Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

A more direct irritant was the fact that Joey, that winter, was pretending to admire Blake. Joey was too smart to genuinely admire Blake, but he was going through an adolescent rebellion that required him to like the very things that Patty most hated, in order to drive her away. She probably deserved this, owing to the thousand mistakes she’d made in loving him too much, but, at the time, she wasn’t feeling like she deserved it. She was feeling like she was being lashed in the face with a bullwhip. And because of certain monstrously mean things she’d seen that she was capable of saying to Joey, on several occasions when he’d baited her out of her self-control and she’d lashed back at him, she was doing her best to vent her pain and anger on safer third parties, such as Blake and Walter.

She didn’t think she was an alcoholic. She wasn’t an alcoholic. She was just turning out to be like her dad, who sometimes escaped his family by drinking too much. Once upon a time, Walter had positively liked that she enjoyed drinking a glass or two of wine after the kids were in bed. He said he’d grown up being nauseated by the smell of alcohol and had learned to forgive it and love it on her breath, because he loved her breath, because her breath came from deep inside her and he loved the inside of her. This was the sort of thing he used to say to her—the sort of avowal she couldn’t reciprocate and was nevertheless intoxicated by. But once the one or two glasses turned into six or eight glasses, everything changed. Walter needed her sober at night so she could listen to all the things he thought were morally defective in their son, while she needed not to be sober so as not to have to listen. It wasn’t alcoholism, it was self-defense.

And here: here is an actual serious personal failing of Walter’s: he couldn’t accept that Joey wasn’t like him. If Joey had been shy and diffident with girls, if Joey had enjoyed playing the role of child, if Joey had wanted a dad who could teach him things, if Joey had been helplessly honest, if Joey had sided with underdogs, if Joey had loved nature, if Joey had been indifferent to money, he and Walter would have gotten along famously. But Joey, from infancy onward, was a person more in the mold of Richard Katz—effortlessly cool, ruggedly confident, totally focused on getting what he wanted, impervious to moralizing, unafraid of girls—and Walter carried all his frustration and disappointment with his son to Patty and laid it at her feet, as if she were to blame. He’d been begging her for fifteen years to back him up when he tried to discipline Joey, to help him enforce the household prohibitions on video games and excess TV and music that degraded women, but Patty couldn’t help loving Joey just the way he was. She admired and was amused by his resourcefulness in evading prohibitions: he seemed to her quite the incredible boy. An A student, a hard worker, popular at school, wonderfully entrepreneurial. Maybe, if she’d been a single mother, she would have worried more about disciplining him. But Walter had taken over that job, and she’d allowed herself to feel she had an amazing friendship with her son. She hung on his wicked impressions of teachers he didn’t like, she gave him uncensored salacious gossip from the neighborhood, she sat on his bed with her knees gathered in her arms and stopped at nothing to get him laughing; not even Walter was off-limits. She didn’t feel she was being unfaithful to Walter when she made Joey laugh at his eccentricities—his teetotaling, his insistence on bicycling to work in blizzards, his defenselessness against bores, his hatred of cats, his disapproval of paper towels, his enthusiasm for difficult theater—because these were all things she herself had learned to love in him, or at least to find quaintly amusing, and she wanted Joey to see Walter her way. Or so she rationalized it, since, if she’d been honest with herself, what she really wanted was for Joey to be delighted by her.

She didn’t see how he could possibly be loyal and devoted to the neighbor girl. She thought that Connie Monaghan, sneaky little competitor that she was, had managed to get some kind of filthy little momentary hold on him. She was disastrously slow to grasp the seriousness of the Monaghan menace, and in the months when she was underestimating Joey’s feelings for the girl—when she thought that she could simply freeze Connie out and make lighthearted fun of her trashy mom and her mom’s boneheaded boyfriend, and that Joey would soon enough be laughing at them, too—she managed to undo fifteen years of effort to be a good mom. She fucked it up royally, Patty did, and then proceeded to become quite unhinged. She had terrible fights with Walter in which he blamed her for making Joey ungovernable and she was unable to defend herself properly, because she wasn’t allowed to speak the sick conviction in her heart, which was that Walter had ruined her friendship with her son. By sleeping in the same bed with her, by being her husband, by claiming her for the grownup side, Walter had made Joey believe that Patty was in the enemy camp. She hated Walter for this, and resented the marriage, and Joey moved out of the house and in with the Monaghans and made everybody pay in bitter tears for their mistakes.

Though this barely scratches the surface, it’s already more than the autobiographer intended to say about those years, and she will now bravely move on.

One small benefit of having the house to herself was that Patty could listen to whatever music she wanted, especially to the country music that Joey had cried out in pain and revulsion at the merest sound of, and that Walter, with his college-radio tastes, could tolerate only a narrow and mostly vintage playlist of: Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash. Patty loved all of those singers herself, but she loved Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks no less. As soon as Walter left for work in the morning, she cranked up the volume to a level incompatible with thinking, and steeped herself in heartbreaks enough like her own to be comforting and enough different to be sort of funny. Patty was strictly a lyrics-and-stories gal—Walter had long ago given up on interesting her in Ligeti and Yo La Tengo—and never tired of cheating men and strong women and the indomitable human spirit.

At the very same time, Richard was forming Walnut Surprise, his new alt-country band, with three kids whose combined age wasn’t much greater than his own. Richard might have persisted with the Traumatics, and launched further records into the void, were it not for a strange accident that could only have befallen Herrera, his old friend and bassist, whose dishevelment and disorganization made Richard look like the man in the gray flannel suit in comparison. Deciding that Jersey City was too bourgeois (!) and not depressing enough, Herrera had moved up to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and settled in a slum there. One day he went to a rally in Hartford for Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates and assembled a spectacle that he called the Dopplerpus, which consisted of a rented carnival octopus ride on whose tentacles he and seven friends sat and played dirges on portable amps while the ride flung them around and distorted their sound interestingly. Herrera’s girlfriend later told Richard that the Dopplerpus had been “amazing” and a “huge hit” with the “more than a hundred” people who’d attended the rally, but afterward, when Herrera was packing up, his van started rolling down a hill, and Herrera chased after it and reached in through the window and grabbed the steering wheel, which swung the van alongside a brick wall and pancaked him. He somehow finished packing up and drove back to Bridgeport, coughing blood, and there nearly expired of a ruptured spleen, five broken ribs, a broken clavicle, and a punctured lung before his girlfriend got him to a hospital. The accident, following the disappointments of Insanely Happy , seemed like a cosmic sign to Richard, and since he couldn’t live without making music, he’d teamed up with a young fan of his who played killer pedal steel guitar, and Walnut Surprise was born.