Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  Finding surprising energy reserves during ketosis was one thing, acting jumpy and hyperactive quite another. A thick, spicy aroma mixed with the usual smog of tobacco, as if I were suffering hallucinations of the nose.

  “Coffee was all right,” I said warily. “You know, that table can’t have anything but mint-tea rings. I don’t see why you’re working so hard.”

  “Gonna do anything, do it right. Got pretty slick at wiping down tables at Three Bars before they kicked me out.” Despite this frenzy of cleanliness, he discarded the paper towels on the kitchen counter above the trash can. He washed his hands with the thoroughness of Macbeth, splashed his face, and scrubbed his mouth with a dishtowel.

  “Edison,” I said on a hunch, “how’s your breath today?”

  “Whoa, you don’t wanna come near me! Afraid I been lax on the fluid intake. You know what that’s like: dead rat. So what’s on the program tonight? Scrabble? Seven-card stud? There’s a Jennifer Aniston rom-com on at eight-thirty, which isn’t my bag, but I know you got a soft spot for that shit, and I could probably stand it.”

  If Edison was volunteering to watch Jennifer Aniston, something was fishy. I eased into the kitchen, where Edison blocked my way. “Excuse me,” I said, reaching behind him to shove the paper towels through the trash-can flap. It met resistance. I pulled off the top, and the few things I’d thrown into a fresh liner that morning—empty BPSP pouches, a defunct box of laxatives, and the packaging from a couple of gloriously long books I’d ordered from Amazon—now bulged at the top of the pail. I lifted the liner out. Sure enough, another bag scrunched beneath it, angular with folded cardboard. That’s when I pinpointed the smell: pepperoni, and garlic-butter stuffed crust.

  “Edison, how could you.”

  “How could I what?”

  I couldn’t decide whether to shout or weep. “Tomorrow is our one-month anniversary. Why would you blow that? After thirty-nine pounds?”

  “Got no idea what you’re talking about.” Edison was already rounding from innocent to hostile.

  “Skip it,” I said furiously. “You left the box. Why destroy a flawless winning streak for one crummy pizza?”

  Edison folded his arms and narrowed his eyes to slits. “Well, whaddya think? I got hungry.”

  “You’re supposed to be hungry! After all we’ve sacrificed—was it worth it? For one greasy, sneaky gorge fest, that you probably shoved down in less time than it took to cover it up?”

  “Yes, if you wanna know the truth! It was great. It was the best fucking pizza I ever ate!”

  “I don’t believe that. I think it was polluted with an aftertaste of stupidity, and self-hatred, and BETRAYAL!”

  “You mean betrayal of you. This was all your idea, and I’m supposed to get in lockstep with your program, and be a good little doobie all day long because sister says! Well, I may be fat, but I’m still a man, and if I want to order a pizza I’ll order a pizza!”

  “You have some nerve! You think this is how I want to be spending my life? Dissolving little envelopes of powder and thinking up diversions to fill interminable evenings and babysitting my older brother? I may be slightly overweight—in fact, technically I’m already down to the acceptable BMI for my height—but I didn’t have to go on this gonzo diet! I could have cut back on carbs and skipped dessert like a normal person and accomplished the same thing on my own account, couldn’t I? Most of all, I could have stayed home! Don’t you think I miss my husband? Do you imagine I enjoy sleeping by myself every night, when I have a warm, handsome man waiting for me two neighborhoods over? Do you think I like having become an absentee mother, as if I no longer had custody and Fletcher and I were already divorced? I have put—EVERTHING—on the line for you, and you’ll throw all that over for a pizza! I’m grievously offended! You’re an ungrateful, selfish BABY and a total CREEP!”

  I had been irritable, but thinking back I’m not sure I’d ever lost my temper with my brother. Thinking back, I hardly ever lost my temper with anybody.

  “You left me alone,” he said sulkily. “I had a crisis, and nobody was here to help me.”

  “I have to be able to leave you alone! If nothing else, I have a business to run. If I have to hold your hand twenty-four-seven just in case you’re possessed by a killer zombie who wants a cheeseburger, this is never going to work!” I flopped into a recliner. The adrenaline was subsiding, and left me weak. “You know I was just bragging about you. Fletcher couldn’t believe it. How much weight you’d lost. How faithful you’ve been. And now I come home to this. Fletcher’s always said you didn’t have it in you, and he was right.”

  “He claimed I wouldn’t last a week. He wasn’t right about that.”

  “What, so now you’ve proved you can make it past a week, never mind? The deal was you get back to one-sixty-three. And you remember what else I said at the outset, don’t you?”

  “What.” He knew what.

  “I said if you ever cheated the experiment was over and I was out of here. When you ordered that pizza, you can’t have forgotten that little detail. So you either want to do this all by yourself, or you want to stay fat. Which is it?”

  Edison looked down at his hands. The loss of thirty-nine pounds had reduced the fleshiness of his neck, but he retained the proportions of a little boy. “I didn’t mean to throw the whole thing over. I had a lapse, that’s all. I’ll go back to the motherfucking shakes tomorrow. I promise.”

  “You promised before. Besides, you don’t need me. You’re obviously developing your own method: the Pizza Hut Diet. So go ahead. It doesn’t take two to order the sausage and jalapeño.”

  “I do need you,” he mumbled. “I can’t do this by myself. I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you assuming your minder is a gullible softie? Who doesn’t mean what she says. It’s my goo-goo-eyed little sister, after all. Who will always trot after big brother, whatever devilish, secretly attractive badness he gets up to.”

  “It’s not like I didn’t take you seriously, man. But, Christ, when you go to AA and confess you fell off the wagon, they don’t kick you out. They don’t say, you’re obviously not a fucking saint, so we’re washing our hands of your imperfect, mortal ass. It’s more like: we’re all sinners, and we’ll support you one day at a time. Don’t see why you can’t tear a page from their playbook.”

  “I can’t do this if I can’t trust you. I don’t want to come back here every day and have to search the garbage.”

  “It won’t be like that, man. Come on, Panda Bear!” He kneeled by my recliner, assuming a suitor’s position that he’d have difficulty getting up from. “Fix us some tea. Then we can watch that Jennifer Aniston flick.”

  As if Edison had spied on my tête-à-tête with Fletcher, he seemed to be making a hearty stab at outbegging my husband. Yet a smile played around Edison’s hammed-up hangdog. He’d always been able to inveigle permission to go to a Roy Orbison concert from our mother when he was grounded, just as Caleb Fields had wrapped Mimi Barnes around his little finger, too; for all I knew, Edison had mastered the technique of wearing down women from watching Joint Custody. Besides, he knew that the prospect of having come this far only to throw in the towel made me sick.

  “Think of it this way, babe,” he wheedled. “It was like those sorry suicides who leave empty bottles of Percocet scattered around the bedroom. I didn’t have to leave the box in the trash, did I? I could have taken it to the cans out back and committed the perfect crime. I wanted to get caught! It was, whaddya call it, a cry for help—!”

  Though my brother gave every sign of having started to enjoy himself, suddenly his face blanched and shone with a light sweat. His expression of distress did not appear conjured for effect, though physical discomfiture would have made for a clever ploy. “Oh, man. I don’t feel too good. Panda, you gotta help me up here. I gotta get to the head pronto.”

  By the time I’d hel
ped pull him to a stand, Edison had unbuckled his belt. Jeans sliding, he shuffled in a double-quick waddle to the bathroom. Once he emerged ten minutes later, he had to lie down on the couch. I brought him a Diet Coke.

  “You can’t come off a monthlong liquid diet with a wolfed-down pepperoni pie.”

  “Yeah, well, duh,” he groaned. “Satisfied now? I got my comeuppance. And I got a queasy feeling the punishment ain’t quite through.”

  After Edison made two more trips to the john, we did end up watching Friends with Money that night, while he recovered lying down. After I’d taken my turn in the bathroom—which still reeked—he stopped me on the way to bed.

  “Yo, Panda. We cool? I’m into it, man, like four shakes a day, end’a story. But I gotta have moral support. Somebody to hang with. And so far it’s been, you know, kinda hip. The walks and shit. Trips to the mall, where I never thought I’d ever be shopping for a smaller belt. It’s not like I take you for granted, kid. I know I’m taking you away from your family. But if you give me a break this one time, like, just cut me this little bit of slack, I swear it won’t happen again.”

  I appreciated that he didn’t try to slide back to business as usual without acknowledging my concession. “All right,” I said. “But you’ve used up your only Get Out of Jail Free card. One more pizza box in that trash can and you’re on your own, understand? Mother was a pushover. I’m not.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “And brush your teeth. You have rat breath from ten feet. Worse, rat with extra cheese.”

  I called Fletcher the next day. “It means the world to me that you want me to come home. Even if that entailed my still being Edison’s coach. But I just—”

  “You’re not coming back.”

  “Somehow this whole hothouse setup . . . Keeping tabs from a distance wouldn’t be the same. Having someone to report to and to celebrate his progress, at least for now having company on the program—it helps.”

  “You’re honestly telling me that your lazy, two-faced brother has not eaten anything but those miserable protein shakes for a whole month. And you haven’t caught him hitting the Twinkies and said, ‘That’s okay, sweetie, I’ll overlook your stuffing your fat face as usual this one little time.’ ”

  “That’s right. I told you: if he ever cheats, it’s over.”

  I hung up, dolorous. It wasn’t only the lying. On the walk back from Java Joint, I’d allowed myself to seriously consider returning to Solomon Drive: I could make regular phone calls, stop by Prague Porches, meet my brother for walks. Besides, wasn’t Edison in the groove now? Yet when I found that box in the trash can, it came home to me that an arm’s-length involvement would never work. Perhaps that’s the revelation for which the box had been planted in the first place.

  chapter five

  In reviewing Edison’s tailspin in New York—which I’d related in detail to Oliver, in the hopes that pouring my brother’s confidences into such a watertight vessel didn’t make me a snitch—I failed to derive a simple answer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether he got depressed because he was fat or vice versa. His weight had narrowed his professional opportunities, which was depressing, which made him eat, which made him fatter. It narrowed his romantic and sexual opportunities, which was depressing, which made him eat, which made him fatter. Fat itself was depressing, which made him fatter. I could grudgingly see how when you’re having such a hard time that you’re forced to sell the primary tool of your occupation, and then your younger squirt of a sibling who you’ve never really imagined would amount to anything—who to the contrary you’ve regarded as your own private cheerleader—is suddenly thriving on a national scale, well, okay, that’s hard to take.

  Yet my-sister’s-famous-while-I’m-nobody was one small driver of a larger spiral into despondency. Edison had no real family of his own, and his career had hit the skids. He may have had friends, but in the last few years, by straining their goodwill, he’d lost more friends than he’d made. As I despaired to Oliver when we put our feet up in my office after hours, “The trouble is, he has nothing to look forward to.”

  “With one exception,” said Oliver. “Which was all your idea. And if he ever does hit one-sixty-three, the only thing he still looks forward to evaporates.”

  “I know,” I said, closing down my computer for the day. “When I first took this project on, I worried it was more than I could handle. But the real project turns out to be much, much bigger. I have to do nothing less than give my big brother a reason for living.”

  “You can’t do that for anybody,” said Oliver readily.

  “I can nudge him in the right direction.”

  “What, get him excited about reviving his career? Talk up his résumé. Suggest he put out a solo CD. Goad him into boasting again—about all the headliners who’ve recognized his unparalleled talent.” The delivery was poker-faced. Though Oliver had kept his grave reservations about my Prague Porches folly to himself, I’d known him intimately for fourteen years, and his diplomacy was wasted.

  “Right,” I said dryly. “Shore up the very vanity that triggered his if-I-can’t-be-famous-then-fuck-it obesity in the first place. Reconstruct from the ground up the same egomaniac nobody could stand, including you.”

  “I never said I couldn’t stand him,” said Oliver innocently.

  “Uh-huh. So getting him all jumped up over his career again isn’t the solution. After all, achievement hasn’t been the solution for me.” I nodded at my messy office. “I mean, sure, it was nice to be able to give Fletcher space to make his furniture. I’d never be able to run a private rehab clinic without some extra cash. And for a while, yeah, Monotonous was a kick. But these dolls are sure to become old hat sooner or later, and when suddenly nobody will be seen dead with one I’ll be relieved. For me, the big surprise has been that making a go of something professionally doesn’t turn out to matter that much. It’s not a reason for living.”

  “So what’s the answer? Love?”

  “In that case, he’s shit out of luck. I’m not much of a matchmaker.”

  “But, Pandora, what does the guy do all day?”

  I shrugged. “Little shopping. YouTube. Lots of TV. When I come home, we talk.”

  “About what?”

  “We do some soul searching,” I said cautiously, not wanting Oliver to feel supplanted. “But nobody can dig deep all the time, and we’ve started to run out of stories. It’s embarrassing, but the rest of the time we talk mostly about food.”

  Oliver laughed. “Like how?”

  “You know, reminiscing about our favorite childhood dishes—my mother’s ‘Spanish Noodles,’ with Kraft Parmesan and scads of greasy breadcrumbs. Which got soggier, Cocoa Puffs or Cocoa Krispies, and the color Fruit Loops turned the milk.”

  “Sounds stimulating.”

  “It is, believe it or not. The memories we trip are hallucinogenic. And you know I’ve been reading a lot, right? More than I have since college. I guess if I were more ambitious I’d be tackling War and Peace. Instead I’ve devoured Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything—all thousand fifty-six pages. So when Edison’s having trouble sleeping, I read him recipes. When I was small, he read me The Little Red Hen. Now I read him ‘Fried Chicken Made Easy.’ ”

  “Listen, why doesn’t he get a plain old job? You’re big on hard work. Nothing worse for the existential heebie-jeebies than time on your hands.”

  “Who’s going to hire Edison?”

  “You,” said Oliver. “Put him to work here.”

  “Ha! I can’t think of anything he’d want less.”

  “He didn’t want to lose weight, and so far this bonkers diet has been the guy’s only salvation. Problem is, it’s temporary.”

  “I’ll think about it. But I keep feeling the real answer is fiendishly subtle. Somehow he needs to learn to enjoy ordinary life.” That said, I’d always resisted this expres
sion. Nothing was ordinary about the seemingly-small-but-secretly-ample delights to which it alluded.

  “What, like—the perfect color toast?” Oliver suggested mischievously. “The first sip of a tart little Sauvignon Blanc at the end of a very long day.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, I’ve scotched those thrills for now. But there has to be more to life than food and drink.”

  There was more, and I devoted myself to locating it: the dry, squeaky crunch of virgin snow when I refused to allow inclement weather to deter our walkabouts. The discovery that, despite a temperature of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, trooping about after a blizzard raised a light sweat, and by the time we got home we were hot. Breaking out the box set of Joint Custody that I’d asked Cody to fetch from my study and rolling on the carpet in hilarity. Calling Travis and announcing that Edison had now lost sixty-nine pounds and taking wan satisfaction in the transparent insincerity of our father’s encouragement.

  Otherwise, I concluded Oliver was right: Edison could stand to appreciate the pleasures of unalloyed hard work, the kind at the end of which no one bursts into applause. Predictably, Edison resisted my becoming his taskmaster twice over. Yet once he gave Monotonous a reluctant try he was relieved to get out of the apartment, and the days went faster when he was busy. Assuming a woman’s humility, he learned to sew. I also used him for recordings, his big booming voice perfect for blowhards for whom families had cooked up just deserts. The other employees came to like Edison, admiring his unerring dietary celibacy—no more pizza boxes had cropped up in our trash can—as he held forth with the passion of the convert about the evils of Cinnabons. Stitching miniature denim jackets, he’d festively recount his most extravagant binges of ribs and racks of lamb, tales especially popular before lunch.

  By throwing himself into the soft, gooshy embrace of a meatball hero, in the process losing everything from his professional standing to his Miles collector’s edition box set, and landing at last on the edge of a bathtub with his fly open while his own sister collected his turds like Easter eggs, my brother had emulated the alcoholic’s notorious prerequisite to recovery: he’d hit bottom. Yet I don’t think hitting bottom is therapeutic because you finally get to the point where things can’t get any worse. Things can always get worse. It’s more that you firebomb absolutely everything in sight that seems to keep you alive, only to wake the next morning perplexed, amazed, and maybe even furious that you’re still here. Tinker around its edges, and both the curse and blessing of your own existence simply sits there. For Edison, that discovery had to have been accompanied by an intuition that all along “making a name for himself” when he already had one had been merely a little extra, a maraschino cherry atop something momentous. Not fat, momentous.