The End of the World as We Know It (23 page)

We didn't know what to do. The car wouldn't run. They tried things, of course, they tried what they had learned on old wrecks and farm trucks but they didn't know much and the car wouldn't do anything.

There was a house across a field. We walked to it and the people
were at supper but they kindly let us in. People did that then. They opened their doors to strangers without hesitation. They offered them something cool to drink. They would have offered us some supper, if there had been enough. They had children, who stared at us as though we were astronauts. I called my father collect.

It was cocktail time. Their supper wouldn't be for another hour. I spoke to my father. A lot of bad unsayable things were said about what kind of a person I was, and he said he sure as hell wouldn't come get us and he didn't give a good goddamn how we got home.

We took the Greyhound bus. The man was kind enough to drive us to the station, the roommate lugging all his luggage across the field, me locking the car although I don't know who could have stolen it anyway, since it didn't work. We waited hours for the bus, and we didn't get back to town until ten o'clock.

My father picked me up at the dilapidated station. He was white, speechless with rage.

At home, my mother was in her blue bathrobe with a cocktail by her side, and they didn't offer me anything to eat, and then they started in. It went on for a long time, and I don't remember it, I don't know what was said, except that it was bad. It was all about what kind of person I was and the kind of person I was was unacceptable.

I said that the car broke down. I hadn't hit anything. Nobody had been killed. It wasn't my fault. They heard nothing. My father said he had called a tow truck, and it was leaving at seven the next morning to go get the car and I had to ride with the tow
truck operator as a punishment for fucking up the car, only he didn't say that, I never heard my father say
fuck
in his life.

I was crying. I was tired and I finally couldn't stand it anymore and I was crying and I left them screaming at me and I went to bed. I don't know where my brother and sister were; they must have been there. They must have heard it. To me everything was silence, the kind of silence a deaf person hears, the kind of black a blind person sees.

My mother came up to bed. I heard her call my name. I asked her to please leave me alone and let me sleep, I had to get up early, but she wouldn't stop and she wanted me to come into their room. I sat at the foot of their bed and it started all over again and it went on for a long time while my father sat downstairs pulling on a drink. She was meaner than he was. She was probably smarter, and she knew how to get to you and she got to me and I started crying again because I was tired and because I just didn't get it. I didn't get what it was all about and, as calmly as I could, I said goodnight, and then I went back to my bed.

She called my name again.

“I'm not coming in there. I'm not going to come in there again.”

Pause. “Yes. Yes you are.” And I knew she was right, and I got up in my underwear and went and sat on my mother's bed again. I had just started wearing boxer shorts.

She was smoking. She had one of those little tartan beanbag ashtrays by her bed, you see them in flea markets now, so every time she stubbed out a cigarette there was a small noise like a child walking on a gravel driveway, and she had a drink, too, but she put the drink down and she looked at me, pulling on her cigarette, her bathrobe off, her summer nightgown thin against her body.

“I'm going to say this once, and I want you to listen carefully. If you're sleeping with him, if you're having sex with him, I'll put you in a mental hospital and I'll put him in prison.”

“What?”

“I've said it. Are you?”

I didn't say anything.

She screamed at me, “Are you?”

“No! I don't know what you're talking about!”

But I did, I did know. He had kissed me once on the forehead in the gauze-draped room and I burned with shame and fear. She knew. She knew, the way she always knew when I was going to have a migraine, she knew what was in my mind. She could see us, lying in an embrace on his bed in his candlelit room. She had seen him kiss me on the forehead, bending down and putting his hands on my shoulders and kissing me gently on the forehead. She could see that, if he had wanted to sleep with me, I would have let him. She could see that I was in love.

“Stop it. Just please stop it and let me go to bed. I'm not sleeping with anybody.” And I left and she didn't call me back anymore.

It was an early September night. I was just eighteen. I wanted to love my parents. I wanted them to be proud of me and I'm told they were, although they never told me. I wanted us not to look at one another like pit vipers through a pane of glass. I wanted to have sex with a blond-haired girl out by the river. I wanted the stinging, burning pain to stop. I wanted what I felt for the boy in the candlelit room to be embraceable, not to be some ephemeral wrong that my mother could see with pinpoint clarity.

I wanted to be someone else. I didn't want to be me anymore.

I got up and drove with the tow truck to get the car. I never knew what was wrong with it. There was a going-away cocktail party for me that day, and I refused to go.

“Yes, you will,” my mother said, and there was no point. No point at all. My parents had stopped speaking to me, hadn't spoken to me all day except for that.

At the party, my gentle aunt, my mother's sister, came up and put her hand on my arm. She was wearing short white cotton gloves with her sleeveless Liberty lawn.

“I know it's hard,” she said. “I know it's hard.” I didn't know what she meant. I didn't know what she knew.

The next day my parents drove me silently to Baltimore. They chatted, the way they always did, but it was as if I weren't there. We got to Baltimore after hours of agonizing silence where we spent the night with some friends of theirs in a great big Stanford White house in Roland Park. My parents never spoke to me, but they were charming and funny and not too drunk with our hosts. They made it appear as though we were talking just normally, and I played along.

I had said good-bye to my friend the night before. I told him nothing except that there was a big insane fight. I had impressed him with my parents' relentless cruelty. I had told him I loved him, I would always love him, so foolish, I didn't, but he had held me in his arms and kissed the top of my head and hugged me tighter and tighter until I couldn't breathe.

Afterward, he and my mother became best friends. They talked for hours. They did little art projects together. He helped her plant a new rock garden. He became one of those young
men she took to herself and counseled and charmed with her wit and her grace.

But that was later. That was after. As he held me in his arms, as he kissed me on the top of my head with tears in his eyes, there was no after.

I missed him with every part of my body. It was never the same ever again, not just because of my mother but because it was all as ephemeral as gauze and things change, and eventually we fought and I haven't spoken to him for years and years and years.

The next morning, my parents kissed our hosts good-bye—they were old, good friends—and drove me to campus. They helped me get my stuff into my dorm. I silently kissed my mother good-bye. I silently shook my father's hand.

My mother said, “Do brilliantly, darling. Write soon.” And without another word they left me standing there, waiting for the rest of my life to start.

In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are—joy, tenderness, success, beauty—but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us. Sons die, needles in their gangrenous arms, no matter how fathers value them and try to save them from degradation and despair. We lose everything we have worked to acquire, money and houses and dreams and friends. The meat of life goes bad one day and leaves us sickened.

Still, we tend to go on. We tend to want to live, to breathe the air, to stay in hotels in London or Prague and go to the theater to see the bright, the tantalizing new thing and watch baseball on TV and fly to pleasurable places in first class on airplanes and eat dinner in restaurants and pay for everybody with our platinum cards. We generally tend to love, and to be loved. We tend to want.

We want new sports jackets in the fall and linen shirts in the spring. We want to enjoy sexual pleasure. We want flat stomachs and strong arms and whatever kind of hair we don't have. We
want to live while we live, not to be inert and silent as the rocks. We want to do something with the time we have, something that will give that time a certain meaning, a certain weight.

We tend to continue. We tend to continue to gossip, to admire other men and women, to fall sumptuously, even if temporarily, in love, just for the sensation, just for the way we feel in our skin, the exhilaration, the exhaustion, the innate and delectable perfection of the first kiss, the plunge into the sublime abyss.

Even if very bad things happen.

We tend to want to love our families. We tend, in fact, to do so. We are caught in a filigree of relations, of ways of being with our families, and these ways seem both more real and more binding than other ways we are caught in the web of love. We tend to have some place we call home, and that place is defined by the place we grew up, by the way our mothers cooked dinner, by the ways we dressed as children, by the way we grew to maturity as members of a tribe that was completely and wholly unique in all the world.

Even if bad things happen.

Even if we choose to sever the ties to all we ever knew as home, to redefine the spaces we live in, the emotions that seem most natural to us, the ways we have of loving, there is a haunting feeling of loss and admiration for the people we knew first and best. Even if we never speak to them again, they are our first and purest loves. There is, for all of us, a time in which they meant the world.

Sometimes, that time lasts as long as we live. It is eternal as breath. It is changeless and deathless.

Sometimes, it ends at a very early age. Sometimes, we cannot help ourselves. Things happen.

We tend to want to hear the water from the creek flowing by as we go to sleep at night. We tend to want to hear rain on a tin roof. We tend to want to watch the sky turn into blue steel on a chilly fall evening. We will want to go on picnics, rent summer houses by the sea, to kiss, to learn French or Chinese cooking, to see the mountains across the broad brown track at Santa Anita.

We will want to be more beautiful than we are, to have better bodies, to be loved in ways the people who love us cannot imagine. In ways they can never get right, no matter how hard they try.

We will not get everything we want, but most of us will get some of it. And the things we get cannot be taken from us. They are permanent. They are on our permanent record.

I recently saw pictures of my mother as a young woman. She looked happy and beautiful, sitting down by the creek in a black skirt and a white sleeveless blouse and red flat shoes. She looked happy, and the water flowed clear by her red shoes and she had a drink by her feet. In the photograph, it is a billowing summer day. If the picture were to move for a moment, she would laugh.

She looks as though she is leading a charmed life, her hair short and dark and carefully arranged, her posture gamine, her eagerness for the charm of company clear in her face. Not just for the camera, for the world. She used to say, “A collision at sea can wreck your whole day.” “It's not a tragedy, it's an irritation.” That's the kind of thing the woman in the photograph used to say.

In another, she is sitting with a lovely friend, down by the creek on the same day, at peace and wrapped in the embrace of kindness and affection and the pleasure of friendship. Two pretty young women, just beginning the chore of raising children, of smocking dresses, of cooking dinners and changing sheets and of living a life in which things are taken care of, in which more is saved than is lost.

And I saw pictures of myself, holding my baby sister. I look happy. I, too, look eager for life. In the photograph I am six or seven years old. My sister is squirming out of my arms, and I am holding her, presenting her for the camera. I am a handsome child, in a striped T-shirt, my brother standing behind me, blond, buck-toothed, more serious for the camera than I am.

I look happy, even if bad things happened. In the photograph, I will look happy forever. I will never look tortured, or sad, or less than handsome. I will always wear a striped T-shirt. I will always hold my squirming sister. My brother will always have buck teeth, although they were, of course, laboriously straightened in his teens.

My mother had a necklace. It was costume jewelry, rhinestones set with fake rubies, an evening kind of thing. For dressing up. For going out. It was beautiful, in an old-fashioned kind of way, in an artificially glamorous kind of way. Like something the queen might wear, except hers would have real stones. Its intention was more endearing than its execution. It had a secret and permanent value. It was the first present my father ever gave my mother.

I still have it. We tend to go on loving the things the people
who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they did not turn out to be who you thought they were. I never saw my mother wear it.

I keep it because it looks like the kind of thing the woman in the photograph would own, the woman who dressed to go out at night, the woman who sewed and kept dresses in rich shades of red and blue, who hated green, who wore dresses to show off her waist. I keep it because it looks like the kind of present a man would give to a woman he loved, a woman for whom he had higher hopes than it turned out he could deliver.