A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘How sizeable?’ I asked.

  Claude turned to me. ‘I thought you were a co-signer of this application.’

  ‘Sure, she just forgot. Two-fifty, remember, Core? There’s a lot of audio work in the Triangle, and I need the wherewithal to cash in. Hire a bigger crew, take on more than one contract at a time. That dough will come back in spades.’

  My mouth was hanging open. ‘But Mordecai,’ I whispered, ‘doesn’t that mean I’d be responsible for—?’

  ‘It’s a dead cert, Claude. And you know Oakwood; even if my expan-sion didn’t pay out, that property’s going to keep appreciating. Any trouble, sell the place off in a couple of years and make a wad.’

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  ‘But the whole point,’ I objected, ‘is to keep the house in the family—’

  At last Claude paid me attention. ‘Now, Ms McCrea, your source of income is—?’

  ‘She works for me,’ Mordecai intervened.

  All right, so it wouldn’t help our case for me to be making $4.75 an hour at Crabtree Valley. I shut up.

  ‘You’ll also note—’ Mordecai leaned forward and mashed his roll-up on his boot sole. ‘My sister and I have $140,000 each, clear, inheritance from my parents. Of course we don’t want to tie it all up in real estate, but the money would cover mortgage payments for the next several years. Pretty safe bet, Clyde. Offered to me, I’d take it.’

  Claude rubbed his chin. ‘You’re pushing your luck, Mordecai,’ he said appreciatively, tapping at his terminal. ‘That’s a fair proportion of the value of the property, but…let’s see what we could do with a 25-year term.’

  As Claude entered figures into his computer, I began to panic.

  ‘Listen, I—Mr Richards, I don’t have to sign anything yet, do I?’

  He shrugged. ‘Of course, nothing’s binding until you acquire the property. But in a public auction, you’ve got to have financing right up front—that is why you are here.’ He looked at me as if I were a dolt adult.

  ‘You’ll be in touch, then, on February 5?’ Claude shook hands with my brother. ‘Have to say, never would have thought my bank would be lending The ‘Shroom two bits. Life sure is funny.’

  Mordecai gave me a friendly pat on the rump as I hauled myself into the truck. ‘Quarter of a mil. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.’

  My mind was churning. The entire transaction had been conducted over my head. Large amounts of money intimidated me, and I tried to keep out of the clutches of financial institutions just as I avoided the long arm of the law. Now I was potentially snared into owing that little Tudor gingerbread $250,000.

  I tried to take it slowly. ‘Say the house goes for the appraisal. We own half of it—’

  ‘So we pay off the do-gooder and the do-nothing with $205,000,’

  Mordecai finished for me. ‘Leaving you with your $140,000 untouched, with which you can contribute half of the mortgage 195

  payment every month, and buy yourself a few chocolate-covered cherries to boot.’

  ‘But if Wachovia gives us two-fifty, there’s $45,000 left over. What happens to that?’

  ‘I pay off the lease on my Prolinea 4/66, for a start.’

  ‘It all gets sunk into Decibelle? Wouldn’t half of it be mine?’

  ‘Technically,’ said Mordecai, clicking his eye teeth together with an edge of irritation. ‘You could become one of my investors.’

  ‘What would I get out of investing in your company?’

  ‘Or you could take your damned money, but I’d say that was pretty ungrateful.’

  ‘For what should I be so grateful?’

  ‘You can’t imagine that our friend Clyde would give you a mortgage for two-fifty on the basis of that job framing kitty cats in Crabtree Valley.

  Without me and Decibelle, the best you could hope for would be to get on his Christmas card list. So, yeah, I think you should be grateful. Still want your money?’

  I folded my arms. ‘I’ll sleep on it. I have to remind you, this whole proposition is hypothetical. I haven’t decided to buy the house with you. I haven’t decided what I’ll do.’

  Mordecai gunned the motor in exasperation. ‘Well, you’ve got eighteen fucking days to make up your mind, baby. For Christ’s sake, Corrie Lou, how can you live in that mealy head of yours? I’d shoot myself.’

  I pouted, silent and purple like my mother, staring pointedly out the window and tugging my skirt as close as it would come to my knees.

  ‘Hey, loosen up,’ Mordecai cajoled. ‘Sure it must be pretty tricky, you being True’s big buddy and all. I’ll put in a little work, you get freshened up, I’ll take you out to dinner and we’ll talk all this through. Wear something slinky, huh? We’re gonna show this punk town a pair of legs.’

  ‘Why are you getting so gussied up?’

  ‘Karen’s is chi-chi. For Raleigh, anyway.’ I fastened my mother’s pearls.

  The way Truman was glaring you’d think I had a date with Jesse Helms.

  Yet by the time I had finished dabbing a bit of perfume behind each ear, repairing my eyeliner and working the grey heel 196

  smudge on my white hose into my satin pumps, Truman’s antagonism had given way to disconsolation. His face slackened much as it had when I hobbled down the front walk to my first prom. My mother reported that as I swept my Lurex gold formal into the waiting Mustang, Truman had collapsed on the stoop and announced with chin in hand,

  ‘I’ve lost my sister.’ Melodramatic, but he was right: once I hit sixteen, I bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend, and didn’t give my little brother the time of day. If this evening he was only losing me to his older brother, the dynamic of desertion was if anything compounded.

  I kissed Truman on the forehead and promised I wouldn’t be late.

  Mordecai was waiting—in a clean white shirt, turquoise bolo tie and freshly shined boots.

  ‘Happy chicken thighs!’ I shouted out the door, relieved to escape the monotony of perfect nutrition for one night. As I clambered into the adjutant’s seat, trying to protect my pantyhose, the incongruity of my slit-skirted hot-pink silk in Mordecai’s army truck was lost on neither of us, but then Mordecai looked on all ceremony as satire.

  At Karen’s, the sign about jacket and tie did not, apparently, apply to my brother; I knew of no rule to which Mordecai did not regard himself as an exception. The maitre d’ looked happy to see him, though only when the bill arrived would I realize why. Mordecai didn’t wait to be escorted, but lumbered to his ‘regular’ table in the corner, where a chilled double of aquavit had arrived before he sat down.

  ‘We’ll keep you taken care of, Mort,’ the waiter whispered, and my brother beamed at the schnapps. I was not sure I wanted Mordecai taken care of all that well.

  I stuck with wine, and pulled at the silk under my thighs so it wouldn’t wrinkle from nervous sweat. I liked wearing dresses sometimes, but they could have a dismal effect on my personality. Mordecai already made me timid, and the dress clinched it. In a skirt I grew demure; I scissored my legs where I was more given in jeans to prop an ankle on the other knee, like my father. Though I usually bantered with waiters, ‘gussied up’ I seemed to think ‘that sounds terribly tasty’ in response to the specials was enough—I traded in my wit for looking pretty.

  I nodded. ‘No hard-hat. This must be a special time.’

  I twirled my wine stem, and surveyed the restaurant. Karen’s 197

  had low-lit billiard-green and white-linen decor, its hushed tuxedoed waiters gliding between tables as if on casters. Its curiously conspirat-orial atmosphere was enhanced by a mural covering the far wall, in which outsized diners lifted champagne flutes to mythical triumph.

  The women in the painting bulged from skimpy black dresses; meant to appear voluptuous, they looked puffy. Their bow ties choking too high on the neck, the men seemed desperate to get home to flannel plaid. Rosy brush strokes in cheekbones, intending the high colour of good cheer, instead evoked over-indulgence. Smiles were stiff, eyes vacant, and
even in the mural waiters leaned towards one another, collusive. Surely the commission was designed to present clientele with a picture of themselves as chic, glossy, urbane, but the artist had depic-ted the reverse: a crowd of trussed up tar-heels dining in a dreary shopping centre of the American hinterlands; they would just as soon be tucking into a Roy Rogers quarter-pounder as veal piccante. It was a painting about fraud.

  ‘So, how’d you like Clyde?’ Mordecai polished off his double; a replacement appeared silently within five seconds.

  ‘I always wondered what happened to people like that, after school,’

  I said. ‘The low-profile, undistinguished sorts. I guess they really do become accountants and bankers.’

  ‘Among other things, they marry your own brother.’

  ‘Was Dix a nerd?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about Dix, and you know it,’ he said sharply. ‘For that matter, True himself was a nerd, wasn’t he? His reports were on time, with nifty binders. You said yourself he had no friends. His room was neat.’ For Mordecai, the only habit more damning than a well-kept room was legible handwriting.

  I had come out this evening having made a promise to myself, and I would soon find how difficult—how astonishingly difficult—it would be to keep. This constant sniping at one brother to placate the other was topping me up with unspeakable self-loathing. I would not, I swore, be enticed into whittling down my undefended little brother from salad to mints. So I curved the conversation, stalling while I came up with something brutally nice to say about Truman McCrea.

  ‘I’m always gobsmacked,’ I said, ‘by proles who doggedly execute those dumpy jobs. Grocery management, soap distribution, even work that pays—law, stock trading. They’re welcome to the 198

  money. I need shop-keepers and soap-sellers; they allow me my fringy, irresponsible life, and without them I guess I’d have to take that sodding job at Wachovia myself.’

  The latter section of my speech I hurried. Whenever I talked to Mordecai I heard a clock ticking; if I tried to tell him a whole story, I pared the details until it was boring—just what I was afraid of becoming. One of the most gracious privileges you can extend to others is permission to be dull; surely it is only when provided this relaxing latitude that most people will successfully amuse.

  Indeed, Mordecai had ignored my recitation in favour of the menu, and proceeded to order an excess of its most expensive dishes. Besides, he would not be wrested from his pet subject of the night, which if allowed he would worry like a vicious cat with a mouse that was already dead.

  ‘Maybe it’s about time you explain to me how your brother and I could be biologically related,’ he began, popping olives. ‘Do you realize that every time I lay eyes on that henpecked asshole he’s vacuuming the stairs?’

  ‘He likes order,’ I submitted. ‘And every time I lay eyes on you, you’re spilling ashes on the stairs.’

  ‘Who gives a fuck, Core?’ The second aquavit was beginning to take hold; his voice was louder, his accent more Southern.

  ‘Truman does. It’s daunting, growing up as the youngest. Here’s a little chaos theory for you: when everyone around you is more competent, more powerful, your universe is anarchic. Everything takes place out of your hands and over your head. So you have a neat room. It’s a way of taking control.’

  ‘It’s a way of wasting your fucking life dusting your fucking bureau.’

  My arbitration wasn’t making a lot of headway.

  ‘You didn’t grow up in anyone’s shadow,’ I persevered. ‘You were free to invent yourself. By the time Truman was in first grade, you were already established as the family bright spark, and I’d cornered the market on creativity. What was left for Troom?’

  ‘Only the rest of the whole goddamned planet.’

  ‘That’s not the way it seems, in a family. You didn’t come of age thinking of yourself in terms of other people. Truman couldn’t help but compare himself to us, because everyone else did. He 199

  went to Martin, too, and had your teachers—they remembered you.

  Boy, did they ever remember you. Mrs Gordon failed Truman for the first half of a term before she figured out he was—’

  ‘A rabbit.’

  I took a breath, and stirred my arugula. ‘I’ve always thought of you as courageous. Well, Truman is afraid. You remember how long it took him to give up that decrepit blanket, how long he sucked his thumb?

  How for hours at a time he’d go mum? Maybe you can call that a failing.

  Fine, it’s a failing—’

  ‘I can see quailing from spiders, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Ever hear of pantophobia? That’s the kid’s problem. Fear of everything.’

  ‘But he was born that way, Mordecai; you can tell from his photographs. I’m not a hopeless determinist, but some traits of character are not our fault. I’m a little devious, and I was probably born that way, too; you were born stubborn. You were, according to Mother, an obstin-ate baby. Still, of the failings, isn’t trepidation defensible, even rational, given what you know about the world? It’s a ghastly place.’

  ‘It’s a fucking riot, if you don’t let it get on top of you. There’s nothing about “the world” that makes everyone cower in the attic of their parents’ house until they’re twenty-whatever. Besides, what’s the guy got to be afraid of?’

  ‘Walking into his own parlour and finding his mother dead, for starters.’

  ‘Cookies crumbling. Any day of the week you can walk into a room and find yourself dead.’

  Mordecai was subdued for a moment by the arrival of his carpaccio.

  He prided himself on his taste for raw meat.

  ‘I know you especially fault Truman for not leaving home,’ I continued carefully, ‘when you couldn’t wait to get out, even if that meant flipping hamburgers at the Red Barn. But when you’re the youngest you look at a family from the other end. You and I regarded our parents and Heck-Andrews as this big heavy immutable thing we had to get away from. But Truman watched us go, our parents get older. The youngest is clued up, actually. He knows that a family isn’t some permanent burden but a tremulous and temporary coalescence, because the youngest is around to watch it fall apart. That makes you conservative. That makes you stay home, because you’re afraid that if you turn your

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  back for a minute there won’t be a home. And you’re right. There won’t be.’

  Visibly unmoved, Mordecai washed a clump of French bread down with schnapps. ‘OK, so he’s stayed in that house because if he stepped outside the bogeyman would get him, or the fucking thing would disappear. But sheer timorousness or “conservatism”, as you call it, didn’t necessitate that into old age he buy Mommy’s groceries and mow the lawn. I can’t believe that every youngest kid is such a snivelling, ass-licking toady.’

  ‘So you never tried to earn your parents’ approval?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Get off it! Didn’t you run home with that IQ test result that proved you’re a genius? Didn’t you leave your 100% Algebra II tests on the kitchen table? Even as an adult, weren’t the only times you stopped by when you had a big contract coming in and you wanted to trot out those big figures, and didn’t the fact that Father was never impressed by money drive you to distraction? For that matter, didn’t you bring your girlfriends to your bedroom instead of taking them to a Motel 6

  in order to make Mother jealous?’

  ‘There’s a big difference—’ He took a deep drag on his Three Castles,

  ‘—between expecting recognition for achievement, and wanting a pat on the head for obsequiousness.’

  ‘Truman wasn’t obsequious, he was nice!’

  Our waiter cleared the starters and smoothed in the main course: for me, fish; for Mordecai, a thick black-and-blue fillet steak. I found the waiter’s air of indifference feigned. I was sure they routinely eavesdropped on Mordecai’s tirades, looked forward to the show even, while Mordecai was careful to give
them one. I’d gone through twice as much wine as I would normally in less than an hour, and I, too, was getting rather loud.

  ‘Now that’s a loser attribute if I ever heard one,’ said Mordecai, sawing into the meat savagely and exposing flesh so red it was probably cold. ‘Every screw-up ever lived was nice. That’s just another way of saying your brother’s a rabbit! Sure you’re nice when you’re afraid, otherwise somebody’s gonna bite your head off.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad he took care of Mother? Wasn’t that better than her being all by herself, aren’t you thankful—’

  ‘I thank my lucky stars it wasn’t me, that’s for sure.’

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  ‘And Truman’s been nice to me. Nicer than you by a mile. And kindness isn’t a “loser attribute”; most losers are sour prats. The number of things Truman’s done for me—’

  ‘When was the last time you asked me to do something for you, Core?

  When you were six years old.’

  I picked the bones from my haddock. ‘My first day of school,’ I said.

  ‘You held my hand. I asked you.’

  Mordecai swabbed his meat juice with a fistful of bread, intently.

  ‘You spent so much time with that kid, and I have tried to understand why, tried to figure what you saw in him I didn’t, but I’m just flum-moxed, Corrie Lou—I mean, where’s that kid’s spunk? Did he ever say no I will not go to church this Sunday, I don’t believe in God? Did he ever shoplift a roll of lifesavers, has he ever been bad? Has he ever said fuck-you to anybody, Core? In his life?’

  ‘He’s said fuck-you to you a few times.’

  ‘Not to my face he hasn’t. And I would shake the guy’s hand, I would!

  I would pay the little bastard money just to hear it!’

  I drummed my fingers. ‘I doubt that. I doubt that extremely. And Truman did rebel, in his own quiet way, if that’s what you’re after.