Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Looking for Robin,” Denise said.

The girl nodded at the open rear door of the house. “She’s in back.”

The garden was raw but peaceful. Not much seemed to have been grown here besides squashes and their cousins, but the patches of vine were extensive, and the smells of mulch and dirt, and the onshore autumn breeze, were full of childhood memory.

Robin was shoveling rubble into a makeshift sieve. She had thin arms and a hummingbird metabolism and took many fast small bites of rubble instead of fewer big ones. She was wearing a black bandanna and a very dirty T-shirt with the text QUALITY DAYCARE: PAY NOW OR PAY LATER. She seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see Denise.

“This is a big project,” Denise said.

Robin shrugged, holding the shovel with both hands as if to stress that she felt interrupted.

“Do you want some help?” Denise said.

“No. The kids were supposed to do this, but there’s a game over at the river. I’m just cleaning up.”

She whacked the rubble in the sieve to urge some dirt through. Caught in the mesh were fragments of brick and mortar, gobs of roofing tar, ailanthus limbs, petrified cat shit, Baccardi and Yuengling labels with backings of broken glass.

“So what did you grow?” Denise said.

Robin shrugged again. “Nothing that would impress you.” “Well, like what?”

“Like zucchini and pumpkins.”

“I cook with both of those.”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“I have a couple of half-time assistants that I pay. Sara’s a junior at Temple.”

“And who are the kids who were supposed to be here?”

“Neighborhood kids between twelve and sixteen.” Robin took off her glasses and rubbed sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve. Denise had forgotten, or had never noticed to begin with, what a pretty mouth she had. “They get minimum wage plus vegetables, plus a share of any money we make.”

“Do you subtract expenses?”

“That would discourage them.”

“Right.”

Robin looked away, across the street, at a row of dead buildings with rusting sheet-metal cornices. “Brian says you’re very competitive.”

“Oh really?”

“He said he wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle you.”

Denise winced.

“He said he wouldn’t want to be the other chef in the kitchen with you.”

“No danger of that,” Denise said.

“He said he wouldn’t want to play Scrabble with you.”

“Uh huh.”

“He said he wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with you.”

OK, OK, Denise thought.

Robin was breathing hard. “Anyway.”

“Yeah, anyway.”

“Here’s why I didn’t go to Paris,” Robin said. “I thought Erin was too young. Sinéad was having fun at art camp, and I had tons of work here.”

“I understood that.”

“And you guys were going to be talking about food all day. And Brian said it was business. So.”

Denise raised her eyes from the dirt but couldn’t quite look Robin in the eye. “It was business.”

Robin, her lip trembling, said, “Whatever!”

Above the ghetto a fleet of copper-bottomed clouds, Revere Ware clouds, had withdrawn to the northwest. It was the moment when the blue backdrop of the sky grayed to the same value as the stratus formations in front of it, when night light and day light were in equilibrium.

“You know, I’m not really into guys,” Denise said.

“Pardon me?”

“I said I don’t sleep with men anymore. Since I got divorced.”

Robin frowned as if this made no sense to her at all. “Does Brian know that?”

“I don’t know. Not from my telling him.”

Robin thought this over for a moment and then began to laugh. She said, “Hee hee hee!” She said, “Ha ha ha!” Her laugh was full-throated and embarrassing and, at the same time, Denise thought, lovely. It echoed off the rusty-corniced houses. “Poor Brian!” she said. “Poor Brian!”

Robin immediately became more cordial. She put down her shovel and gave Denise a tour of the garden—“my little enchanted kingdom” she called it. Finding that she had Denise’s interest, she risked enthusiasm. Here was a new asparagus patch, here two rows of young pear and apple trees that she hoped to espalier, here the late crops of sunflowers, acorn squash, and kale. She’d planted only sure winners this summer, hoping to hook a core group of local teenagers and reward them for the thankless infrastructural work of preparing beds, running pipes, adjusting drainages, and connecting rain barrels to the roof of the house.

“This is basically a selfish project,” Robin said. “I always wanted a big garden, and now the whole inner city’s going back to farmland. But the kids who really need to be out working with their hands and learning what fresh food tastes like are the ones who aren’t doing it. They’re latchkey kids. They’re getting high, they’re having sex, or they’re stuck in some classroom until six with a computer. But they’re also at an age when it’s still fun to play in the dirt.”

“Though possibly not as much fun as sex or drugs.”

“Maybe not for ninety percent of kids,” Robin said. “I just want there to be something for the other ten percent. Some alternative that doesn’t involve computers. I want Sinéad and Erin to be around kids who aren’t like them. I want them to learn how to work. I want them to know that work isn’t just pointing and clicking.”

“This is very admirable,” Denise said.

Robin, mistaking her tone, said, “Whatever.”

Denise sat on the plastic skin of a bale of peat moss while Robin washed up and changed her clothes. Maybe it was because she could count on one hand the autumn Saturday evenings that she’d spent outside a kitchen since she was twenty, or maybe because some sentimental part of her was taken in by the egalitarian ideal that Klaus Müller-Karltreu found so phony in St. Jude, but the word she wanted to apply to Robin Passafaro, who had lived in urban Philly all her life, was “midwestern.” By which she meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-spirited .

She didn’t care so much, after all, about being liked. She found herself liking. When Robin came out and locked the house, Denise asked if she had time for dinner.

“Brian and his dad took the girls to see the Phillies,” Robin said. “They’ll come home full of stadium food. So, sure. We can have dinner.”

“I have stuff in my kitchen,” Denise said. “Do you mind?”

“Anything. Whatever.”

Typically, if a chef invited you to dinner, you considered yourself lucky and you hastened to show it. But Robin seemed determined not to be impressed.

Night had fallen. The air on Catharine Street smelled like the last weekend of baseball. Walking east, Robin told Denise the story of her brother, Billy. Denise had already heard the story from Brian, but parts of Robin’s version were new to her.

“So wait,” she said. “Brian sold his company to W—, and then Billy attacked one of W—’s vice presidents, and you think there’s a connection?”

“God, yes,” Robin said. “That’s what’s so horrible.”

“Brian didn’t mention that part.”

Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. “I can’t believe it! That’s the whole point . God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.”

“Explain to me what the problem is?”

“Rick Flamburg’s disabled for life,” Robin said. “My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on anti-psychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W — just did for us, let’s move to Mendocino!”