A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘What we should get him,’ Truman grumbled, ‘is a set of free weights, a nicotine patch, and a prescription for ala-puke, or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘And what we will get him,’ I said, ‘is a fifth of aquavit and tin of Three Castles. Unless you know five girls we could hire to descend on him at once with no clothes on. As I recall, he’s a fellatio fiend.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Truman took off his glasses.

  ‘That’s disgusting!’

  I smiled. Averil must say that’s disgusting about ten times a day. I bore down on some straggling ankle hairs, ah-mm, ah-mm. ‘You know Mordecai likes to talk smut.’

  ‘I certainly don’t,’ said Truman primly, caging himself in wire-rims again.

  The pine popped; I switched to my left leg. The hum of the epilator set a tremble in the air; the firelight flickered.

  Finally Truman looked over from his book, as if noticing my appliance for the first time. ‘How does that thing work?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I held it up, enticing Truman from his chair.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ He approached closer, and touched my thigh, once.

  As he stooped by the fire, his jeans rode above his dark socks. I snagged a few exposed hairs before he exclaimed, ‘Hey!’ and jumped back.

  It was like coaxing a pet from under a bed. ‘Try it.’ I handed him the Epilady.

  ‘I don’t need bald—’

  ‘Not on yourself, on me.’

  He traced the coil over my right calf in a deft circle. ‘That’s 119

  amazing!’ He tried another patch in the hollow between tendon and knee. I rested back on my elbows.

  ‘Corrie Lou’s getting cellulite,’ said Averil quietly.

  Truman glanced at his wife, and handed the appliance back with, I thought, a trace of regret.

  I had lived in Heck-Andrews just shy of three weeks by then, and though Averil had been by and large decent to me I couldn’t escape the feeling that she regarded me as a guest whose welcome was wearing thin. We were not overtly hostile, but our relationship suffered an absence; we were polite. Amid the formal kindness, there were lapses: Averil would bring out only two wine glasses, apologize, and fetch a third. In compiling my own absurdly short Christmas list, I regularly left Averil off of it, and when I forced myself to try and think of something to buy my sister-in-law I’d grow irritable and write down one more present for Truman instead. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we didn’t like each other; I don’t know what you call it when you have nothing against someone precisely except you wish they weren’t there.

  I told myself that Averil was simply not quite my sort. It was only at her behest we bought mild salsa for our corn chips; she wore pastels with high necks; she listened to Suzanne Vega and Janis Ian and still kept a teddy bear on her dresser. When we scanned listings of the oldie cable network, she rooted for Room 222, That Girl, and The Partridge Family. I think she was affectionate with my brother, responsible in her job, and technically quite bright. Nevertheless, Averil had an compliant intelligence. She rarely ventured an opinion she hadn’t read elsewhere, and when she did improvise was given to outbursts like why don’t all the governments in the world get rid of their weapons at once so there could be peace on earth. Fair enough, but she lacked a certain edge.

  We collided in the most puerile contexts, and keeping a mature head above it all didn’t come naturally to either of us. She liked her coffee weak, and when I brewed it strong and boiled water on the side to dilute her cup, she remained discernibly sulky and once claimed the watered coffee wasn’t the same. She was touchy about being the one to iron and fold Truman’s two dozen identical forest green workshirts, and had a peremptory way about her in the grocery store, when I’d been versed in Truman’s dietary

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  dictums since before those two met. If I ventured a new item in the cart, she didn’t put it back, but her countenance darkened. She drank skimmed milk, which I couldn’t abide, and acted as if keeping a quart of 4% for me was the worst sort of pampering. Just within my earshot she had started imitating my English accent, ‘We’re out of tinned tomahtoes,’ and I wished she’d do it to my face so I could tell her she wasn’t very good at it.

  ‘Might I drive?’ I enquired, as we three zipped jackets by the Volvo.

  Truman assumed the wheel. ‘Stiff clutch.’

  I remained standing. ‘I could get used to it.’

  He started the car. ‘You’ve made such a point of being accustomed to the left side of the road, I wouldn’t risk your careening into oncoming traffic whistling “God Save the Queen”.’

  I actually had to stop myself at the age of thirty-five from saying,

  ‘Can I have the front seat?’ That Averil always sat beside her husband shouldn’t have grated as much as it did. I swallowed, ducked in the back, and reflected that my return home was thus far having an alarmingly regressive effect. I had recently been tortured by cravings for Hostess Sno-balls, and during TV adverts would bark around on all fours in the sitting room and chew my brother’s trouser leg. No one in London would have believed it.

  I’ve wondered if everyone’s emotional make-up isn’t an eight-year-old’s, and growing up is merely learning to disguise ‘Gimme back my ball!’ as lawsuits over contractual ownership and ‘You cheated, I saw!’

  as high-minded editorial comment in Harper’s—the difference may be essentially linguistic. If so, of late my real primary school interior was laid bare; I couldn’t let the car business go. ‘Averil, don’t you ever drive?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Averil has trouble with the clutch, too.’

  ‘I never said I had trouble with the clutch—’

  ‘Can we please—?’

  Good lord, he sounded exactly like my father.

  We were going to buy a Christmas tree. The ensuing déjà vu was vertiginous. Traditionally this had been another Frolicsome Family Outing, which had reliably degenerated into my needing to pee and Mordecai hum-a-zooing ‘Yellow Submarine’ until I whined, ‘Fa-ather!

  Make him shut up!’ and ‘He’s pinching me!’

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  Mordecai would look all innocence, while Truman sucked at the blanket Mother was trying to break him of because he was too old for it—

  ‘Muu-dder! More-cai took my bembet!’ and Troom would start to cry.

  Father would lurch into a Minute Market car park and swing to the back seat. ‘If you kids don’t quiet down I’m turning around and we won’t have a Christmas tree this year, understand me?’ We were always

  ‘you-kids’. I don’t think my father liked having children.

  ‘Now, Sturges,’ Mother always purred, ‘this is supposed to be a special time. Let’s try to have fun.’ I must have been in university before I developed a normal concept of fun. I thought it was something you tried to have. Mordecai belting out ‘100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ to the very last verse while I gripped my crotch so tightly that my dress would be crumpled for school the next morning and Troom picked morosely at the bubble gum his brother had matted into his blanket—I thought this was ‘fun’.

  We’d believe that we were indeed in danger of having no Christmas tree, so I’d stop whimpering about a restroom, Troom would sniffle into his sticky ‘bembet’, and Mordecai would give us Indian rubs with impunity since we could not howl. By the time we got to the tree lot, I’d be so incapacitated by the demands of my bladder that I could barely walk pigeon-toed, while Mordecai dissociated himself a hundred yards away with an I’ve-never-met-these-people glower and probably snuck off for a smoke. Truman dribbled after my mother chattering in his windbreaker, red nose drizzling as she debated evergreens; Mother was oblivious to fiasco since I’m sure the evening was already lodged imperviously in her psychic freezer as a ‘special time’. My father, impatient to get the errand over with, regularly refused to let us buy candied apples like the other kids, guaranteeing the three of us would pout all the way home.

  The f
lashback was forbidding. My God, I thought. I was thirty-five, still stuck scrapping in this damned Volvo, shopping for a dead tree to commemorate the birth of a Messiah I didn’t believe in: having fun. So this was inheritance. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. Wish you were here.

  In fact, I rather felt they were.

  However, I couldn’t imagine my parents had had a ‘special time’

  except in the sense of especially tortuous: cramped with 122

  shrieking, brawling, piss-filled children, barely able to drive or hear themselves think and expending huge amounts of energy just trying to keep from hauling off and belting the little bastards until they couldn’t breathe. I am sometimes disconcerted why anyone has children volun-tarily when I consider what it must have been like to raise myself. If wilful pregnancy is not the result of a convenient poor memory, it must be to atone, to drive yourself to the same wit’s end to which you once drove your own parents. It was an ugly cycle of penance.

  On one point, however, I vowed to do better: if any little girl in my back seat was gripping between her legs and breaking into a cold sweat, I would pull over to a loo.

  I suspected the same string of lights was swinging in Truman’s head, so I leaned forward with my chin on his headrest and mused, ‘Would Father ever pull into a Texaco for you?’

  ‘Of course not. But I learned not to drink anything, not on car trips.

  No juice, no Coke. I’d get thirsty, but that was better than busting my gut.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Averil.

  ‘Our father,’ I explained. ‘He wouldn’t make rest stops unless he had to take a slash, and he could slurp down a thermos of coffee without a twinge. Whenever we’d ask it was, like, “Can’t you wait? We’ll be there in another two hours.”’

  ‘That’s horrible!’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t like being pistol-whipped or thrown in a frying pan or anything,’ I apologized; yet my efforts to keep our middle-class tribulations in perspective never made much headway, for childhood grudges are pernicious. ‘But it was painful and embarrassing. We had a hard enough time admitting we had needs in the first place, so that by the time I got around to tapping my mother on the shoulder I’d be about to explode. She’d lean over and whisper to my father and then I’d get this another-two-hours shit. Sometimes I cried. I suppose weeping was one way of getting a little liquid out of my body.’

  ‘He was Mister Rights for Everyone in Raleigh,’ said Truman. ‘But his kids didn’t have any rights. He didn’t give a damn if we had to piss.

  He didn’t have to.’

  By the trifling thou shalt know them. I saw my father’s whole character laid bare in our Volvo, speeding blithely past Sinclair dinosaurs, Shell scallops and Esso ovals while their keys to ladies’

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  rooms glistened in his dashboard. To date my memory of drives to my grandparents’ house is not of Dairy Queen breaks or jovial family sing-alongs, but of squeezing against the car door, my eyes shooting wide every time we hit a bump. Mordecai would tickle me, and I would seep.

  In my mind, my father’s refusal to stop at Texaco was part of his awesome power.

  Yet with the common enemy of the deceased, and the giddy freedom of being able pull over to a petrol station whenever we pleased, the three of us were allied for once, so for five golden minutes as the sun set over Taco Bell on Western Boulevard we had—we had fun.

  The tree lot was swimming with screaming kids, faces crimson with candied apple, and with such a mirror before us we were adult for once and picking the tree took five minutes. For the way home, Averil offered me the front seat.

  ‘Have you ever considered what they believed?’ I supposed as the car infused with cedar fumes. ‘That Jesus was the “son of God” and

  “born of the Virgin Mary”? Troom, our parents were intelligent people.’

  ‘ I believe in God the father almighty,’ he intoned, ‘ maker of heaven and earth…Can you finish it?’

  Truman and I tried to piece together the Apostles’ Creed. Two things impressed me: first, that though we had been forced to repeat this short passage every Sunday from the age of four, we couldn’t place where Pontius Pilate came in and the last line was a muddle. The credo had not got in. My second revelation, though, was that when we managed to patch together the first bit ( crucified, dead and buried, to be raised again on the third day and sit…) the hairs rose on my arms. Some germ of mysticism had successfully slipped under our skins, which helped explain why we had this bloody Christmas tree in the back of what was now our own car.

  ‘It’s bizarre,’ Truman concurred, ‘how two people with college educations could take part in gruesome ceremonies where tasteless wafers are the body of Christ and grape juice is his blood without taking serious drugs. But do you think maybe we were better off? Having parents with a catechism, even if it was crackers?’

  ‘Why? So we could ruin half of every precious weekend piping

  “Nearer My God to Thee” wearing patent leather shoes?’

  ‘I mean it gave us something to not-believe.’

  I grunted. True: our rejection of Presbyterianism was so richly 124

  indignant that apostasy became its own faith. But now the oppressors of our religious scepticism were dead. We could call Christianity

  ‘crackers’ and no one objected. It was a bitch to be a heretic without a foil.

  Then, belief in Jesus wasn’t that much of a stretch when the gods of our family were human enough. So in decorating our tree back home, we constructed a pagan memorial. Truman balanced my father’s gavel on an inside branch; we pierced a paperclip through the foetid sponge from the upstairs bath and bound it on top as the star. I folded my mother’s last grocery list, inscribed on the back with my family tree of allegiances, and balanced it on the evergreen like a greeting card. We dug up an opaque Ziploc from the kitchen that must have been washed twenty times, filled it with my father’s favourite cool blue mints and twist-tied it on a branch; though the candies had gone white and soft after two years in his desk drawer, their waft was still the sweet clear breath of our father when he would kiss us goodnight only when he thought we were asleep. Truman retrieved the photos that had been spread at our mother’s feet when she died, and these we attached with clothespins: her flashy smile basking up at my father’s squinting weathered face, which was faintly reminiscent of John F. Kennedy; his mortarboard at a cocky tilt as he accepted the honorary degree from Shaw University that meant so much to him because Shaw was black.

  Beneath the tree, we collected the coffee mugs he had shattered and glued so appallingly together again, and arranged jars of spiced peach halves like an offering to who we knew, even as young children, was the real Santa.

  The results were a bit motley—the branches sagged with mementoes not one of which was pure, each with a Janus-faced ambivalence down to my mother’s unconvincing smile. If we had made a shrine to our parents’ failings, it was also to our fondness for them, for it is people’s faults you cherish. As for anything our parents did properly, we were not remotely interested.

  Yet when we turned off all the lamps and plugged in the coloured lights, something rippled over me. Maybe my childhood was not such an unremitting disaster as that, for as the hair had risen on my arms when we successfully recited crucified, dead, and buried, the glow off that Christmas tree gladdened some part of me immune to our mockery of Presbyterianism. For the first time I was grateful we hadn’t skipped the holiday altogether. The parlour

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  poppled with those tiny rare moments when my mother was looping Palmer-method tags on last-minute packages, giving coy hints about their contents in the days that we cared what was inside, when my father would peer over his glasses with a brief in his lap and slyly suggest we have pumpkin pah, while Truman victoriously caught me in the act as I palmed one more five hundred from the Monopoly bank.

  Mordecai would be off in his own corner taping together his first Mobius strip, while I hoped that
my gyroscope might be one gift among the socks that he’d hold dear. The light from our commemorative tree was just low enough that in its subdued blur I could recall brief beats of time—though no longer—in which I did not chafe at my parents’ moralism, at Mordecai’s precocious recitations of college-level physics, or at the unsheddable devotion of my younger brother, but felt safe, round, whole; when my mother restrained herself from picking the calluses off her feet, and my father for once ceased his interminable droning about justice and made a joke. I wondered if you put all those moments together—the moments in which we truly were a happy family—they would constitute more than five or ten minutes, but I also wondered if those few minutes might arguably be worth suffering the balance, thirty-five-and-some years of crap.

  The following day Truman directed before he left for Preservation/NC

  that I was not to forget what I’d promised. He insisted the job be finished by evening in the same stern paternal tone in which I was once admon-ished to clean my room, except this time the room I was to clean was my mother’s. I’d volunteered to go through her things, keep what I liked and give the rest to Goodwill, and I’d put off the task for a week.

  When he returned late afternoon and I’d still not started, Truman threatened to forestall dinner until I’d at least made some progress. All right. Of all our sortings through, this was the task I most dreaded.

  Among the several sensations from which I shrank was my own cu-pidity. A mother’s trinkets, no matter how cheap or garish to the world, hold a kleptomaniacal allure to daughters. How many times had I watched, chin in hand, as she dabbed from bright pots I was not to play in, rubbed smoky perfume behind her lobes that only on the rarest occasions would she touch to my

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  own wrists, and clasp a doublet of magenta beads behind her neck that I was not to snitch from her dresser when she was out because they were ‘special’. I recognized that my mother’s possessions could not be that commercially valuable, yet I still wished to steer clear of them not because I didn’t want them but because I wanted them too much.