The End of the World as We Know It (18 page)

How did they go on laughing at jokes they heard, laughing at cartoons in the
New Yorker
where the people, even the Cheever people, led the lives they imagined for themselves, lives of sophistication and adultery and bitterness and cocktails and irony, sermons and soda water, and, yes, reading John O'Hara, and making Christmas presents for friends because they didn't have all that much money, and making applejack out of cider we squeezed on a day when my brother had a hangover so he almost threw up, and making clever carving boards and bread boards and entertaining the Episcopal cadets with big pots of spaghetti and garlic bread and having my grandmother's friend Nell Baker come for a month in August from the house where she lived in the Plains, and telling people he had caddied once for Gloria Swanson at the Fredericksburg Country Club although it wasn't true, and going to my father's mother's house and sitting in the
stifling heat and eating those big meals in the middle of the day, and telling endless stories about things that had happened decades before, stories they told over and over the way you do, each new audience a fresh chance, trying to make contact, trying to make an impression of insouciance and glamour, Gloria Swanson and all, and about how my father bought a Turner watercolor for ten dollars in New York when he was a little boy when he went there on a trip with his father and it really is, it really is a Turner watercolor, and I've seen a picture of him and his father with the Empire State building behind them, and my mother telling everybody about how, on their honeymoon in New York, my father had undertipped and the waiter had followed them out of the restaurant and spit in my father's face, and spanking their children with a hairbrush or a belt when we were bad, although not very hard, and having drinks with Edward Albee and meeting Arnold Toynbee and Muriel Rukeyser, and Carson McCullers and Katherine Anne Porter, and reading John le Carré and James Thurber and Michael Arlen—
Exiles
, my mother's favorite book that year, it was always on her bedside table, she must have read it half a dozen times, she knew the whole story before she turned the first page—and wearing red tartan silk dresses with white lace inserts for a fancy dinner for the Barretts when the table was set with red glasses and all the gleaming silver and the best china, and cleaning all the Canton in the corner cupboard once a year, my grandmother saying the reason there weren't any dinner plates was that my mother had broken them all as a child, one plate for every tantrum, and my father calling me when I was fourteen into the sitting room where they were having drinks with two other couples so I could
show everybody my Adam's apple and they all laughed, and, in the summer, putting slipcovers made of white linen and red piping on all the furniture, slipcovers that Lula Hall had made, and choosing new materials—we never said fabrics—to recover old family furniture, blue velvets and cheap brocades and tapestries, and buying cheap new furniture from Schewel's, so that somebody once said there wasn't a single comfortable place to sit in our whole sitting room except the chair my mother always sat in, and making sweet bread and butter pickles in the summer and bitter marmalade in the winter, sterilizing the bottles, sealing the marmalade with melted paraffin, and being just regular people, just ordinary people of their time and class, until my grandmother got old and her friends got old so they wouldn't make the trip out to the country and come down our treacherous sidewalk to play bridge on Wednesdays when the weather was bad, leaving her with all those sandwiches, and my parents began to fall apart by degrees so fewer people came for drinks and they went out less often and the colleges didn't have fancy dances anymore so the fancy dresses rotted to ruin in the closet, and my mother had a cleaning woman, Bertis Dean, who came and kept everything in some semblance of order and a man Alexander Smothers to come once a week in a stinking truck to take the garbage—he got paid two dollars and a shot of whiskey—but she went on making dinners and welcoming us home from school with our favorites and they tried, they really did, to be good parents, and discussing books with us, and sitting by the radiator in the winter and reading mystery stories and poetry by Ngaio Marsh and Robert Bly, how did they go on?

What did they remember? How much did they forget?

How did they go on learning crewelwork and making their own clothes and him writing a column for a finky little Virginia magazine, columns that people loved for their facile charm and wrote letters about after he died, and writing for
American Heritage
and
Holiday
and once for the
New Yorker
, a funny story about my father's cousin breaking a rib while he was out duck hunting and he rolled under a barbwire fence, a bob wire fence as we called it, and rolled over a box of Marlboro cigarettes and heard his bone crack, he was not without distinction or talent, my father, and falling into blind rages at each other, except my grandmother who lived to be ninety-four, knowing what she knew, or forgetting what she had never really heard about what happened, and whom I never saw angry except that snowy day when her friends wouldn't come to play bridge, and my mother and father coming to my graduation and eating crab salad in my apartment in Baltimore with my roommate and his parents and then listening while I gave a speech to the whole graduation assembly in which I described the relentless viciousness and occasional grace of university life in the late sixties, so critical of my college that the president wouldn't shake my hand when he gave me my diploma, but some members of the faculty stood and applauded and a man came up to me at dinner at Hausner's that night, a restaurant that was famous for having the biggest ball of string in the world, came up with tears in his eyes and told me how moved he'd been, and I competed in piano competitions, which I never won, and edited the school newspaper in high school, my mother writing thank-you notes famous for their warmth and politesse and perfection, going to the Homestead to ride in sleighs through the winter snows, and going to house parties,
going to the movies to see
South Pacific
, and asking the children to set the table, to do their homework, to mind their manners, to write thank-you notes on Christmas afternoon while they took their naps, and reading in bed, and smoking Larks, so that we could hear the strike of the match after the alarm went off on school days, my mother smoking in the morning dark in bed, before she put her feet on the floor, just like I do now, and going to bed, my father in his boxer shorts, my mother in her thin nightgowns, and being the kind of people they were, bright and generous and eager for the next thing, and then less and less so, until finally they would start the pickles and let them rot in the crock, until finally she didn't make apple butter anymore and my grandmother got too old to make marmalade so she bought it off the shelf, Dundee, in little white pottery jars, and then she died in her peaceful way, and my mother and father went on until they didn't care enough to read or dress or cut their own toenails or defend themselves against alcoholism and cancer and filthiness and disrepair and rats in the house, how did they go on?

I know how I went on, but here is my question: How did they live a life, knowing what they knew, how did they thrive for so long and then fail? How did they go on?

Before we got the cowboy outfits, we got the Roman outfits. There was a gold plastic breastplate, with strong pecs with raised nipples and awesome abs, and there was a centurion's helmet and a plastic sword. It was purely an upper body thing, we didn't get little skirts or anything, or gold shin guards, so we had to put on all this gear with our blue jeans and sneakers. It was not exactly a Steve Reeves look, but my brother and I were pretty impressed. After Christmas had gone, however, we found that the Roman centurion outfits lacked a certain something. They lacked staying power. They lacked pith.

Perhaps it was the wide, unbridgeably wide disparity between our own boys' bodies and the men's bodies meant to fit snugly inside the breastplate. Perhaps there was something about the straps, or the dinky plastic sword, or our own total lack of knowledge about the Roman Empire, but there was something missing, and the outfits were soon relegated to the miasma of the toy chest.

But when we were six and eight, my older brother and I got matching cowboy outfits for Christmas. There was a vest in a kind of pinto pattern, with a sheriff's badge, a checked flannel shirt, and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, which was black. There was a belt with holsters and a pair of six-shooters.

My God, we loved those costumes. We had a large place in the country and we could find infinite ways of playing good guys and bad guys and badlanders and, well, cowboys. Cowboys we knew something about.

We had actually been to a 3-D cowboy movie that showed Indians throwing sharp spears straight at your face so you had to duck to avoid them. A man almost died of thirst before finding a pond of brackish water. We went to bunches of cowboy movies, regular 2-D ones. People had gunfights and they wore fringed buckskins and bolo ties and they fell in love with school-teachers and there was always Katy Jurado and all kinds of things happened to fire your imagination and we remembered all of it.

I have a photograph that shows the two of us in our cowboy clothes. Our hats are tilted back on our heads. We look proud. We look happy.

The cowboy thing could have gone on forever, but something happened. It was so strange that it almost defies description, but it happened to us while we were still cowboys, just back from riding the range.

It was a cold day. We didn't care. It was such a change from going exploring or throwing mud clods at each other, which was how we usually passed our spare time, trying to come as close to a real injury as possible without actually having to go to the emergency room, so we were out riding the range, hunting down bad guys and blowing the thin trails of smoke away from our hot cap pistols, when our mother called us into lunch.

We didn't walk in. We sidled in. We had seen in the movies the way the cowboys would stalk into the saloons, walking actually sort of the way runway models walk now, slinking, waiting
for the first fire of the first tossed shot of bad whiskey, and we wanted to be everything they were and do everything they did.

We sat down at the yellow linoleum table in our tiny kitchen, and my mother served our lunch. Tuna fish sandwiches and a glass of milk. Grub.

We were total cowboys, except for the cheesy high-tops we had to wear because we didn't have cowboy boots, but that didn't matter when you had the swagger, the Western ethos in your bloodstream. We spoke in terse sentences. We said things like “pardner” and “pardon me, ma'am,” although that wasn't so unusual since we addressed our mother as ma'am anyway.

I took off my hat so it lay against my back, held on by the chinstrap, and I began to eat. My brother, who was as dead stubborn as a box of nails, kept his hat flat on his head, his arms folded, but tense, ready, as though he might reach for his six-shooter at any moment and start shooting shot glasses off the shelf behind the bar.

“Eat your lunch, darling,” said my mother.

“No ma'am,” said my brother.

“You must be hungry. Your brother's eating his lunch.”

“I could eat a horse, I'm so hungry.”

“Then eat your lunch.”

“Can't do it, ma'am.”

“Why not?”

My brother turned a sardonic face toward her.

“I won't eat my lunch until you say, ‘Eat your lunch, cowboy.'”

“What?”

“Eat your lunch, cowboy. Say it.”

“You're being ridiculous. Eat your lunch.”

My mother busied herself around the kitchen, getting things ready for supper or something. Five minutes passed. My brother stared ahead in stony silence.

My mother turned from the sink. She was getting irritated now.

“I thought I told you to eat your lunch.”

“Not until you say, ‘Eat your lunch, cowboy.'”

“I won't. I won't say it. And you will eat your lunch like your brother. Look. He's almost finished.”

“Not until you say it.”

I could feel real trouble brewing. For some reason, for some reason known only to housewives in the fifties, when tranquilizers were just beginning to be prescribed for the incredible boredom and desperation they felt, my mother just snapped. She just freaked the hell out. She refused to say it. She refused, and my brother, who was not on Miltowns, refused to eat.

“I told you to eat your lunch, and you're going to eat it.”

“Nope.”

Trouble was not only brewing, it was bubbling over. I finished my sandwich. I carried my plate and my glass to the sink. My brother had not moved a muscle. My mother sat down at the table across from him and they just stared at each other. If his six-shooter had had real bullets, he would have shot her. If her tranquilizers hadn't already kicked in, she would have strangled him. It was that intense.

I stood awkwardly in the kitchen, not knowing what to do, not knowing what was going to happen.

Nothing happened. Nothing happened for hours. The bread dried out around the edges. For awhile she tried to discuss it
with him. Then she realized that was futile and she just sat staring at him as his lunch grew stale. She shouted at him. She pleaded. She threatened. Nothing.

He was more obstinate by the minute. So was she, despite the Miltowns.

They had a hard lot, those mothers in the fifties. They were home all day. They had to put bobby pins in their hair, pulling them open with their teeth. Everything had to be perfect all the time. And they had these children who had strange notions picked up at the movies. They had children with perfect manners who were completely recalcitrant.

I wish I could remember how it all turned out. I wish I could remember if he had to eat the tuna fish sandwich for dinner, or whether he went to bed without any supper at all.