Freedom [124]
“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