She is shocked, and also afraid to look at him. As he turns the page, he's describing a dessert whose name he cannot remember but which arrived at the table in flames. She feels utterly bewildered. This is who her father is: someone tickled by the existence of sushi. Someone who takes pictures inside a restaurant. Her father is cheesy. Even his handsomeness, she thinks, looking at one of the few photos in which he appears, is of a certain harmlessly generic sort, the handsomeness of a middle-aged male model in the department-store insert of the Sunday Inquirer. Has she only imagined him as a monster? His essential lesson, she always believed, was this: There are many ways for you to transgress, and most you will not recognize until after committing them. But is it she who invented this lesson? At the least, she met him halfway, she bought in to it. Not just as a child but all through adolescence and into adulthood--until this very moment. She realized now that Allison does not buy in to it, that she must not have for years, and that's why Allison doesn't fight with their father or refuse to talk to him for long stretches. Why bother? Hannah always assumed Allison was bullied into her paternal devotion, but no--it is Hannah who has seen his anger as much bigger than it ever was.
( Curtis Sittenfeld )
[ The Man of My Dreams ]
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