Freedom [125]
“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—
“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