Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  While we waited for it to clear and for Dennis to track down my credit score, I left Edison at the motel and drove to an address on the edge of town not far from Baby Monotonous. It was an Iowan outfit called Big Presents in Small Packages, or BPSP; though they were imitating a popular national brand, I liked the idea of supporting another local business. Their website included before and after photos that should have been hard to fake. I’d checked with Dr. Corcoran, who’d supervised patients on their program and didn’t dismiss them as shysters. I needed to lay in supplies immediately, although subsequent purchases I could make online. Entering the innocuous storefront with trepidation, I remembered the children’s books I used to read to Cody, in which deceivingly unassuming rabbit holes or wardrobes proved portals to another world.

  “Hi there, what can I do for ya?” No more than thirty but already settled into a floral-bloused middle age, the generously proportioned receptionist was not a great advertisement for her employer’s products—although having railed so recently against fat discrimination I couldn’t have it both ways. She led me to the array in a glassed-in case. “Now, everybody raves about the cappuccino. And there’s some that swear by the banana, though, me, I think it’s kinda artificial-tasting. You partial to citrus? ’Cause we got a clear line, too.”

  “It’s not only for me, and my brother is . . . a major project,” I said. “I guess it makes sense to lay in a variety, so we don’t get tired of one flavor?”

  The woman’s involuntary laugh reminded me of Corcoran’s. “Think you’ll find after a real short while ‘variety’ don’t make much difference.”

  “With your other customers—does it work?”

  “Sure, it works—if you follow the program,” she said cheerfully.

  “And—do they?”

  “Most folks get religion at the start. But it takes a special type to stick with it. And then there’s the backsliders.” She looked me in the eye with a wan half-smile. “We get plenty of repeat customers.” I inferred this was not a business whose employees were paid partially in stock.

  “Me, I tried everything for a while,” she carried on, stacking my order. “Just made myself unhappy. My husband likes me the way I am, and these days I reckon there’s no point fighting nature. Life’s too short.”

  “My brother’s life being too short,” I said, “is the problem.”

  “Keep us posted!” she cried, raising her Big Gulp in a toast. “We can always use more testimonials for our website.”

  The trunk loaded, I called Fletcher from the parking lot.

  “A year,” he repeated.

  “Probably.” I wouldn’t do myself any favors by playing down the figures.

  “A week is a long time in politics, they say. A year is a long time in anything.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “I’d be angry, except it won’t be a year. It won’t even be a week.”

  “It doesn’t help for you to pray we go belly up.”

  “He’s going to break your heart, Pandora.”

  I asked after the kids, and his accounting was lifeless. Tanner had been caught skipping school. Yes, he was being punished; Fletcher didn’t say how. All his answers were short. He might have been responding to a marketing survey.

  Edison and I moved into Prague Porches two days later. When Dennis Novacek met us at the property with the keys, he kept offering to lease us appliances—washer, dryer, dishwasher, full entertainment center, anything he could think of, probably stuff left behind by previous tenants—addressing himself not to Edison but to me in a newly obsequious spirit. Right: he’d Googled the name on the check. Doubtless he was kicking himself that he could have demanded a higher rent. I had long since stopped taking mere recognition as a compliment. I coveted anonymity for this undertaking, and having transitioned from person to personage with our new landlord was a pain in the neck.

  Our three bags made little impact on all that space. We busied ourselves with unpacking, but there was nothing to unpack into, so in each of our rooms we made piles on the carpet. The beds I’d ordered had arrived that morning, and constructing the frames consumed a couple of hours; Edison’s heft was helpful for nudging them into place. Otherwise, we didn’t even have a table—though there would be no meals, so no matter. The scene was reminiscent of two strapped newlyweds in a ramshackle prefab, where the couple would picnic shyly on the floor with bread, cheese, and wine—a spartan tableau on which they’d later look back fondly: look how happy we were when we had nothing. I wasn’t sure it would work that way for Edison and me: look how happy we were when we ate nothing.

  “There’s something about this pad, man,” said my brother, surveying the bleak expanse.

  “What?” Though I felt it, too: a burbling terror.

  “Makes it real. I guess we’re not heading out to fill the fridge with brewskies.”

  “The refrigerator won’t be strained. But think of it this way: we’ll never need to clean it.” One more thing not to do made me feel robbed.

  For that evening we’d planned “The Last Supper,” and—indulging the very kind of thinking we’d soon have to jettison—we spent hours debating restaurants. Finally, after I’d wiped down counters that were already clean, it was dark enough to go out. We set off in a funereal spirit for one more meal that on the far end of this project Edison would have to “uneat.” I say Edison, since we’d neglected to address one uncomfortable issue: long before I, too, lost 223 pounds, the Incredible Shrinking Sister would be fencing spiders with a straight pin. But we’d have all too much time to resolve this disparity in the months to come, and for now I wanted to set off on this venture as a team.

  Once we’d settled on a little bistro that at least wasn’t a chain, I’d called ahead to warn that my companion would be a “large man,” so could they please arrange for a widely proportioned chair. To ensure a decent table, I’d made the reservation in my company’s name. Tanner was right. Having submitted to all those humiliating photo shoots should be good for something. When we arrived the staff was duly gracious, and Edison’s plush wide-bodied armchair had probably been dragged from the manager’s office.

  I told my brother he could order whatever he wanted. The only rule for the evening was that our consumption be slow and reflective—conscious. “You bolt your food as if you’re afraid someone is about to take it away,” I explained. “Someone like yourself, actually. It’s as if you’re eating behind your own back. But tonight you have permission. Personally, I think you eat so much because you don’t enjoy your food, not because it’s so satisfying you can’t stop. Since you’re obviously turning to food to provide something it can’t, the amount you eat is potentially infinite. It’s like you’re twisting the tap of the sink to fill the bathtub. So you can keep turning the sink taps on fuller and fuller, but you’re never going to fill the tub.”

  “After the other day with that freaking toilet, you can keep your bathroom metaphors to yourself, babe,” he said distractedly, studying the menu with the intensity that yeshiva students devote to the Talmud. “What do you think, the wild mushroom and goat cheese tart or the deep-fried ‘onion flower’?”

  Those batter-dredged whole-onion things ran to a thousand calories apiece. “I think you should order the cold turkey.”

  “Where’s that . . . ?” He finally looked up. “Oh.”

  Through the first course and breadbasket I tried to teach him what I’d learned with my salmon fillet a few days earlier. I held up a tiny piece of walnut bread and then fletcherized it. “Really think about it,” I commended. “About what it is. About what it isn’t. About what you get out of it. And try to store up the memory for later. So you can reference the flavor. So much of eating is anticipation. Rehearsal and then memory. Theoretically you should be able to eat almost entirely in your head.”

  “Too deep for me, little sister.” All the same, he did as I asked. Though he�
�d ordered a second appetizer, by the time he was through with that tart, flake by contemplated flake, he canceled the whole fried onion.

  “Yo,” he said as we waited for our main course—I’d asked the kitchen to drag this meal out for as long as possible. “You still ain’t told me how we’re gonna do this.”

  I drummed my fingers. “Would you agree that you have a tendency to be extreme?”

  “Like how?”

  “Well, look at you, Edison. If you’re going to overeat, you don’t just get a little potbelly; you turn into a human rotunda. I thought we could use that tendency to our advantage. If you have an ‘on’ switch, then you also have an ‘off.’ ”

  “I don’t know why, kid, but you’re making me nervous.”

  “All these menu plans on the Web, with their exacting rules and portions. They’re a torture. I think it’s easier, rather than making dozens of tiny, self-depriving decisions a day, to make one big decision. After which there’s nothing to decide.”

  I laid out the parameters. Surmounting a dumb shock, Edison promised to trust me.

  The Last Supper lasted nearly four hours, and we extracted every available drop of savor from that meal like wringing a dishrag dry. I shared one of my peri-peri tiger prawns, and together we dissected the crustaceans, working our knives into the little triangles of shell at the tails to prize out the last orts of shrimp inside. We exchanged portions of our entrées, slicing Edison’s black-and-blue filet mignon so thin that the beef was translucent, slicking each piece with a glaze of béarnaise sauce accented with a single pink peppercorn. We cut each of my sea scallops into six wedges like tiny pies, constructing bites with a strip of chorizo, a leaf of arugula, and a languid shred of celeriac like edible haiku. During dessert, I crushed individual seeds of the raspberry clafoutis between my front teeth; the chocolate in Edison’s fudge cake seemed dark in every sense—plummeting, infinite, and wicked, though we took so long tining single black crumbs that the ice cream melted. By the end, we had polished off the bread sticks, the caponata dip, the butter packets, and the mints, and while I let Edison have most of the bottle because I didn’t want to get dozy on this of all evenings, we drained the inky, subtly granular Mourvèdre-Cabernet to the last drip. Eating might not have been all it was cracked up to be but it wasn’t negligible either, and I kicked myself for having blindly, blithely shoveled from my plate for most of my life as if stoking a coal furnace. I would be sucking on this memory candy for months, rolling it around in the back of my mind until it was eroded to a shard.

  I am less nostalgic about the next morning.

  Edison must have been hungover—he’d had a cognac with the cake—and dragged into the kitchen, where I was filling the stovetop espresso pot I’d brought from Solomon Drive. (By then having forsworn caffeine, Fletcher wouldn’t miss it.) I was ratty myself, dreading black coffee on an empty stomach, but my brother was a surly ball of resentment and free-floating ill will. “There’s nowhere to sit, man!”

  “We’ll take care of that. But meantime, without the soothing of half-and-half, we should have breakfast before coffee.”

  “I’d be down with that if you meant a tall stack of chocolate-chip pancakes.”

  “The secret to which you told me”—I held up a BPSP envelope—“was vanilla?”

  “Ha-ha,” Edison grumbled, slumping onto the counter. “Man, that dinner last night was killing. I bet they do a mean steak-and-eggs brunch.”

  I’d swiped two water glasses from the motel. Into these I poured one BPSP envelope each: protein, vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes. I dissolved the powder with tap water and stirred. “Mmm, yummy!”

  “Can the chirpy shit, Panda Bear.” He took his first slug. “Fuck!”

  I took a sip. I had to admit it was pretty thin. “Let’s hope the strawberry is better.”

  We milled aimlessly with our beverages, gawking dispiritedly out the picture window at the oak saplings below, their fragile branches metaphors for the flimsiness of our resolve. My newfound sense of savor failed to extend to vanilla protein powder, and I downed the rest in one go. Predictably, even the two fingers of coffee with which I chased our feast-in-a-glass set off an acidic reaction. I had often skipped breakfast altogether, but this morning was different, and I felt piercingly underprivileged without any compensatory sense of accomplishment. I had not even completely skipped breakfast, and I was just as overweight as the night before. Apparently I had no lunch to look forward to, much less any dinner. My entire sense of order had been upended; my life had no protocol, no structure, and on top of that I had to deal with my grumpy, babyish, sniveling older brother.

  “This feels fucking stupid, man,” he mewled repeatedly, chain-smoking at a cracked-open window. “I’m fucking starving.”

  “You promised last night you’d trust me. You promised you would not cheat, and you understood that if you ever do cheat I will quit this project faster than you can say ‘Quarter Pounder with Cheese.’ You remember the rules: you may have diet soda, water—fizzy or still—and herbal tea, but only with lemon and artificial sweetener. I might lay in some sugarless mints. But other than that, four glasses of that sludge a day, period. Now, let’s get out of here, I can’t stand it.”

  I was so relieved to have rented unfurnished accommodations that I could have kissed my own hand. Something to do! And I was already reconsidering an earlier resolution, made in the heady delirium of a full stomach. Any asceticism had initially seemed apropos, and with our family history I can see how I might have wanted to renounce the source of so much neglect throughout our childhoods. Yet after only half an hour of beige carpet and vanilla protein powder I had vowed that, in addition to a couch, two armchairs, and a “dining” set in name only, we were first and foremost buying a TV.

  chapter three

  There’s no point in glossing over it. Those first few days were awful. We felt silly. The withdrawal of food felt arbitrary and, absent any immediate results, pointless. The scale of our ambition was so daunting as to seem demented, and I feared that Fletcher was right: we’d never make it through the week. Though the meager protein shakes must have taken the edge off, I was still gnawingly, unrelentingly hungry, which put a drag on the passage of time and infused every passing moment with a gray sensation. I found myself thinking that I didn’t really care about having put on “a bit of” weight; as Fletcher said, I was a woman in my forties and a little padding was only to be expected. I didn’t need to attract a mate because I was already married, and here I was imperiling that very security for this unfeasible exercise.

  All the same, I am a stubborn person and, as my stepchildren discerned, more prideful than I pretended; the prospect of crawling back to Solomon Drive with a bagel and cream cheese clutched in each messy fist was anathema. So I relied on hubris on the one hand, affection on the other—often reciting the long list of lethal ailments that my brother’s bulk invited. Though their abstraction was problematic, the last thing that Dr. Corcoran had imparted at the door of his office had hit home. “Mr. Appaloosa,” he’d said gravely. “I don’t have any old, fat patients.”

  If the main thing that got me through day by day was Edison, only in retrospect can I infer the corollary: the main thing that got Edison through day by day was me.

  Why, by the evening of the very first day my brother was in tears, which meant I’d seen him cry twice within ten days; the Gibraltar of a sibling I’d grown up with had crumbled to landfill. The furniture we’d bought that afternoon had yet to be delivered, so he puddled against the wall on the living room floor like a human beanbag chair. He’d already strained my patience, since the shopping expedition hadn’t proven the welcome distraction I’d planned. He’d alternated between an unhelpful finickiness and an equally unhelpful indifference, wandering out of the store every five minutes for another cigarette. He’d perked up a little when I proposed heading to Hy-Vee, but the improved attitude was short-lived: all w
e needed was paper goods, cheap china, tea bags, diet soda, artificial sweetener, and sugarless mints. He never exhibited any appreciation for the fact that I was starving, too. We’d been roommates for less than twenty-four hours, and he was getting on my nerves.

  For me, what made the discomfort so debilitating was the very fact that it was so low grade. Going hungry when overweight is a distinctly bourgeois form of suffering, and when no one else would feel sorry for you, it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself. Edison, however, didn’t share my difficulty with self-pity.

  “Why can’t I just have a sandwich?” he whined. “What difference does it make?”

  I plunked next to him on the carpet. “One sandwich is the gateway to two. I know you’re not used to being hungry. But it’s not that bad. Your body is designed to use fat for fuel. It’s doing what it’s supposed to.”

  “I don’t care! Look at me. I’m still a fat fuck. Now I’m a miserable fat fuck. I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Panda. A whole year of this, I can’t do it.”

  “Shush . . .” I fluffed the dark blond curls from his face. “This is the hardest part. The very first day.”

  Giving him strength made me feel stronger, and after I’d brought him a wad of toilet paper to blow his nose I prepared us lemon-ginger tea, trying to look brisk and vigorous as I squeezed every sorry drop of flavor from those sad-ass bags. The more I focused on my brother, the less I suffered myself, and I wondered if in time the solution for Edison, too, might be to worry a little more about me.