Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  She returned to her backpack, and the phone continued its angry ringing. Becky, who came from a family where ignoring a phone was unthinkable, jumped up and answered. She heard the sound of a crowd and Tanner shouting over it.

  “Becky? What are you doing? I’ve been—Gig’s here—we have to play. What are you doing?”

  “Just one second, okay?” She pressed the receiver to her chest and walked it toward Laura. “It’s Tanner,” she said. “They need to start. Will you come with me? Please?”

  The fact that Laura, after a moment, made a petulant, hand-flinging gesture of assent—the fact that she would never have done this if she hadn’t hit Becky, which wouldn’t have happened if Becky hadn’t fallen to her knees to pray, which wouldn’t have happened if the spirit of Christ hadn’t brought her to Laura’s apartment, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t found God in the sanctuary, which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t smoked marijuana—seemed to Becky, as she followed Laura down the snowy stairs behind the drugstore, the most beautiful proof of God’s mysterious workings. She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward. She could feel a whole new life, a life in faith, beginning.

  “This is so stupid,” Laura said as they strode along the sidewalk. “I hope you understand what this is costing me.”

  The cold air stung Becky’s battered ear. She didn’t dare speak, lest Laura change her mind.

  The crowd in the function hall was restive, the stage dimly bathed in purple light. Laura went straight to the door that led backstage while Becky hung back near the vestibule. Seeing the food tables, which were now fully denuded, she understood how considerably stoned she’d still been when she thought she was over being stoned. She was also reminded unpleasantly of Clem.

  Gig Benedetti came ambling over to her, smiling. “We meet again.”

  “Yeah, hi.”

  “I can’t say I’m loving the level of organization here. By which I mean it’s rather low.”

  “Laura wasn’t feeling well.”

  Was there a commandment in the Bible against lying? Maybe not, but the truth would come out anyway. She wondered if, having performed one amazing deed, she might perform another.

  “So, actually, though,” she said. “Actually, here’s the thing. Laura’s quitting the band.”

  Gig laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “The act I came to hear included a female vocalist.”

  “I know. But I’ve heard them play without her, and it’s actually better. Tanner really takes over when he doesn’t have to share the stage. It’s his band, not hers.”

  “Is it possible you’re not the most objective critic?”

  By instinct, her hand went to her hair and lifted it out from her coat collar. She gave it a luxuriant shake, nothing God could disapprove of. It wasn’t her fault if Gig thought she was a good-looking girl.

  “If you really want to know,” she said, “I’m the reason Laura’s quitting. I’m going to feel very shitty if you don’t sign them because of me.” Likewise instinctual was the note of hurt in her voice. She shook her hair again. “I know it sounds like I’m asking you a favor, but Tanner’s the one with ambition. Laura’s just an amateur.”

  Gig narrowed his eyes. “What’s your deal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why am I talking to you and not him?”

  “I don’t know. Just—if you sign the band, you’ll be seeing a whole lot of me.”

  To really flirt, she should have looked him in the eye, but she couldn’t do it.

  “That’s a consideration,” he said.

  After the blizzard came a starry-skied chill. The parsonage was dark, but the snow on the driveway was furrowed with new tracks. As Clem followed them toward the back door, he caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. He stopped and sniffed the air. He was out of cigarettes, having emptied his pack after his fight with his father. He’d intended to quit smoking in New Prospect, but that was before Becky told him to go to hell.

  The smoke was coming from the parsonage itself. Sitting on the front porch, on the firewood box, in a bulky coat, was—his mother? He was tempted to continue up the driveway, slip inside, go straight to bed. But he saw that his father had been right: he hadn’t considered his mother’s feelings when he wrote to the draft board. Worse yet, he saw that he needed to tell her, right now, what he’d done. Better that she hear it from him than from the old man.

  He retraced his steps down the driveway. By the time he reached the porch, her cigarette had vanished and she was on her feet.

  “Sweetie,” she said. “There you are.”

  He leaned down and received a smoky kiss. He knew she’d smoked as a teenager, but that was thirty years ago.

  “Yes,” she said, “I was having a cigarette. You caught me.”

  “Actually—can I bum one?”

  She laughed. “This is getting ridiculous.”

  He didn’t know what she meant, but a laugh was better than a lecture. “I’m going to quit,” he said. “Tomorrow. But—just one?”

  “The things I didn’t know.” She shook her head and reached into her pocket. “Filter? Nonfilter?”

  The quicker to light up, he took a cigarette from the pack that was already open. Filterless Lucky Strikes. In the Arctic air, the smoke was abstract and nearly flavorless. He fastened his eyes on the white street, to make himself an abstraction, and told his mother about the letter and the reason he’d sent it.

  Only when he’d finished did he turn to see how she was taking the news. In her hands was a coffee cup with cigarette ends in it. As if awakened by his silence, she looked down at the cup. It seemed to surprise her. She handed it to him and said, “I’m going inside.”

  He didn’t know what exactly he’d expected, but he’d expected more than no response at all. He extinguished his Lucky and followed her into the house. His bags were at the bottom of the stairs, where he’d dropped them. The Christmas tree was dark.

  In the kitchen, his mother had crouched by a seldom-opened cabinet.

  “Mom, are you all right?”

  She stood up with a bottle of J&B scotch. “Why do you ask? Is there a bottle of liquor in my hand? Oh, why, yes, there is.” She laughed and upended the bottle over a glass. Barely a finger of scotch came out. She drank it off. “What do you want me to say? That I’m happy my son wants to fight in that war?”

  “I’m not going to be morally half-assed about it.”

  She lowered her chin and fixed him with a dubious look, inviting him to amend what he’d said. When he didn’t, she crouched again by the cabinet.

  “I can’t deal with this,” she said. “Not tonight. If you want me to worry about you every hour of the next two years, it’s your decision. It would have been nice to have a little warning, but—it’s your decision.”

  Bottles clanked as she examined their discolored labels.

  “This will devastate your father,” she added. “I imagine you know that.”

  “Yeah, I saw him at church. He’s pretty mad.”

  “He’s at the church?”

  Mrs. Cottrell and her beckoning finger were still fresh in Clem’s mind, and he didn’t owe the old man anything. The question was whether to spare his mother’s feelings.

  “He was with a parishioner,” he said carefully. “We had to dig her car out.”

  “Let me guess. Frances Cottrell.”

  It was dizzying to hear the name from his mother. He wondered if she was smoking and drinking because she knew all about Mrs. Cottrell. Knew more, perhaps, than he did.

  “Do you want something?” she said. “Food? A drink? There’s still some bourbon here. Some ancient vermouth.”

  “I might have a sandwich.”

  She stood up with a bottle and squinted at the dram remaining in it. “Why does this happen? Why is it that, when a person finally really needs a drink, every damn bottle is empty? It can’t be random. If it were random, some o
f the bottles would be full.”

  Something was definitely not right with her.

  “Actually, no,” she said. “I suspect it’s your brother.” She poured the dram into her glass. “It’s sort of heartbreaking when you think about it. He keeps going back and taking a little more, but he can’t leave an empty bottle. How much can he take without making it officially empty? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  The state she was in was too much for Clem to process. In the relative warmth of the house, now that he’d told his parents what he’d done, his exhaustion was overwhelming. He sat down at the kitchen table and rested his head on his arms. He thought he might fall asleep instantly, but he’d passed that point. The exhaustion was so painful that it kept him awake. He heard his mother pouring herself a third drink, opening the refrigerator, handling utensils. He heard her setting a plate on the table.

  “You should eat something,” she said.

  With extreme exertion, he sat up. The sandwich on the plate was ham and Swiss on rye. He was grateful that she’d made it, too sick with exhaustion to want it. He thought of the cinnamon toast that Sharon had offered him that morning, the eggs she’d scrambled him on other mornings. He thought of how happy she’d been to see him, how full of plans for their future. The pain behind his eyes became unbearable.

  “Oh, honey, Clem, sweetie, what is it? Why are you crying?”

  He had so much misery to express and only one way to do it. When his mother put her arms around him, he struggled to maintain some shred of strength and dignity. But, really, he had none.

  It was interesting to note that, when his tears subsided, the sandwich looked more appealing. He also wanted a cigarette. These were the same appetites that returned after sexual release.

  “Will you tell me what’s wrong?” his mother said. “Do you not really want to be in the army?”

  Someone had left a paper napkin on the table. He blew his nose with it, and his mother sat down across from him. In her glass was some brownish vermouth.

  “We can call the draft board in the morning,” she said. “You can say you changed your mind. No one will think any less of you.”

  “No. I’m just worn out.”

  “But that can affect your judgment. Maybe if you got some rest—this is such a crazy thing.”

  “It’s not crazy. It’s the one thing I’m sure about.”

  From his mother’s silence, he could tell that she was disappointed. Her way as a parent had always been to offer suggestions, hoping he would see that they were sensible, rather than telling him what to do.

  “Do you remember what you told me?” he said. “That sex without commitment is a bad idea?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Well, so, I’ve been with a girl. A woman. It’s been the most amazing thing.”

  His mother’s eyes widened as if he’d stuck her with a needle.

  “But you were right,” he said. “If there’s no commitment, people get hurt. And that’s exactly what happened. She’s horribly hurt.”

  The misery rose in him, and his mother reached across the table for his hand. Not wanting to cry again, he pulled it away.

  “We broke up,” he said. “This morning. Or I broke up with her. She didn’t want to.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  “I had to—I’m leaving school.”

  “You don’t have to leave school.”

  “I did a horribly cruel thing to her.”

  The misery overcame him. While he struggled to master it, his mother stood up and went to the stove. He heard a whoosh and smelled smoke. The weirdness of her smoking brought him back out of himself.

  “Don’t you want to go outside?”

  “No,” she said. “This is my house, too.”

  “Why are you smoking?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s been one thing after another today. I’m sorry you’re hurt. I’m sorry about—what’s her name?”

  “Sharon.”

  His mother drew hard on the cigarette. “It’s just hard for me to understand. If you were happy with her, why are you leaving school?”

  “Because my lottery number is nineteen.”

  “But why now? Why not wait another semester?”

  “Because I’m too crazy about her to keep my grades up. As long as I’m there, I only want to be with her.”

  “But that’s—” His mother frowned. “Are you quitting school to get away from her?”

  “I’m pulling a B average. I don’t deserve a deferment.”

  “No, no, no. You’re not thinking straight. Do you love her?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Yes. I mean—yes. But it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

  His mother went to the sink and ran water on her cigarette.

  “It’s never too late,” she said. “If you love her, and she loves you, then don’t leave her. It’s as simple as that. Do not run away from the person you love.”

  “I know, but…”

  His mother wheeled around from the sink. A strange light was in her eyes. “It’s not right! There’s nothing more terrible you can do!”

  He’d never felt afraid of her before. She’d always only been his mother, small and soft, ever-present but diffuse. His fear deepened when she went to the wall phone by the dining-room door and took the receiver off its hook. She thrust it in his face.

  “Call her.”

  “Mom?”

  “Honey, just do it. You’ll feel better. I want you to call her and tell her you’re sorry. Please. She’ll take you back.”

  The receiver was emitting a dial tone. His mother’s hand was shaking.

  “Is Sharon with her family? Did she go home, too?”

  “Tomorrow, I think.”

  “Then tell her you want to come and see her. It’s fine with me.”

  “Mom, it’s Christmas.”

  “So what? You have my permission. I mean, honestly—is this where you want to be? Here?” She made a sweeping gesture with the receiver. “In this?”

  The disgust in her voice was shocking. And yet she had a point. He really didn’t want to be in the parsonage, not after what Becky had said to him.

  “It’s too late to go back,” he said. “She’s leaving in the morning.”

  The receiver burst into an off-the-hook yammering.

  “Then go there now,” his mother said.

  Why Perry, late in the evening, was on the far side of the tracks, in the prospectless part of New Prospect where streets of sorry little houses dead-ended at the rail embankment, was a question answerable only in the narrowest pragmatic sense. To address the greater why of it required a framework of ratiocination whose pointlessness was now evident. As he trotted along Terminal Street, the snow squeaking beneath his feet, he felt pursued by an expanding black crater. Before it caught up and swallowed him, he needed to reach the house whose threshold he hadn’t expected to cross again. Under the circumstances, this seemed excusable.

  The crater had appeared after he confessed to his mother that he’d sold contraband. Although the confession had been strategic, a matter of securing her complicity against the raging of his father, should his misconduct ever come to general light, he’d been prepared to shed some tears, as he’d done with impressive success at Crossroads, in order to be forgiven. But his mother hadn’t seemed to care. She hadn’t scolded him; hadn’t even asked questions. The effect, when he left her to her cigarette and went downstairs, had been to render him defenseless against the mental crater that had opened.

  He’d set out in the snow for Ansel Roder’s house. Surely, if only tonight, he was permitted to get very high. The anticipation of toke after toke in the trusty seclusion of the Roder swimming-pool shed, the foretaste of deliberately massive excess, the imminence of futurity-banishing befuddlement, was giving him a boner that grew harder as he imagined the pleasure of servicing it, while extremely high, in the bathroom Roder shared with his skinny,
non-bra-wearing sister, Annette, when she was home from college. Annette was dry of wit, a junior at Grinnell, and had an oily, rough complexion that only added to her allure. She was close to Perry’s ideal, female-wise, and seemed approximately as attainable to him as the Andromeda Galaxy.

  Embarrassingly, Annette herself answered his ringing of the Roder doorbell. He couldn’t look at her face; could barely find the voice to ask for Ansel. In his cheap parka, his dorkoid rubbers, his arrant craving, he was every inch the repulsive little worm. All he could do was wait for her to turn away. His desperation to be high and by himself, in a locked bathroom, was approaching intolerable. Through the open front door, he saw scintillant orange in the Roder fireplace. The fireplace was outsized, manorial, and burned longer split logs than he’d seen anywhere else.

  Roder, when he came to the door, barefoot, seemed pre-annoyed. “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to come in,” Perry said. “If I may.”

  “Not a good time. We’re playing canasta.”

  “Canasta.”

  “It’s a holiday tradition. It’s actually pretty fun.”

  “You and your family are playing a card game.”

  “Troll the ancient yuletide carol and the like. Yes.”

  The Roders were even less a family unit than the Hildebrandts. Their doing a fun thing together was unusual to the point of seeming cosmically unjust. Without looking behind him, Perry could sense the dark crater widening toward him.

  “Well, then,” he said, his throat thick with disappointment, “I wonder, if you have a second—I made a small error in judgment today. A miscalculation.”

  “Seriously, man.” Roder began to close the door. “Not a good time.”

  “If you could just quickly run and get me one of the bags. Help a friend.”

  “We’re playing a game here.”

  “You mentioned that. If you’d like, I can give you some cash.”

  Roder made a face, as if repulsed by a worm.

  “Ansel, come on. When have I ever come to you like this?”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned money. That was a mistake—I’m sorry.”