Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “Mind if we take your pickup?” I asked Fletcher, keen to scram. I didn’t want to take sides. “I think Edison’s more comfortable in it.”

  “Go ahead. He’s already used it to truck half the poison in Hy-Vee into our house.”

  Edison snatched the pork rinds, grabbed his jacket, and hunched out the door. After he’d clambered into the passenger seat, he spooled out the seatbelt to its maximum extension, while I took two feet of slack out of the driver’s belt. He bunched his arms and tripled his chin into his clavicle. Scowling, he squeezed his eyes to slits. His inmost self was balled into a dense pellet in the middle of a wide berth of shielding flab; I sensed he could not make himself small enough, nor could his defensive perimeter ever be sufficiently ample to make him feel at a safe length from hostile forces. As if to demonstrate that for pure protection he could not get fatter fast enough, by the time I’d backed from the drive he’d opened the pork rinds and was stuffing them through the taut portal of his pursed lips, chewing snacks the texture of spray insulation foam in a spirit of reprisal. I wondered if he was aware that the object of his retaliation was himself.

  We didn’t say anything until he finished the bag.

  “Don’t take this personally,” he grunted, crushing the cellophane. “But your husband is a prick.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I’m not gonna repeat it.”

  I pictured my husband picking his words with care. That was what made his rare invectives so stinging: he didn’t lose his temper. I knew how long the perfectly chosen slight could last—like being called a mousy dishrag at Verdugo Hills High, when my muttering back, “That’s a mixed metaphor,” had branded me only more conclusively as a twit.

  “You had an altercation, I presume,” I said. “Over the groceries.”

  “I was being helpful. Trying to pull my weight.”

  I waited for his embarrassment over his choice of expression to dissipate. “You know he has strong feelings about food.”

  “Who doesn’t? Nobody’s making the guy eat my groceries.”

  “I suspect,” I said delicately, “the issue was the kids?”

  “They’re teenagers. Stock nothing but chickpea kibble, and they’ll hang at Mickie D’s. Christ, Fletch wasn’t a food fascist last time I was here. What happened?”

  “Well . . . our kitchen used to be crammed with leftovers from Breadbasket—poppy-seed tray cakes or big Ziplocs of potato salad, which we’d either have to eat or throw away. Something of a trap, when you’re from the waste-not-want-not school.”

  “And your cooking is the shit,” said Edison.

  “Thanks. Though that’s a trap, too.”

  “Lotta pitfalls for potato salad.”

  “Yes, you have to ask yourself if there was ever a time people just ate something and got on with it. Every time I open the refrigerator I feel like I’m staring into a library of self-help books with air-conditioning. Anyway—when Fletcher realized the leftovers were having the predictable effect, he sort of freaked. You have to understand: his first wife got heavily into crystal meth. That’s why he got custody of Tanner and Cody. She first started snorting crystal to lose weight. But soon she was leaving the kids unattended, disappearing for days. Lost several teeth . . . Got all these sores she’d pick at, and they’d get infected . . . Then when she came down off a tear, all she’d do was sleep. The whole spiral—it was pretty traumatic. Left Fletcher with a control thing.”

  “You don’t get that way in an afternoon. That guy,” Edison grumbled, “has always had a ‘control thing.’ ”

  “His nature errs in that direction,” I conceded. “In any case, when he resolved to drop a few pounds, this obsession with fitness and nutrition snowballed. Meanwhile, Tanner never lets his friends forget that his real mother is a drug addict. Just like you always bragging about how Mother killed herself. It makes him seem darker and more complicated.”

  “Man, this isn’t the Iowa where we visited the Grumps.”

  “No, it’s grown a pretty vile underbelly,” I said—though you’d never know that from the innocent vista out the window. In plowed-under cornfields, tufts of dried husk fluffed the clods. Feedlots snuffled with wholesome cows. Photogenic silos poked the flat horizon. “Iowa’s developed a massive crystal meth problem.”

  “Mexicans,” Edison supposed.

  “Only at first. You can get all the ingredients at Walmart, except some sort of ammonia that’s used on farms as fertilizer. So now it’s homegrown, along with tomatoes and green peppers. Which is worse. The local stuff is purer. The ice from Mexico—”

  Edison chuckled. “Ice! Don’t think of my kid sister in the Midwest as hip to user lingo.”

  “In this state, grannies on Medicare are hip to user lingo. Farmers take meth to stay awake, like when they have to pull all-nighters bringing in crops. So do truckers. They call it ‘high-speed chicken feed.’ And because it burns up all this energy, around here meth is a housewife problem. A diet drug.”

  “Maybe I can see why having an ex who became a meth head would make you more conservative,” said Edison, folding his arms again. “But that cat’s got no reason to be abusive toward me.”

  However brutally, Fletcher must at last have referred directly to the subject I’d avoided since Edison’s arrival. I was tired of feeling like a coward. I’d thought my tact was kind, but maybe I’d simply been trying to make life easier for myself.

  “Listen . . .” I trained my gaze on the road. “We haven’t talked about it. But I couldn’t help but notice . . . since the last time I saw you . . . you’re a little heavier.”

  Edison slapped his knee and hooted. “ ‘Oh, Mr. Quasimodo, I couldn’t help but notice you’re a little stooped over.’ ‘Excuse me, Mr. Werewolf, I couldn’t help but notice you’re a little hairy.’ I guess you’ve finally ‘noticed’ the Empire State Building is a little tall, the sun is slightly bright, and the Earth is a smidgeon on the round side.”

  I laughed, too, if only in relief. “Okay, okay! I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

  “How about, ‘Whoa, bro, you sure are fat!’ Think I don’t know I’m fat? They make mirrors in New York, you know.”

  “All right.” I braced back from the steering wheel. “When I first laid eyes on you at the airport, I was floored. I’m still floored. I don’t understand how you could have put on so much weight in just a few years.”

  “Try it sometime. It’s not that hard.”

  He was right. Add four Cinnabons per day to a calorie-neutral diet, and you could gain 365 pounds in a single year. “But . . .” I asked feebly, “why?”

  “Duh! I like to eat!”

  “Well, everybody does.”

  “So it’s no big mystery, is it? Everybody includes me, and I like to eat a lot.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to get his back up. “Would you like to lose weight?”

  “Sure, if I could push a button.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I would like ten million dollars. I would like a beautiful wife—again, I might add. I would like world peace.”

  “How much you weigh is within your control.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “Yes. That is what I think.”

  “You gained a few pounds yourself. You like to drop those, too?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “So why don’t you? Or why haven’t you?”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure. Ever since Fletcher became such a goody-goody, it’s seemed almost like my job to be the one who’s bad. My coming home from the supermarket with a box of cookies has provided a release valve. If we only stocked edamame, you’re right: we’d lose the kids to Burger King for good.”

  “Pretty complicated for learning to skip lunch, babe.”

  “Well, maybe it is complicated.”


  “So for me it’s even more complicated, dig?” He was getting hostile. “You can’t even lose thirty pounds, and I’m supposed to lose—I don’t know how many.”

  “I don’t need to lose thirty pounds, thank you. More like twenty, at the most.”

  “Don’t worry, if this is a contest, you get the gold star.”

  “It’s not a contest. But we could both agree not to make things worse. That’s a start, isn’t it? The way you’re eating lately, you’re only getting heavier.”

  “There’s the one little problem of my not giving a shit.”

  That was, of course, not one problem, but the problem.

  As I parked in front of Monotonous, Edison said, “Huh. This all yours? Pretty big.”

  It wasn’t much better than a warehouse, with offices on one end—but it was my warehouse. My idea, my employees: my project.

  “I couldn’t have anticipated it at first,” I explained as Edison heaved from the cab, “but one of the keys to this product taking off has been the way it excites competition. Not between companies, but between my customers. Who’s got the wittiest doll. Or the crudest. We’ve had more than one order for a male Monotonous that does nothing but burp, snort, sneeze, hawk, and spit. That has hiccups and a hacking cough. One customer wanted it to stink when it farted, but that was technically beyond us.”

  The short walk to reception, with Edison, was not short. “Then there are the pornographic ones,” I said. “I had to decide whether to accept the orders at first, but there were so many . . . If a wife wants to give her husband a doll that barks, ‘Suck my dick, bitch!’ why should I care?”

  I introduced Edison to Carlotta, our receptionist, whom I’d alerted about my brother coming by for a tour. I had not warned her about anything else, and was glad she took the lack of obvious family resemblance in stride. “It’s a real pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she said, pumping his hand warmly. “Your sister here’s the best boss a body could hope for. And I’m not just saying that to wheedle for a raise.”

  I brought him into the big open area, which hummed with two dozen sewing machines. The walls were stacked with hundreds of fabrics, while one corner mounded with clear plastic bags of cotton stuffing. “All the dolls are custom jobs, but we have standardized a little,” I said, raising my voice over the machines and leading him to the piles of unclothed dolls with no hair or facial features. “Over here, you can see we’ve got three basic body types in both sexes: thin, average, and portly. Three fabric colors seems to cover the racial bases. These we mass-produce. Angela also churns out denim and leather jackets, though we often add a distinguishing detail—embroidery, a political button. It’s the personalized touches that people like.”

  “So—what, they send you a photograph.”

  “Sometimes we work from one jpeg; other customers send five or six. And a list of expressions. We recommend a minimum of ten. We’ll do up to twenty, but the poetry—honestly, it is a form of poetry—seems to work better with fewer.”

  Edison frowned. “This is shit the cat in the photo says all the time. In real life.”

  Clearly, my brother had neither read my interviews nor looked at my website. I wondered if I felt hurt. I marveled that I didn’t seem to. Instead I felt an increment sorrier for Edison. If I felt any sorrier for Edison, I would faint.

  “That’s right,” I said. “We all repeat ourselves, but certain signature phrases become a form of branding. Most people aren’t aware of what they say all the time unless it’s called to their attention. The repetitions are telling. Our dolls are expensive. But as a substitute for therapy, they’re dirt cheap.”

  I introduced Edison to my staff. I was proud of my workforce. A business with an inbuilt sense of humor gave rise to a natural joviality, and as long as orders weren’t piling up we had a good time. They were nice people, so my impulse to protect my brother from my employees was disconcerting; my first introductions were tainted with a challenging demeanor, like, So? What are you looking at? that made my workers glance to the floor. Some of them may have read correctly in my hard stare, You’re not so skinny yourself, you know. I was dismayed that my brother’s size seemed to be all that people saw. I wanted to object, But his mind is not fat, his soul is not fat, his past is not fat, and his piano playing isn’t fat, either.

  But I wasn’t giving my employees enough credit. You have to provide Iowans good reason to be unkind, and if anything a conspicuous weakness for pork rinds made my nightclubbing East Coast brother seem more down-home.

  “Don’t you believe that guff this lady spouts about Monotonous going down the tubes any minute,” said Brad, the weedy guy who inserted the recording mechanisms. “This biz is going like gangbusters. Gonna be one distant day when people in this country run out of folks they wanna make fun of.”

  I explained that Edison was a jazz pianist in New York City.

  “You mean, like—doo-doo-doo-REEE-do-REE-do-do-do-dum-dum-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-dum-do-dum . . . ?” Brad’s screeching recital was comically cacophonous.

  Edison laughed. “More like, dit. Du-dit. Du-dooo-doodly-do . . .” He completed an impromptu ska line with a catchy swing beat, and everyone clapped.

  “Lord, that stuff’s right over my head!” cried Angela, tugging the arms of a miniature denim jacket right-side out. “Afraid you’re more in the land of Barry Manilow, honey. Now, it’s a shame you’ve missed the corn. But while you’re out here, make your sister lay in some good country-style ribs. And head over to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum—it’s a real treat.”

  “Right after we visit the monument to Enron.” Since Angela didn’t pick up, Edison swallowed any more cracks about this state memorializing an Iowa native still a byword in the rest of the nation for catastrophe and incompetence. When he bantered genially about what kind of a whip his kid sister cracked, I demonstrated: time to get back to work.

  “We contract out for the electronics,” I explained once we’d retired to my office. “But we do the audio. At first I had customers send their own recordings of the subjects—who around here we call ‘vics,’ like in cop shows—so the dolls could speak in the vic’s actual voice. But we got complaints that, even if the vic said, ‘Big diff, baby, big diff!’ fifty times a day, it was the dickens to get it on tape. Also, skulking around after spouses with secret digital recorders in their pockets made people feel creepy. So we hire actors, and I think the satire is more successful hyped up in a different voice—and it softens the ribbing somehow. Matching the right actor to the script is part of the art. Among other things, I’m a casting director.”

  “You gotta admit, as manufacturing goes,” said Edison, lowering into my office armchair, “this operation’s pretty out.”

  “I know it’s nuts,” I said easily. “Still, people make stupider products.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whole factories in China do nothing but produce ghastly, hideous, pointless toys for American kids, who break them after playing with them once. I make attractive toys for adults out of natural materials that become treasured members of the family. And these dolls aren’t only a way for people to tell each other what drives them crazy. They’re also a way to show they love each other.”

  “How you figure that? Seems to me what you’d buy when you were fucking dark on somebody, man.”

  “It’s surprisingly difficult to nail people verbally. Some customers take months studying the subject and taking notes. That intensity of attention is a compliment. And for us at Monotonous, it’s been a mini psych course. You should see some of these phrase lists.” I rifled the papers on my desk. “They’re tiny character studies. Like this one. Louisa’s working up his costume, and calls him ‘Dr. Doom.’ ” I handed Edison the printed-out photo of a gangly guy with wild red hair, his hands despairing midair, along with its accompanying script:

  We’re not going to make it.

  All I do all day
is RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN!

  Don’t ask me.

  This is impossible.

  I don’t have any time.

  It’s a disaster!

  I have too much to do.

  It’s not going to happen.

  Fugetaboutit.

  We’d never find a parking place.

  That won’t work.

  I bet it’s sold out already.

  Can’t do it!

  What are we doin’?

  I give up!

  “Real life of the party,” said Edison.

  “Chronic paralysis and defeatism. Revealing, no? Or this one’s fun.” In the photo, a short, plump young woman in a spangled spandex skirt was raising a glass to the camera; one of my staff was bound to have fun with all that jewelry. The phrases in the commissioning email read:

  I don’t have that many credit cards.

  Over the next year, that’s only fifty cents a day!

  No problem, we can take out another home equity loan.

  This house is worth a fortune!

  I’m not telling you how much it cost.

  But that bag was half price!

  All you care about is money.

  We only have a cash flow crisis.

  I owe it to myself to have a few nice things.

  [Meekly] I guess I went over my texting limit.

  I’m not having this conversation unless you use a civil tone of voice!

  “We’ve had more than one of those. This one’s more subtle.” I handed over a photo of an elderly woman in a severe brown dress who looked both self-righteous and aggrieved. Probably an in-law or grandparent, prone to deferring:

  Oh, I’ll have whatever flavor of ice cream no one else wants.

  Don’t turn down the air-conditioning on my account; I can always wear my coat.

  Don’t mind me, it’s what the children would like to do that matters.

  No, no, if Betsy wants to watch American Idol, I can always read.