Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“God damn it, Joey! You stop this right now! Right now , do you hear me?”

“Hey, whoa, I’m doing you a favor here.”

“ What? ”

“Aren’t you sick of not telling on me? I’m doing you a favor! I’m giving you your chance!”

“I’m telling on you now . I’m going to call Dad right now .”

“Go ahead! Didn’t you just hear me? I said I was doing you a favor.”

“You fucker. You smug little fucker . I’m calling Dad right now —” while Connie, stark naked, bloody-red of lip and nipple, sat holding her breath and looking at Joey with a mixture of fear and amazement and excitement and allegiance and delight which convinced him, like nothing before and few things since, that no rule or propriety or moral law mattered to her one-thousandth as much as being his chosen girl and partner in crime.

He hadn’t expected his grandmother to die that week—she wasn’t that old. By hurling shit into the fan one day before she passed, he’d put himself extremely in the wrong. Just how wrong was evidenced by the fact that he was never even yelled at. Up in Hibbing, at the funeral, his parents simply froze him out. He was left to stew separately in his guilt while the rest of his family joined together in a grief that he ought to have been experiencing with them. Dorothy had been the only grandparent in his life, and she’d impressed him, when he was still very young, by inviting him to handle her crippled hand and see that it was still a person’s hand and nothing to be scared of. After that, he’d never objected to the kindnesses his parents had asked him to do for her when she was visiting. She was a person, maybe the only person, to whom he’d been one-hundred-percent good. And now suddenly she was dead.

Her funeral was followed by some weeks of respite from his mother, some weeks of welcome chilliness, but by and by she came after him again. She exploited the pretext of his frankness about Connie to become inappropriately frank with him in turn. She tried to make him her Designated Understander, and this turned out to be even worse than being her little boy-pal. It was devious and irresistible. It started with a confidence: she sat down on his bed one afternoon and launched into telling him how she’d been stalked in college by a drug-addicted pathological liar whom she’d nonetheless loved and his dad had disapproved of. “I had to tell somebody,” she said, “and I didn’t want to tell Dad. I was down getting my new driver’s license yesterday, and I realized that she was in line ahead of me. I haven’t seen her since the night I wrecked my knee. That’s like twenty years? She’s gained a lot of weight, but it was definitely her. And I got so frightened, seeing her. I realized I felt guilty.”

“Why frightened?” he found himself saying, like Tony Soprano’s shrink. “Why guilty?”

“I don’t know. I ran out of there before she could turn around and see me. I still have to go back down for my license. But I was terrified that she was going to turn around and see me. I was terrified of what was going to happen. Because, you know, I am so not a lesbian. You have to believe that I would know it if I were—half my old friends are gay. And I definitely am not.”

“Good to hear,” he said with a nervous smirk.

“But I realized, yesterday, seeing her, that I’d been in love with her. And I was never able to deal with that. And now she has that kind of lithium heaviness—”

“What’s lithium.”

“For manic depression. Bipolar disease.”

“Ah.”

“And I totally abandoned her, because Dad hated her so much. She was suffering, and I never called her again, and I threw her letters away without opening them.”

“But she lied to you. She was scary.”

“I know, I know. But I still feel guilty.”

She told him many other secrets in the months that followed. Secrets that proved to be like candy laced with arsenic. For a while, he actually considered himself lucky to have a mom who was so cool and forthcoming. He responded by disclosing various perversions and petty crimes of his classmates, trying to impress her with how much more jaded and debauched his peers were than young people in the seventies. And then one day, during a conversation about date rape, it had seemed natural enough for her to tell him how she herself had been date-raped as a teenager, and how he mustn’t ever breathe a word of it to Jessica, because Jessica didn’t understand her the way he did—nobody understood her the way he did. He’d lain awake in the nights following that conversation, feeling murderously angry at his mother’s rapist, and outraged by the world’s injustice, and guilty for every negative thing he’d ever said or felt about her, and privileged and important to be granted access to the world of grownup secrets. And then one morning he’d woken up hating her so violently that it made his skin crawl and his stomach turn to be in the same room with her. It was like a chemical transformation. As if there were arsenic leaching from his organs and his bone marrow.

What he’d been dismayed by tonight on the telephone was how completely un stupid she had sounded. This, indeed, was the substance of her reproach. She didn’t seem to be very good at living her life, but it wasn’t because she was stupid. Almost the opposite somehow. She had a comical-tragical sense of herself and seemed, moreover, genuinely apologetic for the way she was. And yet it all added up to a reproach of him. As if she were speaking some sophisticated but dying aboriginal language which it was up to the younger generation (i.e., Joey) to either perpetuate or be responsible for the death of. Or as if she were one of his dad’s endangered birds, singing its obsolete song in the woods in the forlorn hope of some passing kindred spirit hearing it. There was her, and then there was the rest of the world, and by the very way she chose to speak to him she was reproaching him for placing his allegiance with the rest of the world. And who could fault him for preferring the world? He had his own life to try to live! The problem was that when he was younger, in his weakness, he’d let her see that he did understand her language and did recognize her song, and now she couldn’t seem to help reminding him that those capacities were still inside him, should he ever feel like exercising them again.

Whoever was showering in the dormitory bathroom had stopped and was toweling off. The hall door opened and closed, opened and closed; a minty smell of tooth-brushing wafted over from the sinks and into Joey’s stall. His crying had given him a boner that he now removed from his boxers and khakis and held on to for dear life. If he squeezed the base of it really hard, he could make the head of it huge and hideous and almost black with venous blood. He so much liked looking at it, so much enjoyed the feeling of protection and independence its repulsive beauty gave him, that he was reluctant to finish himself off and lose hold of that hardness. To walk around hard every minute of the day, of course, would be to be what people called a prick. Which was what Blake was. Joey didn’t want to be like Blake, but he wanted even less to be his mother’s Designated Understander. With silently spastic fingers, staring at his hardness, he came into the yawning toilet and immediately flushed it.

Upstairs, in his corner room, he found Jonathan reading John Stuart Mill and watching the ninth inning of a World Series game. “Very confounding situation here,” Jonathan said. “I’m experiencing actual pangs of sympathy for the Yankees.”

Joey, who never watched baseball by himself but was amenable to watching it with others, sat down on his bed while Randy Johnson dealt fastballs to a defeat-eyed Yankee. The score was 4–0. “They could still come back,” he said.