Michael Cunningham: A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

The boys would grin with nervous self-admiration as they stumbled back into their clothes. They’d know the truth when they heard it. They’d understand: You were seeding your town with suitable husbands. You were a goddess (a minor goddess, but still) of carnal knowingness; you were seeing to it that the youth of the region knew not only where the clitoris is, but what to do with it. You were cultivating, in absentia, a cohort of girls (might a few of them learn about it, might they pay you an occasional visit?) whose nights in bed with their husbands would feel like proper compensation for their days of washing and ironing.

That future, that particular old age, however, refused to occur.

It had to do, most likely, with the accident (the backfiring car, the horse) that left you with that gimp leg. It had to do with the tiny apartment over the laundry (who expected rents to go up the way they did?), where the smell of mouse pellets and dry-cleaning chemicals seemed only to be made worse by the veils of perfume you sprayed around. What boy would want to come there?

It had to do as well with the surprising timidity of youth; the endangered-species status (or so it seemed) of the fearless princelings you remembered from your own early days — the boys (old men now, the ones who were still alive at all) who’d been drunk on confidence, touching in their unpracticed attempts at swagger. They’d been replaced by this generation of alarmingly well-behaved man-children, who seemed content to learn about women at the hands of girls who knew almost as little about their own bodies as the boys who fumbled with them.

Eventually, by the time you’d come to think of seventy as still young, you bought yourself a bit of real estate. It lay a considerable distance from town — who could afford even the outskirts, anymore? Once the deal had been struck you stood (aided by the cane you still couldn’t quite believe you carried) on your modest patch of bare ground surrounded by forest, and decided that your house would be made of candy.

You did the research. It was, in fact, possible to construct bricks — out of sugar, glycerin, cornstarch, and a few unmentionable toxins — that would stand up to the rain. Gingerbread, if fortified with sufficient cement dust, would do as a roof.

The rest, of course, would require ongoing maintenance. The windows of spun sugar were good for a single winter, if that; the piped-on lintels and windowsills would need to be remade every spring, even when the icing was reinforced with Elmer’s glue. The tiles made of lollipops, the specially ordered shafts of candy cane that served as banisters and railings, held up, but faded in the summer heat and had to be replaced. What could be more depressing than elderly-looking candy?

The house, however, was charming, in its insane and lavishly reckless way, all the more so because it put out its lurid colors, emanated its smells of sugar and ginger, in a tree-shadowed glade far from even the most rudimentary of roads.

And then you waited.

You had — it was probably a miscalculation — expected a more exploratory spirit among the local youngsters, whatever their general devotion to decent behavior. Where were the sweet little picnickers; where were the boy gangs looking for hideouts where they could (with your approval) imbibe the whiskey they needed in order to fully imagine themselves? Where were the young lovers in search of secret sylvan places they could claim as their own?

Time did not pass quickly. There wasn’t much for you to do. You found yourself replacing the frosting and lollipops more often than necessary, simply because you needed projects, and because (it was a little crazy, but you didn’t regret a trace of craziness in yourself) you wondered if a heightened version — a sharpening of cookie smell, some other manufacturer who produced candy with brighter stripes and swirls — might make a difference.

As eighty approached, your first and only visitors were not quite who you’d been expecting. They looked promising when they first emerged, blinking with surprise, from among the tree trunks into the little clearing in which your house stood.

They were sexy, the girl as well as the boy, with their starved and foxy faces — that hungrily alert quality you see sometimes in kids who’ve been knocked around a little. They were pierced and tattooed. And they were, even more gratifyingly, ravenous. The boy didn’t seem to mind that the handfuls of icing he stuffed into his mouth were so clearly held together with paste. The girl sucked seductively (with the cartoonish lewdness of girls taught by porn rather than experience) on a scarlet lollipop.

The boy said, through a mouthful of icing and Elmer’s, “Hey, Grandma, what’s up?”

The girl just smiled at him, tongue pressed to lollipop, as if he were clever and intoxicatingly dangerous; as if he were a rebel and a hero.

And what, exactly, did you expect those young psychopaths, those beaten children, to do, after they’d eaten half your house, without the remotest expression of wonder, or even of simple politeness? Were you surprised that they ransacked the place, eating their way from room to room, stopping every now and then to mock the bits of jewelry they found (she, with your pearls around her neck: “Our mother has pearls like these, how do you like them on me?”) or the vase you’d had since your grandmother died, into which the boy took a long, noisy piss. Did you think they’d fail to complain, ultimately, that there seemed to be nothing here but candy to eat, that they needed a little protein as well?

Were you relieved, maybe just a little, when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you into the oven? Did it seem unanticipated but right, somehow — did it strike you as satisfying, as a fate finally realized — when they slammed the door behind you?

This is not a smart boy we’re talking about. This is not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains.

Never mind asking him to sell the cow, when he and his mother are out of cash, and the cow is their last asset.

We’re talking about a boy who doesn’t get halfway to town with his mother’s sole remaining possession before he’s sold the cow to some stranger for a handful of beans. The guy claims they’re magic beans, and that, it seems, is enough for Jack. He doesn’t even ask what variety of magic the beans supposedly deliver. Maybe they’ll transform themselves into seven beautiful wives for him. Maybe they’ll turn into the seven deadly sins, and buzz around him like flies for the rest of his life.

Jack isn’t doubtful. Jack isn’t big on questions. Jack is the boy who says, Wow, dude, magic beans, really?

There are any number of boys like Jack. Boys who prefer the crazy promise, the long shot, who insist that they’re natural-born winners. They have a great idea for a screenplay — they just need, you know, someone to write it for them. They DJ at friends’ parties, believing a club owner will wander in sooner or later and hire them to spin for multitudes. They drop out of vocational school because they can see, after a semester or two, that it’s a direct path to loserdom — better to live in their childhood bedrooms, temporarily unemployed, until fame and prosperity arrive.

Is Jack’s mother upset when he strides back into the house, holds out his hand, and shows her what he’s gotten for the cow? She is.

What have I done, how exactly have all the sacrifices I’ve made, all the dinners I put together out of nothing and ate hardly any of myself, how exactly did I raise you to be this cavalier and unreliable, could you please explain that to me, please?