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Authors: Richard Russo
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she
deserve
one too? Is she
worth
less than her friends?
Still, what Lily means when she says that we should butt out of our children’s lives is that it’s our duty to put the best possible face upon their behavior, even in the privacy of our own home. If my wife had her way, we would never allude to the sometimes insane behavior of our children, as if merely acknowledging their errors in judgment might further jinx their doomed schemes. Be fair, Lily is fond of counseling. Give them a chance to fail.
Fine by me. It’s the attendant pretense that mangles me. We have to pretend they’re being smart when they’re being dumb. Such pretenses, I have tried to explain to Lily, fly in the face of Occam’s Razor, which demands that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Lies and pretenses, I explain, always require more lies and pretenses. “Promise you’ll act surprised,” is one of Lily’s favorite, supposedly harmless pretenses, one I’m required to act out every time somebody does an entirely predictable thing that is supposed to take me unawares. Feigned stupidity never strikes Lily as undignified, but it does me. For one thing, it’s always used against you later on. (We thought you might be suspicious when you saw all the cars parked outside on your fortieth birthday. Aren’t writers supposed to be observant?) Lily’s got her reasons too. Often they have to do with not hurting people’s feelings. And so I’m required to act surprised at the announcement of a mutual friend’s pregnancy a few short weeks after a hastily arranged wedding. “It hurts
my
feelings to pretend to be this dumb,” I tell my wife. “Don’t you care what people think of
me
?” But she just smiles. “They won’t notice,” she always explains. “It’ll blend in with all the times you’re genuinely slow.”
With regard to Julie and Russell’s new house, I’ve been required to pretend that the result will not be disaster. To further the illusion of our confidence in their judgment, we’ve loaned them money. That I’ve kept my own counsel on the matter has annoyed Lily and at times made me mildly repentant. If the house bankrupts them now, it will be my fault for having failed them at the level of psychic support.
There’s about a fifty-fifty chance it will. Russell has recently quit a good job for what he thought would be a better one, only to discover that several large government loans needed to start up the project he was to direct have not been approved as expected. It could be months, he now admits. A year maybe. In the meantime I don’t know how they’re living. It can’t be on Julie’s service manager’s salary at a department store at the Railton Mall. Russell, a computer software specialist, does a little freelancing.
The house itself is testimony to their sudden reversal of expectation. From the front it’s a dead ringer for our own house, not coincidentally, since they’ve used our contractor, our plans. And it’s true what Lily says. I’m sometimes genuinely slow on the uptake. Seeingtheir house rise out of the ground was an unsettling experience, but it took many weeks for me to tumble to the reason—that our daughter was building our house. Only when I saw the two decks—one front, one back—did the realization come into clear focus. “How’d they get the plans is what I’d love to know,” I told Lily.
“From me, of course,” my wife said, as if this were one of life’s mysteries that even I should be able to plumb on my own.
“You gave them our house plans?” I said, life’s essential sense of mystery undiminished.
“It saved them a lot of money.”
There were other benefits too, according to my daughter. “Carl,” she explained, in reference to our builder, “says he’s going to get the whole thing right this time. He says he remembers all the little ways he fucked up when he built your place. Ours will be perfect.”
Mysteries on top of mysteries. How is
deserve
one too? Is she
worth
less than her friends?
Still, what Lily means when she says that we should butt out of our children’s lives is that it’s our duty to put the best possible face upon their behavior, even in the privacy of our own home. If my wife had her way, we would never allude to the sometimes insane behavior of our children, as if merely acknowledging their errors in judgment might further jinx their doomed schemes. Be fair, Lily is fond of counseling. Give them a chance to fail.
Fine by me. It’s the attendant pretense that mangles me. We have to pretend they’re being smart when they’re being dumb. Such pretenses, I have tried to explain to Lily, fly in the face of Occam’s Razor, which demands that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Lies and pretenses, I explain, always require more lies and pretenses. “Promise you’ll act surprised,” is one of Lily’s favorite, supposedly harmless pretenses, one I’m required to act out every time somebody does an entirely predictable thing that is supposed to take me unawares. Feigned stupidity never strikes Lily as undignified, but it does me. For one thing, it’s always used against you later on. (We thought you might be suspicious when you saw all the cars parked outside on your fortieth birthday. Aren’t writers supposed to be observant?) Lily’s got her reasons too. Often they have to do with not hurting people’s feelings. And so I’m required to act surprised at the announcement of a mutual friend’s pregnancy a few short weeks after a hastily arranged wedding. “It hurts
my
feelings to pretend to be this dumb,” I tell my wife. “Don’t you care what people think of
me
?” But she just smiles. “They won’t notice,” she always explains. “It’ll blend in with all the times you’re genuinely slow.”
With regard to Julie and Russell’s new house, I’ve been required to pretend that the result will not be disaster. To further the illusion of our confidence in their judgment, we’ve loaned them money. That I’ve kept my own counsel on the matter has annoyed Lily and at times made me mildly repentant. If the house bankrupts them now, it will be my fault for having failed them at the level of psychic support.
There’s about a fifty-fifty chance it will. Russell has recently quit a good job for what he thought would be a better one, only to discover that several large government loans needed to start up the project he was to direct have not been approved as expected. It could be months, he now admits. A year maybe. In the meantime I don’t know how they’re living. It can’t be on Julie’s service manager’s salary at a department store at the Railton Mall. Russell, a computer software specialist, does a little freelancing.
The house itself is testimony to their sudden reversal of expectation. From the front it’s a dead ringer for our own house, not coincidentally, since they’ve used our contractor, our plans. And it’s true what Lily says. I’m sometimes genuinely slow on the uptake. Seeingtheir house rise out of the ground was an unsettling experience, but it took many weeks for me to tumble to the reason—that our daughter was building our house. Only when I saw the two decks—one front, one back—did the realization come into clear focus. “How’d they get the plans is what I’d love to know,” I told Lily.
“From me, of course,” my wife said, as if this were one of life’s mysteries that even I should be able to plumb on my own.
“You gave them our house plans?” I said, life’s essential sense of mystery undiminished.
“It saved them a lot of money.”
There were other benefits too, according to my daughter. “Carl,” she explained, in reference to our builder, “says he’s going to get the whole thing right this time. He says he remembers all the little ways he fucked up when he built your place. Ours will be perfect.”
Mysteries on top of mysteries. How is
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