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By Root 6847 0

drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey, and once Patty had left Richard and regained a degree of moral respectability, Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother’s life. Many of her suggestions were fairly obvious, but Patty in her gratitude and contrition meekly presented progress reports at their regular Monday-evening dinners. Although she knew a lot more about life than Jessica did, she’d also made a lot more mistakes. It cost her very little to let her daughter feel important and useful, and their discussions did lead directly to her current employment. Once she was back on her feet again, she was able to offer Jessica support in return, but she had to be very careful about this, too. When she read one of Jessica’s overly poetic blog entries, full of easily improvable sentences, the only thing she allowed herself to say was “Great post!!” When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who’d dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica’s belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty’s age. And when Jessica’s heart was then broken, slowly but thoroughly, Patty had to manufacture shock at the singular unforeseeable outrage of it. Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation—the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding—but mostly because she depends on Jessica’s love now and would do just about anything to keep her in her life.

One indisputable boon of her and Walter’s separation has been to bring their kids closer together. In the months after Patty left Washington, she could tell, from their both being party to information that she’d given only one of them, that they were in regular communication, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the substance of their communication was how destructive and selfish and embarrassing their parents were. Even after Jessica forgave Walter and Patty, she remained in close touch with her war buddy, having bonded with him in the trenches.

How the two siblings have negotiated the sharp contrasts between their personalities has been interesting for Patty to watch, given her own failures in this line. Joey seems to have been especially insightful regarding the duplicity of Jessica’s little drummer boy, explaining certain things to her which Patty had found it politic not to. It also definitely helps that Joey, since he had to be brilliantly successful at something, has been flourishing in a business that Jessica approves of. Not that there aren’t still things for Jessica to roll her eyes at and be competitive about. It rankles her that Walter, with his South American connections, was able to steer Joey into shade-grown coffee at exactly the moment when fortunes could be made in it, while there is nothing that either Walter or Patty can do to help Jessica in her own chosen career of literary publishing. It frustrates her to be devoted, like her father, to a declining and endangered and unprofitable enterprise while Joey gets rich almost effortlessly. Nor can she conceal her envy of Connie for getting to travel the world with Joey, getting to visit precisely those humid countries that she herself is most multiculturally enthusiastic about. But Jessica does, albeit grudgingly, admire Connie’s shrewdness in delaying having babies; she’s also been heard to admit that Connie dresses pretty well “for a midwesterner.” And there is no getting around the fact that shade-grown coffee is better for the environment, better especially for birds, and that Joey deserves credit for trumpeting this fact and marketing it astutely. Joey has Jessica pretty well beaten, in other words, and this is yet another reason why Patty works so hard to be her friend.

The autobiographer wishes she could report that all is well with