Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  It was time for our first weigh-in. I decided not to down my shake beforehand; why add eight more ounces to what could be a grim reckoning? In the future, we’d always need to measure our progress at the same time of day, since one’s weight can vary a good five pounds over twenty-four hours, and I didn’t want us to get disheartened after living all day on Blip-Sup—a shorthand that had already metamorphosed to “Upchuck”—only to weigh in even fatter. By now, Edison badly needed some demonstrable achievement to hold on to. Given his size, we couldn’t really see any difference after four days of starvation, so I could begin to understand how nefariously that process worked in reverse. You eat a whole cheesecake and look in the mirror and big deal: nothing’s changed.

  For my part, I’d started this experiment with no baseline. In the frenzy and chronic nausea of the Breadbasket years, I’d scrawnied down to 117: a lifetime accolade. For most of my life I’d circled around 130, which at 5’7” put my BMI at an irreproachable 20.4, and that’s how I thought of myself: I weighed 130. Yet ever since I’d grown determined to show Fletcher that he couldn’t push me around with a head of broccoli, I had given the scale in our bathroom wide berth.

  An especially contemporary form of cowardice. My compatriots may have connived to amplify what constituted normal proportions, our dress sizes deflating as wildly as university grades were bloating in the other direction. (I’d just seen on CNN that Levi’s planned to bring in the buttock sizes slight, demi, and bold, while considering yet a fourth, supreme curve. How easily I could picture the hilarity at that sales meeting.) But had we therefore ushered in an era of absolution in relation to the waistline? Hardly: the weigh-in was now subject to the most ruthless of interpretations. I believed—and could not understand why I believed this, since I didn’t believe it—that the number on that dial was a verdict on my very character. It appraised whether I was strong, whether I was self-possessed, whether I was someone anyone else would conceivably wish to be. Because I’d been dodging my confessor in the master bath at home, the scale in Prague Porches would also put an exact numerical value on my tendency to what my farmer friend at Walmart claimed “makes life bearable”: self-deceit.

  So Edison and I faced our arbiter with the foreboding of having been sent to the principal’s office. Manfully, I volunteered to go first. I slipped off my shoes. I pulled off my sweater. I removed the change from my pockets, and even took out the comb. Presenting myself like a human sacrifice, I stepped onto the platform. The red needle swept gracefully, inexorably up: 168.

  My cheeks flamed. I stepped back off the scale as if it were physically hot. My head told me that there was no earthly reason to take that number to heart. If temporarily in absentia, I was a decent mother. At least with Edison, I was a devoted sister; if Fletcher would only let me, I was still a devoted wife. I’d now run two businesses, the second a resounding success. These were the aspects of my life that mattered. Furthermore, I was already doing something about this situation, and the higher my weight to start with the longer I’d be able to accompany Edison on his grueling mission. Yet none of this reasonable, rational reassurance moderated by an iota my burning sense of shame.

  “Wow,” I said, flustered. “That was a shock.”

  “Maybe now you got some appreciation for what it’s like to clock in at three-eighty-six.”

  “It’s just a number.” A number that meant I’d gained twice as much weight in the last few years as I’d thought. “Now, hit the deck.”

  Edison removed his shoes and stepped up to the plate with his eyes closed. “You read it, babe. If those sorry-ass shakes are all for squat, break it to me gentle.”

  “Three-seventy-seven! Edison, in only four days you’ve lost nine pounds!”

  “Not too shabby, right?”

  “Shabby? This is fantastic! Those stupid Upchucks work!” After Edison had ambled off the stage of his star turn, I clasped his hands and jumped up and down. “We should celebrate! . . . And I don’t know how.” Indeed, our abstinence eliminated all the traditional means of marking an occasion. We couldn’t pop champagne or book a table. Wanly, I restirred our shakes, and we toasted with the grainy, watery elixir of our salvation.

  We did manage some sense of festivity that night, plugging Edison’s computer into our new sound system and dancing around the living room with his iTunes set on “party shuffle”—a term I welcomed, since we needed every hint of revelry we could scrounge. To say that my brother “boogied” might have been pushing it, but I did, while he jigged around the room inscribing sardonic Middle Eastern hand movements like a belly dancer. With one denied, other senses as well as smell were growing more acute; besides, my ear for jazz had grown unwittingly better educated during my brother’s crash course on Solomon Drive. Rather than clash in a jangle of discordant riffs—which I’d pictured as rusted garden furniture and incomplete board games crammed in a jumbled garage—the music sounded more tuneful and orderly. When we played the who’s-this game I could at last identify Charlie Parker.

  Yet what I most remember is suddenly coming up short. “Edison. Stop a second. I don’t know about you. But I don’t feel hungry.”

  Edison contemplated his midsection. “Huh. You’re right, babe. I don’t, either.”

  “Do you have a funny taste in your mouth?”

  “Now that you mention it—like an animal crawled in there and died.”

  “It’s ketosis! I’ve read about it, but I didn’t really believe it!”

  Thereupon, that night officially became our Ketosis Party: the magic moment when our bodies gave up on ever seeing takeout again and resigned themselves to eating in.

  But our project was going so well! Edison became far less begrudging, and admitted to having more energy than when he was pigging out, even if he refused to grant that the giddy highs of ketosis could quite compare to heroin. It was Edison and Pandora against the world, just like when we were kids. On walkabouts—exercise that also killed time—we shared a mounting superiority to our brethren still groveling in the gutter of earthly delights, lifting our heads at an imperial tilt down gauntlets of fast food. We sampled salty lung-fulls of french fries with the discerning noses of perfumers, able to tease out palm oil versus beef tallow, to detect the tang of ketchup or mellow of mayonnaise. Yet gliding past KFC was like window shopping without our wallets, and we were never tempted. We were invincible, like superheroes; we had special powers. Though I’d imagined myself little concerned with status, living on four slender envelopes of protein powder per day while everyone around me wallowed in buckets of extra-crispy was my most consuming experience of aristocracy. This rising above sensation grew especially intense over Christmas, when in Hy-Vee we would waltz obliviously past pre-basted turkeys and mincemeat pies to haughtily assemble our prissy purchases of paper towels and pink packets of aspartame.

  We both had black days, of course—days I prefer not to recall. I’m not sure what triggered them, but certain mornings I’d wake with oh, no, not this again, groping for my clothes in a miasma of misanthropy. Everything I laid eyes on was infuriating: the cold wet teabags on the counter; the knocked-over recycling bag, its spilled bottles of diet soda drooling on the linoleum; the toothpaste Edison had let crust around the bathroom sink and the skid marks he never brushed from the toilet; my fat, indolent brother most of all, especially if he made the smallest remark that sounded cheerful. Since I couldn’t abandon my business during the whole Christmas rush, I’d gone back to work, and employees for whom I’d thought I harbored great affection inspired nothing but hatred. When they came to me for advice on a commission, I’d snap that this was only a glorified toy company and nothing we did mattered so they could at least make a few trifling decisions on their own. I would look up at the clock in disbelieving outrage that only ten minutes had passed.

  At Prague Porches those evenings, everything on TV seemed moronic, and I’d fix tea I didn’t want and slosh most of it down the sink
. Usually inclined to find the repetitive rhythms of daily life becalming as a lullaby, I have never been so bored. And I mean aggressively bored, maliciously bored, as if my boredom weren’t merely an affliction but a weapon, and when I turned it on Edison with a glowering, sooty-eyed glare I could have been aiming a bazooka. I was bored with his droning on about musicians nobody in their right minds ever listened to anymore. I was bored with his whining about his terrible life when most of what had gone wrong in it was his own damn fault. And the tunes from his computer would sound demented—manic, screeching, fingernail-on-a-blackboard. He learned not to take the dyspepsia personally, since Edison had his own version: lumping in his recliner, utterly inert for hours, falling in and out of a rancorous half sleep. Those black days, they lasted for lifetimes, and once the storm passed the restoration of a gliding serenity and smug supremacy over all the little people and their little food problems felt all the more victorious.

  That’s why what happened the first week of January seemed so inexplicable. We had hit our stride. I’d already left him alone for whole workdays, from which I’d return to find Edison parked placidly in front of 30 Minute Meals, sipping a Diet Coke. I did remark once, “Do you think that’s the best program to be watching?” and he said blithely, “Food porn. Least you didn’t walk in on me jerking off.” I thought it was harmless.

  As well as enjoying several buoyant visits from Cody, I had stayed in regular phone contact with my family, and Fletcher’s conversation had been so cryptic and chilly that when he proposed a little face time I leapt at the chance. I told Edison I was meeting Fletcher at our favorite coffee shop downtown after work, and my brother’s reaction was odd: “What are you seeing him for?”

  “He’s my husband, dummy. A better question is what am I living with you for.”

  Perhaps a bit pointedly—this is the new me who walks everywhere—I arrived at Java Joint on foot, though with New Holland’s paucity of sidewalks that meant teetering around icy puddles on verges and recoiling from rattling semis. Just as pointedly, Fletcher arrived by bike, wrapped in Lycra, for which it was too cold. I waited as he locked up and unclipped his lights. We hugged, awkwardly, and hustled inside. “You know, when the weather improves, I might like my bike back,” I said.

  “Well, sure,” he said, thrown off guard.

  We nestled opposite in a booth, while Fletcher warmed his hands around his neck. He ordered a glass of soy milk and a lactose-free whole-wheat banana muffin, which in the old days would have contrasted sanctimoniously with my usual pastry here—a crumb Danish with cheese—but which took on a more indulgent hue beside my lone cup of black tea. “You want some?” he offered.

  “No, thank you.” Declining food was effortless. It had nothing to do with me.

  “This thing’s enormous.” Hunched over the muffin, he shoveled a clump with embarrassment. I was familiar with this phenomenon. When I joined my employees at lunch just to be sociable, nursing a soda water and slice of lime, they ate with a funny furtiveness, keeping their plates close and sheltering their meals with their hands.

  “You know, you do look—better,” Fletcher allowed, abandoning his muffin.

  “I’ve lost fifteen pounds. It’s only been a month. But Edison’s lost thirty-nine. When you’re that big, it drops off like nobody’s business at the beginning.”

  “Gotta say, I never thought the guy had it in him.”

  “He’s into it now. Or I should say, we are.”

  “In the olden days, when you said ‘we’ it referred to you and me.”

  “It still can,” I said. “This is a time-limited, goal-oriented project, not a new normal.”

  “Is he clear on that?”

  “Of course!”

  “Christmas,” said Fletcher. “It was depressing. I couldn’t pull it off.”

  “Look, we talked about this. Holidays are centered around meals. Even if you’d lifted my exile, Edison and I would have rained on the family parade. People feel weird eating around us. Besides, the holiday’s relentless. I loved getting the kids presents, but otherwise it was a relief to skip it a year.”

  “It reminded me too much of right after splitting with Cleo. That bloodless, going-through-the-motions feeling.” He added with effort, “I miss you.”

  I put a hand on his. “I miss you, too. I know I’m asking a lot, but this thing with Edison is working, and it’s making me happy. I feel like I’m making a difference, a big difference, to at least one person—”

  “But I’m one person, too. You make a difference to me.”

  “You don’t need me in the same way. It’s not forever. Just don’t let your where’s-my-woman macho side get the best of you.”

  “Here’s the thing: I wanted to ask you—to beg you. Please come home. It sounds like your brother’s on a roll, if you’re telling me the truth. So why can’t you be his ‘personal trainer’ from our house? Visit, phone, give him pep talks—whatever you’re doing. This separation, it’s no good. I don’t want to get used to your being gone. You can play Mother Teresa if you have to, but from a couple of miles away.”

  From Fletcher, a proposal that involved Edison in our lives at all was a major compromise. And I was tempted. My bed at Prague Porches was big and cold. Our sibling duo provided the kind of emotional nutrition that lacked a vital mineral whose absence was cumulative; much longer and my hair would fall out or something. On the other hand, I was stricken by the picture of Edison sitting forlornly through meal-free evenings in that barren apartment all by himself.

  Fletcher filled the silence. “I did say beg.”

  Men did not readily prostrate themselves, though I wondered why not; throwing yourself on another’s mercy is so much more effective than hectoring and force. Fletcher had melted me so, huddling over the sad crumbles of a dry-looking muffin that he regretted ordering—in modern America, even a lousy muffin could incur a crippling social disadvantage—that I could not say flat-out no.

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  We caught up on kid stuff, and it was obvious that matters between him and Tanner were going seriously south. For years I’d acted as a buffer, managing food fights by preparing the children escape valves of mac and cheese. I curved their defiance into droll communal mockery with my Fletcher doll. To discourage my stepson’s iffy ambitions, I told manipulative stories from my invidious childhood, whereas Fletcher went for imperatives: you are going to college. I’d seen it between Travis and Edison when my brother was seventeen, the exact age at which young men make the awesome discovery that they don’t have to do what you say. Woe to any parent at war with a teenage boy: you lose.

  “I’ve tried and tried to get him to visit me and Edison, and he blows me off,” I said. “I almost get the impression that it’s only solidarity over how dumb this dieting stunt of mine is that still keeps you two on-side.”

  “There may be some truth to that. He doesn’t think you’re coming back. He’s practicing living without you. I guess I’ve been doing the same thing—without much luck. But it’s not like Tanner doesn’t care. The real problem is he does.”

  When we parted beside the bicycle it was too cold to linger, but while fastening his helmet Fletcher couldn’t resist a final pronouncement that soured somewhat his artful beseeching inside. “This living with your brother, Pandora, in your forties—it’s a little weird. And it’s regressive. Like you’re going back to being thirteen, and your mother’s just died, and your father ignores you, and you’re clinging to big brother for a port in the storm. That was almost thirty years ago. I don’t think this is healthy.”

  “To the contrary, the tables have turned. It’s more like going back forty-four years—and I’m the firstborn. I’m the boss now. I say go for a walk, Edison goes for a walk. He drinks his four envelopes a day, and he hasn’t cheated once. Maybe he’s tired of being the ‘big brother.’ I think he likes being ordered around. As for ou
r living together being ‘unhealthy,’ it can’t possibly be less healthy than Edison a month ago.”

  “Honey, I hate to tell you this. But I’ve done some poking around online. Know how many people who lose more than thirty pounds keep it off five years later? Five percent. Even those poor bastards who get bariatric surgery and live on two tablespoons of tapioca. Who sometimes drop poundage in the hundreds. You realize how much, on average, they keep off over the long term?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “Seven pounds.”

  “Why are you being so”—I reached for Edison’s lingo, which was infectious—“so dark on this project?”

  “I’m trying to protect you.”

  “You’re trying to discourage me.”

  “I’m sorry, then. I didn’t mean that. I only thought you should know the facts.”

  “Statistics aren’t personal destiny, or you’d have had two-point-two kids.”

  “You’re right,” Fletcher backed off. “Of course you’re right.” Leaning down to kiss me, he knocked my forehead with his visor, and we laughed. “Please come home,” he implored after we’d kissed with more success. “I won’t interfere with your weight-loss tutorial. But I want you back in my bed.”

  As I scuttled to Prague Porches, I had to confess: it seemed a reasonable request.

  When I walked in, Edison was feverishly wiping down our white laminated table with paper towels. “Hey, babe. Just doing a little house cleaning, dig? So how was coffee with the hub? Any news on the home front? Any idea when Cody’s dropping by next? I downloaded a couple of tunes for her. She should really be introduced to Monk.”