The Corrections

Chip said.
    “Say it’s a gradual rehab. Say the workmen are very tidy. The brain’s cleaned up every night when you get home from work, and nobody can bother you on the weekend, per local ordinance and the usual covenantal restrictions. The whole thing happens in stages—you grow into it. Or it grows into you, so to speak. Nobody’s making you buy new furniture.”
    “You’re asking hypothetically.”
    Doug raised a finger. “The only thing is there might be some metal involved. It’s possible you’d set off alarms at the airport. I’m imagining you might get some unwanted talk radio, too, on certain frequencies. Gatorade and other high-electrolyte drinks might be a problem. But what do you say?”
    “You’re joking, right?”
    “Check out the Web site. I’ll give you the address. ‘ The implications are disturbing, but there’s no stopping this powerful new technology .’ That could be the motto for our age, don’t you think?”
    That a salmon filet was now spreading down into Chip’s underpants like a wide, warm slug did seem to have everything to do with his brain and with a number of poor decisions that this brain had made. Rationally Chip knew that Doug would let him go soon and that eventually he might even escape the Nightmare of Consumption and find a restaurant bathroom where he could take the filet out and regain his full critical faculties—that there would come a moment when he was no longer standing amid pricey gelatiwith lukewarm fish in his pants, and that this future moment would be a moment of extraordinary relief—but for now he still inhabited an earlier, much less pleasant moment from the vantage point of which a new brain looked like just the ticket.

    “The desserts were a foot tall!” Enid said, her instincts having told her that Denise didn’t care about pyramids of shrimp. “It was elegant elegant. Have you ever seen anything like that?”
    “I’m sure it was very nice,” Denise said.
    “The Dribletts really do things super-deluxe. I’d never seen a dessert that tall. Have you?”
    The subtle signs that Denise was exercising patience—the slightly deeper breaths she took, the soundless way she set her fork down on her plate and took a sip of wine and set the glass back down—were more hurtful to Enid than a violent explosion.
    “I’ve seen tall desserts,” Denise said.
    “Are they tremendously difficult to make?”
    Denise folded her hands in her lap and exhaled slowly. “It sounds like a great party. I’m glad you had fun.”
    Enid had, true enough, had fun at Dean and Trish’s party, and she’d wished that Denise had been there to see for herself how elegant it was. At the same time, she was afraid that Denise would not have found the party elegant at all, that Denise would have picked apart its specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness. Her daughter’s taste was a dark spot in Enid’s vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate.
    “I guess there’s no accounting for tastes,” she said.
    “That’s true,” Denise said. “Although some tastes are better than others.”
    Alfred had bent low over his plate to ensure that anysalmon or haricots verts that fell from his fork would land on china. But he was listening. He said, “Enough.”
    “That’s what everybody thinks,” Enid said. “Everybody thinks their taste is the best.”
    “But most people are wrong,” Denise said.
    “Everybody’s entitled to their own taste,” Enid said. “Everybody gets one vote in this country.”
    “Unfortunately!”
    “Enough,” Alfred said to Denise. “You’ll never win.”
    “You sound like a snob,” Enid said.
    “Mother, you’re always telling me how much you like a good home-cooked meal. Well, that’s what I like, too. I think there’s a kind of Disney vulgarity in a foot-tall dessert. You are a better cook than—”
    “Oh, no. No.” Enid shook her head. “I’m a nothing cook.”
    “That’s not true at all! Where do you think I—”
    “Not from me,” Enid interrupted. “I don’t know where my children got their talents. But not from me. I’m a nothing as a cook. A big nothing.” (How strangely good it felt to say this! It was like putting scalding water on a poison-ivy rash.)
    Denise straightened her back and raised her glass. Enid, who all her life had been helpless not to observe the goings-on on other people’s plates, had watched Denise