Free The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick Page A

embarrassingly drunk and once even had to spend the night, because she fell down on the coffee table and knocked it all to hell and her husband wouldn’t even take her home. But usually, nobody said a mean thing and went home before they got too drunk to drive.
    Everybody smiled, and kissed each other, and the men got drunk but not too drunk and spilled whiskey on their neckties and wrapped their beefy arms around one another’s shoulders and people took black-and-white photographs of all the people in their dense perfection. It was proof that matter can, in fact, be created out of nothing.
    The going-away party at which Napoleon came to mix the cocktails was a huge success. It was for some rich people my parents knew, a man who taught with my father and his wife. They were going to Europe on a boat, on the
Queen Elizabeth
, while everybody else would be sweltering in the heat and driving twelve miles for a swim at Goshen Pass, but there was not a trace of envy. People were glad for them; they had a lot of money and close family connections in Richmond. The wife wasn’t the shiniest nickel in the bag, but she had a sable coat. At Christmas, she spread it out on the coat bed for all the other women to see when they put down their wool coats.
    In those days, it was good manners for the guests of honor to leave first. That was the signal that the party was going to be over soon. As they were leaving, my brother and I were supposed to help them with their coats and whatever things they had brought. The
Queen Elizabeth
couple had a twenty-year-old daughter, and she had worn a small mink stole to the party, a summer fur, I guess they were called, probably borrowed from her mother or her grandmother. Her grandmother had real money. The small mink stole was so soft. It felt so expensive.
    My mother had a mink coat. It was short and light brown. She won it in a contest in which she was asked to describe the goodness of a certain brand of split pea soup. Every day, when my father came home from graduate school, she would serve him split pea soup. She wouldn’t eat it herself, because she loathed it, but he would describe it to her, and then she would sit all afternoon—she was pregnant with my brother at the time—and she would compose twenty-five words or less in praise of this whatever split pea soup. She won. They were so poor, they had to askhis mother for money to pay the taxes on the coat. My mother loved that coat.
    So I was helping the daughter on with the stole, putting it around her shoulders, and she turned and said, “Why, thank you, honey. You’ll make somebody a nice little wife someday.” Why would anybody say that to an eight-year-old boy?
    She lives in Vermont now. She’s old, I guess, and a widow, but her words are still a complete curiosity in my memory. Maybe she just wasn’t very adept, like her mother.
    My mother and father were not only good at giving parties, generous and clever, they were good at going to parties. People adored them for their wit and charm, for their lean good looks, for the way my mother dressed, and my father, too. My mother never wore anything that didn’t show off her slender waist. She had a lot of belts.
    She smoked, and she did it eloquently, and she was not only funny, she was witty, intelligently witty. We had a minister in our church named Barrett, and once, when my mother knelt at the altar rail as he approached with the chalice, she looked up at him with an innocent, pious expression and said so anybody nearby could hear, she said, “Pass the claret, Barrett.” That kind of thing. She wrote witty occasional poems for people’s birthdays, and people treasured her company.
    This was before it all went bad. This was before she started dressing in wash-and-wear pants and blouses from Leggett’s, before she stopped caring, before she stopped sewing, before her conversation turned vague and unfocused.
    They were a handsome