The Corrections

from spells, he privately spoke an incantation: I’m staying for three days and then I’m going back to New York, I’m finding a job, I’m putting aside five hundred dollars a month, minimum, until I’m out of debt, and I’m working every night on the script .
    Invoking this charm, which was all he had now, the paltry sum of his identity, he stepped through the doorway.
    “My word, you’re scratchy and smelly,” Enid said, kissing him. “Now, where’s your suitcase?”
    “It’s by the side of a gravel road in western Lithuania.”
    “I’m just happy you’re home safely.”
    Nowhere in the nation of Lithuania was there a room like the Lambert living room. Only in this hemisphere could carpeting so sumptuously woolen and furniture so big and so well made and so opulently upholstered be found in a room of such plain design and ordinary situation. The light in the wood-framed windows, though gray, had a prairie optimism; there wasn’t a sea within six hundred miles to trouble the atmosphere. And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.
    Chip apprehended it all in a heartbeat. The continent, his homeland. Scattered around the living room were nests of opened presents and little leavings of spent ribbon, wrapping-paper fragments, labels. At the foot of the fireside chair that Alfred always claimed for himself, Denise was kneeling by the largest nest of presents.
    “Denise, look who’s here,” Enid said.
    As if out of obligation, with downcast eyes, Denise rose and crossed the room. But when she’d put her arms around Chip and he’d squeezed her in return (her height, as always, surprised him), she wouldn’t let go. She clung to him—kissed his neck, fastened her eyes on him, and thanked him.
    Gary came over and embraced Chip awkwardly, his face averted. “Didn’t think you were going to make it,” he said.
    “Neither did I,” Chip said.
    “Well!” Alfred said again, gazing at him in wonder.
    “Gary has to leave at eleven,” Enid said, “but we can all have breakfast together. You get cleaned up, and Denise andI will start breakfast. Oh, this is just what I wanted,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had!”
    Gary turned to Chip with his I’m-a-jerk face. “There you go,” he said. “Best Christmas present she’s ever had.”
    “I think she means having all five of us together,” Denise said.
    “Well, she’d better enjoy it in a hurry,” Gary said, “because she owes me a discussion and I’m expecting payment.”
    Chip, detached from his own body, trailed after it and wondered what it was going to do. He removed an aluminum stool from the downstairs bathroom shower. The blast of water was strong and hot. His impressions were fresh in a way that he would either remember all his life or instantly forget. A brain could absorb only so many impressions before it lost the ability to decode them, to put them in coherent shape and order. His nearly sleepless night on a patch of airport carpeting, for example, was still very much with him and begging to be processed. And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. The tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by Enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building.
    Denise’s shampoo had the pleasing, subtle scents of late-model Western capitalism. In the seconds it took Chip to lather his hair, he forgot where he was. Forgot the continent, forgot the year, forgot the time of day, forgot the circumstances. His brain in the shower was piscine or amphibian, registering impressions, reacting to the moment. He wasn’t far from terror. At the same time, he felt OK. He was hungry for breakfast and thirsty, in particular, for coffee.
    With a towel around his waist he stopped in the livingroom, where Alfred leaped to his feet. The sight of Alfred’s suddenly aged face, its disintegration-in-progress, its rednesses and asymmetries, cut Chip like a bullwhip.
    “Well!” Alfred said. “That was quick.”
    “Can I borrow some clothes of yours?”
    “I will leave that to your judgment.”
    Upstairs in his