A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  Averil, pregnant? There was nothing in it for me. It was not my baby, and more, a foetus was tangible evidence of an intimacy Truman and I were forbidden, proof of the final severance of our childhood bond, the reward of his desertion to another woman. I was jealous. We’d have all lived in a finer universe by far if, when I heard Truman was going to be a father, I felt festive, glowing, genuinely buoyed and inclined to hum ‘Day is Done’ as I rinsed at the sink. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and in a funny way I’m glad I didn’t. I may have been a bitter, spiteful shrew of a sister, but I was not a fake.

  The following morning, in an irrational frenzy I set about pounding tacks into the perimeter of a square plywood frame. Then I snipped loops of knackered knee-highs I found in my upstairs dresser, and used them to weave potholder after potholder on the

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  makeshift loom. This was a tried-and-true rainy-day childhood pastime, and potholders from old socks were a favourite Christmas present for my mother, since they didn’t cost anything to make.

  However, it was after Christmas, we didn’t need potholders, and the busy warp and woof of argyles failed to spare me the gloom from their interstice: I had promised to give Mordecai a thumbs up or down in just twenty-four hours.

  He roused earlier than usual, evidenced no interest in or surprise at my ridiculous crafts project, and ploughed off in his truck. Neither brother had noticed that I hadn’t gone to work.

  That evening I couldn’t eat much dinner, for my sickness of heart had sunk to my stomach. Truman and I kept up a pass-the-Worcestershire dialogue that substituted for not speaking.

  When Mordecai returned around nine, he was loaded down with plastic bags, and made more than one trip to lug them all inside. He literally threw the bags at Truman, but they bounced off harmlessly enough.

  ‘What’s all this?’ said Truman, and peeked in one.

  ‘Go ahead,’ urged Mordecai. ‘They’re your Hide-the-Salami presents.’

  Truman made a face at the phrase, and began pulling out stuffed animals—bunnies, opossums, elephants; Mordecai must have bought out the store. The overkill was typical. No doubt Truman would have been more chuffed had Mordecai lingered thoughtfully over a vast selection until he found a single doggie with an appealing expression, rather than snatching every fur-ball within reach. But that was Mordecai; never anything by halves. It struck me that all he and I had bought Truman in the last six weeks was toys.

  The menagerie was a sop: Mordecai was filling his brother’s arms with stuffed bears just like at the NC State Fair, where the giant panda was meant to distract you from the fact that it had cost you fifty dollars in pitched quarters. Mordecai planned to leave Truman with the bunnies and swipe the house. Look, the gifts said to me, don’t feel guilty! We’ll fob off a lot of little furry friends on your brother, slip him a cheque, and he’ll just be too bowled over with gratitude to squeal. Wouldn’t it be bad form for him to keep so many monkeys and lambikins and insist on a mansion as well?

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  Furthermore, Mordecai announced that in celebration of Truman’s glad tidings he would take the night off and spend it with ‘the family’.

  We settled in the sitting room. Mordecai chain-smoked doobies until a cloud hovered at the ceiling like a gathering storm. Since I had failed to slip the bourbon back between the bin-liner and the pail, our Wild Turkey was soon shot, after which Mordecai moved to red wine, and only once our rioja was dispatched did he retrieve his own aquavit from the freezer. Averil, newly responsible mommy, wouldn’t touch a drop.

  Truman wasn’t party-hearty, either. He was mobilizing to demand that after the auction will his brother please remove himself lock, stock and barrel from the premises, and was not in the mood to be cajoled with bunnies or booze.

  Yet if I could not have called it nostalgic, there was something familiar about us three, scrapping in front of the TV amid a herd of stuffed animals and an assortment of hand tools Mordecai had dribbled through every room of the house even as a boy. Just like old times—when I would lobby for My Favourite Martian, Truman would whimper for Mr Ed, Mordecai would insist on The Dirty Dozen and guess what we watched.

  ‘ Bleh-eh-eh!’ bleated the pink lamb, as Mordecai turned it over one more time. The mechanism in its belly made a gagging sound like spew.

  ‘ Bleh-eh-eh!’

  The Caine Mutiny was on, which Truman had seen once and Averil never; they were both keen. Mordecai, however, had commandeered the remote control, and continually channel-surfed. We only got Bogart in snippets, after which Mordecai would flick to a fundamentalist Jesus programme he found campily entertaining. He made the opossum go down on the beaver and made off-colour slurping noises.

  ‘Can we please stay on The Caine Mutiny?’ Truman requested.

  ‘ Bleh-eh-eh!’ The sheep looked half-slaughtered, having suffered a bloody baptism of spilled rioja. For his lamb-puke retort, however, Mordecai had let go of the remote control. Truman snatched it from beside Mordecai’s boot and wouldn’t give it back.

  Unfortunately, the film was on one of those channels that has adverts for Pocket Fisherman every seven minutes. We might reasonably have switched to another show during the breaks, but

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  Truman was intent on not missing any of José Ferrer’s monologue at the end.

  Mordecai was getting surly. We were used to his varying degrees of inebriation, and it was often hard to tell if he was drunk. This evening, however, he was shitfaced. Poor Mort, spending all that money on presents for a sibling he didn’t even like. One more slugfest with Dix in the Basement the day before had doubtless left Mordecai in no mood to hear that his brother was starting another happy family. Moreover, his wishy-washy sister was making him wait until the very last minute to know if he was about to be master of a demesne or was, within days, on the street.

  Luckie Buddie was not warming the atmosphere. On every commercial break the advert for Luckie Buddie’s Used Cars came on at twice the volume of the film, an announcer screeching, ‘I’m crrr-AZY for deals!’ while being hooked off camera in a straight-jacket: the sort of advert that works because you’ll go out and buy a car that very instant if that would get Luckie Buddie to shut up. As if the line weren’t repeated enough times, Mordecai had started mimicking it when The Caine Mutiny came back on, and there was a creeping tone of menace in Mordecai’s crrr-AZY!

  ‘Man,’ he drawled, ‘Ain’t no movie worth this shit.’

  ‘Well, that ad’s no worse than your lamb bleating every five seconds,’

  Truman sniped.

  ‘Hey!’ Mordecai jabbed at Truman’s leg with the sheep’s wine-stained muzzle. ‘It’s your lamb! I go out and buy presents for your kid and look at the thanks I get: Luckie Buddie.’

  The film came back on, and Truman turned stoically to the screen, trying to rise above.

  ‘If that ad comes on one more time,’ Mordecai snarled, ‘I’m putting a brick through the set.’

  I glanced quickly around the sitting room to make sure there was no brick in sight.

  We made it through one more set of handy kitchen gadgets safely to the next seven minutes of Bogie without Luckie Buddie, though Mordecai seemed only to smoulder at the lot owner’s absence. We were into the penultimate scene, just a stone’s throw from the credits, when—

  ‘I’m crrr-AZY for—!’

  The smash of broken glass was followed by the dry pop of an 239

  imploding vacuum. As the tube tinkled to the carpet, a serpentine hiss sighed from what had been, not so very long before, our television set.

  Smoke threaded above the wreckage no thicker than the coil from Mordecai’s roll-up.

  Mordecai had not, after all, been pernickety about his choice of pro-jectile. Truman rose stonily, unplugged the set, and dredged from its innards the electric drill that Mordecai had ‘borrowed’ or ‘inherited’

  from Truman’s workshop and never returned. The bit was bent.

  None of us said anything. Averil inhaled,
with a detectable sough. I attempted a chortle of sorts, but it sounded more like the gasp it was.

  Truman held the drill like a loaded Mac-10, pointing the barrel at his brother, but the bit drooped ludicrously towards the floor. Head tilted back on the sofa, Mordecai was beginning to snore.

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  18

  ‘You call wrecking my electric drill and a $300 television having “style”?’

  ‘Admit it,’ I coaxed. ‘Life around here has gotten a lot less boring since he moved in.’

  ‘Maybe I want to be bored.’

  I stopped smiling. ‘Maybe you do.’

  We were in the kitchen, of course—where my mother had conducted most of her life, and where I seemed destined to waste mine. Averil was at work, and I envied her. It was D-Day. My mind was conspicuously blank.

  ‘So did Mr Dramatic Gesture manage to crawl upstairs?’

  ‘When I peeked in this morning, he was still in the sitting room. I draped him with a blanket.’

  ‘I think it’s wakey-wakey time.’

  ‘Truman, it’s not dark yet!’

  ‘Well, I’m going to find out just how grisly Dracula looks in the light of day.’

  In six weeks, neither of us had ever roused Mordecai from his sleep.

  It wasn’t done.

  I followed Truman to the sitting room. The air was stinging with Three Castles, the carpet splattered with red wine. For once Truman hadn’t cleared the bottles and butts; shattered glass was sprinkled before the gaping TV, whose open black maw still seemed to be sucking slightly. Stuffed animals were face-down or belly-up on the floor, stuporous. Mordecai, stiff in the same lolled position we had left him, might have been a wax Duane Hanson that museum visitors step around. His complexion was so bloodless, like dryer lint, that I was relieved to see him move when Truman kicked him.

  ‘Get up!’

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  Mordecai groaned. Truman whipped my shroud from around his brother’s shoulders and flung it to me. When the blunt toe of Truman’s gumsoles thunked his ribs once more, Mordecai curled to the side and threw up.

  I handed Truman the blanket back to clean his shoes.

  ‘That’s style for you,’ said Troom, swabbing reddish chunks of his own tandoori chicken and dropping the blanket on the stain.

  I suddenly recollected how Truman had finally been cured of his

  ‘bembet’. Mordecai had nicked it, and used the tattered flannel to blow his nose until the little rag was crusted with boogers. Then he gave it back. Truman had been so repelled that even after Mother had washed the talisman he wouldn’t come near it.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Mordecai grunted, cuddling into vomit and clutching the blanket desperately, as Truman had at four.

  Truman wrapped the three foot-long braids around his hand, and heaved his brother in one motion to a stand. Behind Truman’s open collar, bands of muscle stretched taut from skull to shoulder like two tethers.

  I trailed behind as he half-lifted our brother down the hall and deposited his charge at the proverbial kitchen table, where we’d so often faced the music as kids.

  Squinting, Mordecai patted his pockets. In his book report on Lord of the Flies in eighth grade, Mordecai had waxed eloquent not on Ralph or Jack, but on Piggy—the poor pudgy, misunderstood intellectual, blinded without his spectacles. So I went back to the sitting room to locate Mordecai’s glasses, though I could hear, ‘WHO DO YOU THINK

  YOU ARE?’ boom from behind.

  I returned with the thick yellow-tinted lenses, their frames bent and glass streaked with spew, and washed them at the sink. I had to remind myself that I was not being a voyeur, that this was my family and I had every right to listen in.

  ‘What’d I do?’ Mordecai whined, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘You don’t remember pitching my drill through the TV tube?’ Truman stood bracing his hands on the back of my father’s chair, as if threatening to brandish it.

  Mordecai shot me his twelve-year-old grin. ‘I did that?’

  ‘Yes, Mordecai, you did that,’ I recited at the sink, polishing his glasses with a dish towel.

  ‘What’d it sound like?’

  ‘ Poochhhh!’ I laughed. ‘ Hsssss…!’

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  ‘You’re going to pay for it,’ said Truman.

  ‘Sure,’ said Mordecai as I brought him his glasses, but I recognized in the easy acquiescence that he probably wouldn’t.

  Mordecai raised himself in his seat, gathering his unbuttoned shirt to protect his pasty hairless chest, of late a bit breasty. He dabbed at his sleeve with a napkin, and mewled for coffee. Two alligator clips had come off his braids, which were unravelling in withered kinks.

  ‘You come into my house—’ Truman began.

  ‘Troom, let him clean up first.’

  ‘I’ll let him clean up, all right. The sitting room, for a start.’

  ‘Your house, kid? It’s a third—’

  ‘You never earned .01 per cent of this place. Who’s repaired it for fifteen years? Who’s painted it, refloored it, rewired it, roofed it, landscaped it and renovated the attic into a separate apartment?’

  ‘No one asked you to—’ Mordecai began.

  ‘No one had to! And who has single-handedly sawed a hole in the back porch, gouged the hallway with his hand truck, and broken two windows, and whose wife has scrawled YOU BASTUD in red lipstick all over the master bedroom wallpaper like a serial killer?’

  Mordecai was blasé. ‘Division of labour.’

  ‘But let’s talk morally, bro. Did you ever come see Mother when she was grieving for Father, even once? Did you ever come visit either of them when you didn’t want money? And do you think they didn’t notice? Think Mother didn’t remark on how happy you were when they signed that Living Will, and observe that it was “chilling”? How dumb do you think they were? They may have left a quarter of their assets to you, but that’s only because they were hung up on this simplistic sense of fairness. And they thought about doing otherwise, they thought about it a lot. You weren’t here, but they even asked me: should they maybe just leave the house, for example, to me and Corlis. I said no, because I didn’t want to be greedy. In my shoes, would you have asked them to cut me out? At the drop of a hat.’

  ‘You’re shitting me, True.’ Even magnified by lenses, Mordecai’s eyes looked small. ‘They’d never have disinherited me.’

  ‘You treated them like chewing gum on your shoe, why not?’

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  ‘I didn’t treat them in any way whatsoever,’ Mordecai said wearily.

  ‘I got on with my own goddamned life. That’s what kids are supposed to do, shit-for-brains.’

  ‘They’re supposed to be grateful. And you’re right, Mother and Father never seriously considered removing you from the will, but if they were just slightly different people you wouldn’t have seen a red cent. A little more Old Testament, a little less New.’

  ‘Read your Bible,’ spat Mordecai. ‘They’d have killed the fatted calf for me and you know it.’

  ‘Fatted calf, is it? To listen to Father talk, he’d have more likely Isaaced you on some mountain top—’

  I had a passing presentiment of what Truman was about to say and I didn’t know how to make him stop. Outside rare blow-outs, our family was congenitally civil. That doesn’t sound like such a curse until you consider that as a consequence we didn’t know how to fight; that is, fight within limits. Families accustomed to airing grievances understand that even when things heat up the rules may change, that does not mean there are no rules; another set slides in, with wider margins but margins all the same. But we were conflict amateurs—we couldn’t even tell my mother to her face that her rice was mushy—so that when we finally said what we were thinking all hell broke loose. It was a big Protestant problem and I’d seen it in other homes as well: once we allowed ourselves to say something, we allowed ourselves to say anything.

  ‘—You know you were unwanted, don’t you? That when Mother found out she was pre
gnant with you she was furious?’

  ‘So she took pains to inform me,’ said Mordecai dryly.

  ‘Well, it’s one thing to regret a kid before he’s born,’ said Truman.

  ‘An embryo, a blank slate. It’s another to regret him when you know what he’s like.’

  ‘What are you driving at?’ Mordecai’s impatience was nervous.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Truman,’ I interceded, ‘I really don’t think—’

  ‘Four years ago. Right here at this table—’

  ‘Troom, that’s enough.’

  ‘I’m the one who’s had enough. You remember, don’t you, Corlis?

  As I recall, you were on one of your charitable visits home.’

  I nodded unwillingly. ‘ Unconditional love.’

  My father had been objecting there was no such thing.

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  Philosophically, I’d seen his point: that between any two people lurks the unforgivable. I could fling Truman’s textbooks from his tower deck and though he’d be angry we’d be reconciled. If instead I threw Averil off the tower deck and she miscarried his first child, no handshake would smooth the way to nightcaps and chicken thighs. Some are more fragile than others, but all relationships are breakable if you kick them hard enough. Yet reasonable as it sounded, I remember resisting the proposition from my father, getting uneasy.

  ‘Know what he said?’ Truman leaned forward. ‘Direct quotes. If I’d known at the time what he’d put me and your mother through, I’d never have had my first-born son.’

  Mordecai snorted. ‘Big deal. Parents toss that shit off all the time.’

  ‘You think so?’