A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  I only turned on the dim light in the hood of the range, and didn’t truly need that. I could easily enough have made pies in a coal mine.

  I was nearly finished when Bobby appeared, looking sleepily disoriented, though with Bobby it was sometimes difficult to tell. He stood in the kitchen doorway, large and pallidly muscular in boxer shorts.

  “Oh, hi,” he murmured. “I didn’t know you were here. I just, um, came down for a drink of water?”

  Water flowed reliably enough from the bathroom taps. I knew what he had come for: the gin we kept on a kitchen shelf was nearly half water by then. I played along, though.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “So I decided I might as well do something useful.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. He remained standing in the doorway, caught between the danger of advance and the embarrassment of retreat. I filled a glass with tap water and held it out to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. When he stepped forward to take the glass from me he brought his distinctive smell into the kitchen, a young male odor with an underlayer like the smell of metal on a cold day. I could hear the steady gurgle his throat made in swallowing the water.

  “Bobby,” I said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Bobby, aren’t we friends? I thought we were friends, you and I.”

  He nearly dropped his glass. He smiled in an agony of nervousness, and said, “Well, we are. I mean, I think you’re, you know, really cool.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you think I’m really cool. But we haven’t seen much of one another lately, have we?”

  “I guess not,” he said. “I’ve been, you know, pretty busy—”

  I couldn’t stifle a snort of derisive laughter. “You’re not exactly the chairman of the board of General Motors,” I said. “Let’s not try to fool one another, all right? It’s just a waste of time.”

  His smile wilted, and he shrugged helplessly. “Well,” he said. “You know. Jonathan—”

  “Jonathan what?”

  “Well, he sort of. You know. You’re, like, his mother.”

  “That sounds exactly right,” I said. “I’m like his mother. I resemble someone who can be fooled with lame excuses.”

  Bobby offered another Punch-like smile, as if I’d made a joke. I could see that there was no point in pursuing the subject with him. He was only following orders. I stood before him with my arms folded over my breasts. I could easily have said, “Leave this house now and don’t come back.” I could have confirmed his romantic status.

  Struggling visibly to change the subject, Bobby asked, “What’s that you’re making?”

  “What? Oh, a pie. I’m making a couple of pecan pies for tomorrow.”

  “You’re a great cook,” he said avidly. “I’ve never tasted food like this that somebody just made , I mean it’s like a restaurant.”

  “No big deal,” I said. I could tell from his face that this was not a conversational gambit, after all. He was genuinely interested in the fact that I had come downstairs to bake pies at midnight.

  “I’d like to open a restaurant one day,” he said. “I mean, I think it’d be cool to have a restaurant in a big old house somewhere.”

  He looked with open fascination at the pie crust, a pale, lucent circle on the pastry board.

  “No real trick to it,” I said. “I could teach you to cook. It’s just a step-by-step process, no magic involved.”

  “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully.

  “Look here,” I said. “I haven’t rolled out the second crust yet, why don’t you try it?”

  “Really?”

  “Come here. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is, once you’ve learned a few of the tricks.”

  He came and stood close to me at the counter. I slipped the rolled crust into one of the tins, refloured the board, and plopped the remaining dough onto it.

  “Lesson one,” I said. “You want to handle it as little as possible. It’s not like bread dough—you maul that until it comes to life. Pie crust is just the opposite, it needs kid gloves. Now. Roll away from you, in sort of upward motions. Don’t bulldoze it.”

  He took up the rolling pin and pressed it into the soft bulk of the dough.

  “Just coax it,” I said. “Good. That’s right.”

  “I’ve never done this,” he said. “My mother never made things like pies.”

  “You’ll be a good student,” I said. “I can tell already.”

  “Do you know how to make those fancy edges?” he asked.

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  During the ensuing year I taught Bobby everything I knew about cooking. We had long sessions in the kitchen together, moving from pies to bread and from bread to puff pastry. When his work came successfully out of the oven, fatly golden and steaming, he contemplated it with frank, unmitigated wonder. I have never seen anyone take so to baking. He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.

  Jonathan sometimes sat in on our baking sessions, but his heart and mind were clearly elsewhere. He lacked the patience for precise measurements and slow risings. Truly, he lacked the fundamental interest in nourishment itself. Even as a baby he’d been indifferent to food.

  He would linger a while in the kitchen, then wander up to his room and put a record on. Sometimes he played Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones, sometimes a new record I’d never heard before.

  Neither of the boys ever again invited me to listen to music. Now, instead, Bobby would trot into my kitchen, saying, “Look here, I found this recipe for fish that’s, like, inside a pastry.” Or, “Hey, do you know how to make something called brioche?”

  Jonathan applied to several colleges and was accepted at New York University and the University of Oregon. All the schools he’d applied to were at least a thousand miles from Cleveland.

  Bobby applied to no colleges—he did not even mention the possibility. He just continued bringing me recipes, and buying ever more elaborate kitchen aids. He bought a Cuisinart, and a set of German knives so thin and sharp they could have sliced away the kitchen wallpaper without disturbing the plaster beneath.

  In June, Ned and I attended their graduation ceremonies with Burt Morrow, whom we had not seen in over a year. Burt had exchanged his goatee for muttonchop sideburns since our last meeting. He wore a green sport coat and a turtleneck, with a gold medallion the size of a half dollar hanging from a chain around his neck.

  We took seats toward the rear of the high school auditorium, a vast, pale, salmon-colored chamber that smelled, even on this occasion, faintly of damp cement and brown-bag lunches. As the students’ names were called and they stepped up onto the stage to receive their diplomas, they were accompanied by the various hoots and catcalls of their peers. You could gauge the popularity of each individual by the uproar his or her name produced. Neither Bobby nor Jonathan inspired any outburst at all—they might have been unknown to their classmates, although Burt did emit a surprisingly shrill whistle at the sound of Bobby’s name.

  Afterward, Bobby and Jonathan went off to an all-night party at an amusement park on a school bus full of other kids. Ned and I invited Burt out for a drink, since we could not just let him drive home alone.


  “A drink?” he said. “Yes, a drink with the adults would be nice. I think we should do that, yes.”

  His eyes held no light. They might have been made of agate.

  We went to a quiet place near the lake, with copper tables and young waitresses dressed as Mother Hubbard. I ordered a vodka gimlet, which was given to me on a doily instead of on a napkin.

  Ned lifted his glass and said, “To the new generation. Best of luck.”

  We all drank to the new generation. Through hidden speakers, a band played “Moon River.”

  It seemed we were in the least important place on earth.

  Burt Morrow said, “Jonathan chose NYU, did he?”

  “Yep,” Ned answered. “The decision was made strictly on an economic basis. NYU is more expensive than Oregon.”

  Burt blinked, and lit a cigarette. “Well, I’m sure he’ll distinguish himself there,” he said. “Bobby doesn’t seem to be very much interested in college.”

  “He’s still young,” Ned said. “You never know what’ll happen in a year or so.”

  Burt said, “Whatever he chooses is all right with me. I wouldn’t interfere in his life. Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of it. He’s got to do his own thing.”

  “I guess,” Ned said. “They’ve all got to do their own things, don’t they?”

  Burt nodded, pulling deeply at his Pall Mall as if sucking up the stuff of life itself. “Certainly,” he said sagely. “Certainly they do.”

  It was his use of the word “certainly” that got to me. It made him sound so like a precocious child left in our care.

  “They do not,” I said emphatically, “have to do their own thing .”

  “Well,” said Burt, “as long as they don’t hurt anybody—”

  “Burt,” I said. “When Jonathan entered into a relationship with your son he was a sweet, open-natured boy, and now three years later he’s turned into someone I scarcely recognize. He’d been a straight-A student and by the time Bobby was through with him he was lucky to get into any college at all.”

  Burt blinked at me through his own smoke. Ned said, “Now, Alice…”

  “Oh, pipe down,” I said to him. “I just want to ask Burt here one question. I want to ask him what I did wrong.”

  Burt said, “I don’t imagine you did anything wrong.”

  “Then what am I doing here?” I asked. I had begun tapping my glass with my fingernail. I heard the steady rhythmic tapping as if it were an annoying sound being made by someone else. I said, “Why am I living in a city I despise? How did I end up with a son who hates me? I seemed to be doing just one thing and then the next, it all felt logical at the time, but sitting here at this moment, it all seems so impossible.”

  “Well,” said Burt, swallowing smoke. I could still hear my fingernail tapping the glass.

  “We just set out to be a family,” I told him. “We had every good intention.”

  “Well,” said Burt. “Things will work out. You’ve got to have faith.”

  “Faith is something the young can afford. I’ve read all the great books, and I’m not pretty anymore.”

  “Whoa there,” Ned said. “If you’re not pretty I don’t know what half the men in the room have been staring at.”

  “Don’t you patronize me,” I told him. “Don’t you dare. You’re welcome to resent me or despise me or feel bored silly by me, but don’t patronize me like I was some kind of little wife . It’s the one thing I won’t have. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

  Ned, without speaking, put his hand over mine to silence the tapping of my nail against the glass. I looked at his face.

  “Ned.”

  I said only that, his name.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll pay for the drinks and go home.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” he assured me. “We’ve had an emotional day. Our only son just graduated from high school.”

  He kept his hand on mine. I looked across the table at Burt, who had fixed upon me a look of direct, dreadful understanding.

  After Jonathan left for New York, Bobby got his own apartment in an austere limestone building across town. He enrolled in culinary school and worked nights as a waiter. He began to talk of our opening a restaurant together.

  “A family place,” he said. “I think a restaurant would be a good business to go into, don’t you? We could all work there.”

  I allowed as how I might make a passable dishwasher.

  “You’ll be the head cook,” he said. “It’ll be, like, the only true Southern-style place in Ohio?”

  Soon he was making dinners for Ned and me at our house. He did become a good cook, and seemed to have some cogent ideas about financing a restaurant.

  I told him if he wanted to open a place on his own, I’d be his first customer, but to count me out as head cook. He smiled as he had when we first met years before—a smile that implied I had just switched over to a language he didn’t speak.

  That winter I found a job myself, as a secretary in a real estate office. We needed the money. Ned’s theater was faring worse than ever, now that so many malls had established themselves on the outskirts. People avoided downtown after dark. The theater flashed its pink neon on an avenue where streetlights offered only small puddles of illumination; where nude mannequins smiled behind the dark glass of an extinct department store.

  Although my secretarial job was nothing exalted or even especially interesting, I enjoyed having a daily destination so much that I began to dread the weekends. In my spare time I started an herb garden in the back yard.

  Bobby met me occasionally for lunch downtown, since his cooking school was not far from the office in which I worked. He had grown rather handsome, in a conventional fine-featured way, and I must admit I took pleasure in meeting him at crowded restaurants, where the din of all those hungry wage-earners put an edge on the air.

  Over our lunches, Bobby spoke with great animation about the restaurant business. At some undeterminable point he had ceased imitating a clean, personable young man and had actually become one, save for odd moments when his eyes glowed a bit too brightly and his skin took on a sweaty sheen. At those times he put me in mind of a Bible salesman, one of the excruciatingly cordial Southern zealots I knew well enough from my girlhood. In his excitement Bobby could take on that quality but he always caught himself, laughed apologetically, and lowered his voice, actually appeared to retract the sweat back into his pores, so that the effect finally was boyish and charming, a young dangerousness being brought under control.

  I confessed my worries to him, and indulged myself every now and then in a complaint or two about my own situation, since I hated to burden Ned. His asthma had grown much worse as business declined, and he had started drinking a bit.

  Bobby said numberless times, “I’ll find backers and have the restaurant going in another year, two at the most. We can all run it. Everything will turn out all right.”

  I told him, “That’s easy for you to say. You’re young.”

  “You’re young, too,” he said. “I mean, you’re young for your age? You’ll love being head chef, wait and see.”

  “I am not going to be head anything.”

  “Yes you will. Yo
u’ll want to when you see the place I’m going to build for you. Come on, Alice? Tell me you’re behind me, and I’ll build the best restaurant in Ohio.”

  A man at the next table glanced our way. He was fiftyish, trim and successful-looking in a slate-colored suit. I could see the question in his eyes: older woman, severe of face but not utterly through with her own kind of beauty, lunching with avid, handsome young man. For a moment I followed the thread of his imagination as he saw Bobby and me out of the restaurant and up to a rented room where afternoon light slanted in through the blinds.

  Bobby leaned forward, his big hands splayed on the tabletop. I reached out and lightly touched his broad, raw fingers with my own.

  “All right,” I said. “If you’re really all that determined to start a restaurant, count me in. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

  “Good,” he said, and his eyes actually glowed with the possibility of tears.

  He opened his restaurant less than a year later. Perhaps he’d been too much in a rush. If he’d waited until he knew more about the business, he might have done better. But he kept insisting he was ready, and I can only speculate whether Ned’s dwindling fortunes had any bearing on Bobby’s own sense of urgency. He got backing from a rather dubious-looking character named Beechum, a man with cottony hair brushed forward over his bald spot and several heavy silver-and-turquoise rings on his thin white fingers. This Beechum owned, or claimed to own, a prosperous string of coin laundries, and envisioned, or so Bobby said, similar success in the realm of Southern cooking.

  Under Beechum’s guidance, Bobby leased space in a small shopping center in the suburbs, between a discount dress store and a bakery that displayed in its window an enormous, slightly dingy wedding cake. I expressed some doubts about the location, but Bobby had compiled a list of virtues that brooked no argument.

  “It’s near some major retail outlets,” he recited gravely. “Penney’s is the flagship store, and Sears is practically around the corner. There are other food stores in the area. And it’s cheap. I mean, you’ve got to start somewhere, right?”