Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

From upstairs, I heard the toilet flush. I knew my father would be coming down again, ready for another round of Yahtzee. “How’s he doing, really?” I asked my mother.

“Oh, up and down,” she said.

“He’s looked fine since I got here.”

“That’s because you’re here. But Reuben says emphysema is funny. It can just start getting better. Like that.”

“So you think he’s getting better?” I asked.

“No. But he could. He could start getting better at any moment.”

“And how are you?”

“Me? I’m healthy as a horse,” she said. “I’m almost embarrassed by how good I feel.”

“I mean otherwise. You said you wanted to get a job here. You were talking about real estate school.”

“I should. I keep meaning to go out there and see what’s what. But then your father would be alone all day. It’s funny. He was always so capable when we lived in Ohio. He was at that theater so much of the time, I suppose I just figured he liked being on his own. But now that we’re here, he gets nervous if I’m at the store too long.”

“Do you think he’s getting senile?” I asked.

“No. He’s just good and scared, is what he is. Your father was never all that introspective. And now, well, he wants something going on all the time. I’m like the social director on a cruise for one.”

She smiled at me, rolling her eyes good-humoredly, but now the irony crackled through like tissue paper folded into silk.

“Two,” I said. “There are two of you.”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said.

My father and I went the next day to see Hope and Glory at the Phoenix Cinema Eight. My mother, who claimed to have seen enough movies that week, stayed home to work on what she called her garden, a small plot of extravagantly watered grass and hardy, thick-stemmed flowers. When we left her she was on her way out into the heat, wearing plaid Bermudas and a faded straw hat and gardening gloves the size of Minnie Mouse’s hands.

As we walked out the door my father said, “There goes the last of the gentlemen farmers.” She gave him back a look she had developed since they moved to the desert: the patient, clinically affectionate look of a good nurse.

We drove to the movies in my father’s Oldsmobile, a big deep blue Cutlass, silent and ponderous as a submarine. He kept his hands on the steering wheel at three and nine o’clock. He wore a pair of clip-on sunglasses over his ordinary glasses. Above us, the sky was a molten, shifting blue. Mountains shimmered in the distance, beyond the housing tracts and shopping centers. When we swerved to avoid a dead armadillo, my father shook his head and said, “Who ever expected to end up living in the desert, anyway?”

I shrugged. “Who ever expects to end up living anywhere?”

“That’s too deep for me,” he said, and turned into the mall’s parking lot, following a line of neon cowboys on horses with flickering legs.

We were two of perhaps a half-dozen people at the movies, it being a weekday matinee. In its emptiness, the theater reminded me of my father’s old place. Although it was no more than a medium-sized room surrounded on all sides by a saffron-colored curtain, it had the same depopulated melancholy, and the same smell: mildew and old popcorn. An elderly woman two rows ahead turned to glance at us, because of my father’s heavy breathing. Meeting his eyes, she turned back and made a small adjustment to one of her earrings.

I believed I knew what she was thinking: That one’s not long for this world. She was probably a widow; a frequenter of matinees. I wanted to tap her fat shoulder and tell her the story of my father’s life. I’d have liked for her to know that he was not just an elderly man in a polyester sport shirt, gasping in a remote, sad little theater.

Hope and Glory turned out to be highly satisfying, and afterward my father and I browsed through the mall. It was a big mall, with a central oasis where floodlighted palms dipped their fronds into a fountain. The aged sat on benches, and a smiling man in a white denim suit demonstrated the organ. “Arizona is the state of the living dead,” my father told me. He hustled me past the interior grotto and into a Montgomery Ward, to see what was on sale.

We looked at stereos, miniature television sets, and aluminum window frames. We looked at power mowers arrayed on a field of Astroturf. “This is a good machine,” he said, trying the hand brakes on a bright red one.

“I’d rather have a Turf Titan,” I said, referring to a crimson monster the size of a small tractor. “Look, you can ride on it.”

“That’s ridiculous for a young person,” he said. “This one here is a third the price.”

We so vividly impersonated customers that a young salesman with a baldness-concealing haircut strode over and began describing the virtues of a model more expensive than the one my father had picked. As the salesman worked through his spiel, a slender woman walked by, carrying twins in a knapsack-like contraption. She was less than beautiful, with shaggy matte-brown hair and a sharp, shrewd little chin. Her eyes—her whole body—looked tired in a profound, almost permanent way, as if no amount of rest would ever quite restore her. Still, she possessed a sure-footed self-assurance that lent weight to the bright aisle she walked in search of the correct yard tool. Her twins stared with puzzled absorption at the empty air directly in front of them. As she made her way along the aisle I thought of how firmly anchored her life must be, for all its domestic hardship. A year from today, her twins would be walking and speaking. A year from today, she would know exactly how much time had passed.

She turned and disappeared into Lawn Furniture. The salesman pointed out safety features, indicating with his hands the three sensitive spots which rendered the mower incapable of snatching up an arm or a leg and giving it back as a spray of blood and bone chips. His hands were white and thin, the thumbs so curved it seemed they must hurt him.

My father and I listened attentively, promised to think about it. My father, nodding as he received the salesman’s card, looked waxily pale under the fluorescence of Montgomery Ward. Hard white light shone through his thin hair onto the scalp beneath. As soon as the salesman had finished I hurried my father out of the store and bought him a drink in the hushed darkness of a steak house. A sign planted in a bucket of plastic tulips said that the “Early Bird Specials” were now in effect. We were the only bar customers at that hour.

“That kid in there was full of beans,” my father said over his bourbon. “For an extra hundred dollars all you really get is a bigger grass catcher. You could have a grass catcher custom-made for less than a hundred dollars.”

“I haven’t got a lawn anyway,” I told him.

“Well, when you get one, you should know what lawn mower to buy.”

“If I ever have a lawn, then you and I can do some serious mower shopping.”

“I may not be around then,” he said. “I may as well help you get the information now.”

“Listen,” I said. “I really don’t know if I’m the lawn type. I don’t have any plants. I don’t even own a car.”

“That Olds has less than forty thousand miles on it,” he said. “It should still be in good shape when you get it someday.”

“I didn’t mean I want a car. I didn’t mean I feel the lack. Nobody in New York has a car. I can afford a cab when I need to get somewhere.”

“And you’re pretty happy out there?” he asked.

“Yes. I mean, I guess so. Sure.”

“That’s all I care about. You can turn the Olds into a birdbath if you like. I just want you to be happy.”