A Home At The End Of The World Part 14

By then, Clare knew me well enough to let me listen. She didn't talk about unrelated matters during Steve Reich any more than she would have during All About Eve All About Eve . When the record was finished, I said, "Whew." . When the record was finished, I said, "Whew."

"I thought you'd like him," she said.

"Oh, yeah. He's great. He's just, you know-"

I tried to finish the sentence by approximating the shape of the music with my hands. I don't know if she understood what I was trying to tell her.

She did shake her head and say, "Bobby."

"Uh-huh?"

"Nothing. You really are a fanatic, aren't you?"

I shrugged. I couldn't tell where my fanaticism placed me in her view of the world. I didn't know whether to claim it or deny it. I looked at the rug pattern between my feet.

"Do you know what I think?" she said. "Can I be absolutely honest with you?"

"Uh-huh," I said, curious about absolute honesty and fearing it with my whole heart.

"I think you need a new haircut, is what I think."

It was only an outer suggestion, a question of cosmetics rather than personal insufficiency. "Really?" I said.

"I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's whole life." like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's whole life."

I shrugged again, and smiled. "This is my life," I said. "It doesn't seem like the wrong one."

"But this is just the beginning. You're not going to sit around this apartment cooking and cleaning forever."

"Right," I said, though truthfully I had drifted halfway into the conviction that that was exactly what I'd do.

"And, sweetie, that Bee Gees haircut is only going to mislead people. Do you know what I'm saying?"

"Uh-huh. Okay. Maybe tomorrow I'll go to a, you know, haircut place."

My stomach crawled. Would I need clown-colored hair to have a New York life? If I let that happen, I wouldn't fit back into Cleveland, or into Ned and Alice's Arizona house. All my backup options would snap shut.

"I could do it," she said. "Free of charge."

"Really?"

I could tell from her laughter that my every doubt had sounded through that single word.

"I went to hairdressing school, if you can believe that," she said. "I've still got my scissors, I can give you a new look right now. What do you say?"

I paused. Then I decided. It was only hair. I could grow it back to its present state and reapply for my Ohio job; I did not have to lose the thread of my old life.

"Okay," I said. "Sure."

She had me take my s.h.i.+rt off, which was the first embarra.s.sment. I was not in trim or imposing shape. I looked exactly like someone who'd worked in a bakery. But Clare had already switched over to a crisp hairdresser's manner, and did not let her attention stray below my collarbone. She told me in a firmly professional voice to soak my head under the kitchen faucet. Then she put a towel over my shoulders and sat me in a chair in the middle of the living-room floor.

I told her, "The barber at home always just trimmed a little off the sides."

"Well, I'm preparing to do major surgery," she said. "Do you trust me?"

"No," I said, before the instinct to tell cooperative lies could a.s.sert itself.

She laughed. "Well, why should you? But just try and relax, okay? Let Momma take care of it."

"Okay," I said. I tried to make myself stop caring about what I looked like. As she started in with the scissors, I reminded myself that our lives are made of changes we can't control. Letting little things happen is good practice. The scissors snipped close to my ear. Wet clumps of my hair, surprisingly dead and separate-looking, fell on the floor around me.

"Just keep going until you're finished, okay?" I said. "I mean, I'm not going to look until you're all through."

"Perfect," she said. She stopped cutting for a minute and put Van Morrison on, to help keep me calm.

She spent almost forty-five minutes on my haircut. I felt the warmth and the faint jasmine smell of her, the quick competent fingers on my scalp. I felt the tickle of her breath. Once it was started I'd have been glad to have the haircut go on all night-to never see my transformed head but just sit s.h.i.+rtless amid a growing pile of my own shed hair, with the crackle of Clare's scented concentration hovering around me.

But then, finally, she was through. With a deep exhalation and a last snip at my temple she said, "Voila . Come into the bathroom and see the result." . Come into the bathroom and see the result."

I let her lead me, though I knew the way well enough. I wanted to stay a little longer in the cooperative mode, with the state of my hair and my future taken out of my hands. She led me into the bathroom, stood me in front of the mirror, and turned on the overhead fixture.

"Ta-da," she said. And there I was, blinking in the light.

She'd given me a crew cut. The sides were so short my scalp shone through, and the top was a single bristly shelf. Seeing my own face under that haircut, I got my first good look at myself from the outside. I had ears that were small and stingy, curled up on themselves. I had narrow glittering eyes, and a big nose that split at the tip, as if it were meant to be two smaller noses. Those features had always seemed inevitable. Now I saw how particular they were. Seeing my face in the harsh light, backed by white tiles, I might have been a relative called in to identify a body. If we have spirits that fly out when the system shuts down, this may be how we see our own vacated selves-with the same interest and horror we bring to an accident victim.

"Yow," I said.

"You look wonderful," she told me. "Give it a little time. I know it's a shock at first. But trust me. You're going to start turning heads around here."

I just kept staring at the face in the mirror. If this was who I was supposed to be, I didn't know how to do it. Clare might as well have taken me to a pay phone and told me to dial Jupiter.

She said we had to wait up for Jonathan, to show him the new me. I didn't much like the idea of showing myself to Jonathan. I felt too foolish in my exposed vanity, my own willingness to be remade. Still, I agreed. As I've said, Clare had a musical effect on me. She entered my brain. I found myself not only doing what she wanted but losing track of where my desires ended and hers began.

While waiting for Jonathan, we did what had become our usual things. We made popcorn and worked our way through a six-pack of Diet c.o.ke. We listened to Steve Reich again, and watched a rerun of Mary Tyler Moore Mary Tyler Moore . I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed. . I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed.

Jonathan got home after one. When we heard his key, Clare made me hide in the kitchen. "I'm going to sit here very normally," she whispered. "I'll keep him in the living room. After a few minutes, you just walk casually out."

I was reluctant to perform that way. To spotlight my self-concern. But Clare was too big and bright-haired for me. I had a dim recollection of a birthday party at which an old man in a red nose and lettuce-colored wig plucked quarters from my ears and pulled a paper bouquet from inside my s.h.i.+rt. Yes, I'd pretended unhumiliated astonishment and delight.

So I went to the dark kitchen as Jonathan came through the door. I heard the porcine squeak of the hinges, and his simple conversation with Clare. "Hi, honey." "h.e.l.lo, dear." "How'd it go?" "Cataclysmic. The usual." They could sound more perfectly like a husband and wife than any couple I'd met. I understood how having a baby could come to seem like their logical next step.

I listened to them. Weak air-shaft light floated in through the window like fog. Clare's mason jars full of herbs put out a dull grandmotherly gleam on the sill. They bore their names on paper labels, in her small spiky handwriting: foolscap, star anise, nettle.

I heard Jonathan ask, "Where's Bobby?"

"Oh, he's around somewhere," she answered.

That would have been my cue. It was time to walk out as if nothing unusual had happened. What I did, though, was stay in the kitchen. I got distracted by the pale darkness, the refrigerator's hum and the jars of spices meant to cure headaches, insomnia, and bad luck. I might have been a body buried in a brick wall, eavesdropping on the simple business of the living. It came to me that death itself could be a more distant form of partic.i.p.ation in the continuing history of the world. Death could be like this, a simultaneous presence and absence while your friends continued to chat among the lamps and furniture about someone who was no longer you. For the first time in years I felt my brother's presence. I felt it, unmistakably-the purpose and somethingness of him, the Carlton quality that lingered after voice and flesh and all other bodily consequences were gone. I felt him in that kitchen as surely as I'd felt him one cold white afternoon in the graveyard, years ago, when a brilliant future s.h.i.+mmered beyond the headstones, beyond the curve of the earth. He's here, I said to myself, and I knew it was true. I had worked up a habit of not thinking about him; of treating myself as if I'd been born into Ned and Alice's house after our father died. Now I thought of them all, dead in Cleveland. Right now there would be wild daisies on their graves, and dandelions gone to fluff. My harmonica, which I'd tucked into Carlton's breast pocket at the funeral home, would have slipped through his ribs and clunked onto the coffin boards. I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen-into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. Outside, a line of laundry hung in the air shaft. Empty s.h.i.+rtsleeves dangled. I saw that as myself and my brother combined-in both our names-I could pursue a life and a surprising future. I could feed him in his other world by being both myself and him in this one. I stood in that kitchen while Clare threw me one entrance line after another. I watched a white dress s.h.i.+rt sway gently, six floors above the concrete.

Finally, she came for me. She asked if I was all right, and I told her I was fine. I told her I was wonderful. When she asked what was going on, I gestured helplessly in the direction of the hanging clothes. She made a clucking noise, thinking I'd suffered a simple attack of shyness, and led me out by the hand.

Jonathan shrieked at the sight of my hair. He said I looked dangerous. "A Bobby for the eighties," Clare proudly announced, and I didn't disagree with her. Although Jonathan was exhausted, we took my hair out for a walk in the Village. We had drinks at a gay place on St. Marks and danced together, all three of us. I might have broken through a pane of gla.s.s and reached the party, after years of sitting in a graveyard thinking I was alive. When we got tired of dancing I insisted on walking down to the pier on the Hudson, to watch the neon coffee drip from the big neon cup. Then Clare and Jonathan got in a cab for home and I kept walking. I walked all over New York. I went down to Battery Park, where Miss Liberty raised her small light from the harbor, and I walked up to the line of horse carriages waiting hopefully for extravagant drunks and romantics outside the Plaza. I was on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties when the sky started to lighten. A bakery truck rolled by, the driver singing Patsy Cline's "Crazy" in a loud off-key voice, and I sang along with him for half a block. I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.

After that, changes were easy. There was no more need to stay married to the everyday. Clare made a hobby of changing me. She took me shopping for clothes in the thrift stores on First Avenue, where she knew all the salesclerks and half the customers. When shopping, Clare had the concentration of a mother eagle browsing for trout. She could swoop down on a cardboard carton full of bright polyester rags-stained Woolworth's stuff that had been sad and desperate-looking when it was new-and pull out a silk s.h.i.+rt swarming with bright yellow fish. Hers was a garish but scavenging personality; you knew from her eyes that the things she wanted put out a faint glow not visible to other shoppers. I let her make the choices, and after two weeks I had a cheap new wardrobe of old clothes. I had baggy pants from the forties, and loose rayon s.h.i.+rts in putty and tobacco colors. I had old black jeans, and a leather motorcycle jacket, and a box-shouldered black sport coat shot through with random pewter threads. I even had strangers' shoes: brown Oxfords with toes made of brittle leather mosquito net, and black army boots, and a pair of black sneakers spattered with paint.

I had an earring, too. Clare had pulled me into a jewelry store on Eighth Street, and in less time than it takes to say the word "change" a Middle Eastern man had punched a silver post into my left earlobe with a hydraulic gun. It was no more painful than a blackfly's bite. Clare promised she'd make me a perfect earring. The Middle Eastern man smiled. He appeared to have teeth carved from a single piece of wood.

Those days I surprised myself each time I saw my reflection in a store window. I might have been my own rough twin, come from some meaner place to make trouble for ordinary working people. The man whose face I saw floating over shop displays would not have written "Happy Birthday" on ten thousand cakes. He would not have lived contentedly in an upstairs bedroom with a view of the neighbors' jungle gym.

Clare introduced me to her friends: Os.h.i.+ko the cynical hat designer; Ronnie the high-strung painter who spoke only in full paragraphs; Stephen Cooper who talked about cas.h.i.+ng in his marijuana-import business and buying a jewelry store in Provincetown, where he could pay closer attention to his mystical gifts. Those people were like movies playing around me-I watched and listened with the same easy self-relinquishment you'd bring to a seat in the fifth row. They enjoyed being the characters they'd created, and didn't depend on me for input. So we got along. I stood or sat in my clothes, watching things happen. If I developed a local reputation at all, it was for mystery and immovable calm. I learned that New Yorkers-at least the ones Clare knew-value silence in others. Their days and nights are so full of noise. Clare's friends were willing to chalk my silence up to inner knowledge, when in fact I mainly watched, and thought of nothing. Every now and then I asked a question, or answered one. I wore the earring Clare made for me, a wire loop with a silver teardrop-shaped bead, a circle of rusted metal, and a tiny silver-winged horse. Sometimes she asked with a hint of nervousness if I was having a good time, and I always told her yes. It was always the truth. Going to those places-noisy clubs with unmarked entrances, parties in lofts white and spare as the Himalayas-made me simply and purely happy. I had been in a graveyard for years; now I was at the party. In the middle of all that life, I kept quiet as a ghost. A beautiful girl with skin the clear blue-white of skim milk walked serenely among the dancers with a fat, speckled snake coiled around her waist. Two boys in plaid schoolgirlish dresses stood gravely side by side, holding hands as if they were guarding the entrance to a sterner, more difficult world and couldn't imagine that no one would try to get in.

But the best times were the nights Jonathan got off work early enough to go out. Sometimes it would be the two of us, and sometimes Clare came along. On Jonathan's nights we went to movies, then for drinks in one of the bars we liked. Clare's other friends were more intent on giving their lives a fabulous, windswept quality. They had dedicated themselves to motion and to knowing the exact right place, the party inside the party. I could understand that urge. But Jonathan, Clare, and I favored elderly bars that had caved in under the weight of dailiness. The Village was full of them then, and is full of them today. They maintain a stale interior dimness the color of dark beer. They sell potato chips and peanuts from a system of wire clips. Regulars-quiet steady drunks who believe things are getting worse and never cause a ruckus-sit on the bar stools as solid as roosting hens. We always took a booth in the rear.

We took to calling ourselves the Hendersons. I don't remember how it started-it was part of a line tossed out by Clare or Jonathan, and it stuck. The Hendersons were a family with modest expectations and simple tastes. They liked going to the movies or watching TV. They liked having a few beers in a cheap little bar. When we went out together, the three of us, we called it "a night with the Hendersons." Clare came to be known as Mom, I was Junior, and Jonathan was Uncle Jonny. The story took on details over time. Mom was the boss. She wanted us to mind our manners and sit up straight, she clicked her tongue if one of us swore. Junior was a well-intentioned, shadowy presence, a dim-witted Boy Scout type who could be talked into anything. Uncle Jonny was the bad influence. He had to be watched. "Junior," Clare would say, "don't sit too close to your Uncle Jonny. And he doesn't need to go into the bathroom with you, you're big enough now to manage just fine on your own."

We came and went in the Henderson mode. It wasn't something we always did. It was the story we drifted into when we lost interest in our truer, more complicated story. Before Jonathan left in the mornings he might say, "I should be through at a decent hour tonight, would the Hendersons like to go see the Fa.s.sbinder movie?" Clare and I nearly always said yes, because our lives were freer. We preferred a night with the Hendersons to our other entertainments. Sometimes when Clare and I were alone together she'd say something in her Mom voice, a shrill and vaguely British variation on her actual voice. But without Uncle Jonny, the Hendersons didn't work. Without our bad uncle we were too simple-just bossy Mom and the boy who always obeyed. We needed all three points of the triangle. We needed mild manners, perversity, and a voice of righteousness.

I found work, just a nothing job doing prep at an omelette parlor in SoHo. I told people, and sometimes I told myself, that I was learning the restaurant business from the bottom up, so that someday I could have my own place again. But I didn't believe in that ambition, not really. I could only inhabit it for a few minutes at a time, by concentrating on details: my future self frowningly checking a tray of desserts before they left the kitchen, or running my hand along a mahogany bartop smooth and prosperous as a brood mare's flank. I could want that. It could pull the heat to the surface of my skin. But the moment I lost my concentration I fell right back into my present life, just being in New York with Jonathan and Clare, doing an ordinary job. I was content to spend my days with the Mexican dishwasher in the restaurant's greasy kitchen, chopping mushrooms and shredding Gruyere. That was still my embarra.s.sing secret.

One hot night in August I took a shower and walked naked into Jonathan's bedroom, believing myself to be alone in the apartment. Clare had an old friend in town, who needed to be shown the sights, and Jonathan was supposed to be working. The black sky hung thick and heavy as smoke, and b.u.ms left sweat angels behind when they slept on the sidewalks. I walked in singing "Respect," with water beads sizzling off my skin, and found him on the floor, taking off his sneakers.

"Hi," he said.

"Oh, hey. I thought you were, you know, at work."

"The air-conditioning at the office broke down, and we just decided we don't care if the paper doesn't come out this week. There are limits, even in journalism."

"Uh-huh." I stood self-consciously, two steps in from the hallway. There was the problem of what to do with my hands. In this apartment, we were not casually naked. It wasn't something we did. I felt my own largeness heating up the air. Though Jonathan looked at me with friendly interest, I could only think of how I'd come down, in the fleshly sense. When we were wild young boyfriends, more nervous than ecstatic in one another's hands, I'd been proud of my body. I'd had a flat, square chest. My belly skin had stretched uncus.h.i.+oned over three square plates of muscle. Now I carried an extra fifteen pounds. I'd grown a precocious version of my father's body-a barrel-shaped torso balanced on thin legs. I stood there in my furred, virginal flesh, sending water vapor into the air.

"You just take a shower?" he asked.

"Uh-huh."

"That sounds like it could make the difference between life and death." He peeled off his socks and pulled his black T-s.h.i.+rt over his head. He dropped his black cutoffs, telling me how the staff of the newspaper decided to go home early when the receptionist's desktop rose dropped its head and shed all its petals. "Like a canary in a coal mine," he said.

He took all his clothes off. I hadn't seen Jonathan naked since we were both sixteen, but his body was just as I remembered it. Slim and almost hairless, unmuscled-a boy's body. He had not grown new outposts of hair or fat. He had not taken on the heroic V shape of a more disciplined life. His skin looked fresh and taut as risen bread dough. His pink nipples rode innocently on the pale curve of his chest. The only change was a small red dragon, with a snake's body and a mistrustful look, he'd had tattooed on his shoulder.

He grinned at me, slightly embarra.s.sed but unafraid. I thought of Carlton, boy-naked in the cemetery under a hard blue sky.

"I'm going to turn the cold on full blast," he said. "And I bet it'll still feel tepid."

"Yeah. It will," I said.

He walked naked down the hall to the bathroom. I followed him. I could have stayed in the bedroom and put my clothes on, but I didn't. I sat on the toilet lid and talked to him while he showered.

When he was finished we went into the living room together. Our nudity had clicked over by then, lost its raw foolishness. Our skins had become a kind of clothing. He said, "The trouble with this place is, there's no cross ventilation. Do you think it'd be any cooler on the roof?"

I said yes, maybe it would be. He told me to wait, and ran to the bathroom. He came back with two towels.

"Here," he said, tossing me one. "For decency's sake, in case we run into somebody."

"You mean go up there with nothing but a towel on?"

"People have done worse things in lesser emergencies. Come on."

He got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator. We wrapped the towels around our waists, and went barefoot into the hallway. It was mostly quiet. Electric fans whirred behind closed doors, and salsa music drifted up the stairwell. "Shh," he said. He tiptoed in an exaggerated way up the stairs to the roof, holding the dripping blue plastic ice tray. I stuck close behind.

The roof was black and empty, a tarred plateau surrounded by the electric riot of the city. A hot wind blew, carrying the smell of garbage so far gone it was turning sweet. "Better than nothing," Jonathan said. "At least the air's moving."

There was a dreamlike feel, standing all but naked in the middle of everything like that. There was excitement and a tingling, pleasant fear.

"It's nice up here," I said. "It's sort of beautiful."

"Sort of," he said. He took his towel off, and spread it on the tar paper. His skin was ice-gray in the dark.

"People can see you," I said. Two blocks away, a high-rise blazed like a city in itself.

"Not if we lie down," he said. "It's pretty dark up here. And, besides, who cares if they do see us?"

He lay on his towel as if he was at the beach. I took mine off and spread it near his. Moving air from Third Street, full of car horns and Spanish music, touched my exposed parts.

"Here." He cracked the plastic tray. He handed me an ice cube, and kept one for himself. "Just rub yourself with it," he said. "It isn't much, but it's all we've got."

We lay side by side on our towels, running the ice over our sweating skins. After a while he reached over and pressed his own ice cube against the mound of my belly. "As long as Mom's out," he said, "let old Uncle Jonny take care of you."

"Okay," I said, and did the same to him. We didn't talk any more about what we were doing. We talked instead about work and music and Clare. While we talked we ran ice over one another's bellies and chests and faces. There was s.e.x between us but we didn't have s.e.x-we committed no outright acts. It was a sweeter, more brotherly kind of lovemaking. It was devotion to each other's comfort, and deep familiarity with our own imperfect bodies. As one cube melted we took another from the tray. Jonathan swabbed ice over my back, and then I did it to him. I felt each moment break, a new possibility, as we lay using up the last of the ice and talking about whatever pa.s.sed through our heads. Above us, a few pale stars had scattered themselves across a broiling, bruise-colored sky.

CLARE.

I 'D BEEN 'D BEEN thinking of having a baby since I was twelve. But I didn't start thinking seriously about it until my late thirties. Jonathan and I had joked about parenthood-it was our method of flirtation. We always had a scheme going. That was how we discharged whatever emotional static might otherwise have built up. It's strange for two people to be in love without the possibility of s.e.x. You find yourself planning trips and discussing moneymaking ventures. You bicker over colors for a house you'll never own together. You debate names for a baby you won't conceive. thinking of having a baby since I was twelve. But I didn't start thinking seriously about it until my late thirties. Jonathan and I had joked about parenthood-it was our method of flirtation. We always had a scheme going. That was how we discharged whatever emotional static might otherwise have built up. It's strange for two people to be in love without the possibility of s.e.x. You find yourself planning trips and discussing moneymaking ventures. You bicker over colors for a house you'll never own together. You debate names for a baby you won't conceive.

Lately, though, I wasn't so sure. I'd get my money in a little over a year, more than half a million, but at thirty-eight you can't think of your life as still beginning. Hope takes on a fragility. Think too hard and it's gone. I was surprised by the inner emptiness I felt, my heart and belly swinging on cords. I'd always been so present in the pa.s.sing moments. I'd a.s.sumed that was enough-to taste the coffee and the wine, to feel the s.e.x along every nerve, to see all the movies. I'd thought the question of accomplishment would seem beside the point if I just paid careful attention to every single thing that happened.

Soon there would be an important addition to the list of things I was too old to do. I could see the danger: aging woman in love with gay man gets pregnant to compensate herself for the connections she failed to make. I couldn't follow that course with a straight face. Still, it gnawed at me. Jonathan had work, and a lover I'd never met. He had the lat.i.tude still available to a man of twenty-seven. With my b.r.e.a.s.t.s s.h.i.+fting lower on my rib cage, I wanted something permanent. I wanted to do a better job with a child than my parents had done with me. I wanted my money and health and good fortune to be put to better use.

One night Bobby came out of the bathroom in his Jockey shorts, singing "Wild Horses." I was going into my room and we inched past one another in the hall. He smiled. He had a soft, bulky body, muscles vying with incipient fat. My mother would have called him "a big husky fellow," approvingly. Marriage to my father had cured her of her interest in slender, devious men. Bobby was a Midwestern specimen. He was strong and square-boned, untroubled. I said, "Hey, gorgeous."

His face reddened. In the late eighties there was still a man living in New York City who could blush at a compliment. He said, "Um, I'll be ready in a little bit."

We were going out somewhere. I don't remember where. I said, "Take your time, n.o.body'll be there before midnight anyway."

"Okay." He went into the room he shared with Jonathan. I paused, then walked into the bathroom and rubbed a circle on the steamed mirror. There was my face. Neither pretty nor plain. I'd always been a queasy combination of my mother and father.

Surprisingly, my mother was growing better-looking. At an age when women are considered "handsome" rather than "beautiful," she was in fact quite handsome: slightly mannish, broad-faced, with scrubbed pink skin and hair gone from brown to gunmetal gray. Her inexpressive face hadn't wrinkled, and her abrupt, businesslike manner seemed more attractive as other women her age began appearing in stiff ruffles and too much rouge. My mother had caught up with herself. She'd found her beauty. She was always meant to be sixty, even as a girl.

My father, on the other hand, had withered like a plum. His cheeks had deflated and touched bone. His bristly, blue-black hair had dissolved, and the skin hung loose and leathery on his neck. As a girl I'd looked hopefully in mirrors for every sign of my father's face remade in mine. Now I checked for signs of his deterioration, and found them. My neck had gone a little slack. The skin around my eyes was darkening. The genes were at work.