Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

After breakfast, we deposited Goldie at Davis’s house and went driving on arterials in the baking August heat. I guessed that our destination was the Arch, on the riverfront, and it was. I gamely went tap-tapping through the Arch’s underground lobby, my sense of hearing growing sharper by the minute. Davis bought tickets to the top of the Arch while Manley incited me to touch a Remington bronze, a rearing horse. Behind us a man spoke sharply: “Please don’t touch the — Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”

I took my hands away.

“No, no, please, go ahead. It’s an original Remington, but please touch it.”

I put my hands back on the bronze. Manley, the little jerk, went off to giggle someplace with Davis. The park ranger’s hands led mine. “Feel the muscles in the horse’s chest,” he urged.

I was wearing mutilated swimming goggles. My cane was a quarter-inch dowel rod with one coat of white paint. I turned to leave.

“Wait,” the ranger said. “There are some really neat things I want to show you.”

“Um.”

He took my arm and led me deeper into the Museum of Westward Expansion. His voice grew even gentler. “How long have you been — without your sight?”

“Not long,” I said.

“Feel this tepee.” He directed my hand. “These are buffalo skins with the hair scraped off. Here, I’ll take your cane.”

We went inside the tepee, and for a daylong five minutes I dutifully stroked furs, fingered utensils, smelled woven baskets. The crime of deceiving the ranger felt more grievous with each passing minute. When I escaped from the tepee and thanked him, I was covered with sweat.

At the top of the Arch, I was finally unblinded and saw: haze, glare, coal barges, Busch Stadium, a diarrhetic river. Manley shrugged and looked at the metal floor. “We were hoping you’d be able to see more up here,” he said.

It often happened on my birthday that the first fall cold front of summer came blowing through. The next afternoon, when my parents and I drove east to a wedding in Fort Wayne, the sky was scrubbed clean. Giant Illinois cornfields, nearly ripe, rippled in the golden light from behind us. You could taste, in air fresh from crossing Canada, almost everything there was to know about life around here. And how devoid of interiors the farmhouses looked in light so perfect! How impatient to be harvested the cornfields seemed in their wind-driven tossing! And how platonically green the official signs for Effingham! (Its unofficial name, I surmised, was Fuckingham.) The season had changed overnight, and I was reading better books and trying to write every day, starting over from scratch now, by myself.

My father was exceeding the speed limit by an unvarying four miles per hour. My mother spoke from the back seat. “What did you and Chris and Ben do yesterday?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We had breakfast.”

I WAS INTRODUCEDto the German language by a young blond woman, Elisabeth, whom no word smaller than “voluptuous” suffices to describe. It was the summer I turned ten, and I was supposed to sit beside her on the love seat on my parents’ screen porch and read aloud from an elementary German text — an unappetizing book about Germanic home life, with old-fashioned Fraktur type and frightening woodcuts, borrowed from our local library — while she leaned into me, holding the book open on my lap, and pointed to words I’d mispronounced. She was nineteen, and her skirts were sensationally short and her little tops sensationally tight, and the world-eclipsing proximity of her breasts and the great southerly extent of her bare legs were intolerable to me. Sitting next to her, I felt like a claustrophobe in a crowded elevator, a person with severe restless-leg syndrome, a dental patient undergoing extended drilling. Her words, being products of her lips and tongue, carried an unwelcome intimacy, and the German language itself sounded deep-throated and wet compared to English. (How prim our “bad,” how carnal their “schlecht.”) I leaned away from her, but she leaned over farther, and I inched down the love seat, but she inched along after me. My discomfort was so radical that I couldn’t concentrate for even one minute, and this was my only relief: most afternoons, she lost patience with me quickly.

Elisabeth was the little sister of the wife of the Austrian rail-equipment manufacturer whom my father had helped introduce to the American market. She’d come over from Vienna, at my parents’ invitation, to practice her English and to experience life with an American family; she was also privately hoping to explore the new freedoms that Europeans had heard were sweeping our country. Unfortunately, these new freedoms weren’t available in our particular house. Elisabeth was given my brother Bob’s vacated bedroom, which looked out onto a soiled, fenced square of concrete where our neighbors’ piebald hunting dog, Speckles, barked all afternoon. My mother was constantly at Elisabeth’s side, taking her to lunch with her friends, to the Saint Louis Zoo, to Shaw’s Garden, to the Arch, to the Muny Opera, and to Tom Sawyer’s house, up in Hannibal. For relief from these loving ministrations, Elisabeth had only the company of a ten-year-old boy with freedom issues of his own.

One afternoon, on the porch, she accused me of not wanting to learn. When I denied it, she said, “Then why do you keep turning around and looking outside? Is there something out there I don’t see?” I had no answer for her. I never consciously connected her body with my discomfort — never mentally formed any word like “breast” or “thigh” or “dirty,” never associated her knockout presence with the schoolyard talk I’d lately started hearing (“We want two pickets to Tittsburgh, and we want the change in nipples and dimes…”). I only knew that I didn’t like the way she made me feel, and that this was disappointing to her: she was making me a bad student, and I was making her a bad teacher. Neither of us could have been less what the other wanted. At the end of the summer, after she left, I couldn’t speak a word of German.

IN CHICAGO, WHEREI was born, our neighbors on one side were Floyd and Dorothy Nutt. On the other side were an older couple who had a grandson named Russie Toates. The first fun I remember ever having involved putting on a new pair of red rubber boots and, incited by Russie, who was a year or two older, stomping and sliding and kicking through an enormous pile of orange-brown dog poop. The fun was memorable because I was immediately severely punished for it.

I’d just turned five when we moved to Webster Groves. On the morning of my first day of kindergarten, my mother sat me down and explained why it was important not to suck my thumb anymore, and I took her message to heart and never put thumb to mouth again, though I did later smoke cigarettes for twenty years. The first thing my friend Manley heard me say in kindergarten came in response to somebody’s invitation to participate in a game. I said, “I’d rather not play.”

When I was eight or nine, I committed a transgression that for much of my life seemed to me the most shameful thing I’d ever done. Late one Sunday afternoon, I was let outside after dinner and, finding no one to play with, loitered by our next-door neighbors’ house. Our neighbors were still eating dinner, but I could see their two girls, one a little older than I, the other a little younger, playing in their living room while they waited for dessert to be served. Catching sight of me, they came and stood between parted curtains, looking out through a window and a storm window. We couldn’t hear each other, but I wanted to entertain them, and so I started dancing, and prancing, and twirling, and miming, and making funny faces. The girls ate it up. They excited me to strike ever more extreme and ridiculous poses, and for a while I continued to amuse them, but there came a point where I could feel their attention waning, and I couldn’t think of any new capers to top my old ones, and I also could not bear to lose their attention, and so, on an impulse — I was in a totally giddy place — I pulled my pants down.