Big Brother

Big Brother Lionel Shriver The new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin.When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesn’t recognize him. The once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened?Soon Edison’s slovenly habits, appalling diet, and know-it-all monologues are driving Pandora and her fitness-freak husband Fletcher insane. After the brother-in-law has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: it’s him or me.Rich with Shriver’s distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat: why we overeat and whether extreme diets ever really work. It asks just how much sacrifice we’ll make to save single members of our families, and whether it’s ever possible to save loved ones from themselves. COPYRIGHT (#ulink_85c30528-d93a-592f-91bf-d55e0a7be5ce) The Borough Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013 Copyright © Lionel Shriver 2013 Cover design by Stuart Bache © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://shutterstock.com) Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007271108 Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007481651 Version: 2017-04-06 To Greg—who was unfailingly, improbably glad for anything good that ever happened to me, and in the face of whose drastic, fantastic, astonishing life any fiction pales. One in Three Would Trade Year of Life for Ideal Body Daily Telegraph headline, 24 March 2011 Table of Contents Cover (#u02f6f7a1-4bac-5ffc-ae59-2bd70d84bec2) Title Page (#u8c037366-fe54-54b6-8259-299f6f3f1274) Copyright (#ufc3be9fa-88f0-5a8b-99bd-5f2bad4a872c) Dedication (#ucd49e03a-5089-5e04-92e7-b6aeac547f6c) Epigraph (#u64310ed2-d8bc-5b10-bf78-1383ab3fedf5) I: Up (#ub191c03f-1296-5804-a316-a766725188cf) Chapter One (#udd104efe-f5a3-5f30-a302-75b8ef9c97b3) Chapter Two (#u13db47f0-d52e-54a9-9d2e-54157c498e91) Chapter Three (#u3645cea5-32a2-55c7-aacb-a6faa504af79) Chapter Four (#uf7e07e0e-d07a-5148-adfe-8602eddb24ff) Chapter Five (#u5d8c939b-943f-56e5-8c38-43a5719ba2e8) Chapter Six (#u333f3cfc-ef02-5ffc-b110-cb16aa7da283) Chapter Seven (#u467bde35-970b-574e-8655-7fc955aa64e7) Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) II: Down (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) III: Out (#litres_trial_promo) About the Book (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Lionel Shriver (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise for Big Brother (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) I: Up (#ulink_ff6e15bc-6af4-5d6d-b2df-2fc101583efe) chapter one (#ulink_6421038b-7004-59bb-95f2-783ef487bbcf) I have to wonder whether any of the true highlights of my fortysome years have had to do with food. I don’t mean celebratory dinners, good fellowship; I mean salivation, mastication, and peristalsis. Oddly, for something I do every day, I can’t remember many meals in detail, while it is far easier for me to call up favorite movies, faithful friendships, graduations. It follows, then, that film, affinity, and education are more important to me than stuffing my face. Well done, me, you say. But were I honestly to total the time I have lavished on menu planning, grocery shopping, prep and cooking, table setting, and kitchen cleanup for meal upon meal, food, one way or another, has dwarfed my fondness for Places in the Heart to an incidental footnote; ditto my fondness for any human being, even those whom I profess to love. I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch. Throw in the time I have also spent ruing indulgence in lemon meringue pies, vowing to skip breakfast tomorrow, and opening the refrigerator/stopping myself from dispatching the leftover pumpkin custard/then shutting it firmly again, and I seem to have concerned myself with little else but food. So why, if, by inference, eating has been so embarrassingly central for me, can I not remember an eidetic sequence of stellar meals? Like most people, I recall childhood favorites most vividly, and like most kids I liked plain things: toast, baking-powder biscuits, saltines. My palate broadened in adulthood, but my character did not. I am white rice. I have always existed to set off more exciting fare. I was a foil as a girl. I am a foil now. I doubt this mitigates my discomfiture much, but I have some small excuse for having overemphasized the mechanical matter of sustenance. For eleven years, I ran a catering business. You would think, then, that I could at least recall individual victories at Breadbasket, Inc. Well, not exactly. Aside from academics at the university, who are more adventurous, Iowans are conservative eaters, and I can certainly summon a monotonous assembly line of carrot cake, lasagna, and sour-cream cornbread. But the only dishes that I recollect in high relief are the disasters—the Indian rosewater pudding thickened with rice flour that turned into a stringy, viscous vat suitable for affixing wallpaper. The rest—the salmon steaks rolled around somethingorother, the stir-fries of thisandthat with an accent of whathaveyou—it’s all a blur. Patience; I am rounding on something. I propose: food is by nature elusive. More concept than substance, food is the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than satisfaction itself, which is why diet can exert the sway of religion or political zealotry. Not irresistible tastiness but the very failure of food to reward is what drives us to eat more of it. The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one. The actual eating part almost doesn’t happen. This near-total inability to deliver is what makes the pleasures of the table so tantalizing, and also so dangerous. Petty? I’m not so sure. We are animals; far more than the ancillary matter of sex, the drive to eat motivates nearly all of human endeavor. Having conspicuously triumphed in the competition for resources, the fleshiest among us are therefore towering biological success stories. But ask any herd of overpopulating deer: nature punishes success. Our instinctive saving for a rainy day, our burying of acorns in the safest and most private of hiding places for the long winter, however prudent in its way, however expressive of Darwinian guile, is killing my country. That is why I cast doubt on whether the pantry, as a subject, is paltry. True, I sometimes wonder just how much I care about my country. But I care about my brother. Any story about a sibling goes far back indeed, but for our purposes the chapter of my brother’s life that most deserves scrutiny began, aptly, at lunch. It must have been a weekend, since I hadn’t already left for my manufacturing headquarters. As usual in that era, my husband Fletcher had come upstairs on the early side. He’d been getting up at five a.m., so by noon he was famished. A self-employed cabinetmaker who crafted lovely but unaffordable one-of-a-kind furniture, he commuted all the way to our basement, and could arise whenever he liked. The crack-of-dawn nonsense was for show. Fletcher liked the implied rigor, the fa?ade of yet more hardness, fierceness, discipline, and self-denial. I found the up-and-at-’em maddening. Back then, I hadn’t the wisdom to welcome discord on such a minor scale, since Fletcher’s alarm-clock setting would soon be the least of our problems. But that’s true of all before pictures, which appear serene only in retrospect. At the time, my irritation at the self-righteousness with which he swept from bed was real enough. The man went to sleep at nine p.m. He got eight hours of shut-eye like a normal person. Where was the self-denial? As with so many of my husband’s bullying eccentricities, I refused to get with the program and had begun to sleep in. I was my own boss, too, and I detested early mornings. Queasy first light recalled weak filtered coffee scalded on a hot plate. Turning in at nine would have made me feel like a child, shuttled to my room while the grown-ups had fun. Only the folks having fun, all too much of it, would have been Tanner and Cody, teenagers not about to adopt their father’s faux farming hours. Thus, having just cleared off my own toast and coffee dishes, I wasn’t hungry for lunch—although, following the phone call of an hour earlier, my appetite had gone off for other reasons. I can’t remember what we were eating, but it was probably brown rice and broccoli. With a few uninteresting variations, in those days it was always brown rice and broccoli. At first, we didn’t talk. When we’d met seven years before, our comfort with mutual silence had been captivating. One of the things that had once put me off about marriage was the prospect of ceaseless chat. Fletcher felt the same way, although his silence had a different texture than mine: thicker, more concentrated—churning and opaque. This gave his quiet a richness, which dovetailed nicely with my cooler, smoother calm. My silence made a whimsical humming sound, even if I didn’t actually hum; in culinary terms, it resembled a light cold soup. Darker and more brooding, Fletcher’s was more of a red wine sauce. He wrestled with problems, while I simply solved them. Solitary creatures, we never contrived conversation for the sake of it. We were well suited. Yet this midday, the hush was of dread and delay. Its texture was that of sludge, like my disastrous rosewater pudding. I rehearsed my introductory sentence several times before announcing aloud, “Slack Muncie called this morning.” “Who’s Mack Muncie?” asked Fletcher distractedly. “Slack. A saxophonist. From New York. I’ve met him several times. Well regarded, I think—but like most of that crowd, has trouble making ends meet. Obliged to accept wedding and restaurant gigs, where everyone talks over the music.” All of this qualified as the very “making conversation” I claimed to avoid. Fletcher looked up warily. “How do you know him?” “He’s one of Edison’s oldest friends. A real stalwart.” “In that case,” said Fletcher, “he must be very patient.” “Edison’s been staying with him.” “I thought your brother had an apartment. Over his jazz club.” Fletcher imbued “his jazz club” with skepticism. He didn’t believe Edison ever ran his own jazz club. “Not anymore. Slack didn’t want to get into it, but there’s some—story.” “Oh, there’s sure to be a story. It just won’t be true.” “Edison exaggerates sometimes. That’s not the same as being a liar.” “Right. And the color ‘pearl’ isn’t the same as ‘ivory.’” “With Edison,” I said, “you have to learn how to translate.” “So he’s mooching off friends. How’s this for translation: your brother’s homeless.” Fletcher habitually called Edison “your brother.” To my ear that decoded, “your problem.” “Sort of,” I said. “And broke.” “Edison has been through thin patches before. Between tours.” “So because of some mysterious, complicated story—like not paying the rent—your brother has lost his apartment, and now he’s couch surfing.” “Yes,” I said, squirming. “Although he seems to be running out of couches.” “Why did this Slack person call, and not your brother himself?” “Well, I think Slack has been incredibly generous, though his apartment is small. A one-bedroom, where he also has to practice.” “Honey. Spit it out. Say whatever it is that you don’t want to tell me.” I intently chased a floret, too undercooked to fork. “He said there isn’t enough room. For the two of them. Most of their other colleagues are already doubled up, or married with kids, and—Edison doesn’t have anywhere else to go.” “Anywhere else but where?” “We have a guest room now,” I pleaded. “Nobody ever uses it, besides Solstice every two years. And, you know—he’s my brother.” A contained man, Fletcher seldom looked visibly irked. “You say that like playing a trump.” “It means something.” “Something but not everything. Why couldn’t he stay with Travis? Or Solstice?” “My father is impossible and over seventy. By the time my sister was born, Edison was nearly out of the house. He and Solstice barely know each other.” “You have other responsibilities. To Tanner, to Cody, to me. Even”—a loaded pause—“to Baby Moronic. You can’t make a decision like this by fiat.” “Slack sounded at his wit’s end. I had to say something.” “What you had to say,” said Fletcher levelly, “was, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to ask my husband.’” “Maybe I knew what you’d say.” “And what was that?” I smiled, a little. “Something like, ‘Over my dead body.’” He smiled, a little. “Got that right.” “I realize it didn’t go that well. The last visit.” “No. It didn’t.” “You seemed to get on the wrong side of each other.” “There was no ‘seeming.’ We did.” “If it were just anybody, I wouldn’t ask. But it isn’t. It would mean so much to me if you tried a little harder.” “Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don’t. If you’re ‘trying,’ you don’t.” “You can give folks a break. You do that with other people.” I took a moment to reflect that in Fletcher’s case this wasn’t always true. He could be harsh. “Are you telling me that throughout this negotiation you never talked to your brother directly? So his friend is trying to offload the guy behind his back.” “Maybe Edison’s embarrassed. He wouldn’t like asking favors of his little sister.” “Little sister! You’re forty years old.” An only child, Fletcher didn’t understand about siblings—how set that differential is. “Sweetheart, I’ll still be Edison’s little sister when I’m ninety-five.” Fletcher soaked the rice pan in the sink. “You’ve got some money now, right? Though I’m never too clear on how much.” (No, he wouldn’t have been clear. I was secretive.) “So send him a check. Enough for a deposit on some dump and a couple of months’ rent. Problem solved.” “Buy him off. Bribe him to stay away from us.” “Well, he wouldn’t have much of a life here. You can’t say Iowa has a ‘jazz scene.’” “There are venues in Iowa City.” “Pass-the-hat gigs for a handful of cheapo students aren’t going to suit Mr. Important International Jazz Pianist.” “But according to Slack, Edison isn’t—‘in the best form.’ He says Edison needs—‘someone to take care of him.’ He thinks my brother’s confidence has taken a knock.” “Best news I’ve heard all day.” “My business is doing well,” I said quietly. “That should be good for something. For being generous.” The way I’ve been generous with you, I almost added, and with kids who are now my children too, but I didn’t want to rub it in. “But you’re also volunteering the rest of this family’s generosity.” “I realize that.” Fletcher leaned on either side of the sink. “I’m sorry if I seem unfeeling. Whether or not the guy gets on my nerves, he’s your brother, and you must find it upsetting, his being down on his luck.” “Yes, very,” I said gratefully. “He’s always been the hot shot. Being strapped, straining his friends’ hospitality—it feels wrong. Like the universe has turned on its head.” I wasn’t about to tell Fletcher, but Edison and Slack must have fallen out, since the saxophonist’s urgency had been laced with what I could only call, well—disgust. “But even if we did decide to take him in,” said Fletcher, “and we haven’t—the visit couldn’t be open-ended.” “It can’t be conditional, either.” If I was going to think that way, and I preferred not to, I had amassed, as of the previous couple of years, most of the power in our household. I disliked having power, and in ordinary circumstances rather hoped that if I never exercised this baffling clout it would go away. For once, however, the novel agency was useful. “Saying, ‘only for three days,’” I said, “or ‘only for a week.’ That doesn’t sound gracious, but as if we can only stand his company for a limited period of time.” “Isn’t that the truth?” Fletcher said curtly, leaving the dishes to me. “I’m going for a ride.” Of course he was going for a ride. He rode his bicycle for hours almost every day—or one of his bicycles, since he had four, competing with unsold coffee tables for limited space in a basement that had looked so cavernous when we moved in. Neither of us ever mentioned it, but I’d bought him those bikes. Technically, we pooled our resources. But when one party contributes the contents of an eyedropper and the other Lake Michigan, “pooling” doesn’t seem the right word, quite. Ever since my husband had started cycling obsessively, I wouldn’t go near my own ten-speed clunker, by then gathering dust with deflated tires. The neglect was of my choosing, but didn’t feel that way. It was as if he’d stolen my bike. Were I ever to have dragged the thing upstairs, greased the chain, and wended down the road, slowly and not very far, he’d have made fun of me. I preferred to skip it. Every time Fletcher went for a ride I got annoyed. How could he stand the boredom? He’d come home some afternoons in a state of brisk satisfaction that his time had improved, usually by a few seconds. Churning the same route through the cornfields to the river a smidgeon faster was of no earthly consequence to anyone. He was forty-six, and soon the computer on his handlebars would simply track his disappointment in himself. I didn’t like to think that I begrudged him something all his own, but he had the furniture making, which was private enough. He used those rides to shut me out. I felt so guilty about this annoyance that I went to lengths to disguise it, forcing myself to suggest he go for a ride in order, say, to get out of his system some frustration with Tanner, “since it makes you feel so much better.” But a too-lilting falsetto gave my falsity away. Most confounding: he liked that the cycling annoyed me. Clearly, I was a bad wife. Aerobic jaunts would lengthen his life. After Cleo, his ex, went so bizarrely off the deep end, Fletcher had grown ever more consumed with control, and as obsessions went the cycling was harmless. Between exercise and his stringent diet, my husband had lost the tiny roll at his middle for which my own mashed potatoes and muffins had been to blame. Yet I’d cherished that little roll, which had softened him in a larger sense. By soliciting forgiveness, the gentle excess had seemed also to dispense it. I required that forgiveness in some quantity. During the previous three years I must have put on about twenty pounds (I was loath to stand on a scale and confront an exact number). When running Breadbasket I’d been pretty thin. In the catering trade, food has a way of becoming repulsive; a vat of cream cheese is indistinguishable from a batch of plaster. But in my subsequent endeavor, the Mexicans on my staff were forever bringing trays of tamales and enchiladas into work. I’d cooked on my feet; now I sat in my office. Thus I’d come to squander an appalling proportion of my mental time on empty vows to cut down to one meal a day, or on fruitless self-castigation over a second stuffed pepper at lunch. Surely on some unconscious, high-frequency level other people could hear the squeal of this humiliating hamster wheel in my head, a piercing shrill that emitted from every other woman I passed in the aisles of Hy-Vee. It wasn’t fair, but I blamed Fletcher for those twenty pounds. I may have been a quiet sort who hugged the sidelines, but that didn’t mean I was a pushover. I was the kind of person at whom you could finger-wag and tut-tut-tut, who wouldn’t talk back, who would submit to all manner of browbeating while seeming to take it all in like a good little camper, and you’d walk away and think, There, that’s put her straight, and then I’d sift off and blithely do whatever you’d just told me not to. That defiant streak had backfired when I started noshing pointedly between meals on whatever entire food group Fletcher had recently disavowed. (The repudiation of cheese was deadly. The day after that announcement, I returned from the supermarket with half a wheel of Brie.) His spurning of the very dishes that had entranced him during our courtship and early marriage—banana cream pie, homemade deep-dish pizza—hurt my feelings. I shouldn’t have conflated love and food, but that’s a mistake women have made for centuries, so why should I be any different? I missed cooking, too, which I found therapeutic. Hence I still baked an occasional coconut layer cake, which Fletcher would boycott, and even the kids would avoid as their father glowered nearby. Well, someone had to eat that cake. Fatally, I felt sorry for it. We had at least evolved a ritual compromise. From each contraband confection, I cut a one-bite amuse-bouche, arranging it with a dab of whipped cream, a garnish of mint, and a couple of pristine fresh raspberries on a large china dessert plate with a sparkling silver fork. This I would leave in the middle of our prep island, the way kids put out cookies for Santa, then make myself scarce. Fletcher would never take the bait while I was watching; still, it meant more to me than I can say that these illicit samplers of what he now deemed “toxic” vanished within the hour. Strictly speaking, as a nutritional Nazi my husband had grown more attractive, but I’d been attracted to him before. Besides, a pointiness was now more pronounced. He had a high forehead and long oval face; shorn to a prickly furze to minimize the balding, his head was bullet-shaped. His long, strong nose in profile looked like a checkmark, and the wire-rimmed glasses added a professorial sharpness. Some strict, censorious quality had entered the triangular geometry of his wide shoulders and newly narrow waist, so that simply being in his physical presence made me feel chided. As I collected our dishes, it bothered me that Fletcher hadn’t stayed to tidy the kitchen, which wasn’t like him. Commonly we dispatched cleanup with the interlocking fluidity of synchronized swimmers. We were at our best working side by side—neither of us understood or relished “leisure” time—and my fondest memories were of just this sort of cleanup on a grand scale. When we first started dating, on nights I’d catered a big buffet Fletcher would install Tanner and Cody in sleeping bags on my living room floor, so he could help with the kitchen. (When I first saw him shake his hands at the sink—thrusting fingers downward splat-splat, a small, instinctive motion that ensures you don’t dribble water all over the floor on the way to drying your hands on the dishtowel—I knew this was the man I would marry.) Swabbing counters, sealing leftovers, and rinsing massive mixing bowls, he never complained; he never had to be told what to do. He only took breaks to sidle behind me as I removed another set of warm tumblers from the dishwasher and kiss my neck. Believe it or not, those cleanups in spattered aprons were romantic, better than champagne and candlelight. Such memories in mind, I could hardly begrudge sudsing the broccoli steamer after lunch for two. I reviewed our conversation. It could have gone worse. Fletcher might himself have announced “over my dead body”; I’d slyly said it for him. I’d never asked outright, “Is it okay if my brother stays in our house for a while?” He’d never said yes or no. Our house. Of course, it was our house. Having rented most of my life, I still hadn’t shaken the impression that this address on Solomon Drive belonged to someone else; I kept the place fanatically neat as if the real owners might walk in any time unannounced. The house was larger than we required; the kitchen’s plenitude of cabinets invited the purchase of pasta- and bread-making machines that we’d use once. Deserving of the contemptuous tag McMansion, our new home had been an overreaction to the cramp of Fletcher’s tract rental, one of those “temporary” resorts men seek post-divorce, from which unless a new woman puts her foot down they never move. I’d been flushed with awe that I could suddenly afford to buy a house, in cash no less, and in some ways I bought it simply because I could. Also, I’d wanted to find Fletcher a workspace. Furniture was his passion, so I bought his passion for him. Na?ve in the ways of money, I couldn’t have known beforehand how much he would resent me for it. Earlier in our marriage, Fletcher had worked for an agricultural company that made genetically modified seed. I’d been keen to enable him to quit because he wasn’t a natural salesman—not from environmentalist aversion to fiddling with nature, or political outrage that corporate America wanted to patent what was once literally for the picking. I didn’t hold many opinions. I didn’t see the point of them. If I opposed the production of nongerminating disease-resistant corn, it would still be sold. I considered most convictions entertainment, their cultivation a vanity, which is why I rarely read the newspaper. My knowing about an assassination in Lebanon wouldn’t bring the victim to life, and given that news primarily aggravated one’s sense of helplessness I was surprised it was so widely heeded. Refusal to forge views for social consumption made me dull, but I loved being dull. Being of no earthly interest to anyone had been a lifelong goal. In kind, this brick neocolonial had no character. It was newly built, its maple floors unscarred. I adored its unstoried blankness. The sockets were solidly wired, and everything worked. I’d never courted character on my own account, save in the sense of being disinclined to shoplift or cheat on my husband; Edison was the one who sought the designation “a real character,” and he could have it. I gloried in anonymity and by then violently resented that the glare of an uninvited public spotlight had turned me into someone in particular for other people. (For pity’s sake, you’d think after purposefully burying myself in the very middle of the country the least I could expect was to be inconspicuous.) I had enough history, and with the lone exception of Edison himself my instinct regarding the past was to draw the shade. The big, lobotomized house formed the perfect neutral backdrop against which Fletcher’s furniture could stand out. At this point my husband’s handiwork had replaced most of the department-store appurtenances of our original combined households. (This joining of domestic forces was the first time in my life that someone had helped me move. With ferocious efficiency, Fletcher could carton a room in an afternoon, which has to be even more romantic than prizing the fiddly scraps from the food processor.) So lithe were his creations that whenever I walked into the living room the furniture seemed to have been grazing on throw rugs moments before. Its back corners curled like stag horns, bowed legs prancing on pared feet, the couch was weighted down with pillows, without which the skittish creature might have cantered out the door. Though Fletcher liked to think he was improving, my favorite piece was one of his first. We called it the Boomerang. Its red leather cushion was oval. The rail forming the contiguous arms and back slooped high on the right, then arced down on the left, until the far end of the left-hand arm almost touched the floor. The chair looked as if it had been hurled. The slats supporting the great rising back line were also curved—laminated Macassar ebony, rosewood, and maple that he’d soaked for a week to bow. The Boomerang was a talisman of sorts. Most people who’ve refined a skill may cling to such a touchstone: early proof they’ve got the goods. The object to which they can always refer when a current effort is foundering: See? If you can do that, you can do anything. I’d no equivalent myself, because I didn’t care about product. I liked process. Be it a marmalade cake or the absurd merchandise I sold then, output was chaff to me the instant of completion. I found finishing projects perfectly awful. After scrubbing the beige film from the rice pan, I peered out the front window. It had started to rain, but that never drove my intrepid husband home. Safe in my solitude, I crept upstairs to my home office and booked a plane ticket between LaGuardia and Cedar Rapids, choosing an arbitrary return date that we could always change. I wrote a check for five hundred dollars with “incidentals” scrawled in the lower-left-hand corner. Enclosing the check and e-ticket printout, I addressed a FedEx mailer to Edison Appaloosa, care of the address Slack had dictated that morning, and booked a pickup on my account. My having bought this house with the proceeds of my offbeat business two years before might have meant that I had the “right” to install my brother in its guest room without permission. But pulling fiscal rank struck me as vulgar and undemocratic. There were three Feuerbachs in that house, and only one Halfdanarson. What called me to run roughshod over Fletcher’s opposition was something else. I was not, as a rule, held hostage to family. At some point I would make the disagreeable discovery of how deep a tie I retained to my father, but not until he died; meantime, I was free to find him unbearable. My sister Solstice was sufficiently my junior that I could almost be her aunt, and it was only at her insistence that she visited me in Iowa every other summer. (She grew up in the fractured remains of a nutty, failed family, on which she’d long tried to impose a more appealing clich?. So she was the only one who bought presents, sent cards, and paid visits whose perfect regularity suggested a discipline.) My lovely mother Magnolia had died when I was thirteen. Both sets of grandparents had passed. A loner until Fletcher, I’d borne none of my own children. Edison was my family, the sole blood relative whom I clearly and cleanly loved. This one attachment distilled all the loyalty that most people dilute across a larger clan into a devotion with the intensity of tamarind. It was Edison from whom I first learned loyalty; it was therefore Edison from whom all other loyalties flowed, and the beneficiaries of this very capacity to cling fiercely were Fletcher and our kids. I may have been ambivalent about the past we shared, but only Edison and I shared it. In truth, I hadn’t hesitated for a heartbeat when Slack Muncie called that morning. Fletcher was right: it was a trump. Edison was my brother, and we could really have ended the discussion then and there. chapter two (#ulink_9b7d84b0-729d-5284-89c9-41794c8728dd) I’m picking your uncle up at the airport at five.” The pecans on my pie smelled nicely toasted, and I pulled it from the oven. “Be sure and join us for dinner.” “Step-uncle,” Tanner corrected, standing at the counter getting toast crumbs on the floor. “Right next door to total stranger in my book. Sorry. Got plans.” “Change them,” I said. “I wasn’t asking. You and Cody will be at dinner, period. Seven o’clock, if the plane’s on time.” I’d always felt shaky about exerting authority over my stepchildren, even shakier now that Tanner was seventeen, and when you don’t feel confident of authority you do not have it. If he did as I said, he would obey out of pity. “When you have a houseguest,” I added, laying on the parental shtick even thicker, “you may not have to be around for all the other meals, but you do on the first night.” “Is that so?” I wasn’t sure what I’d said was true. “I mean, I’d really appreciate your being here.” “So you are asking.” “Pleading.” “That’s different.” He wiped butter from his mouth with his sleeve. “The guy was here once before, right?” “A little over four years ago. Do you remember him?” “Got a dim recollection of some blowhard. Kept yakking about bands nobody’s ever heard of. Couldn’t remember my fucking name.” The characterization stung. “Edison has a son somewhere, but his ex got full custody when the boy was a baby. So your uncle doesn’t have much experience talking to kids—” “Got the impression the problem was the way he talked to adults. He was boring the shit out of everybody.” “He’s a very talented man who’s led a very interesting life—much more interesting than mine. This is a rare opportunity to get to know him.” I was speaking to a brick wall. I hadn’t quite cracked my stepson. Tanner had a blithe sense of entitlement, a certainty that he was destined for an undefined brand of greatness. Though already a month into his senior year of high school, he had yet to evince the slightest interest in the college education for which I was expressly saving the proceeds from my business. He wanted to write, but he didn’t like to read. That summer the boy had announced that he’d decided to become a screenwriter as if doing Ridley Scott a personal favor. I’d wanted to shake the kid; had he any idea the poor odds of breaking into Hollywood even as a runner? Uncertain whether my impulse was kind or cruel, I’d held my tongue. I had pointed out that his grammar, punctuation, and spelling were atrocious, but Tanner imagined that word processing took care of all that silly prose-style folderol. Anyway, he’d said, for screenwriting you had to know how people really talked, for which a grasp of proper grammar was only an impediment. Okay, I’d thought begrudgingly, one point for Tanner. Throughout his adolescence, Fletcher and I had praised the boy’s every poem, extolled the creativity of his half-page short stories. Parents are supposed to. But, to my horror, Tanner had believed us. Tall, pale, and unmuscled, the boy had that undernourished look that girls so often fall for. His dark hair was painstakingly disheveled. The clashing layers of his clothing showed like peeled-back layers of old wallpaper: a checked sweatshirt over dangling striped shirttails, parted to reveal the elastic of plaid boxers rising above his slumped, unbelted jeans. Most of his friends stopped by in the same state of harlequin half-undress. Tanner carried himself with his hips canted forward, and he’d recently developed a disconcerting habit of touching himself while he talked—smoothing palms down his hips, or up his rib cage to his flat chest. He may have been chronically unimpressed, but that skepticism did not extend to himself, and I was amazed how readily his peers and teachers alike took his superficial assurance at face value. I had to watch myself with Tanner. When I noted that “girls” would fall for his looks, I should have clarified: at his age, I’d have been one of those girls. It’s not that I was tempted to be flirtatious with him; after all, I could still discern traces of the wary, closed-down ten-year-old I first inherited, who had to be coaxed into the open like a cat from under a bed. Nevertheless, I recognized my teenage stepson as just the sort of poised, hip, self-convinced young man with whom I was besotted in high school, where I’d huddled the halls praying above all to be left alone. (My classmates at Verdugo Hills were more than happy to oblige. Unlike Edison, I continued to go by “Halfdanarson,” the surname with which I was born; I never let on that I was Travis Appaloosa’s kid.) What I had to watch with Tanner, then, was resistance. It was tempting to parade before myself how as a grown woman I no longer fell for such a huckster, and I didn’t want to indulge a too-ferocious, slightly vicious determination to see through him. Viewed from the impunity of marriage, the penchant for unrequited passion that persisted through my early thirties had paid off. The likes of Tanner might not have known I was alive, but if you never spoke to the young man he would never reveal his disillusioning enthusiasm for the Bee Gees. Having nursed my loves in private, I had kept them inviolate, and was now spared looking back at a string of deranged entrancements with mortified incredulity. Marathon devotion had developed my emotional endurance, in contrast to Tanner’s sprints with three or four girlfriends a year. I feared that my stepson wasn’t learning to love women but to harbor contempt for the women who loved him. “Glop that much jam on your toast,” Fletcher grunted en route to a glass of water, “might as well be eating cake.” “Whole wheat!” said Tanner. “And he still won’t give it a rest.” I’m sorry, but I don’t eat daaaaaaaaairy! Our thirteen-year-old, Cody, had abandoned her piano practice to tug the pull-string doll propped on the dining area’s middle shelf in case her father needed razzing. The doll was a first effort from four years before, and then a mere whimsy of a Christmas present. I’d sewn it from scratch on the heels of Fletcher’s sudden health kick. The crafts project had doubled as therapy, embodying my struggle to keep a sense of humor about the fact that he would no longer come near my celebrated manicotti. The stuffed ragamuffin wore a miniature version of Fletcher’s standard black fleece, to which I’d glued his signature dandruff of sawdust. The doll had stovepipe black jeans, and other than a few teasing threads that spiked upright it was bald. The calf-high leather boots were constructed from the tongues of a fatigued pair of the life-size kind and soled with a retread strip that had fallen off a truck on Highway E36. I’d fashioned the wire-rim glasses out of aluminum paperclips and stitched a permanent scowl of disapproval into the forehead. One hand clutched a chisel (really a jeweler’s screwdriver), the other a square of foam rubber that I’d had to explain was tofu. The fabric was starting to fray, but it had become a matter of professional importance that the mechanism inside was still going strong. Shoes off the rail, Tanner! The Boomerang took me three months! Since I’d involved my best friend Oliver Allbless in the joke from the beginning, it was his voice I’d recorded, and he’d proven adept at mincing his tones into the huffy and judgmental. The electronic device buried in the torso included twenty edicts and exclamations. Little had I known that my mischievous little handicraft would soon become a monster. The Fletcher doll was an instant hit with our kids, to whom the mocking recordings of their father’s oppressive decrees helped to endear their stepmother. Taking the teasing good-naturedly, Fletcher had been touched by the scale of my effort, down to engaging Oliver to design an updated digital technology. (Not much better than rubber bands, the governor belts that drove the plastic records and turntables inside the old Chatty Cathys from the 1960s had been prone to snap—which is why few of these collector’s items still functioned.) Dinner guests never wearied of pulling the string. The following year, Solstice had begged me to fashion a similar caricature of her new boyfriend, whose incessant repetition of faddish expressions like “Good to go!” and “That’s my bad!” was driving her crazy. I’d been reluctant. I was still running Breadbasket. To work the same magic, the doll would have had to capture the boyfriend’s build and dressing habits. Sensing my hesitation, Solstice offered to pay. I cited a price high enough to put my sister off, but she attached photographs and a list of pet phrases to an email the very same day. Word of mouth no longer depends on gabbing over a picket fence, and with the aid of the Internet the customized pull-string doll business went viral. By that year’s end, I had folded Breadbasket, and Baby Monotonous—though thanks to Fletcher’s goading misnomer some locals believed Baby Moronic was my company’s real name—had headquarters outside New Holland and a full-time workforce. The formula was irresistible: ridicule paired with affection. And while expensive to make, the dolls were far more expensive to buy. Besides, they’d not have been so popular if they were cheap. Costing about the combined price of a KitchenAid mixer and a top-of-the-line Dyson, a Baby Monotonous doll had become a status item, one by popular accord more rewarding than the average vacuum cleaner. Aptly for the last father-son interchange, the third time Cody pulled the doll’s string it declared with exalted sanctimony, I want DRYtoast! I want DRY toast! Both kids fell about laughing. “I’d like to know why that thing never stops being funny,” said Fletcher. “Doesn’t matter why,” said Tanner, struggling to stand up straight. “They’re always funny, they only get funnier, and that’s why Pandora is rich.” “We’re not rich,” I said. Leaving aside my stepson’s inflated assessment of our family’s circumstances, rich was a word for other people, and generally for those one doesn’t like. “We’re only doing okay. And be sure not to say anything like that around your uncle.” I corrected with an eye roll, “Step-uncle.” “Why not?” asked Tanner. “It’s impolite to talk about money. And your uncle Edison seems to have fallen on tough times. You don’t want to rub it in.” Tanner looked at his stepmother sideways. “You don’t want him to tap you.” “I didn’t say that.” “Didn’t have to.” Tanner may have overestimated his literary gifts. But he was pretty smart. Driving to Cedar Rapids Airport, I wondered how four years could have passed, the longest Edison and I had been apart. We had talked on the phone—though more than once his number had been suddenly out of service. He was constantly shifting digs, and often away on tours of Europe, South America, or Japan. It was up to me to track him down by calling other musicians like Slack. Exasperation that my older brother didn’t keep up his end of our relationship was pointless. He always sounded happy to hear my voice, and that’s all that mattered to me. In the flurry of ordering bolts of fabric and bales of cotton stuffing, maybe it was little wonder I hadn’t seen Edison. While establishing my headquarters, hiring actors for the recordings, taking on yet more staff to handle orders and ensure that the portly doll with the hard hat that demanded, “Where’s my grub?” went to Lansing, Michigan, and not to Idaho, it had been tricky to remain attentive to Fletcher, Tanner, and Cody, or even to fit in phone calls to family farther afield. Although one call three years back had sounded fractionally off-key. My product had just begun to capture the popular imagination, and I was still excited; why, my pull-string dolls were apparently all the rage among the upper crust in my brother’s own city, having just been the subject of New York magazine’s lead story, “Monotonous Manhattan”—with inset scripts of Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg dolls. But the tone with which Edison congratulated me on my appearance on that cover had disinclined me to dial again soon. All the words were in the right place, and the slight sneering or testiness might have been in my head; you could never quite trust the phone. Since then, for me Monotonous had become too successful—meaning, all that remained was for the enterprise to become less so. Only a tipping point awaited, beyond which orders would decline. It wasn’t a “problem” with which I expected others to sympathize, but recently I’d been suffering from an insidious lassitude that derived from having everything—more than, really—I had ever wanted. On the personal side, I had found Fletcher Feuerbach, to others tightly wound, but warmer and funnier behind closed doors than most suspected. (Stripped, he was a surprisingly handsome man, and he had once said the same of me: we were “stealth attractive.”) I’d had none of my own children, but my adoptive ones were still speaking to me, which was more than could be said of the average teenager one had borne; I’d skipped the bawling-baby stage of childrearing, and gotten in on the best part. On the career side, I had never been ambitious, and suddenly I headed a thriving business of the most improbable sort: one with a sense of humor. I’d made just enough money that the prospect of making a little more left me cold. Wise high-flyers kept this battle with the baffling flatness of success discreetly to themselves. Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn’t a very nice sensation to not want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing. I had always been a hard worker, and this damnable repleteness was enervating. Without a doubt, there was only one solution to my growing torpidity, my Thanksgiving-dinner stupor writ large: I needed a new project. Brown with elegiac hints of yellow, cornfields drying for the October harvest slipped past my window. Overland electrical cables scalloped rhythmically by on creosoted poles, while globular water tanks on narrow stems glowed in autumnal sun like giant incandescent lightbulbs. The pastoral effect was blighted by big-box stores and strip malls—Kum & Go, Dollar General, Home Depot, and the recent explosion of Mexican restaurants, while as ever the Super 8 bannered in garish black-and-gold plastic: GO HAWKEYES, SUPPORT OUR TEAM! Yet on pristine stretches the countryside expressed the timeless groundedness and solidity that had captivated me as a child on visits to my paternal grandparents: white clapboard, potato crops, the odd horse. Whatever foofaraw was roiling the rest of the country always seemed far away. Since then, Iowa had changed. A wave of illegal immigrants had arrived to work in the pork-processing plants. State politics had grown a febrile right-wing fringe. Most family farms of the sort my grandparents tilled had long ago been sold or rented to agribusiness, so that numerous farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings along this route had collapsed. The crop already subsidized to the hilt, more than half of that corn would be converted to ethanol—netting still more lucrative federal subsidies and so slathering a whole second layer of corruption on a grain once a byword for wholesomeness and a hokey sense of humor. The subdued isolation that was soothing to me was soporific to modern young people, for whom the anonymity in which I wallowed was swallowing. Just like my father in his youth, my stepson was frantic to get out. By contrast, Fletcher was born in Muscatine, and his never having moved from his home state didn’t signal a lack of imagination; rather, a contented acceptance and even a certain profundity. “Iowa is somewhere,” he said once, “and that’s as much as anywhere can claim.” The modesty of the Midwest, its secure, unpretentious self-knowledge, its useful growth of crops that people ate as opposed to the provision of elusive “services,” appealed to us both. Nearing the airport, I looked forward to having Edison around again—finally, company with appetite. My brother had been imbued with all the verve, the flair, the savoir faire that I lacked. Tall, fit, and flamboyant, he’d inherited our father’s Jeff Bridges good looks without also assuming the oiliness that had always contaminated Travis. Edison’s younger features were fine, almost delicate, and last I’d seen him the somewhat broader lines of his face at forty still hadn’t buried the high cheekbones. He kept his dirty-blond hair just long enough to flare into an unruly corona around his crown. The manic keyboard of a smile glinted with a hint of wickedness, the predatory voracity of a big cat. In my early teens, my misfit friends were always smitten with my brother. He had an energy, an eagerness, a rapacity; even into adulthood, he never hugged me without lifting me off the floor. Edison was bound to breathe some life into that vast blank house on Solomon Drive, a residence that, since the advent of Fletcher’s mad cycling and cheerless diet, had erred on the grim side. For I was a homebody. I hated travel, and gladly let my brother act as my alter ego, catching red-eyes while I slept. I recoiled from attention; from childhood, Edison could never get enough of it. Aside from the obvious competition with our father, I was mystified why my brother wanted so badly for other people to know who he was. I could see coveting recognition for his talent, but that wasn’t what made him tick. Ever since I could remember, he’d wanted to be famous. Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn’t? I adored the fortification of proper strangers, whose blithe disinterest constituted a form of protection, a soft, oblivious aspic of apathy in which I could hide, like a square of fruit cocktail in strawberry Jell-O. How raw and exposing instead to be surrounded by strangers who want something from you, who believe they not only know but own you. I couldn’t imagine why you’d want droves of nitpickers to comment on your change of hairstyle, to regard everything from your peculiar furniture to the cellulite in your thighs as their business. For me, nothing was more precious than the ability to walk down the street unrecognized, or to take a seat in a restaurant and be left in peace. But then, the joys of obscurity were my own discovery. Like everyone else in L.A., I was raised to regard being a nobody as a death. It may have been easier for me to reject that proposition because from the age of eight I grew up with celebrity at ready hand—or celebrity by association, the worst kind: unearned, cheap. I found being admired myself unpleasant, and far preferred looking up to someone else. While I’d looked up to numerous teachers as a child, that comfortable hierarchy—in which the weaker party isn’t humiliated by the submission—is decreasingly on offer in adulthood. Grown-ups are more likely to despise than adulate their bosses, and in my own self-employment I could only despise or adulate myself. Long gone were the days American electorates looked up to a president like JFK; we were more apt to look askance at politicians. Celebrities splashed across magazines excited less adoration than envy; in an era of the famous-for-being-famous, the assumption ran that with the right PR rep this talentless no-account with all the goodies could be you. I used to look up to my father, and the fact that I did no longer pained me more than I admitted. I loved Fletcher’s graceful, sinuous furniture, but I didn’t look up to him. In fact, maybe if you look up to your spouse there’s something wrong. I looked up to Edison. I knew little about jazz, but anyone who tripped out that many complicated notes without creating sheer cacophony was accomplished. I was never sure the level of recognition Edison had achieved in his rarified circles, but he had played with musicians whom folks in the know seemed to recognize, and I’d memorized their names in order to rattle off an impressive list to skeptics like Fletcher: Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Jeff Ballard, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Paul Motian, Evan Parker, and even, once, Harry Connick, Jr. Edison Appaloosa was listed on dozens of CDs, a complete set of which enjoyed pride of place beside our stereo—even if we didn’t play them much, since none of us was big on jazz. I was in awe of his travels, his far-flung colleagues, his fearless public performances, and his sexy ex-wife—the vast canvas on which he’d painted his life. He may often have made me feel mousey, tongue-tied, not quite myself. I didn’t mind so long as someone in our family was dashing and flashy, gunning a harvester through the hay of the daily grind. Fine, he smoked too much, and kept insensible hours. Fletcher and I were up to our eyeballs in sensible, and a splash of anarchy was overdue. Still, I pulled into short-term parking with a pang of misgiving. Edison himself wasn’t the beanpole he’d been as a track star in high school, and though he hadn’t kept up with the running he’d always been one of those men (they simply don’t make women like this) whose naturally athletic build sustained all manner of drinking and sloth. My brother was sure to ride me mercilessly for looking so shopping-mall and middle-aged. Cedar Rapids Airport was small and user-friendly, its beige d?cor a picture frame for whatever more colorful passengers deplaned there. At the end of September, baggage claim was deserted, and I was relieved to have arrived before Edison’s flight landed. If people divide into those who worry about having to wait and those who worry about keeping others waiting, I fell firmly into the second camp. Soon the connecting flight from Detroit was posted on Carousel 3, and I texted Fletcher that the plane was on time. While passengers threaded from the arrivals hall and clumped around the belt, I loitered from a step back. In front of me, a lanky man in neat khaki slacks—with a tennis racket slung over a shoulder and the remnants of a summer tan—was conversing with a slender brunette. The young woman must have saved her apple from the in-flight snack; she polished it against her cashmere sweater as if the fruit would grant three wishes. “I can’t believe they gave him a middle seat,” said the tennis player. “I was grateful when you offered to switch,” said the woman. “I was totally smashed against the window. But letting him have the aisle didn’t help you much.” “They should really charge double, and leave the next seat empty.” “But can you picture the ruckus, if on top of having to put your hemorrhoid cream in a clear plastic bag you had to stand on a scale? There’d be an insurrection.” “Yeah, not socially practical. But I lost my armrest, and the guy was half in my lap. And you saw how hard it was for the attendant to get the cart past him.” “What gets me,” the woman grumbled as luggage emerged on the belt, “is we all get the same baggage allowances. Our friend in aisle seventeen was packing a quarter ton in carry-on. I swear, next time they try to charge me extra because one pair of shoes has pushed me over twenty-six pounds, I’m going to offer to eat them.” The man chuckled. Meanwhile, no sign of Edison. I hoped he hadn’t missed the plane. “I gather they’ve had to recalculate the number of ‘average’ passengers older planes can take,” said the man. “But you’re right: normal people are subsidizing—” “What ‘normal people’?” the woman muttered. “Look around you.” Searching again for Edison, I scanned their fellow passengers, to whose geometry I’d become so inured that at first I missed the snotty woman’s inference. Earlier generations built on acute angles, today’s Americans were constructed with perpendiculars, and the posteriors lining the baggage belt were uniformly square. Given the perplexing popularity of “low rise” jeans, tight waistbands crossed the hips at their widest point and bit under the gut, which the odd short-cut top exposed in all its convex glory. I avoided the unfortunate fashion, but with those twenty extra pounds I didn’t stand out from the crowd myself. So I felt personally insulted when the sportsman muttered to his companion, “Welcome to Iowa.” “Oh, that’s mine.” The woman slipped her Granny Smith, now very shiny, into her handbag before leaning close to her acquaintance. “By the way, on the plane with that guy, what I really couldn’t stand? Was the smell.” I was relieved the woman’s suitcase had arrived, since the pariah whom she and her seatmate had so cruelly disparaged must have been the very large gentleman whom two flight attendants were rolling into baggage claim in an extra-wide wheelchair. A curious glance in the heavy passenger’s direction pierced me with a sympathy so searing I might have been shot. Looking at that man was like falling into a hole, and I had to look away because it was rude to stare, and even ruder to cry. chapter three (#ulink_e1bcdd0c-837d-552c-a0e5-8191b39614b0) Yo, don’t recognize your own brother?” Wheeling to the familiar voice at my shoulder was like striding through a sliding door and smacking flat into plate glass. The smile I’d prepared in welcome crumpled. The muscles around my mouth stiffened and began to twitch. “… Edison?” I peered into the round face, its features stretched as if painted on a balloon. Searching the brown eyes, nearly black now so hooded, I think I was trying not to recognize him. The longish hair was lank, too dull. But the keyboard grin was unmistakable—if sulfurous from tobacco, and tinged with a hint of melancholy along with the old mischief. “Sorry, but I didn’t see you.” “Find that hard to believe.” Somewhere under all that fat was my brother’s sense of humor. “Don’t I get a hug?” “Of course!” My hands nowhere near met on his curved back, the form soft and warm, but foreign. This time when he embraced me, he didn’t lift me off the floor. Once we disengaged and I met his gaze, my chin rose only slightly. Edison had once been three inches taller than I, but he was no more. It was now less physically natural to look up to my brother. “Do you—did you not need that wheelchair, then?” “Nah, that was just the airline being impatient. Don’t walk fast as I used to.” Edison—or the creature that had swallowed Edison—heaved toward the baggage belt. “But I thought you didn’t see me.” “It’s been over four years. I guess it took me a minute. Please, let me take that.” He allowed me to shoulder his battered brown bag. Visiting my brother in New York, I’d trailed after his ground-eating galumph, nervous of getting left behind in a strange city as he threaded nimbly through slower pedestrians without colliding with lit cigarettes. Yet walking with him toward the airport exit, I was obliged to employ the step-close, step-close of a bride down the aisle. “So how was your flight?” Dull, but my mind was spinning. Edison had stirred a range of emotions in me over the years: awe, humility, frustration (he never shut up). But I had never felt sorry for my brother, and the pity was horrible. “Plane could take off,” he grunted. “Even with me on it. That what you mean?” “I didn’t mean anything.” “Then don’t say anything.” I’m not supposed to say anything. I was already climbing the steep learning curve of an alien modern etiquette. Edison could crack wise at his own expense, and had he shown up in a form bearing some passable resemblance to the brother I remembered he most certainly would have hounded me about my hips. But when your brother shows up at the airport weighing hundreds more pounds than when last you met, you don’t say anything. We finally reached the exit. I said, casually, why don’t I bring the car around, though I was parked only a hundred yards away. A middle-aged woman with smartly cut auburn hair who’d been loitering by the information booth had followed us outside—confirming my suspicion that Edison and I were being stared at. “Sorry to bother you,” said the stranger. “But are you by any chance Pandora Halfdanarson?” For many a younger sibling with an older brother looking on, being solicited for an autograph, or whatever this woman wanted, would be a fantasy come true. But not today, and I came close to denying I was any such person just to get away. On the other hand, explaining to Edison why I’d lied would make a bigger mess, so I said yes. “I thought so!” said the woman. “I recognized your face from the profile in Vanity Fair. Well, I just had to tell you: my husband gave me a Baby Monotonous doll for our anniversary. I don’t know if you remember it—well, of course not, you must make so many—but it’s wearing a stiff suit and snooty hat, and the TV remote is stitched in one hand. It says things like, George! You know you’re supposed to cut down on salt! And George! You know I can’t bear that shirt! And George! You know you don’t understand Middle Eastern politics! Or sometimes it preens, I went to Bryn Maaaaaaaawr! I was offended at first, but then I just had to laugh. I’d no idea I was so critical and controlling! That doll helped save my marriage. So I wanted to thank you.” Don’t get me wrong: I’m usually very nice to satisfied customers. I might not enjoy being recognized in public as much as some people would—as much as Edison would—but I don’t take any la-di-da status for granted. The main thing that rattles me about such encounters is the embarrassment: this woman recognized me and I didn’t recognize her, which didn’t seem right. So usually I’d have been warm and chatty and grateful, but not today. I shook off the fan mumbling, “Well, I’m very happy for you, then,” and pivoted to the crosswalk. “Is it true?” the woman cried at my back. “You’re Travis Appaloosa’s daughter?” Annoyed, since I’d not told that to Vanity Fair and the journalist dug it up anyway, I declined to answer. Edison boomed behind me, “Got that ass-backwards, lady. Travis Appaloosa is Pandora Halfdanarson’s father. Which is eating the fucker hollow.” Fortunately, when I drove up to the curb she’d cleared off. Hefting his bag into the back, I said, “Sorry about that woman. Honestly, that hardly ever happens.” “Price of fame, babe!” His tone was opaque. It took some doing to get the front passenger seat of our Camry to go back to its last notch. Climbing inside, Edison braced one hand on the door; I worried whether the hinges could take the stress. I’d have helped him myself, but I didn’t think he could lean on me without us both collapsing. He lowered himself into the bucket seat with the delicacy of a giant crane maneuvering haulage from a container ship. When he dropped the last few inches, the chassis tilted to the right. His knees jammed the glove compartment, and I had to give his door an extra oomph to get it shut. Those heavy hips were good for something. I had trouble releasing the parking brake, with Edison’s thigh pressed against it, and getting the gearshift out of park was hampered by the spill of his forearm. I was desperate to call Fletcher and warn him, though advance notice that the brother-in-law who had shown up at the airport looked thrice the size of the brother-in-law he’d once hosted would have been useless. As I pulled from the lot, my phone rang, and I recognized the caller. After our curbside encounter with that Baby Monotonous fan, this was the last thing we needed, and I didn’t answer. Edison rustled into the pockets of his black leather jacket—the hip kind with lapels, though this one would have required the benevolence of half a cow. I recognized it as a replacement of the calf-length leather trench coat that he’d worn for years, with a tie-belt, soft as the skin of an eggplant, always worn with the collar raised. He’d looked so cool in it, so Mafioso mysterious and—sleek. I wondered what happened to the original, out of nostalgia, but also because whether Edison had kept his smaller clothes might be a key to how he saw his future. This wider, unfitted jacket had more the texture of plastic, and none of the fine styling of his old trademark. I’d no idea where one got such clothes; I’d never seen apparel that size in Kohl’s, or even at Target. He withdrew what looked like a mashed Cinnabon, the white frosting drooling over its waxed paper. I did not say, You know, that strikes me as the last thing you need. I did not say, You know, I read once that those buns clock in at 900 calories apiece. I did not say, You know, we’re going to be eating dinner in less than an hour. In all, everything I did not say would have nicely filled out the entire recording of one of my pull-string dolls. Yet even the innocuous question I put instead sounded loaded: “So what have you been up to?” As if it weren’t obvious. “Few CDs,” he said through frosting. “Mostly New York gigs, and a lot of the scene has moved to Brooklyn. Hooked up with this guitarist Charlie Hunter who’s really starting to headline. Some killing up-and-comers: John Hebert, John O’Gallagher, Ben Monder, Bill McHenry. Really hit it off with Michael Brecker at a hang at the 55 Bar last year, and it’s a damned shame he just died of leukemia. Man, between the two of us, we could have done Birdland standing room only. Regular thing in Nyack—restaurant, which is a drag, though with so many venues closing we all gotta take what we can get. Maine Jazz Camp for bread, but also ’cause your brother got a few promising prot?g?s, believe it or not. Working on my own tunes, of course. Long tour of Spain and Portugal coming up in December. Maybe London Jazz Festival next fall. Some interest from Brazil, though that’s not nailed. Money’s not good enough. Cat in Rio’s working on it.” I was accustomed to Edison’s catalogue of names that meant nothing to me. Eyes on the road, I could almost hear my brother as he’d always sounded: brash, slick, sure of himself; whatever the disappointments of the present, something lucrative and high profile lay just around the corner. I thought: He’d never sounded fat over the phone. “Talk to Travis lately?” asked Edison. Travis Appaloosa sounds made up—since it was. “Dad,” n? Hugh Halfdanarson, had assumed his barmy stage name when I was six and Edison nine, too late to sound anything but artificial. So we always called him Travis, with an implicit elbow in the ribs, a get-a-load-of-this. Yet during my childhood and adolescence Travis Appaloosa had lilted with the tuneful familiarity of Bill Bixby, Danny Bonaduce, and Barbara Billingsley. Maybe any sequence of syllables that rings out across the nation every Wednesday at nine simply cannot sound ridiculous. From 1974 to 1982, Travis Appaloosa was part of the landscape, just as Hugh Halfdanarson had always hoped. “About a month ago,” I said. “He’s obsessed with his website. Have you seen it? There’s a quiz on Joint Custody trivia. A ‘Where Are They Now?’ tab that updates you on whatever drugs Tiffany Kite is currently shooting up—” “Or which ten-year-old boys Sinclair Vanpelt is shtupping—” “Though you’d be surprised, Floy Newport is mayor of San Diego.” “The underestimated one. They’re the ones who sneak up from behind. The devious little fuckers who plot behind your back. Who use the fact that nobody pays any attention to them to bide their time, and then make their move when you least expect it.” Edison’s tone was playful but needling. Of the three kids in our father’s supposedly cutting-edge one-hour drama, Floy Newport was the closest I had to a doppelg?nger, although—oddly, since Edison of all people should know the difference—he was confusing Floy the actress with Maple Fields, the character she played. On Joint Custody, Maple was the middle one, sandwiched between prodigies, eternally unnoticed and not especially good at anything. Whereas Edison had reviled the character he most resembled in the show, Caleb Fields, as much as the vain pretty boy Sinclair Vanpelt who played him, I’d identified with Maple Fields completely. “On that website,” I said. “Believe it or not, Travis has also listed out the plots of every single episode. In order. Several paragraphs apiece.” “Talk about time on your hands.” “Too bad we didn’t video that woman back at the airport for him. ‘Travis Appaloosa’ meant something to her. That’s a dying breed.” “She was about forty-five? The right age. Probably watched every season. It’s a whole cohort, Panda Bear. They’re not that old, and they’re not all dead yet.” “Only a few names from the shows you grew up with stick in your head,” I said. “As a rule, Travis’s isn’t one of them.” “You’d be surprised. You don’t use his surname. I still get asked about the geeze more often than you’d think.” In point of fact, I had gone by Pandora Appaloosa for a while in college. A little lost, I imagined that if other people thought they knew who I was, then I would know, too. But before long, the very query I was courting—“Any relation to Travis?”—began to seem not only like cheating but counterproductive. My classmates at Reed would only want to hear about my dad the TV star; in contemporary terms, I had reduced myself to a hyperlink to someone else’s Wikipedia page. So I reverted to Halfdanarson when I moved to Iowa. In recent years even fans of retro TV were unlikely to recognize my father’s pseudonym, which disuse was returning to the goofiness that had first sent my mother into peels of laughter. But I was mostly glad of having resumed the ungainly Swedish singsong my father had shed because Halfdanarson was my real name. I’d usually have savored ragging on our father with Edison, that ritual touching base with our sick, stupid history. I rarely discussed my childhood with Fletcher. I hadn’t even let on that my father had been a television actor in a wildly successful show until months into our relationship, and when I finally let it slip I was relieved to learn that Fletcher hadn’t watched Joint Custody when it was on in prime time. Yet no matter how firmly I’d emphasized that my offbeat upbringing in Tujunga Hills was an arbitrary footnote in a life otherwise ordinary by design, Fletcher always took reference to the program as a pulling of rank, and I avoided the subject. Only with Edison, then, could I access a past that, however loath I was to depend on it for a sense of importance, I was reluctant to jettison completely. It was my past, whatever it meant, the only one I had. I grew up with a set of parallels that expressed varying degrees of distortion and caricature. I didn’t only have a father named Hugh Halfdanarson, but one who doubled ludicrously as Travis Appaloosa, who played another father named Emory Fields, a fake dad who was a far more successful paterfamilias than the self-absorbed monomaniac I saw only occasionally at home. I wasn’t simply Pandora Halfdanarson, but could choose to be Pandora Appaloosa if I wished, and on Wednesday nights for eight years I recognized an idealized version of myself in Maple Fields, a sweeter and more altruistic little girl than I who was always trying to get her parents back together. In turn, Maple Fields was played by one of those rare child actors who wasn’t unendurable, either on-screen or off-, even if Floy Newport was probably not her real name either. I idolized her and sometimes thought they should have kept filming the show and canceled our real family. So you can see how my fashioning mocking duplicates for a living might have seemed almost inevitable. After all, my favorite episode of Night Gallery was “The Doll.” This time driving back to New Holland our traditional sharing of notes—first and foremost, on whatever crackpot strategy Travis had recently devised to restore himself as the apple of the public eye—felt diversionary and dishonest. As we continued to discuss the latest on Joy Markle and Tiffany Kite, I could get with the program only so long as I trained my gaze on I-80. Side glances at the unaccountable mass in the passenger seat broke the spell, and it would suddenly seem a bit rich for Edison in this condition to be deriding anyone else for having failed to live up to youthful promise. For that dizzying sorrow on glimpsing the large gentleman in an airport wheelchair had only intensified, and I’d no idea how I would make it through the whole evening to come without falling apart. chapter four (#ulink_e88ea6f1-290f-518a-98f1-9d1c04946f10) Calling, “We’re ho-ome!” in the hallway, I tinged the announcement by descending into a minor key, a note of warning that my family would fail to pick up on. Here I’d hoped to present Tanner with a member of his extended family whom he could plausibly “look up to,” but with my brother’s spine compacted two inches Tanner was already too tall. Nothing about being obese diminished Edison’s accomplishments, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the way Tanner would see things. When Edison trailed me to the kitchen, Fletcher’s face mirrored what my own must have looked like when I turned to my brother’s voice at the airport: that flat smack against plate glass, the shock of having your expectations so thoroughly thwarted. My husband is not an impolite person, but when he looked up from the stove he said absolutely nothing and forgot to close his mouth. Time stretched. He was dying to look at me, but cutting away would have seemed unwelcoming. “Hey,” he said feebly. “Hey, bro, good to see you, man!” Edison clapped Fletcher’s shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who’d last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people’s transparent hypocrisy. They couldn’t say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile. “Tanner?” I led Edison over to where my stepson slouched at the table, taking in the scene while dawdling at his laptop. I could already read in the twist of his mouth the ruthless description of our new houseguest that he’d post on Facebook. “You remember your uncle Edison?” “Not really,” said Tanner warily. “Hell, kid, you’ve really shot up,” said Edison, extending his hand. “Can’t say I’d recognize you on the street, Tan.” Nobody called Tanner “Tan.” Tanner continued to slouch, so when he extended his arm to limply shake Edison’s hand it was from as far away as possible. “Can’t say I’d recognize you, either, Ed.” Nobody called Edison “Ed.” “So you’re seventeen? Figure my son Carson’s about your age,” Edison supposed. Tanner exclaimed, “You don’t even know?” That’s when Cody filtered into the doorway. With fair flyaway hair and a diffident manner, she was a shy girl, as I had been. Responding to her natural modesty and diligence, I’d tried for years not to show her any partiality over her more arrogant brother. Although no prodigy at the piano, the girl had a precocious sensitivity that would either be the making of her or would doom her for life as an easy mark. This was one of those moments in which she distinguished herself, for her instincts were pitch perfect. Cody took a mere instant to assess the situation, after which she ran to my brother crying, “Hi, Uncle Edison!” and gave him an unreserved hug. He hugged her back, hard. I wondered how many times recently anyone had held him like that—with joy, with affection, with no trace of distaste. I wished I’d hugged him that way myself. “So what’s cookin’?” asked Edison, hovering by the stove. “Ratatouille and shrimp with polenta,” said Fletcher. “I’m afraid the shrimp are only the frozen supermarket kind,” I said. “It’s the landlocked Midwest, and Fletcher decides the only animal protein he’ll eat is seafood.” “No prob—smells great!” Edison helped himself to a large nearby jar of peanuts and asked for a beer. I poured him a lager and followed him anxiously to the table. Fletcher had made the dining set, and the chairs all had finely curved arms—between which my brother was not going to fit. “I’m sure you’re worn out after your trip,” I said hastily, “but you may not be—comfortable in these chairs.” I did a rapid inventory: the living room was furnished with Fletcher’s rigid normal-size-person creations. But one broken-down recliner in the master bedroom was leftover from the days I lived alone; I’d refused to part with an ugly chair so sumptuous for curling up to read. My husband’s confabulations of oak, cedar, and ash were more sensuous for the eye than the ass. I tried to be offhand about it. Turning off the ratatouille, Fletcher was stoic, Cody eager to help. Once upstairs, my husband and I finally met each other’s eyes. Desperate to talk to him for hours, I could only shake my head in dismay. “Mom,” Cody whispered as we knelt on one side of the recliner and Fletcher took the other. “What happened to Uncle Edison?” “I don’t know, sweetie.” “Is he sick?” “According to the latest thinking on the subject”—we heaved to a stand—“yes.” Though I was personally unsure how labeling obesity an “illness” got anyone anywhere. “Does he eat too much?” “I think so.” “Why doesn’t he stop?” “That’s a good question.” We paused at the top of the stairs. “He makes me sad,” said my stepdaughter. “Me, too.” I kept my voice steady for her sake. “Very, very sad.” I was determined not to make a big deal out of this project, but the recliner was heavy, and in order to get it around the turn at the landing we had to tilt the chair on its side. A certain amount of huffing and Fletcher’s barked directions must have leaked to the kitchen. When we lugged in the recliner, Edison was holding forth to Tanner while leaning on the prep island. I felt bad about making him stand so long, which he must have found tiring. The peanuts were finished. “I’m not dissing Wynton Marsalis,” Edison was opining. “He’s brought in some bread, if nothing else. But the trouble with Wynton is he feeds this whole nostalgia thing, like jazz is over, you hear what I’m sayin’? Like it’s in a museum, under glass. Nothing wrong with keeping the standards alive, so long as you don’t turn the whole field into one big snoring PBS doc. ’Cause it’s still evolving, dig? I mean, you got a certain amount of lost free crap, which the public hates, and drives what few folks do listen to jazz even further into the ass of the past. Cats who blow all freaky don’t appreciate that even Ornette riffed on an underlying structure. But other Post-Bop cats out there are killing. Even some of Miles’s contemporaries are still playing, still innovating: Sonny, Wayne …” “Talk about ‘ass of the past,’” said Tanner, focused on his keyboard. “What’s with all the ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘dig’? That shit must have been pretty moldy by the time you were a kid.” “Yo, every profession got its patois,” said Edison. “It’s true, they really do talk like that,” I said, after we’d set the recliner down in the kitchen to rest. “I’ve visited your uncle several times in New York, and all the other jazz musicians talk the same way. Time warp. It’s hilarious.” When Edison withdrew his cigarettes, I urged him to the patio. We didn’t allow smoking in the house. “Jesus, it’s like he’s trying to sound like a jazz musician,” Tanner grumbled once Edison had shambled outside. “Like some stereotype of a jazz musician that wouldn’t wash in a biopic because it’s trite. You’re not going to tell me, Pando, that he grew up speakingjive.” “Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn’t mean it’s fake,” I snapped. “You could be a little more gracious. Like, give us a hand, because I think we’re going to have to move the table.” Lodging the chair at the head of the table was an operation, since the recliner wouldn’t fit in front of the step up to the living room without our moving the table a foot toward the patio door—which meant Tanner had to push his own chair right up against the glass. Reseated but cramped, he looked put out, doubly so when he had to get up again to let Edison inside. As my brother sank with obvious relief into the crazed leather cushion, I caught Fletcher appraising the room critically. He was house-proud. Now the room was off-center, and the dirty maroon eyesore hardly set off his dining table. “Hey, Pando, I almost forgot,” said Tanner, typing with the very urgency I had dreaded. “Some photographer called while you were gone, about a re-sked of the Bloomberg Businessweek shoot. Wish you’d pick up your damn iPhone. Taking a handwritten message on a pad is like carving on the wall of a cave.” “Oh, God, not another photo shoot,” I said before I realized how that sounded. “I hate them,” I continued, them making it worse, since the very plurality was the problem. “I can’t stand having to decide what to wear, and it doesn’t even matter since I always look hideous,” always continuing to dig my grave. Since it was true enough, in my haste to say something more self-deprecating still to cover for the embarrassing fact of the shoot itself, I almost added, but pulled up short just in time, that lately all I could think when I saw pictures of myself in the media was that I looked fat. “They don’t always come out so bad,” said Tanner. “The New York magazine cover, where they added a pull-string on your back? That one was a kick.” “Little cheesy, though,” Edison proclaimed from his new throne, and drained the last of his beer. “That rag’s gone to shit. One step from Entertainment Weekly.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to realize that Edison might have regarded that cover as an invasion of sorts. New York was his patch. “You ever been in New York magazine?” Tanner charged my brother. “Nah. I’m more the Downbeat type.” As I retrieved napkins at his side, Tanner muttered, “Look more like the beat down type to me.” I hoped Edison hadn’t heard him. I should have been glad that Tanner stuck up for me, but I didn’t want the responsibility of being the one he looked up to. Baby Monotonous had come to me flukishly. I hadn’t planned the venture or even wanted it, much less worked hard for it until it landed in my lap. I believed I set a bad example. “Well, we should all enjoy this making of hay while the sun shines,” I said, laying plates. “Baby Monotonous dolls are a fad. Fads don’t last. Like pet rocks—a perfectly ridiculous gift item that you kids are too young to remember. They lasted about five minutes. In that five minutes, someone made a bundle. But if he wasn’t smart, he’d have been left with whole warehouses full of stones in stupid little boxes. I’ve been very lucky, and you should all be prepared for that luck to run out. Orders are already starting to level off, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see those dolls start cropping up on eBay by the hundred.” Orders hadn’t leveled off. “We’re never putting Dad’s doll on eBay!” said Cody. “Pando, what’s with trashing your own company all the time?” said Tanner. “Someone finally gets a business off the ground in this family, and all you can do is apologize.” “Thanks a lot, Tanner,” said Fletcher at the stove. “Basement full of furniture says this house got only one going concern,” said Tanner. “Nobody buys quality anymore.” “Thanks a lot, Fletcher,” I said. It was a pale facsimile of family banter—the fast-paced, rollicking back-and-forth to which our foursome had indeed risen on occasion, but which I generally located only on television. I’d grown up in such proximity to scripted family follies that you’d think I could have done a better job of faking it. But ever since I’d walked in with Edison in tow our interchanges had been forced. For once when I told the kids to wash their hands before dinner, there were no groans; with a thick glance between them that I recognized from my own childhood, they scooted off, both spurning the nearest bathroom for the one upstairs. After a lag, I followed. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to admonish them—probably with something bland and pointless about trying to be nice. When I arrived outside the door, they weren’t even bothering with the pretense of running water. “Then, like, he drops some peanuts,” Tanner was saying in a harsh whisper, “and stoops to pick them up, right? Except he loses his balance, ’cause that whale gut throws him forward, and he ends up on his hands and knees! I’m not kiddin’, Code, the son of a bitch couldn’t get off the floor! So I had to help drag his ass upright, and I thought we was both goin’ down! Even his hand is huge. And sweaty.” “He is kinda gross,” said Cody. “Like when he bends down, and his shirt’s too small so it hikes up and you can see his crack with little black hairs in it, and these huge butt-blobs bulge over his belt.” “Guy could do his own retro TV show, just like Grampa’s: My Three Chins,” said Tanner. “And he’s got a bigger rack than Pando.” “If I looked like that, I’d just wanna die. His ankles are bigger around than your thighs. Hey, you think Mom knew he’d turned into such a load?” “I kinda doubt it. But notice how she keeps pretending how everything’s all normal? Like, nobody’s supposed to mention that ‘Uncle Edison’ barely fits through the fucking door.” I’d heard enough. Clearing my throat, I walked in. “Get it out of your system now. Just because someone’s overweight doesn’t mean he has no feelings.” Yet when I closed the door behind us, the atmosphere remained conspiratorial. “But how long’s this guy gonna hang around?” said Tanner. “In twenty-four hours he could bust the whole place up. What if he sits on the john and it cracks to pieces?” “I don’t know how long he’ll stay,” I said quietly. “But while he’s here, I want you to imagine what it might be like if you two grow up, and then you, Tanner, visit your sister and her family, and maybe you’ve had a hard time, and maybe you’ve been hitting the H?agen-Dazs. Wouldn’t you want your sister to still treat you like the same person? Wouldn’t you feel hurt if her family made fun of you?” “Tanner will never get fat!” said Cody. “He’s got to watch his figure so he can keep pawing all over his girlfriends.” I shot back, “That’s what I thought about my brother.” That sobered them up. As we walked back downstairs, Cody dragged on my hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “What I said, I didn’t mean it.” She was close to tears. I assured her with a squeeze that I knew she hadn’t. Prone to self-recrimination, Cody was all too capable of tossing sleeplessly that night, berating herself for having been mean about her uncle even out of his earshot. I’d only ever seen her try to be nasty to impress Tanner, and she was lousy at it. At school, she perennially befriended the social dregs out of compassion, pulling her own mid-level status down several notches in the process. We sat down to dinner. Fletcher passed his shrimp dish, in a tangy tomato, zucchini, and eggplant sauce over bars of baked polenta. As a special concession, he allowed the rest of us to spike it with Parmesan. The guest, Edison helped himself first, after which our largest rectangular baking pan was half empty. I took a tiny serving to ensure enough remained for everyone else, and Cody did likewise—unless the totem of excess at the end of the table was putting her off her feed. Me, I still had an appetite, but couldn’t meet my brother’s eyes; simply looking at him felt unkind. So I stole glances when he was occupied with his food, terrified he’d catch me staring—at the rolls of his neck, the gapes between straining buttons on his shirt, the tight, bulging fingers that recalled bratwurst in the skillet just before the skin splits. I announced that Cody was studying the piano, and she said she “sucked,” but that she’d be grateful if Edison would give her a few lessons. He acted game—“Sure, kid, no problemo”—but his tone was surprisingly cool, considering that he’d usually jump at the chance to show off. I encouraged Fletcher to show my brother what he was working on in the basement later, though Edison couldn’t come up with anything to ask about cabinetry besides, “What’s the latest project?” (another coffee table) and “What materials?” (though Fletcher was doing some striking work with bleached cow bones, his terse reply was “walnut”). There’s nothing more leaden than this sort of exchange, and awareness that Edison didn’t care about the answers to his lame questions made Fletcher protective and closed. Yet Edison grew more animated when I pressed Tanner to tell his step-uncle about his interest in becoming a screenwriter. “The feature film industry is a total crapshoot,” Edison advised, rearing back in the recliner. “Half the time when after years of frustration the project’s finally lined up with casting, crew, everything, some douche pulls the money. Most Hollywood screenwriters just do rewrites of other people’s rewrites, and never see a script shot. You should think about TV, man. They get shit out the door. Travis, our dad—I guess you’re sort of related, right? Wouldn’t count on a guy who sells Pocket Fisherman on Nick at Nite to provide you a lot of contacts. But he may still know people who know people, and that’s the way it’s done. Me, I got friends out there who went into the industry, including one guy at HBO. Be glad to put you in touch.” If I could have gotten away with it, I’d have been pulling the ridge of a flattened hand across my throat. Tanner’s expectations were already unrealistic. I didn’t want him encouraged. “Thanks,” Tanner grunted skeptically. “Tanner’s met his step-grampa,” I said. “A cautionary tale.” “What’s that mean?” “An unpleasant story that should keep you from making the same mistake.” “What’s so cautionary about my grampa being a TV star?” I noted that in this instance Tanner had dropped the “step.” “Was a TV star,” I said. “He spends most of his time opening used-car lots and doing Rotary Club lunches—” “Lecturing on environmentalism, believe it or not,” said Edison with a laugh. “Chump never recycled a Coke can in his life.” “—or,” I went on, “printing truckloads of anniversary T-shirts, when Travis Appaloosa is the only man on God’s earth who knows or cares when the first episode of Joint Custody aired on NBC. TV Land used to occasionally have him on in the graveyard slot, but he burned that bridge by badgering the channel to run Joint Custody marathons the way they do with Twilight Zone and Andy Griffith. Last time I talked to him he’d gotten a fire under him about putting together a reunion show like The Brady Bunch did—only the child actors Travis worked with grew up to be wasters, bar one, and the mayor of San Diego has better things to do. Cautionary. I’ll say.” I knew I’d been going on, but someone had to counter the deadly proffering of Edison’s helping hand. I was loath for our kids to feel exceptional for the wrong reasons, and so to fall prey to the same unjustified sense of importance from which I’d suffered as a kid. While superficially self-effacing, my keeping my parentage under wraps at school may have been even more corrupting than Edison’s bannering of his father’s identity at every opportunity. I’d still smugly carried around the fact that my father was Travis Appaloosa like a secret charm, an amulet to ward off evil, when really it was no better than a pet rock. Even more averse than I to playing up my Burbank connection, Fletcher changed the subject—turning to the one topic sure to fill out the rest of the meal: all that jazz. “Hey, I’ve played with some heavy cats, dig?” Having scraped out the remains of the polenta, Edison upended the bowl of Parmesan on top. Tanner and Cody locked eyes, which bulged in unison. “Stan Getz hired me for three years—paid better than Miles, believe it or not. But just my luck the really iconic recordings haven’t been the gigs I’ve been on. So nobody remembers that, yeah, Edison Appaloosa played with Joe Henderson—because I wasn’t on Lush Life. Paul Motian, too—and it’s hardly my fault the guy has pretty much stopped playing with pianists. And, man, I could shoot myself over the fact that nobody, nobody thought to record that jam session with Harry Connick, Jr., at the Village Gate in 1991. Harry Connick! Rare for him to sing in those days. Crack pianist himself, and said I had ‘the touch.’ Okay, he wasn’t big yet. But Jesus fucking Christ, I could have been everywhere.” I didn’t enjoy the thought: He sounds like Travis. It bothered me that my brother was still trotting out the same list of musicians that I’d learned years before to impress aficionados. It was a list, apparently, that Edison recited to himself. “Thing that really gets me in New York these days,” he went on, Parmesan pasted in the corners of his mouth, “is this obsession with ‘tradition.’ Some of the younger cats, they sound like fuddy-duddies. Studying all these chords and intervals like those mindless fucks in madrassas memorizing the Koran. Ornette, Trane, Bird—they were iconoclasts! They weren’t about following the rules, but tearing them up! Personally I blame jazz education. Sonny, Dizzy, Elvin—they didn’t get any degrees. But these good doobies coming out of Berklee and the New School—they’re so fucking respectful. And serious. It’s perverse, man. Like getting a Ph.D. in how to be a dropout.” We didn’t usually have wine with dinner, but tonight was an occasion. Edison had opened the second bottle—which made Fletcher’s jaw clench—helping to explain why my brother was dropping consonants, slurring vowels, and adopting a drawling cadence like the honorary African-American he considered himself to be. Most of the founding fathers of jazz were black, and Edison claimed being a white guy was a disadvantage in the field, especially in Europe, where “real” jazz musicians had to look the part. “… See, what Wynton’s done by bringing in Jazz at Lincoln Center is cast the genre as elitist. As high culture, high art. Elitist, can you believe it? A form that came straight outta whites-only water fountains? But that’s the drill now, man. Middle-aged boomers hit the Blue Note when they’re too out of it to keep up with hip-hop and figure they need to ditch pop for something more sophisticated. It’s a pose, man …” As my mind wandered, I considered the script for an Edison doll: I’d have been famous, man, if only I was black! I’ve played with some heavy cats. Jazz prodigy my ass! Sinclair Vanpelt couldn’t play “Chopsticks.” Yeah, as a matter of fact, Travis Appaloosa is my dad. I can’t believe no one recorded the Harry Connick jam. Yo, pass the cheese. Well, that last line would be a recent addition. I collected the plates, while Edison heaved from the maroon recliner—again—to head to the patio to smoke. So Tanner had once more to get up, push his chair in, and maneuver out of the way. It was chilly for the end of September, and each lumbering departure and reentry lowered the temperature by five degrees. The central heating couldn’t keep up, and Cody had to slip upstairs to get us both sweaters. I was reconciled that Tanner and Cody had to negotiate a world in which people smoked. Given that my brother was not only chronically short of breath but also himself a heavy cat, the kids probably wouldn’t view him as a role model. But Fletcher tensed every time we went through all this brouhaha for an unfiltered Camel. He didn’t want anyone smoking around the kids. I unveiled my pecan pie. Fletcher wouldn’t have any, but it used to be my brother’s favorite dessert as a boy. If glutinous with corn syrup, the pie was already baked; besides, look at him: what difference did it make? Although I guessed that’s what he routinely told himself. “Edison, you want ice cream with this?” I called plaintively. But I knew the answer. I lay on my back in bed while Fletcher folded his clothes, which without the maroon recliner he had to stack on his dresser. Finally I said, “I had no idea.” After slipping between the sheets, Fletcher, too, lay in a wide-eyed stupor. We seemed to be experiencing a domestic post-traumatic stress, as if recovering from an improvised explosive device planted at our dining table. “I’m starving,” said Fletcher. A bit later he said, “I rode fifty miles today.” I let him get it out of his system. After another couple of minutes he said, “That polenta dish was huge. I thought we’d have scads left over.” I sighed. “You should have had some pie. Before Edison finished it off.” I nestled my head on his chest. For once his build seemed not a reprimand, but a marvel. “What happened to him?” I let Fletcher’s question dangle. It would take me months to formulate any kind of an answer. “I’m sorry,” said Fletcher, stroking my hair. “I’m so very, very sorry.” I was grateful that he opted for sympathy over judgment. Sympathy for whom? For his wife, first of all. For Edison as well, obviously. But maybe—in a situation I’d unwittingly gotten us into and had myself contrived as horrifyingly open-ended—for everybody. chapter five (#ulink_7f3ed8bf-1343-537e-af4d-c7cfa70a9273) I shuffled downstairs the following morning, a Sunday, to find Edison in the kitchen, which Fletcher and I had swabbed down laboriously the night before and was once more a melee of mixing bowls. “Morning, Panda Bear! Thought I’d earn my keep. Breakfast on the house.” He’d fired up our cast-iron griddle, above which he dribbled batter from a dramatic height. Once the batch began to sizzle, he pulled a cookie sheet from the oven that was towering with pancakes—chocolate chip, I would discover. I usually had a piece of toast. “Thanks, Edison, that’s very—generous.” Tanner was not yet up, and Fletcher had fled to the basement. So I sat down next to Cody, who was parked before a stack of five. Thus far she had carved a single wedge from the top pancake and placed it on the plate rim. In a show of politeness, she cut a doll-size bite from the wedge and chewed elaborately. As well as pancake fixings—jams and sour cream—there was also a bowl of scrambled eggs, getting cold, and large enough to have decimated both cartons. If I wanted toast, that was on offer as well—piled and pre-buttered. I nibbled on a triangle. It oozed. “Wow,” I said faintly as my own stack arrived—layered with more butter and drenched in maple syrup. Resourcefully, my brother had finished the open bottle and located our backup in the pantry. “Is there any coffee?” “Coming up!” He poured me an inky mug-full. I slipped up and looked in the fridge. I took my coffee with milk. The empty plastic gallon sat on the counter. “Whatcha looking for?” Edison had already adopted a proprietary attitude toward our kitchen. “The half-and-half.” Of which ordinarily I took a tiny splash on top of the milk, but straight would do for now. “Sorry about that,” said Edison. “Needed some coffee myself, to power through the flapjacks. There wasn’t much left, and I killed it.” I’d opened a fresh pint the previous morning. “Never mind, then. I’ll take it black.” I returned to the pancakes I didn’t want, fighting a burst of petulance. All I did want was my usual white coffee, and not this bleeding-ulcer-in-a-cup. I told myself he was trying to be nice, but it didn’t feel nice. “Think I should take a stack down to Fletch?” “No, he wouldn’t touch them. Not with the white flour, and especially not with chocolate chips.” My tone was a little clipped. “I could make another batch with buckwheat and walnuts, no prob. We’d just have to get more milk.” “No, please don’t make any more pancakes!” Edison’s ladle froze; I might as well have slapped him. The rebuke rang in my ears, and I flushed with remorse. My brother had just gotten here and there had to be something terribly wrong for him to be looking like this and I wanted him to feel welcome and loved, which was the only way he would ever get a hold of himself. I took my coffee to the stove and put an arm around his shoulders. It shocked me that it took a small but detectable overcoming of revulsion to touch my own sibling. “All I meant was—you should knock off all this work and join us for breakfast. I just had a bite, and the pancakes are terrific.” The touch more than the verbal reassurance made the difference. “Vanilla flavoring,” he advised. “And you have to really watch these suckers, or the chocolate burns.” He insisted on finishing the batter, at which point Tanner emerged as well. “Jesus fuck! This is fantastic!” Reviling his father’s preachy nutritional guidelines, Tanner exulted in white flour and chocolate for breakfast. Six pancakes would disappear down that scrawny gullet no harm done, and my stepson’s enthusiasm helped to turn the emotional tide. Edison basked in Tanner’s praise for his breakfast. I may have had more than I wanted, but that was a small sacrifice to make my brother feel appreciated, and Cody finally consumed half a pancake. Why, it seemed we’d have a garrulous, boisterous time together so long as we all kept eating. At eleven a.m., aside from yet another kitchen cleanup, the day yawned. “So, Edison,” I ventured, “have you thought about what you’d like to do while you’re here?” “Go cow-watching?” “We don’t look at cows!” said Cody. “Yeah, believe it or not the Midwest has electricity now,” said Tanner. “They’re even talking about bringing in something called ‘broadband’ so you can make contact with civilization right through the air—though I think that’s a wild rumor myself.” “Tanner’s right,” I said. “There’s plenty to do in Iowa, you East Coast snob.” That said, I’d never been keen on activities for their own sake. I preferred work to play—a temperament I’d recognized on meeting Fletcher Feuerbach. I’d been catering a July Fourth cookout for Monsanto when a quirky, taciturn seed salesman fled the corporate chitchat to mind the grill. He helped clear and pack up, leaving me in no doubt that tying off trash bags and arranging leftover deviled eggs in plastic containers was his idea of a good time. Little wonder I brought him home, where he washed every single serving platter before he kissed me. For both of us, work was play. “You can always practice,” I added. “Cody doesn’t monopolize the piano more than an hour a day.” “Whoa, busman’s holiday!” It wasn’t the response I’d expected. “I could show you Baby Monotonous.” “Cool,” said Edison noncommittally, stabbing his gooey stack. “But I been working my ass off. Gigs, sessions, practice; until recently, booking the club. Keeping current with the scene, burning the candle at both ends. I’m pretty whacked. Don’t mind doing jack for a while. I was just glad a gap in my schedule made it possible to fit in a visit. Catch up, get reacquainted. Finally get to know these kids a little.” Edison’s hectic version of his life jarred with Slack’s forewarning that my brother seemed dispirited, but I now interpreted that caution as concerning Edison’s girth. Besides, I was accustomed to finding my brother’s life opaque. I had no idea how one went about arranging a European tour. I didn’t know anything about all those names he threw around, Dizzy and Sonny and Elvin, and I’d learned the hard way not to ask “Who’s this?” when Edison played a track; he always took my head off because I could never remember whether “Trane” played the saxophone or the trumpet. Aside from courteously listening to his own recordings—once—before sliding their cases into the section of our music collection that gathered dust, I didn’t listen to jazz, and I didn’t fathom who did go to those clubs when the pianist wasn’t their brother. “What’s your schedule?” I asked. “I mean, coming up.” “This tour of Spain and Portugal. Three solid weeks on the road. Takes more out of me than it used to. Haven’t taken a sabbatical since I hit New York in 1980. Truth is, Iowa could be the ticket—if that’s okay with you. Somewhere I got a legit excuse to beg off more gigs in the Village: a fifteen-hundred-mile commute. Recharge the batteries. Smell the coffee.” With lots and lots of half-and-half. “Now, when’s the Spain and Portugal tour again?” I asked neutrally. “Early December.” His answer was muffled with pancake. That was in just over two months. If I was understanding Edison’s concept of a sabbatical correctly, and he intended to stay with us until heading off on this tour, that would make for an awfully long “visit,” but it was also not an ellipsis. We just had to go the distance without everyone in this family gaining fifty pounds. “You’re not maintaining an apartment at the moment, I gather.” I was diffident. “So where’s all your stuff? Your piano?” “In storage.” This answer, too, was thick with chocolate chip. “I got your classic cash-flow crisis, dig? Royalties from SteepleChase in the pipeline. And plenty work on the horizon, of course. So I, uh.” He wiped maple syrup from his mouth. “You know. Appreciated the little loaner.” “Oh, no problem!” That had been hard for him to say. “And if you need …” “Well, yeah, now that you mention it—a little, you know, pocket change …” “Sure, just tell me …” The kids were on their computers, but they were listening. I didn’t want to embarrass him. “Later today.” However happy to slip him whatever he needed to tide him over, I’d never been in the parental position of giving my older brother an allowance. Edison had always been the big spender. On my visits to New York he’d never let me pay for anything, putting me on the guest list for his own performances and inveigling me into dives with cover charges for free because he was known, flashing C-notes at waiters and taxi drivers. Now the one with means, I felt a loss that must have been mutual. He’d liked his being the big spender. He’d liked his being my protector. So had I. Yet what bothered me while scrubbing burnt drips of batter from the stove wasn’t giving Edison a “loan.” So far, no one, not even my impolitic stepson, had addressed my brother’s dimensions head-on. I myself had not once alluded to Edison’s weight to his face, and as a consequence felt slightly insane. That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so—he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don’t recognize my own brother, and now we’re all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit. Now in order to have a convivial morning together I’d eaten a breakfast five times more filling than usual, and Tanner’s and my gorging had provided cover for Edison’s eating far more. That clich? not mentioning the elephant in the room was taking on a literal cast. chapter six (#ulink_bef2be0b-ff6b-546f-b68e-c935de37d9ac) Edison was touchy about any suggestion that he got the idea of playing jazz piano from Caleb Fields. Me, I could never remember whether my brother started studying piano with a storied black old-timer in South Central (not Melrose—our driver kept Jack Washington’s hairy address a secret from our parents, and so did I) before or after the first season of Joint Custody aired. Travis had always believed that Edison was competing with a television character, and was still riding his firstborn for aping the ambitions of a contrivance—though the imputation was rich, since our father’s fictional children had always seemed more real to Travis himself than his actual kids. Travis called the series a “cult show,” but if so the cult comprised exactly one person. In truth, Joint Custody was not one of those iconic programs like Star Trek that go on to distribute generous residuals. That woman at the airport, for example: she wouldn’t have been a “fan” of Joint Custody. She’d simply watched it. I wasn’t sentimental about most of the junk we’d parked in front of, either, although I was abashed to admit that I could still hum the theme song for Love, American Style and that I continued to nurse a nostalgic crush on the late Bob Crane. Calling the concept “groundbreaking” gave the show too much credit, but the producers did do their homework. Take a look at its forerunners. The Rifleman: a widowed rancher struggles to bring up a boy with a Tourettesian impulse to cry “Paw!” at every opportunity. Family Affair: a widower raises two insufferable brats with the help of a stuffy, charmless English butler. My Three Sons: a widowed aeronautical engineer with three boys finally remarries after ten seasons—wedding yet another hapless victim of spousal mortality. Flipper: the performances of a widowed father and two sons are all overshadowed by a bottlenose dolphin. The Andy Griffith Show: widowed, single-parent sheriff convinces even most North Carolinians that there really is a town called Mayberry. The Beverly Hillbillies: widowed hick makes a bundle on bubbling crude … oil, that is … black gold!Bonanza: a patriarch in Nevada ranches with three grown sons born to three different mothers, all of whom are dead. The Brady Bunch: a widower and (it is blithely presumed) widow with three kids apiece know it’s much more than a hunch! that the subsequent family show will live eternally in syndication, to Travis’s particular disgust. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father: a querulous little boy matchmakes for his widowed dad, whose being called “Mister Eddie’s Father” by the Japanese housekeeper the scriptwriters believed would continue to seem beguiling even after being repeated eight hundred times. Extraterrestrials who picked up the airwaves emanating from the United States in the sixties and early seventies would have concluded that our species was much like salmon, and once the females had borne their young nature had no use for them and they promptly expired. On the other hand, once you threw in the widowed women who spearheaded The Lucy Show, Petticoat Junction, The Big Valley, The Partridge Family, Julia, and The Doris Day Show, the married males weren’t exactly thriving, either. So the producers of Joint Custody were on a crusade. Nearly half the marriages in America were ending in divorce, and the failure to reflect this fact on television was hypocritical. (In The Brady Bunch pilot the mother Carol was divorced, but the network vetoed the idea; subsequent scripts never referred to how her marriage ended. The audience opted wholesale for the industry’s default setting. Only one competing program ever had an excuse: Eight Is Enough, in which a newspaper columnist with eight kids loses his wife after four episodes. The actress who played the wife really and truly died after four episodes.) Worse, claimed the producers, this misportrayal did a disservice to the legions of kids whose parents had split and who deserved to watch programs that wrestled with problems arising in fractured families like their own. This is old hat now, when TV series are cramming as many gays, transvestites, half siblings, and third marriages as they can wedge into half an hour, but it was radical for 1974. Alas, convincing my father that his becoming a network TV star was doing the nation a public service did not benefit his character, and it made him proprietary. When One Day at a Time came along, in which actress Bonnie Franklin is unashamedly divorced, he was resentful and accused the producers of having stolen the idea. So much for his championing of social realism. In retrospect, Joint Custody did form a cultural conduit between the doe-eyed sixties and the bottom-line eighties. The premise ran that the mother, Mimi (played by Joy Markle), has had enough of the hippy thing—leaving her idealistic husband, Emory Fields, reverting to her maiden name of Barnes, and going establishment with a family law practice in Portland (the show opened with a few pans of the Fremont Bridge, but it was shot in Burbank). Stuck in the past, Emory is an eco-warrior who lives in a cabin of his own construction in the Cascades, with no running water or electricity and only an outhouse; he grows organic vegetables that die. The role may seem farsightedly right-on in terms of more recent obsessions with conservation and climate change, but the scripts weren’t really sympathetic with Emory’s insistence on doing everything the hard way. Mimi despairs in one episode that his exclusive emphasis on not using up resources and not polluting the environment encouraged the children to believe that “the most they could hope to aspire to was to be harmless.” But in the main the program is about the three kids negotiating the tricky terrain of parents who hate each other, as well as the logistical travails of shuttling between households, given the eponymous legal arrangements. Mimi is authoritarian, less concerned for her kids’ creative expression than for their career prospects. Emory espouses countercultural fulfillment, and his permissiveness often gets his kids into trouble. That might have all worked okay, except two of the three children just had to be prodigies. Oh, that’s only one of the reasons we hated those two so much. Still, fictional aptitude is cheap, like athletic prowess from steroids. A scriptwriter can stuff a few token foreign phrases into the dialogue, and voil?: his character is fluent in eight languages. Sinclair Vanpelt played a precocious jazz pianist without mastering one minor seventh. As for why jazz, in 1974 every kid wanted to be a rock star, and the pilot’s development team wanted Caleb Fields to take the road less traveled. But between Caleb Fields having been conceived as super-hip and the genre itself being still halfway happening in the early 1970s, Edison may have gotten a distorted impression of jazz as a logical route to seeing your name in lights. Maybe that explained the bitterness of his diatribes about how marginalized the form had grown, and about what a farcical shard of market share he and his colleagues commanded—“most of which is Norah Jones.” Fourteen in the first season, Caleb is the rebel of the three, who carries on a whole parallel life as a hep cat in dark clubs in Old Town and the Pearl District, where he has to keep his status as a minor on the QT. The oldest has no patience with either parent, and adolescent viewers identified with his driving ambition to leave them both in the dust. He wears a porkpie hat and black turtleneck, and it’s a running issue in the show that he’s started to smoke. As for Sinclair himself, he had a lanky build that resembled Edison’s own—at least back in the day—and the two of them were good-looking in a similar vein. Sinclair’s hair was brown, Edison’s dirty blond, but both mops tended to tendril, and one similarity my brother would be hard-pressed to deny: he’d styled his longish hair, which went electric in humid weather, just like Caleb Fields’s for his entire life. Otherwise Sinclair was a supercilious snob who chummed smarmily with our father whenever Edison and I were around during rehearsals, marginalizing us into mere extras. I have one clear memory of Sinclair’s registering the fact that Travis-slash-Emory had an actual son near his age. Edison and I were loitering in the studio wings because our family was supposed to attend an NBC picnic in Griffith Park after the taping. Between takes, Edison took it upon himself to demonstrate to Sinclair how to play properly with crossed hands—at which point my brother confirmed, yes, he did know what he was talking about: lo, real-life son was now studying real-life jazz piano. “God,” Sinclair exclaimed, “that is—too droll!” The actor’s doubled-over laughter would secure Edison’s enmity forever after. But neither Sinclair’s arch condescension nor his affected world-weariness would help him much once the show was canceled and he failed to be cast again in any other major role. (He scored one guest appearance on Family, but being conspicuously gay didn’t convert to an advantage until the mid-1990s, by which time he was dissolute-looking and half bald.) Teensy, the youngest, is only four in the first season, and she’s a math whiz. I guess it’s pretty impressive that an actor so young could rattle off all those numbers idiot-savant style, since the scriptwriters were persnickety about her human-calculator answers to multidigit equations being correct. But it would be surprising if Tiffany Kite herself had finally mastered the multiplication table by the time the show wrapped up eight years later. She had black ringlets and the soulful brown eyes of a refugee. To my personal consternation, as Tiffany grew older she only got prettier and so, of course, became more of a princess. In the show, Teensy is a perky genius but still a little girl, and they got a whole episode out of her phobic avoidance of her father’s outhouse: in Emory’s custody, Teensy refuses to go to the bathroom, and on her daughter’s return Mimi has to dose the poor kid with laxatives every time. Then there’s Maple, the only three-dimensional character on the program—the kid always conveying messages between her warring parents and editing the content along the way (“Did your father really say that?” “Did your mother really say that?”). Since the middle child alone is not bequeathed magical powers, she’s actually likable. Sandwiched between two attention-grabbers with a high wow factor, Maple has no heaven-sent gift as a shorthand personality and no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. Accordingly, I’ve sometimes heard contemporaries thumbnail a conscientious, decent, but undistinguished woman who is roundly ignored and sometimes taken advantage of as: “You know, she’s a Maple Fields.” Both on and off camera, Floy Newport was unassumingly attractive in that way that L.A. always overlooks. Maple Fields was the one character in Joint Custody whom Edison almost never mentioned. I still felt conflicted about our father’s program. Naturally Edison and I had made a lifelong sport of ridiculing the show, but external ridicule was another matter. Pressured by Tanner and Cody, I’d broken down a couple of years earlier and ordered all eight seasons on DVD. Accustomed to the slicker fare of HBO, you forget how crude, obvious, and hammy television used to be, as well as technically rinky-dink; I naturally remembered the sets as sets, but they looked like sets to Tanner and Cody as well, who couldn’t believe the show was so “lame.” I was discomfited. I tried to laugh with them, but I couldn’t, and before we’d finished the first season I put the DVDs away. At least for me it had been a revelation to see Travis, since it’s always a revelation to see images of your parents younger than you are now. Suddenly all the surety and authority you’ve accorded them falls away, and these glimpses of outsize icons as ordinary lost people with no road map, no special access to the truth or to justice or to anything, really—well, such epiphanies are tender and sweet and frightening all at the same time. I even softened briefly, thinking maybe Edison and I had been too hard on Travis. It was hardly an outrage that he kidded himself about how handsome he still was or exaggerated his own importance like most people. Another revelation: while our father prided himself on his sophistication, it was clearly his wholesome farm-stock presence to which the casting director had taken a shine; Travis Appaloosa played it, but Hugh Halfdanarson had gotten the part. In fact, Travis had originally auditioned for Apple’s Way, in which a father quits the L.A. rat race for his hometown in Iowa, only to find the transition from slick to hick traumatic. But Travis didn’t have the fish-out-of-water quality they were looking for. In Iowa, as far as the producers were concerned, Travis fit right in. The one aspect of our father’s show that I still admired was its representation of the way siblings live in a separate world from their parents, who for kids function as mere walk-ons. Joint Custody captures the intense, hothouse collusion between siblings, while Mimi and Emory are played for fools. Often ashamed of tugging the children’s loyalties in opposite directions, the parents fail to grasp their kids’ salvation: the children’s uppermost loyalty is to each other. To the degree he intuited the ferocity of mutual clinging that got Edison and me through our childhoods intact, my husband resented it. I didn’t think he should have resented it on our marriage’s account; when Edison first arrived on Solomon Drive, I was still of the view that being a devoted sister made no implicit incursions into my devotions as a wife. But as an only child, Fletcher should have envied this intimacy on his own account. If you don’t have a sibling to keep the sides drawn, you’re stuck lumped in with your minders, an alliance that makes you a traitor, your own tattletale, with the schizoid psyche of a double agent. Edison and I did rat each other out from time to time, but these were isolated strategic sorties in the complex politics of the playroom about which our parents knew nothing. We used our mom and dad as weapons in the far more central relationship to one another. Certainly with Tanner and Cody I tried never to forget: children know your secrets. You do not know theirs. Ironically, given the show’s ostensible edginess, when I was thirteen our own family took a turn toward the network clich? of times past. I came home from school to find, of all people, Joy Markle waiting to receive me. In retrospect, Travis’s selection of his costar to break the news—with the physical implication that now the fake mother had replaced the real one—was in poor taste. When she wasn’t playing Mimi, Joy’s metallic blond hair was no longer bunned in a metaphor for strictness that must have made her scalp hurt. I suppose she was pretty, though not beautiful, a lack she tried to make up for when playing herself—and like so many of the people I grew up around, Joy Markle did play herself—with an undercurrent of sluttiness, exposing the lace of her bras well before the practice was fashionable. That afternoon she wore a low-cut dress, an unfortunate scarlet—which signifies and rhymes with harlot—and when she stooped to talk to me I knew there was something wrong. I wasn’t that much shorter than she was, and this impulse to kneel in order to you-poor-dear could only have been in the service of melodrama. Travis was at the hospital, playing his own part to the hilt, though he wasn’t unaffected. To the contrary, and it must be an unnerving experience to gesture toward emotion professionally for years on end only to be mugged by the raggedy, artless ineloquence of the real thing. Edison and I harbored conflicting versions, because my brother thought of himself as savvy, while I thought of myself as gullible. So Edison maintained that he’d known for years that Travis and Joy were having an affair, while I maintained that neither of us realized until Travis started seeing her openly after our mother’s death. (They didn’t last. Many an affair topples without anyone to cheat on, like a three-legged stool whose supports are reduced to two. They needed my sweet, credulous mother from Ohio for their otherwise too-predictable showbiz shenanigans to be any fun. Yet Travis and Joy’s subsequent falling-out added a bona fide acrimony to their portrayals of Emory and Mimi, making the last two seasons the best of the series.) There was only one reason I cared whether Edison had known all along about our father’s philandering: if so, I couldn’t bear the idea that he hadn’t told me. Raised in Oberlin, our delicately comely mother hailed from a solid, formerly industrial family of some standing; her father edited the local paper for decades. When she met Hugh at a regional horse show in Dubuque, I doubt she took seriously his aspirations to act, assuming he’d soon put the pipedream aside to tend his parents’ farm. After all, a life of pies cooling in windows and relief about long-awaited rainfall would have suited her well. My mother has long been a touchstone of authenticity for me, and my migration to the Midwest was an homage to her of sorts. Yet at parties in L.A., she was at a loss how to dress, and confided to me once that she waited out many a drunken gathering in a locked bathroom, while other revelers tiddled on the door and finally went away. Detesting her husband’s pompous, self-promoting new friends, Magnolia Halfdanarson privately wept every time Joint Custody was renewed for another season. (She only went by “Appaloosa” in public, to humor our father; her checkbooks were printed with the name of the man she thought she had married.) So she may have been depressed, and in that case the condition had worsened after Solstice was born three years earlier. But I’d only had the one; how was I to know whether a mother sleeping whole afternoons was normal? Likewise I couldn’t be expected to differentiate between depressed as in has-a-serotonin-deficit and depressed as in for-good-reason. If the question was whether she knew Travis was cheating on her, the answer was probably yes, if only because the answer to that question is almost always yes. Edison had come to glory in having a mother who killed herself, which told well in New York jazz clubs. Remember—he’s the one who went by look-at-me Appaloosa, which even for those never brainwashed to accord it legitimacy every Wednesday at nine was still bound to raise eyebrows as no convincing family surname but a breed of horse. Not looking to differentiate myself with a sleeve-tug bio, I never thought her death was suicide. Though obviously devastated to have lost her so young, I didn’t regard having a mother die of natural causes as a narrative letdown, much less as a personal insult. She was standing at the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Woodland Avenue, and she stepped off the curb. That is the whole story, though as it happened a UPS delivery truck barreled past a fraction of a second later. Edison would have it that our mother sighted the truck and gave herself up to its bumper on purpose, a lateral variation on hurling oneself off a bridge. Magnolia despaired of her husband’s betrayal, ergo the loss of our bashful, winsome mother in our teens was Travis’s fault. This simple, durable construction had long bulwarked my brother’s preconceived opinion: that Travis was an asshole. If I held few opinions, I did cling to a handful—like the view that facts are not the same as beliefs, and that most people get them confused. When your mother dies, you want the loss to mean something, reprieving grief from its purest, most intolerable form, in which there is only loss, with no compensation, no takeaway. Driven by this craving if not for a moral then at least for an accusation as a kind of mortality kewpie doll, even commonly honest people will reconfigure the mangle of the truth into a form that has pizzazz. By contrast, here is what I reconstructed: Hundreds if not thousands of times per day we make small rudimentary decisions while thinking about something else. When I ascended our front porch steps, I was never thinking, “Raise your right leg; establish firm footing, lift left heel and push off.” No, I was probably wrestling with whether I could sneak a little sour cream into our evening’s casserole without Fletcher noticing. I’m no neurologist, but there must be a watchful part of the brain that carries out routine tasks and frees the rest of your head to ponder the telltale pastel effects of dairy products. If so, the watchful part is not perfect. I’ve experienced it enough times myself: those instants when the overseer blinks out like a flawed digital recording. When the bit that allows the rest of your mind to be distracted itself gets distracted. My mother stepped off a curb. She was a good mother in a traditional sense, and had inculcated in her children the importance of looking both ways. This time she didn’t. You could say that left me with pure and therefore intolerable loss. But I did derive something from Magnolia’s fate. One afternoon in my mid-twenties, I was cycling along a deserted two-lane street in New Holland, and I ran smack into a parked car. Picking myself up and examining the crumpled bike frame, I thought of my mother. What I took from her moment of inattention was incredulous gratitude: that I did not plow my bike into parked cars all the time. That for decades I had been devising recipes for salsa, guiltily dreading Solstice’s impending visits, or contriving phrases for my husband’s pull-string doll, all the while making incalculably numerous, crucial negotiations of this perilous world, and I still hadn’t died. That was enough for me. But so minor a matter as thankfulness for the competent multitasking of the human brain 99.9 percent of the time would never be enough for Edison, for whom plot had always to be writ large. Perhaps this seems a stretch, but for me it was all of a piece: his appetite for Cinnabons and suicide alike, his insistence on building his life along such drastic lines that thinking big had manifested itself in his proportions. If my brother’s weight was symptomatic of something wrong, then it also emblemized a vanity. He wasn’t the type to submit to slings and arrows with a bit of a paunch. In the same style in which he’d schemed to succeed, so also would he fail: on a grand scale. chapter seven (#ulink_683c8c0b-fc38-5e47-a0e4-70f522ed01b2) Over the next ten days I offered to show Edison Baby Monotonous several times, but he always begged off to check out some jazz interview online. In the end I rather insisted. If Vanity Fair and Forbes were interested in my business, my own brother might express some small curiosity about what I did for a living. Edison had been sleeping late, so I arranged to drop back by the house mid-afternoon and ferry him to the premises. Aside from the preparation of meals—a large enough issue to defer for the moment—I wasn’t sure what my brother got up to while I was at work. I think he spent a fair bit of time on the Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity—although Fletcher said that down in the basement he could hear the yammer of the TV, too, for hours on end. What Fletcher did not hear, unless Cody was practicing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” was the piano. Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy and might have learned to relax more, but I did find it disturbing how, especially with the assistance of media gizmos, it was possible for time and time and more time to pass in the process of doing absolutely nothing. I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for whole afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house, waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu. When I returned to Solomon Drive to escort Edison to my headquarters around four p.m., I found him faced off with Fletcher in the kitchen, surrounded by groceries on every counter. Edison’s face was red. He was huffing, hands held out from his jeans, quick-draw. Fletcher stood rigidly opposite, his expression steely. If this was a duel, my husband was the sheriff, my brother the outlaw. “Edison,” I said. “You ready to go?” “Better believe it,” he said gruffly, eyes narrowed. I surveyed the counters, mounded with corn chips, pork rinds, canned beef chili, croissants, soda, double-cream sandwich cookies, pizza rolls, frozen french fries, and coffee cakes. I was sure to hear about it in the car, though from picking out the items that needed refrigerating—three packs of butter, smoked mozzarella, and two quarts of half-and-half—I could infer the gist. “Mind if we take your pickup?” I asked Fletcher, keen to scram. I didn’t want to take sides. “I think Edison’s more comfortable in it.” “Go ahead. He’s already used it to truck half the poison in Hy-Vee into our house.” Edison snatched the pork rinds, grabbed his jacket, and hunched out the door. After he’d clambered into the passenger seat, he spooled out the seatbelt to its maximum extension, while I took two feet of slack out of the driver’s belt. He bunched his arms and tripled his chin into his clavicle. Scowling, he squeezed his eyes to slits. His inmost self was balled into a dense pellet in the middle of a wide berth of shielding flab; I sensed he could not make himself small enough, nor could his defensive perimeter ever be sufficiently ample to make him feel at a safe length from hostile forces. As if to demonstrate that for pure protection he could not get fatter fast enough, by the time I’d backed from the drive he’d opened the pork rinds and was stuffing them through the taut portal of his pursed lips, chewing snacks the texture of spray insulation foam in a spirit of reprisal. I wondered if he was aware that the object of his retaliation was himself. We didn’t say anything until he finished the bag. “Don’t take this personally,” he grunted, crushing the cellophane. “But your husband is a prick.” “What did he say?” “I’m not gonna repeat it.” I pictured my husband picking his words with care. That was what made his rare invectives so stinging: he didn’t lose his temper. I knew how long the perfectly chosen slight could last—like being called a mousy dishrag at Verdugo Hills High, when my muttering back, “That’s a mixed metaphor,” had branded me only more conclusively as a twit. “You had an altercation, I presume,” I said. “Over the groceries.” “I was being helpful. Trying to pull my weight.” I waited for his embarrassment over his choice of expression to dissipate. “You know he has strong feelings about food.” “Who doesn’t? Nobody’s making the guy eat my groceries.” “I suspect,” I said delicately, “the issue was the kids?” “They’re teenagers. Stock nothing but chickpea kibble, and they’ll hang at Mickie D’s. Christ, Fletch wasn’t a food fascist last time I was here. What happened?” “Well … our kitchen used to be crammed with leftovers from Breadbasket—poppy-seed tray cakes or big Ziplocs of potato salad, which we’d either have to eat or throw away. Something of a trap, when you’re from the waste-not-want-not school.” “And your cooking is the shit,” said Edison. “Thanks. Though that’s a trap, too.” “Lotta pitfalls for potato salad.” “Yes, you have to ask yourself if there was ever a time people just ate something and got on with it. Every time I open the refrigerator I feel like I’m staring into a library of self-help books with air-conditioning. Anyway—when Fletcher realized the leftovers were having the predictable effect, he sort of freaked. You have to understand: his first wife got heavily into crystal meth. That’s why he got custody of Tanner and Cody. She first started snorting crystal to lose weight. But soon she was leaving the kids unattended, disappearing for days. Lost several teeth … Got all these sores she’d pick at, and they’d get infected … Then when she came down off a tear, all she’d do was sleep. The whole spiral—it was pretty traumatic. Left Fletcher with a control thing.” “You don’t get that way in an afternoon. That guy,” Edison grumbled, “has always had a ‘control thing.’” “His nature errs in that direction,” I conceded. “In any case, when he resolved to drop a few pounds, this obsession with fitness and nutrition snowballed. Meanwhile, Tanner never lets his friends forget that his real mother is a drug addict. Just like you always bragging about how Mother killed herself. It makes him seem darker and more complicated.” “Man, this isn’t the Iowa where we visited the Grumps.” “No, it’s grown a pretty vile underbelly,” I said—though you’d never know that from the innocent vista out the window. In plowed-under cornfields, tufts of dried husk fluffed the clods. Feedlots snuffled with wholesome cows. Photogenic silos poked the flat horizon. “Iowa’s developed a massive crystal meth problem.” “Mexicans,” Edison supposed. “Only at first. You can get all the ingredients at Walmart, except some sort of ammonia that’s used on farms as fertilizer. So now it’s homegrown, along with tomatoes and green peppers. Which is worse. The local stuff is purer. The ice from Mexico—” Edison chuckled. “Ice! Don’t think of my kid sister in the Midwest as hip to user lingo.” “In this state, grannies on Medicare are hip touser lingo. Farmers take meth to stay awake, like when they have to pull all-nighters bringing in crops. So do truckers. They call it ‘high-speed chicken feed.’ And because it burns up all this energy, around here meth is a housewife problem. A diet drug.” “Maybe I can see why having an ex who became a meth head would make you more conservative,” said Edison, folding his arms again. “But that cat’s got no reason to be abusive toward me.” However brutally, Fletcher must at last have referred directly to the subject I’d avoided since Edison’s arrival. I was tired of feeling like a coward. I’d thought my tact was kind, but maybe I’d simply been trying to make life easier for myself. “Listen …” I trained my gaze on the road. “We haven’t talked about it. But I couldn’t help but notice … since the last time I saw you … you’re a little heavier.” Edison slapped his knee and hooted. “‘Oh, Mr. Quasimodo, I couldn’t help but notice you’re a little stooped over.’ ‘Excuse me, Mr. Werewolf, I couldn’t help but notice you’re a little hairy.’ I guess you’ve finally ‘noticed’ the Empire State Building is alittle tall, the sun is slightly bright, and the Earth is a smidgeon on the round side.” I laughed, too, if only in relief. “Okay, okay! I didn’t know how to bring it up.” “How about, ‘Whoa, bro, you sure are fat!’ Think I don’t know I’m fat? They make mirrors in New York, you know.” “All right.” I braced back from the steering wheel. “When I first laid eyes on you at the airport, I was floored. I’m still floored. I don’t understand how you could have put on so much weight in just a few years.” “Try it sometime. It’s not that hard.” He was right. Add four Cinnabons per day to a calorie-neutral diet, and you could gain 365 pounds in a single year. “But …” I asked feebly, “why?” “Duh! I like to eat!” “Well, everybody does.” “So it’s no big mystery, is it? Everybody includes me, and I like to eat a lot.” I sighed. I didn’t want to get his back up. “Would you like to lose weight?” “Sure, if I could push a button.” “What does that mean?” “That I would like ten million dollars. I would like a beautiful wife—again, I might add. I would like world peace.” “How much you weigh is within your control.” “That’s what you think.” “Yes. That is what I think.” “You gained a few pounds yourself. You like to drop those, too?” “Yes, as a matter of fact.” “So why don’t you? Or why haven’t you?” I frowned. “I’m not sure. Ever since Fletcher became such a goody-goody, it’s seemed almost like my job to be the one who’s bad. My coming home from the supermarket with a box of cookies has provided a release valve. If we only stocked edamame, you’re right: we’d lose the kids to Burger King for good.” “Pretty complicated for learning to skip lunch, babe.” “Well, maybe it is complicated.” “So for me it’s even more complicated, dig?” He was getting hostile. “You can’t even lose thirty pounds, and I’m supposed to lose—I don’t know how many.” “I don’t need to lose thirty pounds, thank you. More like twenty, at the most.” “Don’t worry, if this is a contest, you get the gold star.” “It’s not a contest. But we could both agree not to make things worse. That’s a start, isn’t it? The way you’re eating lately, you’re only getting heavier.” “There’s the one little problem of my not giving a shit.” That was, of course, not one problem, but the problem. As I parked in front of Monotonous, Edison said, “Huh. This all yours? Pretty big.” It wasn’t much better than a warehouse, with offices on one end—but it was my warehouse. My idea, my employees: my project. “I couldn’t have anticipated it at first,” I explained as Edison heaved from the cab, “but one of the keys to this product taking off has been the way it excites competition. Not between companies, but between my customers. Who’s got the wittiest doll. Or the crudest. We’ve had more than one order for a male Monotonous that does nothing but burp, snort, sneeze, hawk, and spit. That has hiccups and a hacking cough. One customer wanted it to stink when it farted, but that was technically beyond us.” The short walk to reception, with Edison, was not short. “Then there are the pornographic ones,” I said. “I had to decide whether to accept the orders at first, but there were so many … If a wife wants to give her husband a doll that barks, ‘Suck my dick, bitch!’ why should I care?” I introduced Edison to Carlotta, our receptionist, whom I’d alerted about my brother coming by for a tour. I had not warned her about anything else, and was glad she took the lack of obvious family resemblance in stride. “It’s a real pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she said, pumping his hand warmly. “Your sister here’s the best boss a body could hope for. And I’m not just saying that to wheedle for a raise.” I brought him into the big open area, which hummed with two dozen sewing machines. The walls were stacked with hundreds of fabrics, while one corner mounded with clear plastic bags of cotton stuffing. “All the dolls are custom jobs, but we have standardized a little,” I said, raising my voice over the machines and leading him to the piles of unclothed dolls with no hair or facial features. “Over here, you can see we’ve got three basic body types in both sexes: thin, average, and portly. Three fabric colors seems to cover the racial bases. These we mass-produce. Angela also churns out denim and leather jackets, though we often add a distinguishing detail—embroidery, a political button. It’s the personalized touches that people like.” “So—what, they send you a photograph.” “Sometimes we work from one jpeg; other customers send five or six. And a list of expressions. We recommend a minimum of ten. We’ll do up to twenty, but the poetry—honestly, it is a form of poetry—seems to work better with fewer.” Edison frowned. “This is shit the cat in the photo says all the time. In real life.” Clearly, my brother had neither read my interviews nor looked at my website. I wondered if I felt hurt. I marveled that I didn’t seem to. Instead I felt an increment sorrier for Edison. If I felt any sorrier for Edison, I would faint. “That’s right,” I said. “We all repeat ourselves, but certain signature phrases become a form of branding. Most people aren’t aware of what they say all the time unless it’s called to their attention. The repetitions are telling. Our dolls are expensive. But as a substitute for therapy, they’re dirt cheap.” I introduced Edison to my staff. I was proud of my workforce. A business with an inbuilt sense of humor gave rise to a natural joviality, and as long as orders weren’t piling up we had a good time. They were nice people, so my impulse to protect my brother from my employees was disconcerting; my first introductions were tainted with a challenging demeanor, like, So? What are you looking at? that made my workers glance to the floor. Some of them may have read correctly in my hard stare, You’re not so skinny yourself, you know. I was dismayed that my brother’s size seemed to be all that people saw. I wanted to object, But his mind is not fat, his soul is not fat, his past is not fat, and his piano playing isn’t fat, either. But I wasn’t giving my employees enough credit. You have to provide Iowans good reason to be unkind, and if anything a conspicuous weakness for pork rinds made my nightclubbing East Coast brother seem more down-home. “Don’t you believe that guff this lady spouts about Monotonous going down the tubes any minute,” said Brad, the weedy guy who inserted the recording mechanisms. “This biz is going like gangbusters. Gonna be one distant day when people in this country run out of folks they wanna make fun of.” I explained that Edison was a jazz pianist in New York City. “You mean, like—doo-doo-doo-REEE-do-REE-do-do-do-dum-dum-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-dum-do-dum …?” Brad’s screeching recital was comically cacophonous. Edison laughed. “More like, dit. Du-dit. Du-dooo-doodly-do …” He completed an impromptu ska line with a catchy swing beat, and everyone clapped. “Lord, that stuff’s right over my head!” cried Angela, tugging the arms of a miniature denim jacket right-side out. “Afraid you’re more in the land of Barry Manilow, honey. Now, it’s a shame you’ve missed the corn. But while you’re out here, make your sister lay in some good country-style ribs. And head over to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum—it’s a real treat.” “Right after we visit the monument to Enron.” Since Angela didn’t pick up, Edison swallowed any more cracks about this state memorializing an Iowa native still a byword in the rest of the nation for catastrophe and incompetence. When he bantered genially about what kind of a whip his kid sister cracked, I demonstrated: time to get back to work. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/lionel-shriver/big-brother/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.