The Corrections

doing it. They’re latchkey kids. They’re getting high, they’re having sex, or they’re stuck in some classroom until six with a computer. But they’re also at an age when it’s still fun to play in the dirt.”
    “Though possibly not as much fun as sex or drugs.”
    “Maybe not for ninety percent of kids,” Robin said. “I just want there to be something for the other ten percent. Some alternative that doesn’t involve computers. I want Sinéad and Erin to be around kids who aren’t like them. I want them to learn how to work. I want them to know that work isn’t just pointing and clicking.”
    “This is very admirable,” Denise said.
    Robin, mistaking her tone, said, “Whatever.”
    Denise sat on the plastic skin of a bale of peat moss while Robin washed up and changed her clothes. Maybe it was because she could count on one hand the autumn Saturday evenings that she’d spent outside a kitchen since she was twenty, or maybe because some sentimental part of her was taken in by the egalitarian ideal that Klaus Müller-Karltreu found so phony in St. Jude, but the word she wanted to apply to Robin Passafaro, who had lived in urban Philly all her life, was “midwestern.” By which she meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-spirited .
    She didn’t care so much, after all, about being liked. She found herself liking. When Robin came out and locked the house, Denise asked if she had time for dinner.
    “Brian and his dad took the girls to see the Phillies,”Robin said. “They’ll come home full of stadium food. So, sure. We can have dinner.”
    “I have stuff in my kitchen,” Denise said. “Do you mind?”
    “Anything. Whatever.”
    Typically, if a chef invited you to dinner, you considered yourself lucky and you hastened to show it. But Robin seemed determined not to be impressed.
    Night had fallen. The air on Catharine Street smelled like the last weekend of baseball. Walking east, Robin told Denise the story of her brother, Billy. Denise had already heard the story from Brian, but parts of Robin’s version were new to her.
    “So wait,” she said. “Brian sold his company to W——, and then Billy attacked one of W——’s vice presidents, and you think there’s a connection?”
    “God, yes,” Robin said. “That’s what’s so horrible.”
    “Brian didn’t mention that part.”
    Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. “I can’t believe it! That’s the whole point . God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.”
    “Explain to me what the problem is?”
    “Rick Flamburg’s disabled for life,” Robin said. “My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on anti-psychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W——just did for us, let’s move to Mendocino!”
    “But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Denise said. “You’re not responsible for any of those other things.”
    Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”
    They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.
    She further noted, however, that Robin didn’t seem particularly loyal.
    Denise’s living room contained little more than it had after Emile had emptied it three years earlier. In their contest of self-denials, on the Weekend of Tears, Denise had had the double advantage of feeling guiltier than Emile and of having already agreed to take the house. In the end she’d succeeded in making Emile take practically every joint possession that she liked or valued and many others that she didn’t like but could have used.
    The emptiness of the house had disgusted Becky Hemerling. It was cold , it was self-hating , it was a monastery .
    “Nice and spare,” Robin commented.
    Denise sat her down at the half Ping-Pong table that served as her kitchen table, opened a fifty-dollar wine, and proceeded to feed her. Denise had seldom had to struggle with her weight, but she would have blimped out in a month if she’d eaten like Robin. She watched in awe as her