Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Halfway up the basement stairs, on her way to preparing this dinner, she paused and gave a sigh.

Alfred heard the sigh and suspected it had to do with “laundry” and “four months pregnant.” However, his own mother had driven a team of plow horses around a twenty-acre field when she was eight months pregnant, so he was not exactly sympathetic. He gave his bleeding cheek a styptic dusting of ammonium aluminum sulfate.

From the front door of the house came a thumping of little feet and a mittened knocking, Bea Meisner dropping off her human cargo. Enid hurried on up the stairs to accept delivery. Gary and Chipper, her fifth-grader and her first-grader, had the chlorination of the Y about them. With their damp hair they looked riparian. Muskratty, beaverish. She called thanks to Bea’s taillights.

As fast as they could without running (forbidden indoors), the boys proceeded to the basement, dropped their logs of sodden terry cloth in the laundry room, and found their father in his laboratory. It was in their nature to throw their arms around him, but this nature had been corrected out of them. They stood and waited, like company subordinates, for the boss to speak.

“So!” he said. “You’ve been swimming.”

“I’m a Dolphin!” Gary cried. He was an unaccountably cheerful boy. “I got my Dolphin clip!”

“A Dolphin. Well, well.” To Chipper, to whom life had offered mainly tragic perspectives since he was about two years old, the boss more gently said: “You, lad?”

“We used kickboards,” Chipper said.

“He’s a Tadpole,” Gary said.

“So. A Dolphin and a Tadpole. And what special skills do you bring to the workplace now that you’re a Dolphin?”

“Scissors kick.”

“I wish I’d had a nice big swimming pool like that when I was growing up,” the boss said, although for all he knew the pool at the Y was neither nice nor big. “Except for some muddy water in a cow pond I don’t recall seeing water deeper than three feet until I saw the Platte River. I must have been nearly ten.”

His youthful subordinates weren’t following. They shifted on their feet, Gary still smiling tentatively as though hopeful of an upturn in the conversation, Chipper frankly gaping at the laboratory, which was forbidden territory except when the boss was in it. The air here tasted like steel wool.

Alfred regarded his two subordinates gravely. Fraternizing had always been a struggle for him. “Have you been helping your mother in the kitchen?” he said.

When a subject didn’t interest Chipper, as this one didn’t, he thought about girls, and when he thought about girls he felt a surge of hope. On the wings of this hope he floated from the laboratory and up the stairs.

“Ask me nine times twenty-three,” Gary told the boss.

“All right,” Alfred said. “What is nine times twenty-three?”

“Two hundred seven. Ask me another.”

“What’s twenty-three squared?”

In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation. A cast aluminum lid clattered as the rutabaga water came abruptly to a. boil. Earlier in the day a half package of bacon in the refrigerator had suggested liver to her, the drab liver had suggested a complement of bright yellow, and so the Dinner had taken shape. Unfortunately, when she went to cook the bacon she discovered there were only three strips, not the six or eight she’d imagined. She was now struggling to believe that three strips would suffice for the entire family.

“What’s that? ” said Chipper with alarm.

“Liver ‘n’ bacon!”

Chipper backed out of the kitchen shaking his head in violent denial. Some days were ghastly from the outset; the breakfast oatmeal was studded with chunks of date like chopped-up cockroach; bluish swirls of inhomogeneity in his milk; a doctor’s appointment after breakfast. Other days, like this one, did not reveal their full ghastliness till they were nearly over.

He reeled through the house repeating: “Ugh, horrible, ugh, horrible, ugh, horrible, ugh, horrible …”

“Dinner in five minutes, wash your hands,” Enid called.

Cauterized liver had the odor of fingers that had handled dirty coins.

Chipper came to rest in the living room and pressed his face against the window, hoping for a glimpse of Cindy Meisner in her dining room. He had sat next to Cindy returning from the Y and smelled the chlorine on her. A sodden Band-Aid had clung by a few lingering bits of stickum to her knee.

Thukkety thukkety thukkety went Enid’s masher round the pot of sweet, bitter, watery rutabaga.

Alfred washed his hands in the bathroom, gave the soap to Gary, and employed a small towel.

“Picture a square,” he said to Gary.

Enid knew that Alfred hated liver, but the meat was full of health-bringing iron, and whatever Alfred’s shortcomings as a husband, no one could say he didn’t play by the rules. The kitchen was her domain, and he never meddled.

“Chipper, have you washed your hands?”

It seemed to Chipper that if he could only see Cindy again for one moment he might be rescued from the Dinner. He imagined being with her in her house and following her to her room. He imagined her room as a haven from danger and responsibility.

“Chipper?”

“You square A, you square B, and you add twice the product of A and B,” Alfred told Gary as they sat down at the table.

“Chipper, you better wash your hands,” Gary warned.

Alfred pictured a square:

1. Large Square & Smaller Squares

“I’m sorry I’m a little short on bacon,” Enid said. “I thought I had more.”

In the bathroom Chipper was reluctant to wet his hands because he was afraid he would never get them dry again. He let the water run audibly while he rubbed his hands with a towel. His failure to glimpse Cindy through the window had wrecked his composure.

“We had high fevers,” Gary reported. “Chipper had an earache, too.”

Brown grease-soaked flakes of flour were impastoed on the ferrous lobes of liver like corrosion. The bacon also, what little there was of it, had the color of rust.

Chipper trembled in the bathroom doorway. You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries. The Dinner of Revenge was one of these.

“How was your trip,” Enid asked Alfred because she had to sometime.

“Tiring.”

“Chipper, sweetie, we’re all sitting down.”

“I’m counting to five,” Alfred said.

“There’s bacon, you like bacon,” Enid sang. This was a cynical, expedient fraud, one of her hundred daily conscious failures as a mother.

“Two, three, four,” Alfred said.

Chipper ran to take his place at the table. No point in getting spanked.

“Blessalor this foodier use nusta thy service make asair mindful neesa others Jesus name amen,” Gary said.

A dollop of mashed rutabaga at rest on a plate expressed a clear yellowish liquid similar to plasma or the matter in a blister. Boiled beet greens leaked something cupric, greenish. Capillary action and the thirsty crust of flour drew both liquids under the liver. When the liver was lifted, a faint suction could be heard. The sodden lower crust was unspeakable.

Chipper considered the life of a girl. To go through life softly, to be a Meisner, to play in that house and be loved like a girl.