The Corrections (23 page)

In
Hands-Off Parenting: Skills for the Next Millennium
, Dr. Harriet L.
Schachtman warned:
All too often, today’s anxious
parents “protect” their children from the so-called
“ravages” of TV
and computer games, only to expose them to the far more damaging
ravages of social ostracization by their peers
.

To Gary, who as a boy had been allowed half an hour of TV a day and had not felt
ostracized, Schachtman’s theory seemed a recipe for letting a
community’s most permissive parents set standards that other parents were
forced to lower their own to meet. But Caroline subscribed to the theory
wholeheartedly, and since she was the sole trustee of Gary’s ambition not
to be like his father, and since she believed that kids learned more from peer
interaction than from parental instruction, Gary deferred to her judgment and
let the boys watch nearly unlimited TV.

What he hadn’t foreseen was that he himself would be the ostracized.

He retreated to his study and dialed St. Jude again. The kitchen cordless was
still on his desk, a reminder of earlier unpleasantnesses and of fights still to
come.

He was hoping to speak to Enid, but Alfred answered the telephone and said that
she was over at the Roots’ house, socializing. “We had a
street-association meeting tonight,” he said.

Gary considered calling back later, but he refused to be cowed by his father.
“Dad,” he said, “I’ve done some research on Axon.
We’re looking at a company with a
lot
of money.”

“Gary, I said I didn’t want you monkeying with this,” Alfred
replied. “It is moot now anyway.”

“What do you mean,’ moot’?”

“I mean moot. It’s taken care of. The documents are
notarized. I’m recouping my lawyer’s fees and that’s the
end of it.”

Gary pressed two fingers into his forehead. “My God. Dad. You had it
notarized? On a Sunday?”

“I will tell your mother that you called.”

“Do
not
put those documents in the mail. Do you hear me?”

“Gary, I’ve had about enough of this.”

“Well, too bad, because I’m just getting started!”

“I’ve asked you not to speak of it. If you will not behave like a
decent, civilized person, then I have no choice—”

“Your decency is bullshit. Your civilization is bullshit. It’s
weakness! It’s fear! It’s bullshit!”

“I have no wish to discuss this.”

“Then forget it.”

“I intend to. We’ll not speak of it again. Your mother and I will
visit for two days next month, and we will hope to see you here in December.
It’s my wish that we can all be civil.”

“Never mind what’s going on underneath. As long as we’re all
‘civil.’”

“That is the essence of my philosophy, yes.”

“Well, it ain’t mine,” Gary said.

“I’m aware of that. And that’s why we will spend forty-eight
hours and no more.”

Gary hung up angrier than ever. He’d hoped his parents would stay for an
entire week in October. He’d wanted them to eat pie in Lancaster County,
see a production at the Annenberg Center, drive in the Poconos, pick apples in
West Chester, hear Aaron play the trumpet, watch Caleb play soccer, take delight
in Jonah’s company, and generally see how good Gary’s life was, how
worthy of their admiration and respect; and forty-eight hours was not enough
time.

He left his study and kissed Jonah good night. Then he took a shower and lay down
on the big oaken bed and tried
to interest himself in the
latest
Inc
. But he couldn’t stop arguing with Alfred in his
head.

During his visit home in March he’d been appalled by how much his father
had deteriorated in the few weeks since Christmas. Alfred seemed forever on the
verge of derailing as he lurched down hallways or half slid down stairs or
wolfed at a sandwich from which lettuce and meat loaf rained; checking his watch
incessantly, his eyes wandering whenever a conversation didn’t engage him
directly, the old iron horse was careering toward a crash, and Gary could hardly
stand to look. Because who else, if not Gary, was going to take responsibility?
Enid was hysterical and moralizing, Denise lived in a fantasyland, and Chip
hadn’t been to St. Jude in three years. Who else but Gary was going to
say:
This
train should not be running on these tracks
?

The first order of business, as Gary saw it, was to sell the house. Get top
dollar for it, move his parents into someplace smaller, newer, safer, cheaper,
and invest the difference aggressively. The house was Enid and Alfred’s
only large asset, and Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly,
inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom
sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on
the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old
dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in
the driveway’s asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb
dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls
that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders
in the basement, fields of dried sow bug and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal
and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy. Even in a rising
market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We’ve got
to sell this fucker
now
, we can’t lose another
day
.

On the last morning of his visit, while Jonah helped Enid
bake a birthday cake, Gary took Alfred to the hardware store. As soon as they
were on the road, Gary said it was time to put the house on the market.

Alfred, in the passenger seat of the gerontic Olds, stared straight ahead.
“Why?”

“If you miss the spring season,” Gary said, “you’ll have
to wait another year. And you can’t afford another year. You can’t
count on good health, and the house is losing value.”

Alfred shook his head. “I’ve agitated for a long time. One bedroom
and a kitchen is all we need. Somewhere your mother can cook and we have a place
to sit. But it’s no use. She doesn’t want to leave.”

“Dad, if you don’t put yourself someplace manageable, you’re
going to hurt yourself. You’re going to wind up in a nursing
home.”

“I have no intention of going to a nursing home. So.”

“Just because you don’t intend to doesn’t mean it won’t
happen.”

Alfred looked, in passing, at Gary’s old elementary school. “Where
are we going?”

“You fall down the stairs, you slip on the ice and break your hip,
you’re going to end up in a nursing home. Caroline’s
grandmother—”

“I didn’t hear where we were going.”

“We’re going to the hardware store,” Gary said. “Mom
wants a dimmer switch for the kitchen.”

Alfred shook his head. “She and her romantic lighting.”

“She gets pleasure from it,” Gary said. “What do you get
pleasure from?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve just about worn her out.”

Alfred’s active hands, on his lap, were gathering nothing—raking in a
poker pot that did not exist. “I’ll ask you again not to
meddle,” he said.

The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness
of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The
oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was
the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers
obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls
with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked
puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers
feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to
a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and
.22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the
radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window,
besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt,
a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had
to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a
nonseason, could honestly kill you.

“Are you happy with your life?” Gary said, waiting for a left-turn
arrow. “Can you say you’re ever happy?”

“Gary, I have an affliction—”

“A lot of people have afflictions. If that’s your excuse, fine, if
you want to feel sorry for yourself, fine, but why drag Mom down?”

“Well. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

“Meaning what,” Gary said. “That you’ll sit in your chair
and Mom will cook and clean for you?”

“There are things in life that simply have to be endured.”

“Why bother staying alive, if that’s your attitude? What do you have
to look forward to?”

“I ask myself that question every day.”

“Well, and what’s your answer?” Gary said.

“What’s
your
answer? What do
you
think I should look
forward to?”

“Travel.”

“I’ve traveled enough. I spent thirty years traveling.”

“Time with family. Time with people you love.”

“No comment.”

“What do you mean, ‘no comment’?”

“Just that: no comment.”

“You’re still sore about Christmas.”

“You may interpret it however you like.”

“If you’re sore about Christmas, you might have the consideration to
say so—”

“No comment.”

“Instead of insinuating.”

“We should have come two days later and left two days earlier,”
Alfred said. “That’s all I have to say on the topic of Christmas. We
should have stayed forty-eight hours.”

“It’s because you’re depressed, Dad. You are clinically
depressed—”

“And so are you.”

“And the responsible thing would be to get some treatment.”

“Did you hear me? I said so are you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Figure it out.”

“Dad, really, no, what are you talking about?
I’m
not the one
who sits in a chair all day and sleeps.”

“Underneath, you are,” Alfred pronounced.

“That’s simply
false
.”

“One day you will see.”

“I will not!” Gary said. “My life is on a fundamentally
different basis than yours.”

“Mark my words. I look at your marriage, I see what I see. Someday
you’ll see it, too.”

“That’s empty talk and you know it. You’re just pissed off with
me, and you have no way to deal with it.”

“I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss this.”

“And I have no respect for that.”

“Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for
either.”

It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost
everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did
hurt.

At the hardware store he let Alfred pay for the dimmer switch. The old
man’s careful plucking of bills from his slender wallet and his faint
hesitation before he offered them were signs of his respect for a
dollar—of his maddening belief that each one mattered.

Back at the house, while Gary and Jonah kicked a soccer ball, Alfred gathered
tools and killed the power to the kitchen and set about installing the dimmer.
Even at this late date it didn’t occur to Gary not to let Alfred handle
wiring. But when he came inside for lunch he found that his father had done no
more than remove the old switch plate. He was holding the dimmer switch like a
detonator that made him shake with fear.

“My affliction makes this difficult,” he explained.

“You’ve got to sell this house,” Gary said.

After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport.
While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and
Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the
museum’s exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of
accomplishment. He couldn’t deal with the exhibits themselves, their
exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A CENTURY OF
AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY
. Block after block of taxing text. What Gary hated
most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St.
Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the
respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this
place!
The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed
curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if
facts were going to save them! Not one woman half as pretty or as well dressed
as Caroline. Not one other man with a decent haircut or an abdomen as flat as
Gary’s. But, like Alfred, like Enid, they were all extremely deferential.
They didn’t jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he’d
drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered round and read and learned. God,
he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he
might be getting sick. He took refuge in the museum’s gift shop and bought
a silver belt buckle, two engravings of old Midland Pacific trestles, and a
pewter hip flask (all for himself), a deerskin wallet (for Aaron), and a CD-ROM
Civil War game (for Caleb).

“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.