Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Joey’s feeling of bereavement was giving way to irritation, because, no matter how much she denied that she was doing it, she couldn’t seem to help reproaching him. These moms and their reproaches, there was no end to it. He called her for a little support, and the next thing he knew, he was falling short of providing support to her.

“So how are you on money?” she said, as if sensing his irritation. “Do you have enough money?”

“It’s a little tight,” he admitted.

“I bet!”

“Once I’m a resident here, tuition will go way down. It’s just this first year that’s really hard.”

“Do you want me to send you some money?”

He smiled in the darkness. He liked her, in spite of everything; he couldn’t help it. “I thought Dad said there wasn’t going to be any money.”

“Dad doesn’t necessarily have to know every little thing.”

“Well, and the school won’t consider me a state resident if I’m taking anything from you.”

“The school doesn’t have to know everything, either. I could send you a check made out to Cash, if that would help you.”

“Yeah, and then what?”

“Then nothing. I promise. No strings attached. I’m saying you’ve already made your point with Dad. There’s no need to take on horrible debt at high interest, just to keep proving a point you already made.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Why don’t I put a check in the mail to you. Then you can decide on your own if you want to cash it or not. You won’t have to discuss it with me.”

He smiled again. “Why are you doing this?”

“Well, you know, Joey, believe it or not, I want you to have the life you want to have. I’ve had some free time for asking myself questions while I’ve been fanning magazines on the coffee table, and whatnot. Like, if you were to tell me and Dad you never wanted to see us again, for the rest of your life, would I still want you to be happy?”

“That is a bizarre hypothetical question. It has no bearing on reality.”

“That’s nice to hear, but it’s not my point. My point is that we all think we know the answer to the question. Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That’s what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that’s kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, just in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn’t. I’ve told you a little bit about my own parents, for example—”

“Not very much,” Joey said.

“Well, maybe sometime I’ll tell you more, if you ask me nicely. But my point is that I’ve given some real thought to this question of love, regarding you. And I’ve decided—”

“Mom, do you mind if we talk about something else?”

“I’ve decided—”

“Or, actually, maybe some other day? Next week or something? I’ve got a lot of stuff to do here before I go to bed.”

A silence of injury descended in St. Paul.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just really late, and I’m tired and I still have stuff to do.”

“I was simply explaining,” his mother said in a much lower voice, “why I’m going to send a check.”

“Right, thank you. That’s nice of you. I guess.”

In an even smaller and more injured voice, his mother thanked him for calling and hung up.

Joey looked around the lawn for some bushes or an architectural cranny where he might cry unobserved by passing posses. Seeing none, he ran inside his dorm and, blindly, as if needing to barf, veered into the first john he came to, on a hall not his own, and locked himself into a stall and sobbed with hatred of his mother. Somebody was showering in a cloud of deodorant soap and mildew. A big smiling-faced erection, soaring like Superman, spurting droplets, was Sharpied on the stall’s rust-pocked door. Beneath it somebody had written SCORE NOW OR TAKE A CHIT .

The nature of his mother’s reproach wasn’t simple the way Carol Monaghan’s was. Carol, unlike her daughter, was not too bright. Connie had a wry, compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity to which she gave Joey access only behind closed doors. When she and Carol and Blake and Joey used to have dinner together, Connie would eat with her eyes lowered and seem lost in her own strange thoughts, but afterward, alone with Joey in their bedroom, she could reproduce every last deplorable detail of Carol and Blake’s dinner-table behavior. She once asked Joey if he’d noticed that the point of almost every utterance of Blake’s was how stupid other people were and how superior and put-upon he, Blake, was. According to Blake, the morning’s KSTP weather forecast had been stupid, the Paulsens had put their recycling barrel in a stupid place, the seat-belt beeper in his truck was stupid not to shut off after sixty seconds, the commuters driving the speed limit on Summit Avenue were stupid, the stoplight at Summit and Lexington was stupidly timed, his boss at work was stupid, the city building code was stupid. Joey began to laugh while Connie continued, with implacable recall, to list examples: the new TV remote was stupidly designed, the NBC prime-time schedule had been stupidly rearranged, the National League was stupid for not adopting the designated-hitter rule, the Vikings were stupid for letting Brad Johnson and Jeff George get away, the moderator of the second presidential debate had been stupid not to press Al Gore on what a liar he was, Minnesota was stupid to make its hardworking citizens pay for free top-of-the-line medical care for Mexican illegals and welfare cheats, free top-of-the-line medical care—

“And you know what?” Connie said finally.

“What?” Joey said.

“You never do that. You really are smarter than other people, so you never have to call them stupid.”

Joey accepted her compliment uncomfortably. For one thing, he was getting a strong whiff of competition from the direct comparison of him and Blake—an unsettling sense of being a pawn or a prize in some complicated mother-daughter struggle. And although it was true that he’d checked a lot of judgments at the door when he’d moved in with the Monaghans, he had formerly declared all manner of things to be stupid, in particular his mother, who had come to seem to him a font of endless, nerve-grating asininity. Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.

In truth, the only thing his mother had been guilty of being stupid about was Joey himself. Granted, it had also seemed very dumb of her to be, for example, so disrespectful of Tupac, whose best stuff Joey considered unarguably genius-level work, or so hostile toward Married with Children , whose own stupidity was so calculated and extreme that it was flat-out brilliant. But she would never have attacked Married with Children if Joey hadn’t been so devoted to watching it in reruns, she would never have stooped to doing her embarrassingly off-base caricatures of Tupac if Joey hadn’t admired him so much. The actual root cause of her stupidity was her wish for Joey to keep on being her little boy-pal: to continue being more entertained and fascinated by his mother than by great TV or a bona-fide genius rap star. This was the sick heart of her dumbness: she was competing.

Eventually he’d become desperate enough to drive it into her head that he didn’t want to be her little boy-pal anymore. This hadn’t even been his conscious plan, it was more like a by-product of his long-running irritation with his moralistic sister, whom he could think of no finer way to enrage and horrify than to invite a bunch of his friends over to his house and get drunk on Jim Beam while his parents were with his ailing grandmother in Grand Rapids, and then, the following night, to screw Connie extra-specially noisily against the wall that his bedroom shared with Jessica’s, thereby inciting Jessica to crank up her intolerable Belle and Sebastian to club-level volumes and later, after midnight, to pound on his locked bedroom door with her virtuously white knuckles—