The Corrections

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