The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [64]
At the dinner table, Slater invaded me again. I was cutting Leah’s meat and she was complaining that the pieces were too large, so I cut them and cut them until they were nearly mush. Then she said, “I don’t like it.” I sat back and looked at her, then around the table at the others, and it seemed to me that I was Slater, visiting for dinner. The woman was blond, sort of pretty and nice enough, I thought, but her children were horrible, the oldest sullen and suspicious—clank, clank-clank went her knife and fork on the plate—the next one an oblivious blonde, masticating her food with annoying languor, and the third irritable and squawking. At last, inevitably, Leah smacked her bowl and it landed upside down on the floor. As Slater, I waited for their mother to do something about it. As my wife, Dana looked at me expectantly. Leah looked at me expectantly. I pretended to be their father. I jumped up and grabbed Leah out of her chair, and said in gruffish tones, “That’s enough. I’m putting you into your bed.” And I carried her upstairs. The windows were dirty and the sills needed vacuuming, and there were toys all over the floor of the child’s room. The responsibility for all this seemed put upon me, and I stomped down the stairs, shouting, “Be quiet! Stop yelling! You can come down in five minutes.”
“Dave,” said Dana.
I answered to this name.
“I don’t think you should shout at her like that.”
“Somebody has to. Maybe nobody has enough. You don’t. What the fuck is going on around here?”
Dana looked up fearfully. “Nothing. Nothing is going on, just everything the same. Why don’t you sit down and—”
Now I really was Slater. “Everything’s more fucked every day.”
Lizzie and Stephanie had put down their forks and were staring out at me from under their foreheads, as if they couldn’t take the full blast of me in their faces, but couldn’t resist a look.
Dana said, “Why are you like this? Why are you so angry all the time? It’s unbearable.”
“I’m not angry all the time! I’m not really angry now.”
“Listen to yourself! Can’t you hear what you’re saying?”
“But it’s true, things are more fucked every day! Every day! Every day is worse!”
“No, it isn’t! It isn’t. Don’t say that. I won’t listen to that! You’ve always said that! I hate it.”
“I have not always said that. I just realized it today.”
“You have.” She burst into tears. I was bitterly hurt and angry. Her greatest lifelong sin seemed to me to be that she didn’t agree with me about the way the world is. I thought, I could accept anything else, let her love him, let her fuck him, let her talk to him forever, but give me this little agreement that I’ve never had before. I said, or rather shouted, “Admit that I’m right. Admit that every day is worse!”
“I won’t!”
I could kill you, I thought.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said you could kill me.” I looked into each horrified face and saw that I had said it, or Slater had said it. I groaned. “I didn’t mean to say it.”
“But you thought it.”
“I can’t control my thoughts.”
“You thought you could kill me.”
“I don’t know what I thought. I thought a lot of things. I think all the time.” I sat down and looked first at Lizzie and then at Stephanie, and I said, “A person can think anything that they want, because there is no way to make yourself not think things. But you don’t want to do everything you think. I’m sorry. I think I’ll go out for a little while.” And then Slater and I slammed out of the house and got in the car again, although