Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“No, people have fights when they love each other but still have actual complete personalities and are living in the real world. Obviously, I’m not saying it’s good to fight excessively.”

“No, just exactly enough. I get it.”

“If you’re never having fights, you need to ask yourself why not, is all I’m saying. Ask yourself, where is the fantasy residing?”

“No, Mom. Sorry. Not going to talk about this.”

“Or who it’s residing in, if you know what I mean.”

“I swear to God, I’m going to hang up, and I’m not going to call you for a year.”

“What realities are not being attended to.”

“Mom!”

“Anyway, that was my one question, and now I’ve asked it, and I won’t ask you any more.”

Although his mother’s happiness levels were nothing to brag about, she persisted in inflicting the norms of her own life on Joey. She probably thought she was trying to protect him, but all he heard was the drumbeat of negativity. She was especially “concerned” about Connie’s lack of any friends besides himself. She’d once cited her own crazy college friend Eliza, who’d had zero other friends, and what a warning sign this should have been. Joey had replied that Connie did so have friends, and when his mother had challenged him to name them, he’d loudly refused to discuss things she knew nothing about. Connie did have some old school friends, at least two or three, but when she spoke of them it was mainly to dissect their superficialities or to compare their intelligence unfavorably with Joey’s, and he could never keep their names straight. His mother had thus scored a palpable hit. And she knew better than to stab an existing wound twice, but either she was the world’s most expert implier, or Joey was the world’s most sensitive inferrer. She had merely to mention an upcoming visit from her old teammate Cathy Schmidt for Joey to hear invidious criticism of Connie. If he called her on it, she became all psychological and asked him to examine his touchiness on the subject. The one counterthrust that would really have shut her up—asking how many friends she’d made since college (answer: none)—was the one he couldn’t bear to make. She had the unfair final advantage, in all their arguments, of being pitiable to him.

Connie bore his mother no corresponding enmity. She had every right to complain, but she never did, and this made the unfairness of his mother’s enmity all the more glaring. As a little girl, Connie had voluntarily, without any prompting from Carol, given his mother handmade birthday cards. His mother had crooned over these cards every year until he and Connie started having sex. Connie had continued to make her birthday cards after that, and Joey, when he’d still been in St. Paul, had seen his mother open one, glance at its greeting with a stony expression, and set it aside like junk mail. More recently, Connie had additionally sent her little birthday presents—earrings one year, chocolates another—for which she received acknowledgments as stiltedly impersonal as an IRS communiqué. Connie did everything she could to make his mother like her again except the one thing that would have worked, which was to stop seeing Joey. She was purehearted and his mother spat on her. The unfairness of it was another reason he had married her.

The unfairness had also, in a roundabout way, made the Republican Party more attractive to him. His mother was a snob about Carol and Blake and held against Connie the mere fact that she lived with them. She took it for granted that all right-thinking people, including Joey, were of one mind about the tastes and opinions of white people from less privileged backgrounds than her own. What Joey liked about the Republicans was that they didn’t disdain people the way liberal Democrats did. They hated the liberals, yes, but only because the liberals had hated them first. They were simply sick of the kind of unexamined condescension with which his mother treated the Monaghans. Over the past two years, Joey had slowly traded places with Jonathan in their political discussions, particularly on the subject of Iraq. Joey had become convinced that an invasion was needed to safeguard America’s petropolitical interests and take out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, while Jonathan, who’d landed plum summer internships with The Hill and then with the WaPo and was hoping to be a political journalist, was ever more distrustful of the people like Feith and Wolfowitz and Perle and Chalabi who were pushing for the war. Both of them had enjoyed reversing their expected roles and becoming the political outliers of their respective families, Joey sounding more and more like Jonathan’s father, Jonathan more and more like Joey’s. The longer Joey persisted in siding with Connie and defending her against his mother’s snobbery, the more at home he felt with the party of angry anti-snobbism.

And why had he stuck with Connie? The only answer that made sense was that he loved her. He’d had his chances to free himself of her—had, indeed, deliberately created some of them—but again and again, at the crucial moment, had chosen not to use them. The first great opportunity had been his going away to college. His next chance had come a year later, when Connie followed him east to Morton College, in Morton’s Glen, Virginia. Her move did put her within an easy drive of Charlottesville in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser (which Jonathan, approving of Connie, let Joey borrow), but it also set her on course to be a normal college student and develop an independent life. After his second visit to Morton, which the two of them mostly spent dodging her Korean roommate, Joey proposed that, for her sake (since she didn’t seem to be adapting well to college), they again try to break their dependency and cease communication for a while. His proposal wasn’t entirely disingenuous; he wasn’t entirely ruling out a future for them. But he’d been doing a lot of listening to Jenna and was hoping to spend his winter break with her and Jonathan in McLean. When Connie finally got wind of these plans, a few weeks before Christmas, he asked her if she didn’t want to go home to St. Paul and see her friends and family (i.e., the way a normal college freshman might). “No,” she said, “I want to be with you.” Spurred by the prospect of Jenna, and bolstered by an especially satisfying hookup that had fallen in his lap at a recent semi-formal dance, he took a hard line with Connie, who then cried on the phone so stormily that she got the hiccups. She said she never wanted to go home again, never wanted to spend another night with Carol and the babies. But Joey made her do it anyway. And even though he barely spoke to Jenna over the holidays—first she was skiing, then she was in New York with Nick—he continued to pursue his exit strategy until the night in early February when Carol called him with the news that Connie had dropped out of Morton and was back on Barrier Street, more seriously depressed than ever.

Connie had apparently aced two of her December finals at Morton but simply failed to show up for the other two, and there was virulent antipathy between her and the roommate, who listened to the Backstreet Boys so loudly that the treble leaking from her earphones would have driven anybody crazy, and left her TV tuned to a shopping channel all day, and taunted Connie about her “stuck-up” boyfriend, and invited her to imagine all the stuck-up sluts that he was screwing behind her back, and smelled up their room with terrible pickles. Connie had returned to school in January on academic probation but proceeded to spend so much time in bed that the campus health service finally intervened and sent her home. All this Carol reported to Joey with sober worry and a welcome absence of recrimination.