Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  But in the main the program is about the three kids negotiating the tricky terrain of parents who hate each other, as well as the logistical travails of shuttling between households, given the eponymous legal arrangements. Mimi is authoritarian, less concerned for her kids’ creative expression than for their career prospects. Emory espouses countercultural fulfillment, and his permissiveness often gets his kids into trouble. That might have all worked okay, except two of the three children just had to be prodigies.

  Oh, that’s only one of the reasons we hated those two so much. Still, fictional aptitude is cheap, like athletic prowess from steroids. A scriptwriter can stuff a few token foreign phrases into the dialogue, and voilà: his character is fluent in eight languages. Sinclair Vanpelt played a precocious jazz pianist without mastering one minor seventh. As for why jazz, in 1974 every kid wanted to be a rock star, and the pilot’s development team wanted Caleb Fields to take the road less traveled. But between Caleb Fields having been conceived as super-hip and the genre itself being still halfway happening in the early 1970s, Edison may have gotten a distorted impression of jazz as a logical route to seeing your name in lights. Maybe that explained the bitterness of his diatribes about how marginalized the form had grown, and about what a farcical shard of market share he and his colleagues commanded—“most of which is Norah Jones.”

  Fourteen in the first season, Caleb is the rebel of the three, who carries on a whole parallel life as a hep cat in dark clubs in Old Town and the Pearl District, where he has to keep his status as a minor on the QT. The oldest has no patience with either parent, and adolescent viewers identified with his driving ambition to leave them both in the dust. He wears a porkpie hat and black turtleneck, and it’s a running issue in the show that he’s started to smoke. As for Sinclair himself, he had a lanky build that resembled Edison’s own—at least back in the day—and the two of them were good-looking in a similar vein. Sinclair’s hair was brown, Edison’s dirty blond, but both mops tended to tendril, and one similarity my brother would be hard-pressed to deny: he’d styled his longish hair, which went electric in humid weather, just like Caleb Fields’s for his entire life.

  Otherwise Sinclair was a supercilious snob who chummed smarmily with our father whenever Edison and I were around during rehearsals, marginalizing us into mere extras. I have one clear memory of Sinclair’s registering the fact that Travis-slash-Emory had an actual son near his age. Edison and I were loitering in the studio wings because our family was supposed to attend an NBC picnic in Griffith Park after the taping. Between takes, Edison took it upon himself to demonstrate to Sinclair how to play properly with crossed hands—at which point my brother confirmed, yes, he did know what he was talking about: lo, real-life son was now studying real-life jazz piano. “God,” Sinclair exclaimed, “that is—too droll!” The actor’s doubled-over laughter would secure Edison’s enmity forever after. But neither Sinclair’s arch condescension nor his affected world-weariness would help him much once the show was canceled and he failed to be cast again in any other major role. (He scored one guest appearance on Family, but being conspicuously gay didn’t convert to an advantage until the mid-1990s, by which time he was dissolute-looking and half bald.)

  Teensy, the youngest, is only four in the first season, and she’s a math whiz. I guess it’s pretty impressive that an actor so young could rattle off all those numbers idiot-savant style, since the scriptwriters were persnickety about her human-calculator answers to multidigit equations being correct. But it would be surprising if Tiffany Kite herself had finally mastered the multiplication table by the time the show wrapped up eight years later. She had black ringlets and the soulful brown eyes of a refugee. To my personal consternation, as Tiffany grew older she only got prettier and so, of course, became more of a princess. In the show, Teensy is a perky genius but still a little girl, and they got a whole episode out of her phobic avoidance of her father’s outhouse: in Emory’s custody, Teensy refuses to go to the bathroom, and on her daughter’s return Mimi has to dose the poor kid with laxatives every time.

  Then there’s Maple, the only three-dimensional character on the program—the kid always conveying messages between her warring parents and editing the content along the way (“Did your father really say that?” “Did your mother really say that?”). Since the middle child alone is not bequeathed magical powers, she’s actually likable. Sandwiched between two attention-grabbers with a high wow factor, Maple has no heaven-sent gift as a shorthand personality and no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. Accordingly, I’ve sometimes heard contemporaries thumbnail a conscientious, decent, but undistinguished woman who is roundly ignored and sometimes taken advantage of as: “You know, she’s a Maple Fields.” Both on and off camera, Floy Newport was unassumingly attractive in that way that L.A. always overlooks. Maple Fields was the one character in Joint Custody whom Edison almost never mentioned.

  I still felt conflicted about our father’s program. Naturally Edison and I had made a lifelong sport of ridiculing the show, but external ridicule was another matter. Pressured by Tanner and Cody, I’d broken down a couple of years earlier and ordered all eight seasons on DVD. Accustomed to the slicker fare of HBO, you forget how crude, obvious, and hammy television used to be, as well as technically rinky-dink; I naturally remembered the sets as sets, but they looked like sets to Tanner and Cody as well, who couldn’t believe the show was so “lame.” I was discomfited. I tried to laugh with them, but I couldn’t, and before we’d finished the first season I put the DVDs away.

  At least for me it had been a revelation to see Travis, since it’s always a revelation to see images of your parents younger than you are now. Suddenly all the surety and authority you’ve accorded them falls away, and these glimpses of outsize icons as ordinary lost people with no road map, no special access to the truth or to justice or to anything, really—well, such epiphanies are tender and sweet and frightening all at the same time. I even softened briefly, thinking maybe Edison and I had been too hard on Travis. It was hardly an outrage that he kidded himself about how handsome he still was or exaggerated his own importance like most people. Another revelation: while our father prided himself on his sophistication, it was clearly his wholesome farm-stock presence to which the casting director had taken a shine; Travis Appaloosa played it, but Hugh Halfdanarson had gotten the part. In fact, Travis had originally auditioned for Apple’s Way, in which a father quits the L.A. rat race for his hometown in Iowa, only to find the transition from slick to hick traumatic. But Travis didn’t have the fish-out-of-water quality they were looking for. In Iowa, as far as the producers were concerned, Travis fit right in.

  The one aspect of our father’s show that I still admired was its representation of the way siblings live in a separate world from their parents, who for kids function as mere walk-ons. Joint Custody captures the intense, hothouse collusion between siblings, while Mimi and Emory are played for fools. Often ashamed of tugging the children’s loyalties in opposite directions, the parents fail to grasp their kids’ salvation: the children’s uppermost loyalty is to each other.

  To the degree he intuited the ferocity of mutual clinging that got Edison and me through our childhoods intact, my husband resented it. I didn’t think he should have resented it on our marriage’s account; when Edison first arrived on Solomon Drive, I was still of the view that being a devoted sister made no implicit incursions into my devotions as a wife. But as an only child, Fletcher should have envied this intimacy on his own account. If you don’t have a sibling to keep the sides drawn, you’re stuck lumped in with your minders, an alliance that makes you a traitor, your own tattletale, with the schizoid psyche of a double agent. Edison and I did rat each other out from time to time, but these were isolated strategic sorties in the complex politics of the playroom about which our parents knew nothing. We used our mom and dad as weapons in the far more central relationship to one another. Certainly with Tanner and Cody I tried never
to forget: children know your secrets. You do not know theirs.

  Ironically, given the show’s ostensible edginess, when I was thirteen our own family took a turn toward the network cliché of times past. I came home from school to find, of all people, Joy Markle waiting to receive me. In retrospect, Travis’s selection of his costar to break the news—with the physical implication that now the fake mother had replaced the real one—was in poor taste.

  When she wasn’t playing Mimi, Joy’s metallic blond hair was no longer bunned in a metaphor for strictness that must have made her scalp hurt. I suppose she was pretty, though not beautiful, a lack she tried to make up for when playing herself—and like so many of the people I grew up around, Joy Markle did play herself—with an undercurrent of sluttiness, exposing the lace of her bras well before the practice was fashionable. That afternoon she wore a low-cut dress, an unfortunate scarlet—which signifies and rhymes with harlot—and when she stooped to talk to me I knew there was something wrong. I wasn’t that much shorter than she was, and this impulse to kneel in order to you-poor-dear could only have been in the service of melodrama.

  Travis was at the hospital, playing his own part to the hilt, though he wasn’t unaffected. To the contrary, and it must be an unnerving experience to gesture toward emotion professionally for years on end only to be mugged by the raggedy, artless ineloquence of the real thing.

  Edison and I harbored conflicting versions, because my brother thought of himself as savvy, while I thought of myself as gullible. So Edison maintained that he’d known for years that Travis and Joy were having an affair, while I maintained that neither of us realized until Travis started seeing her openly after our mother’s death. (They didn’t last. Many an affair topples without anyone to cheat on, like a three-legged stool whose supports are reduced to two. They needed my sweet, credulous mother from Ohio for their otherwise too-predictable showbiz shenanigans to be any fun. Yet Travis and Joy’s subsequent falling-out added a bona fide acrimony to their portrayals of Emory and Mimi, making the last two seasons the best of the series.) There was only one reason I cared whether Edison had known all along about our father’s philandering: if so, I couldn’t bear the idea that he hadn’t told me.

  Raised in Oberlin, our delicately comely mother hailed from a solid, formerly industrial family of some standing; her father edited the local paper for decades. When she met Hugh at a regional horse show in Dubuque, I doubt she took seriously his aspirations to act, assuming he’d soon put the pipedream aside to tend his parents’ farm. After all, a life of pies cooling in windows and relief about long-awaited rainfall would have suited her well. My mother has long been a touchstone of authenticity for me, and my migration to the Midwest was an homage to her of sorts.

  Yet at parties in L.A., she was at a loss how to dress, and confided to me once that she waited out many a drunken gathering in a locked bathroom, while other revelers tiddled on the door and finally went away. Detesting her husband’s pompous, self-promoting new friends, Magnolia Halfdanarson privately wept every time Joint Custody was renewed for another season. (She only went by “Appaloosa” in public, to humor our father; her checkbooks were printed with the name of the man she thought she had married.) So she may have been depressed, and in that case the condition had worsened after Solstice was born three years earlier. But I’d only had the one; how was I to know whether a mother sleeping whole afternoons was normal? Likewise I couldn’t be expected to differentiate between depressed as in has-a-serotonin-deficit and depressed as in for-good-reason. If the question was whether she knew Travis was cheating on her, the answer was probably yes, if only because the answer to that question is almost always yes.

  Edison had come to glory in having a mother who killed herself, which told well in New York jazz clubs. Remember—he’s the one who went by look-at-me Appaloosa, which even for those never brainwashed to accord it legitimacy every Wednesday at nine was still bound to raise eyebrows as no convincing family surname but a breed of horse. Not looking to differentiate myself with a sleeve-tug bio, I never thought her death was suicide. Though obviously devastated to have lost her so young, I didn’t regard having a mother die of natural causes as a narrative letdown, much less as a personal insult.

  She was standing at the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Woodland Avenue, and she stepped off the curb. That is the whole story, though as it happened a UPS delivery truck barreled past a fraction of a second later.

  Edison would have it that our mother sighted the truck and gave herself up to its bumper on purpose, a lateral variation on hurling oneself off a bridge. Magnolia despaired of her husband’s betrayal, ergo the loss of our bashful, winsome mother in our teens was Travis’s fault. This simple, durable construction had long bulwarked my brother’s preconceived opinion: that Travis was an asshole.

  If I held few opinions, I did cling to a handful—like the view that facts are not the same as beliefs, and that most people get them confused. When your mother dies, you want the loss to mean something, reprieving grief from its purest, most intolerable form, in which there is only loss, with no compensation, no takeaway. Driven by this craving if not for a moral then at least for an accusation as a kind of mortality kewpie doll, even commonly honest people will reconfigure the mangle of the truth into a form that has pizzazz. By contrast, here is what I reconstructed:

  Hundreds if not thousands of times per day we make small rudimentary decisions while thinking about something else. When I ascended our front porch steps, I was never thinking, “Raise your right leg; establish firm footing, lift left heel and push off.” No, I was probably wrestling with whether I could sneak a little sour cream into our evening’s casserole without Fletcher noticing. I’m no neurologist, but there must be a watchful part of the brain that carries out routine tasks and frees the rest of your head to ponder the telltale pastel effects of dairy products.

  If so, the watchful part is not perfect. I’ve experienced it enough times myself: those instants when the overseer blinks out like a flawed digital recording. When the bit that allows the rest of your mind to be distracted itself gets distracted.

  My mother stepped off a curb. She was a good mother in a traditional sense, and had inculcated in her children the importance of looking both ways. This time she didn’t.

  You could say that left me with pure and therefore intolerable loss. But I did derive something from Magnolia’s fate. One afternoon in my mid-twenties, I was cycling along a deserted two-lane street in New Holland, and I ran smack into a parked car. Picking myself up and examining the crumpled bike frame, I thought of my mother. What I took from her moment of inattention was incredulous gratitude: that I did not plow my bike into parked cars all the time. That for decades I had been devising recipes for salsa, guiltily dreading Solstice’s impending visits, or contriving phrases for my husband’s pull-string doll, all the while making incalculably numerous, crucial negotiations of this perilous world, and I still hadn’t died.

  That was enough for me. But so minor a matter as thankfulness for the competent multitasking of the human brain 99.9 percent of the time would never be enough for Edison, for whom plot had always to be writ large. Perhaps this seems a stretch, but for me it was all of a piece: his appetite for Cinnabons and suicide alike, his insistence on building his life along such drastic lines that thinking big had manifested itself in his proportions. If my brother’s weight was symptomatic of something wrong, then it also emblemized a vanity. He wasn’t the type to submit to slings and arrows with a bit of a paunch. In the same style in which he’d schemed to succeed, so also would he fail: on a grand scale.

  chapter seven

  Over the next ten days I offered to show Edison Baby Monotonous several times, but he always begged off to check out some jazz interview online. In the end I rather insisted. If Vanity Fair and Forbes were interested in my business, my own brother might express some small curiosity about what I did for a living.

&nbs
p; Edison had been sleeping late, so I arranged to drop back by the house mid-afternoon and ferry him to the premises. Aside from the preparation of meals—a large enough issue to defer for the moment—I wasn’t sure what my brother got up to while I was at work. I think he spent a fair bit of time on the Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity—although Fletcher said that down in the basement he could hear the yammer of the TV, too, for hours on end. What Fletcher did not hear, unless Cody was practicing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” was the piano.

  Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy and might have learned to relax more, but I did find it disturbing how, especially with the assistance of media gizmos, it was possible for time and time and more time to pass in the process of doing absolutely nothing. I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for whole afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house, waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

  When I returned to Solomon Drive to escort Edison to my headquarters around four p.m., I found him faced off with Fletcher in the kitchen, surrounded by groceries on every counter. Edison’s face was red. He was huffing, hands held out from his jeans, quick-draw. Fletcher stood rigidly opposite, his expression steely. If this was a duel, my husband was the sheriff, my brother the outlaw.

  “Edison,” I said. “You ready to go?”

  “Better believe it,” he said gruffly, eyes narrowed.

  I surveyed the counters, mounded with corn chips, pork rinds, canned beef chili, croissants, soda, double-cream sandwich cookies, pizza rolls, frozen french fries, and coffee cakes. I was sure to hear about it in the car, though from picking out the items that needed refrigerating—three packs of butter, smoked mozzarella, and two quarts of half-and-half—I could infer the gist.