The Corrections

After lunch she went to her room, which Enid had finally redecorated into near-perfect anonymity, and wrapped presents. (She’d bought clothes for everyone; she knew what people liked to wear.) She uncrumpled the Kleenex that contained thirty sunny caplets of Mexican A and considered wrapping them up as a gift for Enid, but she had to respect the limits of her promise to Gary. She balled the caplets back into the Kleenex, slipped out of her room and down the stairs, and stuffed the drug into the freshly vacated twenty-fourth pocket of the Advent calendar. Everybody else was in the basement. She was able to glide back upstairs and shut herself in her room as if she’d never left.

When she was young, when Enid’s mother had browned the ribs in the kitchen and Gary and Chip had brought home their unbelievably beautiful girlfriends and everybody’s idea of a good time was to buy Denise a lot of presents, this had been the longest afternoon of the year. An obscure natural law had forbidden whole-family gatherings before nightfall; people had scattered to wait in separate rooms. Sometimes, as a teenager, Chip had taken mercy on the last child in the house and played chess or Monopoly with her. When she got a little older, he’d brought her along to the mall with his girlfriend of the moment. There was no greater bliss for her at ten and twelve than to be so included: to take instruction from Chip in the evils of late capitalism, to gather couturial data on the girlfriend, to study the length of the girlfriend’s bangs and the height of her heels, to be left alone for an hour at the bookstore, and then to look back, from the top of the hill above the mall, on the silent slow choreography of traffic in the faltering light.

Even now it was the longest afternoon. Snowflakes a shade darker than the snow-colored sky had begun to fall in quantity. Their chill found its way past the storm windows, it skirted the flows and masses of furnace-heated air from the registers, it came right at your neck. Denise, afraid of getting sick, lay down and pulled a blanket over herself.

She slept hard, with no dreams, and awoke—where? what time? what day?—to angry voices. Snow had webbed the corners of the windows and frosted the swamp white oak. There was light in the sky but not for long.

Al, Gary went to ALL that trouble —

I never asked him to!

Well, can’t you try it at least once? After all the work he did yesterday?

I am entitled to a bath if I want to take a bath .

Dad, it’s only a matter of time before you fall on the stairs and break your neck!

I am not asking anyone for help .

You’re damn right you’re not! Because I have forbidden Mom — forbidden her — to go anywhere near that bathtub —

Al, please, just try the shower —

Mom, forget it, let him break his neck, we’d all be better off —

Gary —

The voices were coming closer as the contretemps moved up the stairs. Denise heard her father’s heavy tread pass her door. She put her glasses on and opened the door just as Enid, slow on her bad hip, reached the top of the stairs. “Denise, what are you doing?”

“I took a nap.”

“Go talk to your father. Tell him it’s important that he try the shower that Gary did so much work on. He’ll listen to you.”

The depth of her sleep and the manner of her awakening had put Denise out of phase with external reality; the scene in the hall and the scene in the hall windows had faint antimatter shadows; sounds were at once too loud and barely audible. “Why—” she said. “Why are we making an issue of this today?”

“Because Gary’s leaving tomorrow and I want him to see if the shower’s going to work for Dad.”

“And tell me again what’s wrong with the bath?”

“He gets stuck. And he’s so bad on the stairs.”

Denise closed her eyes, but this substantially worsened the phase-sync problem. She opened them.

“Oh, plus, and Denise,” Enid said, “you haven’t worked with him on his exercises yet like you promised!”

“Right. I’ll do that.”

“Do it now, before he gets cleaned up. Here, I’ll get you the sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth.”

Enid limped back down the stairs, and Denise raised her voice. “Dad?”

No answer.

Enid came halfway up the stairs and pushed through the rails of the banister a violet sheet of paper (“MOBILITY IS GOLDEN”) on which stick figures illustrated seven stretching exercises. “Really teach him,” she said. “He gets impatient with me, but he’ll listen to you. Dr. Hedgpeth keeps asking if Dad’s doing his exercises. It’s very important that he really learn these. I had no idea you were sleeping all this time.”

Denise took the instruction sheet into the master bedroom and found Alfred in the doorway of his closet, naked from the waist down.

“Whoa, Dad, sorry,” she said, retreating.

“What is it?”

“We need to work on your exercises.”

“I’m already undressed.”

“Just put some pajamas on. Loose clothing is better anyway.”

It took her five minutes to calm him down and stretch him out on his back on the bed in his wool shirt and his pajama bottoms; and here at last the truth came pouring out.