There was a problem to avoid, all right: too many people wanting to buy your product!
Gary shook his head. The idiocy of these manufacturers.
He picked out a sturdy, low aluminum stool with a wide beige seat. He selected a heavy-duty (beige!) gripping bar for the shower. Marveling at the gouge-level pricing, he took these items to the checkout counter, where a friendly midwestern girl, possibly evangelical (she had a brocade sweater and feather-cut bangs), showed the bar codes to a laser beam and remarked to Gary, in a downstate drawl, that these aluminum chairs were really a super product. “So lahtweight, practically indestructible,” she said. “Is it for your mom or your dad?”
Gary resented invasions of his privacy and refused the girl the satisfaction of an answer. He did, however, nod.
“Our older folks get shaky in the shower at a certain point. Guess it happens to us all, eventually.” The young philosopher swiped Gary’s AmEx through a groove. “You home for the holidays, helpin’ out a little bit?”
“You know what these stools would really be good for,” Gary said, “would be to hang yourself. Don’t you think?”
Life drained from the girl’s smile. “I don’t know about that.”
“Nice and light — easy to kick away.”
“Sign this, please, sir.”
He had to fight the wind to push the Exit door open. The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.
Driving north toward the airport, with the low sun mercifully behind him, Gary wondered if he’d been cruel to the girl. Possibly he had. But he was under stress, and a person under stress, it seemed to him, had a right to be strict in the boundaries he established for himself — strict in his moral accounting, strict about what he would and wouldn’t do, strict about who he was and who he wasn’t and whom he would and wouldn’t talk to. If a perky, homely evangelical girl insisted on talking, he had a right to choose the topic.
He was aware, nevertheless, that if the girl had been more attractive, he might have been less cruel.
Everything in St. Jude strove to put him in the wrong. But in the months since he’d surrendered to Caroline (and his hand had healed nicely, thank you, with hardly a scar), he’d reconciled himself to being the villain in St. Jude. When you knew in advance that your mother would consider you the villain no matter what you did, you lost your incentive to play by her rules. You asserted your own rules. You did whatever it took to preserve yourself. You pretended, if need be, that a healthy child of yours was sick.
The truth about Jonah was that he’d freely chosen not to come to St. Jude. This was in accordance with the terms of Gary’s surrender to Caroline in October. Holding five non-refundable plane tickets to St. Jude, Gary had told his family that he wanted everyone to come along with him for Christmas, but that nobody would be forced to go. Caroline and Caleb and Aaron had all instantly and loudly said no thank you; Jonah, still under the spell of his grandmother’s enthusiasm, declared that he would “very much like” to go. Gary never actually promised Enid that Jonah was coming, but he also never warned her that he might not.
In November Caroline bought four tickets to see the magician Alain Gregarius on December 22 and another four tickets for The Lion King in New York City on December 23. “Jonah can come along if he’s here,” she explained, “otherwise Aaron or Caleb can bring a friend.” Gary wanted to ask why she hadn’t bought tickets for the week after Christmas, which would have spared Jonah a difficult choice. Ever since the October surrender, however, he and Caroline had been enjoying a second honeymoon, and although it was understood that Gary, as a dutiful son, would be going to St. Jude for three days, a shadow fell on his domestic bliss whenever he made reference to the trip. The more days that elapsed without mention of Enid or Christmas, the more Caroline seemed to want him, the more she included him in her private jokes with Aaron and Caleb, and the less depressed he felt. Indeed, the topic of his depression hadn’t come up once since the morning of Alfred’s fall. Silence on the topic of Christmas seemed a small price to pay for such domestic harmony.
And for a while the treats and attention that Enid had promised Jonah in St. Jude seemed to outweigh the attractions of Alain Gregarius and The Lion King. Jonah mused aloud at the dinner table about Christmasland and the Advent calendar that Grandma talked so much about; he ignored, or didn’t see, the winks and smiles that Caleb and Aaron were exchanging. But Caroline more and more openly encouraged the older boys to laugh at their grandparents and to tell stories about Alfred’s cluelessness (“He called it Intendo!”) and Enid’s puritanism (“She asked what the show was rated!”) and Enid’s parsimony (“There were two green beans and she wrapped them up in foil!”), and Gary, since his surrender, had begun to join in the laughter himself (“Grandma is funny, isn’t she?”), and finally Jonah became self-conscious about his plans. At the age of eight, he fell under the tyranny of Cool. First he ceased to bring up Christmas at the dinner table, and then when Caleb with his trademark semi-irony asked if he was looking forward to Christmasland, Jonah replied, in an effortfully wicked voice, “It’s probably really stupid.”
“Lots of fat people in big cars driving around in the dark,” Aaron said.
“Telling each other how wunnerful it is,” Caroline said.
“Wunnerful, wunnerful,” Caleb said.
“You shouldn’t make fun of your grandmother,” Gary said.
“They’re not making fun of her,” Caroline said.
“Right, we’re not,” Caleb said. “It’s just that people are funny in St. Jude. Aren’t they, Jonah?”
“People certainly are very large there,” Jonah said.
On Saturday night, three days ago, Jonah had thrown up after dinner and gone to bed with a mild fever. By Sunday evening, his color and appetite were back to normal, and Caroline played her final trump. For Aaron’s birthday, earlier in the month, she’d bought an expensive computer game, God Project II, in which players designed and operated organisms to compete in a working ecosystem. She hadn’t allowed Aaron and Caleb to start the game until classes ended, and now, when they finally did start, she insisted that they let Jonah be Microbes, because Microbes, in any ecosystem, had the most fun and never lost.
By bedtime on Sunday, Jonah was entranced with his team of killer bacteria and looked forward to sending them into battle the next day. When Gary woke him on Monday morning and asked if he was coming to St. Jude, Jonah said he’d rather stay home.
“It’s your choice,” Gary said. “But it would mean a lot to your grandma if you came.”
“What if it’s not fun, though?”
“There’s never a guarantee that something’s going to be fun,” Gary said. “But you’ll make Grandma happy. That’s one thing I can guarantee.”
Jonah’s face clouded. “Can I think about it for an hour?”
“OK, one hour. But then we have to pack and go.”
The end of the hour found Jonah deeply immersed in God Project II. One strain of his bacteria had blinded eighty percent of Aaron’s small hoofed mammals.
“It’s OK not to go,” Caroline assured Jonah. “Your personal choice is what matters here. This is your vacation.”
Nobody will be forced to go.
“I’ll say it one more time,” Gary said. “Your grandma is really looking forward to seeing you.”