Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “Find that hard to believe.” Somewhere under all that fat was my brother’s sense of humor. “Don’t I get a hug?”

  “Of course!” My hands nowhere near met on his curved back, the form soft and warm, but foreign. This time when he embraced me, he didn’t lift me off the floor. Once we disengaged and I met his gaze, my chin rose only slightly. Edison had once been three inches taller than I, but he was no more. It was now less physically natural to look up to my brother.

  “Do you—did you not need that wheelchair, then?”

  “Nah, that was just the airline being impatient. Don’t walk fast as I used to.” Edison—or the creature that had swallowed Edison—heaved toward the baggage belt. “But I thought you didn’t see me.”

  “It’s been over four years. I guess it took me a minute. Please, let me take that.” He allowed me to shoulder his battered brown bag. Visiting my brother in New York, I’d trailed after his ground-eating galumph, nervous of getting left behind in a strange city as he threaded nimbly through slower pedestrians without colliding with lit cigarettes. Yet walking with him toward the airport exit, I was obliged to employ the step-close, step-close of a bride down the aisle.

  “So how was your flight?” Dull, but my mind was spinning. Edison had stirred a range of emotions in me over the years: awe, humility, frustration (he never shut up). But I had never felt sorry for my brother, and the pity was horrible.

  “Plane could take off,” he grunted. “Even with me on it. That what you mean?”

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Then don’t say anything.”

  I’m not supposed to say anything. I was already climbing the steep learning curve of an alien modern etiquette. Edison could crack wise at his own expense, and had he shown up in a form bearing some passable resemblance to the brother I remembered he most certainly would have hounded me about my hips. But when your brother shows up at the airport weighing hundreds more pounds than when last you met, you don’t say anything.

  We finally reached the exit. I said, casually, why don’t I bring the car around, though I was parked only a hundred yards away. A middle-aged woman with smartly cut auburn hair who’d been loitering by the information booth had followed us outside—confirming my suspicion that Edison and I were being stared at.

  “Sorry to bother you,” said the stranger. “But are you by any chance Pandora Halfdanarson?”

  For many a younger sibling with an older brother looking on, being solicited for an autograph, or whatever this woman wanted, would be a fantasy come true. But not today, and I came close to denying I was any such person just to get away. On the other hand, explaining to Edison why I’d lied would make a bigger mess, so I said yes.

  “I thought so!” said the woman. “I recognized your face from the profile in Vanity Fair. Well, I just had to tell you: my husband gave me a Baby Monotonous doll for our anniversary. I don’t know if you remember it—well, of course not, you must make so many—but it’s wearing a stiff suit and snooty hat, and the TV remote is stitched in one hand. It says things like, George! You know you’re supposed to cut down on salt! And George! You know I can’t bear that shirt! And George! You know you don’t understand Middle Eastern politics! Or sometimes it preens, I went to Bryn Maaaaaaaawr! I was offended at first, but then I just had to laugh. I’d no idea I was so critical and controlling! That doll helped save my marriage. So I wanted to thank you.”

  Don’t get me wrong: I’m usually very nice to satisfied customers. I might not enjoy being recognized in public as much as some people would—as much as Edison would—but I don’t take any la-di-da status for granted. The main thing that rattles me about such encounters is the embarrassment: this woman recognized me and I didn’t recognize her, which didn’t seem right. So usually I’d have been warm and chatty and grateful, but not today. I shook off the fan mumbling, “Well, I’m very happy for you, then,” and pivoted to the crosswalk.

  “Is it true?” the woman cried at my back. “You’re Travis Appaloosa’s daughter?”

  Annoyed, since I’d not told that to Vanity Fair and the journalist dug it up anyway, I declined to answer. Edison boomed behind me, “Got that ass-backwards, lady. Travis Appaloosa is Pandora Halfdanarson’s father. Which is eating the fucker hollow.”

  Fortunately, when I drove up to the curb she’d cleared off. Hefting his bag into the back, I said, “Sorry about that woman. Honestly, that hardly ever happens.”

  “Price of fame, babe!” His tone was opaque.

  It took some doing to get the front passenger seat of our Camry to go back to its last notch. Climbing inside, Edison braced one hand on the door; I worried whether the hinges could take the stress. I’d have helped him myself, but I didn’t think he could lean on me without us both collapsing. He lowered himself into the bucket seat with the delicacy of a giant crane maneuvering haulage from a container ship. When he dropped the last few inches, the chassis tilted to the right. His knees jammed the glove compartment, and I had to give his door an extra oomph to get it shut. Those heavy hips were good for something.

  I had trouble releasing the parking brake, with Edison’s thigh pressed against it, and getting the gearshift out of park was hampered by the spill of his forearm. I was desperate to call Fletcher and warn him, though advance notice that the brother-in-law who had shown up at the airport looked thrice the size of the brother-in-law he’d once hosted would have been useless. As I pulled from the lot, my phone rang, and I recognized the caller. After our curbside encounter with that Baby Monotonous fan, this was the last thing we needed, and I didn’t answer.

  Edison rustled into the pockets of his black leather jacket—the hip kind with lapels, though this one would have required the benevolence of half a cow. I recognized it as a replacement of the calf-length leather trench coat that he’d worn for years, with a tie-belt, soft as the skin of an eggplant, always worn with the collar raised. He’d looked so cool in it, so Mafioso mysterious and—sleek. I wondered what happened to the original, out of nostalgia, but also because whether Edison had kept his smaller clothes might be a key to how he saw his future. This wider, unfitted jacket had more the texture of plastic, and none of the fine styling of his old trademark. I’d no idea where one got such clothes; I’d never seen apparel that size in Kohl’s, or even at Target.

  He withdrew what looked like a mashed Cinnabon, the white frosting drooling over its waxed paper. I did not say, You know, that strikes me as the last thing you need. I did not say, You know, I read once that those buns clock in at 900 calories apiece. I did not say, You know, we’re going to be eating dinner in less than an hour. In all, everything I did not say would have nicely filled out the entire recording of one of my pull-string dolls.

  Yet even the innocuous question I put instead sounded loaded: “So what have you been up to?” As if it weren’t obvious.

  “Few CDs,” he said through frosting. “Mostly New York gigs, and a lot of the scene has moved to Brooklyn. Hooked up with this guitarist Charlie Hunter who’s really starting to headline. Some killing up-and-comers: John Hebert, John O’Gallagher, Ben Monder, Bill McHenry. Really hit it off with Michael Brecker at a hang at the 55 Bar last year, and it’s a damned shame he just died of leukemia. Man, between the two of us, we could have done Birdland standing room only. Regular thing in Nyack—restaurant, which is a drag, though with so many venues closing we all gotta take what we can get. Maine Jazz Camp for bread, but also ’cause your brother got a few promising protégés, believe it or not. Working on my own tunes, of course. Long tour of Spain and Portugal coming up in December. Maybe London Jazz Festival next fall. Some interest from Brazil, though that’s not nailed. Money’s not good enough. Cat in Rio’s working on it.”

  I was accustomed to Edison’s catalogue of names that meant nothing to me. Eyes on the road, I could almost hear my brother as he’d always sounded: brash, slick, sure of himself; whatever the disappointme
nts of the present, something lucrative and high profile lay just around the corner. I thought: He’d never sounded fat over the phone.

  “Talk to Travis lately?” asked Edison.

  Travis Appaloosa sounds made up—since it was. “Dad,” né Hugh Halfdanarson, had assumed his barmy stage name when I was six and Edison nine, too late to sound anything but artificial. So we always called him Travis, with an implicit elbow in the ribs, a get-a-load-of-this. Yet during my childhood and adolescence Travis Appaloosa had lilted with the tuneful familiarity of Bill Bixby, Danny Bonaduce, and Barbara Billingsley. Maybe any sequence of syllables that rings out across the nation every Wednesday at nine simply cannot sound ridiculous. From 1974 to 1982, Travis Appaloosa was part of the landscape, just as Hugh Halfdanarson had always hoped.

  “About a month ago,” I said. “He’s obsessed with his website. Have you seen it? There’s a quiz on Joint Custody trivia. A ‘Where Are They Now?’ tab that updates you on whatever drugs Tiffany Kite is currently shooting up—”

  “Or which ten-year-old boys Sinclair Vanpelt is shtupping—”

  “Though you’d be surprised, Floy Newport is mayor of San Diego.”

  “The underestimated one. They’re the ones who sneak up from behind. The devious little fuckers who plot behind your back. Who use the fact that nobody pays any attention to them to bide their time, and then make their move when you least expect it.”

  Edison’s tone was playful but needling. Of the three kids in our father’s supposedly cutting-edge one-hour drama, Floy Newport was the closest I had to a doppelgänger, although—oddly, since Edison of all people should know the difference—he was confusing Floy the actress with Maple Fields, the character she played. On Joint Custody, Maple was the middle one, sandwiched between prodigies, eternally unnoticed and not especially good at anything. Whereas Edison had reviled the character he most resembled in the show, Caleb Fields, as much as the vain pretty boy Sinclair Vanpelt who played him, I’d identified with Maple Fields completely.

  “On that website,” I said. “Believe it or not, Travis has also listed out the plots of every single episode. In order. Several paragraphs apiece.”

  “Talk about time on your hands.”

  “Too bad we didn’t video that woman back at the airport for him. ‘Travis Appaloosa’ meant something to her. That’s a dying breed.”

  “She was about forty-five? The right age. Probably watched every season. It’s a whole cohort, Panda Bear. They’re not that old, and they’re not all dead yet.”

  “Only a few names from the shows you grew up with stick in your head,” I said. “As a rule, Travis’s isn’t one of them.”

  “You’d be surprised. You don’t use his surname. I still get asked about the geeze more often than you’d think.”

  In point of fact, I had gone by Pandora Appaloosa for a while in college. A little lost, I imagined that if other people thought they knew who I was, then I would know, too. But before long, the very query I was courting—“Any relation to Travis?”—began to seem not only like cheating but counterproductive. My classmates at Reed would only want to hear about my dad the TV star; in contemporary terms, I had reduced myself to a hyperlink to someone else’s Wikipedia page. So I reverted to Halfdanarson when I moved to Iowa. In recent years even fans of retro TV were unlikely to recognize my father’s pseudonym, which disuse was returning to the goofiness that had first sent my mother into peels of laughter. But I was mostly glad of having resumed the ungainly Swedish singsong my father had shed because Halfdanarson was my real name.

  I’d usually have savored ragging on our father with Edison, that ritual touching base with our sick, stupid history. I rarely discussed my childhood with Fletcher. I hadn’t even let on that my father had been a television actor in a wildly successful show until months into our relationship, and when I finally let it slip I was relieved to learn that Fletcher hadn’t watched Joint Custody when it was on in prime time. Yet no matter how firmly I’d emphasized that my offbeat upbringing in Tujunga Hills was an arbitrary footnote in a life otherwise ordinary by design, Fletcher always took reference to the program as a pulling of rank, and I avoided the subject. Only with Edison, then, could I access a past that, however loath I was to depend on it for a sense of importance, I was reluctant to jettison completely. It was my past, whatever it meant, the only one I had.

  I grew up with a set of parallels that expressed varying degrees of distortion and caricature. I didn’t only have a father named Hugh Halfdanarson, but one who doubled ludicrously as Travis Appaloosa, who played another father named Emory Fields, a fake dad who was a far more successful paterfamilias than the self-absorbed monomaniac I saw only occasionally at home. I wasn’t simply Pandora Halfdanarson, but could choose to be Pandora Appaloosa if I wished, and on Wednesday nights for eight years I recognized an idealized version of myself in Maple Fields, a sweeter and more altruistic little girl than I who was always trying to get her parents back together. In turn, Maple Fields was played by one of those rare child actors who wasn’t unendurable, either on-screen or off-, even if Floy Newport was probably not her real name either. I idolized her and sometimes thought they should have kept filming the show and canceled our real family. So you can see how my fashioning mocking duplicates for a living might have seemed almost inevitable. After all, my favorite episode of Night Gallery was “The Doll.”

  This time driving back to New Holland our traditional sharing of notes—first and foremost, on whatever crackpot strategy Travis had recently devised to restore himself as the apple of the public eye—felt diversionary and dishonest. As we continued to discuss the latest on Joy Markle and Tiffany Kite, I could get with the program only so long as I trained my gaze on I-80. Side glances at the unaccountable mass in the passenger seat broke the spell, and it would suddenly seem a bit rich for Edison in this condition to be deriding anyone else for having failed to live up to youthful promise. For that dizzying sorrow on glimpsing the large gentleman in an airport wheelchair had only intensified, and I’d no idea how I would make it through the whole evening to come without falling apart.

  chapter four

  Calling, “We’re ho-ome!” in the hallway, I tinged the announcement by descending into a minor key, a note of warning that my family would fail to pick up on. Here I’d hoped to present Tanner with a member of his extended family whom he could plausibly “look up to,” but with my brother’s spine compacted two inches Tanner was already too tall. Nothing about being obese diminished Edison’s accomplishments, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the way Tanner would see things.

  When Edison trailed me to the kitchen, Fletcher’s face mirrored what my own must have looked like when I turned to my brother’s voice at the airport: that flat smack against plate glass, the shock of having your expectations so thoroughly thwarted. My husband is not an impolite person, but when he looked up from the stove he said absolutely nothing and forgot to close his mouth. Time stretched. He was dying to look at me, but cutting away would have seemed unwelcoming. “Hey,” he said feebly.

  “Hey, bro, good to see you, man!” Edison clapped Fletcher’s shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who’d last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people’s transparent hypocrisy. They couldn’t say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile.

  “Tanner?” I led Edison over to where my stepson slouched at the table, taking in the scene while dawdling at his laptop. I could already read in the twist of his mouth the ruthless description of our new houseguest that he’d post on Facebook. “You remember your uncle Edison?”


  “Not really,” said Tanner warily.

  “Hell, kid, you’ve really shot up,” said Edison, extending his hand. “Can’t say I’d recognize you on the street, Tan.” Nobody called Tanner “Tan.”

  Tanner continued to slouch, so when he extended his arm to limply shake Edison’s hand it was from as far away as possible. “Can’t say I’d recognize you, either, Ed.” Nobody called Edison “Ed.”

  “So you’re seventeen? Figure my son Carson’s about your age,” Edison supposed.

  Tanner exclaimed, “You don’t even know?”

  That’s when Cody filtered into the doorway. With fair flyaway hair and a diffident manner, she was a shy girl, as I had been. Responding to her natural modesty and diligence, I’d tried for years not to show her any partiality over her more arrogant brother. Although no prodigy at the piano, the girl had a precocious sensitivity that would either be the making of her or would doom her for life as an easy mark. This was one of those moments in which she distinguished herself, for her instincts were pitch perfect. Cody took a mere instant to assess the situation, after which she ran to my brother crying, “Hi, Uncle Edison!” and gave him an unreserved hug.

  He hugged her back, hard. I wondered how many times recently anyone had held him like that—with joy, with affection, with no trace of distaste. I wished I’d hugged him that way myself.

  “So what’s cookin’?” asked Edison, hovering by the stove.

  “Ratatouille and shrimp with polenta,” said Fletcher.

  “I’m afraid the shrimp are only the frozen supermarket kind,” I said. “It’s the landlocked Midwest, and Fletcher decides the only animal protein he’ll eat is seafood.”

  “No prob—smells great!” Edison helped himself to a large nearby jar of peanuts and asked for a beer. I poured him a lager and followed him anxiously to the table. Fletcher had made the dining set, and the chairs all had finely curved arms—between which my brother was not going to fit.