Now that her speech is finally cleared of the stuttering, all that comes through is this junkWhat he had dreamed about--that his wonderful, gifted child would one day stop stuttering--had come to passShe had mastered miraculously the agitated stuttering only to reveal, at the eye of the storm that was her erupted personality, this insane clarity and calmWhat a great revenge to take: This is what you wanted, Daddy? Well, here it is Her being able successfully to explain and to talk was now the worst thing of all The harshness he felt but didn't want her to hear was in his voice nonetheless when he said, "You will meet a violent end, MeredithKeep trying them out twice a day, keep it up and you'll find out just how much they know about your loveTheir hunger, Merry, is not for loveSomebody will kill you!" "But only to be reborn "I doubt that, honeyI seriously doubt that "Will you concede that my guess is as good as yours, Dad?" "Won't you at least take off that mask fake chanel bag while we're talking? So I can see you?" "See me stutter, do you mean?" "Well, I don't know if wearing that is what accounts for the disappearance of your stutter or notYou tell me that it hasYou tell me that the stutter was only your way of doing no violence to the air and the things that live in the airis that correct? Have I understood what you were saying?" "Yeseven if I were to concede that, I have to tell you I think you might eventually have a better life with your stutterI don't minimize the hardship it was for youBut if it turns out you had to carry things to this extreme to be rid of that damn thingthen I really do wonderwell, if it's the best trade-off imaginable "You can't explain away what I've done by motives, DaddyI certainly wouldn't explain away what you've done by motives "But I do have motives "You cannot reduce the journey of a soul to that kind of psychologyIt is not worthy of you "Then you explain itExplain it to me, pleaseHow do you chanel earings explain that when you took all thiswhat looks to me like misery and nothing more, that when you did that, took upon yourself real suffering, which is all this is, suffering that you have chosen, Merry, real suffering and nothing more or less than suffering"--his voice was wavering but on he went, reasonable, reasonable, responsible, responsible--"then, only then--do you see what I'm saying?--the stutter vanished?" "I've told youI am done with craving and selfhood "Sweet, sweet child and girl He sat down amid the filth of the floor, helpless to do anything other than try to his utmost not to lose control In the tiny room, where they now sat no more than an arm's length from each other, there was no light other than what fell through the dirty transomShe lived without lightWhy? Had she renounced the vice of electricity too? She lived without light, she lived without everythingThis was how their life had worked out: she lived in Newark with nothing, he lived in Old Rimrock chanel jewelry online with everything except herWas his good fortune to blame for that too? The revenge of the have-nots upon those who have and ownAll the self-styled have-nots, the playacting Rita Cohens seeking to associate themselves with their parents' worst enemies, modeling themselves on whatever was most loathsome to those who most loved them There used to be a slogan she'd crayoned in two colors on a piece of cardboard, a handmade poster that she'd hung over her desk, replacing his Weequahic football pennant; the poster had hung there undisturbed all during the year before her disappearanceTill it went up, she had always coyly coveted the Weequahic pennant because the Swede's high school sweetheart had taken it to sewing class in 1943 and stitched into the felt along the bottom edge of the orange and brown triangle, in thick white thread, "To All-City Levov, XXXX, Arlene The poster was the only thing he had dared to remove from her room and destroy, and even doing that much had taken silver chanel three months; appropriating the property of another, adult or child, was simply repugnant to himBut three months after the bombing he marched up the stairs and into her room and tore the poster downIt read: "We are against everything that is good and decent in honky AmericaWe will loot and burn and destroyWe are the incubation of your mother's nightmares In large square letters the attribution: "weathermen motto And because he was a tolerant man he'd tolerated that too"Honky" in his daughter's handHanging there for a year in his own home, each red letter shadowed heavily in black And because even though he hadn't liked it one bit he did not believe it was his right blah-blah blah-blah blah, because--out of regard for her property and her personal freedom--he couldn't even pull down an awful poster, because he was not capable of even that much righteous violence, now the hideous realization of the nightmare had come along to test even further the limits of his enlightened omega deville watch tolera