Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  I took advantage of a grassy verge to draw alongside. “He lost his temper. That one chair is—I know it’s ‘just’ a chair, but especially when it’s something you’ve made yourself you can love an object. To Fletcher, breaking that chair is worse than breaking his arm. The Boomerang is a ward, a responsibility. He feels like he wasn’t looking out for it. I wouldn’t compare a chair to a child, but he was still—bereaved. When people get upset, they say things they don’t mean.”

  “Sometimes they lose their rag and say exactly what they mean.” Chin buried in his neck, Edison scowled at the sidewalk. The streetlight scored dramatic shadows in the folds of his face, and a halo around his head as the light caught the frizz of his curls gave him a saintly, martyred cast. “He doesn’t give you much credit, either, Panda Bear. Whole company, nationally distributed product? Cat acts like you go off every day to a quilting bee.”

  “Fletcher’s furniture business isn’t doing that well,” I said. “He works really hard, but people around here won’t pay what his stuff is worth when they can get ready-made dining sets from Target for three hundred bucks. You know what it’s like when you’ve hit a rough patch. It makes you—ungenerous.” I was tiring of this ritual: explaining Fletcher to Edison, and Edison to Fletcher. It didn’t work.

  “My staying here has obviously got uncool,” said Edison, “if I’m ‘ruining your whole family’s life.’ I should move up the plane reservation. Get out of your hair.”

  “You’re not in our hair!” said Cody. “And you promised to help me with ‘April Come She Will.’ ”

  We were coming up on more trees, which would push me back behind him; I stepped ahead, turned around, and stopped them both. Handing off her coat to Cody’s free hand, I draped the broad down jacket around my brother’s rounded shoulders, hoping that he remembered our companionable afternoon shopping for it. Only with the streetlight shining directly into them could I now see how constricted his pupils were, how the tiny muscles around his eyes had a twitchy tremble. “It’s my house too, and I want you to stay,” I said. “Because I love you.”

  People hear that all the time from family, but the impact of this simple, standard avowal on my brother at that moment was both deeply moving and alarming. Releasing Cody’s hand so she could shiver into her coat, he embraced me in a grateful cocoon of flesh and feathers that made me feel warm and safe, my brother briefly restored as my protector, but also a little smothered. I was the middle child, the stepmother, until recently the mere caterer of other people’s grand occasions. Well before sharing a rare center stage in my long-in-coming marriage, I’d grown accustomed to feeling ancillary—a bit off to the side, an afterthought. This was my first intimation of what it might feel like to be too important.

  Eventually Cody and I cajoled Edison back to the house. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  By our return, the Boomerang had been banded with yellow packing tape from a wood shipment that suggested a crime scene. Fletcher was buried in the basement. When I tried to coax him upstairs, he only acceded to talk things out when I observed that a standoff wasn’t fair to me.

  Banishing Cody and Tanner to their rooms so no one could play to the gallery, I sat the antagonists down at the dining table, where Edison sank into the maroon recliner and Fletcher sat stiffly at the opposite end. Having already worked on my brother during our dark, frigid walk home, I got him to concede it was “barely possible” that in “a moment of distraction” he’d sat in the Boomerang, and that maybe he had “the dimmest memory” of a little cracking sound that “he hadn’t paid attention to at the time”—in which hypothetical case he was sorry, an apology sufficiently hedged to save a little face. Loath to let my brother off the hook with anything short of a groveling mea culpa and still grieving for the talisman of his talents, Fletcher expressed his skepticism of this half-confession with the regular hollow pock of flossing his teeth, hurling bits of Swiss chard two feet across the table.

  “Fletcher, would you please do that later?” I asked.

  With a glare, he propped his elbows on the table and stretched the ligature wound on opposite forefingers into a six-inch garrote. “You have any idea what that one piece means to me—that piece in particular?”

  “The very fact that Edison was afraid to tell you about the damage,” I interceded, “assuming, of course, he did sit there by mistake—suggests he does know how much it means to you.” I wasn’t sure about this reasoning, which imputed greater powers of empathy to liars, but it sounded good at the time. I raised my eyebrows at Fletcher, to indicate it was his turn. Maybe I’d have done all right with toddlers after all.

  He lowered the floss. “I’m sorry I called you fat.” I inferred this was all he planned to concede.

  “Look, man, I know I’m fat.” Finally Edison addressed himself to Fletcher directly. “But the way you say it, it’s like I’m scum. It’s not a description but a verdict. Like I’m an abomination, the source of all evil and corruption in the universe. I eat too much, but I ain’t murdered anybody. I ain’t no pedophile. I didn’t even filch your wallet, man.”

  “What is this?” said Fletcher sourly. “ ‘Fat pride’?”

  “I’m not proud of myself, or I am, but not for my weight. Still, when I polish off a doughnut, that’s not doing anything to you.”

  Fletcher took this in. I honestly believe he did experience Edison’s overeating as a form of assault. “You’re killing yourself, you know.”

  “If so, that’s my business.”

  “I’m not so sure. I had a wife start committing suicide by degrees, and it definitely felt like my business.”

  “Then maybe it’s lucky we’re not married.”

  “You’re putting your sister in a lot of pain, and I am married to her.”

  “That’s between me and Pandora. She got something to say to me, she can say it.”

  “It’s a compliment, you know,” said Fletcher. “That she cares. But you make my wife cry, and I don’t like it.”

  I’m the one who suffered the injury, and you’re mad at me.”

  “He hurt a thing,” I said in bed that night. “You hurt his feelings. You’d never have let fly like that if he were missing a leg, or had a deformity.”

  “He deformed himself. Fat isn’t a ‘disability.’ I may have apologized, but maybe a short, sharp shock is what he needs.”

  “Nobody needs cruelty.”

  “Your look-the-other-way routine doesn’t drop his weight an ounce.”

  “But Edison’s right on one point,” I said. “You act as if you’re on a moral crusade. His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he’ll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it isn’t evil. Just like all that exercise of yours has nothing to do with being good. I know you think it does. It makes you feel good, and feel good about yourself, and superior to people who slob around all day. But it’s mostly a waste of time that doesn’t do anything for anybody else but you.”

  “This is too much. Your brother eats us out of house and home and smashes up the furniture, and who gets raked over the coals? Me. For selfishly cycling too much. How about, ‘Thank you for putting up with my pain-in-the-ass brother for two solid months’? How about, ‘I’m so sorry he destroyed one of the best pieces you ever made’?”

  “I am sorry . . . Do you think it’s repairable?”

  “The slats, maybe. Re-creating that upper hoop from a single piece of wood is another matter. I’m not sure I’ve got the heart. You do something once as an act of love. You do it all over again as an act of drudgery.”

  “Well, either fix it or cannibalize it for other work, but in any case drag it to the basement. Right now it’s like we have a dead body in the living room. It’s accusatory.”

  “What’s wrong with that? You keep acting as if your brother’s the victim, the poor fat guy. But he is victimizing us.”

  “M
aybe he’s not a victim, but he is a soft target. Pick on someone your own size.”

  “You’re such a sap. Ever ask yourself whether you’d put up with half the shit that guy pulls if he weren’t obese?”

  “Two more weeks,” I said. “For me. Please let’s get through the home stretch without doing any more damage.”

  “It’s your brother who’s doing the damage.” A darkness of tone implied that he wasn’t only talking about the chair.

  Lying side by side, we weren’t touching. I wanted to reach for his hand. Everything would be all right if only we made physical contact. Yet each time I commanded my hand to move, I saw Fletcher’s hateful grimace in the living room, and Edison’s expression as well—so stricken that my husband might have swung at his jaw with a plank. The few inches of cold cotton yawned between us like an Arctic ice sheet.

  Sleep being out of the question, at length I asked quietly, “What about your ‘look-the-other-way routine’?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m the only one in this house who ever uses the F-word.”

  “That’s what I mean. You think Edison is wearing on his sleeve how weak he is—how lazy, how indulgent. So what must you think of me?”

  Fletcher faced me on his side; the sheer relief of his hand on my cheek made me dizzy. “Honey. What are you talking about?”

  “What we never talk about.” As I closed my arms more tightly around my middle, I realized that I lay in bed this way routinely, hands clasped around opposite rolls at my waist. “I’m not the same size I was when we got married, and you know it.”

  “God, sweetheart, your brother—there’s no comparison!”

  “See? You have noticed.”

  “Maybe, a little, but so what? Women your age almost always fill out a little. I don’t care! You’re still as beautiful to me as the day we met.” He smoothed the hair from my eyes, but I turned my face to the wall.

  “That’s just what you think you’re supposed to say.” I was determined not to cry. “I feel like a cow. None of my old clothes fit anymore. And meanwhile, you’re so strict about your diet that now you won’t even eat those miniscule taster plates I leave you—”

  “Hey, hey! I love those little cheats. I just can’t stand looking like a hypocrite when your brother’s around. Which I’m sorry to say he always is.”

  “But you bike all the time, and you’re skinnier than you’ve ever been—”

  “That’s about me. Like you said—about what makes me feel better, about myself. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “It makes you feel better than me. After all, if what you said to Edison is anything to go by, I disgust you.”

  “No, no, no!” Fletcher turned my face toward him. “I admire the dickens out of you! Running a profitable start-up? Still managing to be a great mother to kids who aren’t even biologically yours? Jesus, putting up with me, and my farce of a furniture business? What’s a couple pounds next to that?”

  “It’s more than a couple of pounds,” I mumbled. “But if you’re ashamed of me I don’t blame you, because I feel ashamed of myself, too. Sometimes I think I eat to punish myself. For eating. Don’t say anything—I know that makes no sense. And now with my brother here, with his issues, and the huge meals he makes, and then to turn up my nose at his cooking would seem mean, and like siding with you in a way that’s ganging up on him . . . Well, it’s worse than ever. Which makes you hold me even more in contempt, and think I’m just, completely—gross.”

  Fletcher kissed my neck. “You are still,” he whispered, “stealth attractive. In this bedroom? Nothing ‘stealthy’ about it, either. No lousy burrito is ever going to change the fact that I love you and you’re my wife.”

  Limp with despair, I allowed my husband to run his hands adoringly over all the parts of my body I despised—the thighs that puckered in harsh light, the stomach that once ski-sloped from my rib cage but these days bulged even when I lay on my back, the breasts that I used to wish were larger and now I hated for being larger since the only reason I sported proper knockers was that I was overweight. But if I had come to loathe my own anatomy, then Fletcher Feuerbach would love it for me, so in gratitude I returned his affections and slept soundly in his arms that night. Maybe the greatest favor a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can’t.

  My forty-first birthday arrived later that week, and the kids arranged to do to me what I did by profession to other people every day. Unsurprisingly, the laughter gets a little strained when the joke’s on you.

  Edison cooked, I don’t remember what, though we can be sure it was filling. I remember ruing on that birthday that an occasion of any sort put consumption at the center. Gatherings were tagged by whatever you might put in your mouth: let’s have coffee, get together for a drink, do dinner some night. The very chronology of the day was marked off with ingestion—breakfast time, lunchtime, suppertime—which was why one seldom arranged social get-togethers at eleven in the morning, or three in the afternoon.

  After the meal, my booty: Fletcher had carved me an ergonomic kitchen stool that kept my back aligned, and I tried not to take it as an insult that he thought I had bad posture. Edison’s present of cheeses and summer sausage was a nice gesture, yet I wished he’d been able to think of a gift that didn’t involve food. Cody played me a rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that showcased her growing ability to improvise, the performance setting the stage for my main present from Tanner and Cody, who had teamed up this year.

  My stepchildren had commissioned a Pandora doll from my own company. I still have it. In preference to the skinny model, they’d selected the mid-range build, which at headquarters we chose for vics who were distinctly chubby. The doll has short, crazy yellow yarn hair and an expression of optimistic goodwill that seems faintly imbecilic. It’s clad in a Baby Monotonous sweatshirt, with our logo stitched on the breast. I pulled the string at the back, occasioning much raucous laughing and clapping each time:

  I’m too humble and meek to drop names, but my dad is totally famous.

  Joi-oi-nt Custody! Fra-a-ctured family!

  Travis is a cautionary tale.

  It’s in this week’s Forbes magazine, but don’t worry—any day now my company’s going to fold.

  Oh, no! Not another photo shoot!

  I’m not rich; I’m just doing okay.

  My nationally successful product is a silly passing fad.

  I love my kids, and that’s why I want them to be absolute nobodies.

  I’m an entrepreneur who writes my own ticket, but I expect everyone else to go to community college and sell seed corn.

  I may have become a household name, but all I ever really wanted is to be ignored.

  He ain’t heavy—he’s my bro-o-ther!

  When I arrived at that last line, belted out to the tune of the Hollies’ hit, Cody biffed her brother and objected, “You promised you’d leave that one out!”

  “Don’t worry about it, kid,” said Edison. “I think it’s a riot.”

  If Edison could be that good-humored, I could take the ribbing in stride too, and I thought that publicly I managed to seem charmed. I was indeed touched that they’d gone to so much trouble, though privately I was chagrined. What was modesty to me was false modesty to everyone else.

  Even my pretense of taking my own medicine with brio was later held up to the cold light of day and found wanting. Fletcher corralled us into a standing group photo, and I still have that picture, too. Edison takes up half the shot, with Cody and Tanner squeezed around me. I’m clutching my new look-alike, but my grip on the doll is anything but fond. I might have been trying to strangle it.

  chapter ten

  Whenever I encounter a picture of myself, the first thing I assess is my weight. I am attached to particular photographs not because they memorialize a signal occasion, but because they depict me as thin. I could probably arrange my every
photo in a precise order of preference that would perfectly correspond to a continuum of my size. The most beloved are those from the Breadbasket years, when I was gaunt, which makes me look sexless and insignificant. I don’t care. Being underweight might not be fetching, but it still strikes me as a badge of nobility—yes, I realize how ludicrous this sounds—and I envy my previous incarnation’s appearance of enjoying a little leeway. I scoffed at Fletcher’s association of physique with vice and virtue, but I bought into the same equivalence myself.

  So Tanner and Cody imagined that I was hiding (or failing to hide) my vanity when I shied from photo spreads. But I couldn’t bear to look at pictures of myself from the previous three years precisely out of vanity, and that’s why I didn’t order extra copies of New York magazine or even obtain one hard copy of the Forbes piece: I looked fat.

  All right, I’m ashamed of this. I don’t know if this heightened concern for size was done to me or is something I have done to myself. What I do know: (1) I am not the only one who appraises their photographs with exactly the same eye; (2) the folks who also “weigh up” pictures of themselves are not all women.

  Confronting a photograph of oneself is always a fraught business, for one’s own image doesn’t merely evoke the trivial fretting of “I had no idea my nose was so big.” This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body. This is quite a different matter from whatever dissatisfaction I may harbor over the heft of my ass. It is more a matter of having an ass, any ass, that other people can ogle, criticize, or grasp, and being staggered that to others this formation, whatever its shape, has something to do with me. Every once in a while I can connect a droll set of my facial muscles with the real, in-head experience of finding something funny and keeping the source of this amusement to myself. But in the main I fail utterly to recognize myself, the me of me, in my photographs. I do not identify with the cropped, once naturally blond head of hair with a tendency to frizz; when I have again neglected to color the roots for three solid months, the camera chastises, but I know that walking around with gray down the center part feels exactly the same as when the gray is covered. I’m not convinced that my elemental self even has hair. I do not identify with my short fingers; my relationship to my hands is to what they do, and digital stubbiness has never impaired their competent folding of buttermilk biscuit dough. I do not feel like someone with a neck lately on the thick side, with its implications of low sophistication and loutishness; I grew up in L.A., for heaven’s sake. About all I truly recognize in my photos is my clothes—and I will greet the image of a quilted jacket from 1989 with the joy of meeting a long-lost friend. The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.