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Denise still couldn't say no to the drug of Robin. She still wanted Robin's hands on her and at her and around her and inside her, that prepositional smorgasbord. But there was something in Robin, probably her propensity to blame herself for harms that other people inflicted on her, that invited betrayal and abuse. Denise went out of her way to smoke in bed now, because cigarette smoke irritated Robin's eyes. She dressed to the hilt when she met Robin for lunch, she did her best to highlight Robin's dowdiness, and she held the gaze of anyone, female or male, who turned to look at her. She visibly winced at the volume of Robin's voice. She behaved like an adolescent with a parent except that an adolescent couldn't help rolling her eyes whereas Denise's contempt was a deliberate, calculated form of cruelty. She shushed Robin angrily when they were in bed and Robin began to hoot self-consciously. She said, "Keep your voice down. Please. Please." Exhilarated by her own cruelty, she stared at Robin's Gore-Tex raingear until Robin was provoked to ask why. Denise said, "I'm just wondering if you're ever tempted to be slightly less uncool." Robin replied that she was never going to be cool and so she might as well be comfortable. Denise allowed her lip to curl.
When she was young, when Enid's mother had browned the ribs in the kitchen and Gary and Chip had brought home their unbelievably beautiful girlfriends and everybody's idea of a good time was to buy Denise a lot of presents, this had been the longest afternoon of the year. An obscure natural law had forbidden whole-family gatherings before nightfall; people had scattered to wait in separate rooms. Sometimes, as a teenager, Chip had taken mercy on the last child in the house and played chess or Monopoly with her. When she got a little older, he'd brought her along to the mall with his girlfriend of the moment. There was no greater bliss for her at ten and twelve than to be so included: to take instruction from Chip in the evils of late capitalism, to gather couturial data on the girlfriend, to study the length of the girlfriend's bangs and the height of her heels, to be left alone for an hour at the bookstore, and then to look back, from the top of the hill above the mall, on the silent slow choreography of traffic in the faltering light.
A holly wreath was on the door. The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn't see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn't simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages. The old street with its oak smoke and snowy flat-topped hedges and icicled eaves seemed precarious. It seemed mirage-like. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something beloved and dead.
"So what have you been doing with yourself?" Gary said.
"I've been helping a Lithuanian friend of mine defraud Western investors."
"Jesus, Chip. You don't want to be doing that."
Everything else in the world might be strange, but Gary's condescension galled Chip exactly as it always had.
"From a strictly moral viewpoint," Chip said, "I have more sympathy for Lithuania than I do for American investors."
"You want to be a Bolshevik?" Gary said, zipping up his bag. "Fine, be a Bolshevik. Just don't call me when you get arrested."
"It would never occur to me to call you," Chip said.
amazing
"Can you stand to be forgiven?"
"No," he said. "Basically, no. I can't. It's better all around if I pay you."
Still kneeling, Denise bent over and tucked in her arms and made herself into an olive, an egg, an onion. From within this balled form came a low voice. "Do you understand what a huge favor you'd be doing me if you would let me forgive the debt? Do you understand that it's hard for me to ask this favor? Do you understand that coming here for Christmas is the only other favor I've ever asked you? Do you understand that I'm not trying to insult you? Do you understand that I never doubted that you wanted to pay me back, and I know I'm asking you to do something very hard? Do you understand that I wouldn't ask you to do something so hard if I didn't really, really, really need it?"
Chip looked at the trembling balled human form at his feet. "Tell me what's wrong."
"I'm having trouble on numerous fronts," she said.
"This is a bad time to talk about the money, then. Let's forget it for a while. I want to hear what's bothering you."
Still balled up, Denise shook her head emphatically, once. "I need you to say yes here, now. Say 'Yes, thank you.'"
Chip made a gesture of utter bafflement. It was near midnight and his father had begun to thump around upstairs and his sister was curled up like an egg and begging him to accept relief from the principal torment of his life.
I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn't go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane's homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well-orchestrated it seemed quasi-official, like the "Support Our Troops" ribbons that had shown up on half the country's cars overnight. But it seemed to me that helping Katrina's homeless victims ought to be the government's job, not mine. I'd always voted for candidates who wanted to raise my taxes, because I thought paying taxes was patriotic and because my idea of how to be left alone--my libertarian ideal!--was a well-funded, well-managed central government that spared me from having to make a hundred different spending decisions every week. Like, was Katrina as bad as the Pakistan earthquake? As bad as breast cancer? As bad as AIDS in Africa? Not as bad? How much less bad? I wanted my government to figure these things out.
good perspective
For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and re-boarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren't going to waste. I stared at the merry-go-round's chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they'd tried to give me. My mother, ever the dutiful traveler, took pictures of my father and me on our uncomfortably small horses, but beneath her forcible cheer she was angry at me, because she knew she was the one I was getting even with, because of our fight about clothes. My father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse-impaling metal pole, gazed into the distance with a look of resignation that summarized his life. I don't see how either of them bore it. I'd been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously comformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn't want the things they wanted. I didn't value what they valued. And were were all equally sorry to be riding the merry-go-round, and we were all equally at a loss to explain what had happened to us.
while at Disney World with his parents and feeling embarrassed to be seen with them (and in his mother-chosen clothes) as well as alienated from all the other teens. so sad
[...] The script, which I'd written, had a large number of bit parts and one very generous role that I'd created with my own memorization abilities in mind. The action took place on a boat, involved a taciturn villain named Mr. Scuba, and lacked the most rudimentary comedy, point, or moral. Not even I, who got to do most of the talking, enjoyed being in it. [...]
funny cus it reminds me of the motivations behind my own one-act play
[...] If you took away Christ's divinity, you were left with "Kum Ba Ya." You were left with "Let's hold hands and be nice to each other. Jesus' authority as a teacher--and whatever authority Mutton and company had as followers of his teachings--rested on his having had the balls to say, "I am the fulfillment of the prophecies, I am the Jews' gift to mankind, I am the son of Man," and to let Himself be nailed to a cross to back it up. If you couldn't take that step in your own mind, if you couldn't refer to the Bible and celebrate communion, how could you call yourself a Christian?
"That bee that hovers so close to the open window but never actually goes outside but instead just rests behind the curtain buzzing." (Shafik Mandhai on Twitter)
Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is a leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but if you're stupid if you do. [...]