PHILIP ROTH
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instant life conceived in that sham place. Dracula eats at her house
when he's in town. He comes from a nice happy household with a
mother who cooked and a father who worked and stood for brushing
teeth and doing homework and represented sanity and order- a ca–
lamity at his house was missing his lunch. What could he know of
the horror of all horrors? Depression. The sleeping, the drinking, the
self-hate. I was scared to death of my mother. What happens to them
in the morning waking up. The doom that waking up is for them.
The silences. The apology. The hideous efforts to make it up to you
and they can't. I have a key to an apartment which I never sent back
because the thought of sending it back filled me with my mother's
face and her rages . The insults she spits when she forgets herself. In
her blur the faces get mixed but she still fires away. The emotional
temperature of her conversations, especially drunk and maudlin.
Wild with no justification, rages, drunk - unbelievable. I am afraid
of high-powered people and their tendency to get carried away. I
never told him of that key because he would hammer away at me to
send it back
this morning.
I feel pity mostly for so much greed and
avarice and self. I don't even hate her anymore . I say this not in my
defense because I don't give a shit about that. It's just knowledge,
some of which I can use. I just want to keep as far away from the
cruelty as I can. The death-mother. The whole atmosphere ofa fam–
ily that allows something like this to go on. The destruction of a girl
by a selfish, brutal, wooden mother. My strong tarantula mother, all
iron in green silk. In her cups and flying. A woman without walls.
The father is only known through the mother's hatred of him. The
trouble with the human race is rotten mothering. And no fathers .
The instant attraction and obsessive clinging and violent loving- all
protection against my mother. I got gypped out of mother-love . I
don't know from dick about theory: that is just the plain truth, the
undercurrent of this twisted thing. There are mothers and daughters
who love each other, and need each other, and will always need each
other's love. Not her. I ran out into the world and I held my nose and
jumped in, and that's the whole story. I haven't survived her at all. I
just stuck it out past childhood, and here I am, still flapping around .
And still waiting for her to wise up and be human . A need not to lose
my mother any more than I have . I take that broken woman to lunch
and try not to listen to a word she says. Her basic madness is by now
a little on the boring side , but her voice - that voice! Still the voice of
my demon , so completely the voice of a woman who tortures people
in a particularly hair-raising mindless way . People don't get better as
