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 alclass="underline" 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?