The Hotel New Hampshire

“I’m not going to clean up my language. I’m going to aim my language wherever I want,” she told me. “It’s the one weapon I’ve got. And I’m only going to grow when I’m ready to, or when it’s time,” she told Lilly. “And I’m not ever going to be like you, Frank. No one else will ever be like you,” she added, affectionately. “And I’m not going to be a bear,” she told Susie. “You sweat like a pig in that stupid costume, you get your rocks off making people uneasy, but that’s because you’re uneasy just being you. Well, I’m easy being me,” Franny said.

“Lucky you,” Frank said.

“Yes, lucky you, Franny,” Lilly said.

“So what if you’re beautiful?” said Susie. “You’re also a bitch.”

“From now on, I’m mainly a mother,” Franny said. “I’m going to take care of you fuckers—you, you, and you,” Franny said, pointing to Frank and Lilly and me. “Because Mother’s not here to do it— and Iowa Bob is gone. The shit detectors are gone,” Franny said, “so I’m left to detect it. I point out the shit that’s my role. Father doesn’t know what’s going on,” Franny said, and we nodded—Frank, Lilly, and I; even Susie the bear nodded. We knew this was true: Father was blind, or he soon would be.

“Even so, I don’t need you to mother me,” Frank said to Franny, but he didn’t look so sure.

Lilly went and put her head in Franny’s lap; she cried there—comfortably, I thought. Franny, of course, knew that I loved her—hopelessly, and too much—and so I didn’t have to make a gesture or say anything to her.

“Well, I don’t need a sixteen-year-old straightening me out,” said Susie the bear, but her bear’s head was off; she held it in her big paws. Her ravaged complexion, her hurt eyes, her too-small mouth betrayed her. She put her bear’s head back on; that was her only authority.

The student, Miss Miscarriage, serious and well intentioned, seemed at a loss for words. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Say it in German,” Frank encouraged her.

“Just spit it out any way you can,” Franny said.

“Well,” Fehlgeburt said. “That passage. That lovely passage, that ending—to The Great Gatsby—that’s what I mean,” she said.

“Get to it, Fehlgeburt,” Franny said. “Spit it out.”

“Well,” Fehlgeburt said. “I don’t know, but—somehow—it makes me want to go to the United States. I mean, it’s against my politics—your country—I know that. But that ending, all of it— somehow—is just so beautiful. It makes me want to be there. I mean, there’s no sense to it, but I would just like to be in the United States.”

“So you think you’d like to be there?” Franny said. “Well, I wish we’d never left.”

“Can we go back, Franny?” Lilly asked.

“We’ll have to ask Father,” Frank said.

“Oh boy,” Franny said. And I could see her imagining that moment, waltzing a little reality into Father’s dreams.

“Your country, if you’ll forgive me,” said one of the other radicals-the one they called simply Arbeiter (Arbeiter means “worker” in German), “your country is really a criminal place,” Arbeiter said. “If you’ll forgive me,” he added, “your country is the ultimate triumph of corporate creativity, which means it is a country controlled by the group –thinking of corporations. These corporations are without humanity because there is no one personally responsible for their use of power; a corporation is like a computer with profit as its source of energy—and profit as its necessary fuel. The United States is—you’ll forgive me—quite the worst country in the world for a humanist to live in, I think.”

“Fuck what you think,” Franny said. “You raving asshole,” she said. “You sound like a computer.”

“You think like a transmission,” Frank told Arbeiter. “Four forward gears—at predetermined speeds. One speed for reverse.”

Arbeiter stared. His English was a little plodding—his mind, it would occur to me, later, was about as versatile as a lawn mower.

“And about as poetic,” Susie the bear would say. No one liked Arbeiter—not even the impressionable Miss Miscarriage. Her weakness—among the radicals—was her fondness for literature, especially for the romance that is American literature. (“Your silly major, dear,” Schwanger always chided her.) But Fehlgeburt’s fondness for literature was her strength—to us children. It was the romantic part of her that wasn’t quite dead; at least, not yet. In time, God forgive me, I would help to kill it.

“Literature is for dreamers,” Old Billig would tell poor Fehlgeburt. Old Billig the radical, I mean. Old Billig the whore liked dreams; she told Frank once that dreams were all she liked—her dreams and her “mementos.”

“Study economics, dear,” Schwanger told Fehlgeburt—that’s what Miss Pregnant told Miss Miscarriage.

“Human usefulness,” Arbeiter lectured to us, “is directly related to the proportion of the whole population involved in decisions.”

“In the power,” Old Billig corrected him.

“In the powerful decisions,” Arbeiter said—the two men stabbing like hummingbirds at a single small blossom.

“Bullfuck,” Franny said. Arbeiter’s and Old Billig’s English was so bad, it was easy to say things like “Take it in the ear” to them all the time—they didn’t get it. And despite my vow to clean up my language, I was sorely tempted to say these things to them; I had to content myself, vicariously, by listening to Franny speak to them.

“The eventual race war, in America,” Arbeiter told us, “will be misunderstood. It will actually be a war of class stratification.”

“When you fart, Arbeiter,” Franny asked him, “do the seals in the zoo stop swimming?”

The other radicals were rarely a part of our group discussions. One spent himself on the typewriters; the other, on the single automobile that the Symposium on East-West Relations owned among themselves: all six of them, they could just fit. The mechanic who labored over the decrepit car—the ever-ailing car, useless in any getaway, we imagined, and probably never to be called upon for a getaway, Father thought—was a sullen, smudge-faced young man in coveralls and a navy-blue streetcar conductor’s cap. He belonged to the union and worked the main-line Mariahilfer Strasse Strassenbahn all night. He looked sleepy and angry every day, and he clanked with tools. Appropriately, he was called Schraubenschlüssel—a Schraubenschlüssel is a wrench. Frank liked to roll Schraubenschlüssel’s name off his tongue, to show off, but Franny and Lilly and I insisted on the translation. We called him Wrench.

“Hi, Wrench,” Franny would say to him, as he lay under the car, cursing. “Hope you’re keeping your mind clean, Wrench,” Franny would say. Wrench knew no English, and the only thing we knew about Wrench’s private life was that he had once asked Susie the bear for a date.

“I mean, virtually nobody asks me out,” Susie said. “What an asshole.”

“What an asshole,” Franny repeated.

“Well, he’s never actually seen me, you know,” Susie said.

“Does he know you’re female?” Frank asked.

“Jesus God, Frank,” Franny said.

“Well, I was just curious,” Frank said.

“That Wrench is a real weirdo, I can tell,” Franny said. “Don’t go out with him, Susie,” Franny advised the bear.

“Are you kidding?” Susie the bear said. “Honey, I don’t go out. With men.”

This seemed to settle almost passively at Franny’s feet, but I could see Frank edging uncomfortably near to, and then away from, its presence.

“Susie is a lesbian, Franny,” I told Franny, when we were alone.

“She didn’t exactly say that,” Franny said.