Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “What if I’m not?”

  I was glad he realized the commitment was so forbidding that he might not be able to make it. “Then no apartment, and it’s straight to the airport.”

  “You’d hate me,” he said morosely.

  “I wouldn’t hate you. I’d be disappointed in you is all.”

  “That’s what Mother used to say. Cut me to the quick.”

  There was more than a whiff of the maternal about this whole project, and I would have to live with having acquired not two children but three.

  “But, breakfast . . .” Edison wafted his fingers. “What’s the drill?”

  “I’m hoping we can find our private ground zero within the week. During which you may eat. But I want you to use this time to think about why you eat, and to reflect on the fact that every morsel you put in your mouth you’ll effectively have to spit back out. That is, everything you eat from now on you will have to uneat. This morning, I suggest coffee and toast. You can devour the loaf and slather it with a pound of butter if you have to, so long as you contemplate the extra starvation that every bite will cost you. Which may induce . . . the dawning of restraint.”

  Even Edison’s two slices made him self-conscious. “I wish you wouldn’t watch me like that.”

  “Get used to it.”

  I fixed him with the same steady stare as he raised the half-and-half over his mug. His usual ratio was one part coffee to two parts whitener, leaving a thick, tepid milkshake that over the morning he would down at least four times. Under my hard eye, he dribbled only a couple of tablespoons and scowled at the results. “It’s not the same.”

  “Better not be,” I said. “Ever look at the calorie count of that stuff? Twenty per tablespoon. I haven’t said anything, which I’m ashamed of, but you’ve been going through a gallon of half-and-half every five days.” I scrawled on the kitchen phone pad. “At five thousand six hundred and seventy calories, that’s nearly two pounds’ worth of fat per week. So enjoy white coffee while you can. You’ll have to learn to drink it black.”

  That meant I’d have to learn to drink it black. It wasn’t only Edison who needed a few days to “marshal resolve.” Black coffee on an empty stomach made me ill.

  I scurried up to my study to book rooms at Blue Cottages, a motel with separate white clapboard huts and cobalt shutters only two blocks down the road; to begin with, I’d be virtually next door to the kids while they got used to the new state of play. My starting at noises from downstairs recalled the covert, traitorous sensation of buying Edison’s plane ticket in the first place. I still hadn’t talked to Fletcher.

  I fetched bags from the attic, a large one for me and another for Edison’s spillover. I packed in the master bedroom on tiptoe, and simply removing my toothbrush from our communal glass felt disloyal. To the naïve eye, this furtive stuffing of underwear would have looked like a wife breaking her wedding vows—vows that I had taken in great earnest. I desperately didn’t want Fletcher to catch me in this sneak-thief mode, his heart stabbing with fear that I was leaving him.

  Which I was. I was lying to myself. I wasn’t sure if I was leaving for a few days or for many months, but in any case this departure was a violation of contract.

  I was helping Edison with his luggage—that is, taking it down for him—when the basement door slammed. Fletcher rounded from the hall and bounded up the stairs to take the suitcase from me, the spring in his step restored. However chimerical Edison’s European travels, his bags were packed, and that was all that mattered. “Hey,” said Fletcher, hefting the bulging brown bag effortlessly downstairs. “Thought I’d come up and say goodbye before you guys leave for the airport.”

  Despite my coffee’s furtive dash of half-and-half, I still felt sick. “There’s been a change of plans.” I trailed him to the foyer, where he plunked Edison’s bag. “We’re not going to the airport.”

  Fletcher wheeled. “You do remember what I told you?”

  “That if Edison stayed here five seconds after that plane takes off you and I were”—I couldn’t say it—“going to have problems. So he won’t be here. As for the plane, you didn’t say he had to be on it.”

  “Pretty legalistic.”

  “If you’re going to make ultimatums, you’ve got to expect I’m going to adhere to them to the letter. Anyway, I’ve booked us into Blue Cottages for now.”

  Fletcher had a good ear for pronouns. “Us.”

  Edison was bringing up the rear with his lighter second bag, with which he was still struggling. I let him struggle. I thought: That’s another twenty calories down.

  “I’m going with him. Then I’ll find us an apartment. I’m going to help him lose weight.”

  Fletcher’s eyes could have burned pinholes in paper. He stood supremely still. With exceptions, like the Boomerang debacle, his wiring was reversed. What triggered rage in most men drove Fletcher Feuerbach to extremities of composure.

  “Losing weight is generally an activity one can do by oneself,” he said, his enunciation precise. “In New York as well as Iowa, from what I’ve read.”

  “You’re an athlete. So you should appreciate the concept of a personal trainer.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “You don’t need one. Edison does. Maybe I do too, for that matter. I’d be a lot easier to live around if I dropped a few pounds myself.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Fletcher looked between me and Edison, who had huffed to the foyer. “You’re moving in with your brother, so you can read each other the nutritional label on the cottage cheese. How long is this hand-holding supposed to last?”

  “If I catch him with a single Ho-Ho”—I shot my brother a look—“it will last as long as it takes me to drive right back home. At eighty miles an hour, running lights. But if he shows determination, and follows my instructions—my orders—and it seems to be working . . . Well, I can’t say how long until he gets on a scale. He can’t use ours; the numbers don’t go that high.” I no longer beat about the obesity bush.

  Fletcher looked straight at Edison and employed an aggressive third person. “He can’t do it.”

  “We’ll see about that, bro,” said Edison. “You don’t know me well as you think.”

  “I know your type. Before I rescued my kids from a lying, thieving, abusive meth-head, I heard more high-flown resolutions than you’ve had hot suppers. It’s just more self-deceiving bullshit. Put you alone in a room with a plate of french fries, and the spuds win every time. The will is a muscle. Yours is flabby as the rest of you, bro.”

  “You got no idea what I been through. My version of being tested ain’t going on some jive-ass bike ride. So you want to put some money on it, man?”

  “What, so you could pay off the bet with my wife’s money? Think I’ll pass. Wouldn’t want to double up your embarrassment.”

  “We’ll see who’s embarrassed, motherfucker.”

  This was the first instance in which Edison had gone public with what must have still been a pretty wobbly pledge. It was a cold perspective on my own husband: Fletcher could prove a useful tool. Edison would dislike failing in front of me; he would revile failing in front of Fletcher. But if my husband’s antagonism was beneficial for my brother, the moment was fast approaching when I should also be keeping an eye on what was good for me. Lest I sound improbably selfless, in truth I was already safeguarding my project. I had always been single-minded in this way, and the blinkered focus was really a form of egotism: my project.

  “Could you give us some privacy, please?” Fletcher asked my brother with rare civility.

  “Well, the one thing not up for grabs is I’m outta here. I’ll be in the car.” Edison marched out wheeling the lighter bag, his carriage as stiff and upright as his mass permitted. Being left alone with my husband made me strangely fearful.

  “Are you also walking out on my children?” Pronouns
again. With which Fletcher sometimes took his children back.

  “Any apartment I even consider will be within walking distance of this house. They can visit us as much as they like.” Since I didn’t also mention being able to visit them, I must have known what was coming next.

  Fletcher didn’t get mad; he got sad. Which was worse. He was both tender and matter-of-fact. It meant something to me that the words came heavily, and there was no malevolence in his voice. “I can’t promise I’ll welcome you back.”

  However gently put, it was a right hook. “This isn’t against you.”

  “You’re leaving your husband and kids in the lurch for your fat-fuck brother. How’s that not against us?”

  “I’m taking some time out from one family to attend to another,” I said staunchly. “Why would you punish me for that?”

  “I’m not threatening to ‘punish’ what you’d obviously like me to see as an admirable largeness of heart. I’m not being spiteful. Really. But you do something like this, and it has consequences. For how I feel. Not any different from the physical world. Bring a hammer down on a piece of molding, it cracks in half. And not because the molding wants to crack in half. It’s simple cause and effect. Your being willing to throw us all over for this fool’s errand—it makes me feel expendable. Expendable for jack.”

  I liked the way my husband talked. What other people often missed in his commonly taciturn manner is that he is very thoughtful—usually in both senses of the word, if presently in only one. “It’s not a fool’s errand,” I said weakly.

  “That slob’s not going to drop any weight. You’ve got him all worked up about some grandiose scheme, which mostly appeals to him because it means not having to face the music back in New York. You’ll keep paying his tab, and he doesn’t have to sort out his life. But the minute he can’t have a cracker, it’s over. Why is he so important to you?”

  “He has to be important to somebody.”

  “ . . . What if I forbid you?”

  “Don’t try that. I seem to recall skipping the ‘honor and obey’ part.”

  “I forbid you,” he said limply. There was a hint of the sardonic, but he wanted to make it official.

  “All right, I forbid you to forbid me. Checkmate.”

  “He’s a sponger you’re related to by accident. I’m your husband by choice. If you ‘love’ that loudmouth it’s a kneejerk genetic thing; I’m supposed to be the real love of your life. Frankly, I’m insulted.”

  “You’re choosing to be insulted, which is perverse. Why can’t you understand that I need to accomplish something more meaningful than making doll babies”—I used Travis’s flattering term—“that torture people with what’s wrong with them? That shove up in their faces how repetitious and tiresome they are, that make people seem cartoonish and ridiculous?” It came out in a rush. “Because I strongly believe that if someone doesn’t do something—and I’m the only one who can—my brother is going to die.”

  He sighed. “Well, well, another trump card.”

  “I don’t play it lightly. Can you imagine how I’d feel if he, you know, collapsed from a heart attack, and I’d never lifted a finger to help?”

  “So this is a big preventive guilt trip. An insurance policy. To be able to tell yourself, when he collapses anyway, that you tried.”

  It didn’t sound so great put that way, but I conceded, “That’s about the sum of it.”

  “Then you’re really going to do this.” I was surprised it took him so long to circle around to the perfect fruitlessness of his appeal. He knew me.

  “Yes. I don’t know if he can do it. If he can’t, I’ll come home.”

  “If I want you home.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll risk that I won’t.”

  “If the alternative is walking outside and telling Edison we’re going to the airport after all—leaving him all alone, without a hope in hell of losing an ounce without someone to cheer him on—abandoning him to mockery and ostracism, and letting him drop dead in five years if he keeps overeating at this rate—yes.”

  Fletcher sagged against the banister. “That puts me in my place. On your list of priorities, my kids and I come somewhere between the toilet paper and the aluminum foil.”

  “Being anywhere near the toilet paper makes you pretty important.” The levity fell flat.

  “I already had one wife who didn’t rate her obligations to her family.”

  “I cannot put methamphetamine addiction on a par with a crash diet.”

  Impasse: my willfulness versus Fletcher’s incredulity. At least in his next laying down of the law I detected the glimmer of recognition that this was actually happening.

  “I don’t want you dropping by all the time because you forgot your hairbrush. If you’re ready to come back for keeps, we can discuss that. But if you need something, ask the kids for it”—the go-between image this conjured was piquantly reminiscent of Joint Custody—“because I don’t want a wife half in, half out. I don’t want to suffer a lot of little goodbyes. I’d rather go through one big one. Come here.”

  Fletcher opened his arms, and we hugged hard. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even enjoy Edison’s company as much as my husband’s, and though I had just spent ten minutes explaining I now had no idea why I was doing this. I indulged a brief, ugly hope that I’d come upon my brother dive-bombing another box of confectioner’s sugar by something like Day Two, and then I could go home.

  Fletcher bowed to rest his forehead against mine. “So is it up to me to tell the kids? That the pretty, considerate, tender, diligent woman I brought home seven years ago, who’s a smashing cook and doesn’t even happen to be a drug addict, won’t be living here anymore?” A rarity, his voice cracked.

  “If that’s your version?” I slipped a hand around his neck. “I’d rather head them off on the way back from school. If only to assure them that the woman you brought home hasn’t really gone anywhere, loves them to pieces, loves their father to pieces, and will be back.”

  Fletcher insisted on lugging out the other two suitcases, and packing the bags into the trunk. When we were ready to go, he leaned through the driver’s window and kissed me. “You know, I didn’t mean we couldn’t talk.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s a relief.”

  Edison shook his fist out his window. “Yo, I’ll see you eat your words, man!” Our departure had taken on the jittery, nervous gaiety of embarking on an intrepid Arctic expedition. If we were driving exactly two blocks away, the journey stirred the same amalgam of optimism and anxiety as starting out on a poorly equipped slog of daunting distance, during which conditions were bound to turn nasty, unanticipated obstacles could prove insurmountable, and rations—this much was certain—would grow perilously sparse.

  “Tell you what, brother-in-law, you make a go of this, I’ll do better than eat my words,” said Fletcher, coming around to Edison’s side. “What’s your sister gotten you to promise? What’s the target?”

  “One-sixty-three. Back to what I weighed for years, or bust.”

  “You cross that finish line, and I will eat an entire chocolate cake in one sitting. That’s my version of being made to eat shit. But you’re a long way from one-sixty-three, pal, and I’m betting I get to stick to cauliflower.”

  “You’re on, pal. I’d starve for years to see your pious mug plastered with fudge icing.”

  As we drove off, I considered the disparity: Edison was gambling with pride, Fletcher was gambling with cake, and I was gambling with my marriage.

  Dropping Edison’s luggage beside his bed, I announced, “I got you your own cottage, since our sharing the same room would be too weird. But that means I can’t keep an eye on you. Nothing prevents you from hitting the vending-machine Doritos. Just remember what I said: any further weight you gain before the starting gun is more weight you have to lose. The C
ool Ranch will cost you a whole lot more than a buck fifty.”

  “What about lunch?” Edison whined. “Breakfast was jive, and I’m starving.”

  “Get used to it. When were you last really hungry? Physically hungry?”

  “I’m hungry all the time.”

  “The hell you are. You confuse hunger with boredom.” I was curt; I was hungry, too. “I’ll be next door. I have research to do. There’s an ocean of fast food on the main drag half a mile from here, but you’ll have to walk. As for walking: get used to it.”

  “Jesus. From Florence Nightingale to Mussolini in twenty-four hours.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Pretty soon you’ll be living with Attila the Hun.”

  I retired to the adjacent cottage, a small, sweet room with a pink chenille bedspread and curtains of blue dotted swiss. Despite the homey touches, any motel room has a sobering bleakness. Here it is, the cubicle asserted. Roof. Bed. Light. TV with limited channels. Toilet. Desk, with nothing on it but a flyer from the Cedar Rapids I-Max. This, aside from the food we were about to all but forswear, is everything you need, and needing this little was sort of awful.

  Fortunately, I had work to do. I called Carlotta, warning that I’d be making myself scarce at Monotonous for the rest of the week, and booked Edison a checkup with our family doctor. I booted up my laptop, agreeing to a larcenous $12.95 per day for WiFi. I wasn’t used to skipping lunch myself, and battled a growing petulance by heeding my instructions to Edison: Observe, I recited, feeling like some Sufi space case. Hunger is a surprisingly mild experience. You could hardly call it pain. So why is it so nagging, so insistent? So distracting. It would have to become the norm. It would have to become a pleasure.

  My stomach yowled: Fat chance.