"Will you make more money?"
"And how."
"Oh, boy," she responds.
And she swarms all over me irrepressibly, her arms and legs and mouth opening and entwining, with our bedroom door open and the children probably still awake. And I am the one now who wiggles free and rises from the bed to close and lock the door and extinguish the overhead light.
"You're some girl," I tell her admiringly, after a long, deep embrace during which we are both practically still.
"You did it," she agrees readily, with a boastful laugh, sitting astride me now and rocking back and forth. "You made me this way."
I can't believe it was all my fault.
My daughter's unhappy
Both our children are unhappy, each in his (or her) separate way, and I suppose that is my fault too (although I'm not sure I understand how or why). I no longer think of Derek as one of my children. Or even as mine. I try not to think of him at all; this is becoming easier, even at home when he is nearby with the rest of us, making noise with some red cradle toy or making unintelligible sounds as he endeavors to speak. By now, I don't even like his name. The children don't care for him, either. No one really cares for him, not even the nurses we hire, and they are paid to care for him and to pretend to like him; they are nearly always unmarried women in their late thirties or older; they are very expensive and usually pretend to love him in the beginning; they act adoring and jealously protective of him for just the first few weeks and then turn negligent toward him and impudent and reproachful with the rest of us. We turn nasty with them. They go. They either leave on their own or are fired. My wife and I take turns telling them they must go. I begin to detest all of them almost from the moment we hire them; they don't like me. I hate and fear the one we have now, who is older than I am, superstitious, and forcefully opinionated; she reminds me of Mrs. Yerger. I want to yell dirty things at this nurse now for the debasement Mrs. Yerger made me suffer then. Every older woman I find myself afraid of reminds me of Mrs. Yerger. Every feeble old woman I see reminds me of my mother. Every young girl who attacks my pride reminds me of my daughter. No one reminds me of my father, which is okay with me, I guess, since I don't remember a father for anyone to remind me of. Except Arthur Baron. I think I may feel a little bit about Arthur Baron the way I might have felt about my father if he had lived a little longer and been nice to me. I hope this one quits soon. I want to be rid of her. If she doesn't quit soon, my wife or I will have to fire her, which never seams to upset any of them as much as it does us, and as much as it would upset me if I were ever fired. This will leave things at home dismal and disorganized for a while. I will go out of town on a business trip until a new one is found. I always like to leave things like that for my wife and her sister to take care of. Her sister is good at things like that. I always like to be out of town when we have to look for a new nurse or move from one house to another. I always like to be somewhere else when anything unpleasant is taking place. We will feel glad to be rid of her when we finally do make her go; but each one has to be replaced; we always have to find another; or we will have to send Derek away early to a home for retarded people and never look at him again. We will erase him, cross him out, file him away — even though we go to visit him three or four times the first year, one or two times the second, and after that perhaps not at all, we will never really look at him again. We will put him out of sight, think of him less and less. He will visit us, maybe, in dreams.
"I wonder how he's doing," one of us might think of speculating from tune to time, if either of us dared to face the consequences of a reply.
And later:
"Whatever happened to him? You know, that kid we used to have? Derek, I think his name was. The one with something wrong. Are we still in touch with him?"
My wife and I are not able to send him away yet. He is still too little. There is no hope. He is lots of trouble. He has let us down. He needs care constantly, and no one wants to give it to him, not his father, his mother, his sister, or his brother. None of us really even wants to play with him anymore. Although we take turns making believe.
My daughter, who is past fifteen, is a lonely and disgruntled person. (She is much more than disgruntled, I know. She is unhappy; but that's the form her unhappiness tends to take, and that's the nature of the criticism and complaints with which we generally have to contend. I wouldn't mind so much, I think, if she were unhappy and obliging. Like my son. It would make things easier for me. Although it does not seem to make things easier for him.) She is dissatisfied with us and dissatisfied with herself. She is a clever, malicious girl with lots of insight and charm when she isn't morose and rude. She is often mean, often depressed. She resents my wife and me terribly and as much as tells us frequently that she wishes one or both of us were gone or dead. (In fact, she does tell us that, in exactly those words.) And it's a lucky thing my wife and I are both sensible enough to remind each other that she really doesn't mean it. (Even though I know she often does mean it, and that deep inside her, probably, she often wishes, in melodramatic fantasy, that she were dead also, and that we were at her graveside and sorry.) At least I'm sure she may mean it at the time she says it and perhaps, subconsciously, she harbors that evil wish in regard to us always. Perhaps she really does wish that my wife or I will die soon. It would not be so unnatural for her to do so; it would not be so difficult for me to understand (for didn't I have that same repugnant wish for my mother after she fell sick, and perhaps even earlier, when she began to grow old, once I no longer needed her, and she began to need me? I was impatient for her to die. And told myself she'd be better off). If my daughter is poised, if she is looking smug and wearing her thin-lipped half-smile of calculating villainy when she remarks to my wife or me that she really doesn't think she would mind very much if my wife and/or I fell sick and/or died, I know she does not mean what she is saying; she is speaking for effect; she is merely searching, immaturely and compulsively, for a painful, punishing clash with us (making sadistic family small talk, so to speak) and slicing out at a sensitive old wound that she knows intuitively will open freely and bleed with pain. (My daughter likes to hurt us. She sometimes professes remorse, but lets us know she doesn't really feel it.) If, however, the statements gush from her in a high shriek or tumble out brokenly in gulping, hysterical sobs, then there is no ignoring the sincerity of her passionate hatred and bottomless misery. She is not, as I said, happy. (In these moments she is pathetic. She would break my heart, if she were somebody else's.)
She has a very pretty face but doesn't believe it. (She has what I believe is called a low — or poor — self-image.) And nothing my wife or I can do will help. I realize now that I have not always given replies to her questions and comments that were appropriate. When she tells me she wishes she were dead, I tell her she will be, sooner or later. When she tells me life is empty and monotonous and that there does not seem to be any point to it, I tell her everybody feels that way now and then, particularly at her age, and that she's probably right. When she told me, in tones of solemn importance, that she hoped to have a lover before she was eighteen and would want to live with him for several years even though she is never going to get married, I nodded approvingly and wisecracked I hoped she'd find one — and was astounded when her face went bloodless with shock and she seemed about to cry. When she asks me if I ever thought of killing myself when I was young, I answer yes. And when she came to me, even that first time, to say she wasn't happy, I told her that I wasn't either and that nobody ought to expect to be. By now, she is able to anticipate many of my sardonic retorts and can mimic my words before I say them. Sometimes this annoys me; other times it amuses me — I don't know why there is a difference in my reaction. My error, I think, is that I always speak to her as I would to a grown-up; and all she wants, probably, is for me to talk to her as a child. I am simply not able to stop myself from saying things to her I know I shouldn't; sometimes the words escape from me before I can consider them, before I
am even aware they have sprung from my mind and are being shaped by my mouth and tongue to fly out between my lips. And I hear my blunt or cutting remarks with a start of astonishment, as though they came from somebody else and were directed harmfully at me as well as at her, as though they had their source in some dark and frightening area of my soul with which I am not in communication. It is that same weird, perverse, glowering part of me that shelters my recurring impulse to kick Kagle's lame leg very hard, and to kick my daughter's leg under the table or strike her (I am never really tempted to hit my wife or my boy, and I never have. I don't think I have. I have never hit my daughter either. Or kicked her), and it nourishes refreshingly that thrilling desire of mine to say very cruel things to people I like who are in trouble and confide in me and request my sympathy or help. I do rejoice momentarily in the misfortunes of friends. I cannot condone their weakness; I cannot forgive them for being in need; I experience undeniable gladness that I enjoy suppressing. I like finding out I'm better off than somebody else. There are things going on inside me I cannot control and do not admire.
My daughter doesn't laugh much anymore (she enjoys my boy a great deal, but picks on him often with bad intent) and has few interests or pleasures. (The same seems true of the boys and girls who remain her friends. They like music but not much, not as much as they seem to wish they could. None are cheerful. All are glum and creepy, usually. They cast a pall. I hope they outgrow it. I don't know how to talk to them.) She sits alone in her room for long periods of time doing absolutely nothing but thinking (I sit alone in my study for long periods of time doing absolutely the same thing); and what she likes to think about most is herself; what interests her most is herself; what she broods about most is herself; what she likes to talk about most is herself. She is not much different from me, I suppose.
I think, though, that I was happier than she is when I was young, and that all the boys and girls I grew up with and went to elementary school with and high school with were also much happier than she and her friends. I like to think that. But I really didn't know these other boys and girls as well as I know her. And perhaps they were not so happy as I think they were. And perhaps I was not. I didn't have as much to do with them when we were out of school and not in the street; I did not know them in the home and did not know them when they were alone. And I'm not so confident anymore that my own recollections of my childhood are as infallible as I have always believed them to be. I also think I may have been more unhappy than my daughter when I was young, and felt even more entrapped than she does in my own sense of pathless isolation. There are long gaps in my past that remain obscure and give no clue. There are cryptic rumblings inside them but no flashes of recall. They are pitch black and remain that way, and all the things I was and all the changes and things that happened to me then will be lost to me forever unless I find them. No one else will. Where are they? Where are those scattered, ripped pieces of that fragmented little boy and bewildered young man who turned out to be me? There are times now when it seems to me that I may not have been any place at all for long periods of time. What ever happened to all those truly important parts of my past that no longer exist in my memory and have been ignored or forgotten by everyone else? No one will ever recall them. It is too late to gather me all up and put me together again. My life, therefore, is not entirely credible.
I have trouble believing it. I can believe that it was me (I know) with Virginia in the storeroom of the automobile casualty insurance company and me with my wife making love on our honeymoon and me who is bored, melancholy, and reflective in my office at the company now, or in my study at home; but I can't really believe it was really me (Even though I know it's true) who sang those silly military songs exuberantly so long ago as we marched slovenly along in formation in uniform, sorted accident reports in an insurance office, filed folders, shot crap and played cards for pennies, nickles, and dimes, had satisfactory erotic dreams and was thankful for them, masturbated, and was thankful that I could, read the comic strips and sports pages of the New York Daily News and the New York Mirror, which, alas, is now defunct — soon there won't be anything left — said good-bye to my mother five mornings each week if I reminded myself to say anything at all to her when I left, carried a brown paper bag containing an apple and two baloney, egg, or canned salmon sandwiches with me into Manhattan for lunch, had tantrums as a child in frenzied and incoherent arguments at home with my mother or sister and wept inconsolably over matters I could not understand or explain, was a hardy and impetuous patrol leader in the beaver patrol of the Boy Scouts of America for many years and worked to earn merit badges, masturbated some more, even as a Boy Scout, and rode back and forth to my automobile casualty insurance company each working day on a very stuffy subway car crowded with tired, hostile, grimy adults who glared, sighed, snored, and sweated. That was somebody else, not me — I insist on that; it exists in my memory but that's all; like a children's story; it is way outside the concrete experience of the person I am now and was then; it never happened — I do insist on that — not to me; I know I did not spend so much of myself doing only that; so there must have been a second person who grew up alongside me (or inside me) and filled in for me on occasions to experience things of which I did not wish to become a part. And there was even a third person of whom I am aware only dimly and about whom I know almost nothing, only that he is there. And I am aware of still one more person whom I am not even aware of; and this one watches everything shrewdly, even me, from some secure hideout in my mind in which he remains invisible and anonymous, and makes stern, censorious judgments, about everything, even me. He hardly ever sleeps. I am lacking in sequence for everything but my succession of jobs, love affairs, and fornications; and these are not important; none matters more than any of the others; except that they do give me some sense of a connected past.
Who cares if I get Kagle's job or not? Or if I do get into young Jane in the Art Department's pants before Christmas or that I was never able to graduate myself into laying older-girl Virginia on the desk in the storeroom of the automobile casualty insurance company or in a bed in a hotel, although I did squeeze her good tits many times and feel the smooth inside of her thighs?
I care. I want the money. I want the prestige. I want the acclaim, and congratulations. And Kagle will care. And Green will care, and Johnny Brown will care so much he might punch me in the jaw as soon as he learns about it, and I know already I will have to begin making plans beforehand for coping with him tactfully or getting rid of him altogether, even though he's good. But will it matter, will it make a difference? No. Do I want it? Yes. (Should I want it? Nah. But I do, I do, dammit. I do.)
And there's no mistaking, either, the fact that my daughter does honestly covet the greater freedom enjoyed by girls and boys she knows who have lost a father or a mother through accident or illness, or whose parents are divorced or separated. (Even though they don't really seem to be enjoying it; they just seem to have more freedom.)
"Who the hell would take care of you if we were divorced, or if we were killed in a plane or automobile accident?" I try to explain to her tolerantly one evening during one of those «frank» (and generally abusive) discussions she persists in inaugurating regularly, usually when she observes that I have settled myself alone in my study to do some work or read a magazine. "You couldn't live alone. You know that. Who would feed you and clean up after you, help you pick your clothes out and remind you to brush your teeth and help you keep your weight down? You'd have to live with someone, you know. So it might as well be us. You know, you get some pretty God-damned good things from us, too."
"I wish," says my wife, "that you wouldn't swear so much when you talk to the children. And that you didn't always have to yell. Can't you see you're only scaring her?"
"Can't you make her keep out of it?" says my daughter to me, sullenly, about my wife.
"And I wish," I reply to my wife -
"She's always butting in."
— in a growl
that rises menacingly.
But I don't know what I wish (except that I damn well wish I were somewhere else), so I grind my jaws shut without completing my sentence. (My voice does have a tendency to get loud whenever I am irritated, frustrated, or attacked. And I will stammer ferociously if I attempt to speak a long sentence with strong emotion.)
I wish I knew what to wish.
I wish my daughter would stop complaining and feeling so sorry for herself all the time and start trying to make the best of things. She doesn't think much of us. She is nervous, spiteful, embittered, and vindictive. She is approaching sweet sixteen, smokes, and hates us both intensely — at least part of the time (if not nearly all of the time). I don't know what we have done, or failed to do, to account for it all: I don't know what she blames us for; but she blames us for something. (I grow pretty damned spiteful and embittered myself at my inability to please her, at our failure to make her happy. And I often strike back at her in clever, malign ways. I enjoy striking back at her. Revenge is sweet, even against her. And she is not yet sixteen. I sometimes find myself wishing that she would run away from home, just to make things easier for me.) I know my daughter hates us because she makes a point of telling us so. She may hate us singly or she may hate us both together: she is versatile, my darling little girl, at least in this one respect, extremely gifted; without straining herself unduly, she can hate all three of us simultaneously, my son included, or she can begin hating him separately without apparent reason and be oblivious to us; or she can hate Derek, his nurse, our house, our community. She can, of course, hate herself. With uncommon resourcefulness, she can even stop hating us for a little while, just to throw us off stride and lure us into an unguarded state of well-being that leaves us wide open for her next piercing assault. She is perverse, and proud of it. My daughter can't (or won't) learn chemistry, grammar, or plane geometry easily; but she did learn how to smoke cigarettes at an early age (even inhale, she boasts. Marijuana, too, she intimates, without being asked) and to say motherfucker so effortlessly as to appear to have been saying it unselfconsciously to us at home all her life; and she did learn how to hate us and say cruel things that hurt my feelings and reduce my wife to plaintive tears. It took my wife and me ten or fifteen years-of full-time marriage and hard and constant practice to learn how to hate each other with good, wholesome vigor and elation (when we do hate each other. We do not hate each other all the time), but my precocious daughter has learned how to do it already. It may be a talent she has, a genuine aptitude (if it is, it's the only talent she has. I am often quite furious with her, but I won't give her the satisfaction of showing it. I am often cruelly sarcastic with her in return). She hates my wife much more, and much more often, than she hates me, which is ironic and unfair, because my wife loves and cares for her without limit or restraint and would lay down her life for her. (And I would not.) But I get my share too. (She has enough hatred to go around.)
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