It was a bit wicked: Avery rather enjoyed watching her husband get pushback from a fourteen-year-old kid. He’d trained their elder son to be a voluble mini-me, but Willing hadn’t memorized the same script. Oh, no doubt her nephew had no idea what he was talking about—patchy knowledge could be worse than clean ignorance, and there was no more blind a zealotry than that of the autodidact—but he was doing a remarkably good job of ruffling Lowell’s oft-preened feathers.
“When your country has its own currency, son,” Lowell said, “you’re not obliged to measure your gains in comparison to another currency. It’s a closed system.”
“It’s only a closed system because the United States is barely participating in world trade,” Willing said.
“We’re engaged in a protracted tug-of-war over which currency in the world will reign supreme,” Goog said. “It’s a showdown between the dollar and the bancor.”
“You don’t call it a showdown,” Willing said evenly, “when there’s no contest.”
Two years his cousin’s senior, Goog wasn’t giving ground. “The dollar is a historied currency that’s stabilized the international economy for over a century, Wilbur. The bancor is an upstart pretender whose constraints are unworkably strict. We just have to hold our nerve. After all—look at what happened to bitcoin.”
“Historied?” Willing said. “The dollar’s history is of becoming systematically worthless. A pile of paper versus promissory notes that can be exchanged for wheat, oil, gold, and rare earths? I know what I’d want in my wallet.”
“It would be treasonous to have bancors in your wallet, Wilbur.” At first the misnomer Goog contrived that afternoon had seemed affectionate. Perhaps not. “The bancor will go down in flames. You’re the kind of credulous schmuck got stuck with trunks of Confederate bills at the end of the Civil War.”
“I’m credulous?” Willing shot a withering glance at Lowell before leaning toward his cousin. “Who’s staying at whose house?”
“Boys!” Avery and Florence said at once.
Florence cleared plates, and Avery leapt up to help. She was mortified her kids had scarcely touched their meal—yet still more mortified when, rather than scrape the uneaten food into the garbage, her sister stored the remnants in a glass refrigerator container. The practice was unsanitary!
When they returned with what used to be a half-gallon of ice cream, Goog and Bing really shouldn’t have asked for a third scoop. Willing demurred from having any. Avery refused to believe he didn’t want it. Twenty ounces would not feed ten people.
Kurt was opining earnestly to Savannah, “See, Republicans can’t blame both evil foreign powers and a supposedly unqualified president—”
“Who cares what Republicans do?” Savannah looked so bored she was limp. “That’s like worrying about, you know, Zoroastrians.”
“Know who really can’t afford for the Republican Party to get sucked into the bowels of the earth?” Nollie said. “Democrats. When you’re permanently in power, everything is your fault.”
Nollie delivered verdicts with a last-word authority that made Avery want to kill.
“You also get credit,” Florence said. “Like for changing Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments from annual to monthly. That’s made a huge difference to our parents, and to Grand Man and Luella.”
“Which Republicans fought tooth and nail,” Kurt said.
“Republicans want to cut Medicare, of all things!” Florence said passionately. “To curtail unemployment benefits! Trim the Medicaid rolls! What kind of platform is that? No wonder they were slaughtered in the midterms.”
So the old picket-line Florence was still in there somewhere; ineffectual railing against injustice wore Avery out. She vowed never to let slip here that she’d ever voted Republican, even if right now that meant shoving a fist in her mouth. Maybe it was fortunate there was so little wine.
“It’s the usual GOP austerity blunder,” Lowell said. “Because this is a time to pump up government expenditure. Invest in infrastructure, like a second New Deal. Reinvigorate America’s industrial base, and reduce the need for imports.”
It occurred to Avery that her husband needed to get out more. His familiar economics platitudes failed to connect with the rampaging crowds on the Mall, the encampments on the Potomac, the numerous cars on the interstate on the trip to New York with mattresses and bundles of clothing lashed on top, like a modern-day Grapes of Wrath. She had the same sensation listening to press conferences from the White House. The administration went through the motions of being the American government, and saying the things that American officials say, but the exercise had an air of imitation—the studied intensity of tots who cook pies with mud.
“By the way, everybody, Friday my mom gets paid,” Willing announced. “That means we go shopping. Right away.”
“What’s the hurry?” Lowell asked.
“By the next paycheck, prices will be higher.”
“A couple of weeks can’t matter that much,” Lowell said. “Aren’t you being a tad theatrical, kiddo?”
“Obviously,” Willing said, “Aunt Avery buys the groceries in your family.”
“That’s ri-ight!” Avery sang. “And everything e-else!”
“Prices go up every week,” Willing said, “and sometimes every day. And it’s not predictable. Some products stay the same, and then suddenly the cost of Ziploc storage bags will double. We don’t use them anymore. We use glass.”
As Goog, being a guest, went first in the upstairs bathroom, Willing stacked the unassailable facts like building blocks before him: (1) According to this country’s customs, insofar as it continued to manifest a unified culture of any sort, caring for family was an obligation. The ties that bind might have frayed over the years, but they had not yet snapped. (2) Whether you “loved” each other was immaterial. (3) The Stackhouses had nowhere to live. (4) The basement could not accommodate mattresses for all five members of that family. (5) If everyone had to make sacrifices, Willing had to make sacrifices, too. That meant the fact that he found Goog’s invasion of his small second-floor kingdom insufferable was so irrelevant that it didn’t even get a number.
This being “his” room was a mere conceit, perhaps one he should be too old for. His mother owned the house. He had permission to sleep here, and now his mother had given his cousin permission also. But he had cherished a door he could close, as well as the protocol, however artificial, that for others to open it they had to knock first. Solitude was vital for his research. That sounded pretentious. So be it.
His dislike for Goog was thin, and so did not provide much entertainment. The boy’s body was rounded. Not heavy, but the limbs had no articulation, no indentations and no sharpness. Everything he said he got from somewhere else. Which made Willing worry that he, too, was derivative. Perhaps he instinctively recoiled from another kid who recited received wisdom because he himself did the same thing. Willing did, of course, pride himself on triangulating. But even triangulation could have been another idea that Willing had lifted from elsewhere. He would think on this. Then he did think on this. To conclude that this was not a time when originality was of the slightest importance.
Willing did resolve to give his mother no grief. Yet he was unable to make himself want his cousin in his room because open-armed hospitality would be convenient. The clothing and toiletries in the splayed suitcase had nowhere to go, creating disarray where before there was a system.
When his cousin lumbered back from the bathroom with a glare, it was the new roommate’s mammalian physicality that was hardest to take: the reek of his socks when he took off his shoes, the sourness of his breath because Goog was clearly one of those idiots who only brushed his teeth in the morning, the diaper look of his briefs and having to turn away to keep from seeing a peek of hair behind the fly. The revulsion was animal. Willing had the unpleasant impression of having traded in Milo for a bigger, dumber pet that wasn’t even housebroken.
Willing lay rigidly on
the very edge of the mattress, atop the spread with a flimsy throw from the sofa downstairs, abdicating the rest of the bed. They didn’t talk. Goog appeared to resent his own impingement on Willing’s space as much as Willing did. But then, Goog didn’t like his cousin, either. Willing wondered if this commonality was sufficient basis for a working relationship.
When his wife proposed their first contribution to the Darkly budget the next morning, Lowell thought the amount insane. Fine, make a gesture of gratitude, but acting too extravagantly indebted effectively increased the debt. Besides, he was grumpy. His back hurt from the soft mattress, and he missed their 650-thread-count sheets. The pillows here were flat. They had no privacy, necessitating a T-shirt and boxers when he’d slept in the buff since he was twelve, and with restless children snoozing on both sides, he’d no clue how he and Avery would ever have sex. Upstairs, nothing to eat but toast—no eggs, no bacon, no semblance of coffee, not even a 90 percent barley blend. He sometimes had trouble tolerating even the company of his own family, and now he’d wake daily as if attending a chaotic conference whose invitations had been indiscriminate. There weren’t enough places to sit. So “breakfast” entailed standing in the kitchen getting crumbs on the floor. He dove back downstairs.
The first order of business was another search for open academic positions. He’d originally limited himself to the top-flight schools where he belonged: the Ivies, of course, the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT. But he’d have to cast a wider net, maybe stooping to Emory or Chapel Hill, where they could sit out the downturn in agreeable enough faculty housing and at least pour themselves a decent-sized glass of wine. Before long, the re-emergence of orderly market forces was bound to include renewed appreciation for classical Keynesian economists. Restore a steady, predictable growth in GDP and say good-bye to gold-bug losers like Vandermire—currently under the ludicrous misimpression that clinging to candlesticks as a rational medium of exchange had been vindicated by the bancor—and incendiary firebrands like Biersdorfer, his field’s street-corner evangelist screaming, “Repent!” Lowell rejected his former chancellor’s disparagement of his discipline as not being a “hard science,” but it was an insecure science, whose practitioners, in the grip of hysteria, readily lost touch with fundamentals.
“What?”
Avery folded her arms before his makeshift desk. “I would like you to go with Florence to the grocery store.”
“You don’t need my help carrying bags if you take the car.”
“Not for your powerful biceps,” she said, with an insulting edge. “You claim to be interested in economics. And you said what I suggested we give Florence was way too much. So go ahead. Do fieldwork.”
“Maybe another time.”
“Right now. I’m not spending another day in this house without demonstrating that we’ll carry our weight.”
She remained so infuriatingly adamant that he relented. He’d make short shrift of the stupid shopping trip. Women could make such a to-do about a simple stocking up. At least if he went along he could ensure that tonight’s evening meal included more than an ounce of chicken. He could grab a six-pack, and a few bottles of Viognier—although if all six adults matched his own average consumption, they’d go through a case every four days. All this sharing was for chumps. He’d have to send Avery out separately to install a private stash.
The most off-putting aspect of the errand was being thrown into the company of his sister-in-law, whom he didn’t know quite well enough to firmly like or dislike, and Lowell preferred such matters settled. Despite her worthy calling, Florence exhibited a hard quality, which made her difficult to read. He vaguely associated benevolence with idiocy, but this shelter employee who’d squandered her studies on environmental policy wasn’t the schmaltzy pushover you’d expect.
Yet after last night’s trying dinner conversation, Lowell had rounded on a firm opinion of her kid—a smartass pipsqueak who apparently fancied himself a fiscal fortune-teller. Sure, like Goog, the boy was precocious. But having been precocious himself, Lowell was never wowed by teenagers who could recite the periodic table of elements or whatever. He was on to them. Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed—since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned. Worse, with application, less glibly gifted peers often caught up with or overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meantime the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work. That was what he was always drilling into Goog, or had done before his elder son was tragically thrown to the leones at Roosevelt High.
But this Willing kid had slathered on an extra level of crapola, and unless his performance the previous evening was a one-off display to impress visiting relatives, Lowell could be throttling the little bastard within the week. The boy glowed with divine inspiration, as if he had a personal psychic hotline to the late editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal. Unoccupied while Avery helped clean up, Lowell had studied his nephew after dinner: He was too comfortable being silent. He had a tendency to stare, and didn’t embarrass when you caught him. He did nothing a lot—and he never seemed lost in his own world or mindlessly vegged out; he was present, he was right there. When he did talk, as he had over that wretched couscous casserole, he asserted himself with an untoward conviction that he could not possibly have earned, and he displayed a doggedness, a staunchness, that he must have come by from his mother. He’d been difficult to rattle, and didn’t insult easily either; for a kid that age to be able to hide so well that you’d hurt his feelings was unnatural. But really, where did that boy get off, spouting all that economics drivel? Someone was feeding the kid lines.
So it irked Lowell inordinately that the squirt was coming, too.
“Do we have a list?” he asked at the wheel of the Jaunt.
“It’s pointless to have a list,” Willing said from the backseat, though Lowell had asked Florence.
“I find a list keeps you from getting home and realizing you forgot the Parmesan,” Lowell said. “And it reduces impulse buying—”
“There will be no cheese,” the Oracle foretold, as if incanting the Old Testament. “It keeps too well. And there will be nothing but impulse buying.”
“With so many shortages,” Florence explained, “a grocery list ends up being a torturous reminder of everything you wanted and couldn’t find.”
It boggled Lowell’s mind that this neighborhood was supposed to be up and coming, or even up and come. The streets sponsored some of the ugliest residential architecture he’d laid eyes on: poky, improbably narrow rectangular units, some brick, some stone-effect siding, some curling tarpaper, with painted iron grille doors, striped aluminum awnings, and front yards the size of Parcheesi boards. Gentrifiers had extended forward with closed-in, skylighted porches, but no amount of home improvement could disguise the deep dumpiness of the neighborhood’s very soul. Original residents were savvier about how to decorate in keeping with the East Flatbush spirit: with plastic flowers, plaster dwarfs, flamingoes, and rooster-topped weather vanes.
At Green Acre Farm—ill-christened, for Utica Avenue was a desolate wasteland of tire and auto-repair shops, without a blade of grass in sight—the parking lot was packed, and he was lucky to find a space when someone pulled out. Inside, the supermarket had the atmosphere of a military encampment where hostile powers had called a wary, temporary truce. Shoppers gripped their carts with white knuckles and never left them unattended, like troop transporters that might otherwise be commandeered by the enemy. They shot sidelong glances but never met one another’s eyes, preferring to peer pryingly at the contents of other carts. Some carts were covered in tarps, as if the nature of a pantry haul were a state secret. Customers spoke in hushed, guarded tones. Sent on sorties three aisles over, children undertook their missions with the gravity of carrying coded messages to the front lines.
“My God, Willing, they’ve got eggs!” Flo
rence whispered. “Quick!”
Willing serpentined the traffic jam, returning triumphantly with a half dozen.
“We’re buying for ten people,” Lowell objected. “Can’t we get more than six?”
“Limit of a half-carton per party,” Willing said. “And they’re under guard.”
“Yeah, why’s there so much security?” Uniformed personnel were stationed in every aisle. To Lowell’s astonishment, the burly men were armed.
“The shoplifting is unbelievable,” Willing said. “Everyone at school brags about slipping cans of baked beans into their coat linings, even with the guards and cameras.”
Intrigued, Lowell ambled off to explore. He was accustomed to expansive American emporiums packed floor to ceiling with enticements, where the main challenges were to keep from overstocking because you forgot there were already six cans of tomatoes back home, to avoid chips and chocolates that would thicken your waistline, and to resist falling into a paralytic stupor while choosing between forty-five flavors of soup. But here, whole chunks of the displays were missing, the shelves bare. Remembering Willing’s remark that cheese “keeps too well,” he picked up a pattern: dried pulses, grains, frozen foods, and canned goods—particularly cans with meat, like chili, Vienna sausage—were the sections consistently ravaged. For those products that were available—canned grapefruit ($19.99) did not seem much in demand—reprinting the shelving’s price tabs must have become too much trouble, and many of the labels had been scratched out and scrawled with ballpoint corrections half a dozen times.
“What’s with the run on nonperishables?” Lowell asked when he relocated his party. “Everyone’s gone all Jarred, preparing for the End of Days?”
“The hoarding has begun,” Willing intoned portentously.
“Why do you say it that way?” Lowell didn’t hide his irritation.
“It was inevitable. I tried to get my mom to start stockpiling months ago. She wouldn’t listen. Now it’s much harder to buy twenty bags of flour. They have rules. Not that you can’t get around them. Some kids at school spend their weekends going to different stores all over Brooklyn, buying one of this and one of that. Which is how you beat the maximums.”
The Mandibles Page 22
