A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

  “I’d rather have a Turf Titan,” I said, referring to a crimson monster the size of a small tractor. “Look, you can ride on it.”

  “That’s ridiculous for a young person,” he said. “This one here is a third the price.”

  We so vividly impersonated customers that a young salesman with a baldness-concealing haircut strode over and began describing the virtues of a model more expensive than the one my father had picked. As the salesman worked through his spiel, a slender woman walked by, carrying twins in a knapsack-like contraption. She was less than beautiful, with shaggy matte-brown hair and a sharp, shrewd little chin. Her eyes—her whole body—looked tired in a profound, almost permanent way, as if no amount of rest would ever quite restore her. Still, she possessed a sure-footed self-assurance that lent weight to the bright aisle she walked in search of the correct yard tool. Her twins stared with puzzled absorption at the empty air directly in front of them. As she made her way along the aisle I thought of how firmly anchored her life must be, for all its domestic hardship. A year from today, her twins would be walking and speaking. A year from today, she would know exactly how much time had passed.

  She turned and disappeared into Lawn Furniture. The salesman pointed out safety features, indicating with his hands the three sensitive spots which rendered the mower incapable of snatching up an arm or a leg and giving it back as a spray of blood and bone chips. His hands were white and thin, the thumbs so curved it seemed they must hurt him.

  My father and I listened attentively, promised to think about it. My father, nodding as he received the salesman’s card, looked waxily pale under the fluorescence of Montgomery Ward. Hard white light shone through his thin hair onto the scalp beneath. As soon as the salesman had finished I hurried my father out of the store and bought him a drink in the hushed darkness of a steak house. A sign planted in a bucket of plastic tulips said that the “Early Bird Specials” were now in effect. We were the only bar customers at that hour.

  “That kid in there was full of beans,” my father said over his bourbon. “For an extra hundred dollars all you really get is a bigger grass catcher. You could have a grass catcher custom-made for less than a hundred dollars.”

  “I haven’t got a lawn anyway,” I told him.

  “Well, when you get one, you should know what lawn mower to buy.”

  “If I ever have a lawn, then you and I can do some serious mower shopping.”

  “I may not be around then,” he said. “I may as well help you get the information now.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I really don’t know if I’m the lawn type. I don’t have any plants. I don’t even own a car.”

  “That Olds has less than forty thousand miles on it,” he said. “It should still be in good shape when you get it someday.”

  “I didn’t mean I want a car. I didn’t mean I feel the lack. Nobody in New York has a car. I can afford a cab when I need to get somewhere.”

  “And you’re pretty happy out there?” he asked.

  “Yes. I mean, I guess so. Sure.”

  “That’s all I care about. You can turn the Olds into a birdbath if you like. I just want you to be happy.”

  I drew in a breath, and at that moment, for the first time in months, I felt prodigally—almost obscenely—healthy. I’d been waiting most of my life for him to express desires more detailed and possible than his single overriding wish: that I be completely happy, every minute.

  “Excuse me, please,” I said. “I’ve got to go to the men’s room.”

  “I’ll be right here,” he said.

  The bathrooms were at the front of the restaurant, behind the cashier’s station. I realized that instead of going to the men’s room I could walk out the front door without my father’s knowing it, and I did so, with no hesitation and no reason beyond the simple fact that it was possible. I stepped through the smoked-glass door into the even, shadowless light of the mall’s main concourse. I stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden brightness, as the door sighed shut behind me. When it had closed, a sensation of wild freedom opened up in me; a giddy vertiginous feeling. I threaded my way among the shoppers to the mall entrance, and passed through the hydraulic doors into daylight proper. The parking lot was filling up with husbands and wives just released from their jobs—golden afternoon sun gilded the windshields and radio antennae of their cars. It was an autumnal light without a hint of autumn’s chill. I walked, thinking of nothing in particular, over the parking lot’s western range to the line of stunted Joshua trees that separated the mall from the highway. Beyond the highway stood a scattering of mobile homes, and beyond the mobile homes was the desert, an immense cactus-studded flatness rimmed with irregular red mountains. I thought I would cross the highway and walk into the desert. I did not think of motives or consequences. I saw for the first time that one could walk away on little more than a whim. One could elect to leave behind his father’s death, his mother’s ironic loneliness, his own uncertain future. One could find a job and a room under a new name in a strange city, walk its boulevards without fear or embarrassment. I stood for a while, watching the desert as the cars whizzed by.

  It was my father who called me back. Or, rather, it was the thought of his growing agitation as I failed to return. I didn’t mind so much the idea of him searching the empty men’s room, looking around Ward’s or Sears and finally calling the police. I didn’t mind thinking of the actions he would take. What I could not abide was the idea of him right at that moment, alone with his drink at the steak house, just beginning to realize something must be wrong. I jogged across the parking lot, and had to stand for a minute in front of the restaurant, catching my breath.

  When I returned to the table, he said, “Are you all right? I was about to go in there after you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “A little indigestion.”

  “You don’t look all that well,” he said. “Maybe we’d better get you home.”

  “Nope. I am perfectly, perfectly fine. I guess I’m not really used to drinking in the afternoon.”

  The waitress, a woman about my age, wearing powder over bad skin, laughed at something the bartender said. They both smoked cigarettes. The bartender was a middle-aged man with the hopped-up, friendly look of a terrier. His own reflection hovered in the smoked mirror behind the bar, dark as a figure suspended in ice. Above the illuminated bottles, a team of small plastic Clydesdales pulled a miniature beer wagon in an eternal circle.

  That night after dinner, when my father pulled out the Scrabble set, I asked if he’d like to go for a walk instead. “There’s no place to walk to,” he said. “It’s solid condos for miles around.”

  “Go on, Ned,” my mother said. “Reuben said a little exercise might be good for you.”

  “Just a short one,” I added. “Ten minutes.”

  He stood with a dry, papery expenditure of breath. “All right,” he said. “But don’t think you’re getting out of Scrabble this way.”

  “I’m going to hit the bathroom for a minute,” I said. “Be right back.”

  “This kid is in the bathroom more than he’s out of it,” my father said to my mother.

  “I’m twenty-seven,” I said. “I’m older than you were when you met Mom.”

  In the powder room, which was papered in pert orange rosebuds, I splashed cold water over my face. I just stood there for a while, under the low hum of the fluorescent panel. I did not look at myself in the mirror. I looked instead at the wallpaper, its rosebuds arrang
ed in soldierly lines, each suspended over a single olive-drab leaf.

  At nineteen, I had worn a strand of pearls around my neck, and gotten a dragon tattooed on my right shoulder. I’d left NYU for a semester, without telling my parents, and used some of my tuition money to enroll in bartending school. I’d thought I could turn into the kind of person who would do a thing like that. And now here I was, standing in a powder room in Phoenix, with no idea what to do with my father, either alive or dead. I’d never expected to find myself in such a usual situation. I stayed in the bathroom as long as I credibly could. I flushed the toilet twice by way of explanation.

  When I came out again, my father said, “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m great,” I said. “Come on, let’s go for that walk.”

  Outside, it was a clear Arizona night, crazy with stars. When we reached the street my father said, “Which way do you want to go? There’s nothing in either direction.”

  “Left, then.”

  We went left. On either side of us, windows glowed in the snug parchment-colored houses. My father started softly singing “Give My Regards to Broadway,” and I joined in. After we’d gone a couple of blocks I said, “If we cut between two of these buildings, we’d be out in the desert, wouldn’t we?”

  “Snakes out there,” my father said. “Scorpions.”

  The idea that Ned Glover, former Ohio theater owner, lived in the same place as snakes and scorpions was so impossible that I laughed out loud. My father must have thought I was laughing at his caution. Saying, “Well, I hope you’ve got good thick shoes on,” he headed out between two houses toward the open country.

  I hung back, wondering about the snakes. My father walked twenty yards or so, turned and beckoned to me, then walked on. When he passed from the shadow of the buildings into desert starlight the wind blew his hair straight up. It was like seeing him emerge from a tunnel. I trotted after him, checking the ground as I went.

  “Are there really snakes?” I asked.

  “Yep. Rattlers. Mrs. Cohen two doors down found one drowning in her Jacuzzi.”

  We walked into the desert together. The ground was level as a movie set, spouting here and there the spiky black starburst of a yucca. Ahead of us stood the flat-topped mountain range, which brightened as it rose toward the sky. In the deep shadows at its base a few pale, watery lights shone, hermits’ lanterns or Navajo ghosts or aliens setting up camp.

  “Nice night,” he said.

  “Beautiful. Dad?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I feared we were running out of time. Although I’d always assumed in an unspoken way that my father would die before me, I’d imagined his demise taking place in some remote future; a future in which I’d be wiser and solider, more present. Suddenly—it seemed literally overnight—his lungs were failing at an unguessable rate and my own blood was possibly under invasion, preparing to manifest the first symptoms. There were things I wanted to ask him, but I couldn’t seem to get them phrased in the condo or the Oldsmobile or the shopping mall. I had hoped for more resolve out here under the stars.

  “Cat got your tongue?” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I’d been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand.

  My father said, “I’ve been thinking about that lawn mower.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s such a good deal. Maybe tomorrow we’ll go back and get it, and I can keep it here until you need it.”

  “Would you use it in the meantime?”

  “Me?” he said. “What have I got to mow, my rock garden? We’ve got that big two-car garage, there’s plenty of room.”

  “You mean on the off chance I ever have a lawn, I’m going to come out here and pick up this ten- or twenty-year-old mower?”

  “They only make things worse and worse,” he said. “Do you know how much your mother would give to have her old Hoover upright back again? You can’t buy those anymore for any price, now vacuums are all made out of plastic.”

  “You’re not serious about this,” I said.

  “Sure I’m serious. You’ll inherit everything in that house anyway, why not inherit a good lawn mower at some future time when the only ones you can buy are made of rubber?”

  “I don’t want a lawn mower,” I said. “Really. Thanks for offering.”

  “Maybe I’ll buy it anyway,” he said. “Then it’ll be there, and if you don’t want it, you can give it to the Salvation Army or whatever.”

  “Dad, I don’t want the mower,” I said.

  “Well, wait and see.”

  “I don’t want a power drill, or a microwave, or a Mercury sedan. I don’t want season tickets to the Indians. I don’t want a Rototiller, or a rod and reel, or a thermos that keeps coffee hot all day.”

  “Now, now,” he said. “No need to get excited.”

  “What I’d really like,” I said, “is to know what happened to me. Why can’t I seem to make a life for myself?”

  His face clenched up. It was a familiar expression of his, this gathering of the facial muscles under the skin—it happened when he was confronted by the contrary or the inexplicable. His face actually appeared to pucker and shrink as his features worked their way toward center. He might have been straining to see through a keyhole from a distance of several feet.

  “You’ll find something,” he said. “You’re still young, it takes time.”

  “What happened ? You were there, you must have seen it. I keep thinking there must be something I don’t remember. I’ve got a decent job, I have lovers and friends. So why do I feel so numb and separate? Why do I feel like a failure? Did you do something to me? I won’t hold it against you. I just need to know.”

  He paused to take in a gulp of air. His face continued to shrink.

  “I loved you,” he said. “I worked hard, I don’t know. I must have made mistakes. Your mother and I took the best care of you we could.”

  “Well, I know you did,” I said. “I know. So how have I turned out to be such a mess?”

  “You’re not a mess,” he said. “I mean, if you’re having some problems—”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. His eyes went glassy, and his mouth hung slightly open. What was he remembering? There would of course have been some thing—a spasm of hatred when I would not stop crying, some meanness born from jealousy. Some little act or omission, a brief ordinary failure of love that would not, in the end, explain anything.

  We stood for a while in silence, which was rare for us. Ordinarily, my father and I avoided silence. We were both good talkers, and we knew how to keep the air around us thoroughly occupied with talk or games or snatches of song. The sickle shape of a hawk skated over the stars. An empty 7-Up can gleamed in the moonlight like something precious.

  “Dad, listen,” I said.

  He did not reply. It was only then that I realized how he was straining for breath.

 
“Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  His face was dim, his eyes unnaturally large as he concentrated on pulling in air. He had the shocked look of a fish pulled out of the water into a world of piercing, unbreathable light.

  “Dad? Can you talk?”

  He shook his head. My first thought was of flight. I could still get away; I could deny everything. No one need ever suspect me.

  “Dad,” I said helplessly. “Oh, Dad, what should I do?”

  He gestured me closer. I took hold of his shoulders, inhaling his whiskery, cologned smell, which had not changed since I was a baby. His lungs squeaked like a balloon being vigorously rubbed.

  Carefully, as if he were made of porcelain, I helped lower him to a sitting position. I sat beside him, holding him, on the talcumy earth.

  So this is it, I thought. This is my father’s death. I did not know how to help, what to do; where to bury him. I stroked his wispy hair, which had once been thick and prosperous enough to base a marriage on.

  I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had nothing to tell him. All I could think of were the deathbed clichés, which any stranger might have offered. Still, I offered them. The alternative was to let him die in silence.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”

  He could not speak. His face was darkened and enlarged by the effort of his breathing.

  I said, “Don’t worry about Mom or me. We’ll be fine. Everything’s all right, really. Everything’s fine.”

  I couldn’t tell if he heard me. He seemed to have gone so far inside himself, to have withdrawn from his own brain and focused his very being on the insufficient action of his lungs. I kept stroking his head and shoulders. I kept telling him everything would be all right.

  And, after a while, he recovered. The air started catching in his lungs again and his face, minute by minute, lost its wild, strangled quality. We sat together in the dirt while his lungs, worn thin as cheesecloth, somehow managed once again to negotiate the passage of oxygen.