"I've got posters on my wall and some funny lampshades that I painted myself and some funny collages that I made out of magazine advertisements. And I'm reading a book by D. H. Lawrence that I'm really enjoying very much. I think it's the best book I ever read."
"I'm interested in all that," I tell her. "I'd like to see your posters and your funny lampshades and collages. What's the book by D. H. Lawrence?"
"You don't like D. H. Lawrence."
"My own taste isn't too good. I'd like to see what you've done with your room."
"Now?"
"If you'd let me."
She shakes her head. "You don't want to. You'd only pretend to look around for a second and then tell me to pick my clothes up off the floor."
"Are they on the floor?"
"You see? You're only interested in joking. You're not really interested in anything I do. You're only interested in yourself. You're not interested in me."
"You're not interested in me," I retaliate gently. "When I do start to ask you questions about yourself, you think I'm snooping into your affairs or trying to trap you in a lie or something."
"You usually are."
"Not always. You do tell lies. You do have things you try to hide."
"You won't let me hide them. You want to know everything. Mommy too."
"Sometimes they're things we should know."
"Sometimes they've got nothing to do with you."
"How can I tell until I find out what they are?"
"You could take my word."
"I can't. You know that."
"That's very flattering."
"You do lie a lot."
"You don't enjoy talking with me. You never want to discuss things with me or tell me anything. Unless it's to make me do my homework. Mommy spends more time talking to me than you do."
"Then why don't you like her more?"
"I don't like what she says."
"You aren't being fair. If I do try to tell you something about the company or my work, you usually sneer and make snotty wisecracks. You don't think the work I do is important."
"You don't think it's important, either. You just do it to make money."
"I think making money for you and the rest of the family is important. And doing my work well enough to maintain my self-respect is important, even though the work itself isn't. You know, it's not always so pleasant for me to have the work I do at the company ridiculed by you and your brother. Even though you're joking, and I'm not always sure you are. I spend so much of my life at it."
(Why must I win this argument? And why must I use this whining plea for pity to do it? Why must I show off for her and myself and exult in my fine logic and more expert command of language and details in a battle of wits with a fifteen-year-old child, my own? I could just as easily say, "You're right. I'm sorry. Please forgive me." Even though I'm right and not really sorry. I could say so anyway. But I can't. And I am winning, for her look of resolution is failing, her hesitations are growing, and now it is her gaze that is shiftily avoiding mine. I relax complacently, with a momentary tingle of scorn for my inferior adversary, my teen-age daughter. I am a shit. But at least I am a successful one.)
My daughter replies apologetically. "I'm interested in your work," she tries to defend herself. "Sometimes I ask you questions."
"I always answer them."
"With a wisecrack."
"I know you're going to sneer."
"If you didn't wisecrack, maybe I wouldn't sneer."
"I promise never to wisecrack again," I wisecrack.
"That's a wisecrack," she says. (She is bright, and I am pleased with her alertness.)
"So is that," I retort (before I can restrain myself, for I suppose I have to show her that I am at least as good).
My daughter doesn't return my smile. "See? You're grinning already," she charges in a low, accusing tone. "You're turning it into a joke. Even now, when we're supposed to be serious."
I turn my eyes from her face and look past her shoulder uneasily at the bookcase on the wall. "I'm sorry. I was only trying to make you feel better. I was trying to make you laugh."
"I don't think there's anything funny."
"No, I'm not. I'm sorry if you thought so."
"You like to turn everything into a joke."
"I don't. Now don't get rude. Or I'll have to."
"You start making fun of me. You never want to talk seriously to any of us."
"That isn't true. That's the third time you've made me deny it."
"You always try to laugh and joke your way out whenever something serious comes up."
"That's the fourth."
"Or you get angry and bossy and begin yelling, like you're starting to do now."
"I'm sorry," I say, and pause to lower my voice. "It's my personality, I guess. And my nerves. I'm not really proud of it. What you have to try to remember, honey, and nobody seems to, is that I've got feelings too, that I get headaches, that I can't always control my own moods even though I seem to be the one in charge. I'm not always happy either. Please go on talking to me."
"Why should I?"
"Don't you want to?"
"You don't enjoy talking to me."
"Yes, I do."
"Now?"
"Yes. Tell me what you want to. That's how I'll know. Please. Otherwise I always have to guess."
"Was Derek born the way he is?"
"Yes. Of course. We think so."
"Or was it caused by something one of us did?"
"He was born that way."
"Why?"
"Nobody knows. We all think he was. That's part of the problem. Nobody knows what happened to him."
"Maybe that's what I'll be when I go to college. An anthropologist."
"Geneticist."
"Did you have to say that now?"
"You want to learn, don't you?"
"Not always."
"I thought you'd like to know the difference when you make a mistake."
"Not now. You knew what I meant. You didn't have to stop me just to show you're smarter. Did you?"
"You're very smart. You're very bright and very clever. Maybe you should be a lawyer. That's a compliment. I don't pay you compliments often."
"I'll say."
"You like to force people into a corner. I'm the same way."
"I think I try to be like you."
"I was happier."
"Was your family disappointed in you?"
"I can't remember. Is yours?"
"I don't know."
"I think my mother was. But later on, not when I was a child. When I was older and moved away."
"You never kiss me," my daughter says. "Or hug me. Or kid with me. Like other fathers."
She has black, large shadows under her eyes, which are swollen, gummy, and red suddenly, and she looks more wretched than any other human being I have ever stared at before. (I want to wrench my gaze away.)
"You stopped wanting me to kiss you," I explained softly with tenderness, feeling enormous pity for her (and for myself. Whenever I feel sorry for someone, I find that I also feel sorry for myself). "I used to. I used to want to hug you and kiss you. Then you began to pull away from me or draw your face back with a funny expression and make a disgusted sound. And laugh. As a joke at first, I thought. But then it became a habit, and you pulled away from me every time and made that same face and disgusted sound every time I tried to kiss you."
"So now you've stopped trying."
"It wasn't pleasant for me to be insulted that way."
"Were you hurt?" There is that glitter of too much eagerness in her expression. "Did it make you unhappy?"
"Yes." We are talking in monotones. (I don't remember when it really did begin to hurt me deeply each time she pulled away from my demonstrations of affection with signs of mock revulsion; and I also don't remember when it stopped bothering me at all.) "I was very unhappy. My feelings were hurt"
"You never said so."
"I wouldn't give you th
e satisfaction."
"I was little then."
"It was still very painful."
"I was just a little girl then. Wouldn't you give up just a little bit of your pride to satisfy me, if that's what I wanted?"
"No. I didn't."
"Would you do it now?"
"I'm not."
"You won't?"
"No. I don't think so. I don't think I'll ever let you get any satisfaction out of me that way.»
"You must be very disappointed in me?"
"Why?"
"I'll bet you are. You and Mommy both."
"Why should we be?"
"I know she is. I'm not good at anything."
"Like what? Neither am I."
"I've got a greasy scalp and skin. And pimples. I'm not pretty."
"Yes, you are."
"I'm too tall and fat."
"For what?"
"I'm not even sure I want to be. I don't know what I'd do even if I was good at anything."
"Like what?"
"Like art. I can't paint or sculpt. I'm not very smart. I'm not good at music. I don't study ballet."
"I don't study ballet either."
"It's not funny!"
"I'm not trying to be." (I was trying to be.) "We're not good at those things either."
"I'm not even rich."
"That's my fault, not yours."
"At least that would be something. I could be proud of that. Are we ever going to be? I mean really rich, like Jean's father, or Grace."
"No. Unless you do it."
"I can't do anything. Should I be ashamed?"
"Of what?"
"Because we're poor."
"We aren't poor."
"Of you."
"At least you're frank."
"Should I be?"
"What would you expect me to say?"
"The truth."
"Of me? I hope not. Being ashamed is something you either are or aren't, not something you do because you should or shouldn't. I do well enough. Jean is ashamed of her father because he's mean and stupid, and thinks I'm better. Isn't she? So is Grace. I think Grace likes me a lot more than she does her father."
"I'm never going to be anything."
"Everybody is something."
"You know what I mean."
"Like what?"
"Famous."
"Few of us are."
"I don't blame you. I don't blame you for being disappointed in me."
"We're not. Do you think we'd be disappointed in you just because you aren't good at anything?"
"Then you never even expected anything of me, did you?" she accuses, with a sudden surge of emotion that catches me by surprise.
"Now you're not being fair!" I insist.
"It's not funny."
"Honey, I —»
But she is gone, disappearing intransigently with a look of mournful loathing as I put my arms out to comfort her (and I am left again by myself in my study with my empty hands outstretched in the air, reaching out toward nothing that is there).
There is something I have done to her (or am doing to her now) for which she refuses to forgive me, and I don't know what that something is (or even if it is to her I am doing it. I know she acts angry and hurt when I am drunk or even a little high. She does not like it either when I flirt with her friends). I try to remember when it began, this mordant, stultifying sorrow into which she sneaks away to bury herself so often. I know it was nothing that happened this year, for she was not much different last year, and it was nothing that happened last year for she was not much different then than the year before. (She is not much different at fifteen from what she was at twelve and not much different at twelve from what she was at nine.) Almost as far back as I can recall, in fact, she has always been pretty much the same person she is now, only smaller. And yet, there must have been a break somewhere, an end and a starting point, a critical interval in her development of some breadth and duration that I cannot remember or did not notice (just as there must certainly have been a similar start of metamorphosis somewhere back in my own past that I took no notice of then and cannot remember now), for she was an infant once (indeed she was, I do remember that), a playful, chubby, gleeful, curious, active, giggling, responsive baby, easily pleased, quickly interested, and happily diverted. (Whatever happened to it, that baby she was? Where did it go? Where is it now? And how did it get there? Such beings, such things, just don't happen one day and stop happening the next. Do they? What happened to the lovely little me that once was? I remember certain things about him well and know he used to be.) What happened to her early childhood, that unmarked waste between the infant we had then and the daughter we have now and have kept reasonably good track of? (Where is it? Where was it? When — I can remember intact everything in her history, and I don't know — did it take place? I know this much: there was a cheerful baby girl in a high chair in my house once who ate and drank with a hearty appetite and laughed a lot with spontaneous zest; she isn't here now; and there is no trace of her anywhere. And I am sure of this much: there was a little boy who surprised his big brother with a girl in a coal shed once and had a lump of coal thrown at him, and opened a door once on his father and mother embracing in bed, or thinks he did; the mother and father are dead, and the little boy is missing; I don't know where he came from; I don't know where I went; I don't know all that's happened to me since. I miss him. I'd love to know where he's been.) Where in her lifetime (and in mine too, of course) was that legendary happy childhood I used to hear so much about (those carefree days of joy and sunshine, ha, ha, that birthright) that she is entitled as a human being to be enjoying even right now (along with all those other moldering, moody, incapacitated kids her own age who are her friends) and should be at liberty to look back upon fearlessly later with intense and enriching gratification (like my wife, whose childhood was really like some kind of suffocating ashland until I swept into the picture and carried her away from unhappiness into her present life of uninterruptable bliss. Ha, ha) when life turns old, threadbare (teeth come out, toes abrade, arches begin to ache and spinal columns too, and shoes no longer fit), dry, and sour? Where is that pleasurable childhood everybody keeps thinking everybody else has? I know I didn't have one (although I might have thought I did and could have thought I knew why I didn't in case I thought I didn't). If I was unhappy, I could always tell myself it was because my father was dead. If my daughter is unhappy, she might feel it's because her father is alive!
(Freud or not, I have never been able to figure out how I really did feel about my mother, whether I liked her or not, or even felt either way about her at all. I think I felt nothing. I had the same feeling, or absence of feeling most of the time, toward the other members of my family and my best friend, with whom I am not on very friendly terms anymore. We grew tired of each other, and I am relieved. He needed money; I couldn't give it generously more than once. I have never been sure I ever really cared for anyone in this whole world but myself and my little boy. But I still do have these grief-filled dreams about my mother. There's a part of me I can't find that is connected to her still as though by an invisible live wire transmitting throbs. It refuses to die with her, and will continue to live inside me, probably, for as long as I survive. In my final coma, I suppose, even if I live to be a million, my self-control will lapse and I will die moaning: "Ma. Momma. Momma." Which is pretty much the way I began. I feel lucky sometimes that I don't remember my father, that he died without making an impression upon me, or I might be having dreams about him, too. In case I ain't having them already. He might have fucked up my life even more just by being around if he had lived, just the way I seem to be fucking up everyone else's around me. Even though I don't want to. I swear to Christ I never consciously wanted to. Maybe I am having bad dreams about him anyway and just don't know it. Soon after I die, nobody will ever think about him again. And soon after my children die, nobody will ever think of me.)
I had no happy childhood, if I recall correctly,
and neither did my wife (who prefers to recollect incorrectly, when I let her), and my boy, at nine, though he laughs a lot and is intent on making many good jokes, is running into stormy weather already, even though I do everything I can to try to make things easier for him. (With my daughter, I've stopped trying. There does not seem to be any way left to propitiate her, except to allow her to continue forcing us to buy expensive things for her and yield her those minute, transitory victories of ego that evaporate in an instant and dump her right back down where she was, in that same vacant, unlighted predicament of not knowing what to do next, no different than before. It was easier for me to spend the eight or eighty dollars on her than to argue with her why I shouldn't.) I forage through experience to try to discover when my daughter was different from now, and I must go very far back indeed to find her radiant in a high chair (she was a gorgeous, lovable child, and I feel a wistful pang of love and regret when I remember) at a birthday party in her honor, when she was either two or three years old. (What a difference there is between a baby and the person it becomes.) She is our only child. Relatives from both sides of the family are present. My wife and I are younger. My mother is alive. Many people have assembled. The apartment bustles. Our attention is dispersed. We are absorbed in each other, and my little girl is forgotten until she suddenly strikes the tableboard of the high chair sharply with the plastic pink party spoon clutched in her dimpled fist and calls out clearly and gloriously:
"Good girl, grandma!"
It takes a moment for all of us to comprehend. And when we do, all simultaneously it seems, we roar with laughter and begin applauding and congratulating this little girl and ourselves exuberantly (and my daughter, seeing this response of raucous gaiety she has stimulated, bounces and rocks with glee so vigorously in her high chair that we fear she will fall out or topple over), for my mother (her hair was not all white yet, her face not all disiccated and creased) had merely lifted a glass to her lips and drained it of some strawberry punch. But my daughter was watching her. And when my daughter, who was herself being trained then by my wife and me to drink from a glass and faithfully rewarded with handclaps of delight and cries of "Good girl!" whenever she succeeded, saw my mother drink from a glass, she banged her own hands down with delight and approval and called out:
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