Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Denise was trimming the stems of the sunflowers she’d brought. “Why was Dad carrying twelve pounds of pecans down the basement stairs?”

“He wanted a project he could work on in his chair. He was going to shell them.” Enid hovered at Denise’s shoulder. “Is there something I can do here?”

“You can find me a vase.”

The first cabinet that Enid opened contained a carton of wine-bottle corks and nothing else. “I don’t understand why Chip invited us here if he wasn’t even going to eat lunch with us.”

“Conceivably,” Denise said, “he didn’t plan on getting dumped this morning.”

Denise’s tone of voice was forever informing Enid that she was stupid. Denise was not, Enid felt, a very warm or giving person. However, Denise was a daughter, and a few weeks ago Enid had done a shameful thing that she was now in serious need of confessing to somebody, and she hoped Denise might be that person.

“Gary wants us to sell the house and move to Philadelphia,” she said. “Gary thinks Philadelphia makes sense because he’s there and you’re there and Chip’s in New York. I said to Gary, I love my children, but St. Jude is where I’m comfortable. Denise, I’m a midwesterner. I’d be lost in Philadelphia. Gary wants us to sign up for assisted living. He doesn’t understand that it’s already too late. Those places won’t let you in if you have a condition like Dad’s.”

“But if Dad keeps falling down the stairs.”

“Denise, he doesn’t hold the railing! He refuses to accept that he shouldn’t be carrying things on the stairs.”

Underneath the sink Enid found a vase behind a stack of framed photographs, four pictures of pinkish furry things, some sort of kooky art or medical photos. She tried to reach past them quietly, but she knocked over an asparagus steamer that she’d given Chip for Christmas once. As soon as Denise looked down, Enid could not pretend she hadn’t seen the pictures. “What on earth?” she said, scowling. “Denise, what are these?”

“What do you mean,’ what are these?’?”

“Some sort of kooky thing of Chip’s, I guess.”

Denise had an “amused” expression that drove Enid crazy. “Obviously you know what they are, though.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You don’t know what they are?”

Enid took the vase out and closed the cabinet. “I don’t want to know,” she said.

“Well, that’s something else entirely.”

In the living room, Alfred was summoning the courage to sit down on Chip’s chaise longue. Not ten minutes ago, he’d sat down on it without incident. But now, instead of simply doing it again, he’d stopped to think. He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall. His excellent blue chair in St. Jude was like a first baseman’s glove that gently gathered in whatever body was flung its way, at whatever glancing angle, with whatever violence; it had big helpful ursine arms to support him while he performed the crucial blind pivot. But Chip’s chaise was a low-riding, impractical antique. Alfred stood facing away from it and hesitated, his knees bent to the rather small degree that his neuropathic lower legs permitted, his hands scooping and groping in the air behind him. He was afraid to take the plunge. And yet there was something obscene about standing half-crouched and quaking, some association with the men’s room, some essential vulnerability which felt to him at once so poignant and degraded that, simply to put an end to it, he shut his eyes and let go. He landed heavily on his bottom and continued on over backwards, coming to rest with his knees in the air above him.

“Al, are you all right?” Enid called.

“I don’t understand this furniture,” he said, struggling to sit up and sound powerful. “Is this meant to be a sofa?”

Denise came out and put a vase of three sunflowers on the spindly table by the chaise. “It’s like a sofa,” she said. “You can put your legs up and be a French philosophe. You can talk about Schopenhauer.”

Alfred shook his head.

Enid enunciated from the kitchen doorway, “Dr. Hedgpeth says you should only sit in high, straight-backed chairs.”

Since Alfred showed no interest in these instructions, Enid repeated them to Denise when she returned to the kitchen. “ High, straight-backed chairs only,” she said. “But Dad won’t listen. He insists on sitting in his leather chair. Then he shouts for me to come and help him get up. But if I hurt my back, then where are we? I put one of those nice old ladder-back chairs by the TV downstairs and told him sit here . But he’d rather sit in his leather chair, and then to get out of it he slides down the cushion until he’s on the floor. Then he crawls on the floor to the Ping-Pong table and uses the Ping-Pong table to hoist himself up.”

“That’s actually pretty resourceful,” Denise said as she took an armload of food from the refrigerator.

“Denise, he’s crawling across the floor . Rather than sit in a nice, comfortable straight-backed chair which the doctor says it’s important that he sit in, he crawls across the floor . He shouldn’t be sitting so much to begin with. Dr. Hedgpeth says his condition is not at all severe if he would just get out and do a little. Use it or lose it, that’s what every doctor says. Dave Schumpert has had ten times more health problems than Dad, he’s had a colostomy for fifteen years, he’s got one lung and a pacemaker, and look at all the things that he and Mary Beth are doing. They just got back from snorkeling in Fiji! And Dave never complains, never complains. You probably don’t remember Gene Grillo, Dad’s old friend from Hephaestus, but he has bad Parkinson’s — much, much worse than Dad’s. He’s still at home in Fort Wayne but in a wheelchair now. He’s really in awful shape, but, Denise, he’s interested in things. He can’t write anymore but he sent us an ’audio letter’ on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he’s started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don’t speak any English and Gene wants to be able to talk to them a little. Can you believe? Here Gene is in a wheelchair, completely crippled, and he’s still thinking about what he can do for somebody else! While Dad, who can walk, and write, and dress himself, does nothing all day but sit in his chair.”

“Mother, he’s depressed,” Denise said in a low voice, slicing bread.

“That’s what Gary and Caroline say, too. They say he’s depressed and he should take a medication. They say he was a workaholic and that work was a drug which when he couldn’t have it anymore he got depressed.”

“So drug him and forget him. A convenient theory.”

“That’s not fair to Gary.”

“Don’t get me started on Gary and Caroline.”

“ Golly , Denise, the way you throw that knife around I don’t see how you haven’t lost a finger.”

From the end of a French loaf Denise had made three little crust-bottomed vehicles. On one she set shavings of butter curved like sails full of wind, into another she loaded Parmesan shards packed in an excelsior of shredded arugula, and the third she paved with minced olive meat and olive oil and covered with a thick red tarp of pepper.

Enid spoke—“Mm, don’t those look nice”—as she reached, cat-quick, for the plate on which Denise had arranged the snacks. But the plate eluded Enid.