How It Ended

by Jay McInerney

  “How do you like my wheels?” Mary says. “Don't tell Mom you saw me, okay? I'm supposed to be at Laura's house.” The kid comes around the side of the car and looks me over. Mary doesn't introduce anyone. They leave in a roar of exhaust.

  Back in the car, I describe the scene for Tory, who has been reading. “She's young,” Tory says, then goes back to her magazine. Mary is the only member of the family who escapes Tory's censure. Tory's still able to see her as the baby. It seems to be something she clings to, this idea that there's still a baby in the family after all that has happened.

  In the kitchen, Carol and her daughter, Lily, are playing with Barbies. Carol has four months to go on her next, but she's already huge. Between her religion and her fertility, she's bursting with contentment. Ginny, the aproned matriarch, is fixing lunch.

  Lily lifts her Barbie toward me and waves it from side to side as she speaks in a high, squeaky voice. “Look, Barbie, it's Ken.”

  “That's not Ken,” Carol says. “Who is that?”

  “That's Michael,” Lily says in her own voice, hiding her face in her mother's arm.

  “You like Michael, don't you?” Carol says, doing a Barbie voice.

  Lily shakes her head back and forth. She won't look up.

  “Don't teach her to be a dumb blonde, Carol,” Tory says.

  “And who's that?” Carol says, directing Lily toward Tory.

  Tory kneels beside Lily's chair and points her finger at herself. “Do you remember my name?”

  Lily shakes her head and hides it again in her mother's shoulder. She can't remember Tory's name but has the others down cold.

  “That's Tory,” Carol says. “Isn't that a pretty name? Tory rhymes with story and glory, doesn't it?”

  Tory says, “And gory.”

  “Do we have a kiss for nice Aunt Tory?”

  When Lily shakes her head against her mother's shoulder, Tory stands up and leaves the room.

  “Sandwiches are ready,” Ginny says. “Grilled cheese, tomato and bacon.” Ginny's one of those people who believe that there is very little that can't be fixed by putting a meal on the table.

  “Jim doesn't eat bacon,” Carol says.

  “I thought he was a Christian. Isn't it Jews who don't eat bacon?”

  “We eat low cholesterol.”

  Ginny puts the hot tray down on the counter. She takes off the oven mitt and lights a cigarette. “You eat low cholesterol. You don't smoke. You don't drink. You don't swear, and you don't like it when other people do. Is there anything else I should know as your innkeeper? Would you maybe like some more hay in your manger?”

  “Jesus loves you, Mom.”

  Jim, the born-again husband, comes in, looking sleepy. “Is that bacon I smell?” he says.

  “I was going to do fishes and loaves,” Ginny says, “but I couldn't find a good recipe.”

  I find Tory in her room, lying on the bed with a stuffed tiger in her arms.

  “I brought you a sandwich,” I say.

  She shakes her head. I sit down beside her on the bed. A framed grave rubbing hangs over the headboard: HERE LYES THE BODY OF … The bedside table displays a collection of handmade dolls. I pick up a porcelain doll in peasant costume, then put it back.

  “This was my room all the time I was growing up,” Tory says.

  “Maybe one of these days we'll buy ourselves a big old house like this,” I suggest. I wish I hadn't said “maybe,” but I feel uncertain of the future. Tory and I have talked about marriage, though everything seems to be changing. I don't really know what I want. Everything has become so gloomy and difficult lately.

  “I don't want a big old house,” Tory says. “A big old house needs kids in it.”

  “Don't be so pessimistic. The doctor said that was a worst-case scenario.”

  “Doctors have been treating women like children for centuries.”

  There's a knock on the door, and Bunny comes in.

  She throws herself down on the bed beside Tory. “And now the graduate, exhausted from rehearsal in the hot sun, takes a load off her feet,” Bunny says. “Also, by avoiding her own room, she hopes to escape interrogation at the hands of the mother of the graduate.”

  “What interrogation?” Tory says.

  “She wants to know whether Bill's going to be at the ceremony.”

  “Is he?”

  “Of course.”

  “You could introduce him as the father of the graduate,” Tory says. “He's even older than Dad. Is he going to bring his wife with him?”

  “He's not older than Dad. They're the same age.”

  “That makes it perfect.”

  “He's in terrific shape. He works out and plays tennis every day.”

  “You're going to ruin the graduation for Mom if she sees him there.”

  “She won't see him.”

  “Is Dad coming?”

  “I didn't invite the bastard.”

  The sisters fall silent, both bouncing lightly on the bed, as if responding to some signal I can't hear. The resemblance of the two sisters lying on the bed is eerie and exciting. They seem to lend each other beauty, their juxtaposition creating a context for appreciation. In silence, they exercise a lifetime of intimacy. I hear the clop-clop of a horse outside on the road. Dust swarms in the wedge of sunshine coming in through the curtains; a shaft of yellow light catches the edge of Bunny's hair and appears to ignite it. Both women have their eyes closed. I watch them. They seem to be asleep.

  When I go downstairs, Ginny is sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine. The TV is on, a game show. Ginny looks up and smiles. “My Gourmet arrived, so I'm happy,” she says. “I hardly ever cook anymore, but I love to read the recipes.” I take a seat at the big round table that is the hub of family activity. The house has dens, living rooms and I'm not sure what else, but everyone hangs out in the kitchen. I wonder if it was always this way.

  Ginny closes the magazine and looks up at the television. Then she looks at me. “Do you think in this day and age it's possible to win an alienation of affection suit?”

  “I believe it's very difficult,” I say. “But I'm afraid it's not my area.” I wish I could tell her something encouraging, save the farm, stay the execution. I imagine myself flat on my back while a hostile jury piles stones on the beam across my chest. I went into law school with a vague notion of righting wrongs. “I don't know much about divorce law,” I say. “Corporate marriages are my field. But I could look into it for you.”

  “No, that's okay. I've got a lawyer. I shouldn't be bothering you for advice.” She reaches over and pats my hand. “It's good to have you here. I'm so pleased that Tory has someone like you to take care of her. You're great together.” She lights up a cigarette. “Carol—I'm just relieved that she's not in jail or the nuthouse. If Jesus is what it takes, fine. Although I must say having those two around makes me want to curse and smoke and drink just out of spite.” She looks at her watch.

  “How about a drink, Ginny? I picked up a bottle of vodka.”

  “Well, I suppose, since it's the weekend. …”

  “It's an occasion,” I say. “I think we're well within our rights here.” I fix the drinks. We were pleased to discover, last night, that we both like vodka on the rocks with a splash. Tory, less pleased, thinks her mother drinks too much.

  “I'm so glad you're a sinner,” Ginny says. “I can't tell you what a relief it is. Carol and Jim were here for two days before you arrived, and it felt like two weeks. Cheers.”

  The phone rings. Ginny jumps up and catches it on the second ring. She says hello three times and hangs up. “That could've been one of three people,” she says after she's back at the table. She raises her hand and holds up a finger. “It could've been my husband, calling to see if I was out so he could sneak over and steal the silver. He tried one afternoon, but Bunny came home and caught him.” She lifts a second finger. “It could've been Bill, Bunny's aging lover. He hangs up if I answer, because he knows I won't let him tal
k to Bunny. Can you tell me what a young girl would want with a fifty-five-year-old man? And he's married. He keeps telling her he's going to divorce his wife, but he certainly hasn't told the wife yet. Although she knows all about it.” Ginny raises a third finger. “Bill's wife is the other mystery-phone-call candidate. She calls sometimes when she doesn't know where her husband is, to see if Bunny's home. She disguises her voice when she asks for Bunny.”

  Ginny takes a long sip of her drink. “You know, I almost feel relieved when I think of Mary drinking beer with boys her own age.”

  While I freshen our drinks, Ginny starts dinner. Mary calls to say she's having dinner at Laura's house. I wonder if Ginny knows about Heavy Chevy Billy. I feel uneasy, vaguely responsible for her. What if she's in an accident tonight? Lily cautiously enters the kitchen, without parents, self-conscious and pleased when Ginny and I compliment her on her new dress. She tells us her mommy made it. “Your mommy made it?” Ginny says.

  Lily nods.

  “Christ really does work miracles,” Ginny says.

  Tory comes down. “Why didn't you wake me up?” she says.

  “For what?”

  “I don't know. What have you been doing?”

  “Saying bad things about you,” Ginny says. “Want a drink?”

  I can tell Tory's looking her mother over to see how much she's had. “I'll have a beer.”

  The phone rings again and Ginny grabs it. She says hello several times. Then she says, “I know it's you,” and hangs up.

  “Who?” Tory says.

  “Who knows,” Ginny responds.

  Supper is chicken Kiev, cranberry muffins and asparagus. Carol and Jim take turns scolding Lily for her table manners. He seems very uncertain of his surroundings, and his discomfort makes me feel more at home. Although he has been here two days longer, I feel he's the outsider, the rude interloper. I hate his clothes and his mustache. I also hate the way he snaps at Lily. She's not even his kid. I wink at her across the table. Bunny announces she isn't going to eat anything and makes good on her threat, though she filled her plate to stop the argument. She's upset because her mother yelled at her about the phone calls. The news is on TV. A group in Boston is in front of a hospital, protesting abortion.

  “Jim and I belong to a right-to-life group back home,” Carol says.

  “A woman should have the right to do whatever she wants with her body,” Bunny says.

  “No one has the right to murder the unborn.”

  I find it annoying how everyone bandies around the concept of rights.

  “It would be nice,” Bunny says, “if you people were as concerned with living women as you are with fetuses.”

  “Murder,” Carol says. “That's what you're talking about.”

  “Is this dinner-table conversation?” Ginny asks.

  Tory stands up and excuses herself, then leaves the room.

  “That was lovely, girls,” Ginny says. “Tory's going into the hospital on Monday.”

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I'll go see if she's all right.”

  Tory's in her room, lying facedown on the bed. I sit beside her and stroke her hair. “It's going to be all right.”

  She flips over to face me. “All right for you. You don't want children. You're glad about all of this.”

  “That's not fair.”

  “I wouldn't even be having these problems if it weren't for you. I'd be a mother already if it weren't for you.”

  “We weren't ready yet. It would've been a mistake.”

  “Carol is right. It's murder.”

  “You don't believe that.”

  Carol's inside the room before she knocks on the open door, then stands right beside the bed. “I don't mean to barge in,” she says. “But I thought maybe I could be of help.” She lowers her ponderous form onto the mattress. “None of us is strong enough to bear his burden alone.”

  “All of us,” Tory says, “are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.”

  “Jesus wants to lighten your load. All you have to do is ask.” Carol stretches out her hand to Tory, who examines it and its owner with mild distaste. “Do you love Jesus, Tory?”

  “Do I look like a necrophiliac to you?”

  I expect Carol to be shocked, but her smile is indelible. “You can run from Jesus, but you can't hide.”

  Tory says, “But can you get a restraining order, is what I want to know.”

  The evening passes in the kitchen in front of the TV. The women are skilled at dividing their attention between the television and one another, so while never seeming to watch, they will suddenly comment on the action on the screen. The conversation has a casual, intimate rhythm. I listen from outside the circle, a privileged observer. I enjoy studying Tory on her home ground, and am eager to pick up the family lore. I feel a renewed interest, seeing her in this context. More than bone structure and habits of speech, I can see aspects of character I was never quite able to bring into focus suddenly illuminated and framed in their genetic setting. I feel like someone whose appreciation of an artist has been based on a single painting but who then is suddenly admitted to his studio.

  My role of licensed connoisseur is compromised by the presence of Jim. Awkward and out of place, he butts into the conversation to ask who or what. He looks resentful, worried that a joke is being perpetrated at his expense. Mercifully, he heads up early after yawning pointedly at his wife. She tells him she'll be up soon. Bunny is up and down. At one point she disappears for most of a sitcom. I find myself sharing Ginny's anger at the old bastard who's stealing her youth.

  Ginny keeps saying how nice it is to have everyone home, until, with her fourth drink, she begins to foresee the end of the reunion and slips into sullenness. “Mary's been out every night since she got her license,” she complains to Carol and Tory. “She's no company. She doesn't have time to sit down with her old mom. She's always coming or going, and everything's a big secret. She doesn't tell me anything. And then Bunny. She hates me because I don't want her to throw her life away.”

  “She doesn't hate you,” Tory says impatiently.

  “Of course she doesn't,” Carol says. “She loves you. We all love you.”

  Ginny looks at Carol through tears and says, “Spare me this indiscriminate love. The trouble with you religious types is that you're promiscuous. Love, love, love. But then, you always were a cheap date.”

  “Stop it,” Tory says. “That's no way to talk to your daughter.”

  “That's all right, Tory,” Carol says. “I understand Mom's anger.”

  “No, you don't,” Ginny says, slapping her palm down on the table. “You can't begin to understand my anger.”

  I feel I should leave, but right now that would only make my presence more blatant.

  “Between your sloppy L-U-V and Tory's Ice Queen judgment, I'm dying for a little daughterly affection.” She shakes her head. “What a brood. And Bunny. As if I need to be reminded about old letches and young bimbos.”

  Ginny lights a cigarette. “And where the hell is Mary? She's supposed to be in at eleven o'clock.” We all turn to the clock above the range: It reads 10:40. “All right,” Ginny says, “so she's got twenty minutes.” They all laugh at the same moment, like synchronized swimmers executing an abrupt, graceful maneuver, their anger dispersed.

  “Do you think she's still a virgin?” Ginny asks suddenly.

  “Of course she is,” Tory says.

  “Mary's a sensible girl,” Carol says. “She's not going to let herself be talked into anything.”

  I remember Tory told me that Carol had her first abortion when she was fifteen.

  “She's only sixteen,” Tory says.

  “She's so cute,” Carol says.

  “She is,” Ginny says.

  Tory turns to me and says, “Isn't she a cutie?”

  I could get very inspired on this subject. Instead, I just say, “She sure is.”

  Carol says, “Remember that time she stuck the key in the electrical socket?”


  At eleven o'clock, Tory announces she's tired. “You don't have to come to bed yet,” she says to me. I would like to stay up with the others, to sit quietly and listen to three women talk, but I say I'll go up with her. Ginny lets us share a room. Everyone kisses good night. Bunny, who has come back down, presses close enough for me to feel her breasts as she kisses me. Carol's breath smells chemically sweetened. Ginny folds me in a long motherly hug. She says she's going up, too.

  After she takes off her shirt, Tory points to the small protuberance on her left side. It is the size of a BB, only slightly darker than the surrounding skin. “Do you know that this would have been enough evidence to convict me of witchcraft in the seventeenth century?” she says.

  I do know, because she has told me several times, but I say, “Really?”

  “It's what they call an ‘auxiliary nipple.’ A devil's teat. Proof that I've been suckling demons.”

  “Rules of evidence have advanced a little since then,” I say cheerfully.

  “Wouldn't it be strange if in former lives you were a prosecutor at the witch trials and I was a witch?”

  “I'm on your side, Tory,” I say, putting my arms around her. As her face disappears against my chest, I see that she is looking not at me but at some region inside herself. “Everything will be all right,” I say. I can still see the sadness in her eyes and mouth. “We'll have children together.” Maybe I say it because I want to sleep with her sisters and I feel guilty about it, or because she thinks that, like her father, I'll leave and I'm afraid she's right.

  Lying there after Tory has fallen asleep, I conjure up the image of Bunny and Tory sleeping side by side on this same bed, and think about how I felt then, how I wanted to crawl between them and have both. What I really imagined, seeing these two women who look so much alike, was a single woman who was Tory leavened with Bunny's careless grace. As I drift toward sleep, I superimpose Mary's face, which in the liquor-store parking lot seemed fearless and flushed with sexual anticipation, and to that I add Carol's womb. Then I see Ginny alone in the bed in which the four of them had been conceived. And I think of my own mother, who is dead, and my father, whom I haven't seen in eight months, and imagine myself as a pinprick of life, floating whole in the dark, before all of these divisions and divorces and separations.