My daughter doesn't really like her friends very much (she shuffles them in and out of her good graces arbitrarily), and neither do I, with the exception of one classmate half a year older who is slim and pretty and secretive and who, I am just about convinced, is flirting with me, leading me on. (I encourage her.) She is not, my daughter tells me, a virgin anymore. She has a knowing, searching air about her that sets her apart from the others. She keeps her look on me when I am near, and I keep mine on hers. I'm not sure which one of us started it. I think it was me. (Perhaps we recognize something, the same thing, in each other, and she thinks that I am flirting with her, which may be true, but if I am, I am only kidding. I hope I'm only kidding.) Sixteen would be too young, even for me. (Or would it? Someone is going to be laying that provocative, pretty, hot-pantsed little girl soon, if someone isn't doing it already, and why shouldn't it be me, instead of some callow, arrogant wise guy of eighteen or twenty-one, who would not relish her as much as I would, regale and intoxicate her with the spell of flattery and small attentions I could weave, or savor the piquant degeneracy of it nearly as much as I would be certain to. Although I'm not so sure I would want to tell anyone about this one.) No, sixteen is too young (young enough to be my daughter, ha, ha), and I turn irritable whenever my daughter comes out of her room to chat with us wearing only a nightgown or a robe that she doesn't always keep fully closed on top or bottom. (I don't know where to look.) I either walk right out without explanation (seething with anger but saying nothing) or command her in a brusque, irascible voice to put a robe on or put her legs together, or keep the robe she does have on closed around the neck and down below her knees if she wants to stay. She is always astounded by my outburst; her eyes open wide. (She does not seem to understand why I am behaving that way. I cannot explain to her; I can't even explain it to my wife. I find it hard to believe my daughter is really that naпve. But what other interpretation is there?) Afterwards, I am displeased with myself for reacting so violently. (But there is little I can say to apologize. Where am I supposed to look when my tall and budding buxom daughter comes in to talk to me wearing almost nothing, sprawls down negligently with her legs apart, her robe open? How am I supposed to feel? Nobody ever told me.) They are all morbidly alike, the girls and boys in this somber social circle of adolescents of which my daughter is a part (none are happy), much more so than the girls and boys and men and women I work with in the company (although, to them, we might seem all alike). None are well-adjusted. (I am well-adjusted, which is not exactly the best recommendation for adjustment, is it?) They manifest defiance, displeasure, lassitude, and indifference. They generally have nothing they want to do. There is nothing they want to be when they grow up; they have no idols. (Neither have I. There is now no one else I would rather be than me — even though I don't really like me and am not even sure who it is I am.) They are not comfortable with adults (me); they pose and attitudinize when they are with us; they strive to be as reticent and solitary as moles. They do not want us to hear what they say when they talk to each other. I used to believe they were always feigning; now I believe they really are as cynical and disheartened as they think they are pretending to be. They don't want to be doctors when they grow up, or aviators, or heavyweight champions of the world. They don't really want to be lawyers. None of them wants to be President of the United States, Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Board of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., or me. (Why should they? There are enough other people to do that kind of work. Me, for instance. I will do it because by now I have nothing else I can do.) They have good reason to be so pessimistic, I feel; the pity is they found it out so soon.
Some of the girls and some of the boys always do seem to be having an easier time of it than the others, but this only lasts a little while for any of them, and even my daughter will surface buoyantly every now and then and whiz along vivaciously until something happens (sometimes that something is so elusive that it cannot even be identified; it is almost as though she suddenly runs out of her supply of joy the way a car runs out of gas) that breaks her morale and dissolves her confidence, and she sinks back sluggishly and safely into her accustomed mire of regret. Some of the boys she goes with swagger and boast a good deal more than the others, but the worldly self-assurance they affect is transparently unreal. If not, if they really were as tough and egotistical and domineering and amoral as they wish to appear, I would find them obnoxious and insufferable, for I have seen my daughter with these boys in crowded cars, and I did not like what I saw, or imagined. (But what difference does that make?)
What difference does it make, really, what she is or isn't doing already with those boys I could so easily dislike, and even perhaps with girls (just about all of the young girls I do it with these days brag now about having done it, at least once, with other girls too), in those crowded cars she drives in to pizza joints with loud music (I don't really like most of their music, although I sometimes pretend to just to please my daughter) or to parties with the same loud music in other people's darkened houses — as long as they don't drive recklessly and get killed or maimed in an automobile accident?
(What difference does it make anymore who is screwing whom?) It is already too late for anything else. It is too late, I think, for me to stop her or change her, and I would not know anymore how to try. Something happened to both my children that I cannot explain and cannot undo. I can't be good to them, it seems, even when I want to.
"Listen," I say to both of them anxiously, practically pleading with them to allow me to help them. "What do you want to be when you grow up? Tell me. What do you want to do?"
"I don't ever want to get married," my daughter mumbles moodily, "or ever have children."
"Work in a filling station," my boy answers.
"Well, that's a bit better." I approve, nodding with a look of praise. Why not? Own his own business? It makes some sense. Profitable franchise: Exxon, Texaco, Sunoco, Shell, Gulf? Sure. It's something. A start. Okay. "Why?"
"I like the smell of gasoline."
Christ!
"Jack, you've got kids," I appeal to Green at the office, almost in desperation. "That are older than mine. You've got a boy in college, haven't you? What does he want to be when he gets out?"
"A suicide."
"I'm not joking."
"You think I am? I've got a daughter in college too. She has abortions. Between suicide attempts. She lays bums. They don't want to continue. There've been three attempts between them. That I know about. One by slashing, two by drugs. It sounds like Paul Revere, doesn't it? They're both on drugs. My new wife is crazy too. So is her mother. So is mine. It's not my business anymore."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"Go do some work. It's not your business either."
He has written his children off, filed them away, closed them out like dead records that are not his business anymore. But I still have my children, and I wish to engulf them in devotion and safeguard them against every slight. (I want them to believe I love them.)