The Corrections

“You know, I hate to say this,” Enid said, “but aches and pains are a part of getting older. I could talk about pain all day long if I wanted to. My hip is always hurting. As you get older, though, hopefully you get a little more matoor.”

“Oh! Ahh! Ahh!” Caroline cried out voluptuously.

“Yeah, that’s the hope,” Gary said.

“Anyhow, what did you decide?”

“The jury’s still out on Christmas,” he said, “but maybe you should plan on stopping here—”

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“It’s getting awfully late to be making Christmas reservations,” Enid said severely. “You know, the Schumperts made their Hawaii reservations back in April, because last year, when they waited until September, they couldn’t get the seats they—”

Aaron came running from the kitchen. “Dad!”

“I’m on the phone, Aaron.”

“Dad!”

“I’m on the telephone, Aaron, as you can see.”

“Dave has a colostomy,” Enid said.

“You’ve got to do something right now,” Aaron said. “Mom is really hurting. She says you have to drive her to the hospital!”

“Actually, Dad,” said Caleb, sidling in with his catalogue, “there’s someplace you can drive me, too.”

“No, Caleb.”

“No, but there’s a store I really actually do need to get to?”

“The affordable seats fill up early,” Enid said.

“Aaron?” Caroline shouted from the kitchen. “Aaron! Where are you? Where’s your father? Where’s Caleb?”

“It certainly is noisy in here for a person trying to concentrate,” Jonah said.

“Mother, sorry,” Gary said, “I’m going someplace quieter.”

“It’s getting very late,” Enid said, in her voice the panic of a woman for whom each passing day, each hour, signified the booking of more seats on late-December flights and thus the particle-by-particle disintegration of any hope that Gary and Caroline would bring their boys to St. Jude for one last Christmas.

“Dad,” Aaron pleaded, following Gary up the stairs to the second floor, “what do I tell her?”

“Tell her to call 911. Use your cell phone, call an ambulance.” Gary raised his voice: “Caroline? Call 911!”

Nine years ago, after a midwestern trip whose particular torments had included ice storms in both Philly and St. Jude, a four-hour runway delay with a whining five-year-old and a screaming two-year-old, a night of wild vomiting by Caleb in reaction (according to Caroline) to the butter and bacon fat in Enid’s holiday cooking, and a nasty spill that Caroline took on her in-laws’ ice-covered driveway (her back trouble dated from her field-hockey days at Friends’ Central, but she now spoke of having “reactivated” the injury on that driveway), Gary had promised his wife that he would never again ask her to go to St. Jude for Christmas. But now his parents had come to Philly eight years in a row, and although he disapproved of his mother’s obsession with Christmas—it seemed to him a symptom of a larger malaise, a painful emptiness in Enid’s life—he could hardly blame his parents for wanting to stay home this year. Gary also calculated that Enid would be more willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she’d had her “one last Christmas.” Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a modicum of cooperation from his wife: a mature willingness to consider the special circumstances.

He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.

“This is ridiculous,” Enid said in a defeated voice. “Why don’t you call me back?”

“We haven’t quite decided about December,” he said, “but we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here after the cruise.”

Enid was breathing rather loudly. “We’re not making two trips to Philadelphia this fall,” she said. “And I want to see the boys at Christmas, and so as far as I’m concerned this means you’re coming to St. Jude.”

“No, Mother,” he said. “No, no, no. We haven’t decided anything.”

“I promised Jonah—”

“Jonah’s not buying the tickets. Jonah’s not in charge here. So you make your plans, we’ll make ours, and hopefully everything will work out.”

Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from Enid’s nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at once he realized.

“Caroline?” he said. “Caroline, are you on the line?”

The breathing ceased.

“Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line?”

He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.

“Mom, sorry—”

Enid: “What on earth?”

Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk, unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutching his catalogue like a Jehovah’s Witness with a pamphlet, to the master bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.

“Are you eavesdropping on me?”