Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

And so it went. The more Robin agreed to be abused, the more Denise enjoyed abusing her. She ignored Nick Razza’s phone messages. She stayed in bed until two in the afternoon. Her social cigarette habit bloomed into craving. She indulged fifteen years’ accumulated laziness; she lived on her savings account. Every day, she considered all the work she had to do to prepare the house for her parents’ arrival — putting a handle in the shower, carpeting the staircases, buying furniture for the living room, finding a better kitchen table, moving her bed down from the third floor and setting it up in the guest room — and concluded that she lacked the energy. Her life consisted of waiting for the ax to fall. If her parents were coming for six months, there was no point in starting something else. She had to get all her slacking-off done now.

What exactly her father thought about Corecktall was difficult to know. The one time she asked him directly, on the phone, he didn’t answer.

“AL?” Enid prompted. “Denise wants to know HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT CORECKTALL.”

Alfred’s voice was sour. “You’d think they could have found a better name than that.”

“It’s a completely different spelling,” Enid said. “Denise wants to know if you’re EXCITED ABOUT THE TREATMENT.”

Silence.

“Al, tell her how excited you are.”

“I find that my affliction gets a little worse every week. I can’t see that another drug is going to make much difference.”

“Al, it’s not a drug, it’s a radical new therapy that uses your patent!”

“I’ve learned to put up with a certain amount of optimism. So, we will stick to the plan.”

“Denise,” Enid said, “I can do lots to help out. I can make all the meals and do all the laundry. I think it will be a great adventure! It’s so wonderful that you’re offering.”

Denise couldn’t imagine six months with her parents in a house and a city she was done with, six months of invisibility as the accommodating and responsible daughter that she could barely pretend to be. She’d made a promise, however; and so she took her rage out on Robin.

On the Saturday night before Christmas she sat in her kitchen and blew smoke at Robin while Robin maddened her by trying to cheer her up.

“You’re giving them a great gift,” Robin said, “by inviting them to stay with you.”

“It would be a gift if I weren’t a mess,” Denise said. “But you should only offer what you can actually deliver.”

“You can deliver it,” Robin said. “I’ll help you. I can spend mornings with your dad, and give your mom a break, and you can go off by yourself, and do whatever you want. I’ll come three or four mornings a week.”

To Denise Robin’s offer only made the prospect of those mornings bleaker and more suffocating.

“Do you not understand?” she said. “I hate this house. I hate this city. I hate my life here. I hate family. I hate home. I’m ready to leave. I’m not a good person . And it only makes it worse to pretend I am.”

“I think you’re a good person,” Robin said.

“I treat you like garbage! Have you not noticed?”

“It’s because you’re so unhappy.”

Robin came around the table and tried to lay a hand on her; Denise elbowed it aside. Robin tried again, and this time Denise caught her squarely in the cheek with the knuckles of her open hand.

Robin backed away, her face crimson, as if she were bleeding on the inside. “You hit me,” she said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“You hit me rather hard. Why did you do that?”

“Because I don’t want you here. I don’t want to be part of your life. I don’t want to be part of anybody’s life. I’m sick of watching myself be cruel to you.”

Interconnecting flywheels of pride and love were spinning behind Robin’s eyes. It was a while before she spoke. “OK, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

Denise did nothing to stop her from leaving, but when she heard the front door close she understood that she’d lost the only person who could have helped her when her parents came to town. She’d lost Robin’s company, her comforts. Everything she’d spurned a minute earlier she wanted back.

She flew to St. Jude.

On her first day there, as on the first day of every visit, she warmed to her parents’ warmth and did whatever her mother asked her to. She waved off the cash Enid tried to give her for the groceries. She refrained from commenting on the four-ounce bottle of rancid yellow glue that was the only olive oil in the kitchen. She wore the lavender synthetic turtleneck and the matronly gold-plate necklace that were recent gifts from her mother. She effused, spontaneously, about the adolescent ballerinas in The Nutcracker , she held her father’s gloved hand as they crossed the regional theater’s parking lot, she loved her parents more than she’d ever loved anything; and the minute they were both in bed she changed her clothes and fled the house.

She paused in the street, a cigarette on her lip, a match-book ( Dean & Trish ♦ June 13, 1987 ) trembling in her fingers. She hiked to the field behind the grade school where she and Don Armour had once sat and smelled cattails and verbena; she stamped her feet, rubbed her hands, watched the clouds occult the constellations, and took deep fortifying breaths of selfhood.

Later in the night, she undertook a clandestine operation on her mother’s behalf, entering Gary’s bedroom while he was occupied with Alfred, unzipping the inside pocket of his leather jacket, replacing the Mexican A with a handful of Advils, and spiriting Enid’s drug away to a safer place before she finally, good daughter, fell asleep.

On her second day in St. Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it. At breakfast she was tortured by every word her mother said. Browning the ribs and soaking the sauerkraut according to ancestral custom, rather than in the modern style she’d developed at the Generator, made her angry. (So much grease, such sacrifice of texture.) The bradykinetic languor of Enid’s electric stove, which hadn’t bothered her the day before, made her angry. The hundred-and-one refrigerator magnets, puppy-dog sentimental in their iconography and so feeble in their pull that you could scarcely open the door without sending a snapshot of Jonah or a postcard of Vienna swooping to the floor, filled her with rage. She went to the basement to get the ancestral ten-quart Dutch oven, and the clutter in the laundry-room cabinets made her furious. She dragged a trash can in from the garage and began to fill it with her mother’s crap. This was arguably helpful to her mother, and so she went at it with abandon. She threw away the Korean barfle-berries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. She threw away the wreath of spray-painted pinecones that somebody had ripped apart. She threw away the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. She threw away the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted, the Nixon-era bottle of Mai Tai mix with an oozing crust around its neck, the collection of Paul Masson Chablis carafes with spider parts and moth wings at the bottom, the profoundly corroded bracket for some long-lost wind chimes. She threw away the quart glass bottle of Vess Diet Cola that had turned the color of plasma, the ornamental jar of brandied kumquats that was now a fantasia of rock candy and amorphous brown gunk, the smelly thermos whose broken inner glass tinkled when she shook it, the mildewed half-peck produce basket full of smelly yogurt cartons, the hurricane lanterns sticky with oxidation and brimming with severed moth wings, the lost empires of florist’s clay and florist’s tape that hung together even as they crumbled and rusted …