"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.