Interstate by Stephen Dixon Page A

for your age, lean, one of those going-to-outlive-us-all vigors and physiques, a little less hair than from the photographs of around the last time I saw you, or a few years before—you didn’t take any in there, did you? and I’m not being facetious either—in most ways you don’t seem to have aged a day in twenty years,” and he says “Which ways have I, outside of my hair?” and she says “Your elbows, nobody can do anything to conceal aging elbows,” and he says “But I’m wearing a jacket and long-sleeved shirt,” and she says “I know, so maybe your humor and quick-wittedness have suffered a little too—I’m not serious,” and he says “Listen, don’t kid me, I’m just an old blowhard now, which when you think of it is not too far from being a loud fart, excuse me, must be the beer and just seeing you which is making me talk to my daughter so sillily like this, though actually talking to you alone here—before with them, Saul and Glen, I was just feeling better than I have in years—but with you now I feel less stupid, even half intelligent which I almost never feel, than I have since I went to prison, as much as I tried to keep and even advance my mind in there, but here the words, even, that have eluded me—like ‘eluded’—or I’ve simply forgotten, and just speaking them—the fluidity in the way I speak—and ‘fluidity,’ for christsake—it must be that among other things you’re the first really brainy person I’ve talked to in twenty years, at least one brimming with mental nimbleness and ideas and intelligent intelligible speech, if that’s how long it’s been since I went in, or that speaking to someone like you, even one’s daughter who I’m supposed to, I suppose, posture and lord over, that if this person—me—had something of a mind before, generates or regenerates something like it in him, but you want to know something?—and most of that was confusing, wasn’t it?” and she says “Some, but what ‘do I want to know something?’” and he says “And cut me off if I’m running on too much, and I am but if you think it’s just irritating boring stuff, but you said I should stay if I wanted to say something to you,” and she says “I said stay because there may be things, with the implication being it’s been so many years, you only want to talk over with me,” and he says “Anyway, my darling child, and you’re not getting angry with me, are you?” and she says “No, or only a little, but I’m always a bit of a grouch,” and he says “Anyway,” and takes her hands and rubs them on his cheek and kisses them, “now that I’ve seen you again—” and starts crying on her hands and she pulls them away and wipes them and says “Dad, please don’t, it’s not that it’s embarrassing for a public place, although it is in a way, or that I hate or disapprove of seeing you cry,” and he says “But you don’t know what this means to me—no, that’s too baloney a thing to say, and when I said it I wasn’t talking about just holding and kissing your hands,” and she says “I know, but what is it you want to say, because really I can’t understand you when you’re choking and coughing up tears and phlegm,” and he says “I’ve killed it for ever seeing you again, haven’t I, with all my whining and crying and sentimentalizing?” and she says “We’ll see each other again, you heard Glen,” and he says “But when I asked one or the other of you when, you went into this double- or just avoiding talk,” and she says “We’ll call, we’ll write, this is Convention City now so before you know it we’ll be flying in again or Glen will and he’ll call and if he