The Corrections

here. I hate family. I hate home. I’m ready to leave. I’m not a good person . And it only makes it worse to pretend I am.”
    “I think you’re a good person,” Robin said.
    “I treat you like garbage! Have you not noticed?”
    “It’s because you’re so unhappy.”
    Robin came around the table and tried to lay a hand on her; Denise elbowed it aside. Robin tried again, and this time Denise caught her squarely in the cheek with the knuckles of her open hand.
    Robin backed away, her face crimson, as if she were bleeding on the inside. “You hit me,” she said.
    “I’m aware of that.”
    “You hit me rather hard. Why did you do that?”
    “Because I don’t want you here. I don’t want to be part of your life. I don’t want to be part of anybody’s life. I’m sick of watching myself be cruel to you.”
    Interconnecting flywheels of pride and love were spinning behind Robin’s eyes. It was a while before she spoke. “OK, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”
    Denise did nothing to stop her from leaving, but when she heard the front door close she understood that she’d lost the only person who could have helped her when her parents came to town. She’d lost Robin’s company, her comforts. Everything she’d spurned a minute earlier she wanted back.
    She flew to St. Jude.
    On her first day there, as on the first day of every visit, she warmed to her parents’ warmth and did whatever her mother asked her to. She waved off the cash Enid tried to give her for the groceries. She refrained from commenting on the four-ounce bottle of rancid yellow glue that was the only olive oil in the kitchen. She wore the lavender synthetic turtleneck and the matronly gold-plate necklace that were recent gifts from her mother. She effused, spontaneously, about the adolescent ballerinas in The Nutcracker , she held her father’s gloved hand as they crossed the regional theater’s parking lot, she loved her parents more than she’d ever loved anything; and the minute they were both in bed she changed her clothes and fled the house.
    She paused in the street, a cigarette on her lip, a match-book ( Dean & Trish ♦ June 13, 1987 ) trembling in her fingers. She hiked to the field behind the grade school where she and Don Armour had once sat and smelled cattails and verbena; she stamped her feet, rubbed her hands, watched the clouds occult the constellations, and took deep fortifying breaths of selfhood.
    Later in the night, she undertook a clandestine operation on her mother’s behalf, entering Gary’s bedroom while hewas occupied with Alfred, unzipping the inside pocket of his leather jacket, replacing the Mexican A with a handful of Advils, and spiriting Enid’s drug away to a safer place before she finally, good daughter, fell asleep.
    On her second day in St. Jude, as on the second day of every visit, she woke up angry. The anger was an autonomous neurochemical event; no stopping it. At breakfast she was tortured by every word her mother said. Browning the ribs and soaking the sauerkraut according to ancestral custom, rather than in the modern style she’d developed at the Generator, made her angry. (So much grease, such sacrifice of texture.) The bradykinetic languor of Enid’s electric stove, which hadn’t bothered her the day before, made her angry. The hundred-and-one refrigerator magnets, puppy-dog sentimental in their iconography and so feeble in their pull that you could scarcely open the door without sending a snapshot of Jonah or a postcard of Vienna swooping to the floor, filled her with rage. She went to the basement to get the ancestral ten-quart Dutch oven, and the clutter in the laundry-room cabinets made her furious. She dragged a trash can in from the garage and began to fill it with her mother’s crap. This was arguably helpful to her mother, and so she went at it with abandon. She threw away the Korean barfle-berries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. She threw away the wreath of spray-painted pinecones that somebody had ripped apart. She threw away the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. She threw away the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted, the Nixon-era bottle of Mai Tai mix with an oozing crust around its