Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Carol,” he said amiably. “Hello.”

“Hello, Joey. You probably know why I’m calling.”

“No, actually, I don’t.”

“Well, you’ve just about broken our little friend’s heart, is why.”

Stomach lurching, he retreated to the privacy of the stacks. “I was going to call her tonight,” he told Carol.

“Tonight. Really. You were going to call her tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Why do I not believe you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she’s gone to bed, so it’s good you didn’t call. She went to bed without eating. She went to bed at seven.”

“Good thing I didn’t call, then.”

“This isn’t funny, Joey. She’s very depressed. You’ve given her a depression and you need to stop messing around. Do you understand? My daughter isn’t some dog that you can tie to a parking meter and then forget about.”

“Maybe you should get her an antidepressant.”

“She’s not your pet that you can leave in the back seat with the windows rolled up,” Carol said, warming to her metaphor. “We’re part of your life, Joey. I think we deserve a little more than the nothing you’ve been giving us. This has been a very frightening fall for all concerned, and you have been absent .”

“You know, I do have classes to attend, and so forth.”

“Too busy for a five-minute phone call. After three and a half weeks of silence.”

“I really was going to call her tonight.”

“Never mind Connie even,” Carol said. “Leave Connie out of it for a minute. You and I lived together like a family for almost two years. I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m starting to get an idea of what you put your mom through. Seriously. I never understood how cold you are until this fall.”

Joey directed a smile of pure oppression at the ceiling. There had always been something not quite right about his interactions with Carol. She was what the prep-school boys on his hall and the fraternity brothers who were rushing him were wont to call a MILF (an acronym that, in Joey’s opinion, sounded faintly cretinous for its omission of the T for “to”). Although he was generally a very sound sleeper, there had occasionally been nights, during the period of his residency at the Monaghans, when he’d awakened in Connie’s bed with strange anxious premonitions of himself: as the unwitting and horrified trespasser of his sister’s bed, for example, or as the accidental shooter of a nail into Blake’s forehead with Blake’s nail gun, or, strangest of all, as the towering crane at a major Great Lakes dockyard, his horizontal member swinging heavy containers off the deck of a mother ship and gently depositing them on a smaller, flatter barge. These visions tended to follow moments of inappropriate connection with Carol—the glimpse of her bare butt through the nearly closed door of her and Blake’s bedroom; the complicit wink she gave Joey pursuant to a dinner-table belch from Blake; the lengthy and explicit rationale she presented to him (illustrated with vivid stories from her own careless youth) for putting Connie on the Pill. Since Connie was constitutionally incapable of being displeased with Joey, it had fallen to her mother to register her discontents. Carol was Connie’s garrulous organ, her straight-talking advocate, and Joey had sometimes had the sense, on weekend nights when Blake was out with buddies, of being the sandwiched party in a virtual threesome, Carol’s mouth running and running with all the things that Connie wouldn’t say, Connie then silently doing with Joey all the things that Carol couldn’t do, and Joey jolting awake in the wee hours with a sense of entrapment in something not quite right. Mom I’d Like Fuck.

“So what am I supposed to do?” he said.

“Well, for starters, I want you to be a more responsible boyfriend.”

“I’m not her boyfriend. We’re on hiatus.”

“What is hiatus? What does that mean?”

“It means we’re experimenting with being apart.”

“That’s not what Connie tells me. Connie tells me you want her to go to school so she can learn administrative skills and be your assistant in your endeavors.”

“Look,” Joey said. “Carol. I was stoned when I said that. I mistakenly said the wrong thing while stoned on the incredibly strong pot that Connie buys.”

“You think I don’t know she smokes pot? You think Blake and I don’t have noses? You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All you do is make yourself look like a bad boyfriend when you try to snitch on her.”

“My point is that I said the wrong thing. And I haven’t had a chance to correct myself, because we agreed not to talk for a while.”

“And whose responsibility is that? You know you’re like a god to her. Literally like a god, Joey. You tell her to hold her breath, she’ll hold her breath until she faints. You tell her to sit in a corner, she’ll sit in a corner until she keels over with starvation.”

“Well, and whose fault is that?” Joey said.

“It’s yours.”

“No, Carol. It’s yours. You’re the parent. You’re the one whose house she’s living in. I just came along.”

“Yeah, and now you’re going your own way, without taking responsibility. After being all but married to her. After being part of our family.”

“Whoa. Whoa. Carol. I’m a freshman in college. Do you understand that? I mean, the weirdness of even having this conversation?”

“I understand that when I was one year older than you are now, I had a baby girl and was having to make my own way in the world.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“Not too bad, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t going to tell you this, because it’s still early on, but since you ask, Blake and I are going to have a little baby. Our little family’s about to get a little bigger.”

It took Joey a moment to compute that she was telling him that she was pregnant.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m still at work. I mean, congratulations and all. I’m just busy at this particular moment.”

“Busy. Right.”

“I promise I’ll call her tomorrow afternoon.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Carol said, “that won’t do it. You need to come out right away and spend some time with her.”

“That’s not an option.”

“Then come for a week at Thanksgiving. We’ll have a nice family Thanksgiving, all four of us. It’ll give her something to look forward to, and you can see for yourself how depressed she is.”

Joey had been planning to spend the holiday in Washington with his roommate, Jonathan, whose older sister, a junior at Duke, either photographed misleadingly well or was somebody not to miss meeting in person. The sister’s name was Jenna, which in Joey’s mind connected her to the Bush twins and all the partying and loose morals that the Bush name connoted.

“I don’t have money for a flight,” he said.

“You can take a bus, just like Connie. Or is the bus not good enough for Joey Berglund?”

“I also have other plans.”

“Well, you better change your plans,” Carol said. “Your girlfriend of the last four years is seriously depressed. She cries for hours, she doesn’t eat. I’ve had to talk to her boss at Frost’s to keep her from getting fired, because she can’t remember orders, she gets confused, she never smiles. She may be getting high at work, I wouldn’t be surprised. Then she comes home and goes straight to bed and stays there. When she has her afternoon shifts, I have to drive all the way home on my lunch break to make sure she’s up and gets dressed for work, because she won’t answer the phone. Then I have to drive her to Frost’s and make sure she goes inside. I tried to send Blake to do it for me, but she won’t talk to him anymore or do anything he says. Sometimes I think she’s trying to wreck my relationship with him, just to be spiteful, because you’re gone. When I tell her to see the doctor, she says she doesn’t need a doctor. When I ask her what she’s trying to prove, and what her plan is for her life, she says her plan is to be with you. That’s her only plan. So whatever your own little Thanksgiving plan is, you better change it.”