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PARTISAN REVIEW
vide , he puts down his paper, folded into neat and very readable
quadrants. Over the years I attempt these talks with my father,
al–
ways at my mother's urging, about pending decisions - the decisions
of a daughter. Should I go to summer camp? Should I travel to
Europe on my own? And once, in my early twenties , in a never-to–
be-repeated flurry- should I marry? Invariably these talks would
become monologues, my father waxing enthusiastic about the logic–
or illogic-of going to summer camp , traveling to Europe , getting
married . His enthusiasm is founded on facts, statistics - the making
and unmaking of corporations . (About my marriage prospect he
peered at me and said , "Just as long as you're not marrying him for
his earning power." Buy me, sell me: it would be comic if I weren't
the object.) I would sit on the very edge of the couch adjacent to his
easy chair, silently nodding, crawled back under cover of mute
agreement into some primordial part of myself that was beyond the
call of reason. When I think back on them, it seems to me that all
these occasions were fraudulent from the start, insoluble - and my
father believed in solutions - because they arose from a basic and
fatal incapacity on my part. Behind each and every occasion that
presented itself for a decision, I felt only dread , a panic about the
consequentiality, the separateness, that all decision-making im–
plied - even tiny, girlish decisions .
If
only I could say to my father:
"I can't move. I can never go anywhere even though I look perfectly
fit because I can't leave my mother, your wife ."
What I would most like to know, need to know, but don't ask is
this: Am
I
value for his money? I don't think so, not at all , but can he
trade me in for a more cost-efficient model? He is Pharaoh, and I am
Joseph; the best I can do is to be of use, indispensable, point out that
a famine is on the way and he would do well to set in supplies . My
father likes people - children - who can be relied on to get things
done. So it is that one winter, about the middle of January, he hits
upon the perfect approximation, his form of affection.
It is the same winter I witness my cousin Beatrice screaming at
the foot of the stairs and begin to have insomnia, a precursor of the
pitfalls of adulthood. Come twelve, one o'clock in the morning, I
can't fall asleep. Everything is keeping me awake: the library books,
already overdue, I must remember to return ; our nurse Lena, whom
I'm afraid of; Naomi Litt, whom I want to like me but who only does
so when she isn't "against" me; my mother, whom I'm afraid of; my
arms, which aren't entirely smooth-skinned the way Rachel's are but
