Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“I love rutabaga,” said Gary inconceivably.

“I could live on nothing but vegetables,” Enid averred.

“More milk,” Chipper said, breathing hard.

“Chipper, just hold your nose if you don’t like it,” Gary said.

Alfred put bite after bite of vile Revenge in his mouth, chewing quickly and swallowing mechanically, telling himself he had endured worse than this.

“Chip,” he said, “take one bite of each thing. You’re not leaving this table till you do.”

“More milk.”

“You will eat some dinner first. Do you understand?”

“Milk.”

“Does it count if he holds his nose?” Gary said.

“More milk, please.”

“That is just about enough,” Alfred said.

Chipper fell silent. His eyes went around and around his plate, but he had not been provident and there was nothing on the plate but woe. He raised his glass and silently urged a very small drop of warm milk down the slope to his mouth. He stretched his tongue out to welcome it.

“Chip, put the glass down.”

“Maybe he could hold his nose but then he has to eat two bites of things.”

“There’s the phone. Gary, you may answer it.”

“What’s for dessert?” Chipper said.

“I have some nice fresh pineapple .”

“Oh for God’s sake, Enid—”

“What?” She blinked innocently or faux-innocently.

“You can at least give him a cookie, or an Eskimo Pie, if he eats his dinner—”

“It’s such sweet pineapple. It melts in your mouth.”

“Dad, it’s Mr. Meisner.”

Alfred leaned over Chipper’s plate and in a single action of fork removed all but one bite of the rutabaga. He loved this boy, and he put the cold, poisonous mash into his own mouth and jerked it down his throat with a shudder. “Eat that last bite,” he said, “take one bite of the other, and you can have dessert.” He stood up. “I will buy the dessert if necessary.”

As he passed Enid on his way to the kitchen, she flinched and leaned away.

“Yes,” he said into the phone.

Through the receiver came the humidity and household clutter, the warmth and fuzziness, of Meisnerdom.

“Al,” Chuck said, “just looking in the paper here, you know, Erie Belt stock, uh. Five and five-eighths seems awfully low. You sure about this Midpac thing?”

“Mr. Replogle rode the motor car with me out of Cleveland. He indicated that the Board of Managers is simply waiting for a final report on track and structures. I’m going to give them that report on Monday.”

“Midpac’s kept this very quiet.”

“Chuck, I can’t recommend any particular course of action, and you’re right, there are some unanswered questions here—”

“Al, Al,” Chuck said. “You have a mighty conscience, and we all appreciate that. I’ll let you get back to your dinner.”

Alfred hung up hating Chuck as he would have hated a girl he’d been undisciplined enough to have relations with. Chuck was a banker and a thriver. You wanted to spend your innocence on someone worthy of it, and who better than a good neighbor, but no one could be worthy of it. There was excrement all over his hands.

“Gary: pineapple?” Enid said.

“Yes, please!”

The virtual disappearance of Chipper’s root vegetable had made him a tad manic. Things were i-i-i-looking up! He expertly paved one quadrant of his plate with the remaining bite of rutabaga, grading the yellow asphalt with his fork. Why dwell in the nasty reality of liver and beet greens when there was constructable a future in which your father had gobbled these up, too? Bring on the cookies! sayeth Chipper. Bring on the Eskimo Pie!

Enid carried three empty plates into the kitchen.

Alfred, by the phone, was studying the clock above the sink. The time was that malignant fiveishness to which the flu sufferer awakens after late-afternoon fever dreams. A time shortly after five which was a mockery of five. To the face of clocks the relief of order — two hands pointing squarely at whole numbers — came only once an hour. As every other moment failed to square, so every moment held the potential for fluish misery.

And to suffer like this for no reason. To know there was no moral order in the flu, no justice in the juices of pain his brain produced. The world nothing but a materialization of blind, eternal Will.

(Schopenhauer: No little part of the torment of existence is that Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us catch our breath but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with a whip .)

“I guess you don’t want pineapple,” Enid said. “I guess you’re buying your own dessert.”

“Enid, drop it. I wish once in your life you would let something drop.”

Cradling the pineapple, she asked why Chuck had called.

“We will talk about it later,” Alfred said, returning to the dining room.

“Daddy?” Chipper began.

“Lad, I just did you a favor. Now you do me a favor and stop playing with your food and finish your dinner. Right now . Do you understand me? You will finish it right now, or there will be no dessert and no other privileges tonight or tomorrow night, and you will sit here until you do finish it.”

“Daddy, though, can you—?”

“RIGHT NOW. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, OR DO YOU NEED A SPANKING?”

Tonsils release an ammoniac mucus when serious tears gather behind them. Chipper’s mouth twisted this way and that. He saw the plate in front of him in a new light. It was as if the food were an unbearable companion whose company he had been sure that his connections higher up, the strings pullable on his behalf, would spare him. Now came the realization that he and the food were in it for the long haul.

Now he mourned the passing of his bacon, paltry though it had been, with a deep and true grief.

Curiously, though, he didn’t outright cry.

Alfred retired to the basement with stamping and a slam.

Gary sat very quietly multiplying small whole numbers in his head.

Enid plunged a knife into the pineapple’s jaundiced belly. She decided that Chipper was exactly like his father — at once hungry and impossible to feed. He turned food into shame. To prepare a square meal and then to see it greeted with elaborate disgust, to see the boy actually gag on his breakfast oatmeal: this stuck in a mother’s craw. All Chipper wanted was milk and cookies, milk and cookies. Pediatrician said: “Don’t give in. He’ll get hungry eventually and eat something else.” So Enid tried to be patient, but Chipper sat down to lunch and declared: “This smells like vomit!” You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction — no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.

Lately she had taken to feeding him grilled cheese sandwiches all day long, holding back for dinner the yellow and leafy green vegetables required for a balanced diet and letting Alfred fight her battles.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

She carried two dishes of pineapple into the dining room. Chipper’s head was bowed, but the son who loved to eat reached eagerly for his dish.

Gary slurped and aerated, wordlessly consuming pineapple.

The dogshit-yellow field of rutabaga; the liver warped by frying and so unable to lie flush with the plate; the ball of woody beet leaves collapsed and contorted but still entire, like a wetly compressed bird in an eggshell, or an ancient corpse folded over in a bog: the spatial relations among these foods no longer seemed to Chipper haphazard but were approaching permanence, finality.