Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“OK, then. Be mad at me. Go ahead and be mad. But I still have work to do tonight, and you need to leave me alone now.”

Jessica returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, her jaw set. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You probably want to take a shower and have some dinner. There’s a dining room upstairs that I think it’s nice to actually use now and then. I got a, um.” She looked around in great distraction. “I made a big dinner salad and some pasta I’ll reheat. I also got some nice bread, the proverbial loaf of bread that my mother is apparently incapable of buying when a house full of people is coming for the weekend.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Katz said. “I’ve still got part of a sandwich in my bag.”

“No, I’ll come up and sit with you. It’s just that things are a little disorganized around here. This house is just . . . just . . . just . . .” She clenched her fingers and shook her hands. “Unnhh! This house!”

“Calm down,” Katz said. “It’s great to see you.”

“How do they even live when I’m not here? That’s what I don’t understand. How the whole thing even functions at the basic level of taking the trash out.” Jessica shut the kitchen door and lowered her voice. “God only knows what she eats. Apparently, from what my mom says, she subsists on Cheerios, milk, and cheese sandwiches. And bananas. But where are these foods? There’s not even any milk in the fridge.”

Katz made a vague gesture with his hands, to suggest that he could not be held responsible.

“And, you know, as it happens,” Jessica said, “I know quite a bit about Indian regional cooking. Because a lot of my friends in college were Indian? And years ago, when I first came down here, I asked her if she could teach me how to do some regional cooking, like from Bengal, where she was born. I’m very respectful of people’s traditions, and I thought we could make this nice big meal together, her and me, and actually sit down at the dining-room table like a family. I thought that might be cool, since she’s Indian and I’m interested in food. And she laughed at me and said she couldn’t even cook an egg. Apparently both her parents were engineers and never made a real meal in their lives. So there went that plan.”

Katz was smiling at her, enjoying the seamless way that she combined and blended, in her compact unitary person, the personalities of her parents. She sounded like Patty and was outraged like Walter, and yet she was entirely herself. Her blond hair was pulled back and tied with a severity that seemed to stretch her eyebrows into the raised position, contributing to her expression of appalled surprise and irony. He wasn’t the least bit attracted to her, and he liked her all the more for this.

“So where is everybody?” he said.

“Mom is at the gym, ‘working.’ And Dad, I don’t actually know. Some meeting in Virginia. He told me to tell you he’ll see you in the morning—he’d meant to be here tonight, but something came up.”

“When’s your mom getting home?”

“Late, I’m sure. You know, it’s not at all obvious now, but she was actually a fairly great mom when I was growing up. You know, like, cooked? Made people feel welcome? Put flowers in a vase by the bed? Apparently that’s all a thing of the past now.”

In her capacity as emergency hostess, Jessica led Katz up a narrow rear staircase and showed him the big second-floor bedrooms that had been converted to living and dining and family rooms, the small room in which Patty had a computer and a foldout sofa, and then, on the third floor, the equally small room where he would sleep. “This is officially my brother’s room,” she said, “but I bet he hasn’t spent ten nights in it since they moved here.”

There was, indeed, no trace of Joey, just more of Walter and Patty’s very tasteful furniture.

“How are things with Joey anyway?”

Jessica shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”

“You guys don’t talk?”

She looked up at Katz with her amusedly wide-open and somewhat protuberant eyes. “We talk sometimes, now and then.”

“And what, then? What’s the situation?”

“Well, he’s become a Republican, so the conversations don’t tend to be very pleasant.”

“Ah.”

“I put some towels out for you. Do you need a washcloth, too?”

“Never been a washcloth user, no.”

When he went back downstairs, half an hour later, showered and wearing a clean T-shirt, he found dinner waiting for him on the dining table. Jessica sat down on the far side of it with her arms tightly folded—she was altogether a very tightly wound girl—and watched him eat. “Congratulations, by the way,” she said, “on everything that’s happened. It was very weird to suddenly start hearing you everywhere, and see you on everybody’s playlist.”

“What about you? What do you like to listen to?”

“I’m more into world music, especially African and South American. But I liked your record. I certainly recognized the lake.”

It was possible that she meant something by this, also possible that she didn’t. Could Patty have told her what had happened at the lake? Her and not Walter?

“So what’s going on?” he said. “It sounded like you had a little problem with Lalitha.”

Again the amused or ironical widening of her eyes.

“What?” he said.

“Oh, nothing. I’m just a little impatient with my family lately.”

“I get the sense she’s something of a problem for your parents.”

“Mm.”

“She seems great. Smart, energetic, committed.”

“Mm.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

“No! I just think she’s kind of got her eyes on my dad. And it’s kind of killing my mom. To watch that happening. I kind of feel like, when a person is married, you leave them alone, right? They’re off-limits if they’re married. Right?”

Katz cleared his throat, unsure where this was heading. “In theory, yes,” he said. “But life gets complicated when you’re older.”

“It doesn’t mean I have to like her, though. It doesn’t mean I have to accept her. I don’t know if you’re aware that she’s living right upstairs? She’s here all the time . She’s here more than my mom is. And I just don’t think that’s quite fair. My feeling is she needs to move out and get her own place. But I don’t think my dad wants her to.”

“And why doesn’t he want that?”

Jessica smiled at Katz tightly, in a very unhappy way. “My parents have a lot of problems. Their marriage has a lot of problems. You don’t have to be a psychic to see that. Like, my mom’s been really depressed. For years. And she can’t get out of it. But they love each other, I know they love each other, and it just really bothers me to see what’s happening here. If she would just leave —I mean, Lalitha—if she would just leave, so my mom could have a chance again . . .”

“You and your mom are close?”

“No. Not really.”

Katz ate in silence and waited to hear more. He seemed, luckily, to have caught Jessica in a mood to disclose things to the nearest bystander.

“I mean, she tries,” she said. “But she’s got a real gift for saying the wrong thing. She doesn’t respect my judgment. Like, that I’m a basically intelligent adult who can think for herself? My boyfriend in college, he was incredibly sweet, and she was just horrible to him. It was like she was afraid I was going to marry him, and so she constantly had to be making fun of him. He was my first real boyfriend, and I just wanted to have some time to enjoy that, but she wouldn’t leave it alone. There was this time when William and I came down for the weekend, to go to the museums and do a gay-marriage march. We were staying here, and she started asking him if he liked it when girls flashed their breasts at frat parties. She’d read some stupid article in the newspaper about boys shouting at girls to show their breasts. And I’m like, no, Mother, I’m not at Virginia. We don’t have frats at my college, that’s just some stupid Stone-Aged thing that kids do in the South, I don’t go to Florida for spring break, we’re not like the people in your stupid article. But she wouldn’t leave it alone. She kept asking William how he felt about other girls’ breasts. And kept acting surprised when he said he wasn’t interested. She knew he was being sincere, not to mention incredibly embarrassed that his girlfriend’s mother was talking about breasts, but she acted like she didn’t believe him. To her, the whole thing was a joke. She wanted me to laugh at William. Who, yes, was a little hard to take sometimes. But, like, can I have a chance to figure that out for myself?”