|
St. Jude
The Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: wsomething
terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust
after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion
of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing
zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no
mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a
clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a
paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush
from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.
Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude.
Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd
had his nap and there would be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a
sinus in which infections, bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong
table, listening in vain for Enid.
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear
directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes
with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now
it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of
"bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have
the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves
itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic
resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay
of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except
at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized
that a bell had been ringing in their heads for so long as they could remember; ringing
for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall
was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of
their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the
weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred -- she on her knees in the
dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table
-- each felt near to exploding with anxiety.
The anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer autumn colors. The
coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid was realizing that their expiration dates
(often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer) lay months and even years in the past:
that these hundred-odd coupons, whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially
one hundred twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket that doubled coupons), had all
gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin PM, a dollar off. The dates were not even
close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been ringing for years.
She pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. She was looking for
a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago. Alfred had heard the mailman
knock on the door and had shouted, "Enid! Enid!" so loudly that he couldn't hear
her shouting back, "Al, I'm getting it!" He'd continued to shout her name,
coming closer and closer, and because the sender of the letter was the Axon Corporation,
24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because there were aspects of the
Axon situation that Enid knew about and hoped that Alfred didn't, she'd quickly stashed
the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred had emerged from the
basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment, "There's somebody at the
door!" and she'd fairly screamed, "The mailman! The mailman!" and he'd
shaken his head at the complexity of it all.
Enid felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn't have to wonder, every five
minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she might, she couldn't get him interested in
life. When she encouraged him to take up his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if
she'd lost her mind. When she asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could do, he
said his legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of her friends all had hobbies
(Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby Root his intricate chalets for nesting purple
finches, Chuck Meisner his hourly monitoring of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as
if she were trying to distract him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor?
Repainting the porch furniture? He'd been repainting the love seat since Labor Day. She
seemed to recall that the last time he'd painted the furniture he'd done the love seat in
two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after morning, and after a month she
ventured in to see how he was doing and found that all he'd painted of the love seat was
the legs.
He seemed to wish that she would go away. He said that the brush had got dried out, that
that was what was taking so long. He said that scraping wicker was like trying to peel a
blueberry. He said that there were crickets. She felt a shortness of breath then, but
perhaps it was only the smell of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that smelled
like urine (but could not possibly be urine). She fled upstairs to look for the letter
from Axon.
Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since
nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs -- since the fiction of living in
this house was that no one lived here -- Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She
didn't think of herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she
ferried matériel from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By
night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the breakfast nook,
she staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher
Medicare copayment records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a medical lab
that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance
of $0.00 carried forward and thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case
offering no address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and
Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints under which Enid
waged her campaign she had only the dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on
any given evening. She might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing
force, in the person of Alfred, would be watching a network newsmagazine at a volume
thunderous enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning,
and there was a non-negligible possibility that if she opened the closet door a cascade of
catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch statements would come
toppling and sliding out, incurring Alfred's wrath. There was also the possibility that
the Notices would not be there, since the governing force staged random raids on her
depots, threatening to "pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of
it, but she was too busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of it, and in the
succession of forced migrations and deportations any lingering semblance of order was
lost, and so the random Nordstrom shopping bag that was camped behind a dust ruffle with
one of its plastic handles semi-detached would contain the whole shuffled pathos of a
refugee existence -- non-consecutive issues of Good Housekeeping, black-and-white
snapshots of Enid in the 1940s, brown recipes on high-acid paper that called for wilted
lettuce, the current month's telephone and gas bills, the detailed First Notice from the
medical lab instructing co-payers to ignore subsequent billings for less than fifty cents,
a complimentary cruise ship photo of Enid and Alfred wearing leis and sipping beverages
from hollow coconuts, and the only extant copies of two of their children's birth
certificates, for example.
Although Enid's ostensible foe was Alfred, what made her a guerrilla was the house that
occupied them both. Its furnishings were of the kind that brooked no clutter. There were
chairs and tables by Ethan Allen. Spode and Waterford in the breakfront. Obligatory
ficuses, obligatory Norfolk pines. Fanned copies of Architectural Digest on a glass-topped
coffee table. Touristic plunder -- enamelware from China, a Viennese music box that Enid
out of a sense of duty and mercy every so often wound up and raised the lid of. The tune
was "Strangers in the Night."
Unfortunately, Enid lacked the temperament to manage such a house, and Alfred lacked the
neurological wherewithal. Alfred's cries of rage on discovering evidence of guerrilla
actions -- a Nordstrom bag surprised in broad daylight on the basement stairs, nearly
precipitating a tumble -- were the cries of a government that could no longer govern. He'd
lately developed a knack for making his printing calculator spit columns of meaningless
eight-digit figures. After he devoted the better part of an afternoon to figuring the
cleaning woman's social security payments five different times and came up with four
different numbers and finally just accepted the one number ($635.78) that he'd managed to
come up with twice (the correct figure was $70.00), Enid staged a nighttime raid on his
filing cabinet and relieved it of all tax files, which might have improved household
efficiency had the files not found their way into a Nordstrom bag with some misleadingly
ancient Good Housekeepings concealing the more germane documents underneath, which
casualty of war led to the cleaning woman's filling out the forms herself, with Enid
merely writing the checks and Alfred shaking his head at the complexity of it all.
It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of
other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired he appropriated the eastern end of the
table for his banking and correspondence. At the western end was the portable color TV on
which he'd intended to watch the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but
which was now fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins and baroque
but cheaply made candle holders that Enid never quite found time to transport to the
Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table was the one field on which the civil war
raged openly. At the eastern end Alfred's calculator was ambushed by floral print
pot-holders and souvenir coasters from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries
which Enid had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at the western
end, for absolutely no reason that Enid could ever fathom, ripped to pieces a wreath made
of pinecones and spray-painted filberts and brazil nuts.
Excerpted from THE CORRECTIONS © Copyright 2008 by Jonathan Franzen. Reprinted with permission by Picador USA. All rights reserved.
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
Back to top.
|
