It was fascinating to watch their routine and the...
It was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they hadRemembering how when it was sunny they would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had become an animal
It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how he and Dawn could have been the source of it allHow could their innocent foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have been problems even without a war in VietnamShe might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could beBut she would have been at homeAt home you flip out a little and that's itYou do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated pleasure, you don't get to the point where you flip out a little so many times that finally you decide it's such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot? At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalorAt home you can't live where the disorder isAt home you can't live where nothing is reined inAt home there is that tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines the world to be and the way the world is for herWell, no longer is there that dissonance to disturb her equilibriumHere are her Rim-rockian fantasies, and the culmination is horrifying
Their disaster had been tragically shaped by time--they did not have enough time with herWhen she's your ward, when she's there, you can chanel handbag 2.55 do itIf you have contact with your child steadily over time, then the stuff that is off--the mistakes in judgment that are made on both sides--is somehow, through that steady, patient contact, made better and better, until at last, inch by inch, day by day and inch by inch, there is remediation, there are the ordinary satisfactions of parental patience rewarded, of things working outWhere was the remediation for this? Could he bring Dawn here to see her, Dawn in her bright, tight new face and Merry sitting cross-legged on the pallet in her tattered sweatshirt and ill-shapen trousers and black plastic shower clogs, meekly composed behind that nauseating veil? How broad her shoulder bones wereBut hanging off those bones there was nothingWhat he saw sitting before him was not a daughter, a woman, or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow's clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life, a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could have fooled only a birdHow could he bring Dawn here? Driving Dawn down McCarter Highway, turning off McCarter and into this street, the warehouses, the rubble, the garbage, the debrisDawn seeing this room, smelling this room, her hands touching the walls of this room, let alone the unwashed flesh, the brutally cropped, bedraggled hair
He kneeled down to read the index cards positioned just about where she once used to venerate, over her Old Rimrock bed, magazine photos of Audrey Hepburn
I renounce all killing movable or immovableof living beings, whether subtile or gross, whether I renounce all vices mirthof lying speech arising from anger, or greed, or fear, I renounce all replica fendi spy bag taking of anything not given, either in a village, or a town, or a wood, either of little or much, or small or great, or living or lifeless things
I renounce all sexual pleasures, either with gods, or men, or animals
I renounce all attachments, whether little or much, small or great, living or lifeless; neither shall I myself form such attachments, nor cause others to do so, nor consent to their doing so
As a businessman the Swede was astute, and if need be, beneath the genial surface of the man's man--capitalizing on the genial surface--he could be as artfully calculating as the deal requiredBut he could not see how even the coldest calculation could help him hereNeither could all the fathering talent in the world collected and gathered up and mobilized in one manHe read through her five vows again, considered them as seriously as he could, all the while bewildering himself with the thought, For purity--in the name of purity
Why? Because she'd killed someone, or whether she'd never killed a fly? Did because she would have needed purity it have to do with him? That foolish kiss?
That was ten years behind them, and besides, it had been nothing, had come to nothing, did not appear to have meant anything much to her even at the time
Could something as meaningless, as forgivable, as innocentas commonplace, as ephemeral, as understandable, No! How could he be asked again and again to take seriously things that were not serious? Yet that was the predicament that or Merry had forced on him all the way back when she was blasting away at the dinner table about the immorality of their bourgeois lifeHow could anybody take that childish ranting seriously? He had done tiffany jewelry wholesale as well as any parent could have--he had listened and listened when it was all he could do not to get up from dinner and walk away until she'd spewed herself out; he had nodded and agreed to as much as he could even marginally agree to, and when he opposed her--say, about the moral efficacy of the profit motive--always it was with restraint, with all the patient reasonableness he could musterAnd this was not easy for him, given that it was the profit motive to which a child requiring tens of thousands of dollars' worth of orthodontia, psychiatry, and speech therapy--not to mention ballet lessons and riding lessons and tennis lessons, all of which, growing up, she at one time or another was convinced she could not survive without--might be thought to owe if not a certain allegiance then at least a minuscule portion of gratitudePerhaps the mistake was to have tried so hard to take seriously what was in no way serious; perhaps what he should have done, instead of listening so intently, so respectfully, to her ignorant raving was to reach over the table and whack her across the mouth
But what would that have taught her about the profit motive-- what would it have taught her about him? Yet if he had, if, then the veiled mouth could be taken seriouslyHe could now berate himself, "Yes, I did it to her, I did it with my outbursts, my temper But it seemed as though he had done whatever had been done to her because he could not abide a temper, had not wanted one or dared to have oneHe had done it by kissing herBut that couldn't beNone of this could possibly beHere she is, imprisoned in this rat hole with these "vows
She was better off steeped in contemptIf he had to sacs hermes choose between angry, fat Merry stuttering with Communist outrage and this Merry, veiled, placid, dirty, infinitely compassionate, this raggedly attired scarecrow MerryBut why have to choose either? Why must she always be enslaving herself to the handiest empty-headed idea? From the moment she had become old enough to think for herself she had been tyrannized instead by the thinking of crackpotsWhat had he done to produce a daughter who, after excelling for years at school, refused to think for herself--a daughter who had to be either violently against everything in sight or pathetically for everything, right down to the microorganisms in the air we breathe? Why did a girl as smart as she was strive to let other people do her thinking for her? Why was it beyond her to strive--as he had every day of his life--to be all that one is, to be true to that? "But the one who doesn't think for himself is you!" she'd told him when he'd suggested that she might be parroting the cliches of others"You're the living example of the person who never thinks for himself!"
"Am I really?" he said, laughing"Yes! You're the most conformist man I ever met! All you do is what's expec-expec-expected of you!"
"That's terrible too?"
"It's not thinking, D-d-dad! It isn't! It's being a s-s-stupid aut-aut-aut-aut-aut-automaton! A r-r-r-r-robot!"
"Well," he replied, believing that it was all a phase, a bad-tempered phase she would outgrow, "I guess you're just stuck with a comformist father--better luck next time," and pretended that he had not been terrified by the sight of her distended, pulsating, frothing lips hammering "r-r-r-r-robot" into his face with the ferocity of a lunatic omega seamaster de ville rive