A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  The plane taxied, climbed through tumbling whiteness to a blue sky as bright and featureless as the primmest notions of heavenly reward. I sat quietly, flying across the country in a state of dislocation that was almost lulling—almost like going to the movies. I watched myself as a man of twenty-seven, strapped in against the predicted turbulence, pouring Scotch into a clear plastic glass, on his way to visit his parents in a house he’d never seen.

  In Arizona, for the first time, my father spoke to me about death. A second doctor had confirmed the diagnosis—emphysema—but insisted that with precautions another thirty years were possible. Still, it was time to talk of certain things.

  What my father said was “Son, when it gets down to it, you bury me wherever you want to.” He and I were sitting at the dinette table, where we had been playing Yahtzee while my mother made dinner.

  “It won’t really matter to me,” he added. “I’ll be dead.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I want to decide something like that.”

  “Well, you should decide,” he said. “It’s the place you’re going to have to visit for the next fifty years. Or the next thousand, if they figure out how to replace your organs with plastic.”

  My mother could hear us easily from the kitchen, which formed the lesser end of the L-shaped living-room-dining-area-kitchen. “Biological immortality is no longer in fashion,” she said. “It went out with monorails and vacations on Mars.”

  She brought a platter of tortilla chips and salsa to the table. Since she and my father had retired to Arizona she’d stopped styling her hair. She wore it pulled back in a ponytail, and she had a leathery tan. My father, prone to skin cancers, was white as the moon. They looked like a settler and his Indian bride.

  “It’s not really all that big a deal,” my father said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  I glanced at my mother, who shrugged away any stake in the conversation and returned to her chilis rellenos .

  “Listen, Jonathan,” my father said. “If your mother and I both dropped over right now, if we clutched our hearts and dropped face down in the tortilla chips, what would you do with us?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’d have you sent back to Cleveland.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do,” he said. “You’ll never move back to Cleveland. What would be the point of having dead parents there?”

  “We lived there for years,” I said. “I mean, it still seems like home.”

  “We spent thirty years getting out of Cleveland,” he said. “That theater nearly killed me, and the weather just about killed your mother and me both. If you put me back there, I promise to come haunt you. I’ll wake you up early every Saturday for the rest of your life and tell you to help me trim the hedge.”

  “Well, what about here?” I said. “You like it here, don’t you?”

  “Here I can breathe the air, and your mother’s learning to make blue margaritas. That’s exactly how much Phoenix means to us.”

  I could not picture him buried in Arizona. It would be like a joke on him, having a grave in the Western desert, with coyotes howling over his head.

  “I don’t know if I can talk about this much more,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Okay,” my father said. “How would you like to be trounced again at Yahtzee?”

  “I think I’d rather lie down for a while. Do you mind?”

  “Of course I don’t mind. Are you sick?”

  “No,” I said. “I just want to close my eyes for a minute.” I got up and went to the sofa, which had been newly purchased in Arizona, a copy of the Cleveland sofa, with knobbed maple armrests and a starched colonial skirt. This new one, which folded creakily out into a bed, had been bought especially to accommodate me on my visits, since my parents’ condominium had only one bedroom, as did all the others in the complex. It was a neighborhood of widows and widowers.

  “Why don’t you fold it out and take a nap?” my father said.

  “No, I’ll just lie on it like a sofa,” I said. I lay down, and propped a needlepoint pillow under my head. The sofa upholstery depicted cattails, rust-colored boats, and brown mallard ducks flying away in repeated series of three. A small Christmas tree gleamed on the end table, strung with ornaments I remembered choosing in a dime store as a child. After years of “decorator” trees—with red and silver balls, candy canes, and small white lights—my parents had returned, in miniature, to the gaudy chaotic tree of a household with children.

  “I’m glad you came home for a while,” my father said. “You’re looking a little pale, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Everybody in New York is pale this time of year,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move to Arizona.”

  “Why would you want to move here?” my father said, rattling the Yahtzee dice in their cup. “There’s nothing for a young person to do.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Nothing. There’s really nothing for anybody to do.” He rolled the dice. “Small straight,” he said. “Do you want another drink?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  As he went to the closet-sized bar to pour another for himself, I could hear the labor of his breathing. The bar, a narrow contrivance between the living room and the dinette, displayed its neat row of bottles on a mirrored shelf. A beige hand towel, never used, sat folded beside the miniature chrome sink.

  My parents had brought their Cleveland sense of order to the desert with them. Here, where fine sand blew through the windows at night, where tumbleweed occasionally scratched at the door, the spices on the rack were kept in strict alphabetical order. Each houseplant shone with green, glossy life, and every morning my mother inspected them all, plucking dead leaves and dropping them into a plastic bag.

  “As long as you’re having another drink, I guess I will, too,” I said. I heard the particular gurgle the bourbon made as it flowed out the spout of the quart bottle.

  “Hope and Glory is showing at the mall,” my father said.

  “We could go to the matinee tomorrow,” I said. “It’d keep us out of the sun.”

  “Good.” He brought me my drink.

  “I really don’t want to decide about, you know, funeral arrangements for you guys,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it so much. By the time we’re dead you’ll probably be settled down somewhere. Just bury us within commuting distance.”

  “What if I don’t settle down, though?”

  “You will. Believe me, it gets you sooner or later.”

  “I think I’ll go see if Mom needs help in the kitchen,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just that I have no idea where I’ll settle down,” I said. “I could end up anywhere. I could go to Sri Lanka.”

  “Well, that’s fine. You should travel while you’re young.” My father rolled the dice again, and cursed his dearth of luck.

  “I’m not that young anymore,” I said.

  “Ha. That’s what you think.”

  In the kitchen, my mother dried romaine lettuce with weary efficiency. She might have been diapering her tenth baby. I stood beside her at the sink. She had taken on a brittle smell, like dry leaves.

 
“Hey, Mom,” I said.

  “Will you look at what they call lettuce here?” she said. “I went to three different stores for this, and it still looks like somebody beat it all the way to Phoenix with a stick.”

  She delivered the complaint in a tone of skittish good cheer. Lately, on my visits home, first to Cleveland and now Phoenix, she alternated between fits of irony and folksy, high-strung friendliness.

  “Pretty sad,” I said.

  We stood quietly as my father lifted himself from his chair and walked upstairs to the bedroom. Once he was out of range my mother said, “So. How’s everything? How’s Bobby doing?”

  “Okay. He’s fine. Things are pretty much okay.”

  “Good,” she said, and nodded enthusiastically, as if the answer had been full and sufficient.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Mm-hm?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve been…oh, I don’t know. I sometimes feel so alone in New York.”

  “Well, I can understand that,” she said. “It’s hard to avoid feeling lonely. Just about anywhere.”

  She began cutting a cucumber into astonishingly thin, lucent slices. The knife blade seemed to impart illumination to the vegetable with every slice.

  “You know what I’ve been wondering lately?” I said. “I’ve been wondering why you and Dad don’t have more friends. I mean, when I was a kid, I felt like we were marooned on another planet together. Like the family on the old TV show.”

  “I don’t remember any show like that,” she said. “If you had a baby of your own, and a house and business to run, you’d know how much energy you’ve got left over for running around the neighborhood meeting people. And then your kids pack up and go after eighteen years.”

  “Well, sure they do,” I said. “Of course they do. What else would you expect?”

  She laughed. “They do if you’ve raised them right,” she said cheerfully. “Sweetheart, nobody wants you to have moved back into your old room after you graduated.”

  We were not a confrontational family. We did not attempt to draw one another out. As our lives changed, we strove instead to develop new ways of acting normal in one another’s company.

  “I’ve just been wondering lately if this is, you know, it ,” I said. “An apartment and a steady job and some people to love. What more could I want?”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said.

  I asked, “Mom, when did you know you wanted to marry Dad?”

  She didn’t speak for a full minute. She finished with the cucumber, and started in on a tomato.

  Finally she said, “Well, I still don’t know if I wanted to marry him. I’m still trying to decide.”

  “Come on. Seriously.”

  “All right. Let’s see. I was barely seventeen, you know, and your father was twenty-six. He asked me on our fourth date. I remember I was wearing white shoes a week after Labor Day, and I felt defiant and sort of foolish at the same time. Your father and I were sitting in his car and I was feigning contemplation when in fact I was still worrying over having worn those damned shoes, and he leaned right over and said to me, ‘What if we were to get married?’ Just like that.”

  “And you said?”

  She reached for a second tomato. “I didn’t say anything. I was so startled. And embarrassed, to have been worrying about my shoes at a moment like that. I remember thinking, ‘I am the most trivial person who ever lived.’ I told him I’d need time to think about it. And I found I couldn’t think of one single reason why we shouldn’t get married. So we did.”

  “You were in love with him?” I asked.

  She pressed her lips together, as if the question had been impertinent and slightly irritating. “I was a girl ,” she said. “But yes, sure. I was wild about him. Nobody had ever made me laugh the way he could, do you remember how serious Grandpa always was? And your father had the most beautiful thick chestnut hair then.”

  “You knew that, of all the people in the world, he was the one you wanted to marry?” I asked. “You never worried that you might be making some sort of extended mistake, like losing track of your real life and going off on, I don’t know, a tangent you could never return from?”

  She waved the question away as if it were a sluggish but persistent fly. Her fingers were bright with tomato pulp. “We didn’t ask such big questions then,” she said. “Isn’t it hard on you, to think and wonder and plan so much?”

  From upstairs, I heard the toilet flush. I knew my father would be coming down again, ready for another round of Yahtzee. “How’s he doing, really?” I asked my mother.

  “Oh, up and down,” she said.

  “He’s looked fine since I got here.”

  “That’s because you’re here. But Reuben says emphysema is funny. It can just start getting better. Like that.”

  “So you think he’s getting better?” I asked.

  “No. But he could. He could start getting better at any moment.”

  “And how are you?”

  “Me? I’m healthy as a horse,” she said. “I’m almost embarrassed by how good I feel.”

  “I mean otherwise. You said you wanted to get a job here. You were talking about real estate school.”

  “I should. I keep meaning to go out there and see what’s what. But then your father would be alone all day. It’s funny. He was always so capable when we lived in Ohio. He was at that theater so much of the time, I suppose I just figured he liked being on his own. But now that we’re here, he gets nervous if I’m at the store too long.”

  “Do you think he’s getting senile?” I asked.

  “No. He’s just good and scared, is what he is. Your father was never all that introspective. And now, well, he wants something going on all the time. I’m like the social director on a cruise for one.”

  She smiled at me, rolling her eyes good-humoredly, but now the irony crackled through like tissue paper folded into silk.

  “Two,” I said. “There are two of you.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said.

  My father and I went the next day to see Hope and Glory at the Phoenix Cinema Eight. My mother, who claimed to have seen enough movies that week, stayed home to work on what she called her garden, a small plot of extravagantly watered grass and hardy, thick-stemmed flowers. When we left her she was on her way out into the heat, wearing plaid Bermudas and a faded straw hat and gardening gloves the size of Minnie Mouse’s hands.

  As we walked out the door my father said, “There goes the last of the gentlemen farmers.” She gave him back a look she had developed since they moved to the desert: the patient, clinically affectionate look of a good nurse.

  We drove to the movies in my father’s Oldsmobile, a big deep blue Cutlass, silent and ponderous as a submarine. He kept his hands on the steering wheel at three and nine o’clock. He wore a pair of clip-on sunglasses over his ordinary glasses. Above us, the sky was a molten, shifting blue. Mountains shimmered in the distance, beyond the housing tracts and shopping centers. When we swerved to avoid a dead armadillo, my father shook his head and said, “Who ever expected to end up living in the desert, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “Who ever expects to end up living anywhere?”

 
“That’s too deep for me,” he said, and turned into the mall’s parking lot, following a line of neon cowboys on horses with flickering legs.

  We were two of perhaps a half-dozen people at the movies, it being a weekday matinee. In its emptiness, the theater reminded me of my father’s old place. Although it was no more than a medium-sized room surrounded on all sides by a saffron-colored curtain, it had the same depopulated melancholy, and the same smell: mildew and old popcorn. An elderly woman two rows ahead turned to glance at us, because of my father’s heavy breathing. Meeting his eyes, she turned back and made a small adjustment to one of her earrings.

  I believed I knew what she was thinking: That one’s not long for this world . She was probably a widow; a frequenter of matinees. I wanted to tap her fat shoulder and tell her the story of my father’s life. I’d have liked for her to know that he was not just an elderly man in a polyester sport shirt, gasping in a remote, sad little theater.

  Hope and Glory turned out to be highly satisfying, and afterward my father and I browsed through the mall. It was a big mall, with a central oasis where floodlighted palms dipped their fronds into a fountain. The aged sat on benches, and a smiling man in a white denim suit demonstrated the organ. “Arizona is the state of the living dead,” my father told me. He hustled me past the interior grotto and into a Montgomery Ward, to see what was on sale.

  We looked at stereos, miniature television sets, and aluminum window frames. We looked at power mowers arrayed on a field of Astroturf. “This is a good machine,” he said, trying the hand brakes on a bright red one.