Big Brother (10 page)

“You’re an artist.”

“I still make things people can sit on. They just happen to look good. Tanner could do a lot worse than apprentice himself in our basement. Instead he thinks he can float out of this house into la-la land, where in truth he’ll be pimped out to perverts on some street corner. Your
brother
is shoring up the boy’s illusions.”

“Edison is trying to get Tanner to like him. But Tanner disdains Edison, and doesn’t try very hard to disguise it, either.”

“Tanner disdains everybody. He can still be influenced. It’s just a pose.”

I was of two minds about whether to encourage Tanner to follow his “dream.” Was a mother’s role to preserve his hopes, or to confront him with the practicalities of survival on a planet with seven billion people who all wanted to be famous? Other than urge him to go to college—if nothing else, as delay, giving him time to grow up safely, with a meal plan, in a dormitory—hitherto I had restrained myself from being, as Edison would say,
dark
on his screenwriting ambitions. I’d entertained dubious futures as a teenager myself. Surely I’d have resented any pragmatist who observed that half the girls in my middle school also wanted to be vets, that competition for places in veterinary schools was surprisingly stiff, that if I felt faint during inoculations I didn’t have the stomach, that all I really wanted was a pet. Once closer to Tanner’s age, I wouldn’t have appreciated being admonished by a balloon-busting grown-up that very few candidates were admitted to NASA and that the majority of those who were never made it to outer space; I’d have despised any adult shrewd enough to discern that my brief infatuation with becoming an astronaut was merely a metaphor for a desperation to get as far away as possible from other people.

Yet like Fletcher I also despaired that Edison had been promoting Tanner’s familial links to fame. This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that “feeling special” was a private experience, and no one else’s projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.

“Tanner’s bombarded with celebrity every time he boots up his computer,” I said.

“This is different. With your nut-job dad’s TV thing, your brother
claiming
to be a world-renowned piano player, and you—you and Baby Moronic on the cover of magazines. It all gives him the wrong idea. He thinks everything is easy.”

“Just four more weeks.” I finally put a hand on his thigh. We hadn’t had sex since Edison’s plane landed. One more thing on hold; I shivered with sorrow. I’d have hated to be the houseguest whom my hosts were frantic to send packing.

I
didn’t tell Fletcher, but I’d noticed the systematic disappearance of foodstuffs, like whole pounds of dried apricots and Brazil nuts, which I made sure to discreetly replace. Fletcher wouldn’t miss the cheese, but I still found it alarming that a brick of Swiss could be unopened one day and gone the next. Weird things vanished, too: a pint of tahini, a bottle of toasted wheat germ, a jar of sour cherry preserves. I could always buy more groceries, so I was mostly perturbed by the haunting image of their consumption. The tahini, for example: it was oily but tended to settle, and the heavy, dry bottom layer would stick in one’s throat. It pained me how pleasureless it could only have been to binge on wheat germ.

There was a weekday window of opportunity for the mouse to play while the
cats
were away—when I was at Monotonous, Fletcher was cycling, and the kids were at school. Yet one afternoon I’d been feeling under the weather and knocked off work early. I’m surprised he didn’t hear me come in, but then my brother was occupied. For a moment I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched. Our wooden prep island was littered with bottles. The sides of the depleted Karo were glistening. I recognized an ancient Christmas present that had slid to the back of the pantry: pecans and hazelnuts candied in a thick brown goo. That jar was empty and drooling, too. The honey was out. Bizarrely, a bottle of Indian lime pickle. Cranberry sauce. And this was all in addition to our confectioner’s sugar, which Edison was spooning straight from the box.

He looked up. Some people might have seen the comic side. Syrup from earlier in the pillage glued the white powder to his chin in an homage to Santa Claus. The sugar talcumed his hair, aging the tufts at his temples ten years. It snowed over the cuffs and roll collar of his ubiquitous black cardigan. It dusted the toes of his broad, snub-toed black shoes and a three-foot radius of terra-cotta floor tiles. Moistened white paste mucked rabidly inside his mouth, which he had opened to emit whatever far-fetched explanation might substitute for the self-evident. The nausea I’d been fighting took a turn for the worse.

I fought a cowardly urge to flee. Instead I began rinsing jars for recycling. I lowered my eyes while he swallowed hard, wiped his face with a dishtowel, and closed the box—neatly folding the inside waxed-paper bag and inserting the cardboard tab into the opposite slot with precision. We were way beyond his making up some little story about deciding to bake a cake, and I was relieved he didn’t try.

“You know,” I said quietly, “it would have been less upsetting to have interrupted you snorting cocaine.”

“Sorry about the mess,” he said, brushing his sweater gray. “I got hungry.”

“No, you didn’t. You got something, and I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s not called hungry.”

I must have sounded angry, but by the time I’d rinsed the third jar I left the hot water running and hung my head in the steam. “What . . . ?” I said. “What . . . ?” I kept shaking my head, until whatever had been bothering my stomach earlier that day rose in a great bolus—not vomit but a sob, which must have been trying to get out for the last month. Edison came around and embraced me from behind, pressing his cheek against my back, while my eyes drizzled into the sink. Later I’d decide that the olive Burberry I’d been wearing when I came home would have to be dry-cleaned. Across the shoulders, down the lapels, and all over the sleeves, the coat would be ashed in the impotent consolation of confectioner’s-sugar handprints.

chapter nine

I
t sounds unkind. But aside from Cody, we were all eyeing with desperation the red-letter day of November 29th, the date of my brother’s return flight to New York. In our defense, having a guest of any size for two whole months is trying for most people. Making conversation was exhausting. Between my brother’s running commentary and his iTunes hooked up to our stereo, Fletcher had trouble concentrating. He worked in expensive, often imported woods; if he was calculating an order, a piece an inch too short could be disastrous. Our laundry burden had increased; three of Edison’s voluminous outfits filled out a washer load. Mornings, we were
constantly
out of half-and-half, when we were stocking the stuff by the half-gallon.

My brother was not a physically careful person, which had for weeks expressed itself in a series of small damages that still added up to a sustained sense of violation. He experimented with my stovetop milk steamer and left it on high to run dry; he melted the rubber gasket and blew out the safety valve. He used a metal spatula on my favorite nonstick sauté pan. He broke one of the finely etched wineglasses I’d inherited from our paternal grandparents. Boiling water for pasta, he placed a Revere Ware pot off center on the burner, and flames licked up the side to overheat the handle; the kitchen reeked for hours of melted plastic. Alas, in the advancing season he’d taken on building fires in the fireplace, but employing the same quantity that typified everything he put his hand to, devastating our supply of kindling and burning black spots with rolling coals into our hearthside Persian carpet.

Edison continued to keep unsociable hours, so when I awoke I tiptoed downstairs and refrained from listening to the radio while I made my toast, lest I disturb our slumbering houseguest overhead. On the other hand, I preferred these mornings to the ones after Edison had found tackling the stairs too much of a drain and slept in his clothes in the maroon recliner—obliging the whole family to church-mouse through breakfast and make do with juice or tea, because running the coffee grinder would wake him up. And Edison had sleep apnea. However grating his heavy snore, the long silences during which he stopped breathing altogether disturbed us more. The loud snorts with which these deathly respites concluded were startling, but still a relief.

Given a taint invading the ground floor, I doubted he always smoked out on the patio when the rest of the family was out or abed, especially now that into November it was getting cold. Whenever he did amble out the sliding door and back in again, he dropped the temperature not five degrees but ten.

As if he regarded himself as currently on the road and therefore in the care of hotel staff, my brother’s contribution to keeping the house clean was to get in the way of the vacuum cleaner. We’d kept our décor minimal, the better to feature Fletcher’s woodwork, but lately it featured Edison’s dirty dishes, broken-down slippers, and splayed copies of
Downbeat
instead. Fletcher was a neat man with a spare aesthetic; the first thing he did on emerging from the basement or returning from a bike ride was collect this detritus, lips pressed into an em dash. Despite the regular admonitions of the Fletcher doll, my brother routinely forgot that my husband’s furniture was oiled, not varnished, and cups on the rosewood coffee table would leave rings without a coaster. Since the collateral damage of my brother’s Midwestern sabbatical was, by the transitive property, all my fault, I would skulk in my husband’s wake with a stick of Land O’Lakes to vanquish the circles with rubbed-in butter—the while wondering, if I had learned this trick from our mother, why my brother had not. Whenever Edison showered in the upstairs bathroom, the mat got soaked, along with the floor, and anyone walking in soon after would muddy the tiles with footprints. The guest room was a nest of soiled clothes I had regularly to harvest myself. Now cratered down the middle like a half-dug grave, the mattress would have to be replaced.

I hadn’t concerned myself with the arbitrary, dart-in-a-calendar spirit in which Edison had chosen his return date when we’d changed his airline reservation in October. Presumably once back in New York he was expecting to stay with colleagues for a day or two, perhaps Slack Muncie now that his friend had enjoyed a breather, before heading off with a band to Barcelona. A lack of specificity about his many other bookings through the spring caused me an unease whose scrutiny I avoided. According to Edison, he’d be making enough money off the tour of Spain and Portugal to put down a deposit on a new apartment and haul his things out of storage. (I’d proposed to augment his earnings, too, if that would help him land his own place again, although there was an ugly side to this offer—more than a suggestion that I would pay my brother to not come back here.) That had been the concept all along, right? That this stay in New Holland would see him through a professional dry patch. Presto, he could return from his European tour with cash in pocket, ready to reestablish himself in the Big Apple and attend to his busy schedule. It had all made sense on paper until I laid eyes on him. But I felt I’d done my bit, you see. I thought my whole family had more than done its bit.

Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this “doing your bit” is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you. When I moved to Iowa and stayed for two solid years with the Grumps, I was often apologetic about not yet having found a job and apartment. My grandmother (unwittingly paving my exit by teaching me to cook) used to pat my hand warmly and say, “Why, the very definition of
family
, dear, is the folks who will always take you in.” I’d found her paraphrase of Robert Frost comforting at the time, but during this long fraternal visit that aphorism had come back to bite me. Ergo, what Edison could “reasonably” expect of me was potentially infinite.

I now recognize that responsibility, once assumed, cannot be readily repudiated—not without doing so much damage in the process of its abdication that you might better have never assumed the responsibility in the first place. Whether or not I realized it when I first sent that plane ticket and five-hundred-dollar check, I had taken Edison on. All however many hundred pounds of him. This contract had no end date of November 29th if you studied the fine print. There are instances when pet owners are overwhelmed and leave dogs they didn’t realize would be so much trouble at the ASPCA; foster parents have second thoughts, and return unruly charges to the state. But flesh-and-blood family works in only one direction.

A
AAANNN!
” Or I’m not sure how you’d spell it, a wordless exclamation of torment at a volume I may never before have heard my contained husband reach. Certainly the comic-book “argh!” would not do justice to the sound.

I dropped the pan I was scrubbing in the sink and rushed to the living room just as Edison slipped out to the patio for a smoke. I was terrified Fletcher had hurt himself. “Are you all right?”

My husband was standing with a sketchpad and whiffling. He didn’t seem to be bleeding, but the reedy wheeze in his throat would from anyone else be a scream. He was reared back, as if from the grisly specter of fresh roadkill. I turned to what Fletcher could not bear looking at: the Boomerang.

It was, yes, only subtly out of kilter. Three of the supporting back slats no longer swept upwards in the even curves of a rib cage, but suffered from interruptions, where they poked the wrong way. The arc of the swooping top rail, which formed the whole flung, soaring sweep of the piece, also jerked at a sudden angle, from which a splinter frayed. In a material as uncompromising as wood, subtly out of kilter was the same as—well, completely fucked.

“Oh, no,” I said softly, kneeling to the chair. I examined the slats—fractured unevenly, being laminated, and save for a few shreds cracked all the way through. The top piece was splintered along a good six inches of rail.

With that instinctive ear for sorrow, Cody had slipped downstairs and joined me.

“Not the Boomerang!” As she rested a cheek on its red leather seat, we looked at each other with shared dread. “Dad, I’m so sorry. I love this chair. It’s, like, a member of the family. All my friends think it’s awesome!”

Fletcher was not to be bought off with compliments. “I
told
him not to sit in it. I told him not to sit on any of these pieces. They are designed for normal people. Normal, halfway disciplined, halfway intelligent people.”

It was news to me that Fletcher had banned my brother from his furniture. I had batted away my own misgivings, choosing to trust the robust construction of my husband’s wares—a faith that spared me the mortification of telling Edison that he couldn’t sit where the rest of us did because he was too fat.

“But you can fix it, can’t you, Daddy? We can send the Boomerang to the hospital to get well!” Cody was mature for thirteen, and the childishness was a ploy.

“Are you sure that’s what happened?” I asked wearily.

“Did I sleepwalk into the living room with an axe? Have the kids been practicing their baseball swings indoors? They don’t play baseball. You didn’t have anything to do with this,” he directed to Cody, “
did
you?”

Her eyes panicked: on the spur of the moment she was having a hard time concocting a plausible scenario whereby it was all her fault. “I don’t know. I did sit in it yesterday. Doing my homework. My laptop is . . . sort of heavy . . .”

“What, in this house,” said Fletcher, “aside from my frail daughter’s
six-pound
laptop, is ‘sort of heavy’?”

“I guess that is the most logical explanation,” I said glumly.

“That son of a bitch didn’t even have the integrity to tell me! He left it propped together, the slats pulled to, the railing pressed back into place. So I sit down, and whoa! After all these years, think that chair can’t bear
my
weight?”

“Edison! Could you come in here, please?” I’d not shouted loudly enough for him to hear on the patio unless he was keeping an ear cocked for this very summons. The door slid and clicked, and it took too long for Edison to waddle into the room.

“Yo, whussup, man?” His expression was blankly pleasant.

Still kneeling, I stroked the injured slats, as one might reassure a pet about to be put down. “This chair is broken. Did you have anything to do with it?”

“Hell, no, course not. Don’t know anything about it.”

I sighed. Never having mothered a small child, I’d no idea how you dealt with stonewalling denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. “It would really be better if you confessed.”

“Confessed what? I didn’t do anything! Still, that’s a real shame. That chair is
out
, man. But you can repair it, right? Like, superglue it or something. And your man here. He’s like, a genius in that basement, know what I’m sayin’?”

“You don’t repair high-end custom furniture with
superglue
,” said Fletcher.

Tanner had trailed downstairs, and the added audience of his checking out the drama from the doorway only made everything worse.

“Hey, be glad to help if I can,” said Edison cheerfully. “Run out tomorrow and get the repair stuff—whatever it is. Just say the word.”

“ ‘The word’—or words”—Fletcher looked Edison in the eye, and my brother took a step backwards—“are
I’m sorry
.
I’m sorry I’m such a fat fuck—
”

“Sweetie,” I implored, “I know you’re upset—”

“I’m sorry I’m such a lard-bucket loser that I’ve got nothing to do all day but plop my enormous ass in furniture I was EXPRESSLY forbidden from sitting in. I’m sorry I’m so completely full of shit—”

“Dad, don’t!” Cody wrapped her arms around her father’s waist. “Please just shut up, please!”

Fletcher shook her off.
“That I pretend to be an internationally famous jazz musician, when I’m really some broke, homeless, self-indulgent food junkie leeching off my sucker of a sister and ruining her whole family’s life. I’m sorry my head is fat, my thighs are fat, my fingers and my toes are fat, and even my dick is fat, though my gut is so fat that I haven’t actually laid eyes on my dick for the last two years. That’s why, when I destroy an irreplaceable, priceless object, I leave it delicately propped together for somebody else to find, because I’m not enough of a MAN to admit I broke it.”

As a strategy, the diatribe backfired. When Edison turned white and hustled blindly past us out the front door, not even grabbing his coat when it was below freezing, Cody abandoned her father and rushed after him.

“Sweetheart, it’s a beautiful chair, but it’s still a chair,” I said. “Which you can’t make whole no matter how viciously you berate my brother. Don’t you
ever
do that again.”

I drew on my own coat, threw Cody’s and Edison’s over my arm, and set off to catch up with them. At that size, he wouldn’t have gotten far.

T
hat guy fucking hates me.” Edison was hulking down Solomon Drive, his forward-canted bearing recalling the urgency with which as a taller, slender man he had strode the streets of Manhattan in his smashing leather trench coat. Yet this evening’s velocity was as much side-to-side as straight ahead. Cody clutched one hand, which made it difficult for me to walk on his other side; Edison alone consumed the width of the sidewalk.

“Fletcher doesn’t hate you.” The rebuttal was reflexive, though I didn’t know what you called it if not hatred when you wished so passionately that someone simply wasn’t there.

“I think you’re wonderful, Uncle Edison!”

“
Please
put these on, it’s cold,” I implored. We’d bought Edison’s coat at Kohl’s on one of our more successful outings together, but he ignored the big down jacket that took as much room in my arms as a sleeping bag. Cody spurned her coat, too—either out of solidarity with her uncle or because she couldn’t bear to relinquish his hand.