The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Denise still couldn’t say no to the drug of Robin. She still wanted Robin’s hands on her and at her and around her and inside her, that prepositional smorgasbord. But there was something in Robin, probably her propensity to blame herself for harms that other people inflicted on her, that invited betrayal and abuse. Denise went out of her way to smoke in bed now, because cigarette smoke irritated Robin’s eyes. She dressed to the hilt when she met Robin for lunch, she did her best to highlight Robin’s dowdihess, and she held the gaze of anyone, female or male, who turned to look at her. She visibly winced at the volume of Robin’s voice. She behaved like an adolescent with a parent except that an adolescent couldn’t help rolling her eyes whereas Denise’s contempt was a deliberate, calculated form of cruelty. She shushed Robin angrily when they were in bed and Robin began to hoot self-consciously. She said, “Keep your voice down. Please. Please.” Exhilarated by her own cruelty, she stared at Robin’s Gore-Tex raingear until Robin was provoked to ask why. Denise said, “I’m just wondering if you’re ever tempted to be slightly less uncool.” Robin replied that she was never going to be cool and so she might as well be comfortable. Denise allowed her lip to curl.

  Robin was eager to bring her lover back into contact with Sinéad and Erin, but Denise, for reasons that she herself could only halfway fathom, refused to see the girls. She couldn’t imagine looking them in the eye; the very thought of four-girl domesticity sickened her.

  “They adore you,” Robin said.

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t feel like it. That’s why.”

  “All right. Whatever.”

  “How long is ‘whatever’ going to be your word? Are you ever going to retire it? Or is it your word for life?”

  “Denise, they adore you,” Robin squeaked. “They miss you. And you used to love to see them.”

  “Well, I’m not in a kid kind of mood. I don’t know if I’ll ever be, frankly. So please stop asking me.”

  By now most people would have got the message; most people would have cleared out and never come back. But Robin, it transpired, had a taste for cruel treatment. Robin said, and Denise believed her, that she would never have left Brian if Brian hadn’t left her. Robin liked to be licked and stroked within a micron of coming and then abandoned and made to beg. And Denise liked to do this to her. Denise liked to get out of bed and get dressed and go downstairs while Robin waited for sexual release, because she wouldn’t cheat and touch herself. Denise sat in the kitchen and read a book and smoked until Robin, humiliated, trembling, came down and begged. Denise’s contempt then was so pure and so strong, it was almost better than sex.

  And so it went. The more Robin agreed to be abused, the more Denise enjoyed abusing her. She ignored Nick Razza’s phone messages. She stayed in bed until two in the afternoon. Her social cigarette habit bloomed into craving. She indulged fifteen years’ accumulated laziness; she lived on her savings account. Every day, she considered all the work she had to do to prepare the house for her parents’ arrival—putting a handle in the shower, carpeting the staircases, buying furniture for the living room, finding a better kitchen table, moving her bed down from the third floor and setting it up in the guest room—and concluded that she lacked the energy. Her life consisted of waiting for the ax to fall. If her parents were coming for six months, there was no point in starting something else. She had to get all her slacking-off done now.

  What exactly her father thought about Corecktall was difficult to know. The one time she asked him directly, on the phone, he didn’t answer.

  “AL?” Enid prompted. “Denise wants to know HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT CORECKTALL.”

  Alfred’s voice was sour. “You’d think they could have found a better name than that.”

  “It’s a completely different spelling,” Enid said. “Denise wants to know if you’re EXCITED ABOUT THE TREATMENT.”

  Silence.

  “Al, tell her how excited you are.”

  “I find that my affliction gets a little worse every week. I can’t see that another drug is going to make much difference.”

  “Al, it’s not a drug, it’s a radical new therapy that uses your patent!”

  “I’ve learned to put up with a certain amount of optimism. So, we will stick to the plan.”

  “Denise,” Enid said, “I can do lots to help out. I can make all the meals and do all the laundry. I think it will be a great adventure! It’s so wonderful that you’re offering.”

  Denise couldn’t imagine six months with her parents in a house and a city she was done with, six months of invisibility as the accommodating and responsible daughter that she could barely pretend to be. She’d made a promise, however; and so she took her rage out on Robin.

  On the Saturday night before Christmas she sat in her kitchen and blew smoke at Robin while Robin maddened her by trying to cheer her up.

  “You’re giving them a great gift,” Robin said, “by inviting them to stay with you.”

  “It would be a gift if I weren’t a mess,” Denise said. “But you should only offer what you can actually deliver.”

  “You can deliver it,” Robin said. “I’ll help you. I can spend mornings with your dad, and give your mom a break, and you can go off by yourself, and do whatever you want. I’ll come three or four mornings a week.”

  To Denise Robin’s offer only made the prospect of those mornings bleaker and more suffocating.

  “Do you not understand?” she said. “I hate this house. I hate this city. I hate my life here. I hate family. I hate home. I’m ready to leave. I’m not a good person. And it only makes it worse to pretend I am.”

  “I think you’re a good person,” Robin said.

  “I treat you like garbage! Have you not noticed?”

  “It’s because you’re so unhappy.”

  Robin came around the table and tried to lay a hand on her; Denise elbowed it aside. Robin tried again, and this time Denise caught her squarely in the cheek with the knuckles of her open hand.

  Robin backed away, her face crimson, as if she were bleeding on the inside. “You hit me,” she said.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “You hit me rather hard. Why did you do that?”

  “Because I don’t want you here. I don’t want to be part of your life. I don’t want to be part of anybody’s life. I’m sick of watching myself be cruel to you.”

  Interconnecting flywheels of pride and love were spinning behind Robin’s eyes. It was a while before she spoke. “OK, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

  Denise did nothing to stop her from leaving, but when she heard the front door close she understood that she’d lost the only person who could have helped her when her parents came to town. She’d lost Robin’s company, her comforts. Everything she’d spurned a minute earlier she wanted back.

  She flew to St. Jude.

  On her first day there, as on the first day of every visit, she warmed to her parents’ warmth and did whatever her mother asked her to. She waved off the cash Enid tried to give her for the groceries. She refrained from commenting on the four-ounce bottle of rancid yellow glue that was the only olive oil in the kitchen. She wore the lavender synthetic turtleneck and the matronly gold-plate necklace that were recent gifts from her mother. She effused, spontaneously, about the adolescent ballerinas in The Nutcracker, she held her father’s gloved hand as they crossed the regional theater’s parking lot, she loved her parents more than she’d ever loved anything; and the minute they were both in bed she changed her clothes and fled the house.

  She paused in the street, a cigarette on her lip, a match-book (Dean & Trish ♦ June 13, 1987) trembling in her fingers. She hiked to the field behind the grade school where she and Don Armour had once sat and smelled cattails and verbena; she stamped her feet, rubbed her hands, watched the clouds occult the constellations, and took deep fortifying breaths of selfhood.

  Later in the night, she undertook a clandesti
ne operation on her mother’s behalf, entering Gary’s bedroom while he was occupied with Alfred, unzipping the inside pocket of his leather jacket, replacing the Mexican A with a handful of Advils, and spiriting Enid’s drug away to a safer place before she finally, good daughter, fell asleep.

  On her second day in St. Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it. At breakfast she was tortured by every word her mother said. Browning the ribs and soaking the sauerkraut according to ancestral custom, rather than in the modern style she’d developed at the Generator, made her angry. (So much grease, such sacrifice of texture.) The bradykinetic languor of Enid’s electric stove, which hadn’t bothered her the day before, made her angry. The hundred-and-one refrigerator magnets, puppy-dog sentimental in their iconography and so feeble in their pull that you could scarcely open the door without sending a snapshot of Jonah or a postcard of Vienna swooping to the floor, filled her with rage. She went to the basement to get the ancestral ten-quart Dutch oven, and the clutter in the laundry-room cabinets made her furious. She dragged a trash can in from the garage and began to fill it with her mother’s crap. This was arguably helpful to her mother, and so she went at it with abandon. She threw away the Korean barfle-berries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. She threw away the wreath of spray-painted pinecones that somebody had ripped apart. She threw away the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. She threw away the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted, the Nixon-era bottle of Mai Tai mix with an oozing crust around its neck, the collection of Paul Masson Chablis carafes with spider parts and moth wings at the bottom, the profoundly corroded bracket for some long-lost wind chimes. She threw away the quart glass bottle of Vess Diet Cola that had turned the color of plasma, the ornamental jar of brandied kumquats that was now a fantasia of rock candy and amorphous brown gunk, the smelly thermos whose broken inner glass tinkled when she shook it, the mildewed half-peck produce basket full of smelly yogurt cartons, the hurricane lanterns sticky with oxidation and brimming with severed moth wings, the lost empires of florist’s clay and florist’s tape that hung together even as they crumbled and rusted …

  At the very back of the closet, in the cobwebs behind the bottom shelf, she found a thick envelope, not old-looking, with no postage on it. The envelope was addressed to the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA. The return addressee was Alfred Lambert. The words SEND CERTIFIED were also on the face.

  Water was running in the little half-bathroom by her father’s laboratory, the toilet tank refilling, faint sulfurous odors in the air. The door to the lab was ajar and Denise knocked on it.

  “Yes,” Alfred said.

  He was standing by the shelves of exotic metals, the gallium and bismuth, and buckling his belt. She showed him the envelope and told him where she’d found it.

  Alfred turned it over in his shaking hands, as if an explanation might magically occur to him. “It’s a mystery,” he said.

  “Can I open it?”

  “You may do as you wish.”

  The envelope contained three copies of a licensing agreement dated September 13, signed by Alfred, and notarized by David Schumpert.

  “What is this doing on the floor of the laundry-room closet?” Denise said.

  Alfred shook his head. “You’d have to ask your mother.”

  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.