A Home at the End of the World

Bobby laughed, and then looked at me self-consciously, to be sure I’d intended to make a joke. His expression was so hesitant—he agonized so elaborately over the simplest social transactions—that I started to laugh. My laughter inspired more laughter in him, and Jonathan joined in, laughing over some private joke of his own. This was one of the herb’s best qualities: under its influence you could start laughing at any little thing and, once you’d started, feed it just by letting your eyes wander. Everything seemed absurd and funny—the Buddha- shaped incense burner standing next to a spring-driven hula girl on Jonathan’s desktop; the domesticated, dog-like quality of Bobby’s tan suede shoes.

Sometimes in those days I thought of Wendy from Peter Pan —an island mother to a troop of lost boys. I didn’t make an outright fool of myself. I didn’t buy gauzy skirts or Indian jewelry or sandals from Mexico. I didn’t let my hair grow long and wild. But there was a different feeling now. I had a new secret, a better one. Previously, my only secrets had been the facts that I feared sex and could not summon any interest in getting to know our neighbors. I’d felt frail and thin to the point of translucence, an insubstantial figure who got headaches from the cold and sinus infections from the heat. But this new secret was buoying, exhilarating—I would be the scandal of the neighborhood if I was found out. The secret warmed me as I passed along the aisles of the supermarket. I was a mother who got stoned with her son. The local women—big women loading their wire carts with marshmallows and ice cream, with bright pink luncheon meats and sugared cereals—would have considered me unfit, scandalous, degenerate. I felt young and slender, full of devious promise. There would be a life after Cleveland.

And, perhaps best of all, I found that when I got stoned I could manage things with Ned. The dope loosened me, so that if he pressed his mouth onto mine or stroked me roughly I could go along with it in a lazy, liquid state that differed utterly from what I had once meant by arousal. Sex had always produced a queasy inner tightening that turned quickly from pleasure to panic and from panic to pain, so that as Ned worked his sweaty way toward conclusion I lay nervous and angry beneath him, saying silently, “Finish, finish, finish.” Now I could accommodate him with a languor that produced neither outright pleasure nor pain, but rather an unblemished ticklish sensation that struck me as slightly funny. Dope miniaturized sex; it reduced the act itself from a noisy obligation to a humorous, rather sweet little fleshly comedy. This was Ned, only Ned, bucking and groaning here; a boy grown big and ungainly. This was Ned and this was me, a woman capable of surprising herself.

It lasted into the spring. In my new life I was foxy and unorthodox, liberal-minded and sexually generous—I was the character I wanted to be. That character lived through the thaw and the first green into April, when the pear tree in the back yard exploded in white blossoms. On the Saturday night before Easter, after I had finished dressing the ham, I walked out to look at the tree. It was nearly midnight, and I was alone in the house. Ned had added a late show on Fridays and Saturdays, to compete with the theater complexes that were opening in the malls. Bobby and Jonathan were off somewhere.

I wore an old woolen shirt of Ned’s over my sweater. The air smelled of wet, raw earth, and the pear tree stood in the middle of our small yard as splendid and strange as a wedding dress, its blossoms emitting a faint white light. I stood for a while on the kitchen steps. It was a moonless night, clear enough for the band of the Milky Way to show itself among the multitudes of stars. That night, even our modest back yard looked ripe with nascent possibilities. If the future was a nation, this would be its flag: a blooming tree on a field of stars.

I stepped onto the lawn, though my shoes were too thin for the weather. I wanted to feel the frosty crunch of the grass. I strolled under the tree’s branches, past the beds where my tulips were already pushing their way up. By the time the tree had lost its flowers, the lilacs would be in bloom. Someday we would live in a house with a view of the water. I ran my fingers over the scaly bark of a low branch, shook a few loose blossoms onto my hair.

I’d been out there some time before I noticed that the boys were sitting in my car. It was parked in the graveled space between the garage and the house proper, shadowed by an aluminum overhang, in a pocket of darkness so deep I could not have seen them at all if I hadn’t stood in exactly the right position, so that their heads showed in silhouette between the rear and front windshields.

Their presence struck me as odd but marvelous. Perhaps they were playing at a cross-country trip. I was too enamored of the night to ask questions. The sight of them seemed, simply, a stroke of good fortune. We could smoke a joint together, and shake pear blossoms down onto our heads. I went without hesitation to the car. As I drew closer I could hear rock music playing on the radio. Derek and the Dominos, I thought. I skipped up to the driver’s door, opened it, and said, “Hey, can I hitch a ride?”

We passed, all three of us, through a shocked silence filled with the clash of guitars. Sweet-smelling smoke drifted out of the car. Jonathan sat in the driver’s seat. I saw his penis, pale and erect in the starlight.

“Oh,” I said. Only that.

His eyes seemed to shift forward in their sockets, as if pressed from behind. Even at that moment I could perfectly remember him taking on the same expression at the age of two, when he was denied a bag of lurid pink candy in a supermarket aisle.

“Get out of here,” he said in a tone of quivering control that cut through the music like a wire through fog. It was an entirely adult voice. “How dare you.”

“Jon?” Bobby said. He pulled his jeans up, but before he did so I had seen his penis too, larger than Jonathan’s, darker.

Jonathan waved the sound of his own name away. “Get out of here,” he said. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

I was too surprised to argue. I simply closed the car door, and went back into the house. It was bright and warm inside. I stood in the foyer, breathing. I saw the empty living room with perfect clarity: magazines fanned out on the coffee table, a throw pillow still bearing the dent made by someone’s elbow. A fly walked a half circle across the celadon curve of my grandmother’s vase.

I went upstairs and ran a hot bath. It was all I could think of to do. As I lowered myself into the water I felt a kind of relief. This was real and definite—water slightly too hot to bear. My feet burned as if stuck with pins. My thighs and buttocks and sex were scalded, but I held fast. I didn’t rise up out of that steaming water.

It was not wholly a surprise. Not about Jonathan. I must have known. But I had never consciously thought, “My son won’t marry.” I had thought, “My son is gentler than other boys, kinder, more available to strong feelings.” These were among his virtues. I knew the bite and meanness of boys was missing from his nature. I lowered myself deeper into the tub, so the hot water covered my shoulders and burned against my chin. When it started to cool, I opened the hot tap again.

How had I failed to notice the signs? Jonathan and Bobby were fifteen, yet they never talked of girls. They tacked no airbrushed nudes to the walls. Although I must have suspected, I had never in any part of my being imagined the fleshly implications of their love. To my mind Jonathan had been a perennial child; an innocent. What I could not accustom myself to was the sight of his small erection and Bobby’s larger one, hidden away in the night.

How had I contributed? I knew too much of psychology, and yet I knew too little. Had I been the sort of mother who drives her son from women? Had I feminized him by insisting too obdurately on being his friend?

Jonathan came in hours later, after Ned had returned home and gone to sleep. I thought he might tap on my bedroom door but of course he couldn’t, not with his father present. He went into his own room, producing his usual booted thump on the hall carpet. I wanted to go and comfort him, tell him it was all right. I wanted to go and pull his hair hard enough to draw blood.

It was Easter, and we went through the motions of the day. Ned, Bobby, and Jonathan invaded their baskets, exclaiming over the little prizes, filling their mouths with jelly beans and marshmallow chickens. Jonathan bit the ears off a chocolate rabbit with a gusto that sent an unexpected chill through me. Ned gave me a flat of delphiniums, which I was happy to have, and a silk scarf covered with the brilliant flowers sometimes favored by older women looking for a little flair when they go out to lunch.

Ned must have seen the dismay on my face as I pulled the bright, elderly scarf out of its tissue. He said softly, “What do I know about scarves? It came from Herman Brothers, you can take it back and get something else.”

I kissed him. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s a lovely scarf.”

I couldn’t help thinking that Jonathan would have known what scarf to buy me.

We ate the dinner I’d made, talked of everyday things. After dinner, Ned left for the theater. On his way out the door, Jonathan said to him, “We’ll come to the eight o’clock show, okay?”