Let’s Not Get Carried Away Here
From a short story, “Good Neighbors,” by Jonathan Franzen, in the New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue:
[pg.81-82] He [their son Joey] was no older than eleven or twelve when, at the dinner table, according to Patty, he accidentally or deliberately called his father “son.”
“Oh-ho, did that not go over well with Walter,” she told the other mothers.
“That’s the kind of thing teen-agers all say to each other now,” the mothers said. “It’s probably a rap thing.”
“That’s what Joey said,” Patty told them. “He said it was just a word and not even a bad word. And, of course, Walter begged to differ. And I’m sitting there thinking, Wal-ter, Wal-ter, don’t get into it, point-less to ar-gue, but, no, he has to try to explain how, for example, even though ‘boy’ is not a bad word, you still can’t say it to a grown man, especially not to a black man, but, of course, the whole problem with Joey is that he refuses to recognize any distinction between children and grownups, and so it ends with Walter saying that there won’t be any dessert for him, which Joey then claims he doesn’t even want, in fact he doesn’t even like dessert very much, and I’m sitting there thinking, Wal-ter, Wal-ter, don’t get into it, but Walter can’t help it—he has to try to prove to Joey that, in fact, Joey really loves dessert. But Joey won’t accept any of Walter’s evidence. He’s totally lying through his teeth, of course, but he claims he’s only ever taken seconds of dessert because it’s conventional to, not because he actually likes it, and poor Walter, who can’t stand to be lied to, says, ‘O.K., if you don’t like it, then how about a month without dessert?,’ and I’m thinking, Oh, Wal-ter, Wal-ter, this isn’t going to end well, because Joey’s response is ‘I will go a year without dessert. I will never eat dessert again, except to be polite at somebody else’s house,’ which, bizarrely enough, is a credible threat—he’s so stubborn he could probably do it. And I’m like, ‘Whoa, guys, time out, dessert is an important food group, let’s not get carried away here,’ which immediately undercuts Walter’s authority, and, since the whole argument has been about his authority, I manage to undo anything positive that he’s accomplished.”
