‘Sorry,’ my father said, staring at Barbra.
‘Ditto,’ said my mother as she gave me a weird nod and left with the wine dregs.
My mother had been drinking way more than normal, it seemed. I wanted to tell Barbra all the ways in which my parents hated each other.
‘Lots of leftovers,’ said my father, staring at the drenched Styrofoam containers.
Abigail licked her lips clean of sauce. Barbra slurped her last bit of wine.
‘Use a napkin,’ my father spat. ‘Come on, Abigail. You’re too old for this.’
I couldn’t look directly at Barbra. She actually wanted to study literature here? She was eighteen years old. I knew that kids in Israel at eighteen all went straight to the army. Or maybe they’d already done a year of the army? I actually couldn’t imagine Barbra in high school. I literally could not imagine her sitting at a desk. I couldn’t imagine her with a gun either. She was a fucking giant. She would distract the whole squad. Her sweat stains would discombobulate them.
‘Abigail, stop!’ my father yelled, stacking the takeout containers, ruining the remains.
‘Just let her wipe her face how she wants to,’ I said.
‘Barbra, wanna come up to my room now?’ Abigail said. She ignored my dad and talked to Barbra exactly like I wished I could.
My legs burned. She was now staring at me. It felt like, for a moment, she knew what I was thinking. What was I thinking? That she was lax in the mind? That our table was lopsided from the weight of her tits? That was fucked. I was fucked. My parents were fucked.
All of a sudden, I felt illiterate.
As if this orphan from Israel was mind-murdering me.
My father would say, Stop exaggerating! Everything in you is exaggeration.
But I felt like the hole had already been dug. I sat at the table with my feet staked in muck.
§
One night later, I finished The Metamorphosis. I’d started on Letter to the Father when I heard a scratch at the door. It was two a.m.
‘Go back to bed,’ I whispered. ‘Put on your headphones.’
Abigail sometimes came to my room if she woke up in the middle of the night.
Letter to the Father, I realized, solidified the thesis about Kafka that he was repressed by his dad.
It is as if a person were a prisoner, Kafka wrote in the letter about living in his father’s home, and he had not only the intention to escape but the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure dome.
It occurred to me, too, that that was what the cockroach was – this kind of entrapment and a way to feel pleasure: an attempt to escape the pain in your
head and transfer it down the tracks of your body. Kafka felt that his father kept him in a kind of a prison when all he really wanted was his father’s confidence or conviction – or whatever it was – to be smoothly, pleasurably passed down to him limb to limb.
I heard another scratch.
‘Oh God, just come in.’
Kafka did not want his father’s cruelty in him.
My door opened. It was her. Not my sister. No definable expression. Her T-shirt hung like a dress to her knees.
‘What?’ I said, immediately paranoid.
Barbra leaned back against my door. The door clicked.
‘What?’ I repeated.