The Corrections: A Novel (71 page)

She went out to the bottom of the stairs and raised her voice. “Mom? Can you come down here for a second?”

Enid appeared at the top of the stairs, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What is it? Can’t you find the pot?”

“I found the pot, but can you come down here?”

Alfred, in the lab, was holding the Axon documents loosely, not reading them. Enid appeared in the doorway with guilt on her face. “What?”

“Dad wants to know why this envelope was in the laundry-room closet.”

“Give me that,” Enid said. She snatched the documents from Alfred and crumpled them in her fist. “This has all been taken care of. Dad signed another set of agreements and they sent us a check right away. This is nothing to worry about.”

Denise narrowed her eyes. “I thought you said you’d sent these in. When we were in New York, at the beginning of October. You said you’d sent these in.”

“I thought I had. But they were lost in the mail.”

“In the
mail
?”

Enid waved her hands vaguely. “Well, that’s where I thought they were. But I guess they were in the closet. I must have set a stack of mail down there, when I was going to the post office, and then this fell down behind. You know, I can’t keep track of every last thing. Sometimes things get lost, Denise. I have a big house to take care of, and sometimes things get lost.”

Denise took the envelope from Alfred’s workbench. “It says ‘Send Certified.’ If you were at the post office, how did you not notice that something you needed to send Certified was missing? How did you not notice that you weren’t filling out a Certified Mail slip?”

“Denise.” Alfred’s voice had an angry edge. “That’s enough now.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Enid said. “It was a busy
time for me. It’s a complete mystery to me, and let’s just leave it that way. Because it doesn’t
matter
. Dad got his five thousand dollars just fine. It doesn’t
matter
.”

She further crumpled the licensing agreements and left the laboratory.

I’m developing Garyitis
, Denise thought.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother,” Alfred said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

But Enid was exclaiming in the laundry room, exclaiming in the Ping-Pong—table room, returning to the workshop. “Denise,” she cried, “you’ve got the whole closet completely torn up! What on earth are you doing in there?”

“I’m throwing food away. Food and other rotten junk.”

“All right, but why now? We have the whole weekend if you want to help me clean some closets out. It’s wonderful if you want to help me. But not
today
. Let’s not get into it
today
.”

“It’s bad food, Mom. If you leave it long enough, it turns to poison. Anaerobic bacteria will kill you.”

“Well, get it cleaned up now, and let’s do the rest on the weekend. We don’t have time for that today. I want you to work on dinner so it’s all ready and you don’t have to think about it, and then I
really
want you to help Dad with his exercises, like you said you would!”

“I will do that.”

“Al,” Enid shouted, leaning past her, “Denise wants to help you with your exercises after lunch!”

He shook his head as if with disgust. “As you wish.”

Stacked up on one of the old family bedspreads that had long served as a dropcloth were wicker chairs and tables in early stages of scraping and painting. Lidded coffee cans were clustered on an open section of newspaper; a gun in a canvas case was by the workbench.

“What are you doing with the gun, Dad?” Denise said.

“Oh, he’s been meaning to sell that for years,” Enid said.
“AL, ARE YOU EVER GOING TO SELL THAT GUN?”

Alfred seemed to run this sentence through his brain several times in order to extract its meaning. Very slowly, he nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “I will sell the gun.”

“I hate having it in the house,” Enid said as she turned to leave. “You know, he never used it. Not once. I don’t think it’s ever been fired.”

Alfred came smiling at Denise, making her retreat toward the door. “I will finish up in here,” he said.

Upstairs it was Christmas Eve. Packages were accumulating beneath the tree. In the front yard the nearly bare branches of the swamp white oak swung in a breeze that had shifted to more snow-threatening directions; the dead grass snagged dead leaves.

Enid was peering out through the sheer curtains again. “Should I be worried about Chip?”

“I would worry that he’s not coming,” Denise said, “but not that he’s in trouble.”

“The paper says rival factions are fighting for control of central Vilnius.”

“Chip can take care of himself.”

“Oh, here,” Enid said, leading Denise to the front door, “I want you to hang the last ornament on the Advent calendar.”

“Mother, why don’t you do that.”

“No, I want to see you do it.”

The last ornament was the Christ baby in a walnut shell. Pinning it to the tree was a task for a child, for someone credulous and hopeful, and Denise could now see very clearly that she’d made a program of steeling herself against the emotions of this house, against the saturation of childhood memory and significance. She
could not
be the child to perform this task.

“It’s your calendar,” she said. “You should do it.”

The disappointment on Enid’s face was disproportionately large. It was an ancient disappointment with the refusal of the world in general and her children in particular to participate in her preferred enchantments. “I guess I’ll ask Gary if he’ll do it,” she said with a scowl.

“I’m sorry,” Denise said.

“I remember you used to love pinning on the ornaments, when you were a little girl. You used to
love
it. But if you don’t want to do it, you don’t want to do it.”

“Mom.” Denise’s voice was unsteady. “Please don’t make me.”

“If I’d known it would seem like such a chore,” Enid said, “I never would have asked you.”

“Let me watch you do it!” Denise pleaded.

Enid shook her head and walked away. “I’ll ask Gary when he gets back from shopping.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She went outside and sat on the front steps smoking. The air had a disturbed southern snowy flavor. Down the street Kirby Root was winding pine rope around the post of his gas lamp. He waved and she waved back.

“When did you start smoking?” Enid asked her when she came inside.

“About fifteen years ago.”

“I don’t mean to criticize,” Enid said, “but it’s a terrible habit for your health. It’s bad for your skin, and frankly, it’s not a pleasant smell for others.”

Denise, with a sigh, washed her hands and began to brown the flour for the sauerkraut gravy. “If you’re going to come and live with me,” she said, “we need to get some things clear.”

“I said I wasn’t criticizing.”

“One thing we need to be clear about is that I’m having a hard time. For example, I didn’t quit the Generator. I was fired.”

“Fired?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. Do you want to know why?”

“No!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

Denise, smiling, stirred more bacon grease into the bottom of the Dutch oven.

“Denise, I promise you,” her mother said, “we will not be in your way. You just show me where the supermarket is, and how to use your washer, and then you can come and go as you please. I know you have your own life. I don’t want to disrupt anything. If I could see any other way to get Dad into that program, believe me, I would do it. But Gary never invited us, and I don’t think Caroline would want us anyway.”

The bacon fat and the browned ribs and the boiling kraut smelled good. The dish, as prepared in this kitchen, bore little relation to the high-art version that she’d plated for a thousand strangers. The Generator’s ribs and the Generator’s monkfish had more in common than the Generator’s ribs and these homemade ribs had. You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

She said to her mother: “Why aren’t you telling me the story of Norma Greene?”

“Well, you got so angry with me last time,” Enid said.

“I was mainly mad at Gary.”

“My only concern is that you not be hurt like Norma was. I want to see you happy and settled.”

“Mom, I’m never going to get married again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, in fact, I do know that.”

“Life is full of surprises. You’re still very young and very darling.”

Denise put more bacon fat into the pot; there was no reason to hold back now. She said, “Are you listening to me? I’m quite certain that I will never get married again.”

But a car door had slammed in the street and Enid was running into the dining room to part the sheer curtains.

“Oh, it’s Gary,” she said, disappointed. “Just Gary.”

Gary breezed into the kitchen with the railroad memorabilia that he’d bought at the Museum of Transport. Obviously refreshed by a morning to himself, he was happy to indulge Enid by pinning the Christ baby to the Advent calendar; and, as quickly as that, Enid’s sympathies shifted away from her daughter and back to her son. She crowed about the beautiful job that Gary done in the downstairs shower and what a
huge
improvement the stool there represented. Denise miserably finished the dinner preparations, assembled a light lunch, and washed a mountain of dishes while the sky in the windows turned fully gray.

After lunch she went to her room, which Enid had finally redecorated into near-perfect anonymity, and wrapped presents. (She’d bought clothes for everyone; she knew what people liked to wear.) She uncrumpled the Kleenex that contained thirty sunny caplets of Mexican A and considered wrapping them up as a gift for Enid, but she had to respect the limits of her promise to Gary. She balled the caplets back into the Kleenex, slipped out of her room and down the stairs, and stuffed the drug into the freshly vacated twenty-fourth pocket of the Advent calendar. Everybody else was in the basement. She was able to glide back upstairs and shut herself in her room as if she’d never left.

When she was young, when Enid’s mother had browned the ribs in the kitchen and Gary and Chip had brought home their unbelievably beautiful girlfriends and everybody’s idea of a good time was to buy Denise a lot of presents, this had been the longest afternoon of the year. An obscure natural law had forbidden whole-family gatherings before nightfall;
people had scattered to wait in separate rooms. Sometimes, as a teenager, Chip had taken mercy on the last child in the house and played chess or Monopoly with her. When she got a little older, he’d brought her along to the mall with his girlfriend of the moment. There was no greater bliss for her at ten and twelve than to be so included: to take instruction from Chip in the evils of late capitalism, to gather couturial data on the girlfriend, to study the length of the girlfriend’s bangs and the height of her heels, to be left alone for an hour at the bookstore, and then to look back, from the top of the hill above the mall, on the silent slow choreography of traffic in the faltering light.

Even now it was the longest afternoon. Snowflakes a shade darker than the snow-colored sky had begun to fall in quantity. Their chill found its way past the storm windows, it skirted the flows and masses of furnace-heated air from the registers, it came right at your neck. Denise, afraid of getting sick, lay down and pulled a blanket over herself.

She slept hard, with no dreams, and awoke—where? what time? what day?—to angry voices. Snow had webbed the corners of the windows and frosted the swamp white oak. There was light in the sky but not for long.

Al, Gary went to ALL that trouble
—

I never asked him to!

Well, can’t you try it at least once? After all the work he did
yesterday?

I am entitled to a bath if I want to take a bath
.

Dad, it’s only a matter of time before you fall on the stairs and
break your neck!

I am not asking anyone for help
.

You’re damn right you’re not! Because I have forbidden Mom—
forbidden her—to go anywhere near that bathtub—

Al, please, just try the shower
—

Mom, forget it, let him break his neck, we’d all be better off
—

Gary
—

The voices were coming closer as the contretemps moved up the stairs. Denise heard her father’s heavy tread pass her door. She put her glasses on and opened the door just as Enid, slow on her bad hip, reached the top of the stairs. “Denise, what are you doing?”

“I took a nap.”

“Go talk to your father. Tell him it’s important that he try the shower that Gary did so much work on. He’ll listen to
you
.”

The depth of her sleep and the manner of her awakening had put Denise out of phase with external reality; the scene in the hall and the scene in the hall windows had faint antimatter shadows; sounds were at once too loud and barely audible. “Why—” she said. “Why are we making an issue of this today?”

“Because Gary’s leaving tomorrow and I want him to see if the shower’s going to work for Dad.”

“And tell me again what’s wrong with the bath?”

“He gets stuck. And he’s so bad on the stairs.”

Denise closed her eyes, but this substantially worsened the phase-sync problem. She opened them.

“Oh, plus, and Denise,” Enid said, “you haven’t worked with him on his exercises yet like you promised!”

“Right. I’ll do that.”

“Do it now, before he gets cleaned up. Here, I’ll get you the sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth.”

Enid limped back down the stairs, and Denise raised her voice. “Dad?”

No answer.

Enid came halfway up the stairs and pushed through the rails of the banister a violet sheet of paper (“mobility is golden”) on which stick figures illustrated seven stretching exercises. “Really teach him,” she said. “He gets impatient with me, but he’ll listen to you. Dr. Hedgpeth keeps asking if Dad’s doing his exercises. It’s very important that he really
learn these. I had no idea you were sleeping all this time.”