Bad Connections by Joyce Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

he was soon on intimate terms with the waiters in our favorite Szechuan restaurant, who put cherries in his cokes and plied him with fortune cookies. Even so he yearned for Burger King and a power struggle developed between us, which he won.
    After a few nights of concession, I went back to standing on line at the supermarket after work and home cooking accompanied by the shrieks and grunts of the Flintstones.
    As delightful as small children are, they are not necessarily the best companions for adults. Our tastes and preoccupations are not the same. I had, for example, no appreciation for the monsters that were Matthew’s passion at the time. As much as he sought my opinions as to their respective merits, I could tell him only that I preferred the elegance of Dracula to the essential klutziness of Frankenstein and felt total indifference as to Hulk. This was my unchanging position on the subject.
    â€œBut what about Godzilla?” he asked me one evening for the forty-first time as I brooded upon my life as a single parent, my accumulation of debts, my suspicion that Roberta was as firmly fixed in Conrad’s life as ever.
    â€œI’m afraid I just don’t think about him at all.”
    â€œSo you like Hulk more?”
    â€œSure,” I said.
    â€œYou’re not even listening, Mom! You’re not even listening! You said you didn’t like Hulk last week.”
    His small face trembled with hurt and indignation and I gathered him in my arms. “Listen,” I said, rubbing my cheek against his silky hair, “I’ve got things on my mind.”
    â€œWhat things?”
    â€œNothing you’d understand, honey.”
    â€œWell, I’ve got a right to know everything you’re thinking because you’re my mother.”
    â€œNo,” I said firmly, “nobody has that right about anybody else.”
    â€œYou wanna know what I’m thinking?” he offered.
    â€œIf you want to tell me.”
    â€œWell, I’m thinking that you’re thinking that Conrad isn’t your best friend enough. Otherwise he’d have more sleepovers at our house.”
    I hastily abandoned my introspection, got out a monster comic and read it to him until Conrad arrived, on time for a change. “Oh Conrad!” Matthew said, running up and giving him a little kiss. “What on earth are you doing here so early?”
    I remember it was a Friday night in October and I’d been living on Eighty-sixth Street a little over a month. Conrad was just back from a trip and seemed particularly cheerful, more relaxed than I’d seen him for a while. He insisted on taking over the reading of the comic, which he read with far more dramatic effect than I had ever attempted, and afterward he agreed to be Frankenstein for ten minutes and chased Matthew around the apartment while Matthew fended him off with the plant-mister.
    I sat in the living room as the chase went on, listening to Conrad’s heavy footsteps and Matthew’s light, running ones, his screams of delight. I felt an odd sadness, a suspicious teariness of the kind that comes over me sometimes when I watch reruns of The Wizard of Oz or Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street. It is the theme of reunion or reintegration that I identify with so strongly, the orphan coming home at last. I remember thinking, “Why can’t things be like this?”—which was absurd, because things were indeed “like this” at that particular moment. It was real life I was watching this time.
    There is no doubt in my mind that what I was experiencing just then was an attack of nostalgia for the nuclear family—that it was this outmoded configuration I wished to impose on my relationship with Conrad. Despite the lessons of my recent history, I was only waiting for the opportunity to make the attempt again. It was not so much an image of traditional marriage and family that I had but one of an idealized unity—a stubborn