A Home at the End of the World

  I go into the kitchen and find our mother washing fruit. She asks what’s going on. I tell her nothing is. Nothing at all.

  She sighs over an apple’s imperfection. The curtains sport blue teapots. Our mother works the apple with a scrub brush. She believes they come coated with poison.

  “Where’s Carlton?” she asks.

  “Don’t know,” I tell her.

  “Bobby?”

  “Huh?”

  “What exactly is going on?”

  “Nothing,” I say. My heart works itself up to a humingbird’s rate, more buzz than beat.

  “I think something is. Will you answer a question?”

  “Okay.”

  “Is your brother taking drugs?”

  I relax a bit. It is only drugs. I know why she’s asking. Lately police cars have been browsing our house like sharks. They pause, take note, glide on. Some neighborhood crackdown. Carlton is famous in these parts.

  “No,” I tell her.

  She faces me with the brush in one hand, an apple in the other. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” She knows something is up. Her nerves run through this house. She can feel dust settling on the tabletops, milk starting to turn in the refrigerator.

  “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.

  Carlton and I are the lackeys. We take coats, fetch drinks. We have done this at every party since we were small, trading on our precocity, doing a brother act. We know the moves. A big, lipsticked woman who has devoted her maidenhood to ninth-grade math calls me Mr. Right. An assistant vice principal in a Russian fur hat asks us both whether we expect to vote Democratic or Socialist. By sneaking sips I manage to get myself semi-crocked.

  The reliability of the evening is derailed halfway through, however, by a half dozen of Carlton’s friends. They rap on the door and I go for it, anxious as a carnival sharp to see who will step up next and swallow the illusion that I’m a kindly, sober nine-year-old child. I’m expecting callow adults and who do I find but a pack of young outlaws, big-booted and wild-haired. Carlton’s girlfriend stands in front, in an outfit made up almost entirely of fringe.

  “Hi, Bobby,” she says confidently. She comes from New York, and is more than just locally smart.

  “Hi,” I say. I let them all in despite a retrograde urge to lock the door and phone the police. Three are girls, four boys. They pass me in a cloud of dope smoke and sly-eyed greeting.

  What they do is invade the party. Carlton is standing on the far side of the rumpus room, picking the next album, and his girl cuts straight through the crowd to his side. She has the bones and the loose, liquid moves some people consider beautiful. She walks through that room as if she’d been sent to teach the whole party a lesson.

  Carlton’s face tips me off that this was planned. Our mother demands to know what’s going on here. She is wearing a long dark-red dress that doesn’t interfere with her shoulders. When she dresses up you can see what it is about her, or what it was. She is responsible for Carlton’s beauty. I have our father’s face.

  Carlton does some quick talking. Though it’s against our mother’s better judgment, the invaders are suffered to stay. One of them, an Eddie Haskell for all his leather and hair, tells her she is looking good. She is willing to hear it.

  So the outlaws, house-sanctioned, start to mingle. I work my way over to Carlton’s side, the side unoccupied by his girlfriend. I would like to say something ironic and wised-up, something that will band Carlton and me against every other person in the room. I can feel the shape of the comment I have in mind but, being a tipsy nine-year-old, can’t get my mouth around it. What I say is, “Shit, man.”

  Carlton’s girl laughs at me. She considers it amusing that a little boy says “shit.” I would like to tell her what I have figured out about her, but I am nine, and three-quarters gone on Tom Collinses. Even sober, I can only imagine a sharp-tongued wit.

  “Hang on, Frisco,” Carlton tells me. “This could turn into a real party.”

  I can see by the light in his eyes what is going down. He has arranged a blind date between our parents’ friends and his own. It’s a Woodstock move—he is plotting a future in which young and old have business together. I agree to hang on, and go to the kitchen, hoping to sneak a few knocks of gin.

  There I find our father leaning up against the refrigerator. A line of butterfly-shaped magnets hovers around his head. “Are you enjoying this party?” he asks, touching his goatee. He is still getting used to being a man with a beard.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I am, too,” he says sadly. He never meant to be a high school music teacher. The money question caught up with him.

  “What do you think of this music?” he asks. Carlton has put the Stones on the turntable. Mick Jagger sings “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Our father gestures in an openhanded way that takes in the room, the party, the whole house—everything the music touches.

  “I like it,” I say.

  “So do I.” He stirs his drink with his finger, and sucks on the finger.

  “I love it,” I say, too loud. Something about our father leads me to raise my voice. I want to grab handfuls of music out of the air and stuff them into my mouth.

  “I’m not sure I could say I love it,” he says. “I’m not sure if I could say that, no. I would say I’m friendly to its intentions. I would say that if this is the direction music is going in, I won’t stand in its way.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. I am already anxious to get back to the party, but don’t want to hurt his feelings. If he senses he’s being avoided he can fall into fits of apology more terrifying than our mother’s rages.

  “I think I may have been too rigid with my students,” our father says. “Maybe over the summer you boys could teach me a few things about the music people are listening to these days.”

  “Sure,” I say, loudly. We spend a minute waiting for the next thing to say.

  “You boys are happy, aren’t you?” he asks. “Are you enjoying this party?”

  “We’re having a great time,” I say.

  “I thought you were. I am, too.”

  I have by this time gotten myself to within jumping distance of the door. I call out, “Well, goodbye,” and dive back into the party.

  Something has happened in my small absence. The party has started to roll. Call it an accident of history and the weather. Carlton’s friends are on decent behavior, and our parents’ friends have decided to give up some of their wine-and-folk-song propriety to see what they can learn. Carlton is dancing with a vice principal’s wife. Carlton’s friend Frank, with his ancient-child face and IQ in the low sixties, dances with our mother. I see that our father has followed me out of the kitchen. He positions himself at the party’s edge; I jump into its center. I invite the fuchsialipped math teacher to dance. She is only too happy. She is big and graceful as a parade float, and I steer her effortlessly out into the middle of everything. My mother, who is known ar
ound school for Sicilian discipline, dances freely, which is news to everybody. There is no getting around her beauty.

  The night rises higher and higher. A wildness sets in. Carlton throws new music on the turntable—Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Dead. The future shines for everyone, rich with the possibility of more nights exactly like this. Even our father is pressed into dancing, which he does like a flightless bird, all flapping arms and potbelly. Still, he dances. Our mother has a kiss for him.

  Finally I nod out on the sofa, blissful under the drinks. I am dreaming of flight when our mother comes and touches my shoulder. I smile up into her flushed, smiling face.

  “It’s hours past your bedtime,” she says, all velvet motherliness. I nod. I can’t dispute the fact.

  She keeps on nudging my shoulder. I am a moment or two apprehending the fact that she actually wants me to leave the party and go to bed. “No,” I tell her.

  “Yes,” she smiles.

  “No,” I say cordially, experimentally. This new mother can dance, and flirt. Who knows what else she might allow?

  “Yes.” The velvet motherliness leaves her voice. She means business, business of the usual kind. I get myself out of there and no excuses this time. I am exactly nine and running from my bedtime as I’d run from death.

  I run to Carlton for protection. He is laughing with his girl, a sweaty question mark of hair plastered to his forehead. I plow into him so hard he nearly goes over.

  “Whoa, Frisco,” he says. He takes me up under the arms and swings me a half-turn. Our mother plucks me out of his hands and sets me down, with a good farm-style hold on the back of my neck.

  “Say good night, Bobby,” she says. She adds, for the benefit of Carlton’s girl, “He should have been in bed before this party started.”