A home at the end of the world - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,35
on his worried head. He’s drunk enough to sleep through that, too. I could crawl into bed with him and lose myself in the musky warmth, the smells of Scotch and underarm and British Sterling. I stand a minute beside his bed, considering the possibilities.
What I finally do is leave. I go out of my father’s room, down the hall, and through the front door into the starry, streetlighted Cleveland night.
The Glovers live less than a mile away, in a house with diamond-pane windows. A white-wicker swing sways creakily on the front porch, crisp as frozen lace. I watch their house from among the irises. It is early June; flowers whisper around my knees. Careful as a thief I survey their property, keeping to the shadows. There is the light in Jonathan’s window, a feeble ivory glow from the gooseneck lamp beside his bed. He is reading John Steinbeck for school, and will tell me the story afterward. I creep behind a mulberry tree. Kitchen light throws a long rectangle onto the grass as Alice dries the spoons and the measuring cups. I can’t see her but I know her moves—she is fast and certain as science itself, though she cares more about perfection than she does about order. The cast-iron skillets are always oiled, but the Sunday paper still sits in the living room on a Wednesday night. The Glovers keep a nourishing, semi-clean house that has little to do with neatness. Things catch and hold here.
I wait breathing in the dark as she turns out the kitchen light and goes upstairs. Ned won’t be home for another hour or more. I sneak around in time to see the light go on in her bedroom window. I watch her window and I watch the others, the ones that open onto empty rooms. Behind paired black windows is the gleaming darkness of the dining room, its silver tea service putting out an icy glitter. Behind a third, smaller window is the laundry room, with its scoured smell. Upstairs, Alice sends a brief shadow across the windowscreen.
I wait, watching, until Ned’s car pulls up. I can see him walk from the garage to the front door, his white shirt brilliant in the porchlight, coins jingling in his pockets. Ned slicks his hair with Vitalis; he wears Sansabelt slacks. I hear the click of his key in the door—a perfect fit. He douses the light and goes upstairs. I can feel his tread. Alice is waiting for him, her hair pulled up off her neck. Jonathan still reads in his own room, taking in the story he’ll tell me tomorrow.
I sit in the bushes until every light is out, until the house has settled itself for the night. Then I walk a slow circle around it, with stars and planets shining overhead. Above us, suns nova and collapse, punching holes in the galaxy, pulling their light after them into the next world. Here below, on an earth night humming with gnats and crickets, I orbit the Glovers’ house.
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