The Corrections

Meanwhile her brothers had conspired to make themselves unavailable. Chip had fled to Eastern Europe and Gary had placed himself under Caroline’s thumb. Gary, it was true, did “take responsibility” for his parents, but his idea of responsibility was to bully and give orders. The burden of listening to Enid and Alfred and being patient and understanding fell squarely on the daughter’s shoulders. Already Denise could see that she would be the only child in St. Jude for Christmas dinner and the only child on duty in the weeks and months and years after that. Her parents had better manners than to ask her to come and live with them, but she knew that this was what they wanted. As soon as she’d enrolled her father in Phase II testing of Corecktall and offered to house him, Enid had unilaterally ceased hostilities with her. Enid had never again mentioned her adulterous friend Norma Greene. She’d never asked Denise why she’d “quit” her job at the Generator. Enid was in trouble, her daughter was offering to help, and so she could no longer afford the luxury of finding fault. And now the time had come, according to the story that Denise told herself about herself, for the chef to carve herself up and feed the pieces to her hungry parents.

Lacking a better story, she almost bought this one. The only trouble was she didn’t recognize herself in it.

When she put on a white blouse, an antique gray suit, red lipstick, and a black pillbox hat with a little black veil, then she recognized herself. When she put on a sleeveless white T-shirt and boy’s jeans and tied her hair back so tightly that her head ached, she recognized herself. When she put on silver jewelry, turquoise eye shadow, corpse-lip nail polish, a searing pink jumper, and orange sneakers, she recognized herself as a living person and was breathless with the happiness of living.

She went to New York to appear on the Food Channel and visit one of those clubs for people like herself who were starting to Figure It Out and needed practice. She stayed with Julia Vrais in Julia’s outstanding apartment on Hudson Street. Julia reported that in the discovery phase of her divorce proceedings she’d learned that Gitanas Misevičius had paid for this apartment with funds embezzled from the Lithuanian government.

“Gitanas’s lawyer claims it was an ‘oversight,’ ” Julia told Denise, “but I find that hard to believe.”

“Does this mean you’re going to lose the apartment?”

“Well, no,” Julia said, “in fact this makes it more likely that I’ll get to keep it without paying anything. But still, I feel so awful! My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania!”

The temperature in Julia’s extra bedroom was about ninety. She gave Denise a foot-thick down comforter and asked if she wanted a blanket, too.

“Thanks, this looks like plenty,” Denise said.

Julia gave her flannel sheets and four pillows with flannel cases. She asked how Chip was doing in Vilnius.

“It sounds like he and Gitanas are the best of friends.”

“I hate to think what the two of them are saying about me,” Julia mused happily.

Denise said that it wouldn’t surprise her if Chip and Gitanas avoided the topic altogether.

Julia frowned. “Why wouldn’t they talk about me?”

“Well, you did painfully dump both of them.”

“But they could talk about how much they hate me!”

“I don’t think anybody could hate you.”

“Actually,” Julia said, “I was afraid you’d hate me for breaking up with Chip.”

“No, I never had anything at stake there.”

Clearly relieved to hear this, Julia confided to Denise that she was now being dated by a lawyer, nice but bald, with whom Eden Procuro had set her up. “I feel safe with him,” she said. “He’s so confident in restaurants. And he’s got tons of work, so he’s not always after me for, you know, favors.”

“Really,” Denise said, “the less you tell me about things with you and Chip, the happier I’ll be.”

When Julia then asked if Denise was seeing anybody, it shouldn’t have been so hard to tell her about Robin Passafaro, but it was very hard. Denise didn’t want to make her friend uncomfortable, didn’t want to hear her voice go small and soft with sympathy. She wanted to soak up Julia’s company in its familiar innocence, and so she said, “I’m seeing nobody.”

Nobody except, the next night, at a sapphic pasha’s den two hundred steps from Julia’s apartment, a seventeen-year-old just off the bus from Plattsburgh, New York, with a drastic hairstyle and twin 800s on her recent SATs (she carried the official ETS printout like a certificate of sanity or possibly of madness) and then, the night after that, a religious-studies major at Columbia whose father (she said) operated the largest sperm bank in Southern California.