Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “I never intended to break you guys up, did I? And I tried to be cool with the cat. Feltch was the one kept picking fights with me.”

  “You’ve gotten what you wanted. Little sister, on call, slipper-fetching, unencumbered by any of the inconvenient relationships that grown-ups have. Now we can be brother and sister, living together happily ever after, the sort people whisper about and wonder if there isn’t something strange going on. Just exactly how I wanted my life to turn out. But what does my life matter, if big brother has finally lost some weight.”

  A wisp of a memory visited of how horrible I had been to Solstice, convincing her at four after a few strands came out in the comb that every bit of her hair was going to fall out and she’d better get used to wearing hats, when in truth I was angry my mother was dead, and taking it out on a weaker party wasn’t going to change that.

  “Look, I’m sorry, man.” Edison had started to blubber. Perhaps he was fragile after the crushing disappointment of that soup and his humiliating demotion to humdrum dieter in a spoonful. Besides, never underestimate the effects of starvation on the brain. He’d cried a few days earlier because he couldn’t claw the packing tape off an Amazon shipment. “I shouldn’t have let you do this, man. Not when Feltch wasn’t cool with it. I shoulda gone off somewhere, on my own like a monk or something, and only showed my face again when I wasn’t a fucking embarrassment.”

  Okay, I couldn’t keep up the brutality, though as it slipped away I knew I would miss it. I shuffled out, slid my plate on the table, and squeezed my brother’s hand.

  “It’s not really your fault,” I said glumly. “This whole thing was my idea. Fletcher warned me up front. I didn’t take him seriously enough. I’m only blaming you because you’re here. Brothers and sisters get to treat each other like shit. It must be, like, in the Constitution. A human right. And in the end we’re still brother and sister because you can’t tell me you want a divorce. We’re stuck with each other. That’s what’s bad about us, but that’s what’s good, too. Maybe it helps me to have someone to yell at.”

  “Yell your fuckin’ heart out, then.” I hadn’t bothered to provide him a napkin, so Edison blew his nose in his shirttail. “If it makes you feel better.”

  “Even the other day. The bike ride. I knew we were being too chummy. Leaving Fletcher out. I knew that would make him mad. But I still hung with you. Because it was easier. We have a thing now. Fletcher’s harder for me to reach. I shouldn’t have asked you along in the first place. But I was anxious about spending the day with him. I thought I asked you to come because you could use the day out. But I obviously asked you for my own sake. To feel safe.”

  “I make you feel safe?”

  “Yeah.” I took a flavorless bite and chewed. “And Fletcher could tell. That I was sort of clinging to you. That was the last straw, I figure.” I pushed my plate away.

  “I ain’t the only one gotta eat, babe.” He pushed it back. He closed my hand around my fork.

  Sourly, I stabbed a lettuce leaf. “Sorry about the soup. Could have done better, for your first meal.”

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference. It’s just, you can’t help but fantasize . . .”

  “I tried to describe the big letdown in April, but I could tell you didn’t believe me.”

  “So what’s the moral of the story? Everything sucks?”

  “Not everything. Food sucks. But, you know. Us, here. Sometimes. It hasn’t all totally completely sucked.”

  “Put that on my gravestone,” said Edison. “It hasn’t all totally completely sucked.”

  “That’s more than most people could claim.”

  “You regret it, though?” asked Edison. “Do it all over again, you put me on that plane?”

  I thought about it. I didn’t want to give him a cheap answer. “Nah,” I concluded. “I’d do it again, I guess. Something might have gone off the rails with Fletcher, even without Prague Porches. Maybe there’s something deeper wrong. At least . . .” I choked up a little. “At least I’m not all by myself.”

  Being directly emotional with my brother always felt awkward. I think siblings are supposed to take each other for granted. Which has a bad reputation, but the world out there is precarious, as I’d recently discovered, and it’s a joy and a relief to take someone, anyone, for granted.

  Many of my neighbors would find this inexplicable, but I may not be the only one who looks back on the rest of that month with a backhanded nostalgia. Personally, I was desperate for distraction, and grateful to be pulled out of myself—to do good works on a larger canvas than my brother’s belly. They don’t call these things “disasters” for nothing, of course, and the reconstruction is still not completed to this day. But I was moved by how utterly Edison threw himself into the community effort. The brother who arrived nine months earlier would have put his feet up and watched the spectacle gleefully on TV.

  New Holland is on raised ground, though multiple basements filled with water. I was sorry that my status as persona non grata meant I couldn’t give Cody and Fletcher a hand with moving his backlog of furniture in the basement to the ground floor; the table saw was too heavy for them to manage, and I gather my estranged husband’s most treasured tool of his trade was ruined. At Prague Porches, we were on the second floor, so we didn’t have to worry about Edison’s upright—which freed us to volunteer our services in Cedar Rapids. Once we’d secured our stock on upper shelves, I closed Monotonous until further notice, so that my employees could pull on rubber boots and lend a hand. It was the worst flood in Iowa on record, on a scale the state shouldn’t expect more than once every five hundred years.

  For the first time, I discovered one line of work more fatiguing than a catering business: sandbagging. To deplete different sets of muscles, I mixed up the tasks—shoveling, passing bags down the line, and stacking pallets, though the job of keeping the sacks open while someone else shoveled we tried to reserve for kids, since whole families cropped up in droves. (Cody joined us on a couple of afternoons, but of course it was an issue, and most of the time she lent a hand nearer to New Holland with her father. Her primary job was to ascertain where we were working so that Fletcher could work somewhere else.) For five solid days, round the clock, thousands of volunteers from the area—and a handful of Katrina survivors who drove up from Louisiana with vats of Cajun chicken and a slightly knowing been-there-done-that attitude that got on a few people’s nerves—piled line upon line of sandbags along the Cedar River and at the entrances of businesses downtown. We relayed stacks around the Cedar Rapids Public Library while another set of volunteers packed books into cartons to shift them to the second story, and fortified the ground floor of Mercy Medical Center to protect the generators in the hospital’s basement.

  Edison and I were grateful to have gotten in on the effort early, because in short order the big problem was an excessive response to KCRG’s call for volunteers, and the station soon had to beg good Samaritans to stay away. The locals who’d braved hell and high water to lend a hand only to be told they weren’t needed were the only folks I saw acting grumpy—as if they were being cheated, and I suppose in a way they were. For there’s nothing like a catastrophe for bringing out warm good humor in people, and the spirit of heave-ho hilarity was contagious. I remember remarking to Edison, “You know, you sure wouldn’t have been much use here at three-eighty-six,” and he said, “Yo, six months ago I’da been one of the sandbags, kid.”

  My brother was a comfort to workers who’d been relocated to Prairie High and were trying to take their minds off all the chattel they’d lost back in their evacuated neighborhoods. Most had rescued photographs and a change of clothes, but the furniture, electronics, and whole wardrobes were write-offs, and it was common for a sturdy, stoic volunteer to freeze briefly in a sandbag relay, shoulders slumping with a heavy sigh: “Oh, no, that quilt from my great-grandmother.” Worst of all, since the river was fingering
into areas that weren’t previously on the flood plain, most of these exiles had no flood insurance.

  “That’s rough,” Edison would say. “A while back, I lost everything I owned myself, save a few threads didn’t fit anymore and an ancient computer. You wouldn’t think it, but it’s cleansing. Makes you lighter, man. Like, you wouldn’t believe all the shit you can live without. It weighs you down”—he’d heft another bag along the line like a visual aid—“and not just by making you drag it from place to place. The shit makes you be the kinda person who has that shit. Suddenly you can be somebody who has totally different shit. Or no shit. Suddenly you can be anybody. It lets you go.”

  This was a situation that brought out the best of the Midwest, and while a few codgers made self-deprecatory jokes about bad backs, I never heard anyone really complain—even at the start, when it was still raining. Never mind the steady pummel from the sky, the real problem was getting soaked from sweat. Yet even once the sun came out, the Cedar River continued to rise.

  The first couple of days, Edison had weighed out smoked turkey for his stinting packed lunch, but by the third day we’d run out of sandwich meat, and at the end of our shift a thankful local business drove in pizza pies. My brother was horrified. I said, “I am your coach, and you’ve just expended fifteen hundred calories in sand. Eat the pizza. And that’s an order.” It was thin-crust, while he generally preferred the chewier New York style, but Edison said later that—unlike the verboten one in January—it was truly the best pizza he’d ever had.

  The flood protection effort was a social enterprise, so perhaps it was to be expected that over that pizza Edison asked his bag-filling partner—a younger woman I’d be tempted to call a “girl”—back to our apartment for “a cup of coffee.” It was a long drive for coffee, so I should have known the real agenda, but ever since Edison’s weight gain I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t thought of him as remotely sexual. So I made something of a fool out of myself, hanging about the living room with the two of them well after the coffee no one wanted had cooled. Exhausted from the day’s labors, I was waiting impatiently for her to ask for a ride home, until I realized that they were waiting with considerably more impatience for me to go. Embarrassed, I went to bed.

  I woke stiff and in the first really bad mood since the welcome distraction of civic-mindedness began. The girl—Angie or something—was still here, and the fact that she’d come in our car so of course she was still here didn’t quell my irritation. She emerged from Edison’s bedroom with that languorous sense of territorial entitlement that intimate congress grants total strangers, however temporarily. Slender with lustrous enough chestnut hair, she still didn’t seem that attractive to me, and I’d an intuition “Angie” had volunteered in Cedar Rapids to begin with merely for bragging rights. That morning, she kept draping herself around Edison’s shoulders while he played the piano and I made coffee at a time of day people actually wanted to drink it. After gushing over my brother’s playing, she ran down a series of women’s-glossy dieting tips, when Edison’s intake was my department, thank you, and I found it a tad inappropriate that, having known this woman for less than a day, he had already spilled his guts about his history as a walking Lifetime documentary. He could have been a little more private.

  That evening, I felt sheepish that I hadn’t been friendlier, though this mild remorse was facilitated by the fact that Edison had refrained from bringing her back a second night. He evidenced some of the old swagger of his randy adolescence, and I was pleased to see it. “Shit, man,” he said, stretching beside the scale whose high tolerance he no longer required, “haven’t let anyone see me in the buff in ages. Can you believe it? She thought I was hot stuff.”

  “You are,” I said bashfully. “Barring a certain few years, you always were.”

  Looking back, considering how much the encounter boosted his confidence, I should have encouraged him to keep seeing the girl, and I don’t quite understand why I was so relieved at the time that he didn’t follow up.

  On June 13th, the Red Cross and National Guard decided we’d done what we could and it was time to clear out. Our dismissal was crushing. We didn’t want to give up, and if we were honest with ourselves we were having a wonderful time. Edison and I watched the river crest on local news back home, luxuriating in having electricity—unlike most of the residents we’d been forced to abandon. On news-helicopter footage, rooftops looked like lily pads. Later they estimated that the flood covered thirteen hundred city blocks. The mid-river island on which the Cedar Rapids City Hall sat was completely submerged, and the roof of the library we’d worked so hard to save barely rose from the gray, murky sea. Street signs poked an inch above the water, as if identifying roadways in Atlantis.

  Nobody involved in that mobilization likes to admit it, but most of our sandbagging didn’t do any good.

  I have a bittersweet memory of that summer. As the weeks went by, with nothing but stone silence emanating from Solomon Drive, it came home to me in a series of agonizing increments that Fletcher was serious—the most painful our anniversary in July, which my husband wouldn’t even acknowledge with a text. I wasn’t taking a break from my home life to coach my brother’s weight loss; I was separated, and lived in daily dread of a bailiff at my door serving formal divorce papers. At least Cody continued to treat me like her mother, making dogged visits and accompanying us to the movies. Though I discouraged her from playing up her father’s pining in my absence—“I’ve seen this series, sweetheart,” I abjured, “even the reruns”—she played the go-between anyway. She thought she was sly, but there’s only so subtle a fourteen-year-old gets.

  Commonly, in summertime Iowa comes into its own—the air musty with overturned earth, the corn rising by the day to tower by the roadsides, sweeping with alternating patches of bluer soy fields to the horizon. I associated this time of year with the happiest periods of my childhood, when Edison and I were ritually packed off to visit our paternal grandparents for a solid month. (So indelibly had Iowa in July been imprinted on my mind that my first experience of an Iowan winter was a shock. Before I moved here, I envisioned the Midwest as eternally hot, thick, and green.) My brother’s memories of those stays weren’t as bucolic as mine; he’d resented being put to work during his vacation, and when he got older he stayed behind in L.A. to haunt jazz clubs and practice his piano. But I loved giving the Grumps a hand on the farm. Having relished physical labor from an early age, I gladly fed their few hogs, mucked out the barn, and harvested flat beans in the beating sun.

  Yet that summer defied the season’s halcyon stereotype, and a desolate countryside mirrored the muddy sensation that daily sludged the pit of my stomach. Dismal tracts of our devastated local corn crop were taunting reminders that my life, too, was now a washout: lo, I was no longer a woman who, after a long, lonely young adulthood, had at last found herself a reliable, quietly passionate man with two animated, ready-made children—a woman who finally had a life—but a divorcée in waiting, entering middle age with my older brother for a helpmate. The rows of dead sticks that stubbled slick black fields painted a landscape of stunted promise, blighted hopes. Everywhere I looked I saw pointless destruction and ravaged domestic comity, the curbsides stacked with mottled couches and water-logged freezers, the region’s sanitation workers overburdened by all-too-tangible emblems of loss, resignation, and grief. Roadside vistas that June and July—the tarmac itself often cracked and caked, the gutters strewn with mashed litter and the mangled detritus of lawn furniture, windshield wipers, and jungle gyms, all uniformly muted by a putrid, diarrheal silt—reflected back at me the brown, sodden interior of my own head.

  In the very season of my discontent, the spoilage of my own Iowan idyll, Edison was cleaving to the land of our father’s with a new ferocity. The retreating floodwaters left a mournfulness in their wake that he inhaled like the aroma of fertile soil—for if mournfulness has a smell, it’s loamy, with that hint of corruption, like co
w manure. The sorrow in the air supplied my brother a density, a seatedness, a gravity and depth that contentment alone cannot provide.

  Why, he’d dropped altogether all those cracks about our nowheresville state and the crackers who dangled silver “bull’s balls” under the license plates of their jacked-up dually pickups, with GO HAWKEYES plastered on the bumpers. My brother wasn’t so far gone that he’d caught the local mania for U of I’s football team, but he’d started to delight in the easy pace of life here—the expanse, the serenity, and the space. He seldom mentioned New York, much less referenced any intention to return there. He used to fret at the quiet, but now savored the subtle surge of crickets, a rooster crow, the eh-eh-eh of goats. Rather than roll his eyes while checkout clerks at Hy-Vee chatted amiably about the popularity of a special on butter, he’d shoot the breeze with the bagger himself, still amazed that no one in the line behind us ever acted impatient. He no longer plied the grocery boys with a five-spot for loading our bags in the trunk, knowing they’d be insulted; a bit of buoyant banter en route to the car was all the payment they required. He was starting to see the point of people who talked to each other, even when there wasn’t always much to say, and he commiserated with displaced or financially devastated neighbors in a spirit that conveyed the flood hadn’t happened to them but to us. I no longer detected in him any hint of contempt or restlessness in this big, blank place, and I heard him more than once on the phone to Tanner defending my stepson’s home state, whose charms were rarely apparent to the young people who were born here. Honestly, I began to suspect that, as far as Iowa was concerned, Edison was a convert.

  With more energy on proper food—come July, I upped his daily intake to 1,200 calories—he grew more adventurous, checking out the Iowa City Jazz Festival and driving into the university town on weekends to sit in on jam sessions at The Mill. I often went with him, and was struck by how absolutely he declined to name-drop. When I’d tagged along to his gigs in New York, he’d schmoozed with the audience between sets, always managing to insinuate the fact that he was Travis Appaloosa’s son. These days, when he introduced himself he routinely stuck his hand out announcing his first name alone. He never mentioned the “heavy cats” he’d played with, either. He arrived like any old guy who happened to play the piano in his spare time, and as a consequence he knocked their socks off.