A home at the end of the world (10 page)

ALICE

B
OBBY
rid his voice of its droning, metronomic quality and acquired a boyish lilt, finishing sentences on a high note, so that any statement sounded like an eager, tentative question. His electric hair, when submitted to a barber’s shears, emerged as the ordinary, dryly windblown crop of a teenager prone to cowlicks. Once, as he stood grinning before our front door at noon, I saw that he had daubed his acne with a concealing flesh-colored ointment.

Still, he never managed the complete transition. He retained a subvert, slightly dangerous quality—something ravenous and watchful. It came out at dinner, as he scoured his plate, and it came out in his insistent, unfailing politeness. Only fugitives are capable of flawless courtesy from morning till night. And, besides, the boy Bobby was struggling to become could never have danced like he did.

He took to bringing over records he thought I’d like—a sweeter, more melodic music than the sort Jonathan favored. Every now and then he’d call down from Jonathan’s room: “Mrs. Glover? If you’re not too busy, come on up and listen to something?” I’d almost always go on up. How busy could I be, cooking and washing clothes?

I learned a collection of new names: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Boz Scaggs. Sometimes I just sat with the boys, listening. Sometimes, when an upbeat song came on, I accepted Bobby’s invitation to dance.

His dancing was something to see. His sense of rhythm did not in any way derive from the granite cornices and box hedges of Cleveland. Dancing, he was an original—his hips swayed with a voluptuous certainty more graceful than lewd, and his arms and legs cut their own brisk, surprising pattern through the confined air of my son’s room. Once the song ended he’d smile and shrug, as if dancing had been a slightly embarrassing failure of wit. He’d return by visible degrees to his continuing impression of the pallid suburban boys mothers are supposed to delight in.

Sometimes Jonathan grudgingly joined us dancing, sometimes he sulked with his knees drawn up to his chest. I wasn’t a fool—I knew no fifteen-year-old boy would welcome his own mother’s participation in his social life. But Bobby was so insistent. And, besides, Jonathan and I had always been good friends despite our blood bond. I decided that accepting Bobby’s little gifts of music and dance would do no harm. I had been a bit wild myself, at Jonathan’s age, not so very long ago.

Jonathan grew his hair nearly to his shoulders, in defiance of the school’s dress code. He sewed bright patches on his jeans, and persisted in wearing Bobby’s old leather jacket even after the elbows wore through. At home he was largely silent. Sometimes his silence was petulant, sometimes it was simply blank. Although he worked hard at it, Jonathan could not make himself a stranger to me. I knew him too well. His dancing was as hesitant and clumsy as his father’s, and the flippant nastiness he affected had a shallow bottom. Caught off guard, he would slip into acquiescence automatically, without having meant to. He would smile before he remembered to scowl.

One night in January, Bobby called me up to listen to a new record by Van Morrison. I’d settled myself on the floor with the boys, nodding to the music. Bobby sat cross-legged and straight-backed to my immediate left, like a Yogi meditating. Jonathan sat farther away, sulkily hunched, his shoulders curved over his knees.

“This is nice,” I said. “I like this Van Morrison.”

“Van the Man?” Bobby grinned. Sometimes his meanings remained inscrutable, despite his careful intentions. I often just smiled and nodded, as I would to a foreigner speaking indecipherable but evidently friendly English.

At moments, even in his fits of eager incoherence, Bobby made sense to me. He was an outlander, striving to assimilate. Hadn’t I myself been transplanted to a wintery place where most women of my age and station were overweight and undereducated? Years earlier, when I was still making an effort to fit in, the other women at the PTA and the church guild had offered me recipes for parfaits made with pudding and candy bars, and for frankfurters soaked in mustard and grape jelly. I couldn’t begrudge Bobby his own difficulties with the local ways of making do.

“Van’s all right,” Jonathan said. “If you like this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing is he?” I asked.

“Well, folk-y. Moony. He’s a good old boy singing about the love of a good woman.”

“I don’t know, Jon,” Bobby said. “He’s sort of, you know, better than that?”

“He’s okay,” Jonathan said. “Just a little wimpy. Mom, how about if I play you some real stuff?”

“This seems real enough,” I said.

Jonathan looked at Bobby, whose smile had taken on a stiff, worried quality. “That’s what you think,” Jonathan said. He got up and took the needle off the record in the middle of a song, pulled another out of the collection that was stored in a series of orange crates lined up against the wall.

“This is Jimi Hendrix,” he announced. “The world’s greatest dead guitarist.”

“Jon,” Bobby said.

“You’re going to love this, Mom. Really. I’m turning the volume up a little here, because you’ve got to listen to Jimi pretty loud.”

“Jon,” Bobby said, “I don’t know if—”

Jonathan touched the needle to vinyl, and the room exploded with electric guitars. They squealed and shrieked like tortured animals. A thumping bass line started, so loud and insistent I could feel it up my spine. I had the impression that my hair was being disarranged.

“Nice, huh?” Jonathan shouted. “Jimi was the greatest.”

Our eyes met through the storm of sound. Jonathan’s face was flushed, his eyes brilliant. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to blow me out of the room, to send me tumbling downstairs into the familiar sanctity of dirty dishes and vacuuming. On the record, a male voice sang, “You know you’re a cute little heartbreaker.”

“The greatest,” Jonathan hollered. “Much better than Van the Man.”

I made a decision. I stood up and said, “Bobby, let’s dance.”

He joined me immediately. We danced together in the chaos of the music. It wasn’t so bad, as long as you kept moving. It gave you the airy, buffeted sensation a sparrow must feel when caught in an updraft—a simultaneous sense of assault and liberation. You could scream into the face of this music. It all but lifted your arms into the air.

From the corner of my eye I could see that Jonathan was disappointed. His mother had not cowered before his hard-driving music. Once again, I could see the child contained in the burgeoning man—his expression at that moment recalled the times his checkers moves didn’t work out, or no one fell for his April Fool’s trick. If he’d permitted it, I would have reached over and pinched his cheek.

Presently, he started dancing, too. What else could he do? As we three swayed to the music, that small room seemed as densely packed as Times Square, and every bit as full of the weight of the moment. Jimi Hendrix growled “Foxy lady,” and it struck me as a fair appellation. A smart older woman who didn’t scare easily. Who wouldn’t just retreat to her domestic chores, and start getting fat.

After that, I paid more regular visits. I abandoned my old rule about waiting to be invited. We seemed to have passed beyond that. When my ordinary errands took me upstairs I’d tap on the door and go in for a song or two. I never stayed long.

One night when I knocked on the door I detected a shuffling on the other side. Neither of them answered my knock. I thought I could hear them whispering. Then Jonathan called, “Come in, Mom.”

I smelled it the moment I entered—that sweet smoky reek. The room was blue with it. Bobby stood in an attitude of frozen panic, and Jonathan sat in his accustomed place by the radiator. Bobby said, “Um, Mrs. Glover?”

Jonathan said, in a voice that was calm and almost suave, “Come on in, Mom. Have a hit.”

He extended a smoldering, hand-rolled cigarette in my direction.

I stood uncertainly in the doorway. For a long moment I lost track of my own character and simply floated, ghost-like, watching dispassionately as my son extended a pathetic-looking gnarled cigarette, its ember glowing orange in the dim light of a baseball-shaped lamp I’d bought for him when he was seven years old.

I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to express my shock and outrage or, at the very least, to speak gently but firmly to him about the limits of my tolerance. Either way, it would be the end of our familiar relations—our impromptu dance parties—and the beginning of a sterner, more formal period.

After the silence had stretched to its breaking point, Jonathan repeated his offer. “Give it a try, Mom,” he said. “How else will you know what you’re missing?”

“Your father would have a heart attack,” I said evenly.

“He isn’t here,” Jonathan said.

“Mrs. Glover?” Bobby said helplessly.

It was his voice that decided me—his fearful intonation of my married name.

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “How else will I know what I’m missing?”

I took three steps into the room, and accepted the sad little cigarette.

“Atta girl, Mom,” Jonathan said. His voice was cheerful and opaque.

“How do you do this?” I asked. “I’ve never even smoked regular cigarettes, you know.”

Bobby said, “Um, just pull the smoke, like, straight into your lungs. And hold it as long as you can?”

As I put the cigarette to my lips, I was aware of myself standing in a pale blue blouse and wraparound skirt in my son’s bedroom, about to perform the first plainly illegal act of my life. I inhaled. The smoke was so harsh and bitter I nearly choked. My eyes teared, and I could not hold the smoke in my lungs as Bobby had told me to do. I immediately blew out a thick cloud that hung in the air, raggedly intact, for a full second before dissipating.

Nevertheless, the boys cheered. I handed the cigarette to Bobby.

“You did it,” he said. “You did it.”

“Now I can say I’ve lived,” I answered. My voice sounded cracked and strained.

Bobby pulled in a swift, effortless drag, pinching the cigarette between his thumb and first finger. The ember fired up. When he exhaled, only a thin translucent stream of smoke escaped into the air.

“See?” he said. “You have to, like, hold it in a little longer?”

He handed the cigarette back to me. “Again?” I asked.

He shrugged, grinning in his panicky, baffled way. “Yeah, Mom,” Jonathan said. “You smoke the whole joint. One hit doesn’t do much of anything.”

Joint. It was called a joint, not a cigarette.

“Well, one more,” I said. I tried again, and this time managed to hold the smoke in for a moment or two. Again, I dispelled a riot of smoke, very different from Bobby’s gray-white, elegant jet trail.

I returned the joint to him. Jonathan said, “Hey, I’m here, too.”

“Oops. Sorry.” I handed it over. He took it greedily, as he had once accepted the little treats I brought home from shopping trips.

“What will this do, exactly?” I asked. “What should I prepare myself for?”

“It’ll just make you laugh.” Bobby said. “It’ll just, you know, make you feel happy and a little foolish?”

“It’s no big deal, Mom,” Jonathan said. “The lamb chops won’t start talking to you, or anything like that.” He took a drag, with expert dispatch, and handed the joint along to Bobby. When Bobby passed it to me I shook my head.

“I think that’s enough,” I said. “Just do me one favor.”

“Uh-huh?” Bobby said.

“Play me a Laura Nyro song, and then I’ll get on about my business.”

“Sure,” he said.

He put the record on, and we three stood listening. I waited to start feeling whatever there was to feel. By the time the song was over, I realized that marijuana had no effect at all, beyond producing a dry scratchiness in the throat. I was both relieved and disappointed.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your hospitality, boys.”

“Any time, Mom,” Jonathan said. I could not read his voice. It might have been mocking, or swaggering, or simply friendly.

“Not a word to your father,” I said. “Do you promise? Do you swear?” For a moment I thought the marijuana had affected me after all. But it was just the flush of my own guilt.

“I promise,” he said. “I swear.”

Bobby said, “Mrs. Glover? This is really cool. You are…I don’t know. Really cool. Yow!”

“Oh, call me Alice, for God’s sake,” I told him. And then I left them alone.

A week or so later I tried dope again (it was called dope, not marijuana), and found that if you kept at it, it did have its effects. It made you giddy and pleasantly vague. It took the hard edge off your attention.

On a Wednesday afternoon in February, when a frigid white hush lay over the world, I sat with Jonathan and Bobby sharing a joint. It was the fourth of my career, and I had by then acquired a certain expertise. I held the smoke, feeling its heaviness and herbal warmth inside my lungs. On the stereo, Bob Dylan sang “Girl from the North Country.” The lamp was lit against the afternoon dusk, and the paneled walls had taken on a rich, dark-honey color.

“You know,” I said, “this should be legal. It’s just utterly sweet and harmless, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said.

“Well, it should be legal,” I said. “If Nixon smoked a little, the world would be a better place.”

Bobby laughed, and then looked at me self-consciously, to be sure I’d intended to make a joke. His expression was so hesitant—he agonized so elaborately over the simplest social transactions—that I started to laugh. My laughter inspired more laughter in him, and Jonathan joined in, laughing over some private joke of his own. This was one of the herb’s best qualities: under its influence you could start laughing at any little thing and, once you’d started, feed it just by letting your eyes wander. Everything seemed absurd and funny—the Buddha-shaped incense burner standing next to a spring-driven hula girl on Jonathan’s desktop; the domesticated, dog-like quality of Bobby’s tan suede shoes.

Sometimes in those days I thought of Wendy from
Peter Pan
—an island mother to a troop of lost boys. I didn’t make an outright fool of myself. I didn’t buy gauzy skirts or Indian jewelry or sandals from Mexico. I didn’t let my hair grow long and wild. But there was a different feeling now. I had a new secret, a better one. Previously, my only secrets had been the facts that I feared sex and could not summon any interest in getting to know our neighbors. I’d felt frail and thin to the point of translucence, an insubstantial figure who got headaches from the cold and sinus infections from the heat. But this new secret was buoying, exhilarating—I would be the scandal of the neighborhood if I was found out. The secret warmed me as I passed along the aisles of the supermarket. I was a mother who got stoned with her son. The local women—big women loading their wire carts with marshmallows and ice cream, with bright pink luncheon meats and sugared cereals—would have considered me unfit, scandalous, degenerate. I felt young and slender, full of devious promise. There would be a life after Cleveland.