Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “What’d I do?” It was a replay of the feigned innocence with which Edison had denied breaking the Boomerang.

  “You just had to email that photograph.”

  Fletcher wiped down the sink with, I thought, undue diligence. “Why not? Your sister’s birthday. Include Travis, insofar as he cares.”

  “Include Travis in the fact that his son is now, quote, ‘a human parade float.’ ”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, Edison, I’m so sorry.”

  Fletcher raised his hands in theatrical dismay. “Wouldn’t he already know you’ve had a bad case of the munchies?”

  “I haven’t seen the guy for years. Meaning he hasn’t seen me, either.”

  “Yeah, but.” Fletcher fluttered his fingers. “The Internet . . . ?”

  “That guy has never typed anything into a search field but ‘Travis Appaloosa’ in his life. So why would he be up to date on my appetite?”

  Fletcher finally stopped messing with the sink. “You can’t protect people from what you look like. When you’re umpteen hundred pounds, it’s not a secret. And it’s not my fault that to snap a family photo I have to take three steps back to fit you in the frame.”

  Impatient with letting the prep island afford my husband a bulwark, Edison pulled himself up and stalked into the kitchen. My husband had riled a very large animal, and instinctively retreated. “There’s the inevitable, and then there’s deliberately shoving up in my father’s face what he doesn’t have to know. You realize I police my Wikipedia page every day? Making sure the picture they’re using is still from five years ago. Ever check out my webpage? There must be a hundred shots in the gallery, and they’re good ones, too. From all over the world. Same goes for my Facebook page. In not one of them do I weigh more than one-sixty-five.”

  “You can try and rewrite history if you want. But your problem is reality, and an old picture on your Wikipedia page doesn’t change that.”

  “This is payback, isn’t it? For your fucking chair.”

  “Sending a simple birthday photo to my father-in-law isn’t ‘payback’—”

  “Your fucking chair, man! A piece of furniture, in exchange for my dignity, man—”

  “You’re so concerned with your dignity, then try stopping at one plate of spaghetti!”

  “You have any idea what I just had to listen to?”

  “Travis is a jerk. Why should you even care what he thinks?”

  “He’s my father, man! I can’t help if my dad’s a jerk, he’s still my father, man! You just humiliated me—”

  “You’ve humiliated yourself!”

  “Stop it!” I ordered Fletcher. “Leave him alone!”

  Fletcher shot me a piercing look: look whose side little sister is on.

  “Fuck it.” Edison waved his hand. “What’s done is done, right? You accomplished what you set out to do. Made my father’s day, you’ll be happy to know. Bet he’ll have that photo blown up into a life-size cardboard cutout. Have it plastered all over the family Christmas letter.”

  “He doesn’t send Christmas letters,” I said.

  “He will now.” Edison turned, and I put a hand on his arm to stop him.

  “Don’t go,” I said. “This is no way to leave things. With you flying back in three days—let’s try to talk this out.”

  “Look, if you have to know? Even parade floats sometimes have to take a dump.”

  The stairs creaked; it was apparently worth the extra effort to use the upstairs bathroom, putting a full story between him and Fletcher.

  “Did you?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Did you send that picture to Travis on purpose, to make sure he knew Edison’s gotten so big?”

  “Come on, Travis was bound to find out sooner or later.”

  “He didn’t have to find out from you. Just like he wasn’t going to find out from me. Talking to Travis, and even to Solstice, I’ve never made the faintest allusion to Edison’s having changed. I’ve also kept it to myself that he has money problems. I’ve said he’s between apartments, so we took advantage of the gap to catch up. Period. Don’t you know anything about families?”

  “Plenty,” he said coldly. “You’re forgetting I have one.”

  “We have a family, thank you. I meant siblings. You don’t tell. Not on your brother, and not on your brother-in-law, either.”

  For a few minutes we furiously cleaned the kitchen, and I was annoyed when we finished, leaving nothing to vent myself upon. In desperation, I attacked the smears around the cabinet handles, while Fletcher loitered helplessly, at a disadvantage with nothing to do.

  “The problem is what the guy looks like,” said Fletcher, “not that Travis knows. Why do you always stick up for your brother and never for me? ‘Forsaking all others,’ remember?”

  “I have forsaken all other romantic attachments, but as for the rest of the world, it’s not that simple.”

  “It’s simple, all right. You’ve gone back to the old team. The same childhood buddies who clung to each other to defeat the big bad fake children on TV. But you’re a sidekick, you know. Little sister. A tag-along. He’s helping himself to your house, your family, your apparently infinite patience, and your money. What do you get out of it?”

  The question stopped me cold, and I don’t know what I’d have said if we hadn’t been interrupted by a great bellow from upstairs—a cry of despondency so deep that it sounded like less a response to a single calamity than a lament over a whole life.

  I told Fletcher to stay put. Once I’d hurried upstairs, Edison’s howl had subsided to a more sustainable wailing, reminiscent of the uninhibited bereavement in news reports from the Middle East. The bathroom door was shut. Water was leaking from underneath. An enlarging pool on the hallway floorboards was streaming toward the stairs. I failed to avoid stepping in it as I rapped on the door. “Edison, are you okay? What’s happened? What’s all this water?”

  More wailing. He didn’t sound able to talk.

  I tried the doorknob. “I don’t want to invade your privacy, but you’ve got to unlock the door. Whatever’s wrong, let me help you. We’re developing a lake out here.”

  After a pause, the bolt retracted. When I opened the door, I was treated to one of those revelations people lately call “too much information”: it seems my brother had not evacuated his bowels in quite some time.

  The toilet was brimming. Floating on a skim of waste water, turds were scattered all over the floor—under the sink, beside the shower stall, against the wall of the tub, and dammed at the door, so two balls escaped before I closed it behind me. Having pulled up his pants just enough to save us from more embarrassment, Edison was slumped on the edge of the tub, sobbing in his hands. The scene might have been funny. It wasn’t.

  Brisk efficiency was the ticket—the bright, blithe, unbothered spirit in which our mother had changed our sheets when we wet the bed. It is a female knack, this contending with effluents quickly and in good cheer, thus minimizing disgrace down to the routine untidiness of a dropped napkin.

  So I plunged the toilet—something of a job; a fair bit of both shit and paper had plugged it up. After snapping on rubber gloves, I whisked up wandering turds and popped them in the bowl, flushing at intervals. It’s surprising how when you act unfazed, you feel unfazed; you’d think that, as habitually as I picked up socks, I went about collecting lumps of excrement on a daily basis. I got a couple of old towels to soak up the water on the floor, retrieved the two brown escapees, and dried the hall. By the time the horror had subsided like the end of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Edison’s wailing had diminished to an erratic sob.

  I turned my back and suggested he fasten his fly. Peeling off the rubber gloves, I joined him on the rim of the tub and put an arm around his shoulders. “When I was a kid, that was my deepest fear. It must be every kid’s deepest fear. Whenever I flushed after a ‘number tw
o,’ I’d look at the bowl in terror. The water would rise at first. I was always convinced it would keep rising.”

  “Fletch is right,” Edison blubbered; I doubt I’d seen my brother cry since he was twelve. “All I do is humiliate myself.”

  I squeezed his shoulder. “By the time you’re on the road in Portugal, this will have foreshortened into a hilarious little story that we’ll laugh about on the phone.”

  “There is no Portugal.”

  “Well, that’ll be news to the folks who live in Lisbon.” I’d been assuming a lightness of tone that was hard to drop.

  “There is no tour.”

  “Ah.” I let this sink in. I must have known, deep down, that there was no tour. “So if you fly back to New York on Tuesday—do you have anywhere to live?”

  “No.”

  “Then where have you been planning to go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about all those gigs—in the spring?”

  A flick of his head said it all.

  “But why did you feel you had to invent all this stuff?”

  “I could hardly show up in Cedar Rapids and say, ‘Hi, it’s your big brother, I’ve come to stay for the rest of my life,’ now could I?”

  “Whatever’s gone wrong . . . The eating to compensate, or forget, or hide, or whatever you’re doing . . . You can’t go on like this.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  I’d have liked him to have meant that he didn’t want to keep eating himself to death. But the alternative interpretation was more likely: that his steady overconsumption was purposive—a slow-motion suicide-by-pie.

  chapter eleven

  I allowed Fletcher to believe that the cries of anguish upstairs on Saturday afternoon were solely the result of his having emailed that jpeg to Travis—which protected my brother’s pride and further chastened my husband. By then I was accustomed to controlling the flow of information, a nice way of saying that I had grown chronically dishonest with everyone.

  Fortunately, our master bedroom had an en suite bath, so Fletcher didn’t use the kids’ bathroom down the hall, the one that Edison shared. The next day Tanner sniffed out a turd I had missed—puddled in that dark, hard-to-mop area behind the toilet. Fortunately, too, when he cried, “Oh, gross!” that Sunday afternoon, Fletcher was off on a manic cycle ride. No longer faking myself into a strong stomach for Edison’s benefit, I confess that sweeping the partially melted excrement into a dustpan was revolting, and I immediately exiled both brush and pan to our outdoor trash can.

  When Tanner pushed me to explain how a lump of shit could possibly have gotten on the floor, I said I didn’t know. Edison probably got the blame by default. Perhaps that shouldn’t have mattered, now that he’d be gone in two days, but I was no longer sure I could bear to shove him onto that plane—with no home to return to, friends whose goodwill might still be strained, and no European tour to make him feel important. I feared his return flight would effectively touch down on Houston Street, where Edison and I had once tucked into sandwiches at Katz’s Delicatessen that bulged with twelve ounces of pastrami apiece. Yet I had not told anyone else that Edison’s packed itinerary was bogus, not even Fletcher. Well—especially not Fletcher. Not that he would care. But he would care that I cared.

  That same afternoon I had also to field a call from Solstice, to whom Travis had forwarded the incriminating jpeg. (For that matter, he’d probably sent it gleefully to his entire contact book.) Atypically, my sister didn’t solicit any newsy updates about our kids and cut to the chase. “He’s been there for two months. How could you not have told me?”

  “Told you what?” I said flatly.

  “That’s what I mean. That’s what gets me. That pretend innocence. You can seem so open and confiding, and then it turns out you don’t tell me anything.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah? Edison’s turned into a beach ball and he’s obviously developed some kind of huge problem, but you don’t even mention it, though we’ve talked at least a couple of times since he moved in with you. It’s just so classic! Anything going on, and it’s a little secret between you two. You were always like that, a tight, closed, hostile unit, and you never included me in anything—”

  “How could we? Edison left home when you were four years old.”

  “After he left, you two were always having whispery phone calls with your bedroom door locked. Think I couldn’t hear you? And then you started meeting up, in New York. Hitting the town, living the high life. Nobody ever invited me to New York!”

  “That first trip was the summer before I went to college. You were still a little kid.”

  “I practically grew up an only child! And then he visits you in Iowa for months. Know how many times I’ve scribbled an invitation on my Christmas card to come stay with us in L.A.? He never even emails, ‘No, thanks.’ The last one was returned to sender. Not knowing my own brother’s address—”

  “Half the time I don’t have Edison’s address—”

  “You have it now,” Solstice jeered. “It’s your address. And who knows, if you’d have shared with me about Edison’s troubles, maybe I’d have been able to help—”

  “How? By shipping him a StairMaster? I’m sorry if I didn’t regale you with descriptions, but he deserves his privacy, and I didn’t think it was considerate to broadcast the fact that he’s got a weight problem—”

  “A ‘weight problem’ is an understatement! He obviously needs people to reach out. I’m his sister too, Pandora. But I don’t know how I’m ever going to be a real sister to Edison if you keep running interference and coming between us.”

  One more time I swallowed: Edison may have loomed mythically large in your childhood, if only as an absence. But he’s oblivious to you, my dear. For decades I’ve been protecting you from your brother’s indifference. Instead I said curtly, “Your relationship to Edison is not my responsibility. If you want to ‘reach out,’ nobody’s stopping you.” I hung up with the certainty that she would initiate no contact with our brother of any kind. She was afraid of him.

  My sister’s having being born so much prettier than I had always seemed ample compensation for a little loneliness growing up. Though Solstice was the sole beneficiary of Travis’s late-life discovery of real children, her well-adjusted façade was a poor cover for grievance, which would burst the banks of her contrived niceness at the slightest pretext. Constantly feeling cheated, she could only have mustered this searing sense of deprivation if she had no idea what she’d been left out of, for there was little to envy about the Joint Custody era. I didn’t feel close to her, and she made me feel hunted. For years she’d sent ensnaring care packages of weird and conspicuously useless presents in acknowledgment of no occasion whatsoever: a knitted rooster too loosely woven to use as an oven mitt, a set of porcelain chopstick cradles, a fragile handheld fan so lacy that it wouldn’t have generated a breeze even if any of us had been dainty enough to use one. Superstitious about throwing the knickknacks away, I was forever rifling a kitchen drawer and coming across, say, a velvet change purse with a hole in it. This cascade of uninvited benevolence did, however, accomplish its purpose. I was too busy to send trinkets in return, so the totems planted all over our house created a cumulative sensation of beholdenness and ingratitude.

  Now, how bitterly comical: two months’ worth of spattered pancake batter, coffee rings on rosewood, and cigarette butts all over the patio were straining my marriage to the breaking point, and Solstice was jealous. From all sides, I was castigated for being too chummy with a brother whom, I had lately ascertained, I hardly knew.

  On Monday night, we took Edison out for his farewell dinner at Benson’s, the closest New Holland has to chic. We ate on the early side, since my brother had to pack after dinner. The evening got off to an unpleasant start, since we were seated in a cove near the kitch
en. “Excuse me,” Cody said loudly, “but we’d rather sit over there.” When the waiter mumbled about the middle table being reserved, she wouldn’t let it go. “The one next to it would also do just fine. There’s hardly anybody here. We don’t want to sit off in the corner.” She leveled the guy with an unrelenting stare, and he was helpless to resist a thirteen-year-old girl. Once we were reseated, with a great to-do about finding a larger chair for Edison that chagrinned Tanner, Cody was still furious. “You know why he put us there, don’t you?”

  “That was dead sweet of you, kid,” said Edison. “But I’m used to it.”

  “I’m not ashamed of you, Uncle Edison.”

  “Cool,” said my brother, adding wanly, “but that’s not the same as being proud of me, is it?”

  Cody looked flustered. “I didn’t mean—!”

  “I knew what you meant, babe. And I’m touched, really. But I shouldn’t be putting you in this position, dig? You’re a kid. Hard enough to stick up for yourself.”

  “You should have pulled rank, Pando,” said Tanner. “Local celeb, you could demand to sit anywhere you want. Jesus, you never use it for anything!”

  “That’s ’cause my sister’s got class, man.”

  Edison’s demeanor was subdued. He didn’t go on any riffs about Charlie Parker, and since his arrival I’d never seen him eat so little at a meal—sawing small, unenthusiastic bites from his prime rib, most of which we’d doggie-bag, and he barely touched his wine. It was as if he’d been putting a number over on us for all these weeks, and the energy required to keep it up had run out a single day too soon. Keen to spare him a reprise of his fanciful plans, I consumed much of the dinner with diversionary tales of new orders at Baby Monotonous, but the spirit of the evening was so forlorn that I didn’t make anybody laugh and my imitations of a germ freak’s dialogue went over flat. Maybe the dismal dinner was a tribute at that. Edison was leaving, and we—or most of us—were sad.

  When we got back home it was only nine. Edison excused himself to pack. As my husband got ready for bed, I lay on the spread, my chest heavy.