But it turned out it wasn’t about my cat, it was about my dad. The reason my dad kept on calling was because he wanted to tell us that he just found out, because of his cancer, that he can’t have any more kids.
Cancer is a scary thing. Fortunately, the kind of cancer my dad had was pretty curable. They just had to cut off the cancerous part, and then he had to have chemo, and after a year, so far, the cancer hasn’t come back.
Unfortunately, the part they had to cut off was . . .
Ew, I don’t even like writing it.
Histesticle.
GROSS!
It turns out that when they cut off one of your testicles, and then give you chemo, you have like a really strong chance of becoming sterile. Which is what my dad just found out he is.
Mom says he’s really bummed out. She says we have to be very understanding of him right now, because men have needs, and one of them is the need to feel progenitively omnipotent.
What I don’t get is, what’s the big deal? What does he need more kids for? He already has me! Sure, I only see him summers and at Christmastime, but that’s enough, right? I mean, he’s pretty busy running Genovia. It’s no joke trying to make a whole country, even one that’s only a mile long, run smoothly. The only other things he has time for besides me are his girlfriends. He’s always got some new girlfriend slinking around. He brings them with him when we go to Grandmère’s place in France in the summer. They always drool all over the pools and the stables and the waterfall and the twenty-seven bedrooms and the ballroom and the vineyard and the farm and the airstrip.
And then he dumps them a week later.
I didn’t know he wanted tomarry one of them and have kids.
I mean, he never married my mom. My mom says that’s because at the time she rejected the bourgeois mores of a society that didn’t even accept women as equals to men and refused to recognize her rights as an individual.
I kind of always thought that maybe my dad just never asked her.
Anyway, my mom says Dad is flying here to New York tomorrow to talk to me about this. I don’t knowwhy. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do withme. But when I said to my mom, "Why does Dad have to fly all the way over here to talk to me about how he can’t have kids?" she got this funny look on her face and started to say something, and then she stopped.
Then she just said, "You’ll have to ask your father."
This is bad. My mom only says "Ask your father" when I want to know something she doesn’t feel like telling me, like why people sometimes kill their own babies and how come Americans eat so much red meat and read so much less than the people of Iceland.
Note to self: Look up the wordsprogenitive, omnipotent, andmores
distributive law
5x+ 5y- 5
5(x+y - 1)
Distribute WHAT??? FIND OUT BEFORE QUIZ!!!
Wednesday, October 1
My dad’s here. Well, not here in the loft. He’s staying at the Plaza, as usual. I’m supposed to go see him tomorrow, after he’s "rested." My dad rests a lot, now that he’s had cancer. He stopped playing polo, too. But I think that’s because one time a horse stepped on him.
Anyway, I hate the Plaza. Last time my dad stayed there, they wouldn’t let me in to see him because I was wearing shorts. The lady who owns the place was there, they said, and she doesn’t like to see people in cutoffs in the lobby of her fancy hotel. I had to call my dad from a house phone and ask him to bring down a pair of pants. He just told me to put the concierge on the phone, and the next thing you know, everybody was apologizing to me like crazy. They gave me this big basket filled with fruit and chocolate. It was cool. I didn’t want the fruit, though, so I gave it to a homeless man I saw on the subway on my way back down to the Village. I don’t think the homeless man wanted the fruit either, since he threw it all in the gutter and just kept the basket to use as a hat.
I told Lilly about what my dad said, about not being able to have kids, and she said that was very telling. She said it revealed that my dad still has unresolved issues with his parents, and I said, "Well, duh. Grandmère is ahuge pain in the ass."
Lilly said she couldn’t comment on the veracity of that statement since she’d never met my grandmother. I’ve been asking if I could invite Lilly to Miragnac for like years, but Grandmère always says no. She says young people give her migraines.
Lilly says maybe my dad is afraid of losing his youth, which many men equate with losing their virility. I really think they should move Lilly up a grade, but she says she likes being a freshman. She says this way she has four whole years to make observations on the adolescent condition in post–Cold War America.
STARTING TODAY I WILL
1. Be nice to everyone, whether I like him/her or not 2. Stop lying all the time about my feelings 3. Stop forgetting my Algebra notebook 4. Keep my comments to myself 5. Stop writing my Algebra notes in my journal
The 3rd power ofx is called cube ofx —negative numbers have no sq root
Notes from G & T