Justin Kramon Read Free

Stanley always made too much food, they’d help her eat it.
    Finny’s mother ate happily, saying, “You spoil me, Stanley.
    You’re too good.” Every time. Sylvan and Finny would lie in bed with her, sampling the charred remains of Laura’s breakfast, as Stanley beamed at his family from the couch in their bedroom.
    Only Finny once said, “How could you possibly eat this?”
    “Because to me it’s the best meal in the world,” Laura said.
    “Do you get out much, Mom?” Finny asked.
    Stanley broke in. “Did you know that Henry James went to a hundred and ten dinner parties in one year alone in England?”
    “Really?” Sylvan said.
    “Yes. Or maybe he had a hundred and ten invitations. In any case, it was some kind of record. And all that time he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. The only way I can make sense of it is that he was gathering material, observing the decadence and waste of a dying society so that he could write about the great unfulfilled potential of man.”
    “Isn’t Portrait of a Lady about a lady?” Finny asked.
    “Yes,” Stanley said, looking confused. “What’s your point?”
    “You said the ‘potential of man .’”
    “Ah,” Stanley said. “When I say ‘man,’” he explained in his most professorial voice, “I mean it in the broadest sense. I am talking about all of us, collectively. I’m saying it in the way that a great man once said, ‘The effect of the law is to make men good.’” He paused long enough to give weight to this remark, then said, “Aquinas.”
    “Then why don’t you say people?” Finny asked. She knew it was just the way you said it. But still. It irked her.
    “Because it’s simpler,” Sylvan said, then looked at his father, who nodded.
    “But it’s wrong,” Finny said, her voice breaking, betraying anger. She knew it didn’t matter, but the comment stuck in her somehow.
    “Right or wrong,” Stanley said, “that is the convention.”
    “The convention is stupid,” Finny said, wanting to say more, to fight about it, to make clear how ridiculous she thought all his conventions were. She felt her family’s eyes on her, her mother’s smile like a barrier pushing her back.
    “Speaking of ladies,” Laura said, giving Finny a meaningful look, “I’m not sure you’re acting like one right now.”
    “Mom, if you had a penis, you would act like a lady.” Finny wasn’t sure what it meant, but she was so agitated that the words just spilled from her, like water from a cracked glass.
    “That’s disgusting talk,” Laura said, and Finny noticed she was sucking in little breaths, about to cry. “And we—we were having such a nice breakfast,” Laura sputtered. “Why can’t you ever just let it be when things are going nicely?”
    “Sweetheart,” Stanley said, getting up from the couch, walking over to her. “She’s nothing.”
    What he actually said was, “It’s nothing,” but for some reason Finny heard him wrong.
    Stanley put his hand on Laura’s shoulder. “Don’t you think it’s enough, Finny?” he said, holding his wife like a demonstration of all Finny had screwed up.
    “This food tastes like burnt!” Finny screamed, and stomped out of the room.
    “It doesn’t really,” she heard her brother telling her father as she walked down the hall.
    There seemed to be something about her family that Finny couldn’t take in. Or maybe it was her family who couldn’t take her in. All their agreements and rules, rituals and defenses and bargains, it was all wrapped in a fog of mystery, a haze that Finny wasn’t sure would burn off in the light of experience.
    Finny spent that afternoon in her bedroom, trying not to cry, then giving herself over to it in short, maudlin bursts. She stuffed her face into her pillow and howled, shook with tears. The thought of it, of how she looked, made her sick. If one of her parents or her brother had walked in during these brief concessions to grief, Finny probably would have hopped out the