The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [29]
But then Kirby’s bad mood twists into him, and he lets his head drop on the back of his chair. What is a man? Kirby thinks. What is a man, what is a man? It is someone, Eric would say, who votes, owns property, has a wife, worries. It is someone, Harold would say, who can chop wood all day and fuck all night, who can lift his twenty-five-pound son above his head on the palm of his hand.
After lunch the men have all vanished again, even Isaac, who is taking a nap. In various rooms the women do things. They make no noise. Harold’s house is the house of a wealthy man, Kirby realizes. It is large enough to be silent and neat most of the time, the sort of house Kirby will never own. It is Harold and Eric who are alike now. Only Kirby’s being does not extend past his fingertips and toes to family, real estate, reputation.
Sometime in the afternoon, when Kirby is still sitting quietly and his part of the room is shadowed by the movement of the sun to the other side of the house, Kristin comes in from the kitchen, goes straight to the sofa, pulls off one of the cushions, and begins to jump repeatedly from the cushion to the floor. When he says, “Kristin, what are you doing?” she is not startled. She says, “Jumping.”
“Do you like to jump?”
She says, “It’s a beautiful thing to do,” in her matter-of-fact, deep, three-year-old voice. Kirby can’t believe she knows what she is saying. She jumps three or four more times and then runs out again.
At dinner she is tired and tiresome. When Eric tells her to eat a bite of her meat (ham cooked with apricots), she looks him right in the face and says, “No.”
“One bite,” he says. “I mean it.”
“No. I mean it.” She looks up at him. He puts his napkin on the table and pushes back his chair. In a moment he has swept her through the doorway and up the stairs. She is screaming. A door slams and the screaming is muffled. When he comes down and seats himself, carefully laying his napkin over his slacks, Anna says, “It’s her body.”
The table quiets. Eric says, “What?”
“It’s her body.”
“What does that mean?”
“She should have control over her own body. Food. Other stuff. I don’t know.” She has started strong but weakens in the face of her father’s glare. Eric inhales sharply, and Kirby cannot restrain himself. He says, “How can you disagree with that? It sounds self-evident to me.”
“Does it? The child is three years old. How can she have control over her own body when she doesn’t know anything about it? Does she go out without a coat if it’s twenty below zero? Does she eat only cookies for three days? Does she wear a diaper until she’s five? This is one of those phrases they are using these days. They all mean the same thing.”
“What do they mean?” As Kirby speaks, Leanne and Mary Beth look up, no doubt wishing that he had a wife or a girl friend here to restrain him. Harold looks up, too. He is grinning.
Eric shifts in his chair, uncomfortable, Kirby suddenly realizes, at being predictably stuffy once again. Eric says, “It’s Christmas. Let’s enjoy it.”
Harold says, “Principles are principles, any day of the year.”
Eric takes the bait and lets himself say, “The family is constituted for a purpose, which is the sometimes difficult socialization of children. For a certain period of their lives others control them. In early childhood others control their bodies. They are taught to control themselves. Even Freud says that the young barbarian has to be taught to relinquish his feces, sometimes by force.”
“Good Lord, Eric,” Leanne says.
Eric is red in the face. “Authority is a principle I believe in.” He looks around the table and then at Anna, openly angry that she has gotten him into this. Across Anna’s face flits a look that Kirby has seen before, has seen on Mieko’s face, a combination of self-doubt and resentment molded into composure.
“Patriarchy is what you mean,” Kirby says, realizing from the tone of his own voice that rage has