"Then why did you say it?" my daughter wants to know.
"To tantalize you," I kid.
"What in hell does that mean?" my boy asks.
"Do you have something?" my wife asks.
"Oh, maybe yes," I tease her jovially, "and maybe no."
"To tease us," my daughter exclaims to my boy with mockery and distaste.
(My daughter makes me feel foolish again. And again I have that powerful, momentary, spiteful impulse to injure her, to wound her deeply with a cutting retort, to reach out over the dining room table and smack her hard on the side of the face or neck, to kick her viciously under the table in her ankle or shin. I can do nothing, though, but ignore her and try to maintain my faзade of paternal good humor.)
"Then why don't you tell us?" my wife inquires. "Especially if it's good."
"I will," I say. "All I wanted to say," I announce, and my spirit turns manifestly arch and tantalizing again as I pause to butter a piece of bread and take a bite, "is that I think I may have to start playing golf again."
There is a thoughtful, puzzled, almost rebellious silence now as each of them tries to figure out before the others what it is I am waggishly withholding from them and presently intend to disclose.
"Golf?" asks my nine-year-old boy, who is still not certain what kind of game golf is, whether it is a good game or a bad one.
"Yes."
"Why golf?" asks my wife with surprise. (She knows I hate the game.)
"Golf," I repeat.
"You don't even like golf."
"I hate golf. But it may have to be golf."
"Why?"
"I bet he's getting a better job!" my daughter guesses. (In many ways, she is the smartest and most devious of all of us.)
"Are you?" asks my wife.
"Maybe."
"What kind of job?" My wife's reaction is suspicious, almost morose. I know she has assumed secretly for several years that I have been longing for a different job that would take me away from home more often.
"Selling."
"Selling what?" asks my boy.
"Selling selling."
For an instant, my boy is confused, almost stunned by the riddle of my reply. Then he understands it was meant as a joke, and he bursts into laughter. His eyes sparkle, and his face lights up joyously. (Everybody likes my boy.)
"Do you mean it?" probes my wife, studying me. She is still unsure whether to be pleased or not.
"I think so."
"Will you have to travel more than you have to travel now?"
"No. Probably less."
"Will you make more money?" my daughter asks.
"Yes. Maybe a lot more."
"Will we be rich?"
"No."
"Will we ever be rich?"
"No."
"I don't want you to travel more," my boy complains.
"I'm not going to travel more," I repeat for him, with a trace of annoyance. "I'm going to travel less." (I begin to regret that I brought it up at all. The questions are coming too swiftly; I can feel my self-satisfaction ebbing away, and an army of irritations mobilizing too rapidly for me to keep track of and control. I am already replying to them with my slight stammer.)
"Are you going to start talking to yourself again?" my boy cannot resist baiting me mischievously.
"I wasn't talking to myself," I declare firmly.
"Yes, you were," my daughter murmurs.
"Like last year?" my boy persists.
"I was not talking to myself," I repeat loudly. "I was practicing a speech."
"You were practicing it to yourself," my boy points out.
"Will they let you make a speech this year?" my daughter asks. "At the company convention?"
"Oh, yes," I respond with a smile.
"A long speech?"
"Oh, yes, indeed. I imagine they might let me make a speech as long as I want to at the company convention this year."
"Will you be working for Andy Kagle?" my wife asks.
The question brings me to a halt.
"A little something like that," I stammer evasively.
(The fun goes out of my family guessing game, and now I am sorry that I started it.) I laugh nervously. "It isn't definite yet. And it's all a pretty long way off. Maybe I shouldn't even have mentioned it."
"I'm glad you'll be working for Andy Kagle," my wife asserts. "I don't like Green."
"I didn't say I'd be working for Kagle."
"I don't trust Green."
"Don't you listen?"
"Why are you snapping at me?"
"I don't want you to be a salesman," my daughter exclaims with unexpected emotion, almost in tears. "I don't want you to have to go around to other people's fathers and beg them to buy things from you."
"I'm not going to be a salesman," I protest impatiently. "Look, what's everybody talking about it so much for? I haven't got it yet. And I'm not even sure I'm going to take it."
"You don't have to shout at her," my wife says.
"I'm not shouting."
"Yes, you are," she says. "Don't you hear yourself?"
"I'm sorry I shouted."
"You don't have to snap at everybody, either."
"And I'm sorry I snapped."
My wife is right, this time. Without my realizing it, I have moved from optimistic conceit into a bad temper; and without my being conscious of it, my voice has risen with anger, and I have been shouting at them again. We are all silent at the table now. The children sit with their eyes lowered. They seem too fearful even to fidget. I am guilty. My forehead hurts me (with tension. Another headache is threatening). I am numb with shame. I feel so helpless and uncertain. I wish one of them would say something that would give me a clue, that would point the way I must follow toward an easy apology. (I feel lost.) But no one will speak.
I pounce upon an energetic idea. I whirl upon my son without warning, shoot my index finger out at him, and demand:
"Are you mad or glad?"
"Glad," he cries with laughter and delight, when he recognizes I am joking again and no longer irate.
I spin around toward my daughter and shoot my index ringer out at her.
"Are you mad or glad?" I demand with a grin.
"Oh, Daddy," she answers. "Whenever you make one of us unhappy, you always try to get out of it by behaving like a child."
"Oh, shit," I say quietly, stung by her rebuff.
"Must you say that in front of the children?" my wife asks.
"They say it in front of us," I retort. I turn to my daughter. "Say shit."
"Shit," she says.
"Say shit," I say to my son.
He is ready to start crying.
(I want to reach out instinctively to console and reassure him and rumple his soft, sandy hair. I am deeply fond of my boy, although I am not sure anymore how I feel about my daughter.)
"I'm sorry," I tell him quickly. (I have the shameful, shocking apprehension that if I did put my hand out to comfort him, he would cringe reflexively, as though afraid I were going to strike him. I recoil from that thought in pain.) I turn to my daughter. "I'm sorry," I say to her too, earnestly. "You're right, and I'm sorry. I do act like a child." Now it is my eyes that are down. "I think I want another drink," I explain apologetically, as I stand up. "I'm not going to eat anymore. You go on, though. I'll wait in the living room. I'm sorry."
They continue eating after I leave, their voices subdued.
I do such things to them, I know, even when I don't intend to. But I cannot admit this to my wife or children. My wife would not understand. I cannot really say to my wife: "I'm sorry." She would think I was apologizing. My wife and I cannot really talk to each other about the same things anymore; but I sometimes forget this and try. We are no longer close enough for honest conversation (although we are close enough for frequent sexual intercourse). She would respond with something as vacuous and frustrating and galling as "You should be," or "You didn't have to snap at everybody," or "You don't have to shout at me that way." As though my snapping or her snapping at me (she can snap too), were any part of the problem. She would say something exactly like that; and I would be brought to a stop again, as though slapped sharply; I would be stunned; I would feel abandoned and isolated again, and I would sink back for safety again inside my dense, dark wave of opaque melancholy; I would feel lonely and I would be brought face to face again with the fact that I have nobody in this world to confide in or reach toward for help; I would miss my mother (and my father?) and my dead big brother, and I would begin daydreaming once again about some new job with a different company that would take me far away from home more often. Someday soon someone may be dropping bombs on us. I will scream: