Homesick for Another World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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“A Dark and Winding Road”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“A Dark and Winding Road” Summary

A real estate lawyer named Charles visits his family’s cabin, which lies at the end of a dark, winding road in the woods. Charles has come to the cabin to escape a fight with his pregnant wife, whom he feels is mistreating him. The cabin is extremely bare: no running water, electricity, or cell service, and only a chair and simple bed inside. Charles is happy to be away from his wife and spends the first night eating his favorite foods, smoking marijuana, and drinking Scotch. He had planned to drink a special bottle of wine, which his college roommate had given him as a wedding gift, but he forgot to bring a corkscrew. He finds a flesh-colored dildo in the bed, but is undisturbed, assuming it’s a kind of prank.

The isolation of the cabin leads Charles to think about his family, especially his younger brother MJ. Charles and MJ were not close as children. MJ bullied Charles, calling him anti-gay slurs and beating him up, despite being three years younger. The brothers have grown into very different men: Charles is a lawyer and owns an expensive home, whereas MJ works in a factory and wears old, ratty clothing.

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On his second day at the cabin, Charles’ mood takes a dark turn, shifted by the marijuana he’s smoking. He begins to think about his unborn son, imagining a future where his son resents him and tells his own children horrible things about their grandfather. He imagines his body rotting in the grave, with larvae in his pubic hair.

Charles begins to think about hanging himself, but he is interrupted by a knock at the door. Michelle, a young woman who he identifies as local, says she’s looking for MJ. For reasons he can’t understand, Charles decides to lie, saying that MJ just left the cabin, and will return shortly. When Michelle spots the dildo, she asks Charles if he’s gay, and he allows her to believe that he and MJ are lovers. While the two talk, Charles thinks back to his childhood, when he and MJ would sneak into neighborhood houses and steal things. He remembers a time when he snuck poisonous berries into a pie in the refrigerator of one of the homes they burgled.

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Eventually, Michelle gets bored of waiting, and offers Charles some of the crystal meth she brought to share with MJ. He accepts it, and the two spend the rest of the day high in the cabin. MJ penetrates Charles with the dildo, an experience he finds “disgusting, just as I’d always hoped it to be” (87).

“A Dark and Winding Road” Analysis

Charles and his brother MJ are established as foils early in the story: “[A]s a child I played clarinet, chess. Our parents bought MJ a drum set, but he wasn’t interested. He played video games, made messes” (74). Charles is described as refined, mature, and emotionally distant from the family, while MJ is loud and emotionally volatile. The distinction between Charles’ intellectualism and MJ’s physicality grows as the brothers age. Charles is obsessed with obtaining the trappings of wealth and success, bragging about law school and his “pricey condo in Murray Hill” (75), even as he admits being unsatisfied with his life. In keeping with the collection’s overarching theme of Life Under Capitalism, Charles has been conditioned to equate wealth and professional success with virtue, while at the same time worrying that his comfortable life and intellectual work make him less “masculine.” MJ, on the other hand, is described in animalistic terms: He ate “like a wild boar” (75) and “sounded like a growling bear” while having sex with his girlfriend at Charles and MJ’s family home. This comparison is central to Charles’ identity.

In the final third of the story, the narrator’s revelation of Charles and MJ’s childhood thieving disrupts the easy binary established earlier: Although Charles likes to think of himself as superior to MJ, readers learn that he participated in his brother’s break-ins, thefts, and vandalism as a child. Moreover, it is Charles—and not MJ—who seeks to cause personal harm by adding poisonous berries to a stranger’s blueberry pie on their very first outing. Ultimately, the story of their childhood pranks shows that Charles and MJ are more alike than Charles is willing to admit. The fact that Charles keeps trophies from these break-ins as an adult suggests that the “primal wantonness” (78) he was searching for in the cabin—and which he is so dismissive of in his brother—lurks deep within him. His sexual encounter with Michelle is an opportunity to explore that wantonness and release the restraint that characterizes his life.