My Life as a Man by Philip Roth Page A

Pole, ” though simultaneously she was convinced that he was lurking in the neighborhood, ready to crush her skull with a rock if she should tell any of her little friends the dring he had done to her before disappearing. For years afterward—even as a grown woman, even after her breakdown—whenever she went to the Loop at Christmastime, she would wonder if he might not be one of the Santa Clauses standing outside the department stores ringing a little bell at the shoppers. In fact, having decided in the December of her eighteenth year to run away from Skokie with Ketterer, she had approached the Santa Claus outside Goldblatt ’ s and said to him, “ I ’ m getting married. I don ’ t care about you any more. I ’ m marrying a man who stands six feet two inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds and if you ever so much as follow me again he ’ ll break every bone in your body. ”
    “ I still don ’ t know which was more deranged, ” said Lydia, “ pretending that that poor bewildered Santa Claus was my father, or imagining that the oaf I was about to marry was a man. ”
    Incest, the violent marriage, then what she called her “ flirtation ” with madness. A month after Lydia had divorced Ketterer on grounds of physical cruelty, her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been readying herself for all her life. During the week the woman lay under the oxygen tent in the hospital, Lydia refused to visit her. “ I told my aunts that I had put in all the hours I owed t o the cause. If she were dying, what help could I be in preventing it? And if she were faking again, I refused to participate. ” And when the mother did expire at long last, Lydia ’ s grief, or relief, or delight, or guilt, took the form of torpor. Nothing seemed worth bothering to do. She fed and clothed Monica, her six-year-old daughter, but that was as far as she went. She did not change her own clothes, make the bed, or wash the dishes; when she opened a can to eat something she invariably discovered that she was eating the cat ’ s tinned food. Then she began to write on the walls with her lipstick. The Sunday after the funeral, when Ketterer came to take Monica away for the day, he found the child in a chair, all dressed and ready to go, and the walls of the apartment covered with questions, printed in big block letters with a lipstick: WHY NOT? YOU TOO? WHY SHOULD THEY? SAYS WHO? WE WILL? Lydia was still at her breakfast, which consisted that morning of a bowl full of kitty litter, covered with urine and a sliced candle.
    “ Oh, how he loved that, ” Lydia told me. “ You could just see his mind, or whatever you ’ d call what he ’ s got in there, turning over. He couldn ’ t bear, you see, that I had divorced him, he couldn ’ t bear that a judge in a courtroom had heard what a brute he was. He couldn ’ t bear losing his little punching bag. ‘ You think you ’ re so smart, you go to art museums and you think that gives you a right to boss your husband around— ’ and then he ’ d pick me up and throw me at the wall. He was always telling me how I ought to be down on my knees for saving me from the houseful of old biddies, how I ought to worship him for taking somebody who was practically an orphan and giving her a nice home and a baby and money to spend going to art museums. Once, you see, during the seven years, I had gone off to the Art Institute with my cousin Bob, the bachelor high-school teacher. He took me to the art museum and when we were all alone in one of the empty rooms, he exposed himself to me. He said he just wanted me to look at him, that was all. He said he didn ’ t want me to touch it. So I didn ’ t; I didn ’ t do anything. Just like with my father —I felt sorry for him. There I was, married to an ape, and here was Cousin Bob, the one my father used to call ‘ the little grind. ’ Quite a distinguished family I come from. Anyway: Ketterer broke down the door, saw the