Free American Pastoral by Philip Roth Page B

always put out a bowl of fruit and your father always said to me, 'What is your idea on this subject, Ira? What is your idea on that subject, Ira?' Peaches. Plums. Nectarines. Grapes. I never saw an apple in my house. My mother is ninety-seven. I got her in a home now. She sits there crying in a chair all day long but I honestly don't believe she's any more depressed than she was when I was a kid. I assume your father is dead." "Yes. Yours?" "Mine couldn't wait to die. Failure went to his head in a really big way." And still I had no idea who Ira was or what he was talking about, because, as much as I was remembering that day of all that had paradise remembered once happened, far more was so beyond recall that it might never have happened, regardless of how many Ira Posners stood face to face with me attesting otherwise. As best I could tell, when Ira was in my house being inspired by my father I could as well not have been born. I had run out of the power to remember even faintly my father's asking Ira what he thought while Ira was eating a piece of our fruit. It was one of those things that get torn out of you and thrust into oblivion just because they didn't matter enough. And yet what I had missed completely took root in Ira and changed his life.
    So you don't have to look much further than Ira and me to see why we go through life with a generalized sense that everybody is wrong except us. And since we don't just forget things because they don't matter but also forget things because they matter too much—because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania. But then nobody really bothers to send in their fifty bucks for a forty-fifth high school reunion so as to turn up and stage a protest against the other guy's sense of the-way-it-was; the truly important thing, the supreme delight of the afternoon, is simply finding that you haven't yet made it onto the "In Memoriam" page.
    "How long is your father dead?" Ira asked me. "Nineteen sixty-nine. Twenty-six years. A long time," I replied. "To whom? To him? I don't think so. To the dead," said Ira, "it's a drop in the bucket." Just then, from directly behind me, I heard Mendy Gurlik saying to someone, "Whoja jerk off over?" "Lorraine," a second man replied. "Sure. Everyone did. Me too. Who else?" said Mendy. "Diane." "Right. Diane. Absolutely. Who else?" "Selma." "Selma? I didn't realize that," Mendy said. "I'm surprised to hear that. No, I never wanted to fuck Selma. Too short. For me it was always twirlers. Watch 'em practicing up on the field after school and then go home and beat off. The pancake makeup. Cocoa-colored pancake makeup. On their legs. Drove me nuts. You notice something? The guys on the whole don't look too bad, a lot of them work out, but the girls, you know ... no, a forty-fifth reunion is not the best place to come looking for ass." "True, true," said the other man, who spoke softly and seemed not to have found in the occasion quite the nostalgic license that Mendy had, "time has not been kind to the women." "You know who's dead? Bert and Utty," Mendy said. "Prostate cancer. Went to the spine. Spread. Ate 'em up. Both of them. Thank God I get the test. You get the test?" "What test?" the other fellow asked. "Shit, you don't get the test?" "Skip," said Mendy, pulling me away from Ira, "Meisner doesn't get the test."
    Now Meisner was Mr. Meisner, Abe Meisner, a short, swarthy, heavyset man with stooped shoulders and a jutting head, proprietor of Meisner's Cleaners—"5 Hour Cleaning Service"—situated on Chancellor between the shoe repair shop, where the Italian radio station was always playing while you waited on the seat