A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘All right.’ I tossed a potato in the sink. ‘Did you enjoy earnest evenings with Mother? Be honest.’

  143

  ‘Of course not, and that’s the point!’ He threw down the knife at last.

  ‘Do you realize what it was like here last year? Mother had volunteered to pay your fare, and you said you’d rather spend the holiday with your flatmates. Did Mordecai stop by? When he lived ten blocks away?

  Not one phone call! So Averil and I went out and spent three hundred dollars on a bunch of presents she didn’t need because no one else bought her anything. You didn’t, did you, not even a little package of shortbread or a souvenir from Buckingham Palace. She’d have been touched by trash, Corlis, some stupid trinket. You didn’t even send a decent letter, did you? A postcard! Which arrived, as I recall, in the middle of January.’

  ‘The end of January,’ Averil contributed.

  ‘So we spent last Christmas Eve looking at slides of their travels with Mother’s voice quavering, getting so puddly she couldn’t focus and the ten million shots of ANC worthies kept wobbling into blurs. We heard, again, about how they met in the Young Democrats and how respected Father was and how Jesse Jackson came to his funeral. We made her dinner and cleaned up and wouldn’t let her help, though that was mostly to get away for at least a few minutes, which didn’t work because while I was sudsing glasses she’d droop over my shoulders and thank me for being the one kid who seemed to care and she’d cry. I may have wanted to hit her, but I didn’t hit her, did I? You hit her.’ Truman was hyperventilating.

  ‘I had friends and a career and I lived in another country! That’s what parents bargain for. They do not expect you to stay home until you’re fifty-five, making repairs to the stoop.’

  ‘Then what are you doing now? Except I don’t notice you making repairs to the stoop.’

  ‘I’m taking a little time to work out what to do next. Considering you wasted ten years driving a bloody hardware truck in circles for your in-laws while you decided what to do with your life, I think I’ve earned a few weeks of slack. That is, if you have decided. If studying philosophy isn’t more navel-gazing procrastination. Fucking hell, you’re one to talk.’

  That did him. I was regretful—I was sorry. He looked at his big hands with his shoulders slumped. I was glad I could still make him cry. ‘I thought—’ His chest lurched. ‘Christmas was hard, Corlis. I was tired, she was driving me crazy. I thought you might

  144

  come home for me. You didn’t bother. All you cared about was your boyfriends.’

  Despite the plural dig, I said, ‘I am sorry, Truman,’ and this time the apology felt different; I meant it. ‘Now—’ I poured him a medicinal glass of wine, ‘—Mordecai will arrive any minute. Get this down you, and then some. You’ll need it.’

  Truman had not swilled nearly enough antidote when the kitchen table trembled as a military motor gunned outside. Mordecai managed to drive a vehicle that actually sounded like a bulldozer.

  When he clumped in the back door with three of his workmen in tow, I noticed that his manner had altered. Ordinarily he had acted detached here, the avuncular visitor, but now he waltzed in with a feudal swag just like my father after a long day, who would slide his briefcase on the table and make for the freezer, to shovel ice cream straight from the carton before dinner. Mordecai now walked in this house as if, well, as if he owned it.

  ‘Yo, you guys got something to drink?’

  I scanned all four of them, and felt a little economic sinking that not one of them had arrived with a bottle of anything. Mordecai beelined for the cabernet on the counter, grabbed a gas-war tumbler, and upended the bottle. His roll-up bobbed and shed ash as he talked. Meanwhile his minions ambled through the first floor, poking into closets and picking up knickknacks, as if considering whether to tuck them in an inside pocket. ‘Hey, Mort, some crib,’ the one with the dingy blonde ponytail murmured. ‘Not bad.’ I felt the impulse to count our silver, like some hapless Civil War widow when a Northern general occupied her vanquished house for bivouac. I expect Sherman didn’t arrive with any wine either.

  ‘Where’s Dix?’ I asked as Mordecai helped himself to ham.

  ‘Spending the holidays with her snit,’ he said with his mouth full.

  ‘They were getting on so good, it seemed a shame to part them.’

  ‘What’s she upset about?’

  Mordecai flicked his head in Truman’s direction. ‘Later.’

  God forbid with the three of us together that anyone would confide anything to anyone. It may have been a luxury of a sort to be the centre of information, for each brother told me his side of things so long as the other was out of range, but as a consequence 145

  they left me full of secrets and turned me into a liar with both. Maybe that was the idea.

  Mordecai having left home so early, I’d had little experience with the two of them in the same room. Since I assumed a radically different persona with each brother, they cancelled me out. Not only did I not know what to say, but how to say it. With Truman, my speech was distinctly British—I said ‘con tro versy’ and used a ‘spanner’; with Mordecai, I fell in with his yahoo singsong, and said ‘fuck’ a lot. In Truman’s company, I was careful not to drink to excess, never admitted I sometimes smoked a cigarette, wouldn’t be caught dead nibbling biscuits between meals, and curtailed stories of sexual antics in the interest of portraying myself as a passionate woman with high standards just looking for love. Slumming with Mordecai, I tried manfully to keep up my end of a bottle, name-dropped multiple boyfriends, and snickered knowingly at any reference to pharmaceuticals, never letting on that I’d only taken acid once. Therefore when Mordecai thumped his muddy boots on the table, rolled a joint and passed it to me I froze. With Truman, I claimed I didn’t smoke dope; with Mordecai, I had never refused a few hits. I compromised with a single drag and handed it back. Truman raised his eyebrows. I fled for ham.

  Mordecai and his three grungy employees reached across one another for slabs of Smithfield, ignoring the holly napkins to wipe mustard on their sleeves. Bandying brands of audio manufacturers, they glugged great tumblers of Rosemont cabernet until in short order they’d decimated a third of our case.

  We were never formally introduced, but I sorted out the names of our gate-crashers. MK was the smarmy blonde, whose ponytail hung stiff with a lacquerous sheen. His weight was cadaverously low, his face dappled with the purple undertone of volcanic acne in his youth.

  MK’s drawl overplayed the dumb hick: gosh-dang ain’t that sump’m. I figured him for one of those lowlifes who was always trading on a southerner’s reputed buffoonery—sweet corn to divert attention from the switch-blade taped to his ankle.

  When he followed me once to the sink—to get a glass of water he failed to drink—he may have been locating our case of wine. He said,

  ‘Is it true, Corrie Lou, that Mort took a test at NC State that proved he was a genius?’

  ‘So I’ve been told,’ I said coldly. I noted MK had mail-ordered 146

  my brother’s exact same style of leather boots, as he also rolled his own cigarettes and extolled that sickening caraway schnapps. Imitation made me edgy; it was a kind of theft.

  “Cause that guy sure do run rings around me,’ MK twanged. ‘Half the time, I can’t tell what he’s gassin’ about from the man in the moon.’

  Somehow I didn’t believe that MK felt all that stupid.

  Wilcox was the tall lantern-jawed fellow who didn’t say much, though that left his mouth the freer to suck down drink. His head swivelled, following the others’ chatter as they segued from speaker components to the US Marines’ recent invasion of Somalia, but his pupils were inert and opaque. Wilcox looked like one of those kids in the back of the class who maintained an attentive expression, but if you called on him he’d sputter about the Revolutionary War when the class had long ago moved on to algebra.

  Big Dave was the cut-up of the bunch, an amiable porker with a shameles
s guffaw. Maybe it was the granny glasses, but he seemed quicker than the other two and, more appealing still, I thought Big Dave liked my brother. When he chortled he seemed to have got the joke, where the other two laughed late, waiting for their cue. Big Dave was physically familiar, gripping Mordecai’s forearm, but even this boister-ous prole knew his limits and when Mordecai looked down at the hand Big Dave lifted it with a simpering grin. The whole trio demurred to excess and their good-timeyness felt forced, making me wonder whether Mordecai could be forbidding outside his family as well as in.

  I overheard Wilcox mumble to MK to ‘keep an eye on Mort’ because

  ‘you know that fucker’s a mean drunk’.

  Under-breath asides as MK and Wilcox left in tandem for the loo confirmed that what they said in and out of my brother’s earshot was chalk and cheese— hear any more about fucking Somalia I’m gonna…fucking skinny niggers, who gives a…Mordecai reared back as if his workmen were hanging on his every word, but I thought that their real concentration was on the potato salad.

  While they helped themselves to our dinner and uncorked new bottles without asking, not one of them bothered with niceties like making conversation with Truman and Averil. Typically, no one had mentioned the hearing that afternoon, least of all Truman, who pulled his chair two feet outside the circle and said absolutely nothing.

  147

  MK asked about the folks their boss ‘got this place from’—these three seemed under the impression that Heck-Andrews was Mordecai’s alone.

  Though my brother described his father as an overbearing knee-jerk liberal, he went on to detail several landmark cases his father had tried, until it hit me like an anvil flattening Elmer Fudd: Mordecai was boasting! About his father! Then, MK couldn’t have cared less, his eyes only following his employer’s spliff as it stabbed the air for emphasis and failed to circulate around the table.

  ‘You know, if either of you guys needs some extra dough,’ Mordecai finally addressed his siblings, ‘this contract’s got us pressed. You’re pretty handy with a hammer, ain’tcha kid?’

  Truman shrugged.

  ‘I pay fifteen bucks an hour. Think about it. And Core, I could use a hand in the office. Invoices, typing up bids?’

  I looked at him in stupefaction. ‘You want me to be your secretary?’

  ‘Of course not, Core! You’d be my executive assistant.’

  Having ravaged most of the food, Mordecai screeched his chair out and clomped off to the parlour, bottles in the crook of each arm luring his threesome along with him. Behind him, the table was strewn with potato dribs and half-gnawed carrot sticks, the floor tacky with flattened ham fat. Truman stayed behind to clean up.

  That set the rest of the night: each brother in a different room. I kept excusing myself to the kitchen to fetch another cabernet where I would dawdle and dry glasses, drifting back to the parlour where Mordecai had put on Pearl Jam at a volume that would have broken another window in the door if our father were still alive. In neither room was I relaxed. After ten minutes I was acutely conscious of having left one brother for too long and began to fidget. Finally I gave up on trying to please both and no doubt pleasing neither, curling anti-socially in a far corner of the parlour. The music was too loud to talk anyway, so I amused myself by flipping a photo album that lay flat on a shelf in the absence of Britannicas.

  I’ve wondered if personal memory hasn’t been fundamentally sub-verted by photography. These crinkled snapshots objectified a past that would otherwise have remained a revisable blur. For example, when I remembered those years, I didn’t envisage being

  148

  a child. I may have recalled the sensation of not being wholly in control of my destiny, but I couldn’t picture myself two feet high. Yet look: I was tiny, smothered in lacy frills that would repel me now, my arms spread with their Vienna sausage fingers groping at the air to embrace a world of which I have grown so much warier since. Photos were a corruption, however. That I did not remember feeling physically small had a truth to it. I’d noticed as well the seductive tendency to replace the quiver of real recollection with the steadied camera. I conjured my mother flat and artificially touched up at her college graduation, an event that I couldn’t remember because I wasn’t born then: photographs.

  They did, however, have their uses, and though I was well familiar with this album I turned its leaves this time round as if consulting an oracle. I may have been a little stoned, but my questions were two: why was Truman terrified of his brother, and why did Mordecai revile him?

  In the first four leaves, there is no Truman: Mordecai in our Hi-Flier wagon, holding the handle with two-year-old Corrie Lou between his legs. Here he already wears that signature smirk; by five, he has learned the f-word. I, on the other hand, am unrecognizable: decked in flounces, bouncing with blonde ringlets, gawking up at big brother with ga-ga adoration. He is about to go plummeting recklessly down the hill, and I haven’t a care. My eyes are glad and uncomplex, without duplicity.

  Corlis Louise, dumb but happy.

  More of these: Mordecai galloping with his baby sister on his back, bundling her on his sled for the scant two-inch snowfall on Bloodworth Street, the runners bound to scrape tarmac the second time down—snow in Raleigh is exotic, precious. Mordecai my protector escorts me, without my mother, to my first day of school.

  The next leaf: my mother with fuller breasts, posing in front of the rental Tudor that preceded Heck-Andrews, a formless bundle in her arms. Mordecai is clutching me to his thigh, and averting his head with his eyes closed as if to say: this couldn’t be happening.

  In the following two panels Mordecai grips his sister with resolute possessiveness, plying her with stuffed bunnies, crayon portraits, bugs under jars. The third of our number is no more included in the drama of the moment than shirt cardboard. In Pullen

  149

  Park, Truman fists his mother’s skirt and ducks in its folds as Mordecai, confident, tall and commanding in comparison, pushes my swing.

  I had puzzled over these early shots of Truman before. All small children appear bruisable and undefended, but in Truman these qualities are extreme: his eyes are watery blue, large for his face and too wide open; his lips are parted, his hands held from his sides, wafting as if he doesn’t know what they are for. He looks lost, the other two children colluding behind him, and his innocence is the kind that draws torment as irresistibly as flowers draw bees. These were the days of my first clear memories, when Mordecai and I would follow the toddler about the house ridiculing his first attempts at speech, exaggerating his mistakes; small wonder the little boy went mute for days.

  Still there must have been an afternoon that I refused to participate in the game, though I do not remember it. When, instead of mimicking,

  ‘Doh-nnn! Weave me awone!’ in unison with Mordecai, stooping to leer into Truman’s face as he flapped his arms in the hand-me-down jacket that was still too big for him, I snapped, ‘Quit it, Mordecai,’ put a hand on Truman’s waist-high shoulder, and lent him my model palo-mino. There must have been an afternoon when, after school, instead of ritually threading down to the basement to peer at Mordecai’s latest stink bomb experiment I searched out the four-year-old back from nursery school, still struck dumb from having spent the entire morning at West Raleigh Presbyterian in a corner with his blanket. An afternoon when instead of hiding the ‘bembet’ one more time in the couch cushions I helped him look for it.

  For with a single turn of a page the groupings of our threesome transform—and one construction we never find here is the three of us playing convivially in the sandbox together. No, suddenly I am filling Truman’s pail, edging forward to balance his seesaw, ketchuping his hotdog. These photos already capture the inseparable quality for which among my cousins we were renowned. And this is the first point in the album I recognize my own face. Its lines have sharpened and thinned; my eyes glitter with the quicksilver of a sovereign sibling. I am no longer a gurgly little sister; I am myself a prot
ector, though in the way of most protectors, also the one you need protection from. We do what I say; we do not do what I proscribe, and Truman accepts both punishment 150

  and reward with equal submission because he has never stopped being grateful.

  Truman was still grateful for my defection. That very evening, when I would pop back to the kitchen he didn’t look censorious but beholden.

  Likewise, I concluded as I looked up from the album at Mordecai puffing away on his rollie, eyes cutting in my direction to make sure I had not abandoned him for the galley, my elder brother had never stopped being aggrieved.

  You could see it in the photos. Often, in the later shots, Mordecai is out of the picture altogether. When he appears at all, he is remote from the rest of the family, sucking on candy cigarettes, looking daggers at his sister and her new-found sidekick. (In a single intimate exception, Mordecai is holding his little brother’s waist as the youngest dangles on a jungle gym, but there’s more than a hint in both Mordecai’s sly grin and Truman’s expression of abject horror that Mordecai is considering letting go.) Far at the edge of the frames, his eyes are slit with calculating resentment, as if he is plotting revenge, biding his time while he contrives the ultimate stratagem to win his sister back. When I glanced over at him in my father’s old chair, boots on my mother’s flimsy coffee table, knocking back our cabernet and casting about the parlour with an air of fresh reclamation, I realized that Mordecai was still scheming; he had not given up.

  It had never occurred to me that my desertion might have hurt Mordecai’s feelings. There was humility in my blindness—I never imagined I was that important to him—and admiration as well; he was my big brother, absorbed in pulley systems ingeniously driven by Erector Set motors, or nose down in his dinosaur book. Why would he covet the plaguesome curiosity of a little girl? For in my memory, Mordecai was sufficiently invincible that he didn’t have feelings.

  The other puzzle I hadn’t fitted together was not only why I was forced to choose one brother over the other, but why I had selected the younger one. Was I naturally maternal? Did Truman’s unguarded blue pupils cry out for my safekeeping? Or had I merely revealed a preference for the role of capricious leader over cowed fan? Did I only opt for Truman so I could boss him around? Or did I perhaps—like him better?