The Corrections

Denise did nothing to stop her from leaving, but when she heard the front door close she understood that she’d lost the only person who could have helped her when her parents came to town. She’d lost Robin’s company, her comforts. Everything she’d spurned a minute earlier she wanted back.

She flew to St. Jude.

On her first day there, as on the first day of every visit, she warmed to her parents’ warmth and did whatever her mother asked her to. She waved off the cash Enid tried to give her for the groceries. She refrained from commenting on the four-ounce bottle of rancid yellow glue that was the only olive oil in the kitchen. She wore the lavender synthetic turtleneck and the matronly gold-plate necklace that were recent gifts from her mother. She effused, spontaneously, about the adolescent ballerinas in The Nutcracker, she held her father’s gloved hand as they crossed the regional theater’s parking lot, she loved her parents more than she’d ever loved anything; and the minute they were both in bed she changed her clothes and fled the house.

She paused in the street, a cigarette on her lip, a matchbook (Dean & Trish • June 13, 1987) trembling in her fingers. She hiked to the field behind the grade school where she and Don Armour had once sat and smelled cattails and verbena; she stamped her feet, rubbed her hands, watched the clouds occult the constellations, and took deep fortifying breaths of selfhood.

Later in the night, she undertook a clandestine operation on her mother’s behalf, entering Gary’s bedroom while he was occupied with Alfred, unzipping the inside pocket of his leather jacket, replacing the Mexican A with a handful of Advils, and spiriting Enid’s drug away to a safer place before she finally, good daughter, fell asleep.

On her second day in St. Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it. At breakfast she was tortured by every word her mother said. Browning the ribs and soaking the sauerkraut according to ancestral custom, rather than in the modern style she’d developed at the Generator, made her angry. (So much grease, such sacrifice of texture.) The bradykinetic languor of Enid’s electric stove, which hadn’t bothered her the day before, made her angry. The hundred-and-one refrigerator magnets, puppy-dog sentimental in their iconography and so feeble in their pull that you could scarcely open the door without sending a snapshot of Jonah or a postcard of Vienna swooping to the floor, filled her with rage. She went to the basement to get the ancestral ten-quart Dutch oven, and the clutter in the laundry-room cabinets made her furious. She dragged a trash can in from the garage and began to fill it with her mother’s crap. This was arguably helpful to her mother, and so she went at it with abandon. She threw away the Korean barfleberries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. She threw away the wreath of spray-painted pinecones that somebody had ripped apart. She threw away the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. She threw away the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted, the Nixon-era bottle of Mai Tai mix with an oozing crust around its neck, the collection of Paul Masson Chablis carafes with spider parts and moth wings at the bottom, the profoundly corroded bracket for some long-lost wind chimes. She threw away the quart glass bottle of Vess Diet Cola that had turned the color of plasma, the ornamental jar of brandied kumquats that was now a fantasia of rock candy and amorphous brown gunk, the smelly thermos whose broken inner glass tinkled when she shook it, the mildewed half-peck produce basket full of smelly yogurt cartons, the hurricane lanterns sticky with oxidation and brimming with severed moth wings, the lost empires of florist’s clay and florist’s tape that hung together even as they crumbled and rusted. . .

At the very back of the closet, in the cobwebs behind the bottom shelf, she found a thick envelope, not old-looking, with no postage on it. The envelope was addressed to the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA. The return addressee was Alfred Lambert. The words SEND CERTIFIED were also on the face.

Water was running in the little half-bathroom by her father’s laboratory, the toilet tank refilling, faint sulfurous odors in the air. The door to the lab was ajar and Denise knocked on it.

“Yes,” Alfred said.

He was standing by the shelves of exotic metals, the gallium and bismuth, and buckling his belt. She showed him the envelope and told him where she’d found it.

Alfred turned it over in his shaking hands, as if an explanation might magically occur to him. “It’s a mystery,” he said.

“Can I open it?”

“You may do as you wish.”