My American Unhappiness Read Online Free PDF

realize this: they are and it would.

    That night, we eat dinner at six thirty, like we always do, and my mother is serving what she always serves on Wednesday nights: spaghetti. It has been this way since Cougar and I were young boys, spaghetti and garlic bread, six o'clock Wednesdays. It used to be my father's favorite night of the week, solely for this reason, I think, although my father once slyly intimated to me that Wednesday was also a weekly sex night for him and my mother, though I have tried to forget that for the obvious reasons.
    Tonight, my mother hardly eats a thing, though at least she sits down with us. As of late, she's taken to lying on the couch soon after she serves dinner, falling into a soft nap, and my nieces and I eat together, discussing both the intricacies of my day at a marginal cultural nonprofit, and their days as the only set of twins in the second grade. I might tell them about a grant application I am submitting to a private foundation, and, smiling at each other because they find me so unbelievably boring, they might start to giggle.
    "What?" I'll ask, making my eyes look huge and incredulous. "You're not interested in the programmatic evaluation techniques used by federally funded nonprofits?"
    The girls will giggle harder.
    Eventually, they'll tell me a story about how Miles Gregorson lost three teeth playing floor hockey in gym class, or they'll regale me with details of Marnie Finn's family vacation to Disney World and I will take absolute delight in their storytelling. Watching them build to a narrative climax, trading off the revelation of details, finishing each other's sentences, is really one of the finest moments of my day. When I am away for work, on the road overnight, or even when I am out with friends, I am always cognizant of the fact that I am missing April's and May's stories.
    Tonight, my mother is reading a copy of
Simply You
as we eat, and she interrupts April's story about Brett Wilson's missing dog and begins to read to us aloud: "Listen to this, Zeke," my mother says. "
Does it seem like you're ready for marriage, but you don't have any prospects on the horizon? Well, just like any good business executive knows the importance of cultivating contacts and nurturing networks, any woman who wants to find Mr. Right knows that she must do the
same thing. Follow these simple steps, and you might just be head over heels (or engaged!) by the end of the summer.
"
    "Mom," I say, "April was talking."
    "What does that mean?" April says. "What is head over heels?"
    "I don't get it," May says.
    "Well," my mother says, "it's the sort of quiz that might explain why Uncle Zeke is not married."
    "Aw, come on, Ma," I say. "It's for women."
    My mother continues reading.
    "Are you getting married, Uncle Zeke?" April says.
    "Oh, oh, you totally should," May says.
    "
Attractiveness, real attractiveness,
" my mother says, "
lasting attractiveness, doesn't really set in until you get to know somebody, until you admit that you're open to the possibility of a lasting relationship with somebody.
"
    "Mom," I say, "enough!"
    My mother smiles. "Okay, maybe this isn't a good time," she says.
    "It's not," I say.
    "Always so moody," my mother says.
    The meal falls into silence for a moment, the only sound the clinking of silverware and china together, the same awkward dinnertime cacophony that often plagued my own childhood as the soundtrack for my father's virulent disapproval. When he was mad at me, as he often was, he gave me the silent treatment. If he was disappointed in a sweatshirt I wore, or a paper I'd written, or a comment I'd made, or my failure to get him a birthday card, he could pretend, for weeks on end, as if I didn't exist.

    After supper, my mother wants to rest on the couch as usual. She takes her magazine to the living room, and soon I hear her asthmatic wheeze of a snore from the next room. It is not easy, I'm sure, to be the primary caregiver for two seven-year-olds when one is