Independence Day by Richard Ford

Author:Richard Ford [Ford, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Adult, Contemporary, Pulitzer
ISBN: 9780679735182
Google: kmpKxbT504cC
Amazon: 0679735186
Barnesnoble: 0679735186
Goodreads: 175272
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1995-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

I mean to say nothing. A careful review of how lucky I am could too easily involve more airing of my “be/seem” misdeeds and tie into the possibility that I’m a coward or a liar or worse. I scratch my nose and can still smell grackle on my fingers.

She looks around at where I sit still not very comfortably silent on my lily pad.

“Would you agree to seeing Dr. Stopler?”

“As a patient?” I blink.

“As a co-parent,” she says. “And as a patient.”

“I’m really not based in New Haven,” I say. “And I never much liked shrinks. They just try to make you act like everybody else.”

“You don’t have that to worry about.” She regards me in an impatient older-sister way. “I just thought if you and I, or maybe you and I and Paul, went down, we might iron some things out. That’s all.”

“We can invite Charley, if you want to. He’s probably got some ironing out that needs doing. He’s a co-parent too, right?”

“He’ll go. If I ask him.”

I look around at the mirror window behind which sits the spectral white piano and a lot of ultra-modern, rectilinear blond-wood furniture arranged meticulously between long, sherbet-colored walls so as to maximize the experience of an interesting inner space while remaining unimaginably comfy. Reflected, I see the azure sky, part of the lawn, an inch of the boathouse roof and a line of far treetops. It is a vacant vista, the acme of opulent American dreariness Ann has for some reason married into. I feel like getting up and walking out onto the lawn—waiting for my son in the grass. I don’t care to see Dr. Stopler and have my weaknesses vetted. My weaknesses, after all, have taken me this far.

Behind the glass, though, and unexpectedly, the insubstantial figure of my daughter becomes visible crossing left to right, intending where, I don’t know. As she passes she gazes out at us—her parents, bickering—and, blithely assuming I can’t see her, flips one or both of us the bird in a spiraling, heightening, conjuring motion like an ornate salaam, then disappears through a door to another segment of the house.

“I’ll think about Dr. Stopler,” I say. “I’m still not sure what a milieu therapist is, though.”

The corners of Ann’s mouth thicken with disapproval—of me. “Maybe you could think of your children as a form of self-discovery. Maybe you’d see your interest in it then and do something a little more wholeheartedly yourself.” Ann’s view is that I’m a half-hearted parent; my view is that I do the best I know how.

“Maybe,” I say, though the thought of dread-filled weekly drives to dread-filled New Haven for expensive fifty-five dread-filled minutes of mea culpa! mea culpa! gushered into the weary, dread-resistant map of some Austrian headshrinker is enough to set anybody’s escape mechanisms working overtime.

The fact is, of course, Ann maintains a very unclear picture of me and my current life’s outlines. She has never appreciated the realty business or why I enjoy it—doesn’t think it actually involves doing anything.

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