American Mommy

In 1980 I was twenty-eight years old, in the middle of a long-distance affair with a writer who’d redeemed his general craziness several years previously by winning a National Book Award. In November of that year, the writer wrote me a long despondent letter. The letter is buried somewhere deep in a box in my closet and I can’t help wishing now that the writer had lived up to his early promise so that like Joyce Maynard, I could auction off his letters for a tidy sum of cash. But I digress.

Bob was in despair over Ronald Reagan, the inevitable break up of a world he valued, presaged – he was convinced – by Reagan’s election. I think he may actually have used the word "Götterdämmerung."

There was so much I was oblivious to in those days. There’s so much I’m oblivious to today. I keep up with the newspaper – it’s something to read over breakfast – but truth be told current events are about as meaningless to me as the table of begats in a dusty bible. Who, what, when, where, how – who the fuck cares? The only important question is why and this the talking heads on the six o’clock news refuse to address. Which is the reason I’ve always preferred narrative to didactic – the story is meaningful, the events are not.

I really don’t know why so many of my friends are jumping up and down today, singing "Ding dong, the witch is dead." I only know that there’s something deeply creepy about the fact that the closest relationship in this adult male world leader’s life was with a woman he presumably fucked but needed to call "Mommy."

Ben caught half an hour of Gore Vidal on Janeane Garofalo’s liberal talk radio show the other afternoon. Gore Vidal is in even deeper despair than my erstwhile writer friend over the decline of America. Vidal has the advantage of a classical education. He’s well versed in pendulum swings. He’s in a position to make analogies not with Teutonic comic book prototypes but with actual history, early experiments with the republican model like Athens and Rome. Vidal said that while he knew – inevitably – it was coming, he never thought he’d live to see the erosion of civil liberties that have taken place in the last four years under Ashcroft and Rumsfield. This registered with me. I’ve always known in some deep way that I was living in the declining years of a peculiar zeigeist but I always thought decaying civilizations would afford opportunities for way more fun. Kinky sex and drugs. That kind of stuff.

I wonder what terms of endearment Dubya applies to Miss Laura when he’s sitting around Crawford in his underwear, watching baseball, signing whatever they put in front of him, nostalgic for the days of Lone Star longnecks and shorting energy stocks?

In other news, Ben and I had a screaming fight in the middle of last night. I probably owe him an apology – I was way nasty. But honest to God, I am stretched just about to the limits of my endurance here. Remember, I’m the girl who in my once-every-three-month-concentration-camp dreams tells the Nazis: just shoot me now, let’s get it over with. I woke up with my usual insomnia around midnight and Robin and Kodiak were still awake. Kodiak had brought over Grand Theft Auto. The kids were crashing, raping and pillaging with great and noisy gusto.

"Why didn’t you put them to sleep?" I screamed. "I can’t do everything."

The truth is that Ben is a lousy wife. No doubt because he hates the sociological niche and who can blame him? It sucks being a domestic servant. But I’m the one who’s provided the financial support for the family for the past decade, and damn it, it’s taken every ounce of energy to keep that boat afloat. I can’t do it and still run a household. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. But what are my options here when Ben is doing such a miserable job at it?