Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

The previous spring, in Philadelphia, she and Alfred had eaten a late lunch at the noisy restaurant where Denise was ruining her hands and wasting her youth. After their lunch, which was quite good but much too rich, Denise had made a point of introducing them to the “chef” under whom she’d studied and for whom she was now boiling and toiling. This “chef,” Emile Berger, was a short, unsmiling, middle-aged Jew from Montreal whose idea of dressing for work was to wear an old white T-shirt (like a cook , not a chef, Enid thought; no jacket, no toque) and whose idea of shaving was to skip it. Enid would have disliked Emile and snubbed him even if she hadn’t gathered, from Denise’s way of hanging on his words, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence with her daughter. “Those are such rich crab cakes,” she accused in the kitchen. “ One bite and I was stuffed.” To which, instead of apologizing and deprecating himself, as any polite St. Judean would have done, Emile responded by agreeing that, yes, if it could be managed, and the flavor was good, a “lite” crab cake would be a wonderful thing, but the question, Mrs. Lambert, was how to manage it? Eh? How to make crabmeat “lite”? Denise was following this exchange hungrily, as if she’d scripted it or were memorizing it. Outside the restaurant, before she returned to her fourteen-hour shift, Enid made sure to say to her: “He certainly is a short little man! So Jewish-looking.” Her tone was less controlled than she might have wished, a little squeakier and thinner at the edges, and she could tell from the distant look in Denise’s eyes and from a bitterness around her mouth that she’d bruised her daughter’s feelings. Then again, all she’d done was speak the truth. And she never, not for a second, imagined that Denise — who, no matter how immature and romantic she was, and no matter how impractical her career plans, had just turned twenty-three and had a beautiful face and figure and her whole life ahead of her — would actually date a person like Emile. As to what exactly a young woman was supposed to do with her physical charms while she waited for the maturing years to pass, now that girls no longer got married quite so young, Enid was, to be sure, somewhat vague. In a general way she believed in socializing in groups of three or more; believed, in a word, in parties! The one thing she knew categorically, the principle she embraced the more passionately the more it was ridiculed in the media and popular entertainments, was that sex before marriage was immoral.

And yet, on that October night, as she knelt on the bathroom floor, Enid had the heretical thought that it might after all have been wiser, in her maternal homilies, to have laid less stress on marriage. It occurred to her that Denise’s rash act might even have been prompted, in some tiny part, by her wish to do the moral thing and please her mother. Like a toothbrush in the toilet bowl, like a dead cricket in a salad, like a diaper on the dinner table, this sickening conundrum confronted Enid: that it might actually have been preferable for Denise to go ahead and commit adultery, better to sully herself with a momentary selfish pleasure, better to waste a purity that every decent young man had the right to expect from a prospective bride, than to marry Emile. Except that Denise should never have been attracted to Emile in the first place! It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn’t match. They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.

While observing peripherally that the bathroom carpet was more spotted than she’d realized and ought to be replaced before the holidays, Enid listened to Alfred offering to send Denise a pair of plane tickets. She was struck by the seeming calm with which Alfred took the news that his only daughter had made the biggest decision of her life without consulting him. But after he’d hung up the phone and she’d come out of the bathroom and he’d commented, simply, that life was full of surprises, she noticed how strangely his hands were shaking. The tremor was at once looser and more intense than the one he sometimes got from drinking coffee. And during the week that followed, while Enid made the best of the mortifying position in which Denise had placed her by (1) calling her best friends and sounding thrilled to announce that Denise was getting married soon! to a very nice Canadian man, yes, but she wanted immediate family only at the ceremony, so, and she was introducing her new husband at a simple, informal open house at Christmastime (none of Enid’s friends believed that she was thrilled, but they gave her full credit for trying to hide her suffering; some were even sensitive enough not to ask where Denise had registered for gifts) and (2) ordering, without Denise’s permission, two hundred engraved announcements, not only to make the wedding appear more conventional but also to shake the gift tree a little in hopes of receiving compensation for the dozens and dozens of teakwood salad sets that she and Alfred had given in the last twenty years: during this long week, Enid was so continually aware of Alfred’s strange new tremor that when, by and by, he agreed to see his doctor and was referred to Dr. Hedgpeth and diagnosed with Parkinson’s, an underground branch of her intelligence persisted in connecting his disease with Denise’s announcement and so in blaming her daughter for the subsequent plummeting of her own quality of life, even though Dr. Hedgpeth had stressed that Parkinson’s was somatic in origin and gradual in its onset. By the time the holidays rolled around, and Dr. Hedgpeth had provided her and Alfred with pamphlets and booklets whose drab doctor’s-office color schemes, dismal line drawings, and frightening medical photos presaged a drab and dismal and frightening future, Enid was pretty well convinced that Denise and Emile had ruined her life. She was under strict orders from Alfred, however, to make Emile feel welcome in the family. So at the open house for the newlyweds she painted a smile on her face and accepted, over and over, the sincere congratulations of old family friends who loved Denise and thought she was darling (because Enid in raising her had emphasized the importance of being kind to her elders) (although what was her marriage if not an instance of excessive kindness to an elder?) where she would have much preferred condolences. The effort she made to be a good sport and cheerleader, to obey Alfred and receive her middle-aged son-in-law cordially and not say one single word about his religion, only added to the shame and anger she felt five years later when Denise and Emile were divorced and Enid had to give this news, too, to all her friends. Having attached so much meaning to the marriage, having struggled so hard to accept it, she felt that the least Denise could have done was stay married.

“Do you ever hear from Emile anymore?” Enid asked.

Denise was drying dishes in Chip’s kitchen. “Occasionally.”

Enid had parked herself at the dining table to clip coupons from magazines she’d taken from her Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bag. Rain was coming down erratically in gusts that slapped and fogged the windows. Alfred was sitting on Chip’s chaise with his eyes closed.

“I was just thinking,” Enid said, “that even if things had worked out, and you’d stayed married, you know, Denise, Emile’s going to be an old man in not too many years. And that’s so much work. You can’t imagine what a huge responsibility.”

“In twenty-five years he’ll be younger than Dad is now,” Denise said.

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” Enid said, “about my high-school friend Norma Greene.”