“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.”
Denise took the instruction sheet into the master bedroom and found Alfred in the doorway of his closet, naked from the waist
down.
“Whoa, Dad, sorry,” she said, retreating.
“What is it?”
“We need to work on your exercises.”
“I’m already undressed.”
“Just put some pajamas on. Loose clothing is better anyway.”
It took her five minutes to calm him down and stretch him out on his back on the bed in his wool shirt and his pajama bottoms; and here at last the truth came pouring out.
The first exercise required that Alfred take his right knee in his hands and draw it toward his chest, and then do the same with his left knee. Denise guided his wayward hands to his right knee, and although she was dismayed by how rigid he was getting, he was able, with her help, to stretch his hip past ninety degrees.
“Now do your left knee,” she said.
Alfred put his hands on his right knee again and pulled it toward his chest.
“That’s great,” she said. “But now try it with your left.”
He lay breathing hard and did nothing. He wore the expression of a man suddenly remembering disastrous circumstances.
“Dad? Try it with your left knee.”
She touched his left knee, to no avail. In his eyes she saw a desperate wish for clarification and instruction. She moved his hands to his left knee, and the hands immediately fell off. Possibly his rigidity was worse on the left side? She put his hands back on his knee and helped him raise it.
If anything, he was more flexible on the left.
“Now you try it,” she said.
He grinned at her, breathing like someone very scared. “Try what.”
“Put your hands on your left knee and lift it.”
“Denise, I’ve had enough of this.”
“You’ll feel a lot better if you can do a little stretching,” she said. “Just do what you just did. Put your hands on your left knee and raise it.”
The smile she gave him came reflected back as confusion. His eyes met hers in silence.
“Which is my left?” he said.
She touched his left knee. “This one.”
“And what do I do?”
“Put your hands on it and pull it toward your chest.”
His eyes wandered anxiously, reading bad messages on the ceiling.
“Dad, just concentrate.”
“There’s not much point.”
“OK.” She took a deep breath. “OK, let’s leave that one and try the second exercise. All right?”
He looked at her as if she, his only hope, were sprouting fangs and antlers.
“So in this one,” she said, trying to ignore his expression, “you cross your right leg over your left leg, and then let both legs fall to the right as far as they can go. I like this exercise,” she said. “It stretches your hip flexor. It feels really good.”
She explained it to him two more times and then asked him to raise his right leg.
He lifted both legs a few inches off the mattress.
“Just your right leg,” she said gently. “And keep your knees bent.”
“Denise!” His voice was high with strain. “There’s no point!”
“Here,” she said. “Here.” She pushed on his feet to bend his knees. She lifted his right leg, supporting it by the calf and thigh, and crossed it over his left knee. At first there was no resistance, and then, all at once, he seemed to cramp up violently.
“Denise.”
“Dad, just relax.”
She already knew that he was never coming to Philadelphia. But now a tropical humidity was rising off him, a tangy almost-smell of letting go. The pajama fabric on his thigh was hot and wet in her hand, and his entire body was trembling.
“Oh, shoot,” she said, releasing his leg.
Snow was swirling in the windows, lights appearing in the neighbors’ houses. Denise wiped her hand on her jeans and lowered her eyes to her lap and listened, her heart beating hard, to the labored breathing of her father and the rhythmic rustling of his limbs on the bedspread. There was an arc of soak on the bedspread near his crotch and a longer capillary-action reach of wetness down one leg of his pajamas. The initial almost-smell of fresh piss had resolved, as it cooled in the underheated room, into an aroma quite definite and pleasant.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. “Let me get you a towel.”
Alfred smiled up at the ceiling and spoke in a less agitated voice. “I lie here and I can see it,” he said. “Do you see it?”
“See what?”
He pointed vaguely skyward with one finger. “Bottom on the bottom. Bottom on the bottom of the bench,” he said. “Written there. Do you see it?”
Now she was confused and he wasn’t. He cocked an eyebrow and gave her a canny look. “You know who wrote that, don’t you? The fuh. The fuh. Fellow with the you know.”
Holding her gaze, he nodded significantly.
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Denise said.
“Your friend,” he said. “Fellow with the blue cheeks.”
The first one percent of comprehension was born at the back of her neck and began to grow to the north and to the south.
“Let me get a towel,” she said, going nowhere.
Her father’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling again. “He wrote that on the bottom of the bench. Bommunnuthuh. Bottomofthebench. And I lie there and I can see it.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Your friend in Signals. Fellow with the blue cheeks.”
“You’re confused, Dad. You’re having a dream. I’m going to get a towel.”
“See, there was never any point in saying anything.”
“I’m getting a towel,” she said.
She crossed the bedroom to the bathroom. Her head was still in the nap that she’d been taking, and the problem was getting worse. She was falling further out of sync with the waveforms of reality that constituted towel-softness, sky-darkness, floor-hardness, air-clearness. Why this talk of Don Armour? Why now?
Her father had swung his legs out of bed and peeled off his pajama bottoms. He extended his hand for the towel when she returned. “I’ll clean this mess up,” he said. “You go help your mother.”
“No, I’ll do it,” she said. “You take a bath.”
“Just give me the rag. It’s not your job.”
“Dad, take a bath.”
“It was not my intention to involve you in this.”
His hand, still extended, flopped in the air. Denise averted her eyes from his offending, wetting penis. “Stand up,” she said. “I’m going to take the bedspread off.”
Alfred covered his penis with the towel. “Leave that to your mother,” he said. “I told her Philadelphia’s a lot of nonsense. I never intended to involve you in any of this. You have your own life. Just have fun and be careful.”
He remained seated on the edge of the bed, his head bowed, his hands like large empty fleshy spoons on his lap.
“Do you want me to start the bathwater?” Denise said.
“I nuh-nunnunnunn-unh,” he said. “Told the fellow he was talking a lot of nonsense, but what can you do?” Alfred made a gesture of self-evidence or inevitability. “Thought he was going to Little Rock. You guh. I said! Gotta have seniority. Well, that’s a lot of nonsense. I told him to get the hell out.” He gave Denise an apologetic look and shrugged. “What else could I do?”
Denise had felt invisible before, but never like this. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” she said.
“Well.” Alfred made a vague gesture of explanation. “He told me to look under the bench. Simple as that. Look under the bench if I didn’t believe him.”
“What bench?”
“It was a lot of nonsense,” he said. “Simpler for everybody if I just quit. You see, he never thought of that.”
“Are we talking about the railroad?”
Alfred shook his head. “Not your concern. It was never my intention to involve you in any of this. I want you to go and have fun. And be careful. Tell your mother to come up he
re with a rag.”
With this, he launched himself across the carpeting and shut the bathroom door behind him. Denise, to be doing something, stripped the bed and balled everything up, including her father’s wet pajamas, and carried it downstairs.
“How’s it going up there!” Enid asked from her Christmas-card station in the dining room.
“He wet the bed,” Denise said.
“Oh my word.”
“He doesn’t know his left leg from his right.”
Enid’s face darkened. “I thought maybe he’d listen better to you.”
“Mother, he doesn’t know his left leg from his right.”
“Sometimes the medication—”
“Yeah! Yeah!” Denise’s voice was plangent. “The medication!”
Having silenced her mother, she proceeded to the laundry room to sort and soak the linens. Here Gary, all smiles, accosted her with an O-gauge model railroad engine in his hands.
“I found it,” he said.
“Found what.”
Gary seemed hurt that Denise hadn’t been paying close attention to his desires and activities. He explained that half of his childhood model-railroad set—“the important half, with the cars and the transformer”—had been missing for decades and presumed lost. “I just took the entire storeroom apart,” he said. “And where do you think I found it?”
“Where.”
“Guess,” he said.
“At the bottom of the rope box,” she said.
Gary’s eyes widened. “How did you know that? I’ve been looking for decades.”
“Well, you should have asked me. There’s a smaller box of railroad stuff inside the big rope box.”
“Well, anyway.” Gary shuddered to accomplish a shift of focus away from her and back to him. “I’m glad I had the satisfaction of finding it, although I wish you’d told me.”
“I wish you’d asked!”
“You know, I’m having a great time with this railroad stuff. There are some truly neat things that you can buy.”
“Good! I’m happy for you!”
Gary marveled at the engine he was holding. “I never thought I’d see this again.”
When he was gone and she was alone in the basement, she went to Alfred’s laboratory with a flashlight, knelt among the Yuban cans, and examined the underside of the bench. There, in shaggy pencil, was a heart the size of a human heart:
The Corrections Page 58