Elizabeth Hardwick
EVENINGS AT HOME
I am here in Kentucky with my family for the first time
in a number of years and, naturally, I am quite uncomfortable, but
not in the way I had anticipated before leaving New York. The
thing that startles me is that I am completely free and can do and
say exactly what I wish. This freedom leads me to the bewildering
conclusion that the notions I have entertained about my family are
fantastic manias, complicated, willful distortions which are so clearly
contrary to the facts that I might have taken them from some bloody
romance, or, to be more specific, from one of those childhood stories
in which the heroine, ragged and castoff, roams the cold streets beg–
ging alms which go into the eager hands of a tyrannical stepmother.
I staggered a bit when I actually came face to face with my
own mother: she carries no whips, gives no evidence of cannibalism.
At night everyone sleeps peacefully. So far as I can judge they accuse
me of no crimes, make no demands upon me; they neither praise
nor criticize me excessively. My uneasiness and defensiveness are
quite beside the point, like those flamboyant but unnecessary gestures
of our old elocution teacher. My family situation is distinguished by
only one eccentricity-it is entirely healthy and normal. This truth
is utterly disarming; nothing I have felt in years has disturbed me
so profoundly as this terrible fact. I had grown accustomed to a flat
and literal horror, the usual childhood traumas, and having been
away from home for a long time I had come to believe these fancies
corresponded to life, that one walked in the door, met his parents,
his
brothers and sisters, and there they were, the family demons,
bristling, frowning, and leaping at one's throat. I was well prepared
to enjoy the battle and felt a certain superiority because I was the
only one among us who had read up on the simplicities and inevi–
tabilities of family life, the cripplings and jealousies, the shock of
439
