Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“Why don’t you fold it out and take a nap?” my father said.

“No, I’ll just lie on it like a sofa,” I said. I lay down, and propped a needlepoint pillow under my head. The sofa upholstery depicted cattails, rust-colored boats, and brown mallard ducks flying away in repeated series of three. A small Christmas tree gleamed on the end table, strung with ornaments I remembered choosing in a dime store as a child. After years of “decorator” trees—with red and silver balls, candy canes, and small white lights—my parents had returned, in miniature, to the gaudy chaotic tree of a household with children.

“I’m glad you came home for a while,” my father said. “You’re looking a little pale, if you want to know the truth.”

“Everybody in New York is pale this time of year,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move to Arizona.”

“Why would you want to move here?” my father said, rattling the Yahtzee dice in their cup. “There’s nothing for a young person to do.”

“What do you do here?”

“Nothing. There’s really nothing for anybody to do.” He rolled the dice. “Small straight,” he said. “Do you want another drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

As he went to the closet-sized bar to pour another for himself, I could hear the labor of his breathing. The bar, a narrow contrivance between the living room and the dinette, displayed its neat row of bottles on a mirrored shelf. A beige hand towel, never used, sat folded beside the miniature chrome sink.

My parents had brought their Cleveland sense of order to the desert with them. Here, where fine sand blew through the windows at night, where tumbleweed occasionally scratched at the door, the spices on the rack were kept in strict alphabetical order. Each houseplant shone with green, glossy life, and every morning my mother inspected them all, plucking dead leaves and dropping them into a plastic bag.

“As long as you’re having another drink, I guess I will, too,” I said. I heard the particular gurgle the bourbon made as it flowed out the spout of the quart bottle.

“Hope and Glory is showing at the mall,” my father said.

“We could go to the matinee tomorrow,” I said. “It’d keep us out of the sun.”

“Good.” He brought me my drink.

“I really don’t want to decide about, you know, funeral arrangements for you guys,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it so much. By the time we’re dead you’ll probably be settled down somewhere. Just bury us within commuting distance.”

“What if I don’t settle down, though?”

“You will. Believe me, it gets you sooner or later.”

“I think I’ll go see if Mom needs help in the kitchen,” I said.

“Okay.”

“It’s just that I have no idea where I’ll settle down,” I said. “I could end up anywhere. I could go to Sri Lanka.”

“Well, that’s fine. You should travel while you’re young.” My father rolled the dice again, and cursed his dearth of luck.

“I’m not that young anymore,” I said.

“Ha. That’s what you think.”

In the kitchen, my mother dried romaine lettuce with weary efficiency. She might have been diapering her tenth baby. I stood beside her at the sink. She had taken on a brittle smell, like dry leaves.

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

“Will you look at what they call lettuce here?” she said. “I went to three different stores for this, and it still looks like somebody beat it all the way to Phoenix with a stick.”

She delivered the complaint in a tone of skittish good cheer. Lately, on my visits home, first to Cleveland and now Phoenix, she alternated between fits of irony and folksy, high-strung friendliness.

“Pretty sad,” I said.

We stood quietly as my father lifted himself from his chair and walked upstairs to the bedroom. Once he was out of range my mother said, “So. How’s everything? How’s Bobby doing?”

“Okay. He’s fine. Things are pretty much okay.”

“Good,” she said, and nodded enthusiastically, as if the answer had been full and sufficient.

“Mom?” I said.

“Mm-hm?”

“To tell you the truth, I’ve been…oh, I don’t know. I sometimes feel so alone in New York.”

“Well, I can understand that,” she said. “It’s hard to avoid feeling lonely. Just about anywhere.”

She began cutting a cucumber into astonishingly thin, lucent slices. The knife blade seemed to impart illumination to the vegetable with every slice.

“You know what I’ve been wondering lately?” I said. “I’ve been wondering why you and Dad don’t have more friends. I mean, when I was a kid, I felt like we were marooned on another planet together. Like the family on the old TV show.”

“I don’t remember any show like that,” she said. “If you had a baby of your own, and a house and business to run, you’d know how much energy you’ve got left over for running around the neighborhood meeting people. And then your kids pack up and go after eighteen years.”

“Well, sure they do,” I said. “Of course they do. What else would you expect?”

She laughed. “They do if you’ve raised them right,” she said cheerfully. “Sweetheart, nobody wants you to have moved back into your old room after you graduated.”

We were not a confrontational family. We did not attempt to draw one another out. As our lives changed, we strove instead to develop new ways of acting normal in one another’s company.

“I’ve just been wondering lately if this is, you know, it, ” I said. “An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

I asked, “Mom, when did you know you wanted to marry Dad?”

She didn’t speak for a full minute. She finished with the cucumber, and started in on a tomato.

Finally she said, “Well, I still don’t know if I wanted to marry him. I’m still trying to decide.”

“Come on. Seriously.”

“All right. Let’s see. I was barely seventeen, you know, and your father was twenty-six. He asked me on our fourth date. I remember I was wearing white shoes a week after Labor Day, and I felt defiant and sort of foolish at the same time. Your father and I were sitting in his car and I was feigning contemplation when in fact I was still worrying over having worn those damned shoes, and he leaned right over and said to me, ‘What if we were to get married?’ Just like that.”

“And you said?”

She reached for a second tomato. “I didn’t say anything. I was so startled. And embarrassed, to have been worrying about my shoes at a moment like that. I remember thinking, ‘I am the most trivial person who ever lived.’ I told him I’d need time to think about it. And I found I couldn’t think of one single reason why we shouldn’t get married. So we did.”

“You were in love with him?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together, as if the question had been impertinent and slightly irritating. “I was a girl, ” she said. “But yes, sure. I was wild about him. Nobody had ever made me laugh the way he could, do you remember how serious Grandpa always was? And your father had the most beautiful thick chestnut hair then.”

“You knew that, of all the people in the world, he was the one you wanted to marry?” I asked. “You never worried that you might be making some sort of extended mistake, like losing track of your real life and going off on, I don’t know, a tangent you could never return from?”

She waved the question away as if it were a sluggish but persistent fly. Her fingers were bright with tomato pulp. “We didn’t ask such big questions then,” she said. “Isn’t it hard on you, to think and wonder and plan so much?”