Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Denise said. “You’re not responsible for any of those other things.”

Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”

They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.

She further noted, however, that Robin didn’t seem particularly loyal.

Denise’s living room contained little more than it had after Emile had emptied it three years earlier. In their contest of self-denials, on the Weekend of Tears, Denise had had the double advantage of feeling guiltier than Emile and of having already agreed to take the house. In the end she’d succeeded in making Emile take practically every joint possession that she liked or valued and many others that she didn’t like but could have used.

The emptiness of the house had disgusted Becky Hemerling. It was cold , it was self-hating , it was a monastery .

“Nice and spare,” Robin commented.

Denise sat her down at the half Ping-Pong table that served as her kitchen table, opened a fifty-dollar wine, and proceeded to feed her. Denise had seldom had to struggle with her weight, but she would have blimped out in a month if she’d eaten like Robin. She watched in awe as her guest, elbows flying, devoured two kidneys and a homemade sausage, tried each of the kraut salads, and spread butter on her third healthy wedge of artisanal rye bread.

She herself had the butterflies and ate hardly anything.

“St. Jude is one of my favorite saints,” Robin said. “Did Brian tell you I’ve been going to church?”

“He mentioned it, yes.”

“I’m sure he did. I’m sure he was very understanding and patient!” Robin’s voice was loud and her face red with wine. Denise felt a constriction in her chest. “Anyway, one of the great things about being Catholic is you get to have saints, like St. Jude.”

“Patron saint of hopeless causes?”

“Exactly. What’s a church for if not lost causes?”

“I feel this way about sports teams,” Denise said. “That the winners don’t need your help.”

Robin nodded. “ You know what I mean. But if you live with Brian you start feeling like there’s something wrong with losers. Not that he’ll actually criticize you. He’ll always be very understanding and patient and loving. Brian’s great! Nothing wrong with Brian! It’s just that he’d rather root for a winner. And I’m not really a winner like that. And I don’t really want to be.”

Denise would never have talked about Emile like this. She wouldn’t do it even now.

“See, but you are that kind of winner,” Robin said. “That’s why I frankly sort of saw you as my potential replacement. I saw you as next in line.”

“Nope.”

Robin made her self-consciously delighted sounds. She said, “Hee hee hee!”

“In Brian’s defense,” Denise said, “I don’t think he needs you to be Brooke Astor. I think he’d settle for bourgeois.”

“I can live with being bourgeois,” Robin said. “A house like this is what I want. I love that your kitchen table is half a Ping-Pong table.”

“It’s yours for twenty bucks.”

“Brian’s wonderful. He’s the person I wanted to spend my life with, he’s the father of my kids. I’m the problem. I’m the one who’s not getting with the program. I’m the one who’s going to confirmation class. Listen, do you have a jacket? I’m freezing.”

The low candles were spilling wax in the October draft. Denise fetched her favorite jean jacket, a discontinued Levi’s product with a woolen lining, and noticed how large it looked on Robin’s smaller arms, how it engulfed her thinner shoulders, like a letter jacket on a ball-player’s girlfriend.

The next day, wearing the jacket herself, she found it softer and lighter than she remembered. She pulled on the collar and hugged herself with it.

No matter how hard she worked that fall, she had more free time and a more flexible schedule than she’d had in many years. She began to drop by the Project with food from her kitchen. She went over to Brian and Robin’s house on Panama Street, found Brian away, and stayed for an evening. A few nights later, when Brian came home and found her baking madeleines with the girls, he acted as if he’d seen her in his kitchen a hundred times.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. Her next conquest on Panama Street was Sinéad, the serious reader, the little fashion plate. Denise took her shopping on Saturdays. She bought her costume jewelry, an antique Tuscan jewelry case, mid-seventies disco and proto-disco albums, old illustrated books about costumes, Antarctica, Jackie Kennedy, and shipbuilding. She helped Sinéad select larger, brighter, lesser gifts for Erin. Sinéad, like her father, had impeccable taste. She wore black jeans and corduroy miniskirts and jumpers, silver bangles, and strings of plastic beads even longer than her very long hair. In Denise’s kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child’s palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olive oil, cubes of fried polenta.

On the rare occasions, like weddings, when Robin and Brian still went out together, Denise baby-sat the girls at Panama Street. She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango. She listened to Erin recite the U.S. presidents in order. She joined Sinéad in raiding drawers for costumes.

“Denise and I will be ethnologists,” Sinéad said, “and, Erin, you can be a Hmong person.”

As she watched Sinéad work out with Erin how a Hmong woman might comport herself, as she watched her dance to Donna Summer with her lazy half-bored minimalism, barely lifting her heels from the floor, faintly rolling her shoulders and letting her hair slide and sift across her back (Erin all the while throwing epileptic fits), Denise loved not only the girl but the girl’s parents for whatever childrearing magic they’d brought to bear on her.

Robin was less impressed. “Of course they love you ,” she said. “You’re not trying to comb the tangles out of Sinéad’s hair. You’re not arguing for twenty minutes about what constitutes ‘making the bed.’ You never see Sinéad’s math scores.”

“They’re not good?” the smitten baby-sitter said.

“They’re appalling. We may threaten not to let her see you if they don’t improve.”

“Oh, don’t do that.”

“Maybe you’d like to do some long division with her.”

“I’ll do anything.”

One Sunday in November, while the family of five was walking in Fairmount Park, Brian remarked to Denise, “Robin’s really warmed to you. I wasn’t sure she would.”

“I like Robin a lot,” Denise said.

“I think at first she felt a little intimidated by you.”

“She had good reason to. Didn’t she.”

“I never told her anything.”

“Well, thank you for that.”

It didn’t escape Denise that the qualities that would have enabled Brian to cheat on Robin — his sense of entitlement, his retrieverish conviction that whatever he was doing was the Good Thing We All Want — would also make it easy to cheat on him. Denise could feel herself becoming an extension of “Robin” in Brian’s mind, and since “Robin” had permanent status as “great” in Brian’s estimation, neither she nor “Denise” required further thought or worry on his part.