Free Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen Page B

believe me!” But the grown-up Stead found a way to make readers believe her. The fully mature writer created a faithful mirror of everything her father and Sam Pollit least wanted to see; and when the novel was published, the person in Australia to whom she sent a copy wasn’t David Stead but Thistle Harris. The inscription read: “To dear Thistle. A Strindberg Family Robinson. In some respects might be considered a private letter to Thistle from Christina Stead.” Whether David himself ever read the book remains unknown.

In the early nineties, when I reached the point of having no money at all, I began to borrow people’s houses. The first house I sat belonged to a professor at my alma mater. He and his wife were afraid that their son, a student at the college, would throw parties in their absence, and so they urged me to consider the house my private and exclusive home. This was already something of a struggle, because it’s in the nature of a borrowed house that its closets will be hung with someone else’s bathrobes, its refrigerator glutted with someone else’s condiments, its shower drain plugged with someone else’s hair. And when, inevitably, the son showed up at the house and began to run around barefoot, and then invited his friends over and partied late into the night, I felt sick with powerlessness and envy. I must have been a repellent specter of silent grievance indeed, because one morning, in the kitchen, without my having said a word, the son looked up from his bowl of cold cereal and brutally set me straight: “This is my house, Jonathan.”
    A few summers later, having less than no money at all, I borrowed the grand stucco house of two older friends, Ken and Joan, in Media, Pennsylvania. My orientation occurred one evening over martinis that Ken gently chided Joan for having “bruised” with melting ice. I sat with them on their mossy rear terrace while they enumerated, with a kind of mellow resignation, their house’s problems. The foam mattress in their master bedroom was crumbling and cratered; their beautiful carpets were being reduced to dust by an apparently unstoppable moth infestation. Ken made himself a second martini, and then, gazing up at a part of the roof that leaked during thunderstorms, he delivered a self-summation that offered me an unexpected glimpse of how I might live more happily, a vision of potential liberation from the oppressive sense of financial responsibility that my parents had bequeathed me. Holding his martini glass at a casual angle, Ken reflected to no one in particular, “We have . . . always lived beyond our means.”
    The only thing I had to do to earn my keep in Media was mow Ken and Joan’s extensive lawn. Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities, and, by way of following Ken’s example of living beyond one’s means, I delayed the first mowing until the grass was so long that I had to stop and empty the clippings bag every five minutes. I delayed the second mowing even longer. By the time I got around to it, the lawn had been colonized by a large clan of earth-burrowing hornets. They had bodies the size of double-A batteries and were even more aggressively proprietary than the son in the first house I’d borrowed. I called Ken and Joan at their summer place, in Vermont, and Ken told me that I needed to visit the hornet homes, one by one, after dark, when the inhabitants were sleeping, and pour gasoline into the burrows and set them on fire.
    I knew enough to be afraid of gasoline. On the night I ventured out to the lawn with a flashlight and a gas can, I took care to recap the can after I’d poured gas into a burrow, and to take the can some distance away before returning to throw a lighted match at the hole. In a few of the holes, I heard a piteous feeble buzzing before I set off the inferno, but my empathy with the hornets was outweighed