The Corrections (35 page)

“Enid, drop it. I wish once in your life you would let something drop.”

Cradling the pineapple, she asked why Chuck had called.

“We will talk about it later,” Alfred said, returning to the dining room.

“Daddy?” Chipper began.

“Lad, I just did you a favor. Now you do me a favor and stop playing with your food and finish your dinner.
Right
now
. Do you understand me? You will finish it right now, or there will be no dessert and no other privileges tonight or tomorrow night, and you will sit here until you do finish it.”

“Daddy, though, can you—?”

“RIGHT NOW. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, OR DO YOU NEED A SPANKING?”

Tonsils release an ammoniac mucus when serious tears gather behind them. Chipper’s mouth twisted this way and that. He saw the plate in front of him in a new light. It was as if the food were an unbearable companion whose company he had been sure that his connections higher up, the strings pullable on his behalf, would spare him. Now came the realization that he and the food were in it for the long haul.

Now he mourned the passing of his bacon, paltry though it had been, with a deep and true grief.

Curiously, though, he didn’t outright cry.

Alfred retired to the basement with stamping and a slam.

Gary sat very quietly multiplying small whole numbers in his head.

Enid plunged a knife into the pineapple’s jaundiced belly. She decided that Chipper was exactly like his father—at once hungry and impossible to feed. He turned food into shame. To prepare a square meal and then to see it greeted with elaborate disgust, to see the boy actually
gag
on his breakfast oatmeal: this stuck in a mother’s craw. All Chipper wanted was milk and cookies, milk and cookies. Pediatrician said: “Don’t give in. He’ll get hungry eventually and eat something else.” So Enid tried to be patient, but Chipper sat down to lunch and declared: “This smells like vomit!” You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.

Lately she had taken to feeding him grilled cheese sandwiches all day long, holding back for dinner the yellow and leafy green vegetables required for a balanced diet and letting Alfred fight her battles.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

She carried two dishes of pineapple into the dining room. Chipper’s head was bowed, but the son who loved to eat reached eagerly for his dish.

Gary slurped and aerated, wordlessly consuming pineapple.

The dogshit-yellow field of rutabaga; the liver warped by frying and so unable to lie flush with the plate; the ball of woody beet leaves collapsed and contorted but still entire,
like a wetly compressed bird in an eggshell, or an ancient corpse folded over in a bog: the spatial relations among these foods no longer seemed to Chipper haphazard but were approaching permanence, finality.

The foods receded, or a new melancholy shadowed them. Chipper became less immediately disgusted; he ceased even to think about eating. Deeper sources of refusal were kicking in.

Soon the table was cleared of everything but his place mat and his plate. The light grew harsher. He heard Gary and his mother conversing on trivial topics as she washed and Gary dried. Then Gary’s footsteps on the basement stairs. Metronomic thock of Ping-Pong ball. More desolate peals of large pots being handled and submerged.

His mother reappeared. “Chipper, just eat that up. Be a big boy now.”

He had arrived in a place where she couldn’t touch him. He felt nearly cheerful, all head, no emotion. Even his butt was numb from pressing on the chair.

“Dad means for you to sit there till you eat that. Finish it up now. Then your whole evening’s free.”

If his evening had been truly free he might have spent it entirely at a window watching Cindy Meisner.

“Noun adjective,” his mother said, “contraction possessive noun. Conjunction conjunction stressed pronoun counter-factual verb pronoun I’d just gobble that up and temporal adverb pronoun conditional auxiliary infinitive—”

Peculiar how unconstrained he felt to understand the words that were spoken to him. Peculiar his sense of freedom from even that minimal burden of decoding spoken English.

She tormented him no further but went to the basement, where Alfred had shut himself inside his lab and Gary was amassing (“Thirty-seven, thirty–eight”) consecutive bounces on his paddle.

“Tock tock?” she said, wagging her head in invitation.

She was hampered by pregnancy or at least the idea of it, and Gary could have trounced her, but her pleasure at being played with was so extremely evident that he simply disengaged himself, mentally multiplying their scores or setting himself small challenges like returning the ball to alternating quadrants. Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother’s illusions.

And she looked so vulnerable tonight. The exertions of dinner and dishes had relaxed her hair’s rollered curls. Little blotches of sweat were blooming through the cotton bodice of her dress. Her hands had been in latex gloves and were as red as tongues.

He sliced a winner down the line and past her, the ball running all the way to the shut door of the metallurgy lab. It bounced up and knocked on this door before subsiding. Enid pursued it carefully. What silence, what darkness, there was behind that door. Al seemed not to have a light on.

There existed foods that even Gary hated—Brussels sprouts, boiled okra—and Chipper had watched his pragmatic sibling palm them and fling them into dense shrubbery from the back doorway, if it was summer, or secrete them on his person and dump them in the toilet, if it was winter. Now that Chipper was alone on the first floor he could easily have disappeared his liver and his beet greens. The difficulty: his father would think that he had eaten them, and eating them was exactly what he was refusing now to do. Food on the plate was necessary to prove refusal.

He minutely peeled and scraped the flour crust off the top of the liver and ate it. This took ten minutes. The denuded surface of the liver was a thing you didn’t want to see.

He unfolded the beet greens somewhat and rearranged them.

He examined the weave of the place mat.

He listened to the bouncing ball, his mother’s exaggerated groans and her nerve-grating cries of encouragement (“Ooo, good one, Gary!”). Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else’s Ping-Pong. Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless. The score in Ping-Pong bounced along toward twenty-one and then the game was over, and then two games were over, and then three were over, and to the people inside the game this was all right because fun had been had, but to the boy at the table upstairs it was not all right. He’d involved himself in the sounds of the game, investing them with hope to the extent of wishing they might never stop. But they did stop, and he was still at the table, only it was half an hour later. The evening devouring itself in futility. Even at the age of seven Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture of his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.

This futility had let’s call it a flavor.

After he scratched his head or rubbed his nose his fingers harbored something. The smell of self.

Or again, the taste of incipient tears.

Imagine the olfactory nerves sampling themselves, receptors registering their own configuration.

The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled—the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor—refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.

In the lab below the dining room Alfred sat with his head
bowed in the darkness and his eyes closed. Interesting how eager he’d been to be alone, how hatefully clear he’d made this to everyone around him; and now, having finally closeted himself, he sat hoping that someone would come and disturb him. He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt. Though he was cold to her it seemed unfair that she was cold in turn to him: unfair that she could happily play Ping-Pong, shuffle around outside his door, and never knock and ask how he was doing.

Three common measures of a material’s strength were its resistance to pressure, to tension, and to shearing.

Every time his wife’s footsteps approached the lab he braced himself to accept her comforts. Then he heard the game ending, and he thought
surely
she would take pity on him now. It was the one thing he asked of her, the one thing—

(Schopenhauer:
Woman pays the debt of life not by what she
does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of childbearing and care
for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should
be a patient and cheering companion
.)

But no rescue was forthcoming. Through the closed door he heard her retreat to the laundry room. He heard the mild buzz of a transformer, Gary playing with the O-gauge train beneath the Ping-Pong table.

A fourth measure of strength, important to manufacturers of rail stock and machine parts, was hardness.

With unspeakable expenditure of will Alfred turned on a light and opened his lab notebook.

Even the most extreme boredom had merciful limits. The dinner table, for example, possessed an underside that Chipper explored by resting his chin on the surface and stretching his arms out below. At his farthest reach were baffles pierced by taut wire leading to pullable rings. Complicated intersections of roughly finished blocks and angles were punctuated, here and there, by deeply countersunk
screws, little cylindrical wells with scratchy turnings of wood fiber around their mouths, irresistible to the probing finger. Even more rewarding were the patches of booger he’d left behind during previous vigils. The dried patches had the texture of rice paper or fly wings. They were agreeably dislodgable and pulverizable.

The longer Chipper felt his little kingdom of the underside, the more reluctant he became to lay eyes on it. Instinctively he knew that the visible reality would be puny. He’d see crannies he hadn’t yet discovered with his fingers, and the mystery of the realms beyond his reach would be dispelled, the screw holes would lose their abstract sensuality and the boogers would shame him, and one evening, then, with nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

Enid’s alchemical lab beneath the kitchen contained a Maytag with a wringer that swung over it, twinned rubber rollers like enormous black lips. Bleach, bluing, distilled water, starch. A bulky locomotive of an iron, its power cord clad in a patterned knit fabric. Mounds of white shirts in three sizes.

To prepare a shirt for pressing she sprinkled it with water and left it rolled up in a towel. When it was thoroughly redampened she ironed the collar first and then the shoulders, working down.

During and after the Depression she’d learned many survival skills. Her mother ran a boardinghouse in the basin between downtown St. Jude and the university. Enid had a gift for math, and so she not only washed sheets and cleaned toilets and served meals but also handled numbers for her mother. By the time she’d finished high school and the war had ended, she was keeping all the house’s books, billing the boarders, and figuring the taxes. With the quarters and
dollars she picked up on the side—wages from baby-sitting, tips from college boys and other long-term boarders—she paid for classes at night school, inching toward a degree in accounting which she hoped she would never have to use. Already two men in uniform had proposed to her, each of them a
rather
good dancer, but neither was clearly an earner and both still risked getting shot at. Her mother had married a man who didn’t earn and died young. Avoiding such a husband was a priority with Enid. She intended to be comfortable in life as well as happy.

To the boardinghouse a few years after the war came a young steel engineer newly transferred to St. Jude to manage a foundry. He was a full-lipped thick-haired well-muscled boy in a man’s shape and a man’s suits. The suits were themselves luxuriantly pleated wool beauties. Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.

Cleaning Al’s room in St. Jude she found a much-handled volume of Schopenhauer with certain passages underlined. For example:
The pleasure in this world, it has been said, out
weighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between
the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is
true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of
which is engaged in eating the other
.

What to believe about Al Lambert? There were the old-man things he said about himself and the young-man way he
looked. Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.