Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“That’s why we need to sell the house,” Gene said.

“He’s right, Walter,” Dorothy said. “I hate to see the house go, but he’s right.”

“Well, what about Mitch, though? He could at least pay some rent, and you could hire somebody with that.”

“He’s on his own now,” Gene said.

“Mom still cooks for him and does his laundry! Why isn’t he at least paying rent?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“It’s Mom’s business! You’d rather sell Mom’s house than make Mitch grow up!”

“That’s his room, and I’m not going to throw him out of it.”

“Do you really think we could rent the house?” Dorothy said hopefully.

“We’d be cleaning it every week and doing laundry,” Gene said. “There’d be no end to it.”

“I could drive down once a week,” Dorothy said. “It wouldn’t be so bad.”

“We need the money now ,” Gene said.

“And what if I do what Mitch does?” Walter said. “What if I just say no? What if I just go over to the house this summer and fix it up?”

“You’re not Jesus Christ,” Gene said. “We can get along here without you.”

“Gene, we can at least try to rent the house next summer. If it doesn’t work out, we can always sell it.”

“I’ll go there on weekends,” Walter said. “How about that? Mitch can take over for me on the weekends, can’t he?”

“If you want to try selling Mitch on that, go ahead,” Gene said.

“I’m not his parent!”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Gene said, and retreated to the lounge.

Why Gene gave Mitch a free pass was clear enough: he saw in his oldest son a nearly exact replica of himself, and he didn’t want to ride him the way he’d once been ridden by Einar. But Dorothy’s timidness with Mitch was more mysterious to Walter. Maybe she was already so worn out by her husband that she just didn’t have the strength or the heart to battle her son as well, or maybe she could already see Mitch’s failed future and wanted him to enjoy a few more years of kindness at home before the world had its tough way with him. In any case, it fell to Walter to knock on Mitch’s door, which was plastered with STP and Pennzoil stickers, and try to be a parent to his older brother.

Mitch was lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive on the stereo he’d bought with his bodyshop earnings. The refractory way he smiled at Walter was similar to their father’s, but more sneering. “What do you want?”

“I want you to start paying rent here, or do some work around here, or else get out.”

“Since when are you the boss?”

“Dad said I should talk to you.”

“Tell him to talk to me himself.”

“Mom doesn’t want to sell the lake house, so something’s got to change.”

“That’s her problem.”

“Jesus, Mitch. You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah, right. You’re going to go away to Harvard or wherever, and I’m going to end up taking care of this place. But I’m the selfish one.”

“You are!”

“I’m trying to save up some money in case Brenda and I need it, but I’m the selfish one.”

Brenda was the very pretty girl whose parents had practically disowned her for dating Mitch. “What exactly is your great savings plan?” Walter said. “Buying yourself a lot of stuff now that you can pawn later?”

“I work hard. What am I supposed to do, never buy anything?”

“I work hard, too, and I don’t have stuff, because I don’t get paid.”

“What about that movie camera?”

“That’s on loan from school , moron. It’s not mine.”

“Well, nobody’s loaning me any stuff, because I’m not a candy-assed suck-up.”

“That still doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay rent, or at least help out on the weekend.”

Mitch peered down into his ashtray as into a prison yard crowded with dusty inmates, considering how to squeeze another in. “Who appointed you Jesus Christ around here?” he said, unoriginally. “I don’t have to negotiate with you.”

But Dorothy refused to talk to Mitch (“I’d rather just sell the house,” she said), and Walter, at the end of the school year, which was also the start of the motel’s high season, such as it was, decided to force the issue by going on strike. As long as he was around the motel, he couldn’t not do the things that needed doing. The only way to make Mitch take responsibility was to leave, and so he announced that he was going to spend the summer fixing up the lake house and making an experimental nature film. His father said that if he wanted to get the house into better shape to be sold, that was fine with him, but the house would be sold in any case. His mother begged him to forget about the house. She said it had been selfish of her to make such a big deal about it, she didn’t care about the house, she just wanted everyone to get along, and when Walter said that he was going anyway, she cried out that if he really cared about her wishes he would not be leaving. But he was feeling, for the first time, truly angry with her. It didn’t matter how much she loved him or how well he understood her—he hated her for submitting so meekly to his father and his brother. He was sick to death of it. He got his best friend, Mary Siltala, to drive him down to the lake house with a duffel bag of clothes, ten gallons of house paint, his old one-speed bike, a secondhand paperback copy of Walden , the Super-8 movie camera that he’d borrowed from the high-school AV Department, and eight yellow boxes of Super-8 film. It was by far the most rebellious thing he’d ever done.

The house was full of mouse droppings and dead sow bugs and needed, besides repainting, a new roof and new window screens. On his first day there, Walter cleaned house and cut weeds for ten hours and then went walking in the woods, in the changeless late-afternoon sunlight, seeking beauty in nature. He had only twenty-four minutes of film stock, and after wasting three of these minutes on chipmunks he realized he needed something less attainable to pursue. The lake was too small for loons, but when he took his grandfather’s fabric canoe out into its seldom-disturbed recesses he flushed a heronlike bird, a bittern that was nesting in the reeds. Bitterns were perfect—so retiring that he could stalk them all summer without using up twenty-one minutes of film. He imagined making an experimental short called “Bitternness.”

He got up at five every morning, applied DEET, and paddled very slowly and silently toward the reeds, the camera on his lap. The bittern way was to lurk among the reeds, camouflaged by their fine vertical striping of buff and brown, and spear small animals with their bills.

When they sensed danger, they froze with their necks outstretched and their bills pointing skyward, looking like dry reeds. When Walter edged closer, hoping to see more of bitternness and less of nothing in the range finder, they usually slipped out of sight but sometimes, instead, heaved themselves into flight, which he leaned back wildly to follow with the camera. Although they were pure killing machines, he found them highly sympathetic, especially for the contrast between their drab stalking plumage and the dramatic bold gray and slaty black of their outstretched wings when they were airborne. They were humble and furtive on the ground, near their marshy home, but lordly in the sky.

Seventeen years in cramped quarters with his family had given him a thirst for solitude whose unquenchability he was discovering only now. To hear nothing but wind, birdsong, insects, fish jumping, branches squeaking, birch leaves scraping as they tumbled against each other: he kept stopping to savor this unsilent silence as he scraped paint from the house’s outer walls. The round trip to the food co-op in Fen City took ninety minutes on his bicycle. He made big pots of lentil stew and bean soup, using recipes of his mother’s, and in the evening he played with the ancient but still workable springdriven pinball machine that had been in the house forever. He read in bed until midnight and even then didn’t fall asleep immediately but lay soaking up the silence.