Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  Nevertheless, one of the pleasures of “ordinary” life was music. Not appearing on posters or laying claim to big-name colleagues, but music, and for Edison that meant playing it. I’d a hunch he’d lost touch with the exhilaration of playing the piano for its own sake. So I rented one—an upright, whose very mediocre character I hoped would foster a casual attitude.

  I’d arranged for Novacek to let the piano movers in that afternoon, so when we came home from Monotonous the instrument was sitting at a right angle to the scale. I was disappointed by Edison’s reaction. He didn’t look exultant. He looked worried.

  “I don’t know, babe,” he said, surveying the piano from a safe distance. “I’m pretty rusty.”

  “It’s a piece of junk. And I don’t want you to ‘practice.’ Think of it as music therapy. You must have liked playing the piano once. So I don’t want you to bone up your skills, and get all frustrated that your dexterity has deteriorated, or plot to make a smashing return to the stage in New York. I’ve always thought you were pretty good, but being good isn’t the point. I don’t honestly know, Edison, if you’ll ever be an internationally renowned jazz pianist again.” I tried to say this kindly. “I think it’s important for you to be able to live with the possibility that you won’t be. But no one can take music itself away from you, or the joy of playing it.”

  He approached the keyboard with trepidation. He struck a chord with one hand, something minor and a little complicated, letting its anguish resonate for some time.

  He didn’t want an audience, not even his sister. Edison Appaloosa not wanting an audience was a first, and not necessarily a bad thing. “We’re out of cranberry-orange tea,” I said. “I’ll run to Hy-Vee, and you two can get acquainted.”

  To begin with, he’d only touch the piano when I was out, and I invented more errands to give him privacy. But after about ten days, I returned from another laconic, pulling-teeth coffee at Java Joint with Tanner, who would at least meet me on neutral territory. Edison was in the middle of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” “Please don’t stop,” I implored. And he didn’t.

  Word to the wise: anyone on an all-liquid diet should play an instrument, and I regretted playing nothing myself. The piano was more involving than television, and Edison would hit the keyboard after work the way he used to hit the pantry. My brother’s musing, reflective riffs filled our apartment with life, compensating for the groceries that never slammed on the counter, the silverware that never clattered on the table, the baking pies that never spiced the air. His playing grew progressively lighter, trippier, more assured, but I almost didn’t want to say so, because I’d claimed up front that being good was not the goal.

  Since I wasn’t encouraging him to sharpen his keyboard skills in order to plunge back into the Manhattan fray but only to keep us entertained, over time Edison relaxed his grip on the niche that had defined him, broadening gaily into ragtime, top-forty oldies like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” standards like David Bowie’s “Starman,” and medleys of Queen, R.E.M., and Billy Joel. He took requests, and produced slant, improvised versions of the softie stuff I grew up on: Crosby, Stills, and Nash; James Taylor; Carole King. He played show tunes! Songs from Chess or Sweeney Todd. My growing affinity for jazz was genuine enough, but I can’t tell you the relief of getting a break.

  Cody started coming by for lessons, though with her uncle’s newly catholic approach to music the education worked both ways, she introducing him to Lyle Lovett as he had introduced her to Thelonious Monk. The piano tutorials gave her visits a welcome structure; it had always been socially thin, only being able to serve her diet soda. Even so, evenings cleansed of mealtime distractions had a bare-bones starkness, but also an intensity that I now look back on with nostalgia. Eradicating the froufrou of hospitality stripped away the chitchat, too—about weather and new shoes. As hostages thrown together with a slop bucket must also have learned, it’s amazing how quickly you get down to emotional brass tacks with absolutely nothing to do but talk.

  Cody became more forthcoming about her worries over choosing a career and the grisly host of eating disorders amid her classmates. She shared her humiliation at being forced to take a class in “Social Skills” because of being unacceptably withdrawn. “It’s retarded,” she said. “Six other rejects and a teacher who thinks she’s cool because she has butterfly tattoos on her ankles. We have to fill out a chart every morning on ‘How I Feel Today.’ Then Miss Hannigan—sorry; Nancy—stands in front of the class and yells, ‘I love you!’ while shaking her fist and scowling. So we’re meant to, like, have this revelation about how sometimes what people say and their ‘nonverbal cues’ don’t agree. Well, if you have to ‘learn’ that, you should be taken out and shot. Now everybody knows I’ve been stuck with these losers, and I’ll never live it down. What’s wrong with being ‘withdrawn’? Big deal, sometimes I don’t have anything to say, so I don’t say it. Unlike most people.”

  In times past, that “most people” might have seemed a dig at her uncle, but Edison no longer inclined toward monologues about jazz. He shared more details about his failed marriage and a few other crash-and-burn romances. He finally confessed to a particular low point of his compulsive eating the year before: being forced to file off the metal bracelet I’d given him as a farewell present when he left for New York at seventeen, because the wire was biting his bulging wrist. When her uncle got maudlin over his estranged son, Cody pulled him up short: Just how hard had he really tried to arrange visitation rights? He admitted that to begin with he’d kept putting it off, anxious that Sigrid had poisoned the boy’s head with lies about his dad (worse, with the truth). Then in the last few years, by which time Carson was old enough to make up his own mind, Edison had been too ashamed of his size to arrange a rendezvous: “Maybe the cat’s always fantasized about finally getting to know his dad, going on hiking trips, or deep-sea fishing. How keen is the kid gonna be when he finds out the old man is close to four hundred pounds? I couldn’t deal with it, man. Opening the door to my only son and watching his face fall.”

  I more than anyone appreciated that Edison’s weight loss was gradual, since together we faced the sentinel beside the picture window every morning at nine a.m.—recording the verdicts with a fine black roller-ball on a monthly calendar hanging alongside. The reduction wasn’t, oddly, systematic; he would stall for a couple of days in dismay, only to drop three pounds at once. Yet the process was gruelingly sluggish, and as my brother came off the steep slope of his first few weeks his progress slowed further. After losing thirty-nine pounds the first month, Edison couldn’t help but have calculated that he would therefore drop all 223 pounds in half a year. Wrong. Fat itself requires calories to maintain, so you burn less energy as you get thinner. “It’s an algorithm,” I’d explained. But Edison had never been good at math.

  Despite the paint-drying languor of the exercise, my experience of finally recognizing the brother I grew up with was bizarrely sudden.

  One late Saturday afternoon in March, I’d made another trip to Hy-Vee for toilet paper and tea. Edison had stayed behind to play the piano, at which he was seated when I walked in. Cutting a warmer, springier slant through the blinds, sun shafted across Edison’s head, flashing on cheeks whose high bones were once the defining structure of his face. In concert with the wild, irradiated hair, those hillocks rising over concave hollows had helped to explain why so many of my junior high girlfriends were eager to drop by our house in Tujunga Hills—in the hopes that my loping, too-cool-for-school older brother with his low-slung jeans and collar open to the sternum would nod hello in the hall.

  Ever since this imposter of a brother had hulked into Cedar Rapids Airport, Edison’s cheekbones had been buried like stones in plums. While I had of course taught myself to recognize my own sibling again, in truth I had not been recognizing the brother I knew in childhood. I had instead trained myself to recognize a completely different person who by sheer coincidence
went by the same offbeat name.

  Yet in that moment, lusty spring sunlight unearthed his cheekbones like the treasures of an archaeological dig. The flesh below them sank in shadow, while the curdle of concentration in my brother’s forehead finally formed sharp creases rather than rippled blobs. And I saw him. I saw Edison, the Edison I remembered. It was as if the man with whom I had in reality cohabited for months now had only just been restored to me after many years of having gone to ground. Unable to contain myself, I exclaimed nonsensically, “It’s you, I see you!”

  Edison looked up quizzically from a chord in one of Cody’s favorites, the Roches’ “Quitting Time.” “Cool,” he said uncertainly. “Glad I’m still three-dimensional.”

  I came up behind him and hugged. Firmer shoulders stirred earlier memories of being carted on his back, swung easily to the couch. Never had I dreamed that the brother I grew up with would get fat. I’d persistently failed to get my head around why that seemed so important. I’d tried to latch on to the health implications of obesity, but I knew better; I hadn’t embarked on this project purely to ward off diabetes. I wanted my big brother back.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said.

  “Least I can be famous for something. Though from the shows I seen on TV, babe, I got wicked competition even in the I-used-to-be-a-load game.”

  “You are now in the top tier of what has become the national sport.”

  “Not through to the finals yet.” Any suggestion that it was smooth sailing from here on in, that he could coast, or even cheat a bit, was anathema. Every day was hard; there was no such thing as “only” having to lose 124 more pounds.

  “You’ve read the literature,” I ventured. “So you know they strongly recommend that you come off the diet after three months—”

  “No.”

  “Just for a week. Eating very carefully and healthfully—”

  “NO.”

  “But then you can go right back to it!”

  “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?”

  “That’s become an awful cliché.”

  “Imagine my giving a shit.”

  Having myself labeled his tendencies “extreme,” I’d delayed raising the issue of the prescribed breather until two weeks past the deadline, because I knew what he’d say. Unclear on the risks of violating the program’s rules, I’d not bothered to research them because I was certain to face a brick wall regardless. If Edison had an “addictive personality,” he was now addicted to Upchuck.

  chapter six

  Oliver Allbless was my tech guru. When my computer spat error messages or I needed to password my router, I called Oliver. I’d first hired him to help with prep early in the Breadbasket days, when he’d needed some extra cash while earning his engineering degree at the University of Iowa. Somewhere in there we went out for about six months, and when I concluded that my feelings for him were a little too round, too muffled—too mild and edgeless, without some crucial sharpness, tension, or resistance that I later found in surplus with Fletcher—he accepted the rejection with the same natural equanimity that had probably fostered my edgeless feelings in the first place. We’d been friends ever since. As the technological demands of modern life continued to accelerate, for a while I’d started to feel guilty that I called him too often just to sort out yet another crisis with my printer. I didn’t want him to feel used, even if Oliver liked being of practical value. When I put him on retainer at Baby Monotonous, at least he got something out of being on call, though he’d protested that he’d have advised me on updating pull-string doll technology for nothing. If Oliver was still sweet on me—the gangling, endearingly awkward telecom employee had never married—I was accustomed to it, and so was he. It was remotely possible that I was the love of his life, though for his sake I hoped not.

  When Baby Monotonous took off, Oliver was far more excited than I was. Regarding my subsequent project, my best friend was still reserved. Obliging about being used himself, he was sensitive to any suggestion that Edison might be taking advantage of my good nature. After I’d explained the parameters of our regimen, Oliver had spent hours researching Big Presents in Small Packages, making sure there were no horror stories lurking online. I was married, firmly so, and I’d planted no reasonable expectation that this would change, so his assumption of the role of guardian angel in my life sprang from a selflessness so pure that it passed my understanding. The sole concern he’d allowed himself to express once I assumed residence in Prague Porches was that the arrangement might alienate Fletcher.

  We were having trouble with string retraction in a batch of digital mechanisms—we’d had a few returns, which was a first—and I’d asked Oliver to stop by to diagnose the problem. As he took a malfunctioning doll apart, he kept peering up at me, and his screwdriver would freeze for a second. Before he left he asked, “Got time for a drink, or whatever you call an excuse to talk on that kooky diet?”

  “Maybe, but let me check with Edison.”

  “You have to get permission from your brother?”

  “We usually ride home together,” I said coolly. Now that the weather had warmed, I’d had Cody bring my bicycle by, and I’d bought a mountain bike so Edison and I could commute in tandem.

  “No prob,” said my brother as he completed the stitching on a miniature Macintosh. “I’ll hold off on ‘dinner’ till you get home.”

  I wheeled the bike beside Oliver to a nearby diner, where I reflexively ordered a soda water with lime. Though he’d avoided eating around me for coming up on four months, this time Oliver ordered a triple-decker BLT with fries. “Here,” he offered, holding out a quarter of his sandwich. “Have some.”

  I recoiled. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I never cheat. It’s been quite a discovery—that it’s easier to be perfect than only a little bad. I’m starting to see the attraction of monasteries. It’s less of a strain to be a full-fledged saint than a small-fry sinner.”

  “Eating isn’t a sin. It’s what mammals do to survive.”

  “Apparently it’s unnecessary,” I said lightly. “Another discovery.”

  Oliver put down the sandwich gravely. “What do you weigh?”

  I busied myself pouring artificial sweetener into my soda water. The ceaseless nickel flavor leaking from my gums got on my nerves, and I’d try anything to mask it. “You’re never supposed to ask women that.”

  “All right, let’s start with this: How much did you weigh to begin with?”

  “To my horror, I’d hit one-sixty-eight, and that was after four days of starvation. Hilariously, I’m still keeping it secret from Fletcher how bad it had gotten, when it wouldn’t have been a secret at all because he could see it—”

  “And how much have you lost?” he cut me off.

  Oliver’s impatience surprised me. Teasing out the finer dynamics of my marriage was a mainstay of our friendship. “That’s a trick question,” I said. But he knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to brag. “Fifty-two pounds, if you must know. Closer to fifty-four, with what I dropped before I marshaled the nerve to—”

  “When was the last time you weighed this little?”

  I said quietly, “When I was fifteen.”

  “This has got to stop.”

  “Well, I realize that pretty soon—”

  “Stop now. I read that Big Presents website. It’s been four months, and you were supposed to come off the envelopes for at least a week after three. Did you?”

  “I couldn’t get Edison to take a break. He’s afraid—”

  “Even Edison has to return to the land of the eating eventually, and then he’s got to learn how to have normal-size portions and quit. You said being ‘perfect’ is easier than sinning. But that’s one disturbed version of perfection you’ve got, Pandora. Perfect is eating what you need, no more, and no less
, either.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Not everybody has your metabolism.” Oliver was one of those rarities who ate whatever he felt like, yet whose elongated dimensions hadn’t varied noticeably since he was eighteen. The only thing the even keel cost him was any comprehension of everyone else.

  “Your concentration sucks. When I tried to explain what was going wrong with the retraction mechanisms, I could tell you weren’t taking anything in. I doubt you could recapitulate what I told you if your life depended on it.”

  Declining to take his little test, I wrapped my coat more tightly around me. The gesture was defensive, though I was also cold.

  “That’s another thing.” He pointed at the down jacket that I would usually have retired with the advent of spring. “I’m sure you don’t realize it, but it’s hot in here. Overheated—just like Baby Monotonous. You’ve jacked up the thermostat. It’s in the forties outside, and your employees are coming to work in short sleeves.”

  “Big deal, I get chilly.”