The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “I’m declaring that I will photograph any unnecessary destruction of the ‘premises,’ which I will report.” Though Florence had a rather unexamined idea of herself as brave, her hands were shaking. No goblets, however charming, were worth ten years in prison.

  As she groped for the best way of introducing an epiphany of “just remembering” some “old family trinkets,” they started in the living room, where the Asian pulled out all the leather cushions of Grand Man’s wine-colored sofa from Oyster Bay. It was the household’s only quality piece, and may have given the soldiers a misimpression of the family’s circumstances. After shoving a hand into all the crevices, the soldier made a display of pretending to find a lump, and slit one of the cushions with a box cutter, clearly carried for the purpose of ruining the citizenry’s most treasured appointments.

  “Is my government paying for that upholstery’s repair?” Esteban asked sourly.

  “That’s what they make duct tape for, sir,” the soldier said, pulling out stuffing.

  The gratuitous slashing of that sumptuous sofa suffused Florence with a distinctive rage: the suppressed, fist-in-mouth kind of fury that it isn’t in your interest to give in to. So, fine, she wouldn’t berate these soldiers, and she wouldn’t use profanity. However stiffly, she kept her body still; her bite was clenched, but her expression remained impassive. Yet now she could not bear to reward them by proving herself another lying “hoarder” and letting them waltz off with her beloved graduation present—with which she could easily picture these creeps toasting her degradation with cheap whiskey later this evening.

  The big one trod methodically over the floor, as if to check for hollow-sounding boards. But the thin wooden parquet was laid over flimsy framing, and it all sounded hollow. When they dragged the furniture about, the feet scored scratches in the flooring, and they didn’t put the furniture back. After removing the prints from the walls and piling them on the ravaged sofa, the soldiers knocked on the Sheetrock with a pretense of forensic diagnosis, though the walls all sounded hollow, too. They pulled books from shelves, flipping them with an air of incredulity that anyone would keep these things for anything but carved-out caches.

  When they moved to the kitchen, the big one emptied a canister of flour onto the counter and stirred, as if planning to make homemade pasta. The self-important Asian fellow pulled out the pots and pans and piled them on the floor, while his partner poured out the tub in the sink, splashing greasy gray water all over the clean cookware at his feet. They even went into the refrigerator, as if gold might keep better there; when Midas appeared not to have touched the vegetable drawer, they settled for two cold chicken legs. Out the back door, they went over Florence’s sad excuse for a garden with their metal detectors, getting terribly excited around the rosemary bush, the only herb that she’d been able to nurse through the winter’s biting cold. Hacking at the hard ground with her own shovel, they did manage to sever the roots of the plant, but the corroded key ring that had set their detector ticking, shinier versions of which the Chinese manufactured by the shipload, was unlikely to make a substantial contribution to settling the national debt.

  Once the defenders of the free world hit the second floor, Florence grew silently hysterical. Gripping Willing’s hand, she followed in horror as the duo made a beeline for the parental bedroom. The Asian emptied the jewelry box on her dresser, poking impatiently through broken watches, hair ties, ChapSticks, and a few rhinestone pieces from a brief bling period that Florence no longer wore. After tossing a confetti of socks, bras, and panties onto the floor—“You wouldn’t believe how many folks actually hide shit in their underwear drawer,” the big soldier said scornfully—they began to drag out all the spare duvets, blankets, and pillows from under the bed, unfurling as they went. Florence broke into a cold sweat, and her heart beat in her teeth. Maybe it wasn’t too late to make a “declaration” and escape a prison sentence. Before they reached the middle, she blurted out, “Wait, there is one thing, maybe I should have—”

  “No, Mom,” Willing interrupted, meeting her eyes with a shake of his head. “I checked that necklace you were so worried about. I even did a scratch test, with one of the free kits the cops were giving away on Jay Street. It’s only brass. I know he was trying to seem nice and everything, but Esteban was pulling a fast one on your birthday.”

  “What’s this about a necklace?” the lunk asked warily.

  Willing pointed at the junky-looking pile the Asian had amassed, then separated out a pretty collar with a tiny dangling opal. “That one.”

  The heavy soldier picked it up, bent the metal, and dropped it. “You’re right, kid. Piece of shit.”

  Right then, the Asian reached the middle-most blanket under the bed and unwound the wadding with a flourish.

  Nothing clattered out. Which was fortunate, since Florence was on the brink of throwing up, and flushing the toilet midday would have been a waste of water.

  As rapidly as the soldiers had rampaged into their house, they seemed to weary of the pillage. They tromped downstairs and let the screen door slam, leaving the front door open to ensure that the interior dropped another ten degrees.

  It didn’t make any sense. They’d sifted through the flour, but hadn’t poked one head into the attic, or taken even a cursory stroll through Kurt’s lodgings in the basement, when either space could have stored all the gold in Tutankhamen’s tomb.

  Lightheaded from adrenaline, Florence shuffled through the sofa stuffing to close and double-lock the door. As he pushed furniture back into place, Esteban was fuming around the living room to which she’d exiled him, lest his temper incite the soldiers to further destruction. Peering out the front window to confirm that the men had moved on to ruin someone else’s day, she turned to Willing, who had resumed his perch of choice on the third stair. When searching his face, she often found herself looking for clues as to who his father was. It was that bling period.

  “How did you know …?” she whispered.

  “I know about everything,” he said, “that I need to know about.”

  “It was you,” she said. “The creaks, while I was wrapping them up.”

  “You picked a roachbar hiding place.”

  “And you chose a different one.” He nodded. “Wasn’t that taking a big risk?”

  “Not if it was a good place. Mom. Think about it. All these houses. All the closets. All the floorboards and boxes. When stuff made of gold is so small. It’s impossible. The house-to-house searches are ridiculous. Except not really.”

  “Except not really.”

  “They’re trying to scare you. If they scare you bad enough, they don’t have to find it. You’ll give it to them. Even with you: it almost worked.”

  “¿Qué estás conspirando?” Esteban said, pausing in his reshelving of splayed Steinbecks. “Tenemos mucho trabajo aquí.” He and Willing often chattered together in Spanish, in which Florence was less fluent than her son, and the lingual bond bred a distinctive intimacy. But Florence and Willing generated an intensity that even a live-in boyfriend of five years couldn’t rival, and Esteban sometimes seemed jealous.

  “Es mejor si no lo sabe,” Willing said.

  “You going to tell me where you’ve stashed them?” Florence asked quietly.

  “No. It’s better you don’t know, either.”

  “So when those boomerpoops come back I’ll be petrified no matter where they look.”

  “They won’t come back,” Willing said confidently. “The government will figure out that they aren’t scaring enough gold out of people to pay the soldiers and policemen to do the scaring. The government can’t borrow money anymore. For now, that means they won’t waste it.”

  “For now. You’re such a weird boy.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. But yes. For now. Later there’s going to be a different problem. The government will have lots of money. But it won’t be worth anything. Which is the same as having no money.” He didn’t often, but Willing smiled, sli
ghtly. He seemed pleased with himself.

  “Kiddo, a little internet is a dangerous thing.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “A little internet is immense dangerous. A lot of internet is dangerous in a different way. Dangerous to other people. Not to you.”

  At the time, the Army raid had seemed high drama. In short order, there was grander theater to be found in the grocery store.

  Sunday afternoons, Florence laid in supplies for the week, Willing wheeling the rickety metal cart to drag the haul home. A few years before, they’d often strolled a block and a half up to the commercial drag on Church Street to, say, pick up a bargain baggie of cinnamon sticks from a street vendor for two bucks and take in the bustle of blazing fabric in which busty women from Jamaica were clad, but lately they didn’t bother with the detour. Now that the enterprises had been replaced by Pilates gyms, yoga parlors, and pet groomers, Florence actually missed the check-cashing outfits, African hair-braiding salons, pawn shops, and candy stores with three sticky sour balls stuck at the bottom of a single jar that were obviously fronts for dealing cocaine. The shaved-ice carts on corners long before cleared off, with their lurid syrups of cobalt, chartreuse, and hot pink, the area had been literally drained of color.

  Naturally, she carried more cash to the supermarket as the years went by, what with routine inflation, crop failures, energy price spikes, and the relentless rise of demand from Asia. Her modest cost-of-living adjustments from Adelphi never reflected the steep increase of her expenditures on food.

  But this was different.

  Oh, make no mistake, by Christmas, Florence had learned to ignore any merchandise that was imported. Their family was already accustomed to doing without fripperies like Greek olives, Italian Parmesan, Japanese rice vinegar, and even Mexican dried chilies (to Esteban’s dismay). Soon the imports disappeared from the shelves anyway. According to Brendan, their neighbor the investment banker (former investment banker; the entire financial industry had melted overnight), the country’s international trade had come to a virtual standstill. Exporters couldn’t deposit bancors in American banks but had to employ clumsy intermediaries offshore. With capital controls still in place, importers had to get every transfer of dollars abroad approved by the Department of Commerce, which was overwhelmed. Yet by February something was going funny with domestic goods.

  “I specifically remember buying a cabbage for twenty dollars in October,” Florence told Willing, hefting a poor specimen of same. “This is smaller and crappier, and it’s twenty-five dollars. From the same store. Do the math: at that rate, what will a cabbage cost next October?”

  “Forty dollars,” Willing said readily. “But never mind. I’m sick of cabbage.”

  “Well, so am I! But look around you. What else are we going to buy?”

  For an urban grocery, Green Acre Farm on Utica Avenue was well stocked, having been given a flashy makeover after the watercress-and-wasabi set began systematically displacing the Caribbean immigrants who previously dominated the neighborhood. But now the piles of zucchini ($24/lb.), 7 oz. bags of spinach (formerly 10 oz.; $15 each), and snap peas ($31/lb.) might as well have been museum exhibits. Florence settled on a ratty bunch of kale ($18) and the lone bag left in the quick-sale section, a brown-tipped head of Boston lettuce she didn’t especially want.

  By April, that cabbage was ahead of schedule. It was $30.

  Florence’s fellow shelter employees were obsessed with the cost of meals. Though masking-tape labels on brown-bag sandwiches in the staff-room fridge bristled with exclamation marks, filching grew common; Selma decked a cleaner cold over a bologna on rye. And the topic of fast-food prices was incendiary. They competed on breaks over who could cite the most outrageous markup of the week. “Thirty-five forty-nine for a chicken and bacon wrap at Subway!” Mateo reported. “Threw the bag at the lady and walked out. Said she must think I Howard Buffett or something, and Buffett don’t eat no wraps.”

  “Notice Taco Bell chuck the plastic menu behind the registers?” Rasta said. “Now it all digital. So they can raise the price of the enchilada/tostada combo every week without climbing a ladder.”

  Her pantry frugally stocked to begin with, Florence was hard-pressed to know where to economize. They ate no prepared foods, and little enough meat that she feared for her hair. Strictly speaking, the store-brand dry dog food was an indulgence, but Willing would have scraped his own plate into Milo’s bowl rather than let the spaniel go hungry. So she stopped buying fresh herbs, and spurned condiments. Sadly, she foreswore ice cream. She made Willing eat cooked rice with milk for breakfast instead of corn flakes, and bought white long-grain rather than the more wholesome brown rice because processed grains were, however insensibly, cheaper. You’d think there was a limit to how much pasta a person could bear, but apparently not.

  Compounding the crisis, her flexible-rate mortgage had risen two solid points, and to cover the payments she should really raise her tenant’s rent. Letting out the basement was illegal; the neighborhood was zoned for single-family occupancy. Having signed no formal lease, Kurt relied on her good graces not to boost his rent by caprice. Thus far he’d kept up with his payments, but she worried about his part-time job at the florist’s. In this economy, if there was anything that people could live without more readily than periwinkles she would like to know. Though she didn’t think of herself as a soft touch, the prospect of asking for money he couldn’t possibly spare was hateful.

  One Sunday afternoon in May, they made their traditional trip to Green Acre Farm; now that they purchased so little, they left the cart at home. On the weekly shop they’d usually walk the dog, but Willing insisted on leaving Milo at home as well. He claimed that tying the mutt outside the store risked an unscrupulous passerby getting sticky fingers of the most grisly sort: “Someone might eat him.”

  Florence was further nonplussed on their return journey when Willing said, “I saw that notice you left on the dining table. Your mortgage payments have gone up. This could be a problem.”

  “Look, buddy—not only is that my business—”

  “It’s our business. Mine and Esteban’s and Kurt’s. We live in the house, too.”

  “When I was your age, I didn’t even know what a mortgage was.”

  “I told you: I know what I need to know. Maybe when you were fourteen you didn’t need to know about mortgages.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to worry”—ever a wasted admonishment—“but, yeah, it’s a bit of a problem.”

  “Interest rates rise with inflation. Your mortgage payments will keep getting stiffer.”

  “And why’s that, Mr. Expert—?”

  “Nobody wants to lend good money and get paid back with crummy money.” Willing’s bored monotone implied this was obvious.

  “But there’s always some inflation. Interest rates don’t always go up because of it. In fact, we need inflation. The alternative is supposed to be sort of terrible.”

  “That’s what they want you to think.”

  One of her few concerns about her only child was that he inclined toward smugness. “All right. What. Since I’ve heard we need regular inflation, like at least 2 or 3 percent, my whole life.”

  “I know you have. You’ve been brainwashed.” He sounded so cheerful. “We could easily get along with a small, steady, predictable rate of deflation. Inflation is a tax. Money for the government. A tax that people don’t see as a tax. That’s the best kind, for politicians. But inflation isn’t inevitable. Starting in 1300, the British pound pretty much maintained its value for six hundred years. And that was during the Empire, when English people practically ruled the world. Great Grand Man said what’s happened to the pound is a ‘tragedy.’ All these expressions we have, they’re from that currency: In for a penny, in for a pound. Penny wise and pound foolish. Even the word sterling. It means ‘excellent’ and ‘valuable.’ But the actual money, he says, is now ‘a joke.’ That’s because of inflation. I told Great Grand Man that I thought when you
r money is a joke, then people think you’re a joke. And now the dollar is a joke, too.”

  “Do you feel less valuable as a person because the dollar is less valuable?”

  “In a way. I haven’t worked it out yet. But what’s going on may not only have to do with what we can buy. It may also have to do with how we feel. Like, smaller. Maybe I feel smaller. You might not realize it, but maybe you feel smaller, too.”

  “I feel smaller because with the cost of groceries, I’m losing weight!” It wasn’t a boast. Florence was under no illusion that she needed to slim down, and the wan quality she met in the mirror expressed the very sensation of becoming less substantial that her son seemed to share.

  “So,” Willing introduced jauntily, “do you think now that we’ve bribed the Chinese with all that gold they’ll leave us alone?”

  “I think Beijing got what they wanted. Even if the handover was embarrassing for the United States.”

  “Great Grand Man says unless the gold was used to go back to a ‘modified gold standard’ instead, or to buy into the bancor, giving it away doesn’t matter much. Just sitting there, he said, it was ‘merely pretty.’”

  “Well, I sure don’t miss it,” Florence said.

  “I don’t mind Spanish. But I don’t want to have to learn Chinese. I’ve never liked the sound of it. Too high pitched. Too up in the nose.”

  “The Chinese aren’t going to invade New York, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Maybe not with an army,” Willing said. “But haven’t you seen the packages on the news? They’re all over Midtown. In Saks, and Lord and Taylor. At Tiffany’s, there’s a line of Chinese out the door. Along with some Koreans, and Indonesians, and Vietnamese.”

  “They can get good deals here. It’s the exchange rate.”

  “I know,” Willing said scornfully. “I hate it when you tell me things I know. I just meant—there are lots of different ways to take places over.”

  “You have to be careful, talking like that. You don’t want to sound racist.”