If not, if they really were as tough and egotistical and domineering and amoral as they wish to appear, I would find them obnoxious and insufferable, for I have seen my daughter with these boys in crowded cars, and I did not like what I saw, or imagined. (But what difference does that make?)
What difference does it make, really, what she is or isn't doing already with those boys I could so easily dislike, and even perhaps with girls (just about all of the young girls I do it with these days brag now about having done it, at least once, with other girls too), in those crowded cars she drives in to pizza joints with loud music (I don't really like most of their music, although I sometimes pretend to just to please my daughter) or to parties with the same loud music in other people's darkened houses — as long as they don't drive recklessly and get killed or maimed in an automobile accident?
(What difference does it make anymore who is screwing whom?) It is already too late for anything else. It is too late, I think, for me to stop her or change her, and I would not know anymore how to try. Something happened to both my children that I cannot explain and cannot undo. I can't be good to them, it seems, even when I want to.
"Listen," I say to both of them anxiously, practically pleading with them to allow me to help them. "What do you want to be when you grow up? Tell me. What do you want to do?"
"I don't ever want to get married," my daughter mumbles moodily, "or ever have children."
"Work in a filling station," my boy answers.
"Well, that's a bit better." I approve, nodding with a look of praise. Why not? Own his own business? It makes some sense. Profitable franchise: Exxon, Texaco, Sunoco, Shell, Gulf? Sure. It's something. A start. Okay. "Why?"
"I like the smell of gasoline."
Christ!
"Jack, you've got kids," I appeal to Green at the office, almost in desperation. "That are older than mine. You've got a boy in college, haven't you? What does he want to be when he gets out?"
"A suicide."
"I'm not joking."
"You think I am? I've got a daughter in college too. She has abortions. Between suicide attempts. She lays bums. They don't want to continue. There've been three attempts between them. That I know about. One by slashing, two by drugs. It sounds like Paul Revere, doesn't it? They're both on drugs. My new wife is crazy too. So is her mother. So is mine. It's not my business anymore."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"Go do some work. It's not your business either."
He has written his children off, filed them away, closed them out like dead records that are not his business anymore. But I still have my children, and I wish to engulf them in devotion and safeguard them against every slight. (I want them to believe I love them.)
"Listen," I exclaim to them frantically, "you don't have to do what everybody else does. You can be whatever you want to be. I'll help. You don't have to join the Cub Scouts or play baseball or go to Sunday school or even to college. What do you want to do?"
"Join the Cub Scouts and play baseball," says my boy.
"Go into my room and play my records now," says my daughter.
Good God — has it happened to them already? They don't care. Or they don't know. When did it happen? Where? Where was I when the decisions were made that determined he would want to join the Cub Scouts and play baseball now, and all she would want to do is go into her room to talk on the telephone and play her phonograph records? Is it really too late?
It is too late, I feel, for me to save her, or even to help her, and I really don't think I would know what to do anymore to try (except to sit apathetically and watch her go her unhappy way). It would do no more good for me to try to change her now than it has done in the past, when she was more credulous and suggestible and more eager to please. I have tried; I have taunted, reasoned, thundered, whined, disciplined, flattered, and cajoled, to no avail and perhaps much harm, until I confessed to myself one day that it was not merely hypocritical of me, but futile, and therefore foolish. Then I stopped. (Now I go through perfunctory routines. I acknowledged to myself also that I was not really as exercised as I maintained by her shortcomings and mistakes and by the frameworks for future disasters that I watched her constructing. All that seemed calamitous to me was her disobedience, and her unwillingness to believe me. All that endangers me now is her resistance and disrespect.) What was the purpose in continuing to try to influence her (other than to be able to say someday — now — that I tried)? I know I have no power over her now. (If I knew she were about to become a heroin addict and then a common prostitute, I wouldn't know what to do to avert it. I would rail and cursemyfate; but none of that would help. So I wouldn't try at all.) She doesn't know yet that I have no power over her; so I bluff, and for the time being (redundancy coming) we have amodus vivendi.(All I have left is the power to cripple her.) Where was the morality, duty, and good sense in trying to turn her into a kind of person I do not like and one that she was probably never able to become anyway? I know where it will end (and I do not like it. I do not like knowing it. But what can I do? Nothing. I know that much too). She is already what she is, already well on her way to being what she is destined to become, good and/or bad, and I don't think there is any longer a single thing I or anyone else can do at present to help her or change her. She is going to become a lonely, nervous, contemporary, female human being. (She is too smart to be dumb.) She is much smarter than my wife, which means for one thing (unlike my wife, so far) that she will sleep with other women's husbands (and that she will not be overly impressed, for long, with her own). I can't stop that. I cannot fight and nullify a whole culture, an environment, an epoch, a past (especially when it's my own past and environment as well as hers, and I myself am such a large part of hers), and I have made my own adjustment to them all so contemptibly. Why should I expect her (or even want her) to be different from other girls and women I know and like? (Except that they are not happy.) (But who is?) If she isn't really smoking a pack of cigarettes a day outside the house this year, she will smoke a pack of cigarettes a day outside the house next year. And if she isn't screwing for one or more of the boys she knows now, she'll be screwing for them later, and doing other commonplace sex stunts with them as well.
"That's some thing to say about your own daughter," my wife remarks, with a grimace of revulsion.
"Even if it's true?"
"Yes.
"
(And yet that is precisely the thing webothwould say about her if she were not our own daughter, for my wife and I have engaged in this same derogatory speculation about most of my daughter's friends and about other people's daughters her own age and younger.)
It is not a matter of morals anymore, or even of decision; it is only a matter of time. (And my wife, who has a romantic loyalty to the way thingsoughtto be, ignores her own past. She prefers to forget that evenwewere doing it all to each other before we were married.)
And what's the use of making believe it isn't? I know where my daughter is heading from the girls I know who have already been there. She will not go to church like my wife. (She goes now every third or fourth Sunday only to placate my wife and place her under an emotional debt for which she will later obtain exorbitant payment. She makes fun of the service while she is there and trades laughing, sidelong glances with my boy, who already finds the whole extraordinary ritual somewhat silly.) She will drink whiskey for a while instead; then stop; then start in again after she's been married several years and drink whiskey regularly from then on, like my wife. She will have two children or three and be divorced (unlike my wife), and she will marry a second time if she and the children are still young when the first marriage breaks up. She will smoke marijuana (who doesn't? Even Ivy League fraternity boys on the executive level at the company smoke it now, and so do I when it's proffered at any of the parties I attend in town without my wife), if she isn't doing so already; if she doesn't smoke pot and hash at least once in high school, she will smoke it when I send her away to college and everyone interesting she meets there is already smoking it. She will get laid. (There is just no other way to deal with that fact; and the best one can wish for her in this area is that she enjoy it wholesomely from the start. Although I find it hard to wish it. And I hope she never decides to confide in me aboutthat.)She will go wild for a while (and think she is free), have all-night revels and bull sessions, complain about her teachers and curriculum requirements, have no interest in any of her academic subjects but get passing grades in all with very little work, if she doesn't drop out altogether because of sheer dejection and torpor (which she will eulogize into something mystic and exalted, like superior intelligence). She will experiment with pep pills (ups), barbiturates (downs), mescaline, and LSD, if LSD remains in vogue; she will have group sex (at least once), homosexual sex (at least once, and at least once more with a male present as a spectator and participant), be friendly with fags, poets, snobs, nihilists, and megalomaniacs, dress like other girls, have abortions (at least one, or lie and say she did. Just about every young girl I meet these days has had at least one abortion, or claims she did, and feels compelled to boast about it to me), and sleep, for a while, with Negroes, even though she will probably enjoy none of it, and might really not want to doanyof it. (She is a strong-minded girl who is far too weak to withstand a popular trend.) If it isn't one type of self-destruction and self-degradation she cultivates for a while, it is certain to be another; and she will emerge, if she is lucky, from this period of wanton profligacy and determined self-expression after two-and-one-half to four-and-two-thirds years feeling tense, worthless, spent, and remorseful, having searched everywhere and found nothing, with no ego at all, and pine for just one good, stable, interesting man to marry (like myself) and live happily ever after with. She will wish she had children. (She won't find that one man she wants, of course, because we're not that good.) I hope she stays away from addictive drugs so that she will be able to come out of it when she decides she wants to. I hope she doesn't get pregnant and have to have that abortion. I hope she doesn't insist on telling me about any of it. (I hope she never falls so deeply into some kind of trouble that I have to find out. I hope she doesn't get killed in a car crash.)
I know this bumpy terrain too well, and I know she is already bouncing and tumbling through it downhill, with a will and momentum that cannot be stayed and which is not really entirely of her own choosing (no matter what she elects to believe). The die is cast(iacta alea est),although I don't know when her dice were rolled or who did the throwing. (I know I didn't.) I know I must have done some horribly damaging things to her when she was little, but I can't remember what those things were or when I did them. (I swear I did not want to. There have been times I wanted to hurt, I'll admit, but never seriously, I swear, and not permanently.) My daughter is already plunging downhill into her own tangled future, careening bruisingly from one obstruction right into another, and I can no more halt her descent than I could catch a boulder in an avalanche. ( Iwould be destroyed also if I tried. She is on her way, she is no longer mine.) She is skidding and falling ahead resolutely out of control, into times of arid, incomprehensible turmoil that contain no enticement and offer nothing alluring, except having something else to do and getting free of us. ("Think positive, please," I have urged her tartly. "What do you want to be? What do you want to do?" If I were presented with those same questions, I would not have a good answer anymore either. A suicide? Why not? What's better? A filling station? No. But, what's the hurry? If I did not have girls to play around with and such serious problems at home to contend with, I think, sweet, bleeding Jesus, I would go out of my mind from this fucking job of mine.)
And I tend to feel that she and I have come by now to a point of tacit agreement, ourmodus vivendi,to the mutual understanding that each of us has already written the other off, that neither of us really belongs to the other any longer, and that we are both merely keeping up appearances, going through perfunctory routines (as I wrote my mother off a long time before I buried her, and, as I now believe, she did the same with me. She saw through me, I think, dim and old and speechless as she was, and indulged and babied me correctly by letting me indulge and baby her as she wasted away in that nursing home during those final months of awkward visits in which I did nothing more useful than bring her highly seasoned things to eat and sit by her bedside for almost an hour gazing stealthily at my watch and babbling blithe, patent nonsense in which she showed little interest.