Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “Could have fooled me,” said Fletcher.

  “No gal made has got a shade,” I sang over the music, “on SWEET Georgia Brown!” Honestly, I wasn’t trying to make trouble. I was trying to perpetrate at least the illusion of a carefree, jovial jaunt with two of my favorite people. For Christ’s sake, it was a picnic.

  “Why do you people never play the song?” said Fletcher. “It’s like you’re above songs.”

  “Us people?” said Edison. “We’re above and below the song, man. It’s a dance. A courtship. A romance.”

  “No, it’s like you’re too good for the tune, any tune. Like you don’t believe in the whole idea of a tune. And then you wonder why nobody normal listens to your stuff anymore. What kind of a musician doesn’t believe in songs?”

  “Why don’t you make plain old chairs?” Edison shot back.

  “You should explain to him,” I said. “About how record companies used to pressure jazz musicians to play little enough of the original melody so the companies didn’t have to pay royalties . . .”

  Tightening his front brakes, Fletcher wasn’t listening.

  I felt geometrically awkward. Edison had plunked at my side, his back against a tree. Fletcher continued to stand, holding his bike. I considered clambering up to give him a hug, but the gesture would seem artificial. Even when you’re married, you can’t, physically, do whatever you think would help matters at any given moment. It has to be possible; you have to find a route in. It wasn’t possible.

  Fletcher gazed longingly at the food, but he’d staked out his position—he wasn’t hungry—and now he was stuck with it, refusing the tastes I held out on a plastic fork. I felt self-conscious as the only one eating, but my pretense of a hearty appetite was part of the theater. I was going to force this expedition to be jolly if it killed me.

  “You trying to tell me you made that whole spread,” Fletcher charged my brother, “and you never sampled, like, a cherry tomato?”

  “That would violate our loyalty oath,” I said. “I pledge aversion to the flab—”

  “Of the derided waists of America,” Edison picked up.

  “And to the repulsion for which is stands—”

  “One nation, underweight,” we recited together, “practically invisible, with misery and smugness for all.” Edison and I gave each other the high five.

  Fletcher stood tolerantly for this performance, but didn’t crack a smile. “So you never licked the olive oil off your fingers.”

  “I’d no more put oily fingers in my mouth than stick them in a live socket.” Edison stretched out. “Cooking, I can tell if the shrimp is done with a squeeze. But the idea of eating one is revolting. This whole fasting trip, it’s been motherfucking deep. I finally dig why Gandhi quit eating.”

  “From fat man to philosopher,” said Fletcher, leaning skeptically on his crossbar. “Wonder why Socrates and all those guys bothered. Instead of agonizing over the meaning of life, all they had to do was skip lunch.”

  “Well, sometimes you’re a little fuzzy,” I said, “but others, you focus like a laser. We’ve read dozens of books, some in one sitting. There’s a purity . . . Even a high . . .”

  “So,” said Fletcher, deadpan, “starved yourselves into seeing the face of God.”

  “I never said anything about God,” I said.

  “It’s just, sure, maybe it’s satisfying to drop a few pounds.” Fletcher wouldn’t let it go. “But I don’t know about claiming that a fad diet has anything to do with wisdom.”

  I wasn’t letting it go, either. I wasn’t sure what, but my husband seemed driven to take something from us—something hard-won, something we’d really sacrificed for, maybe as simple a matter as a little credit. “Most religions do associate revelation and fasting,” I said. “When Jesus spent forty days in the desert, he didn’t pack a sandwich.”

  “Hunger is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Edison intoned, reclining. “It maketh me lie down with long novels. It leadeth me to drink still water—”

  “Skipping lunch restoreth my soul,” I picked up gamely, grateful for the little bit of Sunday school we were dragged to before our mother gave up. “It leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for the avoidance of type 2 diabetes’ sake.”

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Doritos,” said Edison, “I shall fear no weight gain—”

  “For my Upchuck art with me. My laxatives and my artificially sweetened herbal tea, they comfort me.”

  Edison frowned. “Some shit about a table . . . ?”

  “Thou preparest a table before me,” I supplied.

  “Which is my enemy!”

  “Thou annointest my fingers with olive oil, though I shan’t lick them,” I said. “My cup runneth over with cherry-chocolate-flavored protein powder and essential enzymes.”

  “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” we recited together. “And I shall dwell in the house of . . .”

  “Starvation?”

  “Privation?”

  It was a cute solution, but in retrospect I wish I’d come up with another idea: I cried victoriously, “Prague Porches!”

  “And I shall dwell in the house of Prague Porches,” we resumed in unison, “forever!”

  We rolled on the bedspread laughing. Giddy over having a good time rather than merely pretending to, I took too long to notice that, not only was Fletcher not laughing with us, he’d turned white.

  At first I figured that he was irked by our having appropriated his making fun of us, in effect hijacking his joke. But it was worse than that, more grammatically profound. It wasn’t the joke; it was the us. And it was the wrong us.

  “You want to stay at your little clubhouse forever?” Fletcher swung a leg across his bike and clipped hard into a pedal. “Be my guest.”

  Now when I sprang up from the bedspread, there was nothing artificial about it. “Come on, we didn’t mean anything!” I reached for Fletcher’s shoulder. “The Lord, Prague Porches—it just sounded good!”

  “Yeah, it obviously sounds good to you. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, sweetie, we were just horsing around! We do that all the time!” But no matter what I thought to say, it was we this and we that, and there was no inclusion of my husband in that pronoun.

  “I warned you from the beginning about this cockamamie scheme.” Hands braced on his handlebars, Fletcher employed that hypercontrolled, level delivery that chilled my blood. “You walk out on a man and his family for six months—a year is what you prepared me for, once you’d done your sums. Well, that has consequences. I told you: feelings change. Not because of what someone decides to feel. Because of cause and effect. Like a hammer on a board. You remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.” I was panicking. This was moving too fast. It was just a bike ride, a picnic, and later I could apologize that maybe bringing Edison along hadn’t been a brilliant idea. We could talk it all out, and I could explain how, given the role of peacemaker that I’d not only been born into but that had been double-imprinted by Maple Fields, I compulsively kept cajoling my husband and my only brother to strike a truce . . .

  “You feel close to me?” Fletcher asked point-blank.

  If he’d asked whether I loved him, I’d have said of course right away, which is probably why that’s not what he asked.

  “Because you sure don’t act like it.” My hesitation had been answer enough.

  “Obviously, when we haven’t spent much time together—”

  “You chose not to spend time with me. You chose to spend a year—a whole year—with your brother instead of me. You know, once you’re in your forties, and we’re talking good years, still in good health, still energetic? There aren’t that many years.”

  “It’s not that much longer, and you can see, look at Edison
, how much better he looks, it’s working—”

  “If I disappeared on you for a solid year, I’d be out on my ear for keeps.”

  “That would depend on what you left for.”

  “Crap. Leaving is leaving. You’ve demonstrated in no uncertain terms who’s most important to you. Generally”—he glanced at Edison—“I don’t like to air dirty laundry with an audience. It’s private, it’s our business. But I don’t think you have any comprehension of ‘our business’ anymore. So I might as well say this stuff in front of you both, if only so you don’t scurry back and report everything I said almost word for word but slightly wrong so that I seem a little more ridiculous and a little more the villain. You think I don’t know how siblings work? I’m not that dumb.”

  “Honey, hardly, we should really talk this out when we’re alone—”

  “I want a divorce.” Even when issuing that ultimatum about Edison’s having to be out of the house by the day of his plane reservation, Fletcher had never used that word.

  “This isn’t fair,” I whispered. “I’ve only been trying—”

  “Trying to have it both ways. You can’t. Sometimes you have to choose. You chose. Live with it. Oh, and for the record: they’re my kids, and they stay with me.”

  “Tell that to Tanner,” Edison cried from the bedspread, and I wished he’d please stay out of this. I wished, too, he’d not lit another cigarette, as if the better to enjoy the show.

  Fletcher swiveled. “While we’re at it, Travis tells me a certain formerly fat fuck is talking on the phone all the time to my son. Lay off the fatherly advice. You’ve poured enough bullshit into that boy’s head already.”

  “He talks to us,” said Edison, “because he refuses to talk to you, man. So maybe you should consider, like, why that might be.”

  “Sweetheart, this is crazy,” I said. “Really calling it quits, it’s too important to decide so impulsively—”

  “I wouldn’t call it impulsive. Today just confirmed what I already knew. Like I said, I’m not that dumb.”

  Fletcher pushed off, accelerating further down the bike path—for a real ride, unencumbered by slowpokes. I collected our picnic containers in silence, for suddenly all the chummy sibling camaraderie had fallen away, and when I told Edison to turn off the damn music I felt a trace of real acrimony, dislike for all that jazz and my brother, too. As with fiscal assets, there had to be such a thing as emotional net worth, and Edison’s account had just plunged into the red.

  chapter nine

  The homeward slog did feel like forty miles, since it once more started to pour. After a long, hot shower, I left my soaked, mud-spattered clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. I unpacked the remains of our picnic and threw out the leftovers with rancorous abandon, whether or not the seaweed would have kept.

  That night, and for days thereafter, I was taciturn and morose; Edison left me to my sulk. He was waiting for me to get over it, as if a nearly eight-year marriage and the adoption of two children were on a par with the junior high crushes he’d watched implode in a torrent of tears as a world-weary high school track star. Meanwhile, I left Fletcher pleading phone messages. I sent beseeching emails and texts, eliciting not a single reply. It was murder to stop myself from using Cody as a go-between.

  Edison lobbed a few unpersuasive assurances that Fletcher and I would patch things up after my husband got over his snit, but I knew Fletcher—a man of few strong moves, who when he packed up his kids and walked out on Cleo had never looked back. Besides, my brother failed to suppress a burbling cheerfulness about this turn of the wheel, and he didn’t want to be persuasive.

  Yet for me, all that had once been thick had gone runny, the way a reheated cornstarch custard can break its emulsion and water. Edison as an addition to my family was one thing, as the whole of my family quite another. I grant there’s a comforting steadiness to the sibling tie; except for the odd blowup like the one over the pizza box in January, Edison and I had thrummed along with the mild ebb and surge of crickets. But I missed the more orchestral crescendos and glissandos of marriage, and had never imagined myself getting old with my brother. I knew there were such couples, at whose loyalty others marveled, but mostly people felt sorry for grown live-in siblings, who had settled for something lesser and slightly wrong. Without any inbuilt conclusion to our dodgy cohabitation, this weight-loss project dribbled to the horizon, no longer finite and climactic, but ceaseless and a chore. The fact that it never stopped raining made me feel trapped in a giant pathetic fallacy—as if I were starring in a heavy-handed film noir.

  Having been working myself up to a showdown over solid food, following that fatal bike ride I wasn’t in the mood. On the six-month anniversary of Edison’s having taken the BPSP pledge—and I now refused to reference their envelopes as “Upchuck,” our in-house lingo too pally—I skipped all the prefatory jollying I’d been contriving for weeks and cut callously to the chase.

  “No more liquid diet,” I announced on our return from Monotonous—my business now aptly named, since the tedium of manufacturing doll babies was suddenly rubbing me the wrong way as radically as my overnight roommate-for-life. We’d taken the car; I wasn’t biking in this weather. “Time to eat.”

  “I’m nowhere near one-sixty-three,” said Edison, as I’d known he would.

  “You already skipped the week of real food in the middle. The literature is unequivocal. Six months max.” My tone was retributive, as if I planned to force gray, lumpy gruel down his throat with a plunger.

  “Just a couple more months, then,” Edison parlayed.

  “Not one more day. You will start with soup, including soft, digestible starch like overcooked potato, along with fruit juices and vegetable purees.”

  He bunched in his recliner and folded his arms. “Sounds fuckin’ awful.”

  “I don’t care.” I’d originally contemplated making him the cool, bright vichyssoise that I’d pictured for my own fast breaking, but now I couldn’t be bothered and strode to the kitchen to open a can of commercial cream of chicken. I wasn’t a bit concerned with whether he liked it.

  I slopped orange juice into a glass and banged the soup bowl on the table. I felt sadistic. It was a new feeling, one I could come to like. “You will now consume eight hundred and ten calories per day for the next month.”

  “This is nuts,” he objected. “We can’t just—”

  “I know. But there’s no ceremony. Well, I’ve got news for you: after all this build-up, food is a big drag. It doesn’t take much time. It’s not interesting. It never was interesting. So eat your stupid soup, drink your stupid juice, and then we’ve still got to find a stupid movie we can stand to watch on TV.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Too bad. Just because you’ve ruined my marriage doesn’t mean I’m stuck in this apartment regardless. Deal’s the same as ever: do what I say, or I’m outta here.”

  His voice went small. “I’m scared.”

  “So? If you had any sense, you were scared the first time you played the piano in front of a live audience. You can at least face down cream of chicken.”

  Edison eased warily from the recliner, eyeing his sister from a distance as if assessing a pet exposed to rabies.

  “Hurry up, it’s getting cold.”

  Edison settled at the table, his chair pushed back from the bowl. “I told you, man: I don’t want it. And I don’t wanna want it.”

  “I do not give a shit.” I swear, it was all I could do to keep from hitting him, or hurling the soup in his face. “You think the last six months were the hard part? Well, think again. Eating nothing is easy. Eating something but not very much is an everloving bitch. You’re right, you’re not finished, not at your target weight. But guess what. You’re never going to be finished. You think this is about getting to one-sixty-three, and then you can relax. Big surprise, bro. You can never relax. You hav
e to learn to eat all over again. And the bad news? Once you’ve messed up as badly as you did, and made food into this personal pitfall, and then this giant source of anxiety, going through all the obsessive hullabaloo with little envelopes, well . . . Eating is never going to be the same again. It’s always going to make you nervous, and it’s never going to be much fun. You’ve ruined that. Got it? So the next six months, they’re going to be even harder.”

  Pitching his soup as challenge rather than indulgence was canny. Edison edged his chair closer to the table and leaned over to sniff. He glowered. “Smells terrible.”

  “Eat it.” I had a future as a prison guard.

  He loaded a spoonful. It pooled there, congealing. How impatient Oliver must have felt with me, the first time at our diner. Under my hard glare, Edison took a sip.

  “There,” I said viciously. “Thanks to a few shreds of chicken and specks of melted potato, you’ve lost your virginity. Back to Go. You’re mortal again. Just a regular guy, gotta drop sixty-five pounds—nothing special, dull as dishwater.”

  Edison finished the spoonful and looked wretched.

  “How’s it taste?” The question was malicious.

  “Like . . .” He scuppered the spoon and wafted his hands. “Like who-cares.”

  “Told you,” I said victoriously. “Now, since your sister will pour the rest of it through a funnel into your nose if she has to, you might as well finish the bowl.” I marched to the kitchen to prepare my own stupid little chicken breast, stupid little pile of stupid little rice, and stupid little salad.

  “This is depressing, man,” came from the dining table.

  “Tough.”

  A little later: “That wasn’t fair, man. What you said before. About ruining everything.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “You have ruined food, probably forever. That’s what happens when you put on hundreds of pounds of self-pity for no reason.”

  “No. That crack about your marriage. I don’t see why Feltch’s issuing you a pink slip is all my fault.”

  I couldn’t control myself. “Fact: if you hadn’t popped up as a basket case on my doorstep, I would at this very minute be sitting down to dinner with my husband and stepdaughter, exchanging the stories of our day. No big fat Edison, no divorce.”