The Corrections

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