John wonders why Sara turned out so unlike the cute, sunny teenage girls he’d had crushes on in high school.
John doesn’t understand why Kelly won’t talk to Sara about why she’s stopped eating, the evasive jokes she makes to the many therapists they’ve spent thousands of
John wants to scream at them both about how selfish they
John looks at Sara’s babysitter’s low-cut top and can’t help but notice her
John wishes he could just
John knows
John is
John feels
John feels
John f
Little dots of hurt flash white in front of my eyes. I feel smothered with jazz and the buzzing conversations and one-sided stories and stifling self-congratulation.
If John is being honest with himself, it bothers him that his daughter is the kid at school nobody likes.
I chug the rest of my Solo cup down. I lose count of the times I get back on the wine line.
Kira is kissing my dad goodbye; Matilda has stopped dozing and started getting fussy and needs to go to bed. Kira waves goodbye to me and says I’ll see her at home. I think I say goodbye to her. My dad is talking to more men. I realize there are an equal amount of men and women in this room, but only the men are talking and the women are listening.
“. . . daughter is about to start reading David Foster Wallace, and it makes me want to reread Infinite Jest.” Dad gestures for me to come join the conversation he is having with three plaid-shirted, hip-bespectacled acolytes. I drink the remainder of my thousandth cup of wine, let it roll off my limp, flat palm onto a bookshelf, and walk up behind them. Almost immediately, someone from the publishing house leads Dad away to shake hands with some other people.
One of the flannels is smirking at me. I don’t like the way they’re looking at me. They’re not leering—I’d almost prefer that. They just look smug.
“So what are you, seventeen?” asks Flannel B.
“Sixteen,” I say.
“God, I can’t imagine comprehending Infinite Jest at that age,” says Flannel A, shaking his head. The other two flannels nod, and they all look slightly envious, like, Yeah, totally, what an awesome thing to be a super-worshipped brilliant literary guy, he was so lucky other than the horrific mental illness that tortured him to death.
“You're a writer too, I heard,” Flannel B says.
“Yeah.”
“Fiction?”
“Fanfiction.”
Flannel A chuckles. Flannel B nudges him, like, She’s serious.
“About what?”
“Lycanthrope High.”
“Isn’t that that werewolf show?”
I bristle.
Dad glances over, senses some kind of tension, and comes back.
“Right now she’s reading The Corrections,” Dad says and puts a proud hand on my shoulder.
“I saw Franzen speak last year. He was brilliant,” says Flannel B. “How are you liking the book?”
“It’s bullshit,” I snap. “Are you aware that there’s a line, an actual line in that book, that goes: ‘At thirty-two, Denise was still beautiful’? At thirty-two. Denise. Was still beautiful.”
There is a moment of reproachful silence with jazz under it, as if I’d just crapped on the floor and only Duke Ellington did not seem to mind.
“And it’s not just Franzen! I tried to read Infinite Jest, but I had to stop on page 167 when Orin is screwing that single mom because he does that, because that’s indicative of how interesting and tortured and fucked up he is? And it says in the paragraph—do you remember this?—that after they had sex, he traced an infinity sign on her back, and, to paraphrase, that she was so stupid that she thought it was an eight.”
“I don’t know if it says—”
“This woman is a single mom, holding down some awful job so she can feed her kid, and being judged for dating when she has the time, and just doing the best she can . . .” I get a little choked up. I can tell by Dad’s face he just figured out why I’m upset.
“—and she sleeps with a guy who thinks he’s smarter than her. And she knows that. Because she’s not stupid, even though he thinks she is, or even if everybody thinks she is. And he traced what could be an eight or an infinity sign on her back after they had sex. Of course she wouldn’t think it was an infinity sign. Because that would be romantic. It makes no sense that some asshole who doesn’t respect you would do that. She’s not stupid.”
I’m being too loud. People are looking over at us, but I don’t care. I don’t want to make a scene, I’m just a little tipsy and a lot sad and I just want to ruin everything that everyone in this room holds sacred.
Flannel C, the oldest, says gently but authoritatively, “Orin’s not supposed to be a nice char—”
“It’s not Orin saying he thinks she’s stupid, it’s the God voice saying she’s stupid. It’s not the character, it’s the writer. I understand the difference between omniscient narration and a close third. That’s your problem, you assume everyone else is stupid, but they’re not!”