Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

I wait breathing in the dark as she turns out the kitchen light and goes upstairs. Ned won’t be home for another hour or more. I sneak around in time to see the light go on in her bedroom window. I watch her window and I watch the others, the ones that open onto empty rooms. Behind paired black windows is the gleaming darkness of the dining room, its silver tea service putting out an icy glitter. Behind a third, smaller window is the laundry room, with its scoured smell. Upstairs, Alice sends a brief shadow across the windowscreen.

I wait, watching, until Ned’s car pulls up. I can see him walk from the garage to the front door, his white shirt brilliant in the porchlight, coins jingling in his pockets. Ned slicks his hair with Vitalis; he wears Sansabelt slacks. I hear the click of his key in the door—a perfect fit. He douses the light and goes upstairs. I can feel his tread. Alice is waiting for him, her hair pulled up off her neck. Jonathan still reads in his own room, taking in the story he’ll tell me tomorrow.

I sit in the bushes until every light is out, until the house has settled itself for the night. Then I walk a slow circle around it, with stars and planets shining overhead. Above us, suns nova and collapse, punching holes in the galaxy, pulling their light after them into the next world. Here below, on an earth night humming with gnats and crickets, I orbit the Glovers’ house.

BOBBY rid his voice of its droning, metronomic quality and acquired a boyish lilt, finishing sentences on a high note, so that any statement sounded like an eager, tentative question. His electric hair, when submitted to a barber’s shears, emerged as the ordinary, dryly windblown crop of a teenager prone to cowlicks. Once, as he stood grinning before our front door at noon, I saw that he had daubed his acne with a concealing flesh-colored ointment.

Still, he never managed the complete transition. He retained a subvert, slightly dangerous quality—something ravenous and watchful. It came out at dinner, as he scoured his plate, and it came out in his insistent, unfailing politeness. Only fugitives are capable of flawless courtesy from morning till night. And, besides, the boy Bobby was struggling to become could never have danced like he did.

He took to bringing over records he thought I’d like—a sweeter, more melodic music than the sort Jonathan favored. Every now and then he’d call down from Jonathan’s room: “Mrs. Glover? If you’re not too busy, come on up and listen to something?” I’d almost always go on up. How busy could I be, cooking and washing clothes?

I learned a collection of new names: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Boz Scaggs. Sometimes I just sat with the boys, listening. Sometimes, when an upbeat song came on, I accepted Bobby’s invitation to dance.

His dancing was something to see. His sense of rhythm did not in any way derive from the granite cornices and box hedges of Cleveland. Dancing, he was an original—his hips swayed with a voluptuous certainty more graceful than lewd, and his arms and legs cut their own brisk, surprising pattern through the confined air of my son’s room. Once the song ended he’d smile and shrug, as if dancing had been a slightly embarrassing failure of wit. He’d return by visible degrees to his continuing impression of the pallid suburban boys mothers are supposed to delight in.

Sometimes Jonathan grudgingly joined us dancing, sometimes he sulked with his knees drawn up to his chest. I wasn’t a fool—I knew no fifteen-year-old boy would welcome his own mother’s participation in his social life. But Bobby was so insistent. And, besides, Jonathan and I had always been good friends despite our blood bond. I decided that accepting Bobby’s little gifts of music and dance would do no harm. I had been a bit wild myself, at Jonathan’s age, not so very long ago.

Jonathan grew his hair nearly to his shoulders, in defiance of the school’s dress code. He sewed bright patches on his jeans, and persisted in wearing Bobby’s old leather jacket even after the elbows wore through. At home he was largely silent. Sometimes his silence was petulant, sometimes it was simply blank. Although he worked hard at it, Jonathan could not make himself a stranger to me. I knew him too well. His dancing was as hesitant and clumsy as his father’s, and the flippant nastiness he affected had a shallow bottom. Caught off guard, he would slip into acquiescence automatically, without having meant to. He would smile before he remembered to scowl.

One night in January, Bobby called me up to listen to a new record by Van Morrison. I’d settled myself on the floor with the boys, nodding to the music. Bobby sat cross-legged and straight-backed to my immediate left, like a Yogi meditating. Jonathan sat farther away, sulkily hunched, his shoulders curved over his knees.

“This is nice,” I said. “I like this Van Morrison.”

“Van the Man?” Bobby grinned. Sometimes his meanings remained inscrutable, despite his careful intentions. I often just smiled and nodded, as I would to a foreigner speaking indecipherable but evidently friendly English.

At moments, even in his fits of eager incoherence, Bobby made sense to me. He was an outlander, striving to assimilate. Hadn’t I myself been transplanted to a wintery place where most women of my age and station were overweight and undereducated? Years earlier, when I was still making an effort to fit in, the other women at the PTA and the church guild had offered me recipes for parfaits made with pudding and candy bars, and for frankfurters soaked in mustard and grape jelly. I couldn’t begrudge Bobby his own difficulties with the local ways of making do.

“Van’s all right,” Jonathan said. “If you like this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing is he?” I asked.

“Well, folk-y. Moony. He’s a good old boy singing about the love of a good woman.”

“I don’t know, Jon,” Bobby said. “He’s sort of, you know, better than that?”

“He’s okay,” Jonathan said. “Just a little wimpy. Mom, how about if I play you some real stuff?”

“This seems real enough,” I said.

Jonathan looked at Bobby, whose smile had taken on a stiff, worried quality. “That’s what you think,” Jonathan said. He got up and took the needle off the record in the middle of a song, pulled another out of the collection that was stored in a series of orange crates lined up against the wall.

“This is Jimi Hendrix,” he announced. “The world’s greatest dead guitarist.”

“Jon,” Bobby said.

“You’re going to love this, Mom. Really. I’m turning the volume up a little here, because you’ve got to listen to Jimi pretty loud.”

“Jon,” Bobby said, “I don’t know if—”

Jonathan touched the needle to vinyl, and the room exploded with electric guitars. They squealed and shrieked like tortured animals. A thumping bass line started, so loud and insistent I could feel it up my spine. I had the impression that my hair was being disarranged.

“Nice, huh?” Jonathan shouted. “Jimi was the greatest.”

Our eyes met through the storm of sound. Jonathan’s face was flushed, his eyes brilliant. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to blow me out of the room, to send me tumbling downstairs into the familiar sanctity of dirty dishes and vacuuming. On the record, a male voice sang, “You know you’re a cute little heartbreaker.”

“The greatest,” Jonathan hollered. “Much better than Van the Man.”

I made a decision. I stood up and said, “Bobby, let’s dance.”

He joined me immediately. We danced together in the chaos of the music. It wasn’t so bad, as long as you kept moving. It gave you the airy, buffeted sensation a sparrow must feel when caught in an updraft—a simultaneous sense of assault and liberation. You could scream into the face of this music. It all but lifted your arms into the air.