Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

At that moment I could picture her in an Ohio bedroom, packing to move to a foolish house in the desert. I could see her sorting through her things, making bundles for the Salvation Army. I could see her coming upon this particular dress. She would have known she’d need it one day. She would have sat down on the bed, holding the slick dark fabric with a certain disbelief. A dress she’d bought offhandedly in a mall, not too expensive, no big thing. She would have sat for a while on a white chenille bedspread, in jeans, with the black fabric spread over her lap. Then, in an efficient and scientific manner, she would have folded the dress in tissue and packed it along with her sun suits and Bermuda shorts.

I could see her so perfectly. I gave my head a little shake, to clear it.

“Now there’s no one,” Eddie said. “Except the people in this room. How did we get to be such a small family, anyway?”

“You don’t necessarily meet a lot of people in this world,” Alice said. She licked her thumb and rubbed a spot off a philodendron leaf. “You do your work and raise your kids and live in your house and that’s that. Neither Ned nor I was ever much of a joiner.”

“You always seemed to have friends in Cleveland,” Eddie said.

“Neighborhood people,” Alice said. “Some of them were very nice. But we moved out of the neighborhood. They all sent flowers.”

She crossed the room briskly, and opened the drapes. Light exploded into the room like a flashbulb. Jonathan gasped, then said, “Excuse me,” as if he had committed some minor bodily embarrassment. I figured Alice and Ned must have been one of those everybody-loves-him-but-nobody-can-stand-her couples. I thought that if I’d been married to Ned, he’d have had some friends who thought enough of him to buy a plane ticket to Arizona. I felt the tears rising again, and clenched my fists to stop them. I settled in closer to Bobby. I’m sorry, Ned, I said silently. For a moment, Bobby and Ned seemed to get confused in my mind. I might have been sixty-five, sitting there with Bobby, my dead husband, who had come back from the grave to point out my inadequacies and mistakes.

The old women kept up a skittish conversation in the kitchen, occasionally striking a series of notes with a spoon against a pot. I questioned Eddie about his life, just to keep things going. His wife was dead. He had two married daughters, who, he explained, could not get away for the funeral. He was the veteran of an orderly life, a sequence of births and deaths in Muncie, Indiana. Memories kept intruding on my attention as I listened to Eddie. My father had stood me on a bartop when I was four years old, to the applause of men. He’d bought frilly dresses my mother didn’t want me to wear. “She looks like a hooker,” my mother had said, and for years I’d believed a hooker was someone who hooked men’s hearts. I’d thought it was a grudging form of flattery. My father was fun and indulgent. My mother believed in a life of work. It was only as I grew older that I began to see her side. My father cursed and wept, fell down the back stairs. He wrecked cars, and began to accuse me of conspiring with my mother. He grew too big and noisy, too dangerous, and if Mother had been any fun at all I’d have joined up with her. My father stumbled naked down the hall. He said something to me I couldn’t understand, and soon after that he was gone. Mother repapered her bedroom in bright sexless daisies. She said, “Things will be better now.”

Eddie sat smoking, his eyes dim and yellowed from fifty years of absorbing his own smoke. “I never expected to outlive him,” he said. “He was the oldest, you know. But still.”

“Yes,” Alice said softly. “I know.”

Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. Black came out of the kitchen. One of them, I couldn’t remember which was which, dried her hands with a striped dishrag. “Rest in peace,” the other one said.

“He didn’t have a bad life, though,” Eddie said. “He always loved the movies, and he ended up owning a movie theater. Not bad.”

“He was a very kind man,” said the old woman with the dish towel, Mrs. Cohen or Mrs. Black. “I always slept better at night, knowing I could call him and he’d come right away. I never did have to call him, thank the Lord, but I always knew I could.”

“A very kind man,” the other one said.

Jonathan had shuffled over to a chair. Bobby went and sat close to him, with one haunch hung over the chair arm. If they could have fused into one being they’d have done fine in the world.

“Thank you for making dinner,” Alice said to the two women. “It must be after five o’clock. Why don’t we all have a drink, or two or three?”

“Oh, I never drink,” said the woman with the dish towel. “I had a kidney operation. I have only one kidney, and that’s my sister’s.”

“That’s right,” said the other.

I wondered if the two women were sisters.

After dinner, they went home. Eddie went back to his hotel room “to freshen up,” promising to return “for a nightcap.”

Alice said, “Maybe you boys should have some time alone together. Why don’t you go out for a drink?”

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “Should we?” He checked with Bobby for an answer. Bobby glanced at me. I wondered how the decision could possibly have come around to me. I nodded imperceptibly, yes.

Jonathan asked if he should take a jacket. Bobby told him he probably should. “You two,” said Alice, “are a pair.” I had never seen anyone as lost as Jonathan, as anxious to be told what to do.

Bobby kissed me on his way out, a moist peck on the cheek. “We won’t, you know, be gone too long,” he whispered. I swatted him away as if shooing a fly. My sense of the real had evaporated. I was back in an arbitrary place, being left alone with a mean-spirited woman I scarcely knew. This episode would end. It would be just another small story in my life.

Jonathan lingered at the doorway. “Bye,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”

“Go,” I said. If I’d been his sister, I could have kept Alice from drawing the juice out of him. I’d have put Alice in her place, and inspired Jonathan to stand up for himself.

“Goodbye, Mom,” he said.

Alice took hold of his chin in her direct, scientific way. She looked straight into his eyes. “Goodbye, son,” she said. “I love you.”

After they had gone, Alice asked, “Can I get you anything?” in a sunny, hostess’s tone, reminding me that I was only a guest.

“Nothing, thanks,” I said. “Can I do anything for you?”

“No. I’m going to spruce up the kitchen a bit, I think.”

“I’ll help.”

“No, thank you,” she said, with a firm smile. “I’d really rather do it alone. You just make yourself comfortable out here.”

That was fine with me. Now neither of us would have to think of things to say. After Alice had gone into the kitchen I turned on the television, with the volume all the way down, so as not to intrude on her thoughts.

I stared at the screen. I didn’t recognize the show, and didn’t care. If I watched television at all, I only watched it for the feeling of something happening. At home I usually turned the sound down and turned up the stereo, so I didn’t have to listen to what one unfamiliar character was saying to another.

Alice stayed in the kitchen for a long time. One show ended, and another. I alternated between watching TV and flipping through magazines. Just killing the time. I figured Bobby and Jonathan were out at some roadhouse, getting drunk and talking about themselves and Alice and me. I felt jealous—not of their devotion to one another so much as their history together. The simple, neurotic fact of their bond. I, a more reasonable and complete person, would fly back to New York and go on to something else. I’d have my baby alone. There was nothing inevitable, no element of fate or doom, about my attachment to anyone here. I leafed through Arizona Highways and National Geographic.