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| That's what he got me for graduationI really suffered in that familyA really benighted familyI lived in a dark place with those peopleYou get shunted aside by your father, Nathan, you wind up a touchy fellowI had a brother we had to put in an institutionYou didn't know thatWe weren't allowed even to mention his nameFour years older than meHe would go into wild rages and bite his hands until they would bleedHe would scream like a coyote until my parents quieted him downAt school they asked if I had brothers or sisters and I wrote 'None' While I was at college, my parents signed some permission form for the nuthouse and they gave Eddie a lobotomy and he went into a coma and diedCan you imagine? Tells me to shine shoes on Market Street outside the courthouse--that is a father's advice to a son
"So what'd you do chanel clearance instead?"
"I'm a psychiatristIt's your father I got my inspiration fromHe wore a white coat but he was a chiropodist
"Whenever I came with the guys to your house, your mother always put out a bowl of fruit and your father always said to me, 'What is your idea on this subject, Ira? What is your idea on that subject, Ira?' PeachesI never saw an apple in my houseMy mother is ninety-sevenI got her in a home nowShe sits there crying in a chair all day long but I honestly don't believe she's any more depressed than she was when I was a kidI assume your father is deadYours?"
"Mine couldn't wait to dieFailure went to his head in a really big way And still I had no idea who Ira was or what he was talking about, because, as much as I was remembering that day of all that had once happened, far more was so beyond recall that it authentic hermes might never have happened, regardless of how many Ira Posners stood face to face with me attesting otherwiseAs best I could tell, when Ira was in my house being inspired by my father I could as well not have been bornI had run out of the power to remember even faintly my father's asking Ira what he thought while Ira was eating a piece of our fruitIt was one of those things that get torn out of you and thrust into oblivion just because they didn't matter enoughAnd yet what I had missed completely took root in Ira and changed his life
So you don't have to look much further than Ira and me to see why we go through life with a generalized sense that everybody is wrong except usAnd since we don't just forget things because they don't matter but also forget things because they matter too much--because each of us remembers and ladies omega watches forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint--it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomaniaBut then nobody really bothers to send in their fifty bucks for a forty-fifth high school reunion so as to turn up and stage a protest against the other guy's sense of the-way-it-was; the truly important thing, the supreme delight of the afternoon, is simply finding that you haven't yet made it onto the "In Memoriam" page
"How long is your father dead?" Ira asked meA long time," I replied"To whom? To him? I don't think soTo the dead," said Ira, "it's a drop in the bucket chanel jumbo bag Just then, from directly behind me, I heard Mendy Gurlik saying to someone, "Whoja jerk off over?"
"Lorraine," a second man repliedWho else?" said Mendy
"Selma? I didn't realize that," Mendy said"I'm surprised to hear thatNo, I never wanted to fuck SelmaFor me it was always twirlersWatch 'em practicing up on the field after school and then go home and beat offCocoa-colored pancake makeupYou notice something? The guys on the whole don't look too bad, a lot of them work out, but the girls, you knowno, a forty-fifth reunion is not the best place to come looking for ass
"True, true," said the other man, who spoke softly and seemed not to have found in the occasion quite the nostalgic license that Mendy had, "time has not been kind to the women
"You know who's dead? Bert and Utty," Mendy saidThank God I get the balenciaga bag test |
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