Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Dad,” Jonah said, “Grandma says she’ll buy me two books that cost less than ten dollars each or one book for less than twenty dollars, is that OK?”

Enid and Jonah were a lovefest. Enid had always preferred little kids to big kids, and Jonah’s adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter vegetables, under-excited by television and computer games, and skilled at cheerfully answering questions like “Are you loving school?” In St. Jude he was luxuriating in the undivided attention of three adults. He declared St. Jude the nicest place he’d ever been. From the back seat of the Oldfolksmobile, his elfin eyes wide, he marveled at everything Enid showed him.

“It’s so easy to park here!

“No traffic!

“The Transport Museum is better than any museums we have, Dad, don’t you agree?

“I love the legroom in this car. I think this is the nicest car I’ve ever ridden in.

“All the stores are so close and handy!”

That night, after they’d returned from the museum and Gary had gone out and done more shopping, Enid served stuffed pork chops and a chocolate birthday cake. Jonah was dreamily eating ice cream when she asked him if he might like to come and have Christmas in St. Jude.

“I would love that,” Jonah said, his eyelids drooping with satiety.

“You could have sugar cookies, and eggnog, and help us decorate the tree,” Enid said. “It’ll probably snow, so you can go sledding. And, Jonah, there’s a wonderful light show every year at Waindell Park, it’s called Christmasland, they have the whole park lit up—”

“Mother, it’s March,” Gary said.

“Can we come at Christmas?” Jonah asked him.

“We’ll come again very soon,” Gary said. “I don’t know about Christmas.”

“I think Jonah would love it,” Enid said.

“I would completely love it,” Jonah said, hoisting another spoonload of ice cream. “I think it might turn out to be the best Christmas I ever had.”

“I think so, too,” Enid said.

“It’s March,” Gary said. “We don’t talk about Christmas in March. Remember? We don’t talk about it in June or August, either. Remember?”

“Well,” Alfred said, standing up from the table. “I am going to bed.”

“St. Jude gets my vote for Christmas,” Jonah said.

Enlisting Jonah directly in her campaign, exploiting a little boy for leverage, seemed to Gary a low trick on Enid’s part. After he’d put Jonah to bed, he told his mother that Christmas ought to be the last of her worries.

“Dad can’t even install a light switch,” he said. “And now you’ve got a leak upstairs, you’ve got water coming in around the chimney—”

“I love this house,” Enid said from the kitchen sink, where she was scrubbing the pork-chop pan. “Dad just needs to work a little on his attitude.”

“He needs shock treatments or medication,” Gary said. “And if you want to dedicate your life to being his servant, that’s your choice. If you want to live in an old house with a lot of problems, and try to keep everything just the way you like it, that’s fine, too. If you want to wear yourself out trying to do both, be my guest. Just don’t ask me to make Christmas plans in March so you can feel OK about it all.”

Enid upended the pork-chop pan on the counter beside the overloaded drainer. Gary knew he ought to pick up a towel, but the jumble of wet pans and platters and utensils from his birthday dinner made him weary; to dry them seemed a task as Sisyphean as to repair the things wrong with his parents’ house. The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

He poured a smallish brandy nightcap while Enid, with unhappy stabbing motions, scraped waterlogged food scraps from the bottom of the sink.

“What do you think I should do?” she said.

“Sell the house,” Gary said. “Call a realtor tomorrow.”

“And move into some cramped, modern condominium?” Enid shook the repulsive wet scraps from her hand into the trash. “When I have to go out for the day, Dave and Mary Beth invite Dad over for lunch. He loves that, and I feel so comfortable knowing he’s with them. Last fall he was out planting a new yew, and he couldn’t get the old stump out, and Joe Person came over with a pickax and the two of them worked all afternoon together.”

“He shouldn’t be planting yews,” Gary said, regretting already the smallness of his initial pour. “He shouldn’t be using a pickax. The man can hardly stand up.”

“Gary, I know we can’t be here forever. But I want to have one last really nice family Christmas here. And I want—”

“Would you consider moving if we had that Christmas?”

New hope sweetened Enid’s expression. “Would you and Caroline consider coming?”

“I can’t make any promises,” Gary said. “But if you’d feel more comfortable about putting the house on the market, we would certainly consider—”

“I would adore it if you came. Adore it.”

“Mother, though, you have to be realistic.”

“Let’s get through this year,” Enid said, “let’s think about having Christmas here, like Jonah wants, and then we’ll see!”

Gary’s anhedonia had worsened when he returned to Chestnut Hill. As a winter project, he’d been distilling hundreds of hours of home videos into a watchable two-hour Greatest Lambert Hits compilation that he could make quality copies of and maybe send out as a “video Christmas card.” In the final edit, as he repeatedly reviewed his favorite family scenes and re-cued his favorite songs (“Wild Horses,” “Time After Time,” etc.), he began to hate these scenes and hate these songs. And when, in the new darkroom, he turned his attention to the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred, he found that he no longer enjoyed looking at still photographs, either. For years he’d mentally tinkered with the All-Time Two Hundred, as with an ideally balanced mutual fund, listing with great satisfaction the images that he was sure belonged in it. Now he wondered whom, besides himself, he was trying to impress with these pictures. Whom was he trying to persuade, and of what? He had a weird impulse to burn his old favorites. But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting anhedonia, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun …

He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside him in the sheets.

His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish, humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.

On Caroline’s nightstand was a hardcover copy of Middle Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had (Caren Tamkin, Ph.D., 1998).

She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly visible through the fabric’s stretched weave …