The Corrections: A Novel (25 page)

“Dad,” Jonah said, “Grandma says she’ll buy me two books
that cost less than ten dollars each or one book for less than twenty dollars,
is that OK?”

Enid and Jonah were a lovefest. Enid had always preferred little kids to big
kids, and Jonah’s adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the
perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter vegetables,
under-excited by television and computer games, and skilled at cheerfully
answering questions like “Are you loving school?” In St. Jude he was
luxuriating in the undivided attention of three adults. He declared St. Jude the
nicest place he’d ever been. From the back seat of the Oldfolksmobile, his
elfin eyes wide, he marveled at everything Enid showed him.

“It’s so easy to park here!

“No traffic!

“The Transport Museum is better than any museums
we
have, Dad,
don’t you agree?

“I love the legroom in this car. I think this is the nicest car I’ve
ever ridden in.

“All the stores are so close and handy!”

That night, after they’d returned from the museum and
Gary had gone out and done more shopping, Enid served stuffed pork chops and a
chocolate birthday cake. Jonah was dreamily eating ice cream when she asked him
if he might like to come and have Christmas in St. Jude.

“I would love that,” Jonah said, his eyelids drooping with
satiety.

“You could have sugar cookies, and eggnog, and help us decorate the
tree,” Enid said. “It’ll probably snow, so you can go
sledding. And, Jonah, there’s a
wonderful
light show every year at
Waindell Park, it’s called Christmasland, they have the whole park lit
up—”

“Mother, it’s March,” Gary said.

“Can we come at Christmas?” Jonah asked him.

“We’ll come again very soon,” Gary said. “I don’t
know about Christmas.”

“I think Jonah would love it,” Enid said.

“I would
completely
love it,” Jonah said, hoisting another
spoonload of ice cream. “I think it might turn out to be the best
Christmas I ever had.”

“I think so, too,” Enid said.

“It’s March,” Gary said. “We don’t talk about
Christmas in March. Remember? We don’t talk about it in June or August,
either. Remember?”

“Well,” Alfred said, standing up from the table. “I am going to
bed.”

“St. Jude gets my vote for Christmas,” Jonah said.

Enlisting Jonah directly in her campaign, exploiting a little boy for leverage,
seemed to Gary a low trick on Enid’s part. After he’d put Jonah to
bed, he told his mother that Christmas ought to be the last of her worries.

“Dad can’t even install a light switch,” he said. “And
now you’ve got a leak upstairs, you’ve got water coming in around
the chimney—”

“I love this house,” Enid said from the kitchen sink,
where she was scrubbing the pork-chop pan. “Dad
just needs to work a little on his attitude.”

“He needs shock treatments or medication,” Gary said. “And if
you want to dedicate your life to being his servant, that’s your choice.
If you want to live in an old house with a lot of problems, and try to keep
everything just the way you like it, that’s fine, too. If you want to wear
yourself out trying to do both, be my guest. Just don’t ask me to make
Christmas plans in March so you can feel OK about it all.”

Enid upended the pork-chop pan on the counter beside the overloaded drainer. Gary
knew he ought to pick up a towel, but the jumble of wet pans and platters and
utensils from his birthday dinner made him weary; to dry them seemed a task as
Sisyphean as to repair the things wrong with his parents’ house. The only
way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

He poured a smallish brandy nightcap while Enid, with unhappy stabbing motions,
scraped waterlogged food scraps from the bottom of the sink.

“What do
you
think I should do?” she said.

“Sell the house,” Gary said. “Call a realtor
tomorrow.”

“And move into some cramped, modern condominium?” Enid shook the
repulsive wet scraps from her hand into the trash. “When I have to go out
for the day, Dave and Mary Beth invite Dad over for lunch. He loves that, and I
feel so comfortable knowing he’s with them. Last fall he was out planting
a new yew, and he couldn’t get the old stump out, and Joe Person came over
with a pickax and the two of them worked all afternoon together.”

“He shouldn’t be planting yews,” Gary said, regretting already
the smallness of his initial pour. “He shouldn’t be using a pickax.
The man can hardly stand up.”

“Gary, I know we can’t be here forever. But I want to have one last
really nice
family Christmas here. And I want—”

“Would you consider moving if we had that
Christmas?”

New hope sweetened Enid’s expression. “Would you and Caroline
consider coming?”

“I can’t make any promises,” Gary said. “But if
you’d feel more comfortable about putting the house on the market, we
would certainly consider—”

“I would adore it if you came.
Adore
it.”

“Mother, though, you have to be realistic.”

“Let’s get through this year,” Enid said, “let’s
think about having Christmas here, like Jonah wants, and then we’ll
see!”

Gary’s anhedonia had worsened when he returned to Chestnut Hill. As a
winter project, he’d been distilling hundreds of hours of home videos into
a watchable two-hour
Greatest Lambert Hits
compilation that he could make
quality copies of and maybe send out as a “video Christmas card.” In
the final edit, as he repeatedly reviewed his favorite family scenes and re-cued
his favorite songs (“Wild Horses,” “Time After Time,”
etc.), he began to
hate
these scenes and
hate
these songs. And
when, in the new darkroom, he turned his attention to the All-Time Lambert Two
Hundred, he found that he no longer enjoyed looking at still photographs,
either. For years he’d mentally tinkered with the All-Time Two Hundred, as
with an ideally balanced mutual fund, listing with great satisfaction the images
that he was sure belonged in it. Now he wondered whom, besides himself, he was
trying to impress with these pictures. Whom was he trying to persuade, and of
what? He had a weird impulse to
burn
his old favorites. But his entire
life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline
had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression
was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary
had no choice but to keep resisting anhedonia, keep gritting his teeth, keep
doing his best to
have fun
…

He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside
him in the sheets.

His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline
lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath
her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish,
humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore
whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.

On Caroline’s nightstand was a hardcover copy of
Middle
Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had
(Caren Tamkin,
Ph.D., 1998).

She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at
the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide
red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the
tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the
elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out
against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly
visible through the fabric’s stretched weave …

When he reached out and smoothed her hair, her entire body jerked as if the hand
were a defibrillator paddle.

“What’s going on here?” he said.

“My back is killing me.”

“An hour ago you were laughing and feeling great. Now you’re sore
again?”

“The Motrin’s wearing off.”

“The mysterious resurgence of the pain.”

“You haven’t said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back.”

“Because you’re lying about how you hurt it,” Gary said.

“My God.
Again
?”

“Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that’s not the
problem. It’s the ringing phone.”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “Because your
mother won’t spend ten cents to leave a message. She has to let it ring
three times and then hang up, ring three times and then hang
up—”

“It has nothing to do with anything
you
did,” Gary said.
“It’s my mom! She magically flew here and kicked you in the back
because she wants to hurt you!”

“After listening to it ring and stop and ring and stop all afternoon,
I’m a nervous wreck.”

“Caroline,
I saw you limping before you ran inside
. I saw the look
on your face. Don’t tell me you weren’t in pain already.”

She shook her head. “You know what this is?”

“And then the eavesdropping!”

“Do you know what this is?”

“You’re listening on the only other free phone in the house, and you
have the gall to tell me—”

“Gary, you’re
depressed
. Do you realize that?”

He laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re brooding, and suspicious, and obsessive. You walk around with
a black look on your face. You don’t sleep well. You don’t seem to
get pleasure out of anything.”

“You’re changing the subject,” he said. “My mother called
because she had a reasonable request regarding Christmas.”

“Reasonable?” Now Caroline laughed. “Gary, she is
bonkers
on the topic of Christmas. She is a
lunatic
.”

“Oh, Caroline. Really.”

“I mean it!”

“Really. Caroline. They’re going to be selling that house soon, they
want us all to visit one more time before they
die
, Caroline, before my
parents
die
—”

“We’ve always agreed about this. We agreed that five people with busy
lives should not have to fly at the peak holiday season so that two people
with nothing in their lives
wouldn’t have to come here. And I’ve been more
than happy to have them—”

“The hell you have.”

“Until suddenly the rules change!”

“You have not been happy to have them here. Caroline. They’re at the
point where they won’t even stay for more than forty-eight
hours.”

“And this is my fault?” She was directing her gestures and facial
expressions, somewhat eerily, at the ceiling. “What you don’t
understand, Gary, is that this is an emotionally healthy family. I am a loving
and deeply involved mother. I have three intelligent, creative, and emotionally
healthy children. If you think there’s a problem in this house, you better
take a look at yourself.”

“I’m making a reasonable proposal,” Gary said. “And
you’re calling me ‘depressed.’”

“So it’s never occurred to you?”

“The minute I bring up Christmas, I’m
‘depressed.’”

“Seriously, are you telling me it’s never occurred to you, in the
last six months, that you might have a clinical problem?”

“It is extremely hostile, Caroline, to call another person
crazy.”

“Not if the person potentially has a clinical problem.”

“I’m proposing that we go to St. Jude,” he said. “If you
won’t talk about it like an adult, I’ll make my own
decision.”

“Oh, yeah?” Caroline made a contemptuous noise. “I guess Jonah
might go with you. But see if you can get Aaron and Caleb on the plane with you.
Just ask them where they’d rather be for Christmas.”

Just ask them whose team they’re on
.

“I was under the impression that we’re a family,” Gary said,
“and that we do things together.”

“You’re the one deciding unilaterally.”

“Tell me this is not a marriage-ending problem.”

“You’re the one who’s changed.”

“Because, no, Caroline, that is, no, that is ridiculous. There are good
reasons to make a one-time exception this year.”

“You’re depressed,” she said, “and I want you back.
I’m tired of living with a depressed old man.”

Gary for his part wanted back the Caroline who just a few nights ago had clutched
him in bed when there was heavy thunder. The Caroline who came skipping toward
him when he walked into a room. The semi-orphaned girl whose most fervent wish
was to be on
his
team.

But he’d also always loved how tough she was, how unlike a Lambert, how
fundamentally unsympathetic to his family. Over the years he’d collected
certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline
Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance:

1. You’re nothing at all like your father.
   
2. You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW.
   
3. Your dad emotionally abuses your mom.
   
4. I love the taste of your come.
   
5. Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life.
   
6. Let’s buy both!
   
7. Your family has a diseased relationship with food.
   
8. You’re an incredibly good-looking man.
   
9. Denise is jealous of what you have.
   
10. There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering.
    

He’d subscribed to this credo for years and years—had felt
deeply indebted to Caroline for each remark—and now he wondered how much
of it was true. Maybe none of it.

“I’m calling the travel agent tomorrow morning,” he said.

“And I’m telling you,” Caroline replied immediately,
“call Dr. Pierce instead. You need to talk to somebody.”

“I need somebody who tells the truth.”

“You want the truth? You want me to tell you why
I’m not going?” Caroline sat up and leaned forward at the funny
angle that her backache dictated. “You really want to know?”

Gary’s eyes fell shut. The crickets outside sounded like water running
interminably in pipes. From the distance came a rhythmic canine barking like the
downthrusts of a handsaw.