Something Happened

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.)

It doesn't really bother me so much anymore that my daughter hates me (I won't let it); by now, I expect it, I am inured to it, and I am willing to bow to her assertion that there is good reason for her hatred, although I don't know what that good reason is (except that I have grown inured to it, which is reason enough, I suppose).

Usually, she will come uninvited to my study to interrupt me when I'm working or reading a newsmagazine (or pretending to work or read) to tell me (in a tense, thin, childlike voice that she endeavors valorously to hold steady and self-assured) that she has arrived at the conclusion (never come to, but always arrived) that she doesn't have any real feelings for my wife or me any longer, thinks very little of her mother and of me too and finds it impossible to respect us, in fact, by now really dislikes us both very much; and that, terrible as she knows it must sound, and even though she will admit that she probably ought to be ashamed of herself — but isn't — for feeling the way she does, she is certain that she really wouldn't be sorry if Mommy (my wife) were killed in an automobile accident, like Alice Harmon's mother — Alice Harmon, in fact, can't make herself feel sorry about her mother at all — or if I were to get sick and die of a brain tumor, like Betsy Anderson's father; that she wouldn't actually take any pleasure in it, she wants me to know, and isn't actually wishing for that to happen, she wants me to understand, and might even regret it a little if it did, as she would regret it if it happened to anyone she knew, but she just doesn't think it would be the biggest tragedy in her life if I did get a stroke or a brain tumor, provided I died quickly and didn't need someone to take care of me for a long time, like some of those people who have brain tumors or strokes and go on living like vegetables, and is not saying all this just to start an argument with me or make me feel bad, but is only saying so because that just happens to be the way she feels, and she knows I want to know the way she really feels — don't I? — because I am her father and she is my daughter. And then, if I have let her progress that far (sometimes I cut her off gruffly as soon as she begins and kick her out right then), she might volunteer the information (again), with that same affected air of casual, unmotivated reflection (still struggling to keep her small voice from wavering and her trembling fingers from picking at things) that if my wife and I ever do get divorced, as she knows we have considered doing, and feels we should consider doing, since we are not so happy together anyway and are not very much alike, she doesn't think she would want to have to live with either one of us but would prefer to be sent away to boarding school, like Christine Murray, who is very happy now that she doesn't have to live with either one of her parents anymore, or even maybe to school in Switzerland, where she knows she will be content. In fact, she has arrived at the conclusion by now that she would be much better off living away from us, anyway, even if we don't get a divorce, and that we would probably be much happier without her too, since she can tell we don't really want her there. Wouldn't we?

Sometimes (with spiteful goals of my own) I will hear her through with the silence of a stone, letting her go on this way for as long as she is able, saying absolutely nothing and gazing at her all the while with a heavy expression that yields no flicker of emotion, forcing her to go on and on with increasing dismay and befuddlement (although I look at her, she must wonder if I am listening to her, if I hear her) as the smug, malevolent composure with which she entered crumbles away into terrified misgivings and she is left, at last, standing mute and foolishly before me, shivering and exhausted, bereft of all her former confidence and determination. (I can outfox her every time.) And then (when she has run out of all things to say and I know I have outfoxed her) if I maintain my silence and continue to stare at her oppressively with my dull, heavy, unresponsive look, she might stammer lamely, in a final, desperate attempt at bravado that fails:

"I'm only trying to be frank with you." And then, with victory palpably before me, I might decide to speak; I might decide to move in skillfully for my own attack, simulating an air of smug composure that seeks mockingly to impersonate her own.

"No," I will say enigmatically. (And this will confuse her.)

"No what?" she must ask.

"No, you're not."

"Not what?" she is forced to inquire, timid and suspicious now. "What do you mean?"

"You're not trying to be frank. You're trying to be anything but frank, so please don't use that as an excuse for your bad nature."

"What do you mean?"

"Aren't you?"

"I don't know. What do you mean?"

"Don't you know what I mean?" I inquire with cool, invigorating vengeance.

She shakes her head.

"What I mean is that you aren't trying to be frank and that you are trying to say the most shocking and outrageous things you can think of in order to hurt my feelings and make me angry at you."

"Why would I do that?"

"Angry enough to yell and begin punishing you."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because that's the way you are."

"Why would I want you to punish me?"

"Because that is the way you are. Don't you see? And that's the way you want me to feel. Don't you see that? Don't you think I can see it?"

"What do you mean?"

"That's what I mean."

"It's a matter of supreme indifference to me," she rejoins loftily, "how you feel."

"Then why bother," I mimic just as loftily, "to tell me at all?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if how I feel is really a matter of such supreme indifference to you, why bother to ever talk to me at all?"

"What should I do?"

"Unless you want something."

"And you wonder why I bite my nails and can't sleep well and why I eat too much."

"Don't blame your eating too much on me."

"What about the rest?"

"I eat too much also."

"You don't think very much of me," she alleges. "Do you?"

"Not right now. How much do you think of yourself?"

"I was only trying to be honest."

"Bull."

"You want me to be honest, don't you?"

"No."

"You don't?"

"Of course not. Why should I?"

An unexpected answer like that always outfoxes her, strikes her speechless for a few moments, makes her stammer and regret even further that she came barging into my study so rashly in the first place to start up with me. If she tries to continue the contest, her voice will drop to a diffident murmur that is almost too faint to be heard (I will pretend not to hear any of it and make her repeat each remark); or she will explode suddenly in a snarling, unintelligible, dramatic outburst and storm away in total defeat, banging some furniture or slamming a door. (I can outfox her easily every time.) But she never seems to learn (or she has learned and is drawn self-destructively to repeat these same cheerless defeats), so we go through innumerable repetitions of these same annoying, time-wasting, belittling (she makes fun of me because I'm getting fat. And getting bald. And I strike back by being faster, keener, and better informed in my repartee) «frank» and «honest» disputes with each other (I manage to win them all, although I sometimes feel wounded afterward) over money, smoking, sex, marijuana, late hours, dirty words, schoolwork, drugs, Blacks, freedom (hers), yelling, bullying, and insults to my wife.

"What will you do," she will ask baitingly, "if I come home with a Black boyfriend?"

This is a peculiarly ingenious stroke of hers that requires lightning dexterity to counter and with which she does succeed in confounding and vanquishing my wife. There is no way out, and I am tempted to award her accolades: if I tell her I'd object, I'm a racist; if I tell her I wouldn't, I have no regard for her. My wife succumbs by taking her seriously. I survive by skirting the trap.

"I would still ask you to clean up your room," I reply nimbly. "And to stop reading my mail and showing my bank statements to your friends."

Of course I'm a racist! And so is she. Who the devil isn't?

"That's not answering the question," she is intelligent enough to sulk. "And you know it."

"Bring one home and see," I challenge her with a snicker, because I know she is not ready to try that one on us yet.

She wants me to promise her now that she'll have her own car. She is willing to promise she'll give up smoking cigarettes in return. I used to order her not to smoke because of the risk of cancer, until I grew so weary of bickering with her over that subject that I stopped caring whether she smoked or not, despite the risk of cancer. (I did my best for a while as a responsible parent. And it did no good.) So now she smokes regularly (she says), over a pack a day (she says), but I don't believe her, for she could be lying about that too. (She lies about everything. She lies to her teachers too.) But she is not allowed to smoke in the house, which makes it easier for my wife and me to pretend that she doesn't smoke at all. And perhaps she doesn't. (Really, who cares? I don't. And I don't like to have to feel forced to pretend to. If she didn't tell us, I wouldn't have to.)

"I do smoke," she insists. "I even inhale. I guess it's a regular habit with me by now. I don't think I could stop smoking cigarettes now even if I wanted to."

"It's your life," I answer placidly.

"Over a pack a day, sometimes two. I know you wouldn't want me to be a sneak about anything like that, would you?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"I do."

"You would?"

"Of course."

"A sneak?"

"Yes."

"What do you mean?" Her eyes cloud with uncertainty and her mouth begins to quiver. I have just outfoxed her again.

"I do want you to be a sneak." I continue breezily, and zero in for the kill. "About smoking, and all those dirty, really very vulgar words and phrases you're so fond of using so openly."

"You use them."

"I'm an adult. And a man."

"Mommy uses them."

"Not the same ones you do."

"Mommy's a prude."

"You're a child."

"I'm sixteen."

"You're fifteen and a half."

"I'm nearer to sixteen."

"So?"

"Can't you say anything more than that?"

"Like what?"

"You always like to give short answers when we argue. You think it's a good trick."

"It is."

"You're so sarcastic."

"Be a sneak," I tell her sarcastically. "I'm not being sarcastic now. It will make things easier for all of us. I give you that advice as a pal, as a really devoted father to a young daughter. Sneak outside on the porch or into the garage when you want to smoke or burn that crappy incense or do something else you don't want us to know about. And close the door of your room when you're on the telephone so we won't have to listen to you complain about us to all of your friends or see those crappy sex novels you read instead of the books you're supposed to be reading for school. You can get away with much more that way. By being a good sneak. Just don't let me find out about it. Because if I do find out, I'm going to have to do something about it. I'm going to have to disapprove and get angry and punish you, and other things like that, and that will make you unhappy and me unhappy."

"Why will it make you unhappy?" she wants to know.

"Because you're my daughter. And I really don't enjoy seeing you unhappy."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Ha."

"And because I don't like to waste so much time fighting with you and yelling at you when I have other things I'd rather be doing."

"Like what?"

"Anything."

"What?"

"Working. Reading a magazine."

"Why must you say that? Why must you be this way?"

(I don't know.) "What way?"

"You know."

"I don't." (I do.)

"Why can't you ever pay me a compliment without taking it back?"

"What compliment?"

"You always have to have the last word, don't you?"

"No."

"See?"

"I'm not going to say another word."

"Now you're trying to turn the whole thing into a big joke, aren't you?" she says reprovingly. "You always have to try to turn everything into a big joke, don't you?"

(I'm contrite. I feel a little bit shamed. But I try not to let it show.)

"Let me work now," I tell her quietly.

"I want to talk."

"Please. I was working when you came in."

"You were reading a magazine."

"That's part of my work. And I have to prepare a program for the next company convention and work on two speeches."

"Where is it? The convention."

"Puerto Rico again."

"Can I help with the speeches?"

"No, I don't think so. Not yet."

"Is it more important than me?"

"It's something I want to get done tonight."

"I want to talk now."

"Not now."

"Why?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"No."

"You never want to talk to me."

"Please get out now."

(I know by now that I don't have too much in common with children, not even with my own, and that I dislike getting involved in long conversations with them. I really don't enjoy children for more than a couple of minutes at a time. It is difficult for me to keep interested in what they say and difficult for me to think of things to say that might interest them. So I no longer try.) Sometimes, when my daughter is in buoyant spirits (for some reason) and feeling exceptionally strong and sure of herself, she will sweep into my study audaciously without any pretext or apology and, as though she and I were commonly on the most familiar terms, settle herself imperiously on my couch as though for a lengthy, top-level consultation, and begin complaining to me about my wife, grossly miscalculating my response, assuming mistakenly, I guess, that because my wife and I fight so much, I will welcome her allegiance. (I don't allow her to speak disrespectfully about my wife; she ought to know that by now.) It used to be that when my daughter was small, and it sounded so beguiling and precocious, I would encourage her to find fault with my wife (my wife would delight in this also, because my daughter really was so bright and entertaining), which may be one reason she reverts to it so frequently now. But I don't like it now; and I will defend my wife (even when my daughter's complaints and unflattering comments are accurate and justified). Or I will cut her off curtly almost as soon as she begins, and kick her out with a stern admonition. My daughter's impression about me is correct: there are times when I simply don't want to talk to her. (She is generally so contentious and depressing. My boy is always easier to take — everybody says that. He is more straightforward and generous and much more likable; unlike my daughter, and me, he never rejoices in the misfortunes of other people; instead, he grows grave and worried in the presence of anything woeful, watching always to ascertain if any in the ungovernable whirl of events around him pose any danger to his own existence.) There are times now when I'm plain fed up with her, when I have had all I am able to take, when I just don't want to hear my daughter tell me one more time that I'm no good as a father and my wife is no good as a mother, that the home is no good as a home and the family no good as a family, and that Derek (our idiot child, of course) and all the rest of us are spoiling her life, even though it all might be true.

So what? What if it all is true? (My mother wasn't much better; and my father was much worse, ha, ha. He was hardly around at all after he died. Ha, ha.) Maybe it is my fault that she does so poorly at school and lacks confidence in herself and bites her fingernails and doesn't sleep well, and even my fault that she eats too much and is heavy and is having a boring and excruciating time of it. But, so what? (I've got my excuses ready too.) What good does it do anyone to know that? Even if I agree (and I often do agree, just to frustrate and befuddle her), it doesn't change anything, it doesn't make anything easier for her. So why must she dwell on it? It has grown so boring by now — it never leads anywhere — just plain boring to the point of maddening irritation (which is obviously all she hopes to achieve with me now, all she feels now that she can obtain from life, to goad me ruthlessly into these states of furious and intolerable resentment in which I stammer, spit, bellow, and launch myself into blustering denunciations that cannot be concluded with dignified grammatical coherence, and which are enough to bring that detestable, unmistakable glint of baleful satisfaction into her cunning eyes).

(What does she want from me?)

"You know," she might begin with deceptive tranquillity, "I really don't think I have anything in common with Mommy anymore. And I don't think you have, either. I don't know why you still stay married to her. I know you're incompatible."

(She doesn't even know what incompatible means.)

If I do (to her enormous surprise and chagrin) cut her off right then and kick her out of my study, it is not improbable that she will go straight to my wife (pals with her, all at once) and begin complaining to her about me! (And she, of course, is the one who never wants to be a sneak!) And then my wife, who is manipulated all too easily by my daughter, will come barging back into my study unsuspectingly to take up the cudgels for her, emboldened in her adventure by her sense of mercy. My daughter, smiling surreptitiously, will lurk in the background, anticipating with gleaming relish the fight that she hopes will now break out between my wife and me. (My boy, on the other hand, is appalled when any two of us quarrel and always looks unnerved and nauseated.) It is my daughter's brazen look of gloating expectation, I think, more than anything else, that inevitably fills me with rage, and with a vicious need to retaliate.

"She says," my wife says, "that you kicked her out of your study just now. She says she came in here to talk to you and you wouldn't listen to her. She says you never want to listen to her. You made her get out before she could even say anything."

I hold my breath for a second or two and pretend to meditate.

"Did she?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Uh-huh."

"Didn't you?"

"He did."

"Uh-huh."

"Did he?"

"Why would I say so?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well?"

"Well?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"You just heard her, didn't you? You kicked her out."

"Is that right?" I ask my daughter tonelessly, staring at her with a look of frigid scorn.

"Didn't you?"

"And did she chance to tell you," I say to my wife, "what it was she wanted to talk to me about?"

"That isn't fair!" my daughter blurts out in alarm. Her startled gaze shoots to the doorway as though she wishes she could run out.

"No."

"Oh."

"What?"

"I kind of thought she might have been careless enough to leave that out. That she wouldn't mind very much, for example, if you got sick and died. She didn't tell you that?"

"That's not true!" my daughter cries.

"Or that she really doesn't think she would care very much if you or I got killed in an automobile or plane crash, like Alice whatever-the-hell-her-last-name-is Harmon's mother, or passed away from a stroke or a brain tumor."

"I didn't say that!"

"You could."

"I didn't."

"You have."

"That isn't what I wanted to talk about!"

"I know. What she does want to talk to me about is that she doesn't think you and I have anything in common and wonders why I continue to stick it out with you instead of getting a divorce. Is that it?"

"I only began that way."

"No? Then let's continue. What was it, then, that you did want to talk to me about?"

"Oh, never mind," my daughter mumbles in moping embarrassment and lowers her eyes.

"No, please," I persist. "I want to. I want to give you that chance to talk to me you always say I never do."

"Why can't you leave her alone now?" my wife demands.

"She's trying to tear us apart, my dear. Don't you see?"

"Why can't we all be nice to each other?" my wife wonders aloud imploringly out of the innate goodness of her heart.

"Must I listen to a sentence like that?"

"What's wrong with it?" my wife retorts sharply. "What's wrong with wishing we would all try to get along once in a while instead of picking on each other all the time?"

"We don't 'pick' on each other all the time," my daughter interjects condescendingly in a tone of sulky contempt (trying to insinuate herself back onto my side in opposition to my wife). I am familiar with this tactic of hers. She flicks her gaze to my face tentatively to see if I am going to let her succeed.

I ignore the overture.

(That's what my wife's innate goodness of heart gets her.)

"I'm tired," I remark deliberately with an exaggerated sigh.

"That's because you drink too much before —»

"I'm tired," I interrupt resolutely, letting my voice get louder in order to drown out my wife's, "of listening to you tell me I drink too much before I come home, and listening to her tell me over and over again how bad you and I are and how much she hates me. I've got better ways to spend my time. Let her hate me. Hate me if you want to, and if you think it solves your problems for you. You've got my permission. I don't care if she hates me. But I do mind, God dammit, if she comes in here to tell me about it every God-damned time I sit down in here and try to do some work."

"He was reading a magazine."

"That's my work."

"She doesn't hate you!" my wife declares.

"What do I care?" I answer. "It's a matter of supreme indifference to me whether she hates me or not."

"And you're supposed to be so intelligent!" my wife exclaims.

"What does that mean?"

"She wants you to pay some attention to her once in a while. Can't you see that? And you're supposed to be so intelligent."

"Will you stop that?"

"You think you're always so smart, don't you?"

"Stop."

"All right. But if you'd only take the trouble to look at her once in a while, and listen to her, you'd see she doesn't hate you. She loves you. You never even show you know."

"Okay."

"You make her feel like a nuisance."

"Okay, I said."

"She doesn't hate you."

"Okay!"

"Okay."

I turn to stare at my daughter searchingly, my face still hard and scornful and belligerent (my defenses are up until I can make certain hers are down). She is standing perfectly still, as though meekly awaiting a verdict. I am awaiting some sign from her. She looks humble and penitent. She is alone. Her downcast eyes are grave and moist, and her ashen lips are pinched together sadly and are twitching, as though, despite all the forces of will she has amassed to hold her poor self together, she is going to collapse into shambles before us and begin crying helplessly, without pride. She is tense. My feelings soften with a sensation of irremediable loss (of something precious gone forever, of someone dear destroyed) as I study her pale, drooping, vulnerable face. I am tense too. I am unable to speak (maybe I do love her), and for a second I am struck with the notion that my wife is right, that perhaps my daughter doesn't hate me and does love me, and perhaps does need to have me know it (and needs to know also, perhaps, that maybe I think well of her). And I begin to feel that maybe I do care very much whether she hates me or not! (I don't want her to!) She must matter to me, I think, for I am nearly overcome with grief and pity by her look of tearful misery (and I want to cry myself), and I want to put my arms out to her shoulders to hold her gently and console her and confess and apologize (even though I have a vivid premonition suddenly that this is all a typical trick, and she will pull away from me in a taunting, jubilant affront as soon as I do reach out to comfort her, leaving me standing there ridiculously with my empty hands outstretched in the air, abashed and infuriated). I decide to risk it anyway — she is so pathetic and forlorn: I know I can survive the rebuff if it comes. Smiling tenderly, stepping toward her repentently, I reach my hands out to take her in my arms, apologize, and hug her gently.

She pulls away from me with a vicious sneer.

And I find myself standing there stupidly with my empty hands in the air, feeling hurt and foolish.

And my wife picks exactly that moment to cry:

"I'm the one she hates! Not you! I'm the one she can't stand!"

And I turn around to gape at her incredulously. (I had forgotten she was even there.)

"Don't you ever hear her?" my wife continues stridently, and runs toward my daughter as though she intends to smack her. My daughter flinches, but holds her ground steadily, glaring insultingly up into my wife's eyes with stubborn defiance, daring her, with a small, cold smile, to do more. "What have I ever done to you?" my wife shouts af her. "What have I ever done to her that she should hate me so much? Look at her! Don't you see the way she's looking at me right now?"

"Christ, yes!" I shout back at my wife. "What the hell do you think I was talking about? Why the hell do you think I kick her out?"

"And you — you're no better!" my wife accuses me. "You don't care either, do you?"

"Oh, Jesus!" I wail.

"Nobody in this house gives a damn about me," my wife laments. "Nobody ever loved me. Not in my whole life. Not even my own mother. Am I so horrible? What did I ever do to you or anyone else that you should all hate me so much? What makes me so horrible that you should all feel you can treat me this way? Tell me."

"Oh, shit!" I groan disgustedly.

"Don't talk to me that way."

"Must I really spend the rest of my life in rotten conversation like this?"

"What's so rotten about me?"

"Nothing."

"What do I do that's so horrible?"

And I find myself wondering once again just what in the mystifying hell an able, well-read, fairly intelligent, sensitive, personable, successful minor organization executive like myself, sound in health (if not in tooth), provocative in wit, still virile and still attractive to many susceptible ladies my own age and much younger, is doing engaged seriously in such a low, directionless argument with two such people (children) as them, my shallow, melancholy, slightly inebriated, self-pitying wife (I often try to figure out what it was I ever saw in her so long ago that made me think I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, except her good and willing ass, which is still not so bad and now even more willing. All in all, in fact, in the long run, I think I enjoy fucking my wife more than I do any of the others, although most of the ones I have gone with a second tune or more have been pretty good, too, and full of very surprising surprises, for a while. Jane in the Art Department will be a headache — I sense that already; she is gullible and unsophisticated and she likes to talk; her skin will be so clear and smooth it will almost hum to my touch, but she is still too young and pleasant, or simple-minded, to make much sense to me now. Some girls laugh a bit too loudly at just about everything amusing I say and drive me batty, between erections, once I recognize they laugh so readily and talk too much. That will be young, sweet, pleasant Jane. I know her already. But I also know I will grab for it lecherously at the next company party or sooner; and that I don't think I will want her to keep on working there with me after I do: she is a present I intend to give myself for Christmas this year, or earlier, and I am already in the process of wrapping her up) and my depressing, self-centered, self-pitying daughter, when I would much rather be concentrating on something else, on those two speeches I want to begin outlining (I like to get started on important things well in advance, on a long convention speech in case I am moved up into Kagle's job by then and am nominally in charge of the whole affair, and on my customary, unexciting, three-minute speech about the plans and activities of my department in case I am not moved up into Kagle's job and am still working for Green, who probably won't let me give it this time, either. I hate Green and will never forgive him or forget him for what he did to me at the convention by not letting me speak. I really don't want Andy Kagle's job — I never did want to do that kind of work or have power over so many people — but I will be heartbroken now if they don't give it to me: I will feel betrayed and disgraced, and I will want to slink away alone into someplace dark and weep and never come out. I am too weak to refuse it, and too vain to be indifferent to the honor. I don't even really need the extra money) and on the list of changes I will want to recommend when I am promoted into Ragle's job. (I will want to show Arthur Baron and Horace White that I am ready. There are people in nearly all our offices I will want to be rid of. I wish I could be rid of Green now, although I don't know who could replace him.)

"Tell me," my wife repeats shrilly. "What do I do?"

"You give me," I answer, "a pain in the ass. Both of you!" I add emphatically, with a long, warning look at my daughter to let her know unmistakably that I am including her also this time in my ire, and to deprive her of that pasty, crafty glee she customarily evinces whenever I turn abusive to my wife.

"Don't yell at me," my wife snaps.

"I wasn't yelling," I explain. "I was speaking emphatically."

"I can yell too, you know."

"You are."

"And don't say things like that to me, not in front of the children. Ever again. I don't care how you talk to me when we're alone."

"Like what?"

"What you said."

"Then stop being one."

"You're so clever."

"I know."

"It's no wonder they use such filthy language, when they listen to you. It's no wonder they talk to me the way they do."

"Oh, stop."

"I'm not going to let you talk to me with such disrespect," my wife goes on vehemently. "Not anymore. Not even when we're alone. I'm not going to put up with it. Do you hear me?"

"Fuck off now," I tell her quietly. "Both of you." My wife is stung. Tears spurt into her eyes. (I am sorry immediately. I feel small and shameful already for having said that.)

"I could kill you for that," she tells me softly.

"Then kill me," I taunt.

"I wish there was someplace I could go."

"I'll find one."

"I wish I had money of my own."

"I'll give it to you."

"That's some way," my daughter observes softly in a petulant tone, "for a father to talk to a fifteen-year-old child."

"Go — " I begin (and pause to conceal a smile, for her reproof is humorous and ingratiating, and I am tempted to laugh and congratulate her) "- away to boarding school."

"I wish I could."

"You can."

"You stop me."

"Not anymore. And that's some way," I exclaim, "for a fifteen-year-old child to talk to her father."

"I didn't —»

"Yes, you —»

"I only started —»

"— and you know it. I get — you know something, kid? I bet you'll never guess in a million years what I get from all these frank and honest discussions of yours that you insist on having with me."

"Headaches."

"You guessed!" I declare, hoping that I will be able to make her laugh. "I get piercing headaches," I continue (pompously, after I fail, for I feel myself inflating grandly, and crossly, with a delicious thrill of outrage. I am nearly ecstatic with grievance, and I forge ahead vigorously in joyous pursuit of revenge). "Yes, I get piercing headaches from all those brain tumors and cerebral hemorrhages you keep giving me. And stabbing chest pains from all the heart attacks you keep telling me you wouldn't feel so unhappy about if I got.I would feel unhappy if I got one! In fact, I'm starting to feel pretty damned miserable from having to listen to both of you tell me all the time how miserable you feel." My wife and daughter are silent now and cowering submissively (and a flood of self-righteous gratification begins to permeate and sweeten my throbbing sense of injury. I feel so sorry for myself it is almost unbearably delicious. I also feel mighty: I feel potent and articulate, and part of me wishes that Green or someone else I yearn to impress, like Jane, or Horace White, or perhaps some terribly rich and famous beauty with marvelous tits and glossy hair, were in a position to witness me so fluent and dominating). "I'm sick," I remark misleadingly in a falling voice, just to puzzle them further a moment. "Yes, by now I am sick and tired of having both of you people come barging in here, into my study, whenever you feel like it, just to tell me what a lousy husband and father you think I am."

"You were reading a magazine," my wife remarks.

"You too?" I jeer.

"We're going."

"This is my study," I remind her caustically (and desperately) in a surly, rising voice, as she turns to leave. "Isn't it? And now that I think of it, just what the hell are both of you doing in here right now — in my study — when I've got so many important things I want to get done?"

"Which is more important?" my wife makes the mistake of asking. "Your own wife and daughter, or those other important things?"

"Please get out," I answer. "That's the kind of question I never want to be asked again the rest of my life."

"All right. We'll go."

"So go."

"Come on."

"No, stay!" I blurt out suddenly at both of them.

"We're going."

"You stay!" I demand.

"Aren't we?"

(All at once, it is of obsessive importance to me — more important to me now than anything else in the whole world — that they stay, and thatI be the one who is driven out. Out of my study. My eyes fill with tears; I don't know why; they are tears not of anger but of injured pride. It's a tantrum, and I am obliged to give myself up to it unresistingly.)

"I'll go!" I cry, as both of them stare at me in bafflement. I stride toward the door with tears of martyred grief. "And stop sneaking these extra chairs in," I add, with what sounds like a sniffle.

"What?"

"You know what I mean. And all of you always take all my pencils and never bring them back."

"What are you talking about?"

"Whenever you redecorate. This God-damned house. You dump chairs in here. As though I won't notice."

My wife is bewildered. And I am pleased. (I am enjoying my fit exquisitely. I am still a little boy. I am a deserted little boy I know who will never grow older and never change, who goes away and then comes back. He is badly bruised and very lonely. He is thin. He makes me sad whenever I remember him. He is still alive, yet out of my control. This is as much as he ever became. He never goes far and always comes back. I can't help him. Between us now there is a cavernous void. He is always nearby.) And when I whirl away again exultantly to storm out, leaving my silent wife and daughter standing there, in my study, at such a grave moral disadvantage, I see my son watching in the doorway. And I stamp on him before I can stop.

"Ow!" he wails.

"Oh!" I gasp.

He has been waiting there stealthily, taking everything in.

"It's okay!" he assures me breathlessly.

Clutching his foot, hopping lamely on the other, he shrinks away from me against the doorjamb, as though I had stepped on him on purpose, and intend to step on him again.

"Did I hurt you?" I demand.

"It's okay."

"But did I hurt you? I'm sorry."

"It's okay! I mean it. It doesn't hurt!"

"I didn't mean to step on you. Then why are you rubbing your ankle?"

"Because you hurt me a little bit. Before. But it's okay now. I mean it. Really, it's okay." (He is supplicating anxiously for me to believe he is okay, pleading with me to stop pulverizing him beneath the crushing weight of my overwhelming solicitude. "Leave me alone — please!" is what I realize he is actually screaming at me fiercely, and it slashes me to the heart to acknowledge that. I take a small step back.) "See?" he asks timorously, and demonstrates.

He puts his foot to the floor and tests it gingerly, proving to me he is able to stand without holding on. I see a minute bruise on the surface of his skin, a negligible, white scrape left by the edge of my shoe, a tiny laceration of the dermatological tissue covering the ankle, no injury of any seriousness. (He is probably the only person in the world for whom I would do almost anything I could to shield from all torment and harm. Yet I fail continually; I can't seem to help him, I do seem to harm him. Things happen to him over which I have no power and of which I am often not even aware until the process has been completed and the damage to him done. In my dreams sometimes he is in mortal danger, and I cannot move quickly enough to save him. My thighs weigh tons. My feet are anchored. He perishes, but the tragedy, in my dreams, is always mine. In real life, he is suffering already from secret tortures he is reluctant to divulge, and from so many others he is unable to comprehend and describe. He is afraid of war and crime. Anyone in uniform intimidates him. He is afraid of stealing: he is afraid to steal anything and afraid of having things stolen from him.) He seems out of breath and waxen with fright as he stands below me now watching me stand there watching him (the delicate oval pods beneath his eyes are a pathological blue), and he is trembling in such violent consternation as he waits for me to do something that it seems he must certainly shake himself into broken little pieces if I don't reach out instantly to hold him together. (I don't reach out. I have that sulking, intuitive feeling again that if I do put my hand out toward him, he will think I am going to hit him and fall back from me in dread. I don't know why he feels so often that I am going to hit him when I never do; I never have; I don't know why both he and my daughter believe I used to beat them a great deal when they were smaller, when I don't believe I ever struck either one of them at all. My boy can hurt me in so many ways he doesn't suspect and against which I have no strength to defend myself. Or maybe he does suspect. And does do it with motive. When I think of him, I think of me.) And I know why he is quaking now, squirming awkwardly and plucking nervously and obliviously at the small bulge of penis inside his pants as though he is tingling to urinate. I know I must have seemed enormous to him as I spun wrathfully to storm away and stamped down blindly upon him. I must have seemed inhuman, gigantic, like that monstrous, dark hairy, splayfooted tyrant (that flying cock elsewhere is not the only fur-bearing blot) on that ugly father-card in the Rorschach test.

"Then what are you looking so unhappy about?" I want to know timidly. "If it doesn't hurt."

"Your yelling."

"I'm not yelling."

"You were yelling. Before."

"I'm not yelling now. I wasn't even yelling at you," I argue with comic fervor, trying to appease him. I want to make him smile too. (I can't stand to see him upset, particularly when I am the cause. I smother furious impulses against him when he fails to be as fully content with life and me as I would like him to be.) "Was I?"

"No," he replies without hesitation, twisting in one place again (as though he would like to wrest his feet free from the floor and fly away) and patting his knees spasmodically with fluttering palms. "But you're going to yell at me," he guesses cagily, with a gleam of insight in his eyes. "Aren't you?"

"No, no, no, no," I assure him. "I'm not going to yell at you."

"You will. I know you will."

"I won't. Why should I yell at you?"

"You see? I told you."

"I'm not."

"You're yelling already."

"I'm not yelling!"

"Ain't he yelling?"

"I don't think he knows what he's doing."

"That's good," I compliment my wife acidly. "That will cool things down."

"You know you're impossible?" she answers. "Whenever you get this way."

"I'm possible."

"He's possible," my daughter intones ruefully.

"Are you going to yell at me now?" my boy asks.

"I'm not going to yell at you at all," I tell him. "I was speaking loudly only to be emphatic," I explain to him almost in a whisper, forcing myself to smile and imposing on my words a scrupulous and conciliatory calm. I squat to my heels directly in front of him, bringing my face almost to a level with his own, and look instructively into his eyes. He lets me take his hands. Tissues inside his hands, I feel, are beating and lurching like little fishes. (Everybody in my family trembles at home but me, even though I don't want them to. I brood and sulk and moan a good deal and wish I were someplace else. I tremble elsewhere. At the office. In my sleep. Alone at airports waiting for planes. In unfamiliar hotel rooms in cities I don't like, unless I drink myself sodden and have some girl or woman I can stand who is able to spend most of the night with me. I don't like being alone at night and always leave a small light on when I have to be. Being dead tired doesn't help; in fact, exhaustion is worse, for I don't sleep any sounder and my defenses are low and laggard. Repulsive thoughts swarm over them and invade my mind like streams of lice or other small, beetle-brown, biting insects or animals, and I am slow to choke them off and force them back down where they came from. There is this animal, I sometimes imagine, that creeps up on paws in the night when my eyes are closed and eats at my face — but that's another childish story. My dreams are demoralizing. I won't reveal them. I have castration fears. I have castration dreams. I had a dream once of my mother with black mussels growing on her legs, and now I know what it meant.) "Please don't be afraid of me," I urge him tenderly, almost begging. "I'm not going to do anything to hurt you or scare you. Now or ever."

"It's okay," he says, trying to comfort me.

"You can trust me. I'm not yelling at you now, am I? I'm speaking softly. Ain't I?"

He nods mistrustfully (and I want to raise my voice and begin yelling at him again to make him believe I never yell at him at all. But I don't. I don't want to scare him again. I don't ever really want to frighten any of them and am always sorry and disgusted with myself afterward when I do. Almost always. But only after I succeed in bullying them; if I try to bully them and fail, I am distraught. And frightened. I am sorry now that I have just intimidated them all; and in speaking to my boy, I am trying to apologize to my wife and daughter as well. I want them to see I am sorry; but I don't want to say so. I want to be forgiven).

"Why do you look that way?" I ask him, in a troubled, slightly nagging voice (pleading with him to relax and feel free and safe and happy with me). "Why do you look so worried?"

"It's okay."

"You can trust me," I promise.

"It's just the way I look."

"And I wasn't yelling at you before, either," I continue uncontrollably. "Sometimes when a person raises his voice and speaks loudly, it isn't because he's yelling at you or even angry, but only because he wants you to believe what he's saying. He does it for. emphasis. He wants to be. emphatic. That's what the word emphatic means." I pause in annoyance as I see my boy catch my daughter's eyes for an instant and then roll his gaze upward with a dramatic look of tedium (as both my children are apt to do ostentatiously when one of us is lecturing them at length for doing something we deem hazardous, or inundating them with unnecessary directions or repetitious questions. I would rather have him bored with me now and making fun than panic-stricken. So I continue peaceably, persuasively, instead of reprimanding him tartly, although my dignity was offended for a second). "Now that's what I was doing when I raised my voice a bit before," I continue. "I was being. emphatic. I wanted you to believe that I wasn't going to yell at you and that I wasn't angry with you. And it was exactly the same when I was speaking with them," I lie. "I wasn't yelling at them, either."

"I know," he says. "I know it now."

"And I'm not yelling at you now, am I?"

"No."

"So I was right, wasn't I?"

"Yes. It's okay."

"Good. I'm glad you understand. And that's why. " I conclude wryly, with a smile — and somehow I know he guesses the joke I'm about to make and that he is going to interrupt and make it for me. I pause, to give him time.

". you yelled at me!" he says.

"Right!" I guffaw.

(Our minds are very much alike, his and mine, in our humor and our forebodings.)

"Does it," he ventures ahead boldly on his wave of success, with a sidelong glance at my wife that glitters with impish intent, "give you a pain in the ass, too?"

"Oh, my!" I exclaim. (My first impulse is to guffaw again; my next is to protect him from any sanctimonious reproof that might come from my wife for his using the word ass. Quickly, clowning, laughing, mugging with grossly burlesqued alarm, before my wife can react at all, I cry:) "Now, she's going to yell at you!"

"She's not!"

"No?"

"Are you?"

But my wife is glad (not mad) and laughs merrily with relief (because she sees I am glad now, too, and not mad at her or my daughter anymore).

"No, but you're a devil and a rascal," she upbraids him affectionately. "Because you knew I wouldn't yell at you this time if you said that word."

"What word?" asks my boy, with a feigned look of innocence. "Ass?"

"Don't say it again!"

"Ass?"

"You're not going to make me say it!"

"What? Ass?" asks my daughter, joining in friskily.

"I give up." My wife throws her arms out mirthfully in exasperation. "What am I going to do with them?"

"Say ass," I advise.

"Ass!" my wife blares obligingly, extending her face out toward both of them like an elephant's trunk. They roar with gulping laughter. "Ass! Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass!"

All of them are laughing hysterically now.

My daughter is unable to keep her balance in the sweeping exhilaration she experiences at finding herself released so unexpectedly, without penalty, from the excoriating conflict she had devised and in which she had so swiftly found herself the tortured victim. She falls against my boy joyously; they hug each other with immense delight and go staggering wildly all about my study, bumping into us and each other and into the superfluous chairs my wife keeps sneaking in when she has no better place to put them. My boy is pleased with himself beyond measure, beside himself with glee and ecstasy at having used his dirty word with impetuous imagination and gotten away with it and at having transported us all to a spirit of warmth and generous good feeling from the savage rancor with which we had been smashing each other. We are close now, intimate, respectful, and informal. The children bump and hug each other and continue to laugh hilariously. I watch them with affection (feeling complacent and benign). I am glad they are mine.

"They're really such good kids," my wife murmurs pensively in my ear, so that only I will hear.

I nod in agreement, feeling wistful and pleased (with myself, too, and with her). I slip my arm around her waist and draw her to my side. She moves willingly, her body limber, and fits herself against me compliantly. I get an erection. (I would lay her now if we were alone. We would lay each other.) I slide my hand down over her ass and follow the curve in at the bottom toward her box. She stretches away.

"Later," she cautions guardedly.

"No, now," I demand, teasingly.

"You're crazy."

"I might not have it later."

"You will. You'd better," she laughs. "I'll see that you do." I laugh too.

And that is the needful service performed for us so regularly and artlessly by this angelic little boy of mine ("He isn't real," my daughter has complained about him enviously. "He's never mean. He never gets mad."), who is no better off than the rest of us (who may be considerably worse off, in fact, because he is only nine and has already been frightened of just about everything, heights and kidnapping, sharks, crabs, drunks, adults who stare, sheriffs, unkempt handymen, wars, Italians, and me. He isn't afraid of monsters or ghosts so much, because monsters and ghosts are silly. He is afraid of human beings. He veers away from cripples. He welcomes the phenomenon of cops, because he has the dim hope they will safeguard him from all the rest, even from me), to draw us together again by reminding us who we are and what we know of each other, to stop the three of us just in time and make us step back — by evoking and recalling to us the great need and capacity for affection each of us has hidden away very deep inside, like a yawning wound, affection for him, and perhaps for each other — from mangling each other willfully, brutally, and irreparably, with much malice and happiness aforethought, if we have not maimed each other permanently already. I believe he pulls us together as a family and keeps us together. (I often think of leaving and always have. My daughter can't wait to get away, or says she can't.) I think we will fall apart as a family when he grows up and moves away. (I love him so much I just know he is going to die.)

"You like him more than me," my daughter has said.

"No," I answer, lying, because I do not always wish to outfox her, and because she sometimes seems so barren of hope that I find myself grieving silently alongside her, as though at an open coffin or grave in which her future is lying dead already. (She is not yet sweet sixteen, but it sometimes seems to both of us that she has already missed all boats. When?) "But you must admit, darling, that in many ways, he is much more likable."

"I know."

They are not so funny to us while they are taking place, these corrosive family arguments that my daughter provokes so malignantly, and they do not always end in bedroom trysts for me and my wife and gales of gleeful laughter for the children. They are excruciating, especially for her. I wish she would write book reports instead, or do complicated jigsaw puzzles with one thousand pieces when she finds herself with lots of time and no exciting way to spend it. (I wish she would fall in love or something.)

But she can't stop.

(It's her compulsion.)

She must continue to agitate, like some dark and moody burrowing creature with a drive to undermine and destroy. I (we) do not know what it is she wants that she feels we can give her (she wants to be beautiful, willowy, brilliant, famous, rich, and talented — and who can blame her? We would like her to be all that too. Perhaps she knows it. But we don't insist), and she does not tell us. She does not know. Sometimes she confides in us without belligerence or guile. She confesses. She stands before us listlessly, her head bowed in disgrace, and, in words that force their way out from her soul and flow from her lips in a low, pining, abject monotone, she says:

"I have nothing to do."

It breaks my wife's heart when my daughter has nothing to do. I will not let it break mine.

My daughter bites her fingernails, and I suppose that is my fault too. (At least it's something to do. My boy has poor posture, and so do I.) She began biting her nails around the age of five. My boy used to suck his thumb in his sleep and raised a swollen white lump (it was the color of fungus or peeling, dead skin) on the joint of his finger that handicapped him at play and stigmatized him in the daytime by reminding him of its cause. We couldn't make him stop. We put casings of evil-odored bandages on his thumb at bedtime, but he sucked at it anyway. We even tried the vile-tasting liquid we had used without avail years before to discourage my daughter from biting her fingernails. That didn't work, either, so she still bites them. I don't know how he finally stopped: I don't know how he ever made himself stop doing things in his sleep. (Often, I can stop unpleasant dreams from developing by bounding wide awake alertly at their first portentous overtures as though in response to some well-recognized primal alarm — like a good censor or movie director I can yell "Cut!" at the first specter of something askew in my dream scripts and make them start all over again in another direction. The words I actually speak to myself are "Oh, no! None of that again" — and keeping guard vigilantly over my slumbering intelligence until my dreams rewrite themselves into scenes and themes that are more to my taste. Then I can relax securely, fall back into sleep, and give them free rein. I can stop these unwelcome dreams from proceeding only if they start as I am sifting down into sleep and am still in touch with myself. Often, I cannot; and I lie in darkness like a limbless baby while they run their ruthless course through me rampantly as though I were a helpless and disembodied mind, or this tiny, armless, legless baby still imprisoned motionlessly in a cradle or womb. I can't bear them. I forget them. They leave traces. I have them often. I have them whenever I want them.)

(I know so many things I'm afraid to find out.) She is a poor sleeper, my daughter, and, except for short-lived, unfounded spells of euphoric gaiety and plan-making (which flare so suddenly and extravagantly as to seem almost feverish), prefers to cling to the tragic view she takes of her own possibilities. She is easily alarmed and often jittery. She is probably a virgin. (If she weren't, she would tell me. When she isn't, she will — I visualize that approaching occasion reluctantly more and more frequently — and I look ahead grimly to the day or evening she marches into my study to mock me with that. What am I supposed to say? I will laugh it off, of course, minimize its importance, so as not to send her into promiscuity and perversion on one side or frigidity and abstinence on the other. What a dilemma.

"Well, I'm sure other girls your age do it too, my dear," I can hear myself saying with suave insouciance, flicking the white ash off a cigar I do not smoke. "I imagine you're not the first. Don't they?"

What will I really feel?) She lacks confidence in herself and, like my boy (and me), is wary of strangers and ill at ease with people to whom she has just been introduced. (I, on the other hand, am a good sleeper at times — although I like to pretend I'm not — especially when I am sleeping at home with my wife, although I usually wait until I can no longer keep awake before I go to sleep. Ha, ha. When I sleep away from home with my wife, I will have a nightmare the first or second night, usually the same one: a strange man is entering illegally through the door, which I have locked, and drawing near, a burglar, rapist, kidnapper, or assassin; he seems to be Black but changes; I think he is carrying a knife; I try to scream but can make no sound. I have this same bad dream at home often, even though I carefully lock all my doors before going to sleep. I have had it dozens and dozens of times. I have always had it. I must make some sound, though, while I am having the dream and trying in vain to scream, for my wife awakens with the noise of my struggles and rouses me by calling my name and tells me, as though I didn't know, that I was having a nightmare. Sometimes, even when I am trapped deep in my agony and whatever menaces me is moving right up to my bedside, some different section of me is tuned in omnisciently to the nature of the experience, knows and reassures me it is all just a very bad dream and watches from outside it tranquilly and smugly and waits expectantly, with enjoyment, for my wife to be disturbed by my noises and motions and to call to me by my name and shake me awake by the shoulder to tell me I was having a nightmare. I think people have more than one brain. I like the idea of scaring my wife with my nightmares. Sometimes, when she is having a nightmare, I revenge myself on her by not waking her up and allowing it to torture her for as long as it wants to, while I watch her from outside, idly and smugly, leaning on my elbow. I have piss dreams too, but they are funny. I think they are. When I am sleeping away from home without my wife, I am often worried I will have this same bad dream, or a different one just as horrifying. Who will wake me? Will I survive it if no one does? I don't have this dream when I'm alone. Will I be embarrassed and apologetic with whoever wakes me in the next room or same bed? There are many nights now when I am grabbed wildly by insomnia the instant my head touches the pillow and am then tumbled about violently all night long. My body — particularly my legs, shoulders, and elbows — is heavy and unmanageable; I have no place to put them; my soul is fragile; my mind is tissue thin and easily pierced by emotions and images. I can do nothing at all. My head fills and races with disconnected thoughts. By now, I can identify this tumultuous insomnia in the first second or two; I no longer try to overcome it. It is useless. I give in to it with a sinking feeling. I lie and wait resignedly, submitting, keeping my eyes closed because that's easier, and depend on morning to come and rescue me or for sleep to steal upon me unawares after several hours and snatch me away from those buffeting cataracts of fantasy, fury, reminiscence, and speculation — all of it inconsequential — that race through my head in such torrential splashes. Poor me. I'm not sure I'm such a good sleeper after all, although I can generally doze off easily after lunch and sexual intercourse. I am surprised when I awake in the morning after a seizure of insomnia to realize I have been asleep; I am often aghast upon awakening from a sound, dreamless sleep to realize how far away from life I have been, and how defenseless I was while I was there. It is almost as though I truly am afraid of the dark. Like my daughter. And my boy. Like I used to be as a child. And later. I might be unable to return. I don't like to lose touch with consciousness entirely. Dreams, even very bad, weird dreams, are my only contact with reality when I sleep; I want them; I even welcome headaches at night; I am out of existence. Where am I, then, when I am not? Filed away? I worry about things like that lately and did when I was small. All the things I worry about now I worried about more when I was small. I worry about the need for surgery someday for just that reason; the cutting, hammering, sawing, and stitching are all obnoxious enough; but the thought of anesthesia that benumbs the mind totally is even more repelling. Where will I be in that bottomless, measureless time between the moment they lower the cone over my nose and mouth and instruct me to breathe deeply, as they did when I was a kid and had my tonsils out, and again when I was married already and had two impacted wisdom teeth pulled, and the moment the first thought stirs in my brain again and I, like Jesus from the cave or Lazarus from the grave, am miraculously resurrected? I think an authentic miracle takes place in the universe every time I come awake again after going to sleep. What is happening to me when I am not conscious of myself? Where do I go? Where have I been? Who watches over me when I am gone to make sure I do get back? If I die under anesthesia, I will certainly be the last one to find out I have departed. I try my wife's tranquilizers when I feel it might be impossible for me to sleep and think they might help. I don't want sleeping pills; they bring to mind visions and aromas of old-fashioned funeral parlors, dentists' offices, and wax fruit. Years back when my daughter was small, she would materialize in our bedroom in the black hours of night, or in the doorway of the living room if one or the other of us was up late, all at once she would just be there; and make faint, odd, rustling noises that were barely audible — we would feel them somehow rather than hear them — until she forced us to look up and take notice of her. She could not speak; her mouth seemed numb; she could only reply with a grunting and drowsy incoherence to the sharp questions we fired at her and she did not remember when we questioned her again in the morning about it after we had made her return to her own room. Or claimed she didn't. We tried gropingly to relate these episodes to her tonsillectomy; but they had started earlier, and there had been no complication over the operation, at the hospital or at home, before or afterward. Just disillusionment. She had expected something different. It soon stopped. And we soon stopped thinking about it, since she seemed to have gotten over it. When my boy's tonsils were taken out, he didn't want to stay in his room, either. There were no complications, they told us. But for a little while afterward, he would sneak into our room in the dead of night and curl up to sleep on the carpet at the foot of our bed. He did not want to be alone. If he came in too soon, when we were still awake, we would make him go back to his own room and tell him he could leave a lamp on; sometimes we would yell; but he would always return, or try to, no matter how many times we yelled, stealing back into our room over and over again as quietly and slyly as he could, like some yearning creature newly born, and curl up on the floor against the foot of the bed. We would find him there when we awoke, lying on his side like a well-formed fetus, sucking his thumb. It was a chilling, heart-sickening experience for us to clamber out of sleep each day and receive as our first blow of the new morning the shocking sensation that there was another living being in the room with us. When we closed the lock of our bedroom door to keep him away, he would sleep curled up on the floor just outside, if one of us had to leave our bedroom for something in the middle of the night, we would strike his body unexpectedly as it lay there when we opened the door and almost scream with fright. If we got out of bed in the darkness, we were afraid we might step on him. We could have let him come into bed with us, of course; we wanted to. But a doctor told us no. We didn't like to see him that way. We did not want to shut him out. I'm sorry now we did. I think the doctor was wrong. I don't know what else we should have done.) She is very touchy and defensive and will interpret even the mildest suggestions about herself as ferocious personal attacks. She is prone to disparaging herself unfairly, and she takes issue with us intensely when we defend or praise her. She will occasionally start to cry, as though we were doing the belittling. She has a definite gift for placing me in predicaments like that. She is not as tall and stout as she thinks she is, her skin is not as oily as she fears it is, and her face is much, much prettier than she is willing to believe. She is actually quite attractive. But she doesn't believe her eyes; and she cannot believe our assurances.

She envies all other girls she knows for one quality or another (this one's figure, that one's hair, the next one's money, the next one's brains or talents) and does not know who it is she should want to emulate. (Now that she is tall for her age, she feels mammoth and clumsy. When she was shorter than most of her friends, she was convinced that only very tall girls were ever considered beautiful. When she was slender, she felt flat and sexless. Now that she is overweight a bit and has large developing breasts, she feels ungainly and believes that boys only fall in love with girls who are slim and have straight bellies.) This might be funny, if it were not so real for her. She cannot decide, for example, whether she wants her breasts (tits) to be larger or smaller. (This might be funny too, if she did not brood over the matter mournfully for long, silent stretches during which she is very much withdrawn. Sometimes she sits with us and is worlds away.

"A penny for your thoughts," I used to say.

Now I get no answer to this gambit, just a look of disdain.)

She feels she is not much good for anything; and she isn't. But who cares? Who cares if she does not have any special aptitudes, talents, beauty, or social skills? She cares. (And perhaps I care. And my wife. And perhaps we have let her know we care. If we said to her that we did not care about things like that, she would say to us that we did not care about her at all. She knows all the tricks. How can I tell my daughter she is the most marvelous, beautiful teen-age girl in the whole world when we both know she isn't? What answer can I give when she asks me how she compares to other girls who outshine her in one way or another?) She cares a great deal. (And so, perhaps, do I.)

"Are you very disappointed in me?" she asks periodically.

"No, of course not," I answer. "Why should I be?"

She knows many people and is lonely, and almost never seems to have a good time. (This is infuriating to us, her obdurate refusal to be happy and have fun, although we try not to look at it in just that light. But I know I have been so enraged with her at times for having nothing to do that I have wanted to seize her fiercely by the shoulders, my darling little girl, and shake her, pummel her frenziedly on the face and shoulders with the sides of both my fists, and scream:

"Be happy, God dammit! You selfish little bitch! Can't you see our lives depend on it?"

I have never done that, of course, or even mentioned the impulse to my wife, who would be repelled by the brutal ugliness of the urge and regard it as abnormal and depraved — even though I know she experiences this same brutal and abnormal impulse herself. And about my wife's own endless naggings with my daughter, I have commented:

"I hope you understand that it's really your own happiness you're thinking about, and not hers."

"That isn't true." My wife was adamant in objection. "Don't you think I want her to be happy? I'm thinking of her!"

"Balls," I replied, or wanted to. Because I know it was my wife who sent her into a paroxysm of weeping by suggesting to her, apropos of nothing else we were talking about, that she have a sweet sixteen party; for it has been an unmentioned secret that she never knows enough boys and girls she likes at any one time, or who like her, to compose a decent celebration for her, and that this is one of the poignant sources of her unhappiness.) She thinks of herself as unpopular. She makes friends easily and discards them callously. She is still shy with boys. (She has already had, I think, at least one bad sex experience of some kind and is looking forward apprehensively to having some more.) She is not comfortable with boys in the house when I am there. Was my wife as innocent in her proposal as she seemed, or did she make the suggestion with sly, and perhaps unconscious, cruelty? I don't know. Probably she was innocent, for my wife tends to look back with nostalgia on what she remembers as the enjoyable occasions of her own girlhood. My wife reveled like a princess in the sweet sixteen party her own mother made for her, or thinks she did. (Perhaps it was the last time in her life she was allowed to feel important.) My wife is one of these warm-hearted, sentimental human beings who are drawn to see some good in everyone (when I let her) and to project the rosiest colorations onto past experiences, with the result that her recollections are often inaccurate. She likes to think she loved her mother, but she knows she hated her. Her girlhood was tortured, not happy. She hates her younger sister and always has. (At least I didn't begin hating my mother until she became a burden to me. I still have sad, yearning dreams about my mother in which I am young and she is going away. And there are tears drying in the corners of my eyes when I open them.)

My daughter doesn't really like her friends very much (she shuffles them in and out of her good graces arbitrarily), and neither do I, with the exception of one classmate half a year older who is slim and pretty and secretive and who, I am just about convinced, is flirting with me, leading me on. (I encourage her.) She is not, my daughter tells me, a virgin anymore. She has a knowing, searching air about her that sets her apart from the others. She keeps her look on me when I am near, and I keep mine on hers. I'm not sure which one of us started it. I think it was me. (Perhaps we recognize something, the same thing, in each other, and she thinks that I am flirting with her, which may be true, but if I am, I am only kidding. I hope I'm only kidding.) Sixteen would be too young, even for me. (Or would it? Someone is going to be laying that provocative, pretty, hot-pantsed little girl soon, if someone isn't doing it already, and why shouldn't it be me, instead of some callow, arrogant wise guy of eighteen or twenty-one, who would not relish her as much as I would, regale and intoxicate her with the spell of flattery and small attentions I could weave, or savor the piquant degeneracy of it nearly as much as I would be certain to. Although I'm not so sure I would want to tell anyone about this one.) No, sixteen is too young (young enough to be my daughter, ha, ha), and I turn irritable whenever my daughter comes out of her room to chat with us wearing only a nightgown or a robe that she doesn't always keep fully closed on top or bottom. (I don't know where to look.) I either walk right out without explanation (seething with anger but saying nothing) or command her in a brusque, irascible voice to put a robe on or put her legs together, or keep the robe she does have on closed around the neck and down below her knees if she wants to stay. She is always astounded by my outburst; her eyes open wide. (She does not seem to understand why I am behaving that way. I cannot explain to her; I can't even explain it to my wife. I find it hard to believe my daughter is really that naпve. But what other interpretation is there?) Afterwards, I am displeased with myself for reacting so violently. (But there is little I can say to apologize. Where am I supposed to look when my tall and budding buxom daughter comes in to talk to me wearing almost nothing, sprawls down negligently with her legs apart, her robe open? How am I supposed to feel? Nobody ever told me.) They are all morbidly alike, the girls and boys in this somber social circle of adolescents of which my daughter is a part (none are happy), much more so than the girls and boys and men and women I work with in the company (although, to them, we might seem all alike). None are well-adjusted. (I am well-adjusted, which is not exactly the best recommendation for adjustment, is it?) They manifest defiance, displeasure, lassitude, and indifference. They generally have nothing they want to do. There is nothing they want to be when they grow up; they have no idols. (Neither have I. There is now no one else I would rather be than me — even though I don't really like me and am not even sure who it is I am.) They are not comfortable with adults (me); they pose and attitudinize when they are with us; they strive to be as reticent and solitary as moles. They do not want us to hear what they say when they talk to each other. I used to believe they were always feigning; now I believe they really are as cynical and disheartened as they think they are pretending to be. They don't want to be doctors when they grow up, or aviators, or heavyweight champions of the world. They don't really want to be lawyers. None of them wants to be President of the United States, Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Board of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., or me. (Why should they? There are enough other people to do that kind of work. Me, for instance. I will do it because by now I have nothing else I can do.) They have good reason to be so pessimistic, I feel; the pity is they found it out so soon.

Some of the girls and some of the boys always do seem to be having an easier time of it than the others, but this only lasts a little while for any of them, and even my daughter will surface buoyantly every now and then and whiz along vivaciously until something happens (sometimes that something is so elusive that it cannot even be identified; it is almost as though she suddenly runs out of her supply of joy the way a car runs out of gas) that breaks her morale and dissolves her confidence, and she sinks back sluggishly and safely into her accustomed mire of regret. Some of the boys she goes with swagger and boast a good deal more than the others, but the worldly self-assurance they affect is transparently unreal. If not, if they really were as tough and egotistical and domineering and amoral as they wish to appear, I would find them obnoxious and insufferable, for I have seen my daughter with these boys in crowded cars, and I did not like what I saw, or imagined. (But what difference does that make?)

What difference does it make, really, what she is or isn't doing already with those boys I could so easily dislike, and even perhaps with girls (just about all of the young girls I do it with these days brag now about having done it, at least once, with other girls too), in those crowded cars she drives in to pizza joints with loud music (I don't really like most of their music, although I sometimes pretend to just to please my daughter) or to parties with the same loud music in other people's darkened houses — as long as they don't drive recklessly and get killed or maimed in an automobile accident?

(What difference does it make anymore who is screwing whom?) It is already too late for anything else. It is too late, I think, for me to stop her or change her, and I would not know anymore how to try. Something happened to both my children that I cannot explain and cannot undo. I can't be good to them, it seems, even when I want to.

"Listen," I say to both of them anxiously, practically pleading with them to allow me to help them. "What do you want to be when you grow up? Tell me. What do you want to do?"

"I don't ever want to get married," my daughter mumbles moodily, "or ever have children."

"Work in a filling station," my boy answers.

"Well, that's a bit better." I approve, nodding with a look of praise. Why not? Own his own business? It makes some sense. Profitable franchise: Exxon, Texaco, Sunoco, Shell, Gulf? Sure. It's something. A start. Okay. "Why?"

"I like the smell of gasoline."

Christ!

"Jack, you've got kids," I appeal to Green at the office, almost in desperation. "That are older than mine. You've got a boy in college, haven't you? What does he want to be when he gets out?"

"A suicide."

"I'm not joking."

"You think I am? I've got a daughter in college too. She has abortions. Between suicide attempts. She lays bums. They don't want to continue. There've been three attempts between them. That I know about. One by slashing, two by drugs. It sounds like Paul Revere, doesn't it? They're both on drugs. My new wife is crazy too. So is her mother. So is mine. It's not my business anymore."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Go do some work. It's not your business either."

He has written his children off, filed them away, closed them out like dead records that are not his business anymore. But I still have my children, and I wish to engulf them in devotion and safeguard them against every slight. (I want them to believe I love them.)

"Listen," I exclaim to them frantically, "you don't have to do what everybody else does. You can be whatever you want to be. I'll help. You don't have to join the Cub Scouts or play baseball or go to Sunday school or even to college. What do you want to do?"

"Join the Cub Scouts and play baseball," says my boy.

"Go into my room and play my records now," says my daughter.

Good God — has it happened to them already? They don't care. Or they don't know. When did it happen? Where? Where was I when the decisions were made that determined he would want to join the Cub Scouts and play baseball now, and all she would want to do is go into her room to talk on the telephone and play her phonograph records? Is it really too late?

It is too late, I feel, for me to save her, or even to help her, and I really don't think I would know what to do anymore to try (except to sit apathetically and watch her go her unhappy way). It would do no more good for me to try to change her now than it has done in the past, when she was more credulous and suggestible and more eager to please. I have tried; I have taunted, reasoned, thundered, whined, disciplined, flattered, and cajoled, to no avail and perhaps much harm, until I confessed to myself one day that it was not merely hypocritical of me, but futile, and therefore foolish. Then I stopped. (Now I go through perfunctory routines. I acknowledged to myself also that I was not really as exercised as I maintained by her shortcomings and mistakes and by the frameworks for future disasters that I watched her constructing. All that seemed calamitous to me was her disobedience, and her unwillingness to believe me. All that endangers me now is her resistance and disrespect.) What was the purpose in continuing to try to influence her (other than to be able to say someday — now — that I tried)? I know I have no power over her now. (If I knew she were about to become a heroin addict and then a common prostitute, I wouldn't know what to do to avert it. I would rail and curse my fate; but none of that would help. So I wouldn't try at all.) She doesn't know yet that I have no power over her; so I bluff, and for the time being (redundancy coming) we have a modus vivendi. (All I have left is the power to cripple her.) Where was the morality, duty, and good sense in trying to turn her into a kind of person I do not like and one that she was probably never able to become anyway? I know where it will end (and I do not like it. I do not like knowing it. But what can I do? Nothing. I know that much too). She is already what she is, already well on her way to being what she is destined to become, good and/or bad, and I don't think there is any longer a single thing I or anyone else can do at present to help her or change her. She is going to become a lonely, nervous, contemporary, female human being. (She is too smart to be dumb.) She is much smarter than my wife, which means for one thing (unlike my wife, so far) that she will sleep with other women's husbands (and that she will not be overly impressed, for long, with her own). I can't stop that. I cannot fight and nullify a whole culture, an environment, an epoch, a past (especially when it's my own past and environment as well as hers, and I myself am such a large part of hers), and I have made my own adjustment to them all so contemptibly. Why should I expect her (or even want her) to be different from other girls and women I know and like? (Except that they are not happy.) (But who is?) If she isn't really smoking a pack of cigarettes a day outside the house this year, she will smoke a pack of cigarettes a day outside the house next year. And if she isn't screwing for one or more of the boys she knows now, she'll be screwing for them later, and doing other commonplace sex stunts with them as well.

"That's some thing to say about your own daughter," my wife remarks, with a grimace of revulsion.

"Even if it's true?"

"Yes."

(And yet that is precisely the thing we both would say about her if she were not our own daughter, for my wife and I have engaged in this same derogatory speculation about most of my daughter's friends and about other people's daughters her own age and younger.)

It is not a matter of morals anymore, or even of decision; it is only a matter of time. (And my wife, who has a romantic loyalty to the way things ought to be, ignores her own past. She prefers to forget that even we were doing it all to each other before we were married.)

And what's the use of making believe it isn't? I know where my daughter is heading from the girls I know who have already been there. She will not go to church like my wife. (She goes now every third or fourth Sunday only to placate my wife and place her under an emotional debt for which she will later obtain exorbitant payment. She makes fun of the service while she is there and trades laughing, sidelong glances with my boy, who already finds the whole extraordinary ritual somewhat silly.) She will drink whiskey for a while instead; then stop; then start in again after she's been married several years and drink whiskey regularly from then on, like my wife. She will have two children or three and be divorced (unlike my wife), and she will marry a second time if she and the children are still young when the first marriage breaks up. She will smoke marijuana (who doesn't? Even Ivy League fraternity boys on the executive level at the company smoke it now, and so do I when it's proffered at any of the parties I attend in town without my wife), if she isn't doing so already; if she doesn't smoke pot and hash at least once in high school, she will smoke it when I send her away to college and everyone interesting she meets there is already smoking it. She will get laid. (There is just no other way to deal with that fact; and the best one can wish for her in this area is that she enjoy it wholesomely from the start. Although I find it hard to wish it. And I hope she never decides to confide in me about that.) She will go wild for a while (and think she is free), have all-night revels and bull sessions, complain about her teachers and curriculum requirements, have no interest in any of her academic subjects but get passing grades in all with very little work, if she doesn't drop out altogether because of sheer dejection and torpor (which she will eulogize into something mystic and exalted, like superior intelligence). She will experiment with pep pills (ups), barbiturates (downs), mescaline, and LSD, if LSD remains in vogue; she will have group sex (at least once), homosexual sex (at least once, and at least once more with a male present as a spectator and participant), be friendly with fags, poets, snobs, nihilists, and megalomaniacs, dress like other girls, have abortions (at least one, or lie and say she did. Just about every young girl I meet these days has had at least one abortion, or claims she did, and feels compelled to boast about it to me), and sleep, for a while, with Negroes, even though she will probably enjoy none of it, and might really not want to do any of it. (She is a strong-minded girl who is far too weak to withstand a popular trend.) If it isn't one type of self-destruction and self-degradation she cultivates for a while, it is certain to be another; and she will emerge, if she is lucky, from this period of wanton profligacy and determined self-expression after two-and-one-half to four-and-two-thirds years feeling tense, worthless, spent, and remorseful, having searched everywhere and found nothing, with no ego at all, and pine for just one good, stable, interesting man to marry (like myself) and live happily ever after with. She will wish she had children. (She won't find that one man she wants, of course, because we're not that good.) I hope she stays away from addictive drugs so that she will be able to come out of it when she decides she wants to. I hope she doesn't get pregnant and have to have that abortion. I hope she doesn't insist on telling me about any of it. (I hope she never falls so deeply into some kind of trouble that I have to find out. I hope she doesn't get killed in a car crash.)

I know this bumpy terrain too well, and I know she is already bouncing and tumbling through it downhill, with a will and momentum that cannot be stayed and which is not really entirely of her own choosing (no matter what she elects to believe). The die is cast (iacta alea est), although I don't know when her dice were rolled or who did the throwing. (I know I didn't.) I know I must have done some horribly damaging things to her when she was little, but I can't remember what those things were or when I did them. (I swear I did not want to. There have been times I wanted to hurt, I'll admit, but never seriously, I swear, and not permanently.) My daughter is already plunging downhill into her own tangled future, careening bruisingly from one obstruction right into another, and I can no more halt her descent than I could catch a boulder in an avalanche. (I would be destroyed also if I tried. She is on her way, she is no longer mine.) She is skidding and falling ahead resolutely out of control, into times of arid, incomprehensible turmoil that contain no enticement and offer nothing alluring, except having something else to do and getting free of us. ("Think positive, please," I have urged her tartly. "What do you want to be? What do you want to do?" If I were presented with those same questions, I would not have a good answer anymore either. A suicide? Why not? What's better? A filling station? No. But, what's the hurry? If I did not have girls to play around with and such serious problems at home to contend with, I think, sweet, bleeding Jesus, I would go out of my mind from this fucking job of mine.)

And I tend to feel that she and I have come by now to a point of tacit agreement, our modus vivendi, to the mutual understanding that each of us has already written the other off, that neither of us really belongs to the other any longer, and that we are both merely keeping up appearances, going through perfunctory routines (as I wrote my mother off a long time before I buried her, and, as I now believe, she did the same with me. She saw through me, I think, dim and old and speechless as she was, and indulged and babied me correctly by letting me indulge and baby her as she wasted away in that nursing home during those final months of awkward visits in which I did nothing more useful than bring her highly seasoned things to eat and sit by her bedside for almost an hour gazing stealthily at my watch and babbling blithe, patent nonsense in which she showed little interest. That was all the solace I could produce for each of us in those final moments we were to spend with each other in all eternity. What a chance I had; we had, to say something. Nothing came out. I'll bet, now, that these inconvenient, unproductive visits were no more pleasant for her than they were for me. I made them because she was my mother; she endured them, I think, because I was her son. She was always perceptive and would see into me), biding our time, my daughter and I, as we go through the formalities of pretending to be still related. She lives here, follows loose procedures, and has dinner with us; I talk to her, buy her things, and will continue to profess to be interested in her until she is old enough to go away to college or move away somewhere else, as she never ceases stressing she wishes to do.

"Someday soon," she says, "maybe this summer when school is over, I think I would like to live in a place of my own. An apartment or studio. In the city. Either by myself or with just one friend. And then in the fall, I think I would like to go away to boarding school. I don't really like any of my friends here."

"I will help you," I reply noncommittally (and know instantaneously that it is the wrong thing for me to say. I had not intended this time to be unkind. But the words themselves carry a sting of rejection that makes me smart with compunction). "Seriously. I will help you find a decent, safe place, and I'll give you the money you need to pay for it and live there."

"I meant it."

"So do I."

"You're making a joke out of it."

"You'll need my help. You'll need me to sign the lease. You're too young."

"I want to live my own life."

"Who's stopping you?" I retort. (And now I know we are contending with each other in another one of those abrasive battles of wits.) "It seems to me you can, now that I've offered to pay the bills and said I'd let you go."

I can outfox my daughter easily just about every time.

(Even when I don't want to. I can't keep my mouth shut.) I don't know what else to do when we spar like that and she tries to show me she is as good as I am. (She isn't. Should I let her win?) She hurts me, and I hurt her; she strikes me, and I strike back. She likes to browbeat my wife and me into spending excessive sums of money on her for things that have not much value to her once she owns them (it is one method she has found of exercising power over us); I permit her to succeed, without resistance, comment, or complaint (it's a method I have found of outfoxing her. And it is easier for me in the long run to let these really rather negligible amounts of money go than to keep quarreling with her over them in a series of emotional discussions that might not be concluded otherwise. I win victories over her, I have found, by giving in to just about everything nettlesome she proposes). She thinks I am immature. It galls me to hear her say so (even when she says it with approval, when I am succeeding in making her laugh, it irks me to hear her tell me that I never fully grew up and that I am, in her opinion, still as playful and childish as a little boy. My boy is frequently distressed and offended when I try to make him and my daughter laugh in public, by singing, walking funny, or making unexpected, loud wisecracks in elevators, drugstores, or supermarkets), and I have taken to wondering (wishing) bitterly now and then after the most disruptive of these sessions with her, as I sit stewing resentfully in discontent and suffering so much sympathy for myself, why she does not oblige me by running far away from home like so many other unhappy girls her age (I guess I might be sorry if she did. I wouldn't miss her, I think, since we don't actually have that much to do with each other anymore, but I would have to go through such elaborate efforts to find her and so many clumsy conversations with other people about her having run away) and make things easier for me by leaving me in peace. And it is my wife, of all people, who brings me to a halt on these occasions, who makes me stop and reflect when I am feeling most murderous and sour, when I am out of my mind with wrath and aboil with a blazing yen for revenge, my wife who utters the words that shed some light, and even hope, and make me remember what I ought never allow myself to forget. She calls me stupid; she tells me I am rotten, self-centered, insane; that I am "no good" (and I regret again that I ever confided to my wife the words I think my mother tried to say to me in the nursing home the last time she spoke). It is my wife, maudlin, discouraged, repetitious, often inane, who, abused by my daughter and oppressive to her in return, berates me with grief and compassion and makes the surprising observation that puts my daughter back into vivid focus suddenly. In tears, crying quietly (I have no patience anymore with women who cry, and my wife knows it and tries not to), it is my wife who remonstrates with me, defending her: "She's just a little girl."

My daughter is just a little girl, and I try to outfox her in argument. (I just can't help it.) I talk to her as I would to a grown-up, to Kagle, Green, Jane, or my wife, cleverly, cogently, glibly, bitingly. I react to her unpleasant moods as I would to some insulting adult my own age or older. I try to embarrass and defeat her in debate: I want to top her always when we trade taunts and wisecracks, and I usually succeed. (If I can't be funnier, I can always get angrier and grasp my victory that way.) I am ashamed; she makes me forget she is only a child. It is very important to me that I beat her in all our contests. When we discuss or dispute anything, I must be the one to deliver the most intelligent opinions. (I compete with her.) If my daughter criticizes me or complains about me or makes a disparaging joke (even a very humorous and lighthearted one), I can be as affronted, hurt, arid unnerved as though some stinging jibe had been inflicted upon me by Green. (I will hide my feelings from both of them, although I suspect Green sees into my skull and knows everything that takes place there. I may even want to cry.) I will sulk (and it is almost as though my daughter is the adult and I am the child). Our roles are reversed; and it is somewhat eerie. (I depend on her. I wanted security from her; I do not get it. Instead, she troubles me with her problems. She takes my time. I do get some of this security from my little boy — so far. "Who do you like?" I can fire at him almost any time with a grin. "I love you, Daddy," he will cry with joy, and hurl himself forward to embrace me with an ardor that jars us both. But he is afraid of spiders and bees — so am I — and of crumbling ankle bones, and I sense much trouble ahead for both of us. I have never felt only sadness at the death of a friend or relative or the departure to a faraway place of someone I like, or even perhaps love. Always there has been simultaneously a marked undercurrent of relief, a release, a secret, unabashed sigh of "Well, at least that's over with now, isn't it?" I wonder how I would feel about the death of a child.) She still has power to wound me; I have power to wound her (so maybe we have not really written each other off entirely yet. Maybe that's why we want to, we are dangerous to each other. My wife can't hurt me. My daughter can). I don't want to hurt her. I do not want her to hurt me. I want her to like me. (I want Green to like me, and everyone else I meet in the whole world to like me, except the people I've already met, handled, found inconsequential, and forgot about.) I want her to obey and admire me (and will hit back brutally at her when she is rude or disparaging). I can't bear defiance from any member of my family (or from waiters or other public servants who are supposed to be subordinate, although I often keep silent with these others and nurse my injuries covertly). I want respect from my daughter and continual kindness. I don't get it.

"She doesn't dislike you," my wife will say to me, when I go to her sometimes for help and advice. "She adores you. Can't you tell?"

"She never says she does."

"Neither do you."

"I don't adore me."

"You know what I mean. Why are you joking now if you really care?"

"She's always angry," I complain. "Even when she isn't really angry, she comes in and pretends she's angry and then she gets angry. She does that with you too."

"That's why she's so sensitive when you're angry with her or pay no attention to her or when you're even too busy to talk to her when she comes into your study to talk to you."

"She never really has anything she wants to talk to me about."

"She doesn't know what to say."

"To me?"

"She doesn't know what else to talk about that will interest you."

"Then why does she try?"

"She wants to impress you."

"She doesn't have to."

"Then why does she try? Your mind is always someplace else. You always act as though we're intruding and you wish you were someplace else. With me, too."

"Stop it, for now, will you? We aren't talking about you. Or I will wish I were someplace else."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that now."

"Yes, you did. Or you wouldn't have said it."

"Do you want to pick on me?"

"All she does is tell you she can't stand me, and all she does is come into my study to tell me she can't stand you and start a fight with me about one thing or another."

"She doesn't know what else to say to you."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"She's shy."

"With me?"

"That's why she goes into your study so often to interrupt you. She wants you to pay some attention to her and tell her she's pretty."

"She isn't so pretty when she says some of those things she does."

"Don't you think she's pretty anyway?"

"Do you?"

"She could be. I think she could be very pretty if she'd lose some weight and take better care of her face and her hair."

"Why do you serve such fattening meals and keep cake and candy and ice cream in the house?"

"I know. I don't know why. I forget."

"None of us want it but you. And her."

"I won't do it anymore."

"I don't know what to say to her."

"She doesn't know what to say to you."

"I don't know how to talk to her when she tells me she thinks she's fat and ugly or asks me to tell her honestly, if she wasn't my daughter, would I think she was pretty. Would I like her? She's not fat and she isn't ugly, and she knows it. What am I supposed to say?"

"She doesn't know what else to say to you. She's afraid to say anything else. I don't know what to say to you either. I have trouble talking to her too."

"What are you talking about?"

"None of us know what to say to you. You're always so irritable. You always get so mad."

"Oh, come on."

"It's true. You make us feel so stupid. You try to."

"I'm not that bad."

"Maybe if you came home earlier or didn't sleep in the city so often."

"What has that got to do with anything we're talking about? I work late."

"Or came home less often. Sometimes we all get along better when you aren't here."

"Maybe I shouldn't come home at all."

"I didn't mean that."

"Are you suggesting a divorce?"

"No. You know that. Why are you bringing that up so quickly?"

"What are you complaining about?"

"I'm not. I'm sorry I said that. I don't know. I don't know why. I didn't mean to say that."

"Yes, you did. Or you wouldn't have said that, either. People say what they mean."

"So do you. She thinks you hate her."

"I don't. Sometimes I do. When she gets me mad."

"She says you never look at her."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"That you never look right at her, even when you're talking to her. She says you always look off to the side somewhere. She notices things like that. She thinks you despise her so much you can't even bring yourself to look at her."

"She's nuts. That's not true."

"Do you look at her?"

"Sure, I do. I don't know. I think I do. Why shouldn't I?"

"She thinks you don't love her."

"It isn't true."

"Do you love her?"

"Of course I do. Do you?"

"You know I do."

"You're always criticizing her. More than I do."

"She's afraid."

"Of what?"

"You."

"Shit."

"We never know what kind of mood you're in."

"That's some way we live."

"We never know what it's safe to say around you."

"I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"What do you think of that? Of you. Of all of you. You've got me walking on eggs, you're all so God-damned touchy and afraid. Do you think I want you all afraid of me? I never know what I can say either around here without hurting somebody's feelings. It's worse than being with Green or Arthur Baron or Horace White. It inhibits me, in my own house. No wonder I yell a lot. Do I really yell so much?"

"All the time now."

"I don't always mean to."

"You're always so irritable."

"I'm irritable all the time now. I'm always tired."

"Maybe you're working too hard."

"I don't work hard. I worry a lot."

"Maybe you should try to get an easier job."

"Don't you ever listen to me?"

"One where you wouldn't have to work so hard."

"I said I don't work hard."

"Well, maybe you should try to get another job."

"I am trying to get another job."

"Will it be harder or easier?"

"Easier, I think. More responsibility, but much less pressure. More money. More worry. I don't know."

"Will you be able to make speeches?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You know what I mean. Speeches."

"Yeah. All I want."

"I hate Jack Green," she says.

"Why?" I retort suspiciously.

"He's a lousy bastard," she declares passionately. "I'll never forgive him for what he did to you."

"What?" I ask, feeling my face burn suddenly and a tense, protective anger begin to rise.

"Not letting you make that speech at the convention last year, like everyone else. I bet he's jealous of you, that's why. I'm surprised Arthur Baron let him do that to you."

"It wasn't that important."

"I know how hard you worked on it. I know how small it must have made you feel."

"Are you doing this deliberately?"

"But how did it make you feel?"

"I don't feel any bigger being reminded of it now."

"See?" she says. "You're too sensitive to things like that. Maybe you shouldn't take this new job if you have to work too hard and worry more."

"Maybe I won't. To hell with the money and the prestige and the success."

"I don't think you ought to travel more."

"I don't think you can keep your mind on one subject for more than one minute at a time, can you?"

"That's just the kind of remark you would make to me. That's just the kind of remark you would make to her, too."

"I made it to you. Let's not fight now. I didn't come in here for that this time. You and I can fight later."

"I'm not trying to fight."

"Then stop needling me like an oh-so-innocent bitch. Or that I'm too dumb to know what you're doing. That speech is none of your business. Why bring it up all the God-damned time if it really makes you so angry? You do it just to remind me."

"And I'm not angry at what you said just now about my mind. I know you think I'm the dumbest person who ever lived. And I'm not trying to pick on you now. But did you hear how you sounded just now? That's just the kind of thing you would say to her. That's just the way you would sound to her. Try to remember when you talk to her that she's only fifteen and a half years old."

My wife is right.

I do not talk to my daughter as I should to a child, or would if she were somebody else's. I'm not nice to her. If my little boy misbehaves, I respond to him dotingly as a careless, mischievous, or overtired little boy who needs a kiss and a hug and the mildest of reprimands; it is a normal, predictable, endearing mistake, and I correct him tolerantly in an almost deferential way. If my teenage daughter does something wrong, it is something wrong: it is an insulting, intentional, inexcusable attack against me that requires swift and severe retribution. (I do not treat them the same.) I wonder why. Is it because she's a daughter? Or a first child, for whom my aspirations were too high, and in whom I am now therefore disappointed? Or is it that she is already in her teens, growing up and away from me, slipping free from my authority, already preparing to live without me, to challenge frontally my wisdom, morality, and ability, and threatening to dislodge me, if she can, from my shaky stronghold of dictatorial self-esteem? Will I have to endure and survive these same assaults and rejections from my little boy when he grows up too? I hope not, for I would derive no satisfaction (I think) in vanquishing him. (Thank God my third child is an idiot: I really don't mean that. What I do mean is that thank goodness I will at least be spared a rebellion from him. I know how I will feel when Derek dies, or when he is finally sent away: relieved, liberated, and I will release a long-compressed breath and say, perhaps even aloud to someone whom I may feel I can trust:

"Well, at last that's over with too now, isn't he?")

I try to remember when this rivalry between my daughter and me first began. I can't. It sometimes seems that we have always been this way with each other, that we have never gotten along any better or differently. I would like to make my daughter less miserable if I can, to help her to be happier and much more pleased with herself. I don't know how. (I like to trap my daughter in carelessness and lies in order to make her admit she's sorry.)

"She wants to know you love her," my wife says. "She doesn't think you do."

"Well, I do. She knows it."

"How?"

"I think I do."

"By your actions? You never tell her."

"That isn't so."

"When?"

"She's my daughter. I can't say 'I love you' to my own daughter."

"Why not?"

"It sounds like incest."

"Only to you. She thinks you're disappointed in her."

"You are. You certainly let her know you are."

"Only because I know she can be better. She could be a good dancer or actress or piano player now if only she'd stuck to things when she was younger. She had so much talent. She could still study dancing or acting."

"So don't deny it. Don't accuse me of that, too."

"I know what happened to me. I wish I'd stuck to something. Like my mother wanted me to. I wish my father had kept out of it and let my mother make me practice more. I might be something today."

"You could be the king of France."

"I'm your wife. You never say 'I love you' to me either."

"You're my wife, I don't have to."

"That isn't funny now."

"Are we talking about you again?"

"I'm not talking about that now. I don't know what to talk about. I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know how to kill time. What am I supposed to do with time if I don't know how to kill it?"

"Have another drink."

"All right. Will you get it?"

"Sure. I don't know what to do about my daughter."

"Me neither," my wife intones in a distant, hollow voice. "She breaks my heart," she adds fretfully. "She can be such a bitch when she wants to hurt me."

"I know."

"You too. A bastard. You can be such a bastard. You could at least try to be friendly with her when she wants to talk to you. Even if it hurts."

"I do. And it does hurt."

"That's why she does it. It's the only way she knows how to make you notice her."

"What about you?"

"Maybe me too. I don't even have that way anymore. I don't think you even care anymore whether I'm nasty or not. I think you just don't care."

(Maybe she is right.)

My wife can wring my conscience for a little while (if I decide to let her), but she does not have the power to hurt me anymore (which is why I think I feel secure with her, why I even might have decided it would be good for me to marry her). She wishes she did. She would like to know she means more to me than she thinks she does, would like to believe I need her. (I don't. I don't think I do. I don't let her know I do.) She wants me to tell her I love her, although she has stopped asking me to (I bring her a box of chocolates every Saint Valentine's Day now, and she is pleased to receive it, although we both know it is only a box of chocolates. Still, it is a box of chocolates, and everybody in the family enjoys eating chocolates but me), just as she has too much pride (or good sense) to delve into the subject of my sleeping away from home so often or hint that I might be sleeping with other girls (as she does surmise about other married men we know. If that ever hopped out into the open between us, like that little mouse I was afraid of in our apartment in the city so long ago, she would have to do something about it, she would have to act — and I know she does not want to. I know that she, like me, prefers to keep us together until time, or life, runs out). I know I don't want my daughter to grow up to become the kind of girl I run around with now (none of whom can hurt me either. I pick them for that, reject them, in fact, in advance, before I even take up with them), but I don't know what kind of girl I do want her to become. (She will never become the king of France either.) She will never dance on the stage of the Radio City Music Hall. She will be some boy's girl friend for a short while, then some other boy's, and then an unhappy wife and mother who will get along no better with her children than I get along with mine, and I don't know what else she can become or anything I can do to help her toward something better — except nothing. (There are really so few things that can happen to people in this lifetime of ours, so few alternatives, so little any of us can become, although neither my wife nor daughter realizes that yet.)

"You never like to talk to me, do you?" my daughter says to me softly and earnestly, speaking this time not merely for effect.

"Yes, I do," I reply, avoiding her eyes guiltily. (She is vulnerable in her candor. I do not want to hurt her.)

"You don't even like to look at me."

"I'm looking at you now."

"Only because I just said so. You were looking over my shoulder, like you always do, until I just said so."

"I was watching a fly. I thought I saw one. When I do look at you, you want to know why I'm staring at you. You do the same thing with Mommy. You yell."

"If I come in here to talk to you, you always look annoyed because I'm interrupting you, even when you're not doing anything but reading a magazine or writing on a pad."

"Sometimes you keep saying good night to me for an hour or two and keep coming back in with something else you want to take up with me. Five or six times. I keep thinking you've gone to bed and I can concentrate and you keep coming back in and interrupting me. Sometimes I think you do it for spite, just to keep interrupting me."

"I keep thinking of other things to say."

"I'm not always that way."

"I'm the only one who ever comes in here."

"Am I always that way?"

"Everybody else is afraid to."

"Except the maid," I say, trying a mild joke.

"I'm not counting her."

"I do come in here to work, or to get away from all of you for a little while and relax. I don't know why everyone around here is so afraid of me when I never do anything to anybody or even threaten to. Just because I like to be alone every now and then. I know I certainly don't get the impression that people around here are afraid to come in here and interrupt me when they want to, or do or say anything else to me, for that matter. Everybody always is."

"You spend nearly all your time at home in here. We have to come in here when we want to talk to you."

"I have a lot of work to do. I make a lot of money. Even though it may not seem like much to you. My work is hard."

"You keep saying it's easy."

"Sometimes it's hard. You know I do a lot of work in here. Sometimes when I just seem to be scribbling things on a pad or reading I'm actually thinking or doing work that I'll need in the morning the next day. It isn't always easy to do it at the office."

"If you ever do say you want to speak to me, it's only to criticize me or warn me or yell at me for something you think I did."

"That's not true."

"It is."

"Is it?"

"You never come into my room."

"Is that true?"

"When do you?"

"You told us not to come in. You don't want me to. You keep the door closed all the time and you ask me to please get out if I do knock and come in."

"That's because you never come in."

"That doesn't make sense, does it?"

"Yes, it does. Mommy would know what I mean. You never want to come in."

"I thought you didn't like Mommy."

"Sometimes I do. She knows what I mean. All you ever do when you come into my room is tell me to open a window and pick my clothes up off the floor."

"Somebody has to."

"Mommy does."

"But they're still always on the floor."

"Sooner or later they get picked up. Don't they? I don't think that's so important. I don't think that's the most important thing you have to talk to me about. Is it?"

"I'll try never to say that to you again. What is important?"

"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 the 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:

"Good girl, grandma!"

(Not long afterward, my mother could not drink from a glass unless someone held it to her lips.)

It was a small thing, an incident of tiny surprise, but it filled the room with rolling waves of tremendous pleasure and warmth. (All of us there were happier people then and closer to each other than we have ever been since.) All of us rejoiced and united in merry praise of my daughter and made the sunniest predictions, and my daughter was so exhilarated by the sheer volume and intensity of such good feeling and elation that she sang out "Good girl, grandma!" two or three more times (no longer spontaneously, but with discerning calculation) and bounced and rocked on her throne of a high chair, giggling her hearty laugh, luxuriating in her triumph and in the looks and words of adoration directed toward her. (She knew. I was proud of her then, I remember. So pleased with what she had said. So devoted and protective.) All of us marveled breathlessly at her cheerful wit and beauty (she was our miracle) and foresaw sparkling attainments. And even my mother, who tended to be cynical toward everything superstitious, was convinced, she declared, that my daughter had been born under an exceedingly lucky star and would enjoy a brilliant, happy, unblemished future. My daughter really was a darling child, and everybody loved her then, even me.

That was just about the last time I saw my daughter so happy. That was just about the last time I saw my mother happy. It was shortly afterward that I made my decision not to invite my mother to live with us, which meant she would have to live the rest of her life alone. Words were not necessary. The omission itself was an indelible statement. (She never asked, never made me say so. She made it easy for me. She was very kind to me about that.) Although I would have dinner with her every other week, at her apartment or ours, and on appropriate family holidays. (I would even drive her home. None of us wanted her, not my wife, not my daughter, not my sister, not me.) Not much after that, she suffered the first in a series of crippling brain spasms that robbed her at the outset of her ability to speak and at the end of her ability to think or remember. (As my mother faded away, speechless, in one direction, Derek emerged, speechless, from the other.) And there you have my tragic chronicle of the continuity of human experience, of this great chain of being, and the sad legacy of pain and repudiation that one generation of Slocums gets and gives to another, at least in my day. (I got little. I gave back less.) I have this unfading picture in my mind (this candid snapshot, ha, ha), and it can never be altered (as I have a similar distinct picture of my hand on Virginia's full, loosely bound breast for the first time or the amazingly silken feel of the tissuey things between her legs the first time she let me touch her there), of this festive, family birthday celebration in honor of my little girl at which my old mother and my infant daughter are joyful together for perhaps the very last time. And there I am between them, sturdy, youthful, prospering, virile (fossilized and immobilized between them as though between bookends, without knowing how I got there, without knowing how I will ever get out), saddled already with the grinding responsibility of making them, and others, happy, when it has been all I can do from my beginning to hold my own head up straight enough to look existence squarely in the eye without making guileful wisecracks about it or sobbing out loud for help. Who put me here? How will I ever get out? Will I ever be somebody lucky? What decided to sort me into precisely this slot? (What the fuck makes anyone think I am in control, that I can be any different from what I am? I can't even control my reveries. Virginia's tit is as meaningful to me now as my mother's whole life and death. Both of them are dead. The rest of us are on the way. I can almost hear my wife, or my second wife, if I ever have one, or somebody else, saying:

"Won't you wheel Mr. Slocum out of the shade into the sunlight now? I think he looks a little cold."

A vacuum cleaner that works well is more important to me than the atom bomb, and it makes not the slightest difference to anyone I know that the earth revolves around the sun instead of vice versa, or the moon around the earth, although the measured ebb and flow of the tides may be of some interest to mariners and clam diggers, but who cares about them? Green is more important to me than God. So, for that matter, is Kagle and the man who handles my dry cleaning, and a transistor radio that is playing too loud is a larger catastrophe to me than the next Mexican earthquake. «Someday» — it must have crossed my mother's mind at least once, after my denial and rejection of her, since she was only human — "this will happen to you." Although she was too generous to me ever to say so. But I know it must have crossed her mind.)

"When I was a baby," my daughter asks, "did you ever play with me?"

"Sure," I reply. "What do you think?" A warning shudder of some kind shoots through me at her question, turning my skin icy.

"Did you ever pick me up and toss me into the air," she inquires, "or give me piggyback rides, or tell me stories before I went to bed, or carry me around in your arms and talk baby talk to me and say very funny things?"

"All the time," I answer. "Of course, I did." Her look of doubt shocks me. "What kind of monster do you think I am?"

"You don't do anything like that now."

"You're a big girl now. I always yell out hello when I come home, don't I? You don't even answer."

"Did I have parties when I was little? Birthday parties?"

"You sure did. Very beautiful parties. Mommy went to a lot of trouble to make them very good ones."

"I don't remember them."

"Yes, you do. You mention them."

"I mean when I was very little. And all our relatives came and made a big fuss over me and gave me expensive presents?"

"Yes. I used to play with you a lot. I used to go right in to see you every day as soon as I came home from work. You were the first person I wanted to see. I always played with you."

"Mommy told me you did. But I didn't believe her."

"What kind of person do you think I am?"

"You're never the same. You always change. Sometimes you laugh at something I do. Sometimes you get angry and annoyed when I do exactly the same thing and want me to go away. I don't like it when you drink. I never know what to expect."

"You're like that too."

"You're a father."

"It isn't easy."

"You don't know how to be a father."

"I try to be. I always tried my best. I try now. I used to play with you every night as soon as I came home from work," I rush on earnestly, the words pouring from me in a torrent of virtuous reminiscence as I seize the chance to explain to her once and for all and exonerate myself forever from whatever blame and neglect she charges me with. "I even played baseball with you with a plastic bat and ball when you were a little girl and didn't know it was a boy's game, and taught you how to swim. I'm the one who taught you. I asked you to put your face down in the water and float and promised that nothing bad would happen to you if you trusted me and did. You believed me then and weren't afraid. And that's how I taught you. Every day as soon as I came home from work, you were just a little baby then and we lived in the city, I would take my hat off, I wore a hat then, one of those funny fedoras with brims that people still wear, and put my head down near you and let you grab my hair. You used to love to do that. Maybe because I had a lot more hair then, ha, ha. You were just a tiny little girl then and couldn't even stand or walk. I would kiss Mommy on the cheek when I walked in and go right in to see you every day as soon as I came home. I would bend my head down and you would grab my hair with both your little hands and pull, and you would laugh and bounce and scream and kick your legs with such wild excitement that we were always afraid you were going to bounce right off the bed or kick your way right out of the crib. Ha, ha. You would giggle like crazy. And Mommy would watch and laugh too. We used to do that every day as soon as I got home from work. And later when you were older," I go on rabidly in obsessive recollection, "after you had your tonsils out and came back from the hospital, I used to have to tell you a story every night before you went to sleep, or you wouldn't go to sleep. You insisted. It was your right, ha, ha, to have a story from me. Every night, and it usually had to be the same story. You didn't like new ones. First it was Cinderella and then it was Peter Pan too after you saw Peter Pan on television. I used to have to act Peter Pan out for you. You would make me. I bet I nearly broke my legs every night jumping from the couch to the floor when I pretended to fly for you. Ha, ha. Then there was Peter and the Wolf, and Siegfried — I once read you the whole story of Siegfried, and you were so soft-hearted then that you even began to cry in sympathy for that dumb blockhead Siegfried, so I never read it to you again — and that one about the rabbit and the tar baby, and for a while I tried telling you The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf, but you didn't like that one at all because the little boy got eaten up at the end, I think, so we went back to PeterPan and Cinderella. And in Cinderella, whenever I came to the part where the prince asks Cinderella to marry him, you would interrupt and answer: 'Sure, prince! Don't you remember? Mommy does. 'Sure, prince! you would cry, ha, ha, and we would both laugh. And Mommy would stand in the doorway and listen, and she would laugh too. When I was out of town, I would try to get to a telephone in the evening before you went to sleep and tell you the story long distance. And I had to tell you the stories in exactly the same way every time. You would make me, ha, ha. If I changed a line or ever tried to leave something out just to speed things up, you would correct me right away very severely and make me do it exactly the way you wanted me to. Oh, you were so strict and determined. Like a stern little princess. Ha, ha. You knew all the stories by heart, and you didn't want me to change a word. Every night. Ha, ha. Don't you remember?"

But she doesn't believe me.

And I don't care.