The Corrections

Time with people you love.”
    “No comment.”
    “What do you mean, ‘no comment’?”
    “Just that: no comment.”
    “You’re still sore about Christmas.”
    “You may interpret it however you like.”
    “If you’re sore about Christmas, you might have the consideration to say so—”
    “No comment.”
    “Instead of insinuating.”
    “We should have come two days later and left two days earlier,” Alfred said. “That’s all I have to say on the topic of Christmas. We should have stayed forty-eight hours.”
    “It’s because you’re depressed, Dad. You are clinically depressed—”
    “And so are you.”
    “And the responsible thing would be to get some treatment.”
    “Did you hear me? I said so are you.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Figure it out.”
    “Dad, really, no, what are you talking about? I’m not the one who sits in a chair all day and sleeps.”
    “Underneath, you are,” Alfred pronounced.
    “That’s simply false .”
    “One day you will see.”
    “I will not!” Gary said. “My life is on a fundamentally different basis than yours.”
    “Mark my words. I look at your marriage, I see what I see. Someday you’ll see it, too.”
    “That’s empty talk and you know it. You’re just pissed off with me, and you have no way to deal with it.”
    “I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss this.”
    “And I have no respect for that.”
    “Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either.”
    It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.
    At the hardware store he let Alfred pay for the dimmer switch. The old man’s careful plucking of bills from his slender wallet and his faint hesitation before he offered them were signs of his respect for a dollar—of his maddening belief that each one mattered.
    Back at the house, while Gary and Jonah kicked a soccer ball, Alfred gathered tools and killed the power to the kitchen and set about installing the dimmer. Even at this late date it didn’t occur to Gary not to let Alfred handle wiring. But when he came inside for lunch he found that his father had done no more than remove the old switch plate. He was holding the dimmer switch like a detonator that made him shake with fear.
    “My affliction makes this difficult,” he explained.
    “You’ve got to sell this house,” Gary said.
    After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum’s exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn’t deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A CENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY . Block after block of taxing text. What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place!The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if facts were going to save them! Not one woman half as pretty or as well dressed as Caroline. Not one other man with a decent haircut or an abdomen as flat as Gary’s. But, like Alfred, like Enid, they were all extremely deferential. They didn’t jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he’d drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered round and read and learned. God, he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he might be getting sick. He took refuge in the museum’s gift shop and bought a silver belt buckle, two engravings of old Midland Pacific trestles, and a pewter hip flask (all for himself), a deerskin wallet (for Aaron), and a CD-ROM Civil War game (for Caleb).
    “Dad,” Jonah said, “Grandma says she’ll buy me two books that cost less than ten dollars each or one book for less than twenty dollars, is that OK?”
    Enid and Jonah were a lovefest. Enid had always preferred little kids to big kids, and Jonah’s adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter