Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  Worse, I could feel Edison driving Fletcher insane. My husband’s rage was so palpable to me that I was terrified that my brother as well could pick up its dog-whistle shriek. Yet as Edison sucked all the conversational air from the room, Fletcher grew outwardly only grimmer and quieter. Tight-lipped by nature, my husband couldn’t become more so without ceasing to speak altogether. Which is pretty much what he did. Our silent communion had morphed into not talking to each other, period.

  In addition to being my technical consultant at Baby Monotonous, Oliver Allbless was my confidant. It was to him I poured out my unalloyed disgust with Fletcher’s fanatical cycling, my perplexity over why the rigidity of my husband’s diet should be driving us apart when after all it was only food, my indignation over being misquoted in profiles since no one else wanted to hear me complain about appearing in national magazines, and my less politic opinions of my stepson’s ridiculous ambition to become a screenwriter. A nice-looking man, lanky and mild of manner, Oliver and I had a history, one whose importance I had played down to Fletcher, who intuited it anyway. So in the main I tried to keep them apart, while putting them in the same room just often enough to flaunt: See? I have nothing to hide. Oliver was deferential in Fletcher’s presence, bowing to the alpha male in such a textbook show of submission that we might have been featuring in Wild Kingdom. He would ask to see Fletcher’s latest furniture, and carry on neutral conversations with me about ethanol’s dubious energy efficiency, never letting on that he was privy to anything more intimate in my life than my perspective on agricultural policy. Since Edison’s arrival I’d skipped this awkward exercise, in dread of being torn not two ways but three. Yet at length I did arrange for my best friend to join us for dinner. I wanted him to meet Edison, if only so we could talk about him once my brother went home.

  I’d prepared Oliver for my brother’s transformation, and when they shook hands my friend covered his incredulity more skillfully than most. At dinner, he admired Fletcher’s barley and mushroom salad, though as Tanner muttered at my elbow, “God, it even tastes beige.”

  “You know, your namesake, Somebody Fletcher,” Edison told my husband informatively, “started a cult in the early 1900s. Called himself ‘The Great Masticator.’ Everybody went ape-shit for ‘fletcherizing.’ All about chewing, every bite, between thirty-two and forty-five times. You even had to chew, like, orange juice. Cat turned eating into such a drag, bet you two woulda got along like a house on fire.”

  Curving the conversation from my brother’s less-than-appreciative response to Fletcher’s cooking, Oliver inquired about Edison’s jazz career, the response predictably extensive. Edison asked nothing about Oliver in return. Keeping a backseat, I felt conflicted. I wanted to feel proud of my brother; I also wanted Edison to behave as piggishly as possible, the better to demonstrate to Oliver what we’d been putting up with.

  “So, Tanner,” said Oliver, a master of social evenhandedness. “What colleges do you plan to apply to?”

  Tanner glanced warily at his father. “Like, none, if you want to know the truth. I’m not into college.”

  “Not yet,” said Fletcher tightly. “None of them’s admitted you.”

  “Know what, quote, ‘higher education’ is about, don’t you?” Hitherto, Edison’s ratta-tat-tat conversation had been powered by an edgy irritation that I’d learned to recognize as petulance over Fletcher’s dreary cuisine. Now that I’d unveiled my ricotta pie—lighter than cheesecake, though with anything half the calories my brother would eat twice as much of it—Edison relaxed and grew more expansive. “Know what a diploma is really about? It’s a little piece of paper says you followed the rules. Says you’re a good doobie, and you’ll do what folks expect you to. Degrees are all about jumping hoops and fulfilling an arbitrary set of requirements, and it don’t matter what those requirements are, only that you ticked the boxes. It’s a rehearsal for nine-to-fiving your life away. Employers want that piece of paper to be sure you’ll drag your sorry ass into an open-plan office day after pointless day, and no matter how futile or flagrantly idiotic the order is, you’ll do what you’re told.”

  “How would you know, bud?” said Fletcher. “You never went to college.”

  “Sure, that’s what they want you to think,” said Edison coolly, his hand twitching into the pocket of his cardigan; he was weighing the merits of finishing his diatribe versus escaping for a cigarette. “Oh, college must be some behind-closed-doors secret initiation that I can’t understand till I get there, like the Masai taking pubescent boys into the bush. Big surprise, bro: they cut your dick off.”

  “In some fields it is important to master a body of information,” said Oliver.

  “The information is available, man, if you want to go get it. The degree’s just about appearing to have mastered the information, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “I’m not sure I want to drive across a bridge designed by someone who learned mechanical engineering off the Internet,” said Oliver. “What I learned at U of I—”

  “Tan here don’t want to build bridges, do you?”

  “Not especially,” said Tanner. (For the motorists of the future I was relieved.)

  “What good’s college gonna do a television scriptwriter?” Edison had converted Tanner’s ambition to TV for him. “Believe it or not, my dad went to agricultural school. Think that helped get him the lead in Joint Custody? Instead of taking calculus, Tanner is literally better off watching TV. Putting his feet up with a laptop and drafting a pilot. And you should listen to this cat—he got some killin’ ideas, too. Same as my biz. Sax player walks into the Vanguard, they don’t care if you went to Berkeley-with-a-Y or Berklee-with-an-E. All they wanna know is can you blow.”

  “Without a B.A.,” said Fletcher, “I’d never have gotten that job with Monsanto.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Edison, “I rest my case.”

  “He’s right, Dad,” said Tanner. “I don’t want to sell seed corn.”

  “It’s not all about what you want,” said Fletcher. “I may not have liked that job much, but I supported my family. We had food and a roof, and I wasn’t a burden on my parents or my neighbors or the state. That’s what it’s about, not following your ‘dream.’ ”

  “Well, in that case we should all save a lot of trouble and I can just fucking kill myself right now,” Tanner grumbled.

  “Set your sights that low, mere survival’s exactly what you’re gonna get,” said Edison. “Look at my little sister—I mean, my really little sister. Went to UCLA, studying I don’t even remember what. Now she’s a publicist. What a life. All day promoting other people’s accomplishments. But Solstice has ‘food and a roof’! Christ, man, I don’t know how that girl could be related to me.”

  “You don’t know her,” I said. “She’s actually pretty nice.”

  “God help me, Panda Bear, if anyone ever says, ‘Edison Appaloosa is actually pretty nice.’ ”

  “No danger of that,” Fletcher muttered.

  “Only interesting thing about that woman is her stupid name,” said Edison. “Didn’t grow up in the same family. Joint Custody was over, and everything got all ordinary.”

  “Mom,” Cody piped up. “Where did you go to college?”

  “Reed,” I said. “I’m a ‘Reedie.’ ”

  Edison chuckled. “Because it was in Portland. Wanted to jump into the other side of the screen.”

  I blushed. “There may have been a power-of-suggestion factor. Portland had acquired a pleasantly familiar feeling. But the school was small, and out of the way, and at least back then easy to get into.”

  “What did you major in?” asked Cody.

  “English.”

  “What’s the point in studying the one language you already speak?” said Tanner.

  “In those days, lots of people majored in English when they weren’t sure what they wanted to do,” I said. “That or psych
ology, but I’d already earned a G.E.D. in lunacy at home. Getting a degree in English gave me time to think. That’s what you could use, Tanner, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Perfect example,” said Edison. “Four years reading a bunch of crap she totally forgot a long time ago, and look: she runs a catering business, and then makes pull-string dolls. What was the point? Fuck college.”

  “College isn’t only about who follows the rules. It’s bigger and cruder than that,” said Oliver carefully. “It’s a sorting mechanism; it weeds out the losers. There are exceptions—Edison, you’re obviously one of them—and you tend to hear from those exceptions, because they’re in a position to be heard. But so many people get an education now that not having one means more than ever. It’s like joining the slave class, Tanner. It’s marking yourself as lost.”

  “Know what else marks you as the ‘slave class’?” Tanner mumbled to his sister. He’d jerked his head in his step-uncle’s direction.

  Uncomfortably, Tanner was right. The country now sported an alarmingly large underclass—large in every sense.

  The dessert course had been served with one predictable abstention. So before sliding the ricotta pie back in the fridge, I sheered a one-bite sliver onto a clean plate, then garnished it with a segment of nectarine and the usual sprig of mint. The confection had turned out well—close-grained, moist, and not too sweet, with a hint of lemon zest and a crisp, tender shortcrust of which my grandmother would have been proud. Per tradition, I left this marital amuse-bouche conspicuously on an empty counter, its fork turned tantalizingly for the right-handed. I helped Fletcher with the kitchen until we were down to drying, then spent more than long enough upstairs saying goodnight to the kids to allow for a single, surreptitious mouthful of contraband.

  But when I came back down, the kitchen was sparkling—with the sole exception of one plate, one fork, and one bite of ricotta pie, for which one of the diners this evening had no appetite: garbage, in other words, which I scraped mournfully into the trash.

  Hoping to get better acquainted with my brother, Oliver had lingered with me and Edison after Fletcher went to bed. When I slipped into our bedroom around midnight, Fletcher was lying on his back, eyes open. Undressing in the dark—a regular habit since putting on weight—I apologized for waking him.

  “You didn’t,” he said. “How would I get to sleep, with that racket?”

  Edison’s computer was plugged into our stereo, then pumping out “Bird,” or someone else with a snappy handle I was supposed to know. “I could ask him to turn it down. Although it gives us cover. To talk.”

  “What would we talk about?” said Fletcher. “Duke Ellington?”

  I slid under the comforter. “How about—how exciting it is you got that new commission. With those great reviews on your website, word about your work must really be starting to travel—”

  “Can it, Pandora. It’s only two matching end tables, the guy wants them pretty boring, and after materials I won’t clear two hundred bucks. You’re trying too hard.”

  “It’s just I feel like I’ve hardly seen you in ages.”

  “Wonder why that would be.”

  “It’s temporary.”

  “I can’t believe we have another month of this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not that sorry. All the in-jokes about Joint Custody. The chummy digs at your dad and Joy Whatserface. The ritual haggle about what really happened to your mother. You’re having a ball. Jesus, I should move out and you two can get married.”

  It was the most he’d said in days. “That’s crazy,” I said lamely.

  “I know you think of this ‘visit’—although I doubt that’s what it’s called when it goes on for two months—as some sort of good deed. But what good are you doing him? Giving him the run of the kitchen, so he can get even fatter?”

  “I can’t say, ‘No, Edison, you can’t have another cookie.’ I’m not his mother.”

  “And he doesn’t do anything. Jesus, I bike just to get away. There’s a miasma in the house. Of sloth. Of laziness. Of malaise. But what’s going to be any different for the guy on the other end of this? He’s got a huge problem, and when he leaves here it’s only going to be bigger.”

  “I’ve been hoping being around family cheers him up. Something about his not playing the piano—it’s weird. Maybe for you it’s a reprieve, but there’s something wrong. I wonder if he’s depressed.”

  “If I were that big a load, I’d be depressed, too.”

  That was the chicken-and-egg question I’d not been able to parse. Was Edison fat because he was depressed, or depressed because he was fat?

  “He really thrives on how nice Cody is to him,” I said. “I don’t think most people are very nice. I’ve seen it, when we’re out and about. The looks. As if he’s—doing something to them, as if he’s an affront. The worst is in the supermarket. With the mounded cart. I feel like I’m surrounded by a giant eye roll.”

  “Sure, he’s all too happy to feed off Cody’s goodwill. She’s a sweetheart. But he’s using her up. And what does she get out of this?”

  “Piano lessons? And practice at compassion. Which maybe she could teach you sometime.”

  “Are you kidding? I do nothing but bite my tongue. Besides, what Cody’s really practicing is pity. Which isn’t doing your brother any favors either.”

  “But when her friends are over, she always sticks up for him, and won’t let them call him names, even behind his back. That takes guts.” I made another fruitless effort to bridge the distance. “Your daughter’s pretty remarkable.”

  “And what about Tanner?” I wasn’t sure if Fletcher was angry at Edison or at me, and he may not have known himself. “All your brother’s talk about being a big cheese in New York and coming from a celebrity L.A. family—he makes fun of your dad, but he plays the Appaloosa card for all it’s worth. So Tanner thinks he can waltz into California and start writing episodes of—whatever.” Fletcher didn’t watch much television. “That kid has to get real! Even if he doesn’t go to college, he could at least learn to make something. Nobody in this country knows how to sink a nail anymore. They’re all dependent on the tradesmen their kids are taught not to become. In the next few decades, the handful of guys who can patch a roof will write their own tickets. But no. Everybody has to be an artist.”

  “You’re an artist.”

  “I still make things people can sit on. They just happen to look good. Tanner could do a lot worse than apprentice himself in our basement. Instead he thinks he can float out of this house into la-la land, where in truth he’ll be pimped out to perverts on some street corner. Your brother is shoring up the boy’s illusions.”

  “Edison is trying to get Tanner to like him. But Tanner disdains Edison, and doesn’t try very hard to disguise it, either.”

  “Tanner disdains everybody. He can still be influenced. It’s just a pose.”

  I was of two minds about whether to encourage Tanner to follow his “dream.” Was a mother’s role to preserve his hopes, or to confront him with the practicalities of survival on a planet with seven billion people who all wanted to be famous? Other than urge him to go to college—if nothing else, as delay, giving him time to grow up safely, with a meal plan, in a dormitory—hitherto I had restrained myself from being, as Edison would say, dark on his screenwriting ambitions. I’d entertained dubious futures as a teenager myself. Surely I’d have resented any pragmatist who observed that half the girls in my middle school also wanted to be vets, that competition for places in veterinary schools was surprisingly stiff, that if I felt faint during inoculations I didn’t have the stomach, that all I really wanted was a pet. Once closer to Tanner’s age, I wouldn’t have appreciated being admonished by a balloon-busting grown-up that very few candidates were admitted to NASA and that the majority of those who were never made it to outer space; I’d hav
e despised any adult shrewd enough to discern that my brief infatuation with becoming an astronaut was merely a metaphor for a desperation to get as far away as possible from other people.

  Yet like Fletcher I also despaired that Edison had been promoting Tanner’s familial links to fame. This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that “feeling special” was a private experience, and no one else’s projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.