Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  His final weeks of tapering issued in a threshold shift more dramatic still. The loss of that last handful of pounds scooped oysters of flesh from his cheeks, chiseled his chin and nose, and dissolved the little overhang above his belt. Consequently, that wild keyboard smile consumed a larger proportion of his face, seeming larger, brighter, more dangerous. Geometrically, he retrieved the rhythms of his teenage years—his hips low slung, his thighs sinewy from running, his shoulders sharp. I knew he was dismayed by the excess skin that creped his torso, so that he wouldn’t leave his bedroom without a shirt, and I’d hinted that maybe we could have the slack taken up surgically if it continued to bother him. And he couldn’t do anything about the fact that his spine had compressed; he was permanently a couple of inches shorter. Be that as it may, during that final month he even moved differently, with the loping, double-jointed looseness with which he had sauntered the halls of Verdugo Hills High whistling “Summertime.” As December 6th drew close, my brother turned heads in the street again, and not because he was fat.

  So far I’ve played down the pleasures of narrowing my own mortal coil on the horizontal axis, not wanting to seem a petty slave to women’s glossies. But once again burning with wide-eyed admiration for my brother, well—that didn’t feel petty. Maybe it is impossible to inhabit your own achievements, because you get attached to the quest itself, its drive, its addictive amphetamine buzz and powering sense of purpose, so that any mission’s fulfillment feels like a loss, all that energy and direction replaced with a stillness within whose halo strivers rapidly grow restless. Yet it may be possible to glory in the achievements of people you love—in the fact that my brother’s beauty, always perceptible to me in some measure, was once more made manifest for everyone to see.

  He says he’ll come.” Closing our door behind her, Cody couldn’t contain her excitement. This time I’d had to use her as an interlocutor, since I’d had no confirmation that Fletcher read my emails or listened to my phone messages. And I’d promised my brother. “He wasn’t going to,” she said, “but I reminded him of that bet. You know, he’s a stickler.”

  “Yes, he’s always adhered to the letter of the law,” I agreed, already jittery, though the party was days away.

  “Yeah, but if the cat’s ‘a stickler,’ ” Edison noted, “I can’t weigh in two-hundredths of an ounce over one-sixty-three or no cake.”

  “Well, you can’t gain weight from reading,” I said. “Because we have to find a recipe—as evil as possible.”

  That evening we pored over the cookbooks I’d accumulated while living on protein powder, finally settling on “Chocolate Dump Cake,” which I quite liked the sound of. The name had an assaulting heaviness, a thunking quality, the kaboom of a colossal confection that would land on your lawn from the back of a truck. The following night, Edison brought home two rectangular baking pans so big that they’d barely fit in the oven.

  “Aren’t you going overboard?” I said. “You can’t expect Fletcher to consume an iced, two-layer sheet cake all by himself.”

  “He said ‘a’ cake. Didn’t say how big, man. Now who’s the stickler?”

  “But you’ll make him sick! Pukingly, violently sick!”

  Edison laughed. “Look. We can’t have all these folks over, serve a motherfucking gorgeous chocolate cake, and only let one guest have any. So, do I mean to horrify the living fuck out of him? Sure. But once he’s stuffed his fatuous face with a shit-eating piece, it’ll be open season.”

  Given that Edison had lived in Iowa for just over a year, I was surprised by how many people were eager to help him celebrate having successfully photocopied himself at 42 percent. All my employees said they wouldn’t miss our party for the world. Regulars at the Mill, a covey of students begged for invitations; they lionized my brother for his keyboard skills, with no idea he’d ever played at the Village Vanguard. A handful of acceptances came from functionaries with whom Edison would never have been on personal terms in other parts of the country: our landlord, a bank teller, a grocery bagger, a waitress at Java Joint, the guy at Barnes & Noble who special-ordered jazz magazines. Dr. Corcoran jumped at the chance to fête one of his rare success stories.

  In planning the menu for our party, Edison eschewed the fried and the sweet—with the singular exception of the Chocolate Dump Cake, whose execution demanded a tippling tower of butter packets, two dozen eggs, and so much baking chocolate that he was obliged to clean out more than one supermarket. Yet that first week in December he never let shopping or chopping get in the way of his daily run, whose length he’d increased to an alarming ten miles. Once he’d weighed in at 168, too, he’d spurned the scale each morning, and for two weeks the calendar went blank. Drama is hard to come by in this game, and he wanted his first weigh-in at or below his target to serve as the theatrical centerpiece of our occasion. Considering the stakes, and the big brown gooey gauntlet Edison was planning to throw down before his bête noire, I admired his gambler’s nerve.

  The day before, he wasn’t taking any chances. He upped his mileage to twelve (which was ridiculous—he limped back so tired that my brother the motormouth couldn’t talk), and that night took a double dosage of senna that kept him in the bathroom half an hour the next morning. After one cup of black coffee, he refused to eat or drink all day, though he was on his feet from the get-go, and I knew firsthand how much physical work was entailed in catering a party for thirty-five. Alas, all this self-denial doubled his consumption of cigarettes, about which I’d started to nag—but Edison said, “Look, babe. Something’s gotta give. One heroic transformation at a time, dig?” Oh, he’d never quit. My brother believed that paragons were “creepy,” and only those unfiltered Camels now separated him from Fletcher Feuerbach.

  I’d taken the day off from work to clean up, lay in drinks, arrange the rental china, and occasionally crack open a window to let out all that smoke. Unsure how one decorates for a Coming of Size party, I wrapped a festive tie around the neck of the scale and tucked a feather in its Stetson. I placed a brace of leftover BPSP envelopes in the clutches of the Pandora doll atop the piano. On the one living room wall that wasn’t covered in jazz icons, I tacked the voluminous pair of jeans we’d used on our snowman in February. Above them, I draped the shapeless cardigan in which Edison had habitually shambled on Solomon Drive. Then I rooted out my camera.

  “Cheese!”

  When Edison looked up from slicing mushrooms, I captured some of the old hunger, and not for french fries. His grin flashed with that voracity of times past, an appetite for life that mine could never equal. While the expectancy in his eyes must have regarded the party to begin in a few hours, this was also the face of the jazzman who had flown to Brazil, the south of France, Japan, who had stayed up until five a.m. tirelessly bashing keyboards in Manhattan jam sessions. Golden afternoon light softening the lines born of regret, obscurity, and disgrace, that photograph could almost be mistaken for a head shot taken in his room in Tujunga Hills, chin raised from his backpack as he prepared at seventeen for his seminal journey to New York City. Though I taped the printed-out eight-by-ten above the scarecrow of colossal clothes, the photo was so moving that the comedy I’d intended was lost.

  With the cooking dispatched, Edison’s computer pre-programmed with a tailor-made playlist—thick with inside jokes, like Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and Fats Domino’s “I’m Livin’ Right”—we dressed, our garments laid on our beds with all the solemnity with which one garbs the dead. In preparation for his ritual weigh-in, Edison had selected light fabrics—black slacks too thin for the season and a slithery cream short-sleeve striped in musical scores. I wore a matching cream-collared black dress, a present from Edison for my forty-second birthday the previous month that was shorter and more revealing than I’d ever have dared to wear the year before. We made a handsome couple.

  Fortunately, we had nearly an hour, just us two, before the guests were due at eight. I needed
to get my mind right before Fletcher arrived, and I wanted to give Edison his Official Trim Person present in private.

  Edison hefted the package. “Whoa!”

  “I know it weighs a lot, and you don’t have to wear it when you take your turn on the scale. But you’re going to be chilly in that flimsy outfit, with all those people opening the door. And”—I smiled—“I want to see you in it.”

  What he lifted from the wrapping had taken hours of online research to locate. “Man! This is enough to get me to believe in life after death! What did you do, track down some bargain-hunting hoarder at Box My Pad?”

  “It’s taken me a while to figure out where and when, but sometimes the application of a little money delivers.”

  As if donning the robes of a religious office, Edison whispered his arms through the lining, settled his shoulders into the cape, and raised the collar at the hugger-mugger tilt it had always assumed in New York. “Fuck me.” He smoothed his hands down the front and nestled them deep in the pockets, striding gingerly to the mirror in his bedroom. “I swear, Panda Bear, it’s the same fucking coat.”

  “It’s Italian. Given the price tag, the leather must have come from Kobe beef. But let me tell you, it was worth it. You look fantastic. You look like yourself.”

  “Was it worth it? I don’t mean just the coat.”

  “I have done one good thing. Maybe that’s what I want on my gravestone.”

  Edison embraced me with fig-soft leather, and for a moment it did seem like his reincarnated trench coat: it had the same smell. I don’t know how long we might have remained that way if the doorbell hadn’t rung.

  “Sorry I’m early.” Cody bustled in with a wrapped box, a sheaf of music under the other arm. “But I walked over, in case you need some help. Besides, I wanted to go over this riff I’ve been working up for the refrain of ‘The Boxer.’ You know, all those lie-la-lies sound kinda dorky, but the intervals have possibilities.” She dragged off her running shoes, and pulled a pair of dazzling high heels from her pack.

  “You’re going to play tonight?” I asked. Pre-Edison, Cody would never have performed for a crowd.

  “Of course! And Edison and I have been working up a duet. What else?” She slipped into the heels. “ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’!” She gave Edison a high five and stepped back. “Hey, you look fucking sharp, man! Hip threads! And that coat is the shit!”

  “Don’t look so bad yourself, sister.”

  I thought the slinky, rhinestone-decked cocktail dress a little grown-up for her, but then, I would. At least she still enjoyed a girlish impatience, insisting her uncle open his present right away: a fat, numbered, limited-edition Miles box set of twelve LPs, including a bio, photos, liner notes, and soft, heavy sleeves. Edison was delighted. If the underappreciated castoff she’d been so excited about tripping across at a yard sale wasn’t the same as the set he’d lost to that self-storage joint, he didn’t let on.

  “You’d better not have snuck any Mars bars, man,” she announced, sliding onto the piano bench. “ ’Cause I can’t wait to see my dad’s face plastered with fudge icing. Poor guy’s been on this raw food jag lately, and all I ever see him eat is carrots. Finally got him to admit his jaw aches. ”

  Now, over the years I’ve been forced to conclude that most celebrations don’t work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened. Speeches, applause, gift openings, presentations of plaques—somehow all these desperate gestures make the tribute fall only flatter, serve only to emphasize that an event has mysteriously failed to occur. I’m not sure what the problem is, besides a species-wide incapacity to seize the day, or a universal inability to anticipate that standing around with a drink in your hand is never going to be that great.

  Yet once in a rare while the stars align, and a company convened for a purpose will be fully present. If we neatly lop off the very end of that evening—and let’s do—Edison Appaloosa’s Coming of Size party was one of those nights. I can’t remember any other gathering that pulsed so with pleasure on another’s behalf. For let’s not forget that our guests did not congregate in a vacuum, but in a particular place at a precise point in time, and in the American state of Iowa early in the twenty-first century there was nothing folks admired more than dropping 223 pounds in a single year. It was one of those rare social circumstances in which guests greeted their host at the door with, “Hey, you look terrific!” and meant it.

  Most people arrived with food—lasagnas, Carlotta’s famous enchiladas, until we were running out of room on the barn-board table—and nearly everyone brought presents. Oliver, a handsome thirty-four-inch black belt pointedly lacking extra notches. Dr. Corcoran, a “World’s Best Patient” coffee mug. Novacek, alas, a book of two-for-one Pizza Hut coupons, on the premise that his scrawny tenant could now afford to splash out on garlic-butter stuffed crust. One of our bank tellers, who had herself tried every diet under the sun to little avail, produced a garish velour tracksuit that Edison wouldn’t be caught dead in, but he appreciated the nod toward his restored athleticism. Edison’s little fan club of students from Iowa City had discovered my brother’s discography online, and showed up with not only a top-shelf single malt, but copies of Edison’s own CDs that they wanted him to sign.

  We waited until after nine to bestow his present from the employees at Baby Monotonous. I was determined not to be distracted by the fact that Fletcher had still not shown up.

  “Look, man, I could see where I was headed.” Edison was holding court with the students beside the scale. “And it don’t matter if you do yourself in with smack, booze, or hot dogs. Coroner did the autopsy thought Bird was sixty years old, man. Poor fucker was thirty-four.”

  I clapped. “Listen up!” Cody finished off “Mrs. Robinson” with a flourish as the crowd cleared a space. “I’m sorry for this to be so predictable”—I handed over the box—“but we worried that if you didn’t get one, you’d be heartbroken.”

  Edison recognized the carton’s proportions; he’d packed enough of them himself. “What else? Edison Appaloosa,” he said before lifting the lid, “talking shit.”

  I’d given my workers a heads up about the trench coat—which Edison had kept on all evening—and they’d sewn a miniature in sumptuous black leather, with the same raised collar and tie belt. A cigarette was stitched between two fingers, in acknowledgment that expecting him to drop his last bad habit was a bridge too far. I was especially pleased with the hair, which knurled in dark-blond curlicues as if the doll had been electrocuted, and on our slimmest model looked cool and rock-star, just as on Edison’s slender frame his real hair no longer imparted that Little Lord Fauntleroy quality of the spoiled toddler. He pulled the ring:

  I was a heavy cat!

  I’ve played with some heavy cats!

  This Iowa trip is deep, you know what I’m sayin’?

  Metheny is jive, man.

  Wynton is jive, man.

  Jarrett is such a douche. Bley is where it’s at.

  Steely Dan ain’t nothin’ without Wayne Shorter.

  Where’s your ear, Panda Bear, that couldn’t be Ornette, it’s tenor sax!

  Trouble is I never played with Miles, man.

  Jazz education about followin’ the rules, jazz about breakin’ ’em, DIG?

  I lived on four envelopes of powder per day for six months. Beat that, motherfucker.

  These cornfields are the shit!

  Oliver had had a ball with the too-hip-by-half recording, but I’d had a disconcertingly difficult time writing the script. Though I’d thrown in the lines about the heavy cats and Miles as a nod to the boastful and sometimes bitter brother who was wheeled into Cedar
Rapids Airport the year before, Edison Take 2 neither habitually trotted out celebrity colleagues, nor incessantly bewailed that if he’d only managed to associate himself with his field’s ultimate icon he’d be a star. He no longer carped about not having been born black. While the Edison doll I’d have crafted a year before would have sneered at Iowan hicks, he’d recently remarked at the fittingness of referring to the Midwest as America’s “heartland” with a straight face. At Solomon Drive, he’d been a slob; at Prague Porches, craving busywork, he’d become a neatnik. Curtailing his verbal incontinence had introduced my brother to the big wide world of listening to someone else. After our late-night confessional dialogues, he was far less prone to broadcast a numbing barrage about Charles Mingus or Chick Corea as a substitute for saying what he felt. I was at a loss to explain it, but he’d dropped a great deal more than weight, as a consequence of which my revamped brother was a challenge to parody. But if his double was only so witty, it was only so insulting, too, and Edison loved it.

  The doorbell rang again, and my pulse womped. Everyone else was here.

  I’d spent an atrocious proportion of the previous six months muttering indignant diatribes to my estranged husband, and when Cody let fly something cutting about her dad I lapped it up. I was furious with him, walking away when all I was trying to do was help my own brother, and I could get pretty unattractively self-righteous on this point. I’d even worried that when he showed up I’d lose my temper and ruin the evening with a shouting match. We’d never staged scenes in public in the past, but I was bursting with a sense of injustice, and maybe it wasn’t only Edison who had changed.

  So it was a shock to open the door and melt. I’d forgotten how handsome he was—maybe not to every woman’s taste, but I found his Pinocchio pointiness appealing. He’d dressed in a nice shirt and slacks—respectfully, for Edison’s big night. His expression was anxious, his stance awkward. He wasn’t looking for a fight.