Читаем The Corrections полностью

Without waiting for an answer, he went into his metallurgy lab and dumped the magazines and jelly glasses into a heavy-duty trash can. From the hammer shelf he took a badly balanced hammer, a crudely forged Neanderthal club that he hated and kept only for purposes of demolition, and methodically broke each jelly glass. A splinter hit his cheek and he swung more furiously, smashing the shards into smaller shards, but nothing could eradicate his transgression with Chuck Meisner, or the grass-damp triangles of cheerleading leotard, no matter how he hammered.

Enid listened from her station at the ironing board. She didn’t care much for the reality of this moment. That her husband had left town eleven days ago without kissing her goodbye was a thing she’d halfway succeeded in forgetting. With the living Al absent, she’d alchemically transmuted her base resentments into the gold of longing and remorse. Her swelling womb, the pleasures of the fourth month, the time alone with her handsome boys, the envy of her neighbors all were colorful philtres over which she’d waved the wand of her imagination. Even as Al had come down the stairs she’d still imagined apologies, homecoming kisses, a bouquet of flowers maybe. Now she heard the ricochet of broken glass and glancing hammer blows on heavy-gauge galvanized iron, the frustrated shrieks of hard materials in conflict. The philtres may have been colorful but unfortunately (she saw now) they were chemically inert. Nothing had really changed.

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she’d stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like “spite.” But it seemed to her that he’d asked her to do more than “one thing” while he was gone. He’d also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband’s kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

Perhaps, in strict fairness, since he’d asked her to do “one thing” extra, she might have asked him to do “one thing” extra, too. She might have asked him to telephone her once from the road, for example. But he could argue that “someone’s going to trip on those magazines and hurt themselves,” whereas no one was going to trip over his not calling her from the road, no one was going to hurt themselves over that. And charging long-distance calls to the company was an abuse of his expense account (“You have my office number if there’s an emergency”), and so a phone call cost the household quite a bit of money, whereas carrying junk into the basement cost it no money, and so she was always wrong, and it was demoralizing to dwell perpetually in the cellar of your wrongness, to wait perpetually for someone to take pity on you in your wrongness, and so it was no wonder, really, that she’d shopped for the Dinner of Revenge.

Halfway up the basement stairs, on her way to preparing this dinner, she paused and gave a sigh.

Alfred heard the sigh and suspected it had to do with “laundry” and “four months pregnant.” However, his own mother had driven a team of plow horses around a twenty-acre field when she was eight months pregnant, so he was not exactly sympathetic. He gave his bleeding cheek a styptic dusting of ammonium aluminum sulfate.

From the front door of the house came a thumping of little feet and a mittened knocking, Bea Meisner dropping off her human cargo. Enid hurried on up the stairs to accept delivery. Gary and Chipper, her fifth-grader and her first-grader, had the chlorination of the Y about them. With their damp hair they looked riparian. Muskratty, beaverish. She called thanks to Bea’s taillights.

As fast as they could without running (forbidden indoors), the boys proceeded to the basement, dropped their logs of sodden terry cloth in the laundry room, and found their father in his laboratory. It was in their nature to throw their arms around him, but this nature had been corrected out of them. They stood and waited, like company subordinates, for the boss to speak.

“So!” he said. “You’ve been swimming.”

“I’m a Dolphin!” Gary cried. He was an unaccountably cheerful boy. “I got my Dolphin clip!”

“A Dolphin. Well, well.” To Chipper, to whom life had offered mainly tragic perspectives since he was about two years old, the boss more gently said: “You, lad?”

“We used kickboards,” Chipper said.

“He’s a Tadpole,” Gary said.