A Home at the End of the World

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 around 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.”

“ No,” I holler. I try to twist loose, but our mother has a grip that could crack walnuts.

Carlton’s girl tosses her hair and says, “Good night, baby.” She smiles a victor’s smile. She smooths the stray hair off Carlton’s forehead.

“ No,” I scream again. Something about the way she touches his hair. Our mother calls our father, who comes and scoops me up and starts out of the room with me, holding me like the live bomb I am. Before I go I lock eyes with Carlton. He shrugs and says, “Night, man.” Our father hustles me out. I do not take it bravely. I leave flailing, too furious to cry, dribbling a slimy thread of horrible-child’s spittle.

Later I lie alone on my narrow bed, feeling the music hum in the coiled springs. Life is cracking open right there in our house. People are changing. By tomorrow, no one will be quite the same. How can they let me miss it? I dream up revenge against our parents, and worse for Carlton. He is the one who could have saved me. He could have banded with me against them. What I can’t forgive is his shrug, his mild-eyed “Night, man.” He has joined the adults. He has made himself bigger, and taken size from me. As the Doors thump “Strange Days,” I hope something awful happens to him. I say so to myself.

Around midnight, dim-witted Frank announces he has seen a flying saucer hovering over the back yard. I can hear his deep, excited voice all the way in my room. He says it’s like a blinking, luminous cloud. I hear half the party struggling out through the sliding glass door in a disorganized, whooping knot. By that time everyone is so delirious a flying saucer would be just what was expected. That much celebration would logically attract an answering happiness from across the stars.

I get out of bed and sneak down the hall. I will not miss alien visitors for anyone, not even at the cost of our mother’s wrath or our father’s disappointment. I stop at the end of the hallway, though, embarrassed to be in pajamas. If there really are aliens, they will think I’m the lowest member of the house. While I hesitate over whether to go back to my room to change, people start coming back inside, talking about a trick of the mist and an airplane. People resume their dancing.

Carlton must have jumped the back fence. He must have wanted to be there alone, singular, in case they decided to take somebody with them. A few nights later I will go out and stand where he would have been standing. On the far side of the gully, now a river swollen with melted snow, the cemetery will gleam like a lost city. The moon will be full. I will hang around just as Carlton must have, hypnotized by the silver light on the stones, the white angel raising her arms up across the river.

According to our parents the mystery is why he ran back to the house full tilt. Something in the graveyard may have scared him, he may have needed to break its spell, but I think it’s more likely that when he came back to himself he just couldn’t wait to get back to the music and the people, the noisy disorder of continuing life.

Somebody has shut the sliding glass door. Carlton’s girlfriend looks lazily out, touching base with her own reflection. I look, too. Carlton is running toward the house. I hesitate. Then I figure he can bump his nose. It will be a good joke on him. I let him keep coming. His girlfriend sees him through her own reflection, starts to scream a warning just as Carlton hits the glass.

It is an explosion. Triangles of glass fly brightly through the room. I think for him it must be more surprising than painful, like hitting water from a great height. He stands blinking for a moment. The whole party stops, stares, getting its bearings. Bob Dylan sings “Just Like a Woman.” Carlton reaches up curiously to take out the shard of glass that is stuck in his neck, and that is when the blood starts. It shoots out of him. Our mother screams. Carlton steps forward into his girlfriend’s arms and the two of them fall together. Our mother throws herself down on top of him and the girl. People shout their accident wisdom. Don’t lift him. Call an ambulance. I watch from the hallway.