Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

Without preamble, as we approached a sign for Jay-Dee’s Cheese Popcorn, Bobby said, “I’ve been thinking. Would you both ever want to, like, get a place out of the city? Like a house we could all live in?”

“You mean all three of us?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Clare said, “Communes are out of style.”

“We wouldn’t be a commune, exactly. I mean, we’re more like a family, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“We are nothing like a family,” Clare said.

“Like it or not,” Bobby told her. “Too late to back out now.”

In a low voice, Clare said, “Stop the car.”

“What? What is it?”

“Are you sick?”

“Stop. Just stop the car.”

Bobby pulled over to the side, assuming she was going to be sick. We were literally nowhere, in a stretch of farmland gone fallow, the fields weedy and strewn with trash. A Texaco sign shimmered at the curve of the road ahead.

“Honey,” I said. “Are you all right?”

She had opened the door almost before Bobby came to a full stop. But instead of leaning out to vomit she jumped from the car and began walking, with fierce determination, along the brushy shoulder. Bobby and I hesitated, searching for the proper response.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“We’d better go after her.”

We got out of the car and ran to catch up with her. An eighteen-wheel truck ground past, swirling grit and a windstorm of garbage around our feet.

“Hey,” Bobby said. He touched her elbow. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Please just go back to the car and leave me alone.”

She may have meant, in a disorganized way, to leave us in Pennsylvania. She may have meant to hitchhike back, or to begin a life of drifting around the country, getting waitress jobs and renting rooms in small-town hotels. I had entertained similar impulses myself.

“Clare,” I said. “Clare.” I thought the sound of my voice would calm her. I was her closest friend, her confidant. She turned. Her face was dark with rage.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Just go. The two of you.”

“What is it?” Bobby asked. “Are you, like, really sick?”

“Yes,” she said. To escape us she left the roadside and veered across the flat expanse of chalky, untended ground. Shredded tires lay around, and the matted pelt of a raccoon that had been mummified by the passing seasons. We kept up, flanking her.

“Clare,” I said, “what is it? Just what in the hell exactly is it?”

Her voice hissed. “I’m pregnant. All right?”

“Pregnant?”

“We’re having a kid?” Bobby said. “You and me?”

“Shut up,” she said. “Please just shut the fuck up. I don’t want to have any goddamn baby.”

“Yes you do.”

“No. Oh, hell. I’ve let it go over three months now. I’ve never had morning sickness before. The other time I was pregnant, I had it taken care of before anything like this happened.”

“You want to have the baby,” Bobby said.

“No. I’ve just been, I don’t know. Lazy and stupid.”

“Yes. We can have it. We can all three have it.”

“You’re crazy. Do you know how crazy you are?”

“A kid,” Bobby said to me. “Hey. We’re having a kid.”

“ We are not having anything,” she said. “ I may be having a baby. Or I may not.”

“Honey, are you sure?” I said.

“Oh, I’m very sure. I’m quite perfectly sure.”

We were halfway across the field, headed nowhere. Nothing lay ahead but a line of bare, cement-colored trees bordering a second field. Still, Clare marched forward as if the answers to all her questions waited just past the horizon. Sun shone anemically through a thin gruel of cloud.

“Clare,” Bobby said. “Stop.”

She stopped. She looked around, and appeared to realize for the first time that she was in the middle of open country, with no reasonable destination at hand.

“I can’t do it this way,” she said. “I should either be in love with one person, or I should have a baby on my own.”

“You’re just scared,” Bobby said.

“I wish I was. I’d rather be scared than furious. And embarrassed. I feel like such a fool. What would we do, sign up for birthing classes together? All three of us?”

“I guess so,” I said. “Why not?”

“I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”

She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.

“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

THE CITY’S pleasures were too complicated for raising a kid. They were too wound up with rot. I thought so, and Jonathan did, too. Clare was less sure—she worried that the baby might grow up with its imagination damaged by too much ease.

“What if it turns out to be some sort of Heidi?” she said. “I don’t want any child of mine growing up too good. I couldn’t stand it.”

I reminded her of what New York has ready for anyone too small or uninformed to do battle for a body-sized patch of air rights. I invented probability numbers about small-town schools and the effects of the color green on psychological development.

“And listen, growing up in the country doesn’t doom anybody to good behavior anymore,” Jonathan said. “Most of the really interesting murderers come from derelict farms and trailer parks.”

“Well, all right,” Clare finally said. “I guess everybody needs New York to escape to. If we raise the kid here, it’ll just move to the country when it grows up.”

And so we started making phone calls. We started driving upstate to look at property so strange or desolate we could afford it with Clare’s inheritance money. Shopping for cheap real estate, you get an insider’s look at daily human defeat. You smell the dank, vegetable smell of the outdoors working its way in through soggy wallboards, see ceilings and floors in a slow-motion state of ongoing collapse. You see how weather and decay win just by continuing, day after day, until the money runs out.

“We can’t stop too long to think,” Clare kept saying. “We have to keep looking. If we stop and think too long, I’m afraid I’ll come to my senses.”

After three weeks we found a two-story brown house five miles out of Woodstock, a place with a motherly, slightly insane dignity whose advantages mostly balanced its faults. Its walls stood on a solid foundation. The price was low—a desperation sale. Light from an alfalfa field floated through the rooms as if the passage of time was man’s silliest delusion. Well water clear and cold as virtue itself flowed from the taps.

On the debit side, the wiring had disintegrated and the pipes had gone lacy with rust. The old pine floors were alive with dry rot and carpenter ants.

“At least this one has a soul,” Jonathan said. “You know what I mean? I feel like it’s not too late. This one isn’t dead in the water yet.”

Clare nodded. She ran her thumb along a doorjamb, and looked with critical uncertainty at her thumb.