The Corrections (63 page)

In early November she took Alfred to the Corporate
Woods Medical Complex for his bimonthly neurological checkup. Denise, who’d signed Alfred up for Axon’s Phase II testing of Corecktall, had been asking Enid if he seemed “demented.” Enid referred the question to Dr. Hedgpeth during his private interview with her, and Hedgpeth replied that Alfred’s periodic confusion did suggest early Alzheimer’s or Lewybody dementia—at which point Enid interrupted to ask whether possibly Alfred’s dopamine-boosters were causing his “hallucinations.” Hedgpeth couldn’t deny that this was possible. He said the only sure way to rule out dementia would be to put Alfred in the hospital for a ten-day “drug holiday.”

Enid, in her shame, didn’t mention to Hedgpeth that she was leery of hospitals now. She didn’t mention that there had been some raging and some thrashing and some cursing in the Canadian hospital, some overturning of Styrofoam water pitchers and of wheeled IV-drip stands, until Alfred was sedated. She didn’t mention that Alfred had requested that she shoot him before she put him in a place like that again.

Nor, when Hedgpeth asked how she was holding up, did she mention her little Asian problem. Fearing that Hedgpeth would recognize her as a weak-willed, wild-eyed substance-craver, she didn’t even ask him for an alternative “sleep aid.” However, she did mention that she wasn’t sleeping well. She stressed this, in fact:
not sleeping well at all
. But Hedgpeth merely suggested that she try a different bed. He suggested Tylenol PM.

It seemed unfair to Enid, as she lay in the dark beside her snoring husband, that a drug legally purchasable in so many other countries should be unavailable to her in America. It seemed unfair that many of her friends had “sleep aids” of the sort that Hedgpeth had failed to offer her. How cruelly scrupulous Hedgpeth was! She could have gone to a different doctor, of course, and asked for a “sleep aid,” but this
other doctor would surely wonder why her own doctors weren’t giving her the drugs.

Such was her situation when Bea and Chuck Meisner departed for six weeks of winter family fun in Austria. The day before the Meisners left, Enid had lunch with Bea at Deepmire and asked her to do her a favor in Vienna. She pressed into Bea’s hands a slip of paper on which she’d copied information from an empty SampLpak—
ASLAΝ
‘Cruiser’
(
rhadamanthine citrate 88%, 3-methyl-
rhadamanthine
chloride 12%
)—with the annotation
Temporarily unavailable in
U.S., I need 6 months supply
.

“Now, don’t bother if it’s any trouble,” she told Bea, “but if Klaus could write you a prescription, it would be so much easier than my doctor trying to get something from overseas, so, anyway, I hope you have a wonderful time in my favorite country!”

Enid couldn’t have asked such a shameful favor of anyone but Bea. Even Bea she dared to ask only because (a) Bea was a tiny bit dumb, and (b) Bea’s husband had once upon a time made his own shameful insider purchase of Erie Belt stock, and (c) Enid felt that Chuck had never properly thanked or compensated Alfred for that inside information.

No sooner had the Meisners flown away, however, than Enid’s shame mysteriously abated. As if an evil spell had worn off, she began to sleep better and think less about the drug. She brought her powers of selective forgetfulness to bear on the favor she’d asked of Bea. She began to feel like herself again, which was to say: optimistic.

She bought two tickets for a flight to Philadelphia on January 15. She told her friends that the Axon Corporation was testing an exciting new brain therapy called Corecktall and that Alfred, because he’d sold his patent to Axon, was eligible for the tests. She said that Denise was being a doll and offering to let her and Alfred stay in Philadelphia for as long as the testing lasted. She said that, no, Corecktall was not a
laxative, it was a revolutionary new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. She said that, yes, the name was confusing, but it was not a laxative.

“Tell the people at Axon,” she told Denise, “that Dad has some mild symptoms of hallucination which his doctor says are
probably drug-related
. Then, see, if Corecktall helps him, we can take him off the medication, and the hallucinations will probably stop.”

She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days. She had tickets for the Christmasland light show and
The
Nutcracker
, tree-trimming, sledding, caroling, and a Christmas Eve church service were also on the bill. She dug out cookie recipes that she hadn’t used in twenty years. She laid in eggnog.

On the Sunday before Christmas she awoke at 3:05 a.m. and thought:
Thirty-six hours
. Four hours later she got up thinking:
Thirty-two hours
. Late in the day she took Alfred to the street-association Christmas party at Dale and Honey Driblett’s, sat him down safely with Kirby Root, and proceeded to remind all her neighbors that her favorite grandson, who’d been
looking forward all year
to a Christmas in St. Jude, was arriving tomorrow afternoon. She located Alfred in the Dribletts’ downstairs bathroom and argued with him unexpectedly about his supposed constipation. She took him home and put him to bed, erased the argument from her memory, and sat down in the dining room to knock off another dozen Christmas cards.

Already the wicker basket for incoming greetings contained a four-inch stack of cards from old friends like Norma Greene and new friends like Sylvia Roth. More and more
senders Xeroxed or word-processed their Christmas notes, but Enid was having none of this. Even if it meant being late with them, she’d undertaken to handwrite a hundred notes and hand-address nearly two hundred envelopes. Besides her standard Two-Paragraph Note and her four-paragraph Full Note, she had a boilerplate Short Note:

It was ten o’clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.

“Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!” Enid sang into the telephone.

“Some bad news here,” Gary said. “Jonah’s been throwing up and has a fever. I don’t think I can take him on the plane.”

This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.

“See how he feels in the morning,” she said. “Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he’ll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!”

“Mother.”

“If he’s really sick, Gary, I understand, he can’t come. But if he gets over his fever—”

“Believe me, we’re all disappointed. Especially Jonah.”

“No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day.”

“I’m warning you it will probably just be me.”

“Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don’t you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything’s going to work out fine!”

It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.

Early the next morning she was awakened—
rewarded
—by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip’s voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.

For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket—a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier—and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her
it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.

“It’s wonderful news about Chip, don’t you think?” she asked Alfred at breakfast.

Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

“
Chip
will be here
tomorrow
,” Enid repeated. “Isn’t that wonderful news? Aren’t you happy?”

Alfred consulted with the soggy mass of All-Bran on his wandering spoon. “Well,” he said. “If he comes.”

“He said he’d be here tomorrow afternoon,” Enid said. “Maybe, if he’s not too tired, he can go to
The Nutcracker
with us. I still have six tickets.”

“I am dubious,” Alfred said.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.

Enid had pinned her hopes, like a baby in a walnut shell, on Corecktall. If Alfred proved to be too confused to participate in the testing, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Her life therefore bore a strange resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were “addicted” to monitoring their investments. According to Bea, Chuck’s anxiety drove him to check quotes on his computer two or three times an hour, and the last time Enid and Alfred had gone out with the Persons, Joe had made Enid
frantic
by cell-phoning three different brokers from the restaurant. But she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful upswing, forever fearful of a crash.

Her freest hour of the day came after breakfast. Every morning, as soon as Alfred had downed his cup of hot milky water, he went to the basement and focused on evacuation. Enid wasn’t welcome to speak to him during this peak hour of his anxiety, but she could leave him to his own devices. His colonic preoccupations were a madness but not the kind of madness that would disqualify him for Corecktall.

Outside the kitchen window, snowflakes from an eerily blue-clouded sky drifted through the twigs of an unthriving dogwood that had been planted (this really dated it) by Chuck Meisner. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon Jell-O. These foods, along with twice-baked potatoes, were official St. Jude favorites of Jonah’s and were on the menu for tonight.

For months she’d imagined Jonah pinning the Christ child to the Advent calendar on the morning of the twenty-fourth.

Elated by her second cup of coffee, she went upstairs and knelt by the old cherrywood dresser of Gary’s where she kept gifts and party favors. She’d finished her Christmas shopping weeks ago, but all she’d bought for Chip was a sale-priced brown-and-red Pendleton wool bathrobe. Chip had forfeited her goodwill several Christmases ago by sending her a used-looking cookbook,
Foods of Morocco
, wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with stick-on pictures of coat hangers with red slashes through them. Now that he was coming home from Lithuania, however, she wanted to reward him to the full extent of her gift budget. Which was: 

Having paid $55 for the bathrobe, she needed $45 worth of additional gifts for Chip. She rummaged in the dresser drawers. She rejected the vases in shopworn boxes from Hong Kong, the many matching bridge decks and score pads, the many thematic cocktail napkins, the really neat and really useless pen-and-pencil sets, the many travel alarm clocks that folded up or beeped in unusual ways, the shoehorn with a telescoping handle, the inexplicably dull Korean steak knives, the cork-bottomed bronze coasters with locomotives engraved on their faces, the ceramic 5×7 picture frame with the word “Memories” in glazed lavender script, the onyx turtle figurines from Mexico, and the cleverly boxed kit of ribbon and wrapping paper called The Gift of Giving. She weighed the suitability of the pewter candle snuffer and the Lucite saltshaker cum pepper grinder. Recalling the paucity of Chip’s home furnishings, she decided that the snuffer and the shaker/grinder would do just fine.

In the season of joy and miracles, while she wrapped, she forgot about the urine-smelling laboratory and its noxious crickets. She was able not to care that Alfred had put up the Christmas tree at a twenty-degree tilt. She could believe that Jonah was feeling just as healthy this morning as she was.

By the time she’d finished her wrapping, the light in the gull-plumage winter sky had a midday angle and intensity. She went down to the basement, where she found the Ping-Pong table buried under green strings of lights, like a chassis engulfed by kudzu, and Alfred seated on the floor with electrician’s tape, pliers, and extension cords.