The Corrections: A Novel (36 page)

“They have a model railroad that takes up a whole room!” Enid said relentlessly.

And the goddamned model railroaders, yes, the goddamned hobbyists. Enid knew perfectly well how he felt about these dilettantes and their pointless and implausible model layouts.

“A whole room?” Gary said with skepticism. “How big?”

“Wouldn’t it be neat to put some M-80s on, um, on, um, on a model railroad bridge? Ker-PERSSSCHT! P’kow, p’kow!”

“Chipper, eat your dinner
now
,” Alfred said.

“Big big big,” Enid said. “The model is much much much much much bigger than the one your father bought you.”

“
Now
,” Alfred said. “Are you listening to me? Now.”

Two sides of the square table were happy and two were
not. Gary told a pointless, genial story about this kid in his class who had three rabbits while Chipper and Alfred, twin studies in bleakness, lowered their eyes to their plates. Enid visited the kitchen for more rutabaga.

“I know who not to ask if they want seconds,” she said when she returned.

Alfred shot her a warning look. They had agreed for the sake of the boys’ welfare never to allude to his own dislike of vegetables and certain meats.

“I’ll take some,” Gary said.

Chipper had a lump in his throat, a desolation so obstructive that he couldn’t have swallowed much in any case. But when he saw his brother happily devouring seconds of Revenge, he became angry and for a moment understood how his entire dinner might be scarfable in no time, his duties discharged and his freedom regained, and he actually picked up his fork and made a pass at the craggy wad of rutabaga, tangling a morsel of it in his tines and bringing it near his mouth. But the rutabaga smelled carious and was already cold—it had the texture and temperature of wet dog crap on a cool morning—and his guts convulsed in a spine-bending gag reflex.

“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.

The foods receded, or a new melancholy shadowed them. Chipper became less immediately disgusted; he ceased even to think about eating. Deeper sources of refusal were kicking in.

Soon the table was cleared of everything but his place mat and his plate. The light grew harsher. He heard Gary and his mother conversing on trivial topics as she washed and Gary dried. Then Gary’s footsteps on the basement stairs. Metronomic thock of Ping-Pong ball. More desolate peals of large pots being handled and submerged.

His mother reappeared. “Chipper, just eat that up. Be a big boy now.”

He had arrived in a place where she couldn’t touch him. He felt nearly cheerful, all head, no emotion. Even his butt was numb from pressing on the chair.

“Dad means for you to sit there till you eat that. Finish it up now. Then your whole evening’s free.”

If his evening had been truly free he might have spent it entirely at a window watching Cindy Meisner.

“Noun adjective,” his mother said, “contraction possessive noun. Conjunction conjunction stressed pronoun counter-factual verb pronoun I’d just gobble that up and temporal adverb pronoun conditional auxiliary infinitive—”

Peculiar how unconstrained he felt to understand the words that were spoken to him. Peculiar his sense of freedom from even that minimal burden of decoding spoken English.

She tormented him no further but went to the basement, where Alfred had shut himself inside his lab and Gary was amassing (“Thirty-seven, thirty–eight”) consecutive bounces on his paddle.

“Tock tock?” she said, wagging her head in invitation.

She was hampered by pregnancy or at least the idea of it, and Gary could have trounced her, but her pleasure at being played with was so extremely evident that he simply disengaged himself, mentally multiplying their scores or setting himself small challenges like returning the ball to alternating quadrants. Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother’s illusions.

And she looked so vulnerable tonight. The exertions of dinner and dishes had relaxed her hair’s rollered curls. Little blotches of sweat were blooming through the cotton bodice of her dress. Her hands had been in latex gloves and were as red as tongues.

He sliced a winner down the line and past her, the ball running all the way to the shut door of the metallurgy lab. It bounced up and knocked on this door before subsiding. Enid pursued it carefully. What silence, what darkness, there was behind that door. Al seemed not to have a light on.

There existed foods that even Gary hated—Brussels sprouts, boiled okra—and Chipper had watched his pragmatic sibling palm them and fling them into dense shrubbery from the back doorway, if it was summer, or secrete them on his person and dump them in the toilet, if it was winter. Now that Chipper was alone on the first floor he could easily have disappeared his liver and his beet greens. The difficulty: his father would think that he had eaten them, and eating them was exactly what he was refusing now to do. Food on the plate was necessary to prove refusal.

He minutely peeled and scraped the flour crust off the top of the liver and ate it. This took ten minutes. The denuded surface of the liver was a thing you didn’t want to see.

He unfolded the beet greens somewhat and rearranged them.

He examined the weave of the place mat.

He listened to the bouncing ball, his mother’s exaggerated groans and her nerve-grating cries of encouragement (“Ooo, good one, Gary!”). Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else’s Ping-Pong. Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless. The score in Ping-Pong bounced along toward twenty-one and then the game was over, and then two games were over, and then three were over, and to the people inside the game this was all right because fun had been had, but to the boy at the table upstairs it was not all right. He’d involved himself in the sounds of the game, investing them with hope to the extent of wishing they might never stop. But they did stop, and he was still at the table, only it was half an hour later. The evening devouring itself in futility. Even at the age of seven Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture of his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.