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.