Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  I required that forgiveness in some quantity. During the previous three years I must have put on about twenty pounds (I was loath to stand on a scale and confront an exact number). When running Breadbasket I’d been pretty thin. In the catering trade, food has a way of becoming repulsive; a vat of cream cheese is indistinguishable from a batch of plaster. But in my subsequent endeavor, the Mexicans on my staff were forever bringing trays of tamales and enchiladas into work. I’d cooked on my feet; now I sat in my office. Thus I’d come to squander an appalling proportion of my mental time on empty vows to cut down to one meal a day, or on fruitless self-castigation over a second stuffed pepper at lunch. Surely on some unconscious, high-frequency level other people could hear the squeal of this humiliating hamster wheel in my head, a piercing shrill that emitted from every other woman I passed in the aisles of Hy-Vee.

  It wasn’t fair, but I blamed Fletcher for those twenty pounds. I may have been a quiet sort who hugged the sidelines, but that didn’t mean I was a pushover. I was the kind of person at whom you could finger-wag and tut-tut-tut, who wouldn’t talk back, who would submit to all manner of browbeating while seeming to take it all in like a good little camper, and you’d walk away and think, There, that’s put her straight, and then I’d sift off and blithely do whatever you’d just told me not to.

  That defiant streak had backfired when I started noshing pointedly between meals on whatever entire food group Fletcher had recently disavowed. (The repudiation of cheese was deadly. The day after that announcement, I returned from the supermarket with half a wheel of Brie.) His spurning of the very dishes that had entranced him during our courtship and early marriage—banana cream pie, homemade deep-dish pizza—hurt my feelings. I shouldn’t have conflated love and food, but that’s a mistake women have made for centuries, so why should I be any different? I missed cooking, too, which I found therapeutic. Hence I still baked an occasional coconut layer cake, which Fletcher would boycott, and even the kids would avoid as their father glowered nearby. Well, someone had to eat that cake. Fatally, I felt sorry for it.

  We had at least evolved a ritual compromise. From each contraband confection, I cut a one-bite amuse-bouche, arranging it with a dab of whipped cream, a garnish of mint, and a couple of pristine fresh raspberries on a large china dessert plate with a sparkling silver fork. This I would leave in the middle of our prep island, the way kids put out cookies for Santa, then make myself scarce. Fletcher would never take the bait while I was watching; still, it meant more to me than I can say that these illicit samplers of what he now deemed “toxic” vanished within the hour.

  Strictly speaking, as a nutritional Nazi my husband had grown more attractive, but I’d been attracted to him before. Besides, a pointiness was now more pronounced. He had a high forehead and long oval face; shorn to a prickly furze to minimize the balding, his head was bullet-shaped. His long, strong nose in profile looked like a checkmark, and the wire-rimmed glasses added a professorial sharpness. Some strict, censorious quality had entered the triangular geometry of his wide shoulders and newly narrow waist, so that simply being in his physical presence made me feel chided.

  As I collected our dishes, it bothered me that Fletcher hadn’t stayed to tidy the kitchen, which wasn’t like him. Commonly we dispatched cleanup with the interlocking fluidity of synchronized swimmers. We were at our best working side by side—neither of us understood or relished “leisure” time—and my fondest memories were of just this sort of cleanup on a grand scale. When we first started dating, on nights I’d catered a big buffet Fletcher would install Tanner and Cody in sleeping bags on my living room floor, so he could help with the kitchen. (When I first saw him shake his hands at the sink—thrusting fingers downward splat-splat, a small, instinctive motion that ensures you don’t dribble water all over the floor on the way to drying your hands on the dishtowel—I knew this was the man I would marry.) Swabbing counters, sealing leftovers, and rinsing massive mixing bowls, he never complained; he never had to be told what to do. He only took breaks to sidle behind me as I removed another set of warm tumblers from the dishwasher and kiss my neck. Believe it or not, those cleanups in spattered aprons were romantic, better than champagne and candlelight.

  Such memories in mind, I could hardly begrudge sudsing the broccoli steamer after lunch for two. I reviewed our conversation. It could have gone worse. Fletcher might himself have announced “over my dead body”; I’d slyly said it for him. I’d never asked outright, “Is it okay if my brother stays in our house for a while?” He’d never said yes or no.

  Our house. Of course, it was our house.

  Having rented most of my life, I still hadn’t shaken the impression that this address on Solomon Drive belonged to someone else; I kept the place fanatically neat as if the real owners might walk in any time unannounced. The house was larger than we required; the kitchen’s plenitude of cabinets invited the purchase of pasta- and bread-making machines that we’d use once. Deserving of the contemptuous tag McMansion, our new home had been an overreaction to the cramp of Fletcher’s tract rental, one of those “temporary” resorts men seek post-divorce, from which unless a new woman puts her foot down they never move. I’d been flushed with awe that I could suddenly afford to buy a house, in cash no less, and in some ways I bought it simply because I could.

  Also, I’d wanted to find Fletcher a workspace. Furniture was his passion, so I bought his passion for him. Naïve in the ways of money, I couldn’t have known beforehand how much he would resent me for it.

  Earlier in our marriage, Fletcher had worked for an agricultural company that made genetically modified seed. I’d been keen to enable him to quit because he wasn’t a natural salesman—not from environmentalist aversion to fiddling with nature, or political outrage that corporate America wanted to patent what was once literally for the picking. I didn’t hold many opinions. I didn’t see the point of them. If I opposed the production of nongerminating disease-resistant corn, it would still be sold. I considered most convictions entertainment, their cultivation a vanity, which is why I rarely read the newspaper. My knowing about an assassination in Lebanon wouldn’t bring the victim to life, and given that news primarily aggravated one’s sense of helplessness I was surprised it was so widely heeded. Refusal to forge views for social consumption made me dull, but I loved being dull. Being of no earthly interest to anyone had been a lifelong goal.

  In kind, this brick neocolonial had no character. It was newly built, its maple floors unscarred. I adored its unstoried blankness. The sockets were solidly wired, and everything worked. I’d never courted character on my own account, save in the sense of being disinclined to shoplift or cheat on my husband; Edison was the one who sought the designation “a real character,” and he could have it. I gloried in anonymity and by then violently resented that the glare of an uninvited public spotlight had turned me into someone in particular for other people. (For pity’s sake, you’d think after purposefully burying myself in the very middle of the country the least I could expect was to be inconspicuous.) I had enough history, and with the lone exception of Edison himself my instinct regarding the past was to draw the shade.

  The big, lobotomized house formed the perfect neutral backdrop against which Fletcher’s furniture could stand out. At this point my husband’s handiwork had replaced most of the department-store appurtenances of our original combined households. (This joining of domestic forces was the first time in my life that someone had helped me move. With ferocious efficiency, Fletcher could carton a room in an afternoon, which has to be even more romantic than prizing the fiddly scraps from the food processor.) So lithe were his creations that whenever I walked into the living room the furniture seemed to have been grazing on throw rugs moments before. Its back corners curled like stag horns, bowed legs prancing on pared feet, the couch was weighted down with pillows, without which the skittish creature might have cantered out the door.

  Though Fletcher liked to t
hink he was improving, my favorite piece was one of his first. We called it the Boomerang. Its red leather cushion was oval. The rail forming the contiguous arms and back slooped high on the right, then arced down on the left, until the far end of the left-hand arm almost touched the floor. The chair looked as if it had been hurled. The slats supporting the great rising back line were also curved—laminated Macassar ebony, rosewood, and maple that he’d soaked for a week to bow. The Boomerang was a talisman of sorts. Most people who’ve refined a skill may cling to such a touchstone: early proof they’ve got the goods. The object to which they can always refer when a current effort is foundering: See? If you can do that, you can do anything. I’d no equivalent myself, because I didn’t care about product. I liked process. Be it a marmalade cake or the absurd merchandise I sold then, output was chaff to me the instant of completion. I found finishing projects perfectly awful.

  After scrubbing the beige film from the rice pan, I peered out the front window. It had started to rain, but that never drove my intrepid husband home. Safe in my solitude, I crept upstairs to my home office and booked a plane ticket between LaGuardia and Cedar Rapids, choosing an arbitrary return date that we could always change. I wrote a check for five hundred dollars with “incidentals” scrawled in the lower-left-hand corner. Enclosing the check and e-ticket printout, I addressed a FedEx mailer to Edison Appaloosa, care of the address Slack had dictated that morning, and booked a pickup on my account.

  My having bought this house with the proceeds of my offbeat business two years before might have meant that I had the “right” to install my brother in its guest room without permission. But pulling fiscal rank struck me as vulgar and undemocratic. There were three Feuerbachs in that house, and only one Halfdanarson.

  What called me to run roughshod over Fletcher’s opposition was something else. I was not, as a rule, held hostage to family. At some point I would make the disagreeable discovery of how deep a tie I retained to my father, but not until he died; meantime, I was free to find him unbearable. My sister Solstice was sufficiently my junior that I could almost be her aunt, and it was only at her insistence that she visited me in Iowa every other summer. (She grew up in the fractured remains of a nutty, failed family, on which she’d long tried to impose a more appealing cliché. So she was the only one who bought presents, sent cards, and paid visits whose perfect regularity suggested a discipline.) My lovely mother Magnolia had died when I was thirteen. Both sets of grandparents had passed. A loner until Fletcher, I’d borne none of my own children.

  Edison was my family, the sole blood relative whom I clearly and cleanly loved. This one attachment distilled all the loyalty that most people dilute across a larger clan into a devotion with the intensity of tamarind. It was Edison from whom I first learned loyalty; it was therefore Edison from whom all other loyalties flowed, and the beneficiaries of this very capacity to cling fiercely were Fletcher and our kids. I may have been ambivalent about the past we shared, but only Edison and I shared it. In truth, I hadn’t hesitated for a heartbeat when Slack Muncie called that morning. Fletcher was right: it was a trump. Edison was my brother, and we could really have ended the discussion then and there.

  chapter two

  I’m picking your uncle up at the airport at five.” The pecans on my pie smelled nicely toasted, and I pulled it from the oven. “Be sure and join us for dinner.”

  “Step-uncle,” Tanner corrected, standing at the counter getting toast crumbs on the floor. “Right next door to total stranger in my book. Sorry. Got plans.”

  “Change them,” I said. “I wasn’t asking. You and Cody will be at dinner, period. Seven o’clock, if the plane’s on time.” I’d always felt shaky about exerting authority over my stepchildren, even shakier now that Tanner was seventeen, and when you don’t feel confident of authority you do not have it. If he did as I said, he would obey out of pity. “When you have a houseguest,” I added, laying on the parental shtick even thicker, “you may not have to be around for all the other meals, but you do on the first night.”

  “Is that so?”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d said was true. “I mean, I’d really appreciate your being here.”

  “So you are asking.”

  “Pleading.”

  “That’s different.” He wiped butter from his mouth with his sleeve. “The guy was here once before, right?”

  “A little over four years ago. Do you remember him?”

  “Got a dim recollection of some blowhard. Kept yakking about bands nobody’s ever heard of. Couldn’t remember my fucking name.”

  The characterization stung. “Edison has a son somewhere, but his ex got full custody when the boy was a baby. So your uncle doesn’t have much experience talking to kids—”

  “Got the impression the problem was the way he talked to adults. He was boring the shit out of everybody.”

  “He’s a very talented man who’s led a very interesting life—much more interesting than mine. This is a rare opportunity to get to know him.” I was speaking to a brick wall.

  I hadn’t quite cracked my stepson. Tanner had a blithe sense of entitlement, a certainty that he was destined for an undefined brand of greatness. Though already a month into his senior year of high school, he had yet to evince the slightest interest in the college education for which I was expressly saving the proceeds from my business. He wanted to write, but he didn’t like to read. That summer the boy had announced that he’d decided to become a screenwriter as if doing Ridley Scott a personal favor. I’d wanted to shake the kid; had he any idea the poor odds of breaking into Hollywood even as a runner? Uncertain whether my impulse was kind or cruel, I’d held my tongue. I had pointed out that his grammar, punctuation, and spelling were atrocious, but Tanner imagined that word processing took care of all that silly prose-style folderol. Anyway, he’d said, for screenwriting you had to know how people really talked, for which a grasp of proper grammar was only an impediment. Okay, I’d thought begrudgingly, one point for Tanner. Throughout his adolescence, Fletcher and I had praised the boy’s every poem, extolled the creativity of his half-page short stories. Parents are supposed to. But, to my horror, Tanner had believed us.

  Tall, pale, and unmuscled, the boy had that undernourished look that girls so often fall for. His dark hair was painstakingly disheveled. The clashing layers of his clothing showed like peeled-back layers of old wallpaper: a checked sweatshirt over dangling striped shirttails, parted to reveal the elastic of plaid boxers rising above his slumped, unbelted jeans. Most of his friends stopped by in the same state of harlequin half-undress. Tanner carried himself with his hips canted forward, and he’d recently developed a disconcerting habit of touching himself while he talked—smoothing palms down his hips, or up his rib cage to his flat chest. He may have been chronically unimpressed, but that skepticism did not extend to himself, and I was amazed how readily his peers and teachers alike took his superficial assurance at face value.

  I had to watch myself with Tanner. When I noted that “girls” would fall for his looks, I should have clarified: at his age, I’d have been one of those girls. It’s not that I was tempted to be flirtatious with him; after all, I could still discern traces of the wary, closed-down ten-year-old I first inherited, who had to be coaxed into the open like a cat from under a bed. Nevertheless, I recognized my teenage stepson as just the sort of poised, hip, self-convinced young man with whom I was besotted in high school, where I’d huddled the halls praying above all to be left alone. (My classmates at Verdugo Hills were more than happy to oblige. Unlike Edison, I continued to go by “Halfdanarson,” the surname with which I was born; I never let on that I was Travis Appaloosa’s kid.) What I had to watch with Tanner, then, was resistance. It was tempting to parade before myself how as a grown woman I no longer fell for such a huckster, and I didn’t want to indulge a too-ferocious, slightly vicious determination to see through him.

  Viewed from the impuni
ty of marriage, the penchant for unrequited passion that persisted through my early thirties had paid off. The likes of Tanner might not have known I was alive, but if you never spoke to the young man he would never reveal his disillusioning enthusiasm for the Bee Gees. Having nursed my loves in private, I had kept them inviolate, and was now spared looking back at a string of deranged entrancements with mortified incredulity. Marathon devotion had developed my emotional endurance, in contrast to Tanner’s sprints with three or four girlfriends a year. I feared that my stepson wasn’t learning to love women but to harbor contempt for the women who loved him.

  “Glop that much jam on your toast,” Fletcher grunted en route to a glass of water, “might as well be eating cake.”

  “Whole wheat!” said Tanner. “And he still won’t give it a rest.”

  I’m sorry, but I don’t eat daaaaaaaaairy! Our thirteen-year-old, Cody, had abandoned her piano practice to tug the pull-string doll propped on the dining area’s middle shelf in case her father needed razzing. The doll was a first effort from four years before, and then a mere whimsy of a Christmas present. I’d sewn it from scratch on the heels of Fletcher’s sudden health kick. The crafts project had doubled as therapy, embodying my struggle to keep a sense of humor about the fact that he would no longer come near my celebrated manicotti.

  The stuffed ragamuffin wore a miniature version of Fletcher’s standard black fleece, to which I’d glued his signature dandruff of sawdust. The doll had stovepipe black jeans, and other than a few teasing threads that spiked upright it was bald. The calf-high leather boots were constructed from the tongues of a fatigued pair of the life-size kind and soled with a retread strip that had fallen off a truck on Highway E36. I’d fashioned the wire-rim glasses out of aluminum paperclips and stitched a permanent scowl of disapproval into the forehead. One hand clutched a chisel (really a jeweler’s screwdriver), the other a square of foam rubber that I’d had to explain was tofu. The fabric was starting to fray, but it had become a matter of professional importance that the mechanism inside was still going strong.