The Corrections

folded her hands in her lap like a good listener. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
    “Then the other thing I have to tell you,” Sylvia said, “is that I’m a gun artist. I draw guns. You really want to hear this?”
    “Yes.” Enid nodded eagerly and vaguely. The dwarf, she noticed, used a small ladder to fetch down bottles. “Interesting.”
    For many years, Sylvia said, she’d been an amateur print-maker. She had a sun-filled studio in her house in Chadds Ford, she had a cream-smooth lithography stone and a twenty-piece set of German woodblock chisels, and she belonged to a Wilmington art guild in whose semi-annual show, while her youngest child, Jordan, grew from a tomboy into an independent young woman, she’d sold decorative prints for prices like forty dollars. Then Jordan was murdered and for five years Sylvia printed, drew, and painted nothing but guns. Year after year only guns.
    “Terrible terrible,” Enid said with open disapproval.
    The trunk of the wind-splintered tulip tree outside Sylvia’s studio suggested stocks and barrels. Every human form sought to become a hammer, a trigger guard, a cylinder, a grip. There was no abstraction that couldn’t be tracer fire, or the smoke of black powder, or a hollow-point’s flowering. The body was worldlike in the repleteness of its possibilities, and just as no part of this little world was safe from a bullet’s penetration, no form in the big world had no echo in a gun.Even a pinto bean was like a derringer, even a snowflake like a Browning on its tripod. Sylvia wasn’t insane; she could force herself to draw a circle or sketch a rose. But what she hungered to draw was firearms. Guns, gunfire, ordnance, projectiles. She spent hours capturing in pencil the pattern of gleam on nickel plating. Sometimes she also drew her hands and her wrists and forearms in what she guessed (for she had never held a gun) were appropriate grips for a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, a nine-millimeter Glock, a fully automatic Μ16 with a folding aluminum stock, and other exotic weapons from the catalogues that she kept in brown envelopes in her sun-drenched studio. She abandoned herself to her habit like a lost soul to its hellishly fitting occupation (although Chadds Ford, the subtle warblers that ventured up from the Brandy-wine, the scents of warm cattail and fermenting persimmon that October winds stirred out of nearby hollows, staunchly resisted being made a hell of); she was a Sisypha who every night destroyed her own creations—tore them up, erased them in mineral spirits. Kindled a merry fire in the living room.
    “Terrible,” Enid murmured again. “I can’t think of a worse thing that could happen to a mother.” She signaled to the dwarf for more cloudberry akvavit.
    Some mysteries of her obsession, Sylvia said, were that she’d been raised as a Quaker and still went to meeting in Kennett Square; that the tools of Jordan’s torture and murder had been one roll of nylon-reinforced “strapping” tape, one dish towel, two wire coat hangers, one General Electric Light ’n Easy electric iron, and one WMF twelve-inch serrated bread knife from Williams-Sonoma, i.e., no guns; that the killer, a nineteen-year-old named Khellye Withers, had turned himself in to the Philadelphia police without (again) a gun being unholstered; that with a husband who earned a huge late-career salary as Du Pont’s vice president of Compliance, and a sport-utility vehicle so massive that ahead-on crash with a VW Cabriolet might hardly have dented it, and a six-bedroom Queen Anne—style house into whose kitchen and pantry Jordan’s entire Philadelphia apartment would have fit comfortably, Sylvia enjoyed a life of almost senseless ease and comfort in which her only task besides cooking for Ted, literally her only task, was to recover from Jordan’s death; that she nevertheless often became so absorbed in rendering the tooling on a revolver butt or the veins in her arm that she had to drive crazily fast to avoid missing her thrice-weekly therapy with an M.D./ Ph.D. in Wilmington; that by talking to the M.D./Ph.D., and by attending Wednesday-night sessions with other Parents of Victims of Violence and Thursday-night meetings with her Older Women’s group, and by reading the poetry and novels and memoirs and insight books that her friends recommended, and by relaxing with yoga and horseback riding, and by volunteering as a physical therapist’s assistant at Children’s Hospital, she