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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 pe
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 Joh
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.)