A home at the end of the world (31 page)

“Maybe I did. About a thousand years ago.”

I look into her scared, aging face. I think I know what frightens Clare—a certain ability to invent our own futures has been lost. Now we are following a plan that got made in a haphazard way along a highway in Pennsylvania. Now the good things are the predictable ones, and surprises mean bad news.

I put my lips on hers again. This time she returns the kiss. Jonathan continues flipping channels, lazily half-watching.

CLARE

I
NEVER
expected this, a love so ravenous it’s barely personal. A love that displaces you, pushes you out of shape. I knew that if I was crossing the street with the baby and a car screamed around the corner, horn blaring, I’d shield her with my body. I’d do it automatically, the way you protect your head or heart by holding up your arms. You defend your vital parts with your tougher, more expendable ones. In that way, motherhood worked as promised. But I found that I loved her without a true sense of charity or goodwill. It was a howling, floodlit love; a frightening thing. I would shield her from a speeding car but I’d curse her as I did it, like a prisoner cursing the executioner.

Rebecca’s mouth worked to form the word “Momma.” She fretted whenever I left her. Someday she’d pay a fortune to therapists for their help in solving the mystery of my personality. There would be plenty of material—a mother living with two men, intricately in love with both of them. An undecided, disorganized woman who fell out of every conventional arrangement. Who dragged her own childhood along with her into her forties. I’d been just a private, slipshod person going about my business and now I was on my way to becoming the central riddle in another person’s life.

Being a mother was the weighted, unsettling thing. Being a lover—even an unorthodox lover—was tame and ordinary by comparison.

Maybe that was the secret my own mother discovered. She’d thought my wild, undisciplined father would prove to be her life’s adventure. And then she’d given birth.

We worked out a variation on the classic arrangement, we three. Bobby and Jonathan went to the café before sunrise every morning, I stayed home with Rebecca. I didn’t want a business. Eventually I’d start making jewelry again, or some other little thing. The restaurant was the boys’ project, a way for them to support themselves and begin paying me back. They were good, uncomplaining workers. Or, Bobby was a good, uncomplaining worker and Jonathan more or less followed his example. They left the house at five o’clock every morning, just as the darkness was beginning to turn, and didn’t come back until four or five in the afternoon, when the dark was already working its way back into the corners of the house. To be honest, I didn’t know too much about their work lives. Bobby cooked, Jonathan was the waiter, and a sweet dim-witted boy from town bussed tables and did the dishes. Although I listened to their stories—furious customers, kitchen fixtures that blew up or caught fire in the middle of the lunch rush, wildly improbable thefts (someone stole the stuffed salmon right off the wall, someone else took the seat off the toilet in the women’s room)—it all seemed to happen in a remote, slightly unliving realm of anecdote. I felt for the boys. But to me their single, salient characteristic was an eleven- or twelve-hour daily absence. Real life, the heart and heft of it, was what happened during the hours they were gone.

For years, for most of my recollected life, I’d walked carefully over a subterranean well of boredom and hopelessness that lay just beneath the thin outer layer of my imagination. If I’d stood still too long, if I’d given in to repose, I’d have fallen through. So I’d made things, gone to clubs and movies. I’d kept changing my hair.

Now, with Rebecca to care for, each moment had an electrified gravity that was not always pleasant but ran right down to the core. Sometimes I grew bored—babies aren’t always interesting—but always, in another minute or hour, she would need something only I could provide. It seemed that every day she developed a new gesture or response that carried her that much closer to her own eventual personality. From hour to hour, she kept turning more fully into somebody. The hours were stitched together, and nothing limp or hopeless ever threatened to unravel the day. I bathed Rebecca, fed her, mopped up her shit. I played with her. I showed her what I could of the world.

All right, I liked it best when the boys were gone. Once they came home, a sense of continuing emergency was lost. Weary as they were, they told me to relax while they attended to Rebecca. They were being good, responsible fathers. I knew I should feel appreciative. But I didn’t want to relax. I wanted to be stretched and beset. I wanted to be frantically busy with Rebecca every waking moment, and then fall into a sleep black and shapeless as the unlived future.

Bobby loved our daughter but was not tormented by her vulnerable, noisy existence. In a world with more room in it he might have been a settler, with visions of reinventing society on a patch of ground far from the site of the old mistakes. He had that religious quality. He was soft-hearted and intensely focused. He was not deeply interested in the flesh. Sometimes when he held Rebecca I knew how he saw her—as a citizen in his future world. He respected her for swelling the local population but did not agonize over particulars of her fate. In his eyes, she was part of a movement.

Bobby and I slept together in a new queen-size bed. Rebecca’s room was the next down the hall, followed by the bathroom and Jonathan’s room. Bobby’s days were unrelenting. He flipped eggs and baked pies, fought with suppliers. He came home to Rebecca’s cries and dirty diapers. At night he slept the sleep of the exhausted and depleted—a desperate unconsciousness. I was grateful for his waning interest in sex, not only because I was tired also but because my nipples had turned brown from Rebecca’s nursing. Three yellow stretch marks stitched their way from my bottom rib to my crotch. I was forty-one. I couldn’t feel pretty anymore. If Bobby had been more ardent or high-strung, if he’d shamefacedly confessed that I repelled him now, I’d have had something to work from. I might have started on a new kind of defiant pride. But he was himself, a charitable, hardworking man. We slept peacefully together.

Jonathan generated more static electricity as he ran through his days. If Bobby moved with the methodical, slightly bovine will of a vacuum cleaner, sucking up each errand and task, Jonathan clattered along like an eggbeater. He was manic and flushed, vague-eyed from lack of rest. He and Bobby both told me that, as a waiter, he offered charm in place of competence. Water glasses went unfilled. Eggs ordered scrambled arrived sunnyside up. He said there were moments during the breakfast rush when he actually seemed to fall asleep while moving. One moment he’d be filling a cream pitcher and the next he’d be standing beside a table, in the middle of taking an order, with no recollection of the intervening time. Soon he and Bobby would hire a waitress, and Jonathan would become the host and backup errand boy. “I’ll make sure everybody’s happy,” he said. “I’ll pour them more coffee and ask about their hometowns. We’ll hire a specialist to see that they actually get what they order.”

His true vocation was the baby. Every evening after work he brought her something: a plastic doll from the dime store, a rose from somebody’s garden, a pair of miniature white sunglasses. He took her for long walks before dinner and read to her after.

Around four in the morning he’d wake her, change her diaper, and bring her to Bobby’s and my bed. He was comically paternal in boxer shorts, carrying our sleepy child. “I know it borders on child abuse, getting her up like this,” he said. “But we need to see her before we go off to bake the bread.” He’d crawl into bed beside me, holding Rebecca on his lap. Some mornings she whined sleepily in the lamplight. Some mornings she chuckled and mouthed unintelligible words. “Miss Rebecca,” Jonathan would whisper. “Oh, you’re a fine thing, aren’t you? Mm-hm. Oh yes. Look at those hands. You’ll be a tennis player, huh? Or a violinist, or a human fly.” He kept up a stream of talk, an unwavering flow. Sometimes when she cried, only Jonathan could comfort her. She’d wail in my arms, and buck and shriek in Bobby’s. But when Jonathan took her she’d quiet down. She’d stare at him with eyes that were greedy and surprisingly hard. She clung to him because he was elusive and because, during his hours at home, he took the most elaborate, courtly care of her. Even that early, I believe she was falling in love.

Rebecca and I shared a more nervous kind of love. While the boys were away, she and I lived together in a state of constant need. She needed and, with growing vehemence, resented my protection. I only needed her safety but I needed it completely, all the time. I had to know she was all right, every minute. It took its toll on both of us. Sometimes when we were together, when I checked the temperature of her bathwater or snatched a pencil out of her mouth, I could almost feel the question crackling in the air around us—
What if I fail to protect
? We could grow irritable together. I could be short-tempered with her, and bossy; I could deny her too much. She was addicted to my fears. She wept if I watched her too closely, and wept if she realized that for a moment I’d forgotten to watch her at all.

I was beginning to understand something about my mother. She’d made a choice after I was born. There wasn’t room in the house or in her parsimonious nature for two difficult children. She’d been forced to choose. Maybe that was how the battle started. My father had had to fight for a share. He’d used his best weapons, his sex and recklessness, but my mother had prevailed with her powers of organization and rectitude. I’d loved my father more. He’d called me Peg and Scarlett O’Hara, said it was all right to buy anything we wanted. But toward the end, when he fell cursing on the front lawn and drunkenly broke furniture, I’d turned away from him. Finally, a child will choose order over passion or charm.

As a grown woman I’d fallen in love with Jonathan’s intelligence and humor and, I suppose, with his harmlessness. He was neither frigid nor dangerous. Neither man nor woman. There was no threat of failure through sex. Now I saw how Rebecca, too, would one day fall in love with him. He had a father’s allure. He had a mother’s warmth without the implied threat—she would not die if Jonathan briefly lost track of her. He worked all day and then came home with a present in his hands, flushed with the sheer excitement of seeing her after so many hours’ separation. Bobby was sweetly remote and I was too constant. Jonathan exerted a steady charm made perfect by his daily absence. Rebecca would be his. She’d care for Bobby and me but she’d belong to Jonathan.

There were times—moments—when I believed I had in fact found my reward. I had love, and a place on earth. I was part of something sweetened and buffered. A family. It was what I’d thought I wanted. My own family had crackled with jealousy and rage. Not a single one of my parents’ wedding gifts survived. We’d devoured the past. Now nothing was left to inherit but the improvements my mother had made, the gilt fixtures and floral prints, after my father went off to quit drinking and find Christ and then start drinking again.

But at other times I missed the violent wrongheadedness of my own family. We’d been difficult people, known around the neighborhood: Poor Amelia Stuckart and That Man She Married. I’d grown famous in our suburb for being Their Poor Little Girl. I’d based my early self-inventions on the concepts of deprivation and pride. I’d worn the shortest skirts, teased my hair into a brittle storm. I’d fucked my first skinny bass player at fourteen, in the back of a van. The local forces of order made it easy for me by wearing lumpy bras and girlish hairdos, by slathering their jowls with Aqua Velva. They said, “Join us in our world,” and I found a drug dealer for a boyfriend. I watched myself shrink in the eyes of the counselors and the pastors—
perhaps, in fact, Mrs. Rollins, this one is beyond our help
. I went to school with a pint of tequila in my purse. I shot through the frozen Rhode Island nights sizzling on speed. I left a vapor trail behind. People who’ve been well cared for can’t imagine the freedom there is in being bad.

Now, late in life, I’d been rescued. The boys came straight home every night, took care of Rebecca, cooked our dinner. Their love wasn’t immaculate. They may have loved one another more than they loved me. They may have been using me without quite knowing it. I could live with that. I didn’t mind touching the rough bottom of people’s good intentions. What I had trouble with sometimes was the simple friendliness of it. We lived in a world of kindness and domestic order. I sometimes thought of myself as Snow White living among the dwarfs. The dwarfs took good care of her. But how long would she have lasted there without the hope of meeting someone life-sized? How long would she have swept and mended before she began to see her life as composed of safe haven and subtle but pervasive lacks?

ALICE

W
HEN
I summoned Jonathan to Arizona, I didn’t mention the parcel I had for him. It wasn’t the sort of gift to talk about over the telephone. I simply exercised my motherly prerogative and demanded a visit. I wasn’t generally much trouble to him, and he had always suffered from an exaggerated sense of his own culpability. I suspect he wished I would burden him more. I think he’d have found some relief in a beleaguered, badgering mother. Given his nature, he had little choice but to obey when I called and said I wanted to see him. “The desert’s lovely this time of year,” I said. “Please come out for a few days.” And he did.

I met him at the Phoenix airport. Country life hadn’t changed him much. Since he’d left for college more than ten years earlier, and I’d grown accustomed to going months without seeing him, I had learned a new objectivity. As a little boy he’d seemed like an invention of mine, and I’d loved him with a stinging, tangled intensity that hurt me at times. It was as if the part of me I felt tenderest toward, the little wounded part that wanted only to cry and be held, had been cut out and now lived separately, beyond my powers of consolation. His existence compelled and distressed me so much that I scarcely knew what he looked like. Now I loved him less dreadfully, from a deeper reserve of calm, and I could see him better in his human particulars. Among the disembarking passengers at the airport he was pale and pretty but unfinished-looking; as he aged I began to see that he stood in danger of growing old without acquiring a visible aspect of repose. Unmarked and boyish, with a boy’s equine beauty, he was taking on the perennially fresh, untried quality that can lead an old man to look like a shocked, ancient child. I waved from among those waiting and he made his way toward me, chipper and a little haunted-looking, threading gingerly through the crowd as if he suspected it might be full of enemies in disguise.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, my dear.”

We embraced, inquired after one another’s health and happiness, and started for the car. On the way he asked me, “How’s business?”

“Booming,” I said. “I’m getting more calls than I can handle, but I hate to turn anybody away at this stage. I’ve been trying to hire another cook. But it’s hard to find anybody who’ll do things the way I like them done.”

“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Who ever expected you to turn into a catering mogul?”

“Watch yourself, now. Don’t get patronizing.”

“I’m not being patronizing. When did you get so thin-skinned?”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” I said. “Nerves, I guess. I’ve never had a business at all, much less a successful one. I keep thinking something will happen and it will all just come apart.”

“Don’t worry. Or is that being patronizing too?
Do
worry. Awful things happen to the nicest people.”

“True,” I said. “Entirely true. How’s your own business?”

“Insane. It seems like we’re always there, and everything is always right on the verge of total madness. But we’re breaking even. On our busiest days we even make a little money.”

“Good,” I said. “It’s a tough field. Breaking even your first year means you’re succeeding.”

“I guess. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘I forgot to take table five their coffee.’”

“Welcome to the front lines,” I said.

When we reached the car, we had a small cordial tussle over who would drive. I preferred to, since I knew the way, but a grown son doesn’t care to be chauffeured by his mother even on her home ground. I tossed him the keys, for his comfort’s sake.

We drove along the flat bright highway, talking of ordinary things. The sun, which was not too merciless at that time of year, shone on the flowering yuccas and the exquisite charcoal-gray tangles of mesquite. I thought without envy of the drizzle and blear that prevailed just then in the East. The desert, I’d found, had a beauty too severe to sink immediately into your skin. Its nearest geographical relative was the glacier—like a glacier it could fool the uninitiated into mistaking its slow turning for stasis. We who lived there loved it for its simplicity and cleanliness, its daily suggestion of the everlasting. A forested landscape came to seem both crowded and ephemeral, sweet enough but far too young, and subject to unpredictable turns of fortune. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in deserts. It is no accident that the elderly often return there.

“You look great,” Jonathan said as he drove. “I like what you did to your hair.”

“Well, I have to make an appearance now,” I said. “I can’t stumble around town like the wild woman of the mountains anymore. To tell you the truth, I’ve found a barber. A men’s barber. Most of the women’s salons out here still insist on giving you these poofy lacquered
hairdos
, and I’ve got no interest in that. I have it cut once every three or four weeks, and don’t think about it otherwise.”

“I love it,” he said. “My mother is a catering mogul with a crew cut. I’m not being patronizing. I’m being appreciative.”

He pulled in at the condominium, and carried his bag into the house. “Place hasn’t changed,” he said.

“It’s just lost a little more ground to the forces of entropy,” I said. “I meant to get it whipped into slightly better shape before you got here. But a good steady client of mine called with a last-minute dinner party, so I spent yesterday making shrimp with cilantro pesto instead of vacuuming and dusting.”

“It’s okay. Our house in Cleveland was always a little too orderly, to tell you the truth. I mean, I’m glad to know you’re not out here cleaning all the time.”

“That’s the least of your worries. Believe me.”

Because he’d be sleeping on the fold-out couch, there was no unpacking to do. He simply set his suitcase in a corner. As he did so, I was overtaken by nervousness—I’d brought him all the way to Arizona for such a strange purpose. Perhaps I’d pass it off as a simple visit after all. Feed him, buy him a few new articles of clothing over his protests, and send him home again.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“A little. I didn’t eat the lunch they served on the plane. At a certain point in my flying career I realized I could just refuse the tray when they brought it. I still feel reckless doing it, though. Like I’m throwing away money.”

“Why don’t we go out for a late lunch?” I said. “I’ve found a marvelous place about ten miles from here, where they make their tortillas from scratch. I’d love to hire their cook away from them, have somebody who really knows traditional Mexican cooking, but I don’t think I could pay her enough.”

“Sounds great,” he said. “Let’s go.”

For a moment he was so like his father that I stopped and stared at him, the blood ringing in my head. All mothers must experience such moments, when their grown children—who have seemed to depart irrevocably into their own personalities—suddenly reveal a strain of their father’s nature so pure and undiluted they might be the man himself, reborn, right down to the three-note cough that has punctuated the past forty-plus years. What I saw in Jonathan just then was Ned’s easy, boneless willingness; his urge to be pleasantly enthusiastic and to keep things rolling along. If I’d been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I’d have taken him by the shoulders and said, “Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you’ll never make a life that uses you.”

Instead, I took the car keys from him and said, “I’d better drive this time. Even I’m not sure exactly how to get to this place, and I’ve been a dozen times.”

We spent the next two days talking and eating and going to movies. I gave him the tour of my rented kitchen and makeshift office, introduced him to my staff of three. I inquired after his life as well, although I wasn’t always sure how to phrase my questions. “How’s the baby?” was the most obvious opening.

“She’s fine,” he said over a margarita. “She’s amazing. Sometimes it seems like she’s changing a little every day. I’m beginning to understand why people have a half dozen kids—it’s hard to realize that now she can crawl, and she’ll never be quite so helpless again. It’s a relief, too. But I can see how you’d want to have another one just for the sake of seeing somebody else through that incredibly helpless period again.”

“And you spend a good deal of time with her?” I asked.

“Of course. Of course I do. I’m her father. I’m one of her fathers.”

I shook my head. “Maybe I don’t quite get it,” I said.

“What’s to get? You’ve been there, you’ve seen us all together. We’re three people who have a baby. What’s the big deal?”

“No big deal,” I said. “I guess I’m just old-fashioned.”

“You’re not old-fashioned. Not with a haircut like that.”

“Well, all right. I worry that you’re being exploited in all this. Bobby and Clare have each other. What have you got?”

This was delicate ground. We’d never formally acknowledged his proclivities—other than Bobby, I’d never met a liaison of his. As far as I knew, he didn’t have them. And here’s the awful truth: I preferred it that way. If he’d insisted on it, I’d have tried to accommodate a mental image of my son engaged in sexual acts with other men. But he wasn’t prone to insistence. He paid his visits in the guise of a chaste bachelor, and his father and I had always been willing to receive him as such. If life was failing to mark him in some way, I suppose we must have played our part.

“We’ve all got each other,” he said. “Mom, you’re right. You’re not getting it. Maybe we should talk about something else.”

“If you like. Just tell me this. You’re happy doing what you’re doing?”

“Yes. I’m ecstatic. And I’m part of something. I’m part of a family and a business. We’re building a home together. You get too caught up in the fact that we don’t look exactly like an ordinary family.”

“All right. I’ll try not to get too caught up in that.”

And, after a moment, we moved on to other subjects. I could have responded to confessions of unorthodox love, if he’d chosen to make them. But I could not demand such candor. I simply couldn’t. It would be his move to make.

I didn’t get around to my own business until the night before his departure. We had eaten in—I’d made a simple avocado vinaigrette and done salmon steaks on the grill. After the plates were cleared away I started coffee and said, “Jonathan, dear, there’s a reason I asked you to come this time. There’s something I want to give you.”

His eyes quickened—he must have thought I had a family treasure put away for him. For a moment I could see him perfectly at the age of four, precociously well mannered but beside himself with greed in a toy store, where no acquisition was too lavish to lie beyond imagining.

“What is it?” he asked, his eagerness politely concealed.

I sighed. If I’d had a quilt or a gold watch I’d have given it to him instead, but neither Ned nor I had ever saved things like that. We both came from families more interested in the future than in the past. I went upstairs to the bedroom without speaking, got the box out of my dresser and brought it down.

He knew what it was. “Oh, Mom,” he said.

I set it gently on the table, a smooth wooden rectangle with a brass plaque that bore Ned’s full name and his dates. “It’s time for you to take charge of this,” I said. “That was your father’s one request. That you decide about disposal.”

He nodded. He looked at the box but did not touch it. “I know,” he said. “He told me.”

“Have you been thinking about it?” I asked.

“Sure. Sure I have. Mom, that’s part of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m trying to make some kind of home.”

“I see.” I sat down beside him. We both watched the box as if we suspected it might move on its own.

“Have you looked inside?” he asked.

“Yes. At first I thought I couldn’t stand to. Then as time passed I realized I couldn’t stand not to.”

“And?”

“It’s sooty. Yellowish-gray. There’s more than you’d think. I’d imagined just a handful, something talcumy you could toss into the wind with one hand. But it’s not like that, there’s quite a lot. There are some little slivers of bone, dark, like old ivory. Honey, I can tell you this—it’s no more of your father than a pair of his old shoes would be. Do you want to look?”

“No. Not right now.”

“All right.”

“Why are you giving this to me now?” he asked. “I mean, well, exactly that. Why now?”

I hesitated. Here was the truth: I had started seeing someone. He was younger than I, his name was Paul Martinez, and he’d begun teaching me a range of pleasures I had hardly imagined while married to Ned.

It seemed I was living my life in reverse. With Ned I had had order and sanctuary, the serenity one hopes for in old age. Now, at the onset of my true old age, I seemed to be falling in love with an argumentative dark-skinned man who played the guitar and kissed me in spots Ned had hesitated even to call by their names. I felt wrong about having his ashes in the house now.

But all I said to Jonathan was “I’m afraid I’m turning into Morticia Addams, with my husband’s ashes on the mantelpiece. I shouldn’t have kept them this long.”

There would be time to tell about Paul, if the attraction caught and held. Although his attentions thrilled me, I didn’t trust them yet—there were so many reasons for a younger man to fleetingly believe he loved an older woman. Why upset Jonathan needlessly? I’d wait and see whether this affair was serious enough to merit upsetting him.

“I can understand that,” he said. “I can’t quite believe these are his real ashes here. It seems so…It doesn’t seem like something that would happen in the twentieth century. For a private citizen to just have his father’s ashes in a box.”

“Do you want to take them out to the desert together?” I said. “We could go right now.”

“Here? You mean take them out and scatter them behind the house?”

“Yes. Now listen. This isn’t the life your father and I dreamed about. It wasn’t our fantasies come true. Hardly. But it’s where we ended up, and we weren’t unhappy here. To tell you the truth, I’ve been very happy.”

“He told me not to bury him in the desert. He told me that explicitly. He wanted me to settle down, and bury him wherever I made a home.”