"I'll say."
"You like to force people into a corner. I'm the same way."
"I think I try to be like you."
"I was happier."
"Was your family disappointed in you?"
"I can't remember. Is yours?"
"I don't know."
"I think my mother was. But later on, not when I was a child. When I was older and moved away."
"You never kiss me," my daughter says. "Or hug me. Or kid with me. Like other fathers."
She has black, large shadows under her eyes, which are swollen, gummy, and red suddenly, and she looks more wretched than any other human being I have ever stared at before. (I want to wrench my gaze away.)
"You stopped wanting me to kiss you," I explained softly with tenderness, feeling enormous pity for her (and for myself. Whenever I feel sorry for someone, I find that I also feel sorry for myself). "I used to. I used to want to hug you and kiss you. Then you began to pull away from me or draw your face back with a funny expression and make a disgusted sound. And laugh. As a joke at first, I thought. But then it became a habit, and you pulled away from me every time and made that same face and disgusted sound every time I tried to kiss you."
"So now you've stopped trying."
"It wasn't pleasant for me to be insulted that way."
"Were you hurt?" There is that glitter of too much eagerness in her expression. "Did it make you unhappy?"
"Yes." We are talking in monotones. (I don't remember when it really did begin to hurt me deeply each time she pulled away from my demonstrations of affection with signs of mock revulsion; and I also don't remember when it stopped bothering me at all.) "I was very unhappy. My feelings were hurt"
"You never said so."
"I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."
"I was little then."
"It was still very painful."
"I was just a little girl then. Wouldn't you give up just a little bit of your pride to satisfy me, if that's what I wanted?"
"No. I didn't."
"Would you do it now?"
"I'm not."
"You won't?"
"No. I don't think so. I don't think I'll ever let you get any satisfaction out of me that way.»
"You must be very disappointed in me?"
"Why?"
"I'll bet you are. You and Mommy both."
"Why should we be?"
"I know she is. I'm not good at anything."
"Like what? Neither am I."
"I've got a greasy scalp and skin. And pimples. I'm not pretty."
"Yes, you are."
"I'm too tall and fat."
"For what?"
"I'm not even sure I want to be. I don't know what I'd do even if I was good at anything."
"Like what?"
"Like art. I can't paint or sculpt. I'm not very smart. I'm not good at music. I don't study ballet."
"I don't study ballet either."
"It's not funny!"
"I'm not trying to be." (I was trying to be.) "We're not good at those things either."
"I'm not even rich."
"That's my fault, not yours."
"At least that would be something. I could be proud of that. Are we ever going to be? I mean really rich, like Jean's father, or Grace."
"No. Unless you do it."
"I can't do anything. Should I be ashamed?"
"Of what?"
"Because we're poor."
"We aren't poor."
"Of you."
"At least you're frank."
"Should I be?"
"What would you expect me to say?"
"The truth."
"Of me? I hope not. Being ashamed is something you either are or aren't, not something you do because you should or shouldn't. I do well enough. Jean is ashamed of her father because he's mean and stupid, and thinks I'm better. Isn't she? So is Grace. I think Grace likes me a lot more than she does her father."
"I'm never going to be anything."
"Everybody is something."
"You know what I mean."
"Like what?"
"Famous."
"Few of us are."
"I don't blame you. I don't blame you for being disappointed in me."
"We're not. Do you think we'd be disappointed in you just because you aren't good at anything?"
"Then you never even expected anything of me, did you?" she accuses, with a sudden surge of emotion that catches me by surprise.
"Now you're not being fair!" I insist.
"It's not funny."
"Honey, I —»
But she is gone, disappearing intransigently with a look of mournful loathing as I put my arms out to comfort her (and I am left again by myself in my study with my empty hands outstretched in the air, reaching out toward nothing that is there).
There is something I have done to her (or am doing to her now) for which she refuses to forgive me, and I don't know what that something is (or even if it is to her I am doing it. I know she acts angry and hurt when I am drunk or even a little high. She does not like it either when I flirt with her friends). I try to remember when it began, this mordant, stultifying sorrow into which she sneaks away to bury herself so often. I know it was nothing that happened this year, for she was not much different last year, and it was nothing that happened last year for she was not much different then than the year before. (She is not much different at fifteen from what she was at twelve and not much different at twelve from what she was at nine.) Almost as far back as I can recall, in fact, she has always been pretty much the same person she is now, only smaller. And yet, there must have been a break somewhere, an end and a starting point, a critical interval in her development of some breadth and duration that I cannot remember or did not notice (just as there must certainly have been a similar start of metamorphosis somewhere back in my own past that I took no notice of then and cannot remember now), for she was an infant once (indeed she was, I do remember that), a playful, chubby, gleeful, curious, active, giggling, responsive baby, easily pleased, quickly interested, and happily diverted. (Whatever happened to it, that baby she was? Where did it go? Where is it now? And how did it get there? Such beings, such things, just don't happen one day and stop happening the next. Do they? What happened to the lovely little me that once was? I remember certain things about him well and know he used to be.) What happened to her early childhood, that unmarked waste between the infant we had then and the daughter we have now and have kept reasonably good track of? (Where is it? Where was it? When — I can remember intact everything in her history, and I don't know — did it take place? I know this much: there was a cheerful baby girl in a high chair in my house once who ate and drank with a hearty appetite and laughed a lot with spontaneous zest; she isn't here now; and there is no trace of her anywhere. And I am sure of this much: there was a little boy who surprised his big brother with a girl in a coal shed once and had a lump of coal thrown at him, and opened a door once on his father and mother embracing in bed, or thinks he did; the mother and father are dead, and the little boy is missing; I don't know where he came from; I don't know where I went; I don't know all that's happened to me since. I miss him. I'd love to know where he's been.) Where in her lifetime (and in mine too, of course) was that legendary happy childhood I used to hear so much about (those carefree days of joy and sunshine, ha, ha, that birthright) that she is entitled as a human being to be enjoying even right now (along with all those other moldering, moody, incapacitated kids her own age who are her friends) and should be at liberty to look back upon fearlessly later with intense and enriching gratification (like my wife, whose childhood was really like some kind of suffocating ashland until I swept into the picture and carried her away from unhappiness into her present life of uninterruptable bliss. Ha, ha) when life turns old, threadbare (teeth come out, toes abrade, arches begin to ache and spinal columns too, and shoes no longer fit), dry, and sour? Where is that pleasurable childhood everybody keeps thinking everybody else has? I know I didn't have one (although I might have thought I did and could have thought I knew why I didn't in case I thought I didn't). If I was unhappy, I could always tell myself it was because my father was dead. If my daughter is unhappy, she might feel it's because her father is alive!