Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Carrying the aluminum stool, he followed her into the house. He compared her reception by Enid to the reception he’d received the day before. He took note of the duration of the hug, the lack of instant criticism, the smiles all around.

Enid cried: “I thought maybe you’d run into Chip at the airport and all three of you would be coming home!”

“That scenario is implausible in eight different ways,” Gary said.

“He told you he’d be here today?” Denise said.

“This afternoon,” Enid said. “Tomorrow at the latest.”

“Today, tomorrow, next April,” Gary said. “Whatever.”

“He said there was some trouble in Lithuania,” Enid said.

While Denise went to find Alfred, Gary fetched the morning Chronicle from the den. In a box of international news sandwiched between lengthy features (“New ‘Peticures’ Make Dogs ‘Red in Claw”’ and “Are Ophthalmologists Overpaid? — Docs Say No, Optometrists Say Yes”) he located a paragraph about Lithuania: civil unrest following disputed parliamentary elections and attempted assassination of President Vitkunas … three-fourths of the country without electric i ty … rival paramilitary groups clashing on the streets of Vilnius … and the airport —

“The airport is closed,” Gary read aloud with satisfaction. “Mother? Did you hear me?”

“He was already at the airport yesterday,” Enid said. “I’m sure he got out.”

“Then why hasn’t he called?”

“He was probably running to catch a flight.”

At a certain point Enid’s capacity for fantasy became physically painful to Gary. He opened his wallet and presented her with the receipt for the shower stool and safety bar.

“I’ll write you a check later,” she said.

“How about now, before you forget.”

Muttering and soughing, Enid complied with his wishes.

Gary examined the check. “Why is this dated December twenty-six?”

“Because that’s the soonest you could possibly deposit it in Philadelphia.”

Their skirmishing continued through lunch. Gary slowly drank a beer and slowly drank a second, relishing the distress that he was causing Enid as she told him for a third time and a fourth time that he’d better get started on that shower project. When he finally stood up from the table, it occurred to him that his impulse to run Enid’s life was the logical response to her own insistence on running his.

The safety shower bar was a fifteen-inch length of beige enamel pipe with flanged elbows at each end. The stubby screws included in the package might have sufficed to attach the bar to plywood but were useless with ceramic tile. To secure the bar, he would have to run six-inch bolts through the wall into the little closet behind the shower.

Down in Alfred’s workshop, he was able to find masonry bits for the electric drill, but the cigar boxes that he remembered as cornucopias of useful hardware seemed mainly to contain corroded, orphaned screws and strike plates and toilet-tank fittings. Certainly no six-inch bolts.

Departing for the hardware store, wearing his I’m-a-jerk smile, he noticed Enid at the dining-room windows, peering out through a sheer curtain.

“Mother,” he said. “I think it’s important not to get your hopes up about Chip.”

“I just thought I heard a car door in the street.”

Fine, go ahead , Gary thought as he left the house, fixate on whoever isn’t here and oppress whoever is .

On the front walk he passed Denise, who was returning from the supermarket with groceries. “I hope you’re letting Mom pay for those,” he said.

His sister laughed in his face. “What difference does it make to you?”

“She’s always trying to get away with things. It burns me up·”

“So redouble your vigilance,” Denise said, proceeding toward the house.

Why, exactly, had he been feeling guilty? He’d never promised to bring Jonah on the trip, and although he was currently ahead by $58,000 on his Axon investment he’d worked hard for those shares and he’d taken all the risk, and Bea Meisner herself had urged him not to give Enid the addictive drug; so why had he felt guilty?

As he drove, he imagined the needle on his cranial-pressure gauge creeping clockwise. He was sorry he’d offered his services to Enid. Given the brevity of his visit, it was stupid to spend the afternoon on a job she should have paid a handyman to do.

At the hardware store, he stood in the checkout line behind the fattest and slowest people in the central tier of states. They’d come to buy marshmallow Santas, packages of tinsel, Venetian blinds, eight-dollar blow-dryers, and holiday-theme pot-holders. With their bratwurst fingers they dug for exact change in tiny purses. White cartoon puffs of steam shot out of Gary’s ears. All the fun things he could be doing instead of waiting half an hour to buy six six-inch bolts assumed ravishing form in his imagination. He could be visiting the Collector’s Room at the Museum of Transport gift shop, or sorting out the old bridge and track drawings from his father’s early career at the Midland Pacific, or searching the under-porch storeroom for his long-missing O-gauge model railroad equipment. With the lifting of his “depression,” he’d developed a new interest, hobbylike in its intensity, in framable and collectible railroad memorabilia, and he could happily have spent the whole day — the whole week! — pursuing it …

Back at the house, as he was heading up the walk, he saw the sheer curtains part, his mother peering out again. Inside, the air was steamy and dense with the smell of foods that Denise was baking, simmering, and browning. Gary gave Enid the receipt for the bolts, which she regarded as the token of hostility that it was.

“You can’t afford four dollars and ninety-six cents?”

“Mother,” he said. “I’m doing the work like I promised. But this is not my bathroom. This is not my safety bar.”

“I’ll get the money for you later.”

“You might forget.”

“Gary, I will get the money for you later .”

Denise, in an apron, followed this exchange from the kitchen doorway with laughing eyes.

When Gary made his second trip to the basement, Alfred was snoring in the big blue chair. Gary proceeded into the workshop, and here he was stopped in his tracks by a new discovery. A shotgun in a canvas case was leaning against the lab bench. He didn’t remember having seen it here earlier. Could he have somehow failed to notice it? Ordinarily the gun was kept in the under-porch storeroom. He was sorry indeed to see that it had moved.

Do I let him shoot himself?

The question was so clear in his mind that he almost spoke it out loud. And he considered. It was one thing to intervene on behalf of Enid’s safety and confiscate her drugs; there was life and hope and pleasure worth saving in Enid. The old man, however, was kaput.

At the same time, Gary had no wish to hear a gunshot and come down and wade into the gore. He didn’t want his mother to go through this, either.

And yet, horrible though the mess would be, it would be followed by a huge quantum uptick in the quality of his mother’s life.

Gary opened the box of shells on the bench and saw that none were missing. He wished that someone else, not he, had noticed that Alfred had moved the gun. But his decision, when it came, was so clear in his mind that he did speak it out loud. Into the dusty, uric, non-reverberative silence of the laboratory he said: “If that’s what you want, be my guest. I ain’t gonna stop you.”

Before he could drill holes in the shower, he had to clear the shelves of the little bathroom closet. This in itself was a substantial job. Enid had saved, in a shoe box, every cotton ball she’d ever taken from a bottle of aspirin or prescription medication. There were five hundred or a thousand cotton balls. There were petrified half-squeezed tubes of ointment. There were plastic pitchers and utensils (in colors even worse, if possible, than beige) from Enid’s admissions to the hospital for foot surgery, knee surgery, and phlebitis. There were dear little bottles of Mercurochrome and Anbesol that had dried up sometime in the 1960s. There was a paper bag that Gary quickly, for the sake of his composure, threw to the back of a high shelf because it appeared to contain ancient menstrual belts and pads.