.

  Their presence struck me as odd but marvelous. Perhaps they were playing at a cross-country trip. I was too enamored of the night to ask questions. The sight of them seemed, simply, a stroke of good fortune. We could smoke a joint together, and shake pear blossoms down onto our heads. I went without hesitation to the car. As I drew closer I could hear rock music playing on the radio. Derek and the Dominos, I thought. I skipped up to the driver’s door, opened it, and said, “Hey, can I hitch a ride?”

  We passed, all three of us, through a shocked silence filled with the clash of guitars. Sweet-smelling smoke drifted out of the car. Jonathan sat in the driver’s seat. I saw his penis, pale and erect in the starlight.

  “Oh,” I said. Only that.

  His eyes seemed to shift forward in their sockets, as if pressed from behind. Even at that moment I could perfectly remember him taking on the same expression at the age of two, when he was denied a bag of lurid pink candy in a supermarket aisle.

  “Get out of here,” he said in a tone of quivering control that cut through the music like a wire through fog. It was an entirely adult voice. “How dare you.”

  “Jon?” Bobby said. He pulled his jeans up, but before he did so I had seen his penis too, larger than Jonathan’s, darker.

  Jonathan waved the sound of his own name away. “Get out of here,” he said. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

  I was too surprised to argue. I simply closed the car door, and went back into the house. It was bright and warm inside. I stood in the foyer, breathing. I saw the empty living room with perfect clarity: magazines fanned out on the coffee table, a throw pillow still bearing the dent made by someone’s elbow. A fly walked a half circle across the celadon curve of my grandmother’s vase.

  I went upstairs and ran a hot bath. It was all I could think of to do. As I lowered myself into the water I felt a kind of relief. This was real
and definite—water slightly too hot to bear. My feet burned as if stuck with pins. My thighs and buttocks and sex were scalded, but I held fast. I didn’t rise up out of that steaming water.

  It was not wholly a surprise. Not about Jonathan. I must have known. But I had never consciously thought, “My son won’t marry.” I had thought, “My son is gentler than other boys, kinder, more available to strong feelings.” These were among his virtues. I knew the bite and meanness of boys was missing from his nature. I lowered myself deeper into the tub, so the hot water covered my shoulders and burned against my chin. When it started to cool, I opened the hot tap again.

  How had I failed to notice the signs? Jonathan and Bobby were fifteen, yet they never talked of girls. They tacked no airbrushed nudes to the walls. Although I must have suspected, I had never in any part of my being imagined the fleshly implications of their love. To my mind Jonathan had been a perennial child; an innocent. What I could not accustom myself to was the sight of his small erection and Bobby’s larger one, hidden away in the night.

  How had I contributed? I knew too much of psychology, and yet I knew too little. Had I been the sort of mother who drives her son from women? Had I feminized him by insisting too obdurately on being his friend?

  Jonathan came in hours later, after Ned had returned home and gone to sleep. I thought he might tap on my bedroom door but of course he couldn’t, not with his father present. He went into his own room, producing his usual booted thump on the hall carpet. I wanted to go and comfort him, tell him it was all right. I wanted to go and pull his hair hard enough to draw blood.

  It was Easter, and we went through the motions of the day. Ned, Bobby, and Jonathan invaded their baskets, exclaiming over the little prizes, filling their mouths with jelly beans and marshmallow chickens. Jonathan bit the ears off a chocolate rabbit with a gusto that sent an unexpected chill through me. Ned gave me a flat of delphiniums, which I was happy to have, and a silk scarf covered with the brilliant flowers sometimes favored by older women looking for a little flair when they go out to lunch.

  Ned must have seen the dismay on my face as I pulled the bright, elderly scarf out of its tissue. He said softly, “What do I know about scarves? It came from Herman Brothers, you can take it back and get something else.”

  I kissed him. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s a lovely scarf.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that Jonathan would have known what scarf to buy me.

  We ate the dinner I’d made, talked of everyday things. After dinner, Ned left for the theater. On his way out the door, Jonathan said to him, “We’ll come to the eight o’clock show, okay?”

  “You bet,” he answered, and winked enormously. After he was gone, the boys washed the dishes. I tried to help, but Jonathan shooed me out of the kitchen. From the living room, where I leafed through a magazine, I could hear the two of them speaking in low, undecipherable voices. Occasionally, they both laughed.

  When they were through with the dishes, they went upstairs to Jonathan’s room. “Great dinner, Mom,” Jonathan said as they passed through the living room. Bobby added, “Yow! It was, like, the best?”

  They did not invite me up. They did not put on any music. After an hour they came down again with their jackets on. They were out the door almost instantly.

  “Night, Mom,” Jonathan called from the lawn.

  “Night, Mrs. Glover?” Bobby added.

  I stood for a while watching them walk down the street, their hands in their jacket pockets. Bobby’s stride was lithe and sure, Jonathan’s slightly bowlegged in the way of adolescent boys who offer swagger in place of conviction. Behind me, the house was empty, the dishes dried and put away.

  I waited to talk to Jonathan until we had a chance to be alone. It took almost a week. Finally he came home unaccompanied from his nocturnal rounds, and I caught him on his way upstairs. He could make such a racket with those boots.

  “Jonathan?” I called. “Might I have a quick word?”

  “Uh-huh.” He stopped halfway up the stairs and leaned over the banister like a cowboy bellying up to a bar. His hair hung lankly over his face.

  “Would you consider coming down?” I said. “I don’t really feel like playing a balcony scene.”

  “Okay,” he said with bland good cheer. He allowed himself to be taken into the living room, where we sat down.

  “Well,” I said. I did not quite know how to begin a difficult conversation with him. I had always spoken to him as effortlessly as if I were talking to myself.

  “Uh-huh?” he said.

  “Jonathan, honey, I know you care a great deal about Bobby.” Wrong. The tone was sexless, schoolmarmish. I attempted a laugh but my laugh thinned out, went squeaky on me. “A great deal,” I added.

  Wrong again. Now my tone was too knowing, too suggestive. I was still his mother.

  He nodded, looking at me with a blank, serene face.

  “Well, honey,” I said, “to be honest, I’ve been wondering if it’s good for you to see so much of Bobby. Don’t you think you should have some other friends, too?”

  “No,” he said.

  I laughed again, more successfully. “At least you’re open-minded on the subject,” I said.

  He shrugged, and wrapped a hank of hair around a finger.

  “I remember when I was your age, we ran around in a big gang,” I said. “We were all more or less in love with one another, and there were seven or eight of us. Girls and boys alike. I mean, I think I know what it’s like to so desperately love a friend.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, in what seemed a less impenetrable, good-boy’s voice. I suspected—I knew —his love for Bobby must have frightened him. It might in fact have been the true cause of this manly posturing, these clomping seven-league boots.

  “Listen, now,” I said. “I’m your friend. I think I understand about Bobby. He can be very—compelling. But I have to tell you. Don’t hem yourself in too much. Not so early in life.”

  He looked at me from under his ragged shelf of hair, and I saw in his face a lick of my old Jonathan, plagued by doubts and almost ostentatiously available to harm. For a moment it seemed we had broken through.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I know how you feel. Honestly, I do. So trust me. The day will come when Bobby will just seem like somebody you used to know.”

  His face shut down. It was a visible process, like shutters slammed over a lighted window.

  He said, “You don’t know how I feel. And you don’t know Bobby. I’m the one who knows him. Stop trying to take over my life.”

  “I’m not .”

  “Yes you are. I can’t stand it. You use up all the air in here. Even the plants keep dying.”

  I stared at him disbelievingly. “Your life is your own,” I said. “I’m only trying to tell you I’m on your side.”

  “Well, honey, there jest ain’t no room on ma side for nobody but me.”

  I slapped him at almost the same moment I knew I was going to. I caught him full across the face, hard enough to pull a string of saliva from the corner of his mouth. My hand stung from the impact.

  After a moment, he smiled and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. The slap appeared to have afforded him great satisfaction, to have proven something he’d suspected all along.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I never meant to hit
you. I never have before, have I?”

  He stood without speaking and walked upstairs, carrying with him that air of satisfied discovery. His boots reported like cannon fire on every tread.

  Our old friendship was finished. Jonathan and Bobby spent more and more time out of the house, coming home late and going directly to bed. They did not invite me up to get stoned with them, or to dance. Ned told me they came to the movies fairly often. Sometimes, he said, he sat with them, watching a film he’d seen a half-dozen times already. He said Jonathan was surprisingly astute about movies—perhaps he had the makings of a film critic.

  I knew better than to try barring Bobby from the house. Hadn’t my own parents forbidden me to see Ned? Hadn’t their glacial ultimatums driven me straight into marriage? I couldn’t honestly have said whether I worried more about Jonathan’s love of boys in general or about his particular devotion to Bobby. Although of course I hoped he would grow into conventional manhood, meet a girl, and have babies, I knew that that decision already lay beyond my powers of intervention. Jonathan was on his own there. But Bobby, a sweet, uncertain boy of no discernible ambitions and questionable intellect…If Jonathan remained tied to Bobby he might never know what the larger world had to offer. Bobby was, ineluctably, a Cleveland boy, and I knew the future Cleveland offered. The downtown streets were full of young men who hadn’t gotten out: men in bright, cheap neckties, thick-waisted at twenty-five, dawdling in luncheonettes before returning to a job performed under fluorescent lights while the second hand swept the face of the clock.

  It was nearly another week before Bobby and I had our encounter.

  I had gone down to the kitchen well after midnight, to roll out the crust for a couple of pies. I had not been sleeping well during the past two weeks, and the problem wasn’t helped by Ned’s asthmatic snoring. Finally, resigned, I’d gone down in my nightgown, hoping that some simple kitchen task would help settle my mind for sleep.