A Home At The End Of The World Part 9

When they were through with the dishes, they went upstairs to Jonathan's room. "Great dinner, Mom," Jonathan said as they pa.s.sed 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 s.e.xless, 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 knew knew -his love for Bobby must have frightened him. It might in fact have been the true cause of this manly posturing, these clomping seven-league boots. -his love for Bobby must have frightened him. It might in fact have been the true cause of this manly posturing, these clomping seven-league boots.

"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 not not ." ."

"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 n.o.body 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 embarra.s.sment of retreat. I filled a gla.s.s with tap water and held it out to him.

"Thanks," he said. When he stepped forward to take the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. 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 we?"

"I guess not," he said. "I've been, you know, pretty busy-"

I couldn't stifle a snort of derisive laughter. "You're not exactly the chairman of the board of General Motors," I said. "Let's not try to fool one another, all right? It's just a waste of time."

His smile wilted, and he shrugged helplessly. "Well," he said. "You know. Jonathan-"

"Jonathan what?"

"Well, he sort of. You know. You're, like, his mother."

"That sounds exactly right," I said. "I'm like like his mother. I resemble someone who can be fooled with lame excuses." his mother. I resemble someone who can be fooled with lame excuses."

Bobby offered another Punch-like smile, as if I'd made a joke. I could see that there was no point in pursuing the subject with him. He was only following orders. I stood before him with my arms folded over my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I could easily have said, "Leave this house now and don't come back." I could have confirmed his romantic status.

Struggling visibly to change the subject, Bobby asked, "What's that you're making?"

"What? Oh, a pie. I'm making a couple of pecan pies for tomorrow."

"You're a great cook," he said avidly. "I've never tasted food like this that somebody just made made , I mean it's like a restaurant." , I mean it's like a restaurant."

"No big deal," I said. I could tell from his face that this was not a conversational gambit, after all. He was genuinely interested in the fact that I had come downstairs to bake pies at midnight.

"I'd like to open a restaurant one day," he said. "I mean, I think it'd be cool to have a restaurant in a big old house somewhere."

He looked with open fascination at the pie crust, a pale, lucent circle on the pastry board.

"No real trick to it," I said. "I could teach you to cook. It's just a step-by-step process, no magic involved."

"I don't know," he said doubtfully.

"Look here," I said. "I haven't rolled out the second crust yet, why don't you try it?"

"Really?"

"Come here. You'll be amazed at how easy it is, once you've learned a few of the tricks."

He came and stood close to me at the counter. I slipped the rolled crust into one of the tins, refloured the board, and plopped the remaining dough onto it.

"Lesson one," I said. "You want to handle it as little as possible. It's not like bread dough-you maul maul that until it comes to life. Pie crust is just the opposite, it needs kid gloves. Now. Roll away from you, in sort of upward motions. Don't bulldoze it." that until it comes to life. Pie crust is just the opposite, it needs kid gloves. Now. Roll away from you, in sort of upward motions. Don't bulldoze it."

He took up the rolling pin and pressed it into the soft bulk of the dough.

"Just coax it," I said. "Good. That's right."

"I've never done this," he said. "My mother never made things like pies."

"You'll be a good student," I said. "I can tell already."

"Do you know how to make those fancy edges?" he asked.

"Sure I do," I said.

During the ensuing year I taught Bobby everything I knew about cooking. We had long sessions in the kitchen together, moving from pies to bread and from bread to puff pastry. When his work came successfully out of the oven, fatly golden and steaming, he contemplated it with frank, unmitigated wonder. I have never seen anyone take so to baking. He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.

Jonathan sometimes sat in on our baking sessions, but his heart and mind were clearly elsewhere. He lacked the patience for precise measurements and slow risings. Truly, he lacked the fundamental interest in nourishment itself. Even as a baby he'd been indifferent to food.

He would linger a while in the kitchen, then wander up to his room and put a record on. Sometimes he played Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones, sometimes a new record I'd never heard before.

Neither of the boys ever again invited me to listen to music. Now, instead, Bobby would trot into my kitchen, saying, "Look here, I found this recipe for fish that's, like, inside a pastry." Or, "Hey, do you know how to make something called brioche?"

Jonathan applied to several colleges and was accepted at New York University and the University of Oregon. All the schools he'd applied to were at least a thousand miles from Cleveland.

Bobby applied to no colleges-he did not even mention the possibility. He just continued bringing me recipes, and buying ever more elaborate kitchen aids. He bought a Cuisinart, and a set of German knives so thin and sharp they could have sliced away the kitchen wallpaper without disturbing the plaster beneath.

In June, Ned and I attended their graduation ceremonies with Burt Morrow, whom we had not seen in over a year. Burt had exchanged his goatee for muttonchop sideburns since our last meeting. He wore a green sport coat and a turtleneck, with a gold medallion the size of a half dollar hanging from a chain around his neck.

We took seats toward the rear of the high school auditorium, a vast, pale, salmon-colored chamber that smelled, even on this occasion, faintly of damp cement and brown-bag lunches. As the students' names were called and they stepped up onto the stage to receive their diplomas, they were accompanied by the various hoots and catcalls of their peers. You could gauge the popularity of each individual by the uproar his or her name produced. Neither Bobby nor Jonathan inspired any outburst at all-they might have been unknown to their cla.s.smates, although Burt did emit a surprisingly shrill whistle at the sound of Bobby's name.

Afterward, Bobby and Jonathan went off to an all-night party at an amus.e.m.e.nt park on a school bus full of other kids. Ned and I invited Burt out for a drink, since we could not just let him drive home alone.

"A drink?" he said. "Yes, a drink with the adults would be nice. I think we should do that, yes."

His eyes held no light. They might have been made of agate.

We went to a quiet place near the lake, with copper tables and young waitresses dressed as Mother Hubbard. I ordered a vodka gimlet, which was given to me on a doily instead of on a napkin.

Ned lifted his gla.s.s and said, "To the new generation. Best of luck."

We all drank to the new generation. Through hidden speakers, a band played "Moon River."

It seemed we were in the least important place on earth.

Burt Morrow said, "Jonathan chose NYU, did he?"

"Yep," Ned answered. "The decision was made strictly on an economic basis. NYU is more expensive than Oregon."

Burt blinked, and lit a cigarette. "Well, I'm sure he'll distinguish himself there," he said. "Bobby doesn't seem to be very much interested in college."

"He's still young," Ned said. "You never know what'll happen in a year or so."

Burt said, "Whatever he chooses is all right with me. I wouldn't interfere in his life. Oh, no. I wouldn't think of it. He's got to do his own thing."

"I guess," Ned said. "They've all got to do their own things, don't they?"

Burt nodded, pulling deeply at his Pall Mall as if sucking up the stuff of life itself. "Certainly," he said sagely. "Certainly they do."

It was his use of the word "certainly" that got to me. It made him sound so like a precocious child left in our care.

"They do not," I said emphatically, "have to do their own thing do their own thing ." ."