Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

Eileen went to Bennington College. It was the best school she’d gotten into and was the choice of Judd, her North Shore boyfriend. It was also the most expensive undergraduate institution in the country. She and Judd had broken up before they arrived for orientation.

Two years later Louis went off to Rice. Rice was cheap and had offered him a good aid package. He worked seventeen hours a week behind the circulation desk in the library, which had the strange effect of making his face widely recognized on campus. He also played poker avidly and kept records in a notebook; by the end of his junior year his three-year average weekly earnings were a very respectable $0.384. He was still accumulating debt, though, and so when an opportunity arose to cut expenses drastically during his senior year, he seized it first and questioned the wisdom of this only later, when his troubles had already begun.

His father had put him in touch with an old grad-school acquaintance of his, a man named Jerry Bowles who taught at Rice and lived with his wife in a house a few blocks west of campus, on Dryden Street, south of Shakespeare, north of Swift. Mr. Bowles had developed a heart condition and was looking for a student to do heavy yard work in the spring and fall in exchange for room and board. Louis appeared to be ideally suited for the job. When he returned to Houston in late August, the Bowleses picked him up at the airport.

During their interview with him the previous spring the Bowleses had been brisk and businesslike, but now that Louis had arrived, like a toy from a catalogue, they were like children scrambling to unwrap him and see if he worked the way they’d hoped he would. They had a toy of their own making, a daughter, an only child, but she was away at school and apparently no longer much fun to play with. Louis was their new enthusiasm. Over dinner the first night they kept editing each other:

“MaryAnn is more than happy to make lunch for you—”

“Jerry, there is no question of me not making lunch, we did offer him full—”

“Do you have some kind of tupperware container that you could—”

“Louis, I am always in the house. I am always in the house, so whenever you want to come home, it makes absolutely no difference—”

“We may be a trifle more particular about dinner—”

“Jerry, why, Jerry, why do you—”

Louis, between them at the table, ate his pork chop and minded his own business the way he used to on the El in Chicago, when a maniac had taken the floor. He’d made a mistake, he could see that. He’d stumbled into the wrong car. But he wasn’t riding for pleasure, he was riding to save money.

Mr. Bowles had a trim white beard and a pipe that he often chewed on and still sometimes smoked. When he wasn’t teaching linguistics, he patrolled his property for weeds and brown branches and crooked flagstones, for dripping faucets, squeaky floorboards, sticky doors, torn screens and dirty windows. His hammers and saws and clippers hung on pegboards with each tool outlined in black magic marker. He didn’t seem to have any friends or hobbies. He liked to explain to Louis how things were done in his house. He rationalized in detail every aspect of his wife’s cooking, relating how she had come to steam vegetables instead of boiling them, how a creamier mashed potato was achieved, and how, over the years, with his own input, she had reached the decision not to serve meat more than twice a day. He outlined ergonomic methods of stacking dishes and reading a newspaper. A recurrent theme was their water softener and its manifold virtues. Louis listened to these discourses with a compassion bordering on horror.

“Look at the look he’s giving you,” MaryAnn said. “Jerry. Look at the way Louis is looking at you.”

“Is something wrong?” asked a potentially miffed Mr. Bowles.

“Maybe he’s heard enough for now about soft water,” said MaryAnn.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said, shaking his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I was thinking about—something else.”

MaryAnn twinkled. “Like maybe some blueberry pie à la mode?”

MaryAnn was younger than her husband. She wore shawls and sandals and floral print dresses cut low to highlight her large and blue-veined bosom. She could often be found, silent, silent, in the corner of the gleaming laundry room where she ironed shirts and pillowcases and underpants. The house was full of places where she sat and rested. She kept books near all these places and could sometimes be seen setting one aside (Sigrid Undset, Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence), but the bookmarks never seemed to advance. The lunches she packed for Louis were heartbreaking: sandwiches on stone-ground wheat bread, carrot sticks, watermelon pickles, Bartlett pears, slabs of homemade yellow cake. The lunches he’d made himself in Evanston generally consisted of baloney on white bread, a banana, Twinkies when in stock, and a package of Del-Mark potato chips. In his entire life he’d never seen Del-Mark potato chips anywhere but in his mother’s kitchen.

He was tactful enough to wait four whole days before telling MaryAnn that he didn’t plan to be eating his dinners on Dryden Street. He said it would be best if he packed both lunch and dinner in a bag to take to campus.

MaryAnn had clearly been expecting this. “I’ll pack them,” she said sadly. “Although I can’t really feed you very well from a paper bag.”

It wasn’t, Louis said, that he wouldn’t enjoy eating dinner at home. But he had his senior thesis and his duties as station manager at KTRU to consider.

“Well,” said MaryAnn. “Maybe on Sundays you’ll have dinner here with us? And any other day you feel like it.”

This would not be the last time that he reviewed the logic: (1) he needed to be polite because (2) he was getting a good deal here and (3) thereby avoiding debt. “Sundays, sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”

It had been fifteen years since anyone had regularly made breakfast for him, and he had never in his life seen anything like the breakfasts MaryAnn made. He got fresh biscuits, fresh oat-bran muffins, fresh corn muffins, slab bacon. He got berry pancakes, veal-and-fennel sausages, french toast and cheese soufflés and steak and eggs. He got eggs scrambled with chives and sour cream, eggs Benedict, whole-grain hot cereals with cream and brown sugar, broiled grapefruit, homemade cinnamon-raisin bread, winter peaches topped with vanilla ice cream, honeydew quarters with strawberries in their hollows. After she had served the food, MaryAnn sat down and quietly drank coffee, showing him her profile, her jutting breasts. The terms of the moral problem were vivid to him each time he came to the table: It would be better not to accept this food. But he was hungry and the food looked very good . He continued to eat the breakfasts even when his pity for MaryAnn began to give way to something closer to alarm. It was a bad moment when he discovered that she’d been darning his socks. It was an even worse moment when a DJ at KTRU opened Louis’s sack dinner and found the tupperware pie-slice container which he’d repeatedly declined to carry, and a note from MaryAnn that read: Maybe you can buy some ice cream for the pie?

One Friday night in January he came home at midnight with a head full of tequila and found MaryAnn on her knees in the dining room, unpacking her collection of Wedgwood teacups and saucers from the breakfront. “How’s my acolyte?” she said. She thought his eternal white shirt and black pants made him look like an acolyte. She told him to sit down. He did so, his body leaning in the direction he wanted to go: upstairs. She took out piece after piece of china, murmuring that she ought to get rid of it all, sell it, what a stupid lot of cups, she’d had no idea how many there were. Finally she was kneeling in the midst of the entire collection, the tassels of her shawl fanned around her. “Take some.” she said angrily, dumping a cup and saucer on Louis’s lap. “Take a couple, take four. Who on earth would want these? You don’t want those.”