How long would she have swept and mended before she began to see her life as composed of safe haven and subtle but pervasive lacks?
ALICE
WHEN I summoned Jonathan to Arizona, I didn’t mention the parcel I had for him. It wasn’t the sort of gift to talk about over the telephone. I simply exercised my motherly prerogative and demanded a visit. I wasn’t generally much trouble to him, and he had always suffered from an exaggerated sense of his own culpability. I suspect he wished I would burden him more. I think he’d have found some relief in a beleaguered, badgering mother. Given his nature, he had little choice but to obey when I called and said I wanted to see him. “The desert’s lovely this time of year,” I said. “Please come out for a few days.” And he did.
I met him at the Phoenix airport. Country life hadn’t changed him much. Since he’d left for college more than ten years earlier, and I’d grown accustomed to going months without seeing him, I had learned a new objectivity. As a little boy he’d seemed like an invention of mine, and I’d loved him with a stinging, tangled intensity that hurt me at times. It was as if the part of me I felt tenderest toward, the little wounded part that wanted only to cry and be held, had been cut out and now lived separately, beyond my powers of consolation. His existence compelled and distressed me so much that I scarcely knew what he looked like. Now I loved him less dreadfully, from a deeper reserve of calm, and I could see him better in his human particulars. Among the disembarking passengers at the airport he was pale and pretty but unfinished-looking; as he aged I began to see that he stood in danger of growing old without acquiring a visible aspect of repose. Unmarked and boyish, with a boy’s equine beauty, he was taking on the perennially fresh, untried quality that can lead an old man to look like a shocked, ancient child. I waved from among those waiting and he made his way toward me, chipper and a little haunted-looking, threading gingerly through the crowd as if he suspected it might be full of enemies in disguise.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, my dear.”
We embraced, inquired after one another’s health and happiness, and started for the car. On the way he asked me, “How’s business?”
“Booming,” I said. “I’m getting more calls than I can handle, but I hate to turn anybody away at this stage. I’ve been trying to hire another cook. But it’s hard to find anybody who’ll do things the way I like them done.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Who ever expected you to turn into a catering mogul?”
“Watch yourself, now. Don’t get patronizing.”
“I’m not being patronizing. When did you get so thin-skinned?”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” I said. “Nerves, I guess. I’ve never had a business at all, much less a successful one. I keep thinking something will happen and it will all just come apart.”
“Don’t worry. Or is that being patronizing too?
“True,” I said. “Entirely true. How’s your own business?”
“Insane. It seems like we’re always there, and everything is always right on the verge of total madness. But we’re breaking even. On our busiest days we even make a little money.”
“Good,” I said. “It’s a tough field. Breaking even your first year means you’re succeeding.”
“I guess. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘I forgot to take table five their coffee.’”
“Welcome to the front lines,” I said.
When we reached the car, we had a small cordial tussle over who would drive. I preferred to, since I knew the way, but a grown son doesn’t care to be chauffeured by his mother even on her home ground. I tossed him the keys, for his comfort’s sake.
We drove along the flat bright highway, talking of ordinary things. The sun, which was not too merciless at that time of year, shone on the flowering yuccas and the exquisite charcoal-gray tangles of mesquite. I thought without envy of the drizzle and blear that prevailed just then in the East. The desert, I’d found, had a beauty too severe to sink immediately into your skin. Its nearest geographical relative was the glacier—like a glacier it could fool the uninitiated into mistaking its slow turning for stasis. We who lived there loved it for its simplicity and cleanliness, its daily suggestion of the everlasting. A forested landscape came to seem both crowded and ephemeral, sweet enough but far too young, and subject to unpredictable turns of fortune. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in deserts. It is no accident that the elderly often return there.
“You look great,” Jonathan said as he drove. “I like what you did to your hair.”
“Well, I have to make an appearance now,” I said. “I can’t stumble around town like the wild woman of the mountains anymore. To tell you the truth, I’ve found a barber. A men’s barber. Most of the women’s salons out here still insist on giving you these poofy lacquered
“I love it,” he said. “My mother is a catering mogul with a crew cut. I’m not being patronizing. I’m being appreciative.”
He pulled in at the condominium, and carried his bag into the house. “Place hasn’t changed,” he said.
“It’s just lost a little more ground to the forces of entropy,” I said. “I meant to get it whipped into slightly better shape before you got here. But a good steady client of mine called with a last-minute dinner party, so I spent yesterday making shrimp with cilantro pesto instead of vacuuming and dusting.”
“It’s okay. Our house in Cleveland was always a little too orderly, to tell you the truth. I mean, I’m glad to know you’re not out here cleaning all the time.”
“That’s the least of your worries. Believe me.”
Because he’d be sleeping on the fold-out couch, there was no unpacking to do. He simply set his suitcase in a corner. As he did so, I was overtaken by nervousness—I’d brought him all the way to Arizona for such a strange purpose. Perhaps I’d pass it off as a simple visit after all. Feed him, buy him a few new articles of clothing over his protests, and send him home again.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“A little. I didn’t eat the lunch they served on the plane. At a certain point in my flying career I realized I could just refuse the tray when they brought it. I still feel reckless doing it, though. Like I’m throwing away money.”
“Why don’t we go out for a late lunch?” I said. “I’ve found a marvelous place about ten miles from here, where they make their tortillas from scratch. I’d love to hire their cook away from them, have somebody who really knows traditional Mexican cooking, but I don’t think I could pay her enough.”
“Sounds great,” he said. “Let’s go.”
For a moment he was so like his father that I stopped and stared at him, the blood ringing in my head. All mothers must experience such moments, when their grown children—who have seemed to depart irrevocably into their own personalities—suddenly reveal a strain of their father’s nature so pure and undiluted they might be the man himself, reborn, right down to the three-note cough that has punctuated the past forty-plus years. What I saw in Jonathan just then was Ned’s easy, boneless willingness; his urge to be pleasantly enthusiastic and to keep things rolling along. If I’d been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I’d have taken him by the shoulders and said, “Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you’ll never make a life that uses you.”
Instead, I took the car keys from him and said, “I’d better drive this time. Even I’m not sure exactly how to get to this place, and I’ve been a dozen times.”
We spent the next two days talking and eating and going to movies. I gave him the tour of my rented kitchen and makeshift office, introduced him to my staff of three. I inquired after his life as well, although I wasn’t always sure how to phrase my questions. “How’s the baby?” was the most obvious opening.
“She’s fine,” he said over a margarita. “She’s amazing. Sometimes it seems like she’s changing a little every day. I’m beginning to understand why people have a half dozen kids—it’s hard to realize that now she can crawl, and she’ll never be quite so helpless again. It’s a relief, too. But I can see how you’d want to have another one just for the sake of seeing somebody else through that incredibly helpless period again.”
“And you spend a good deal of time with her?” I asked.
