Read Online Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel - Free Book Online Page A

substitute for the rock-and-roll casualties of the parental era. Alice in the passenger seat had turned to mom as we drove to the supermarket: “Kurt Cobain was like a Beatle-and-a-half, Charlie. He wrote masterpieces. ”
    I remember the foliage had turned, and everything was decked out thrillingly in tragic colors.
    “All right, Alice. What might be a song to start with?”
    “ ‘Rape Me,’ ” Alice said, and indeed it was in my opinion the last album’s most exciting song.
    Mom repeated the title as a scandalized question and said, “I think that’s terrible.”
    “But it’s a protest song.”
    Even from the backseat I could detect mom’s sharp cross-examining smile. “And what is he protesting darling?”
    “The culture,” Alice said.
    Mom’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
    “Yeah,” I said, “the whole culture.”
    “And what don’t you guys like about our . . . culture?”
    “We’re exposed to so much violence,” I speculated.
    Alice said, “We hate the blasé cynicism.”
    Poor mom! I always wanted her to have some other, better kid. But I wasn’t willing to become that kid myself or capable of convincing Alice that she should do it. Alice was an excellent student who didn’t, however, get very high marks in the attitude department, whereas my geniality, while genial enough in itself, was also pretty transparently an attempt to ingratiate myself with parents who would otherwise punish me for the underexploitation of my alleged mental resources. Mom was never able to secure a single ally in her bid to reform us. We’d given up sibling rivalry early on, committing ourselves to mutual defense, while dad had contented himself as a parental figure with this separation of powers whereby he took part in legislative decisions regarding Al’s and my conduct but played virtually no executive role in the distribution of demerits or awards. Plus he regarded us as unreformable, same as he did everyone else, including himself.
    Yet mom wasn’t asking that much of us, especially Alice, who she only wanted to be happy and heterosexual, and to dress like a happy heterosexual too. Instead Alice had instituted her punk-preppy style, she’d made remarks such as “So I sleep with girls and boys. So what?” and when the Cold War finally ended, and it stopped seeming like we’d been brought into the world only to be incinerated here, Alice still continued fulminating, becoming a Marxist right around ’91 and reassuring dad that while she felt that socialism should be tried one last time, she had no intention, when the revolution came, of executing him personally or encouraging her New Haven comrades to do so.
    “Come on, Alice,” dad growled. “Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I’m a commodities trader. If you don’t kill me, who will you?”
    This was one of the rare things that made Alice cry. She’d spared his life, and he mocked her. Then she swore off meat and therefore game hunting with dad. Not that there wasn’t still the horned head of a taxidermied ibex from their last trip to Africa—really, an ibex —mounted above the bed in her apartment. In fact the creature seemed to bear some kind of glass-eyed witness to some aspect of family relations which it might be painful to picture any more clearly.
    We had followed mom through the receiving line and come to Reverend Withrow. The nervous pink-faced glad-hander slapped me on the back with vacant gameshow host affability, and told me how pleased he was that my sister and I were showing a renewed interest in the Church.
    I was barely sustaining myself on stale Jiggy Juice fumes as we escorted mom back to the apartment. She mentioned again how she was seriously thinking of going to div. school and getting ordained. “The last thing I’d like to become is one of those aging Village ladies tottering around with their grocery carts in between going to the latest what-have-you. Creaky bohemia is not my cup of tea.