Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

out he couldn’t. He and my grandmother missed their grandchildren too much. Paris proved no substitute for us. In six months, Papa and Mama sailed back.
    A donnybrook ensued. Papa and Mama wanted to move back in with us, and my parents (and their analysts) would not let them. Papa and Mama were too pre-Freudian to understand all this, and they never got over the hurt. My mother found them another West Side palace (with north light), a short walk away, but Papa and Mama refused to forgive her. Nor did they forgive Paris for having changed in fifty years. Time was supposed to stand still. Alas, it never does.
    So I am fifty and Papa and Mama are dead. Tomorrow I am going to lunch with my father to see how much I got wrong in this opening chapter.

2.
    How My Parents Were and “All That David Copperfield Kind of Crap”
    If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.
    â€”J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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Fortunate are those of us who are daughters born into knowledgeable, ambitious families where no sons are born...
    â€”Tithe Olsen, Silences
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    It’s Thursday and I’ve made a date for lunch with my father to verify “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”
    â€œYour mother doesn’t remember anything,” my father says, “but I do.”
    Now, you have to know that my father is the kind of guy who never has lunch with me alone because he thinks my mother might be jealous. If we meet during the week—which may happen every seventeen years or so—we snatch lunch at a greasy spoon like rushed adulterers. But this time history is at stake. My father takes a proprietary interest in my literary career—everything from moving books around in bookstores (so that Fear of Flying or Fanny covers the latest from Stephen King, Danielle Steel, or John Grisham), to subscribing to Publishers Weekly (and worriedly reporting on the latest deep-discounting trends), to wringing his hands over my nasty reviews.
    â€œWhy do they call you a pornographer, darling?” he’ll ask, actually, at times, informing me of a shafting I’ve missed. I try to avoid reading reviews—good or bad—and my father, in his solicitude, has actually brought some of the more apoplectic ones to my attention.
    Why, why, why? he questions like Job. His purgatory is to have a daughter who is castigated in the press every few years. At this point, I think it hurts him even more than it hurts me. I want to call up all the reviewers and say: “Look, my dad is eighty-one and a nice guy—give him a break.” (My students at City College in the sixties and early seventies used to do that to me: “If you give me an F, my mother will have a heart attack. And besides, I’ll end up in ’Nam.” Special pleading. And often, it worked.)
    So we are to meet in my father’s showroom at 12:30. But it’s pouring in New York, so the cab ride, from Sixty-ninth to Twenty-fifth Street, takes nearly forty minutes and I am, as usual, late.
    My father is dancing around his showroom with great excitement and impatience, wanting all his staff to meet the famous daughter. He takes me on a tour of the “new line”: “antique” dolls, ceramic tureens and teapots shaped like pumpkins and aubergines, decorative plates in the shapes of sunflowers and asparagi, roses, and onions. Years pass between visits to this showroom, and I am always astonished by what my father and brother-in-law have wrought—as curious in its way as making books out of a blank piece of paper and a pen. The way people make money in America! A Depression-era barabanchik can become a millionaire making “antique” dolls and selling them via the home shopping channel. What