Free Bullet Park by John Cheever

outside the room seemed like some cavern in the sea.
    “Do you have any homework,” Nailles asked.
    “A little,” Tony said.
    “Well I think you’d better do it before you watch television,” Nailles said. On the tube some cartoon figures were dancing a jig.
    “I’ll just watch to the end of this show,” Tony said. “Then I’ll do my homework.”
    “I think you’d better do your homework now,” Nailles said.
    “But Mummy said I could see this show,” Tony said.
    “How long has it been,” said Nailles, “that you’ve asked permission to watch television?” He knew that in dealing with his son sarcasm would only multiply their misunderstandings but he was tired and headstrong. “You never ask permission. You come home at half past three, pull your chair up in front of the set and watch until supper. After supper you settle down in front of that damned engine and stay there until nine. If you don’t do your homework how can you expect to get passing marks in school?”
    “I learn a lot of things on television,” Tony said shyly. “I learn about geography and animals and the stars.”
    “What are you learning now?” Nailles asked.
    The cartoon figures were having a tug of war. A large bird cut the rope with his beak and all the figures fell down.
    “This is different,” Tony said. “This isn’t educational. Some of it is.”
    “Oh leave him alone, Eliot, leave him alone,” Nellie called from the kitchen. Her voice was soft and clear. Nailles wandered back into the kitchen.
    “But don’t you think,” he asked, “that from half pastthree to nine with a brief interlude for supper is too much time to spend in front of a television set?”
    “It is a lot of time,” Nellie said, “but it’s terribly important to him right now and I think he’ll grow out of it.”
    “I know it’s terribly important,” Nailles said. “I realize that. When I took him Christmas shopping he wasn’t interested in anything but getting back to the set. He didn’t care about buying presents for you or his cousins or his aunts and uncles. All he wanted to do was to get back to the set. He was just like an addict. I mean he had withdrawal symptoms. It was just like me at cocktail hour but I’m thirty-four years old and I try to ration my liquor and my cigarettes.”
    “He isn’t quite old enough to start rationing things,” Nellie said.
    “He won’t go coasting, he won’t play ball, he won’t do his homework, he won’t even take a walk because he might miss a program.”
    “I think he’ll grow out of it,” Nellie said.
    “But you don’t grow out of an addiction. You have to make some exertion or have someone make an exertion for you. You just don’t outgrow serious addictions.”
    He went back across the dark hall with its shifty submarine lights and outside the noise of rain. On the tube a man with a lisp, dressed in a clown suit, was urging his friends to have Mummy buy them a streamlined, battery-operated doll carriage. He turned on a light and saw how absorbed his son was in the lisping clown.
    “Now I’ve been talking with your mother,” he said, “and we’ve decided that we have to do something aboutyour television time.” (The clown was replaced by the cartoon of an elephant and a tiger dancing the waltz.) “I think an hour a day is plenty and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which hour you want.”
    Tony had been threatened before but either his mother’s intervention or Nailles’s forgetfulness had saved him. At the thought of how barren, painful and meaningless the hours after school would be the boy began to cry.
    “Now crying isn’t going to do any good,” Nailles said. The elephant and the tiger were joined by some other animals in their waltz.
    “Skip it,” Tony said. “It isn’t your business.”
    “You’re my son,” Nailles said, “and it’s my business to see you do at least what’s expected of you. You were tutored last summer in order to get promoted and if