Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “You look small in every sense. Timid as well as skinny. Your hair is flat and dry. Your clothes hang off you as if they’re hooked on a hat rack. Your face looks older by five years. Your skin is gray—you have the complexion of a sidewalk. And you’re weak. Just going up the few steps to this diner, you had to grip the railing and pull.”

  The way he described me didn’t jibe with my experience of my newly buoyant, featherweight body in the slightest. I felt as if any day now I’d be able to fly. He wasn’t being fair, and he was trying to take something from me. To rob me of something priceless and private and mine.

  Oliver threw up his hands. “You’ve always been so levelheaded! Now you’ve turned into a nut! It’s this starvation thing. You’re not thinking straight anymore. And because you’re not thinking straight, you don’t know you’re not thinking straight. You told me at the outset that, of course, of course, you’d have to return to real food way before your brother did. Now you’ve forgotten all about that. You just said you’ve discovered eating is ‘unnecessary,’ and maybe you said that as a joke, but it’s not a joke. You believe it.”

  “I was planning to come off the envelopes when Edison and I were both supposed to eat solid food at the three-month mark.” I tried to sound moderate and self-possessed, although these were qualities that in the past I’d never needed to feign. “But when he refused . . . the natural juncture was lost.”

  “When you miss the turnoff for New Holland on the interstate, you reverse direction at the next exit; you don’t keep driving until you reach California. You’ve turned into, I don’t know, a junkie. You actually look strung out.”

  “Edison’s the junkie,” I said quickly. “I’m not the type.”

  “All right, prove it, then.” He snagged our passing waitress. “Miss! My friend would like . . . a bowl of soup. Tomato soup.”

  “Don’t!” I panicked. “I can’t!”

  “Bring the soup,” he contradicted brutally, and this pushiness was wildly unlike him. Oliver was a retiring, genial, smart man whom I enjoyed bouncing ideas off of because he always agreed with me. “Now, why can’t you?”

  “I’m not ready,” I stalled.

  “You’re past ready. You’ve gone off the goddamned deep end.”

  I was powerfully resistant to this depiction. Edison had the “addictive personality.” Edison was the one with the problems. I was plain: white rice. Surely my very dullness inoculated me against getting too weird or doing anything dumb. I didn’t have the flair for an eating disorder.

  The soup arrived. The waitress looked between us and, not wanting to get involved, placed it mid-table. Oliver shoved it before me. The smell made me giddy. I was accustomed to swooning at aromas, but not to this proximity of contraband, which triggered such anxiety that my heart raced. I looked down. The pinkish soup was canned, and probably full of sugar. It was appetizing and disgusting at the same time. I poked the croutons to the sides with my spoon, like sending ships to port. Even sitting in front of this muck seemed like perfidy.

  “You know I don’t even get to eat in my dreams?” I said meekly. “I dream about food all the time. But it’s always taken away, or I look at it with my lips pressed. In fact, I have a recurrent nightmare in which I’m sitting at a table and I put a bite of something in my mouth and start to chew. In the dream, I’ve simply forgotten, been absentminded, let my guard down. I always catch myself before I swallow and spit it out.”

  “What you’re describing is mentally ill. Now put some soup on the spoon.”

  I folded my arms. “After we’ve talked about it so much, I’m surprised you don’t appreciate the profundity of the pledge between me and Edison. Eating behind his back would be treachery. Of the worst order.”

  “Destroying your health is betraying yourself. For now, Edison doesn’t have to know.”

  “But—there’s no ceremony!” For I had dwelt on such a moment for months. I knew there were rules about how to come off a liquid diet—rules that, as Oliver knew, this soup adhered to—but within those limits I had contrived a variety of sumptuous dishes with which I might finally break my fast, like a cool vichyssoise spiked with mint and a squeeze of lemon. A thimbleful of sprightly white wine, poured in an elegant glass purchased for the occasion. I didn’t even like canned tomato soup.

  “We’re not in church,” said Oliver. “Ever since we sat down you’ve been listing back and forth as if you’re about to black out. What you’re doing is medically dangerous. If you don’t finish that soup, I swear I will haul you to the hospital.”

  I pooled the puree in the spoon, lifted it to eye level, and stared it down like hemlock. Those nightmares rushed into my head, the ones from which I had often woken in a cold sweat, lest I swallow even a phantom of solid food. This single mouthful frightened me. And maybe that’s what did the trick.

  It frightened me that it frightened me.

  I finished the soup.

  On return to Prague Porches that night, I prattled when all I really wanted to do was dive for the bathroom to brush my teeth. I feared Edison would hear the scrubbing sound, and I wouldn’t usually wash up before our nightly Upchucks. So I bolted mine in the kitchen, hopeful that the malt flavoring would mask the soup. Since I hadn’t been able to resist the pleasingly half-soggy, half-crisp croutons bobbing on the edge of my bowl, I had officially crossed the line and imbibed solid food.

  I didn’t only feel traitorous. I felt exiled, ejected from Eden, an eternally pristine garden where Eve is forever unsullied by eating the apple because she doesn’t eat anything. From the first book of the Bible, food correlates with evil, and I felt contaminated. Demoted to one more schlub who has to decide whether to have a second cookie, I wasn’t special anymore, and here I was the one who’d chided Edison for his dependence on feeling elect. I had destroyed a perfect record, and were I ever again to exceed my personal best in starvation I’d be obliged to start back on Day One—reliving that first awful, gnawing twenty-four hours of choosing furniture when all I’d really wanted to buy was a sandwich.

  Desolate, I begged off Scrabble and went to bed early, claiming I was tired, though in truth I was battling nausea. Once I lay down, I scrutinized a sensation I’d not felt for so long that at first I hadn’t recognized it. I wasn’t about to throw up. I was hungry.

  What I remember most about return to solids was disappointment. I’d built up proper meals into such bliss that once I started eating again I found food bewilderingly commonplace. Lo, I’d been eating all my life, and I knew what it was like. I’d been looking forward to it the way you were meant to look forward to falling in love or having your first child. But a chicken breast was a chicken breast. It didn’t take long to polish off, and whether it was dressed up with a little pesto or Thai curry sauce was neither here nor there. No meal no matter how nicely prepared would resolve what to do with your life on either side of chow.

  More shockingly still, this ho-hum experience extended to being thin, which I had elevated to the rebirth and transformation that all the Jesus people in Iowa promoted through prayer. Oh, once my energy returned I relished the lightness, being able to sprint for the car before the meter ran out and not get out of breath. And, sure, at first it had been exciting to watch the lumps that had attached to me like bloodsucking parasites gradually loosen their grip and melt away to whatever cave they’d crawled from. But during the years I’d put on weight I’d trained myself to turn a blind eye to these expansions; only when I lost the weight had I truly noticed it in the first place.

  After a couple of months of Upchuck I’d bravely installed a full-length mirror in my bedroom, and ever since getting down to 130 again I’d stopped glancing in the opposite direction when I passed it by. Once I could bear to confront the image, I had faced down that mirror naked with embarrassing frequency. Thus an evening before bed after I’d been back to food a day or two, I closed my bedroom door to appraise the organism.


  It was a relief to no longer feel ashamed, and that was probably the most intense emotion my new body stirred: a not-emotion. But I was in my early forties and looked it, fat or trim. Now that I’d taken the diet too far, I enjoyed the “leeway” that I’d envied in Breadbasket photographs—but “leeway” translated into tiny breasts that sagged and striated with wrinkles around the nipples. When I took a deep breath, ribs extruded in parallel tracks above my bosom, but as achievements go this one didn’t do much for me. Aesthetically, I could see the merits of hip bones that looked as if a scoop of ice cream had been curled from each one, but the extra skin that withered on the underside of my upper arms and the inside of my thighs was hardly fetching. While I was a reasonably symmetrical creature, I was never going to be a knockout, for I hadn’t been a knockout even during those few center-cut years when women turn heads. The single aspect of my reduced circumference that I did find pleasing was simply the sense that, physically, I was myself. A few months before, a proportion of my body had seemed to belong to someone else. Yet even this satisfaction was mild. A slender figure therefore joined career success in its so-whatness. Did anything at all in life deliver a proper payoff?

  On the heels of this revelation, I feared for Edison. The anticlimax of losing fifty-four pounds was disconcerting; the anticlimax of losing 223 pounds could prove soul-destroying. For once I’d overshot my own target, what hit me over the head was the host of other problems that being a little slimmer didn’t dent. Over the phone, Fletcher and I had sometimes grown so distant that we weren’t even antagonistic. It was odd to miss his hostility, but without it we were losing that crucial tension for lack of which I had stopped going out with Oliver. Only months from graduation, Tanner had become a chronic truant, and if he failed his courses he’d have to go to summer school or repeat the semester next year. I was growing actively bored with my company, but if I folded or sold it I had no idea what I’d do next. And Edison . . . Well, my brother never made any reference to his life on the other side of this weight-loss project. How cataclysmically would all the balls he’d left in the air in New York come crashing down once he’d met his goal and discovered that being 163 didn’t really solve anything?

  Mistrustful, and thus insistent on overseeing my rehabilitation one-on-one, Oliver stopped by Monotonous at the end of every workday that following week. Edison found this curious enough that he pressed me on whether Oliver and I had become an item. I was taken aback by the acid that laced my brother’s accusation. If he’d been protective of Fletcher, fair enough, but I knew better. Fletcher had been merciless when my brother was our houseguest, and in the months since Edison had gotten in many a vengeful crack about “Feltch” (sans the t, slang for a sexual practice I’d rather not describe; rhyming with belch, squelch, and welch, the new nickname exuded meanness and vulgarity). In theory, my cuckolding his brother-in-law should have made Edison’s day.

  I lied that I was consulting Oliver about how we might redesign the mechanism to use flash drives, thus allowing customers to replace recordings grown tiresome with new sets of phrases (not a bad idea at that). Yet it was comical, what I was hiding: not a steamy, illicit romance, but a steamy, illicit supper.

  Oliver and I went back to the same diner every evening. I’d had some explosive diarrhea, but otherwise returned to solid food without mishap. I carried a toothbrush, and ducked in the restroom to clean my teeth before heading what had started to feel, confusingly, like home. There I shared a protein shake with Edison, which served as cover and provided additional nutrition I could use.

  Only days before, I’d looked forward to those concoctions so! Yet now I turned my head when downing mine lest Edison see me gag. Formerly passionate about flavors of herbal teas, I stashed the infusions arrayed on the counter in a cabinet, just so I didn’t have to lay eyes on the ghastly boxes. Of course, sudden revulsion for these tokens of self-torture was rational: pursued much further, that punishing drill might have killed me. But real food also upset me, and quite apart from the fact that I was hiding it from my brother. After subsisting on four stingy envelopes daily, I no longer profoundly believed, as Oliver noted, that I required solid sustenance to live. Even if I gamely bought into the premise, food had become arbitrary, and scary. My first reaction on sitting down to a meal was panic.

  I wasn’t alone in this hysteria. You could see the same frenzy all over the Internet: diatribes about sugar, clever tips about using tiny plates or drinking lots of water, profiles on celebrities who claim to have “eighty meals a day,” the charts listing the glycemic index of parsnips and potatoes. You could see it in the accelerating demand for extra-wide caskets, roller coasters reinforced with I-beams, and elevators redesigned to carry twice the load. You could see it in burgeoning retail sales for “bountiful” apparel, in the return of the corset. You could see it in the market for airline seatbelt extenders, “Big John” toilet seats, 800-pound-rated shower chairs, and “LuvSeats” for couples of size to have sex. You could see it in popular websites like BigPeopleDating.com, but you could also see it in the prestige designation of size-zero jeans and in the host of Cody’s classmates who’d been hospitalized for starving or throwing up. You couldn’t help but wonder what earthly good was a microprocessor, a space telescope, or a particle accelerator, when we had mislaid the most animal of masteries. Why bother to discover the Higgs boson or solve the economics of hydrogen-powered cars? We no longer knew how to eat.

  The Sunday that began the second week of my furtive feasts, I was feeling remorseful about leaving my brother by himself. At supper with Oliver, I rushed through a spicy chicken cacciatore with all the neglect I’d sworn over salmon in December to eschew, and hastened to the restroom. I couldn’t find my toothbrush and had no time to run to a drugstore; I’d promised Edison that I’d be back in time for Mad Men, to which, if only to spite Travis, we’d grown addicted. So I picked the green pepper from my teeth, rinsed my mouth, and hoped for the best.

  At Prague Porches, I stirred our dinner shakes, averting my face to avoid the smell. Edison watched me from the piano bench with an unnerving stillness that drove me to flights of hyperactivity—turning on the TV though the program wouldn’t air for ten minutes, plumping throw pillows, rehearsing the plot of the last episode, which we both remembered well. With five minutes to go, I was retrieving our Upchucks when Edison walked straight for me with the accuracy of an intercept missile. Leaning in to sniff, he announced, “Chorizo.”

  “In your dreams!”

  He strode to our trash can and lifted the lid.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A pizza box. Or something like it.”

  I hadn’t been that careless. “Tea bags and Senokot foils. As usual.”

  “That’s what tipped me off, man.” Edison jabbed my chest. “You got the trots.”

  “I do not!”

  “This isn’t that big an apartment, babe. I can hear you. Ain’t nobody gets the shits on this diet.” Looming over me, he chided with that piercing parental disappointment, “Panda Bear, how could you.”

  “How could I what?”

  “After all our sacrifice!” He gesticulated as he paced. “Tell me, was it worth it? For a crappy piece of sausage?”

  The game was up. I hung my head and sobbed. “I’m sorry!”

  “You’re an ungrateful, selfish BABY,” Edison bellowed, “and a total CREEP!”

  “It wasn’t my idea! Oliver made me!”

  But Edison couldn’t keep it up, and started to laugh—a huge, rich belly laugh that I hadn’t heard in ages. “Sure bit that hook, line, and sinker! I’m just razzing you, kid. You don’t gotta explain. Look, you look hot as the blazes. Real skinny and real cute. Of course you can’t keep living on five-eighty a day. You’d fucking die, man! But why you been sneaking around? Jesus, it’s been so obvious, I only been waiting for you to come clean.”

  “I’ve deserted you.” I couldn’t stop crying.


  He was getting stronger; when Edison embraced me, at long last he lifted me off the floor. He rested me down gently, and ruffled my hair. “Look, I’ve dug the companionship. But it’s time you got off the boat. Just don’t eat in secret, right? Christ, it could be better than the Food Channel. I should at least get to watch.”

  I wiped my eyes. “That sounds pretty dirty.”

  “I’m not through. Got a hundred nineteen more big ones to drop. So here’s what I propose: I’ll cook for you. I’ll make your breakfast, and pack your lunches, and every night make you a dinner that’s absolutely killing.”

  “You could stand that?”

  “I would love that, man. I could buy food, and cut it, and stir it, and smell it, and pinky-swear I wouldn’t snitch. You were starting to look a little pale there, pal. Now hop to.” He tossed me the remote. “Already missed five minutes, and I know you got a hard-on for Don Draper.”

  So thereafter Edison cooked. He cooked up a storm. We’d have Cody over, and Oliver over, and one night we finally coaxed Tanner over, during which Edison regaled him with tales of fleeing to the East Coast at seventeen—at which point I sensed my brother’s long war to win his de facto nephew’s favor was starting to succeed, since for the first time in years my stepson was palpably impressed: “No shit!” he’d interject, or, “You left with only twenty bucks?” The meals were light and nutritious, and I never once caught the cook slipping a morsel in his mouth when he thought no one was looking. Why, like my successful suitor of yore, to keep from dripping on the floor he now instinctively shook his wet hands splat-splat at the sink before reaching for a dishtowel. Edison found enormous pleasure in his new role as house chef, and not from caloric voyeurism alone. In depriving himself these many months, Edison was exploding with the need to satisfy somebody. Was it the aerobic exercise? He’d grown smaller of girth, but greater of heart.