The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

ruffly quality, it didn’t quite seem to touch the ground. Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99¢ Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.

“Dad fell down the basement stairs again,” Enid said while the rain came down in New York City. “He was carrying a big box of pecans to the basement and he didn’t hold the railing and he fell. Well, you can imagine how many pecans are in a twelve-pound box. Those nuts rolled everywhere. Denise, I spent half a day on my hands and knees. And I’m still finding them. They’re the same color as those crickets we can’t get rid of. I reach down to pick up a pecan, and it jumps in my face!”
    Denise was trimming the stems of the sunflowers she’d brought. “Why was Dad carrying twelve pounds of pecans down the basement stairs?”
    “He wanted a project he could work on in his chair. Hewas going to shell them.” Enid hovered at Denise’s shoulder. “Is there something I can do here?”
    “You can find me a vase.”
    The first cabinet that Enid opened contained a carton of wine-bottle corks and nothing else. “I don’t understand why Chip invited us here if he wasn’t even going to eat lunch with us.”
    “Conceivably,” Denise said, “he didn’t plan on getting dumped this morning.”
    Denise’s tone of voice was forever informing Enid that she was stupid. Denise was not, Enid felt, a very warm or giving person. However, Denise was a daughter, and a few weeks ago Enid had done a shameful thing that she was now in serious need of confessing to somebody, and she hoped Denise might be that person.
    “Gary wants us to sell the house and move to Philadelphia,” she said. “Gary thinks Philadelphia makes sense because he’s there and you’re there and Chip’s in New York. I said to Gary, I love my children, but St. Jude is where I’m comfortable. Denise, I’m a midwesterner. I’d be lost in Philadelphia. Gary wants us to sign up for assisted living. He doesn’t understand that it’s already too late. Those places won’t let you in if you have a condition like Dad’s.”
    “But if Dad keeps falling down the stairs.”
    “Denise, he doesn’t hold the railing! He refuses to accept that he shouldn’t be carrying things on the stairs.”
    Underneath the sink Enid found a vase behind a stack of framed photographs, four pictures of pinkish furry things, some sort of kooky art or medical photos. She tried to reach past them quietly, but she knocked over an asparagus steamer that she’d given Chip for Christmas once. As soon as Denise looked down, Enid could not pretend she hadn’t seen the pictures. “What on earth?” she said, scowling. “Denise, what are these?”
    “What do you mean,’ what are these?’?”
    “Some sort of kooky thing of Chip’s, I guess.”
    Denise had an “amused” expression that drove Enid crazy. “Obviously you know what they are, though.”
    “No. I don’t.”
    “You don’t know what they are?”
    Enid took the vase out and closed the cabinet. “I don’t want to know,” she said.
    “Well, that’s something else entirely.”
    In the living room, Alfred was summoning the courage to sit down on Chip’s chaise longue. Not ten minutes ago, he’d sat down on it without incident. But now, instead of simply doing it again, he’d stopped to think. He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall. His