Ernie's Ark Read Online Free PDF

like one of my daughter’s experiments, and I remember, for no reason I can unravel, since I have talked to my daughter only twice since the commencement of a labor action that has me eating Tums like peanuts all day long and half the night, that her dissertation is something about modeling. As in “being an example.” As in taking socially backward, therapeutically challenged individuals who are stuck halfway between an institution and a garden party, and bringing them into the world by baby steps with the intention of “modeling” decent, socially correct behavior without adding the stress of direct instruction.
    “That was Mom’s dissertation,” my daughter snaps at me when I point out my discovery. Then she narrows her eyes again. “My dissertation is about something else entirely.”
    For the next fifteen minutes, which pass in prickly silence, I feel—well, I don’t know how I feel. The words that come to mind are my daughter’s words, and Emily’s words before her, squishy therapy words like
vulnerable
and
exposed
. I feel the way I used to feel going shopping for shoes with my mother, afraid of meeting anyone I knew, afraid of their knowing how my mother shopped: get the cheapest pair one size ahead, after which I would spend three-quarters of the school year goose-stepping to keep the shoes on.
    “All right, then. What
is
your dissertation about?” I ask, believing I know the answer already. Her dissertation is about me. About my failure as a father. About my meeting in Tokyo that, unfortunately, coincided with her mother’s funeral. I appear indisguise, of course, as a modality or paradigm shift or some other grad-school ga-blah. For a moment I fear she might have brought it with her, that the purpose of the trip is to corner me into reading an analysis of my fatherly absence, how it turned her into a person who can’t make anything easy, not a simple phone call, not an announcement of marriage, not the caretaking arrangements at her mother’s grave site, not the ordering of a truly hideous grilled cheese.
    “I’m not at liberty to discuss my dissertation,” my daughter says loftily. “It’s groundbreaking stuff. I’ve been advised to keep it secret.”
    I don’t like secrets. I drink the rest of my coffee, which tastes faintly of dish soap, and get up. “You done?”
    She gets up. We have both eaten everything on our plate, like two kids on a first date displacing their other appetites. It strikes me that my daughter and I must be experiencing something like that kind of ferocity, an intent to devour each another in ways we have yet to fathom. I leave a twenty on the table, ostentatiously, an aggressive show of generosity. I learned a long time ago that the best defeat is to give the enemy exactly what he has asked for in a way that makes him sorry to have wanted it. “A twenty?” she says. “That’s a twelve-dollar tip.”
    I saunter to the register and pay the bill again, then tell her, “Actually, it’s a twenty-dollar tip.”
    Outside she stops me. “That was insulting, Daddy. The woman’s not a charity case.”
    “I was being nice,” I tell her.
    “No you weren’t,” my daughter says. “You were making a show.” She follows me to the car, steaming. “It’s about interrogating our assumptions,” she adds. “My dissertation. That’s all I can say.”
    Words like this usually go in one ear and float into the oblivion of my subconscious, emerging at odd moments, for instance at a cocktail party or an annual meeting. In this case I do not wish to understand what assumptions my daughter is interrogating. Not now, not at a party six months hence.
    She stops in front of my new car with her arms folded, assessing the license plate, which reads PAPRMKR .
    “You don’t make paper, Daddy,” she says coolly. “They do. Or did.” Then she gets in on the driver’s side. “May I drive?” Of course she is testing me.
    “Sure,” I say, tossing the keys in after her. We’re