“You bet,” he answered, and winked enormously. After he was gone, the boys washed the dishes. I tried to help, but Jonathan shooed me out of the kitchen. From the living room, where I leafed through a magazine, I could hear the two of them speaking in low, undecipherable voices. Occasionally, they both laughed.
When they were through with the dishes, they went upstairs to Jonathan’s room. “Great dinner, Mom,” Jonathan said as they passed through the living room. Bobby added, “Yow! It was, like, the best?”
They did not invite me up. They did not put on any music. After an hour they came down again with their jackets on. They were out the door almost instantly.
“Night, Mom,” Jonathan called from the lawn.
“Night, Mrs. Glover?” Bobby added.
I stood for a while watching them walk down the street, their hands in their jacket pockets. Bobby’s stride was lithe and sure, Jonathan’s slightly bowlegged in the way of adolescent boys who offer swagger in place of conviction. Behind me, the house was empty, the dishes dried and put away.
I waited to talk to Jonathan until we had a chance to be alone. It took almost a week. Finally he came home unaccompanied from his nocturnal rounds, and I caught him on his way upstairs. He could make such a racket with those boots.
“Jonathan?” I called. “Might I have a quick word?”
“Uh-huh.” He stopped halfway up the stairs and leaned over the banister like a cowboy bellying up to a bar. His hair hung lankly over his face.
“Would you consider coming down?” I said. “I don’t really feel like playing a balcony scene.”
“Okay,” he said with bland good cheer. He allowed himself to be taken into the living room, where we sat down.
“Well,” I said. I did not quite know how to begin a difficult conversation with him. I had always spoken to him as effortlessly as if I were talking to myself.
“Uh-huh?” he said.
“Jonathan, honey, I know you care a great deal about Bobby.” Wrong. The tone was sexless, schoolmarmish. I attempted a laugh but my laugh thinned out, went squeaky on me. “A great deal,” I added.
Wrong again. Now my tone was too knowing, too suggestive. I was still his mother.
He nodded, looking at me with a blank, serene face.
“Well, honey,” I said, “to be honest, I’ve been wondering if it’s good for you to see so much of Bobby. Don’t you think you should have some other friends, too?”
“No,” he said.
I laughed again, more successfully. “At least you’re open-minded on the subject,” I said.
He shrugged, and wrapped a hank of hair around a finger.
“I remember when I was your age, we ran around in a big gang,” I said. “We were all more or less in love with one another, and there were seven or eight of us. Girls and boys alike. I mean, I think I know what it’s like to so desperately love a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, in what seemed a less impenetrable, good-boy’s voice. I suspected—I
“Listen, now,” I said. “I’m your friend. I think I understand about Bobby. He can be very—compelling. But I have to tell you. Don’t hem yourself in too much. Not so early in life.”
He looked at me from under his ragged shelf of hair, and I saw in his face a lick of my old Jonathan, plagued by doubts and almost ostentatiously available to harm. For a moment it seemed we had broken through.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “I know how you feel. Honestly, I do. So trust me. The day will come when Bobby will just seem like somebody you used to know.”
His face shut down. It was a visible process, like shutters slammed over a lighted window.
He said, “You don’t know how I feel. And you don’t know Bobby. I’m the one who knows him. Stop trying to take over my life.”
“I’m
“Yes you are. I can’t stand it. You use up all the air in here. Even the plants keep dying.”
I stared at him disbelievingly. “Your life is your own,” I said. “I’m only trying to tell you I’m on your side.”
“Well, honey, there jest ain’t no room on ma side for nobody but me.”
I slapped him at almost the same moment I knew I was going to. I caught him full across the face, hard enough to pull a string of saliva from the corner of his mouth. My hand stung from the impact.
After a moment, he smiled and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. The slap appeared to have afforded him great satisfaction, to have proven something he’d suspected all along.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never meant to hit you. I never have before, have I?”
He stood without speaking and walked upstairs, carrying with him that air of satisfied discovery. His boots reported like cannon fire on every tread.
Our old friendship was finished. Jonathan and Bobby spent more and more time out of the house, coming home late and going directly to bed. They did not invite me up to get stoned with them, or to dance. Ned told me they came to the movies fairly often. Sometimes, he said, he sat with them, watching a film he’d seen a half-dozen times already. He said Jonathan was surprisingly astute about movies—perhaps he had the makings of a film critic.
I knew better than to try barring Bobby from the house. Hadn’t my own parents forbidden me to see Ned? Hadn’t their glacial ultimatums driven me straight into marriage? I couldn’t honestly have said whether I worried more about Jonathan’s love of boys in general or about his particular devotion to Bobby. Although of course I hoped he would grow into conventional manhood, meet a girl, and have babies, I knew that that decision already lay beyond my powers of intervention. Jonathan was on his own there. But Bobby, a sweet, uncertain boy of no discernible ambitions and questionable intellect…If Jonathan remained tied to Bobby he might never know what the larger world had to offer. Bobby was, ineluctably, a Cleveland boy, and I knew the future Cleveland offered. The downtown streets were full of young men who hadn’t gotten out: men in bright, cheap neckties, thick-waisted at twenty-five, dawdling in luncheonettes before returning to a job performed under fluorescent lights while the second hand swept the face of the clock.
It was nearly another week before Bobby and I had our encounter.
I had gone down to the kitchen well after midnight, to roll out the crust for a couple of pies. I had not been sleeping well during the past two weeks, and the problem wasn’t helped by Ned’s asthmatic snoring. Finally, resigned, I’d gone down in my nightgown, hoping that some simple kitchen task would help settle my mind for sleep.
I only turned on the dim light in the hood of the range, and didn’t truly need that. I could easily enough have made pies in a coal mine.
I was nearly finished when Bobby appeared, looking sleepily disoriented, though with Bobby it was sometimes difficult to tell. He stood in the kitchen doorway, large and pallidly muscular in boxer shorts.
“Oh, hi,” he murmured. “I didn’t know you were here. I just, um, came down for a drink of water?”
Water flowed reliably enough from the bathroom taps. I knew what he had come for: the gin we kept on a kitchen shelf was nearly half water by then. I played along, though.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “So I decided I might as well do something useful.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He remained standing in the doorway, caught between the danger of advance and the embarrassment of retreat. I filled a glass with tap water and held it out to him.
“Thanks,” he said. When he stepped forward to take the glass from me he brought his distinctive smell into the kitchen, a young male odor with an underlayer like the smell of metal on a cold day. I could hear the steady gurgle his throat made in swallowing the water.
“Bobby,” I said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Bobby, aren’t we friends? I thought we were friends, you and I.”
He nearly dropped his glass. He smiled in an agony of nervousness, and said, “Well, we are. I mean, I think you’re, you know, really cool.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you think I’m really cool. But we haven’t seen much of one another lately, have
