The Corrections

Enid had done a shameful thing that she was now in serious need of confessing to somebody, and she hoped Denise might be that person.
    “Gary wants us to sell the house and move to Philadelphia,” she said. “Gary thinks Philadelphia makes sense because he’s there and you’re there and Chip’s in New York. I said to Gary, I love my children, but St. Jude is where I’m comfortable. Denise, I’m a midwesterner. I’d be lost in Philadelphia. Gary wants us to sign up for assisted living. He doesn’t understand that it’s already too late. Those places won’t let you in if you have a condition like Dad’s.”
    “But if Dad keeps falling down the stairs.”
    “Denise, he doesn’t hold the railing! He refuses to accept that he shouldn’t be carrying things on the stairs.”
    Underneath the sink Enid found a vase behind a stack of framed photographs, four pictures of pinkish furry things, some sort of kooky art or medical photos. She tried to reach past them quietly, but she knocked over an asparagus steamer that she’d given Chip for Christmas once. As soon as Denise looked down, Enid could not pretend she hadn’t seen the pictures. “What on earth?” she said, scowling. “Denise, what are these?”
    “What do you mean,’ what are these?’?”
    “Some sort of kooky thing of Chip’s, I guess.”
    Denise had an “amused” expression that drove Enid crazy. “Obviously you know what they are, though.”
    “No. I don’t.”
    “You don’t know what they are?”
    Enid took the vase out and closed the cabinet. “I don’t want to know,” she said.
    “Well, that’s something else entirely.”
    In the living room, Alfred was summoning the courage to sit down on Chip’s chaise longue. Not ten minutes ago, he’d sat down on it without incident. But now, instead of simply doing it again, he’d stopped to think. He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall. His excellent blue chair in St. Jude was like a first baseman’s glove that gently gathered in whatever body was flung its way, at whatever glancing angle, with whatever violence; it had big helpful ursine arms to support him while he performed the crucial blind pivot. But Chip’s chaise was a low-riding, impractical antique. Alfred stood facing away from it and hesitated, his knees bent to the rather small degree that his neuropathic lower legs permitted, his hands scooping and groping in the air behind him. He was afraid to take the plunge. And yet there was something obscene about standing half-crouched and quaking, some association with the men’s room, some essential vulnerability which felt to him at once so poignant and degraded that, simply to put an end to it, he shut his eyes and let go. He landed heavily on his bottom and continued on over backwards, coming to rest with his knees in the air above him.
    “Al, are you all right?” Enid called.
    “I don’t understand this furniture,” he said, struggling to sit up and sound powerful. “Is this meant to be a sofa?”
    Denise came out and put a vase of three sunflowers on the spindly table by the chaise. “It’s like a sofa,” she said. “Youcan put your legs up and be a French philosophe. You can talk about Schopenhauer.”
    Alfred shook his head.
    Enid enunciated from the kitchen doorway, “Dr. Hedgpeth says you should only sit in high, straight-backed chairs.”
    Since Alfred showed no interest in these instructions, Enid repeated them to Denise when she returned to the kitchen. “ High, straight-backed chairs only,” she said. “But Dad won’t listen. He insists on sitting in his leather chair. Then he shouts for me to come and help him get up. But if I hurt my back, then where are we? I put one of those nice old ladder-back chairs by the TV downstairs and told him sit here . But he’d rather sit in his leather chair, and then to get out of it he slides down the cushion until he’s on the floor. Then he crawls on the floor to the Ping-Pong table and uses the Ping-Pong table to hoist himself up.”
    “That’s actually pretty resourceful,” Denise said as she took an armload of food from the refrigerator.
    “Denise, he’s crawling across the floor . Rather than sit in a nice, comfortable straight-backed chair which the doctor says it’s important that he sit in, he crawls across the floor . He shouldn’t be sitting so much to begin with. Dr. Hedgpeth says his condition is not at