Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

RASMUSSEN: Oh, not that again.

HEGLER: Yes, precisely that again, and in the case at hand, the subject suffered from the absence of a strong and permanently established father figure toward whom rebellion could be focused. His mother, from what we know of her, had a succession of casual partners. No doubt the boy’s attitude toward his mother, as well as toward these temporary father figures, was ambivalent. Ultimately he would select a female partner who could function symbolically as a mother while masking this capacity by inexperience and permissiveness. His hostility toward the family unit as an entity, which found such vivid expression, can be perceived as hostility toward his own family background, a background he always sought to escape but could never entirely outrun.

RASMUSSEN: If I may?

MODERATOR: Dr. Rasmussen.

RASMUSSEN: I wonder if Dr. Hegler and I are not saying much the same thing. The simultaneous desires to return to one’s roots and to wholly uproot them engender a conflict which can be resolved only by—

When she came downstairs her parents had already finished breakfast and her grandmother was still asleep. It seemed to Betty that the family always ate in shifts. All four of them were rarely at the same table at the same time.

There was half a glass of orange juice left in the carton. She poured it, drank it standing at the refrigerator, rinsed out the glass and set it in the sink. She scrambled an egg, toasted a slice of bread. There was no milk, but then she didn’t much care for milk first thing in the morning, and her father wouldn’t let her drink coffee. He had never explained his opposition, and the one time she asked him about it he wound up launching into a tirade against her sister Judy. “She was a one for drinking coffee,” he had said, “and smoking cigarettes, and running with the boys. The Whore of Babylon gone to hell in her short skirts. And look at her now. Just you look at her now.”

She ate her eggs and toast and drank a glass of water. Her parents drank coffee and fought. As usual, it was hard to tell what the fight was about. There didn’t seem to be any particular point in contention. The two of them took turns reciting familiar lists of the other’s failings.

“House needs painting and the porch won’t never be fixed and the yard’s all mud...”

“Married you and never knowing I was getting your mother in the bargain. Old woman with her teeth in a jar and her mind out in a wheatfield somewhere...”

“Jobs you had and can’t keep a one of them. I swear I should have married Eric Josenhans. Twenty years now with the same company and Susan drives around now in a brand-new Camaro and I can’t begin to tell you how much that boy thought of me. He worshiped me, he never would of took up with Susan Harb but for me not seeing him for dust, blind as I was at the time...”

“Way you take care of this house. Buy you a dishwasher and you’ll stack the dirty dishes in it and not have the sense to turn it on. Just let ‘em sit there so’s you’ve got another storage place for dirty dishes...”

“Mother always thought the world of Eric. And he was polite to her...”

“Not much point keeping the house clean with the old bitch stinking it up like she does. She could die tomorrow and this house would stink of her for the next ten years. Not a chair I can sit in without that smell coming up at me like poison gas. I tell you and tell you, let her sit in her chair and nobody else’s, but for all the good it does to tell you a solitary damn thing...”

It was all the same as always, and she sat there and listened to them, wondering if they ever took the trouble to listen to each other. It was hard to believe that they did. Nothing either of them said ever got a noticeable reaction from the other. They just went right on delivering their lines. The tones of their voices never varied. They spoke with very little expression, and yet their conversation must have had more meaning to them than you would guess from the monotones in which they conducted it.

Because it was not entirely directionless. Sooner or later one of them would mention her sister Judy, and though everything beforehand might have been ignored, Judy’s name was instantly recognized as a signal for the second round of the fight.

And in this round they were always more or less on the same side, the two of them united against the absent Judy. There might still be a certain amount of infighting — “You were always too strict with her.” “You let her have her own way too much, spared the rod and spoiled the child.” But these were asides, never permitted by either party to derail the conversation from its ultimate objective, the utter condemnation of Judy as the spawn of the devil, and a gathering of forces for the third and final round, which consisted of a discussion of Betty’s recent behavior and an analysis of what she must and must not do to avoid following in Judy’s wayward footsteps.

“And this one, Frank.”

“Oh? What about her? Not that I expect it’s something that will bring me joy.”

A long sigh from her mother. “I just don’t know about her. I tell her and tell her to come right home after school—”

“Where were you yesterday, Betty Marie?”

She explained again how she had been studying with Carolyn.

“Studying?”

“There’s a Spanish test this morning.”

“And what’s the matter with studying by yourself in your own room?”

“It’s better if you study with another person. You take turns, you know, one of you asking the words in English and the other answering them in Spanish, and that way it stays in your mind better. The teacher said—”

“Teacher say it always had to be the other girl’s house you study at?” He squinted at her, his eyes small and mean. He was a high school athlete gone soft, big in the belly, flabby in the upper arms. He was still strong, though. Once he and a friend had been working on a Volkswagen and didn’t have a bumper jack that was suited to the little car, and Frank Deinhardt had lifted the back end of it and held it while his friend got one tire off and the other one on. Then he’d been two hours getting his breath back completely, but that didn’t take away from the fact that he’d picked up one end of a car all by himself.

He went at her some more. “One thing,” he said. “You could be helping more around the house. And you could do your own studying and let this Carolyn Fischer do hers. Or do the two of you do a little more than studying?”

“What do you mean?”

“All innocence, aren’t you. Never you mind what I mean. School’s out at three o’clock, today you be home by twenty minutes past.”

“I can’t.”

“Then three thirty, but—”

The movie, Robert Redford and Cybill Shepherd. “I can’t,” she said again. “I have to stay after school.”

“What-all for?”

“Mr. McCulloch said I had to. I’ve been having trouble with algebra and I might fail it—”

“With all the studying you and Carolyn Fischer do?”

“—and he wanted me to stay in yesterday for special help, but I told him how we had to study for the Spanish test, so he said it could wait a day if I would promise to come in today, so I said I would, and I can’t put it off another day because—”

“Who’s this teacher again?”

“Mr. McCulloch,” she said.

“Algebra.”

“That’s right.”

“You were always good at arithmetic.”

“Algebra’s different. And this is intermediate algebra, logarithms and everything, and it’s harder. More complicated.”

“Mr. McCulloch.”