Chapter One
THE MADNESS of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You
could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in
the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees
restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things
coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened
on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks
rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered
in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer,
the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a
paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had
cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love
seat.
Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic
suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in
which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would
be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in
which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong
table, listening in vain for Enid.
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred
and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was
like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send
schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing
for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of
"bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you
have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you
stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard
a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a
granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones;
ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except
at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them
awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads
for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that
the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was
not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing
and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness
was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood.
Then Enid and Alfred—she on her knees in the dining room opening
drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table—each
felt near to exploding with anxiety.
The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer
autumn colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid
was realizing that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by
the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past: that these
hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars
(potentially one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket
that doubled coupons), had all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin
PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even close. The dates were historical.
The alarm bell had been ringing for years.
She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the
drawer. She was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail
some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and
had shouted, "Enid! Enid!" so loudly that he couldn't hear her shouting
back, "Al, I'm getting it!" He'd continued to shout her name, coming
closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon
Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because
there were aspects of the Axon situation that Enid knew about
and hoped that Alfred didn't, she'd quickly stashed the letter somewhere
within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from
the basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment,
"There's somebody at the door!" and she'd fairly screamed, "The mailman!
The mailman!" and he'd shaken his head at the complexity of it all.
Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn't have
to wonder, every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she
might, she couldn't get him interested in life. When she encouraged
him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she'd lost her
mind. When she asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could
do, he said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of
her friends all had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby
Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his
hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she
were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was
that labor? Repainting the porch furniture? He'd been repainting the
love seat since Labor Day. She seemed to recall that the last time he'd
painted the furniture he'd done the love seat in two hours. Now he
went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she
ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he'd painted of
the love seat was the legs.
He seemed to wish that she would go away. He said that the brush
had got dried out, that that was what was taking so long. He said that
scraping wicker was like trying to peel a blueberry. He said that there
were crickets. She felt a shortness of breath then, but perhaps it was
only the smell of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that
smelled like urine (but could not possibly be urine). She fled upstairs to
look for the letter from Axon.
Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the
front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since
the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived
here—Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn't think of
herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she ferried
matériel from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing
force. By night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a
too-small table in the breakfast nook, she staged various actions: paid
bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher Medicare copayment
records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a
medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously
showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and thus
indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address to
which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and
Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the
constraints under which Enid waged her campaign she had only the
dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on any given
evening. She might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the
governing force, in the person of Alfred, would be watching a network
newsmagazine at a volume thunderous enough to keep him awake, and
he had every light in the family room burning, and there was a non-negligible
possibility that if she opened the closet door a cascade of
catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch statements
would come toppling and sliding out, incurring Alfred's wrath.
There was also the possibility that the Notices would not be there, since
the governing force staged random raids on her depots, threatening to
"pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of it, but she was too
busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of it, and in the succession
of forced migrations and deportations any lingering semblance of
order was lost, and so the random Nordstrom shopping bag that was
camped behind a dust ruffle with one of its plastic handles semidetached
would contain the whole shuffled pathos of a refugee existence—non-consecutive
issues of Good Housekeeping, black-and-white
snapshots of Enid in the 1940s, brown recipes on high-acid paper that
called for wilted lettuce, the current month's telephone and gas bills,
the detailed First Notice from the medical lab instructing co-payers to
ignore subsequent billings for less than fifty cents, a complimentary
cruise ship photo of Enid and Alfred wearing leis and sipping beverages
from hollow coconuts, and the only extant copies of two of their children's
birth certificates, for example.
Although Enid's ostensible foe was Alfred, what made her a guerrilla
was the house that occupied them both. Its furnishings were of the
kind that brooked no clutter. There were chairs and tables by Ethan
Allen. Spode and Waterford in the breakfront. Obligatory ficuses,
obligatory Norfolk pines. Fanned copies of Architectural Digest on a
glass-topped coffee table. Touristic plunder—enamelware from China,
a Viennese music box that Enid out of a sense of duty and mercy every
so often wound up and raised the lid of. The tune was "Strangers in the
Night."
Unfortunately, Enid lacked the temperament to manage such a
house, and Alfred lacked the neurological wherewithal. Alfred's cries of
rage on discovering evidence of guerrilla actions—a Nordstrom bag
surprised in broad daylight on the basement stairs, nearly precipitating
a tumble—were the cries of a government that could no longer govern.
He'd lately developed a knack for making his printing calculator spit
columns of meaningless eight-digit figures. After he devoted the better
part of an afternoon to figuring the cleaning woman's social security
payments five different times and came up with four different numbers
and finally just accepted the one number ($635.78) that he'd managed
to come up with twice (the correct figure was $70.00), Enid staged a
nighttime raid on his filing cabinet and relieved it of all tax files, which
might have improved household efficiency had the files not found their
way into a Nordstrom bag with some misleadingly ancient Good Housekeepings
concealing the more germane documents underneath, which
casualty of war led to the cleaning woman's filling out the forms herself,
with Enid merely writing the checks and Alfred shaking his head at the
complexity of it all.
It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually
to serve the ends of other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired
he appropriated the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence.
At the western end was the portable color TV on which
he'd intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue
chair but which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the
seasonal candy tins and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that
Enid never quite found time to transport to the Nearly New consignment
shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil
war raged openly. At the eastern end Alfred's calculator was ambushed
by floral print pot-holders and souvenir coasters from the Epcot Center
and a device for pitting cherries which Enid had owned for thirty years
and never used, while he, in turn, at the western end, for absolutely no
reason that Enid could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made of
pinecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.
To the east of the Ping-Pong table was the workshop that housed
Alfred's metallurgical lab. The workshop was now home to a colony of
mute, dust-colored crickets, which, when startled, would scatter across
the room like a handful of dropped marbles, some of them misfiring at
crazy angles, others toppling over with the weight of their own copious
protoplasm. They popped all too easily, and cleanup took more than
one Kleenex. Enid and Alfred had many afflictions which they believed
to be extraordinary, outsized—shameful—and the crickets were one of
them.
The gray dust of evil spells and the cobwebs of enchantment thickly
cloaked the old electric arc furnace, and the jars of exotic rhodium and
sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth, and the hand-printed labels
browned by the vapors from a glass-stoppered bottle of aqua regia, and
the quad-ruled notebook in which the latest entry in Alfred's hand dated
from a time, fifteen years ago, before the betrayals had begun. Something
as daily and friendly as a pencil still occupied the random spot on
the workbench where Alfred had laid it in a different decade; the passage
of so many years imbued the pencil with a kind of enmity. Asbestos
mitts hung from a nail beneath two certificates of U.S. patents, the
frames warped and sprung by dampness. On the hood of a binocular
microscope lay big chips of peeled paint from the ceiling. The only
dust-free objects in the room were the wicker love seat, a can of Rust-Oleum
and some brushes, and a couple of Yuban coffee cans which despite
increasingly strong olfactory evidence Enid chose not to believe
were filling up with her husband's urine, because what earthly reason
could he have, with a nice little half-bathroom not twenty feet away, for
peeing in a Yuban can?
To the west of the Ping-Pong table was Alfred's great blue chair.
The chair was overstuffed, vaguely gubernatorial. It was made of
leather, but it smelled like the inside of a Lexus. Like something modern
and medical and impermeable that you could wipe the smell of
death off easily, with a damp cloth, before the next person sat down to
die in it.
The chair was the only major purchase Alfred had ever made without
Enid's approval. When he'd traveled to China to confer with Chinese
railroad engineers, Enid had gone along and the two of them had
visited a rug factory to buy a rug for their family room. They were unaccustomed
to spending money on themselves, and so they chose one of
the least expensive rugs, with a simple blue design from the Book of
Changes on a solid field of beige. A few years later, when Alfred retired
from the Midland Pacific Railroad, he set about replacing the old cow-smelling
black leather armchair in which he watched TV and took his
naps. He wanted something really comfortable, of course, but after a
lifetime of providing for others he needed more than just comfort: he
needed a monument to this need. So he went, alone, to a non-discount
furniture store and picked out a chair of permanence. An engineer's
chair. A chair so big that even a big man got lost in it; a chair designed
to bear up under heavy stress. And because the blue of its leather
vaguely matched the blue in the Chinese rug, Enid had no choice but to
suffer its deployment in the family room.
Soon, however, Alfred's hands were spilling decaffeinated coffee on
the rug's beige expanses, and wild grandchildren were leaving berries
and crayons underfoot, and Enid began to feel that the rug was a mistake.
It seemed to her that in trying to save money in life she had made
many mistakes like this. She reached the point of thinking it would have
been better to buy no rug than to buy this rug. Finally, as Alfred's naps
deepened toward enchantment, she grew bolder. Her own mother had
left her a tiny inheritance years ago. Interest had been added to principal,
certain stocks had performed rather well, and now she had an
income of her own. She reconceived the family room in greens
and yellows. She ordered fabrics. A paperhanger came, and Alfred, who
was napping temporarily in the dining room, leaped to his feet like a
man with a bad dream.
"You're redecorating again?"
"It's my own money," Enid said. "This is how I'm spending it."
"And what about the money I made? What about the work I did?"
This argument had been effective in the past—it was, so to speak,
the constitutional basis of the tyranny's legitimacy—but it didn't work
now. "That rug is nearly ten years old, and we'll never get the coffee
stains out," Enid answered.
Alfred gestured at his blue chair, which under the paperhanger's
plastic dropcloths looked like something you might deliver to a power
station on a flatbed truck. He was trembling with incredulity, unable to
believe that Enid could have forgotten this crushing refutation of her
arguments, this overwhelming impediment to her plans. It was as if all
the unfreedom in which he'd spent his seven decades of life were embodied
in this six-year-old but essentially brand-new chair. He was grinning,
his face aglow with the awful perfection of his logic.
"And what about the chair, then?" he said. "What about the chair?"
Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no
more. "I never liked that chair."
This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Alfred.
The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having a personal
vision of the future. Enid's words filled him with such sorrow—he felt
such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its
betrayal—that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and
fell asleep.
(It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling
asleep like this.)
When it became clear that both the rug and Alfred's chair had to
go, the rug was easily shed. Enid advertised in the free local paper and
netted a nervous bird of a woman who was still making mistakes and
whose fifties came out of her purse in a disorderly roll that she unpeeled
and flattened with shaking fingers.
But the chair? The chair was a monument and a symbol and could
not be parted from Alfred. It could only be relocated, and so it went
into the basement and Alfred followed. And so in the house of the
Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be
lived underground.
Enid could hear Alfred upstairs now, opening and closing drawers. He
became agitated whenever they were going to see their children. Seeing
their children was the only thing he seemed to care about anymore.
In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was
chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows. Enid had looked everywhere
for the letter from the Axon Corporation, and she couldn't
find it.
Alfred was standing in the master bedroom wondering why the
drawers of his dresser were open, who had opened them, whether he
had opened them himself. He couldn't help blaming Enid for his confusion.
For witnessing it into existence. For existing, herself, as a person
who could have opened these drawers.
"Al? What are you doing?"
He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence:
"I am—" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became
an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the
light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the
crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft
darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which
were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if
they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an
absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when
as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in
McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into
his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen
in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film
necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of
a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in
the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the
sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't
just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established
for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he
was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto
unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or
rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only
stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish
part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while
he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to
see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing
where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence,
still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for
him, unaware of any woods—"packing my suitcase," he heard himself
say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in
front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing.
But Enid had spoken again. The audiologist had said that he was
mildly impaired. He frowned at her, not following.
"It's Thursday," she said, louder. "We're not leaving until Saturday."
"Saturday!" he echoed.
She berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated,
but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting
very cold.
Excerpted from THE CORRECTIONS
by JONATHAN FRANZEN.
Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Franzen.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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