Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

“No,” I say.

“Something’s going on,” she sighs. She is a small, efficient woman who looks at things as if they give off a painful light. She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and spent her girlhood tying up bean rows, worrying over the sun and rain. She is still trying to overcome her habit of modest expectations.

I leave the kitchen, pretending sudden interest in the cat. Our mother follows, holding her brush. She means to scrub the truth out of me. I follow the cat, his erect black tail and pink anus.

“Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you,” our mother says.

I keep walking, to see how far I’ll get, calling, “Kittykittykitty.” In the front hall, our father’s homemade clock chimes the half hour. I make for the clock. I get as far as the rubber plant before she collars me.

“I told you not to walk away,” she says, and cuffs me a good one with the brush. She catches me on the ear and sets it ringing. The cat is out of there quick as a quarter note.

I stand for a minute, to let her know I’ve received the message. Then I resume walking. She hits me again, this time on the back of the head, hard enough to make me see colors. “Will you stop ?” she screams. Still, I keep walking. Our house runs west to east. With every step I get closer to Yasgur’s farm.

Carlton comes home whistling. Our mother treats him like a guest who’s overstayed. He doesn’t care. He is lost in optimism. He pats her cheek and calls her “Professor.” He treats her as if she were harmless, and so she is.

She never hits Carlton. She suffers him the way farm girls suffer a thieving crow, with a grudge so old and endless it borders on reverence. She gives him a scrubbed apple, and tells him what she’ll do if he tracks mud on the carpet.

I am waiting in our room. He brings the smell of the cemetery with him, its old snow and wet pine needles. He rolls his eyes at me, takes a crunch of his apple. “What’s happening, Frisco?” he says.

I have arranged myself loosely on my bed, trying to pull a Dylan riff out of my harmonica. I have always figured I can bluff my way into wisdom. I offer Carlton a dignified nod.

He drops onto his own bed. I can see a crushed crocus, the first of the year, stuck to the black rubber sole of his boot.

“Well, Frisco,” he says. “Today you are a man.”

I nod again. Is that all there is to it?

“ Yow, ” Carlton says. He laughs, pleased with himself and the world. “That was so perfect.”

I pick out what I can of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Carlton says, “Man, when I saw you out there spying on us I thought to myself, yes. Now I’m really here. You know what I’m saying?” He waves his apple core.

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“Frisco, that was the first time her and I ever did it. I mean, we’d talked. But when we finally got down to it, there you were. My brother. Like you knew. ”

I nod, and this time for real. What happened was an adventure we had together. All right. The story is beginning to make sense.

“Aw, Frisco,” Carlton says. “I’m gonna find you a girl, too. You’re nine. You been a virgin too long.”

“Really?” I say.

“ Man. We’ll find you a woman from the sixth grade, somebody with a little experience. We’ll get stoned and all make out under the trees in the boneyard. I want to be present at your deflowering, man. You’re gonna need a brother there.”

I am about to ask, as casually as I can manage, about the relationship between love and bodily pain, when our mother’s voice cuts into the room. “You did it,” she screams. “You tracked mud all over the rug.”

A family entanglement follows. Our mother brings our father, who comes and stands in the doorway with her, taking in evidence. He is a formerly handsome man. His face has been worn down by too much patience. He has lately taken up some sporty touches—a goatee, a pair of calfskin boots.

Our mother points out the trail of muddy half-moons that lead from the door to Carlton’s bed. Dangling over the foot of the bed are the culprits themselves, voluptuously muddy, with Carlton’s criminal feet still in them.

“You see?” she says. “You see what he thinks of me?”

Our father, a reasonable man, suggests that Carlton clean it up. Our mother finds that too small a gesture. She wants Carlton not to have done it in the first place. “I don’t ask for much,” she says. “I don’t ask where he goes. I don’t ask why the police are suddenly so interested in our house. I ask that he not track mud all over the floor. That’s all.” She squints in the glare of her own outrage.

“Better clean it right up,” our father says to Carlton.

“And that’s it?” our mother says. “He cleans up the mess, and all’s forgiven?”

“Well, what do you want him to do? Lick it up?”

“I want some consideration,” she says, turning helplessly to me. “That’s what I want.”

I shrug, at a loss. I sympathize with our mother, but am not on her team.

“All right,” she says. “I just won’t bother cleaning the house anymore. I’ll let you men handle it. I’ll sit and watch television and throw my candy wrappers on the floor.”

She starts out, cutting the air like a blade. On her way she picks up a jar of pencils, looks at it and tosses the pencils on the floor. They fall like fortune-telling sticks, in pairs and crisscrosses.

Our father goes after her, calling her name. Her name is Isabel. We can hear them making their way across the house, our father calling, “Isabel, Isabel, Isabel,” while our mother, pleased with the way the pencils had looked, dumps more things onto the floor.

“I hope she doesn’t break the TV,” I say.

“She’ll do what she needs to do,” Carlton tells me.

“I hate her,” I say. I am not certain about that. I want to test the sound of it, to see if it’s true.

“She’s got more balls than any of us, Frisco,” he says. “Better watch what you say about her.”

I keep quiet. Soon I get up and start gathering pencils, because I prefer that to lying around trying to follow the shifting lines of allegiance. Carlton goes for a sponge and starts in on the mud.

“You get shit on the carpet, you clean it up,” he says. “Simple.”

The time for all my questions about love has passed, and I am not so unhip as to force a subject. I know it will come up again. I make a neat bouquet of pencils. Our mother rages through the house.

Later, after she has thrown enough and we three have picked it all up, I lie on my bed thinking things over. Carlton is on the phone to his girlfriend, talking low. Our mother, becalmed but still dangerous, cooks dinner. She sings as she cooks, some slow forties number that must have been all over the jukes when her first husband’s plane went down in the Pacific. Our father plays his clarinet in the basement. That is where he goes to practice, down among his woodworking tools, the neatly hung hammers and awls that throw oversized shadows in the light of the single bulb. If I put my ear to the floor I can hear him, pulling a long low tomcat moan out of that horn. There is some strange comfort in pressing my ear to the carpet and hearing our father’s music leaking up through the floorboards. Lying down, with my ear to the floor, I join in on my harmonica.

That spring our parents have a party to celebrate the sun’s return. It has been a long, bitter winter and now the first wild daisies are poking up on the lawns and among the graves.

Our parents’ parties are mannerly affairs. Their friends, schoolteachers all, bring wine jugs and guitars. They are Ohio hip. Though they hold jobs and meet mortgages, they think of themselves as independent spirits on a spying mission. They have agreed to impersonate teachers until they write their novels, finish their dissertations, or just save up enough money to set themselves free.