Big Brother (27 page)

Edison and I were grateful to have gotten in on the effort early, because in short order the big problem was an excessive response to KCRG’s call for volunteers, and the station soon had to beg good Samaritans to stay away. The locals who’d braved hell and high water to lend a hand only to be told they weren’t needed were the only folks I saw acting grumpy—as if they were being cheated, and I suppose in a way they were. For there’s nothing like a catastrophe for bringing out warm good humor in people, and the spirit of heave-ho hilarity was contagious. I remember remarking to Edison, “You know, you sure wouldn’t have been much use here at three-eighty-six,” and he said, “Yo, six months ago I’da
been
one of the sandbags, kid.”

My brother was a comfort to workers who’d been relocated to Prairie High and were trying to take their minds off all the chattel they’d lost back in their evacuated neighborhoods. Most had rescued photographs and a change of clothes, but the furniture, electronics, and whole wardrobes were write-offs, and it was common for a sturdy, stoic volunteer to freeze briefly in a sandbag relay, shoulders slumping with a heavy sigh: “Oh, no, that quilt from my great-grandmother.” Worst of all, since the river was fingering into areas that weren’t previously on the flood plain, most of these exiles had no flood insurance.

“That’s rough,” Edison would say. “A while back, I lost everything I owned myself, save a few threads didn’t fit anymore and an ancient computer. You wouldn’t think it, but it’s cleansing. Makes you lighter, man. Like, you wouldn’t believe all the shit you can live without. It weighs you down”—he’d heft another bag along the line like a visual aid—“and not just by making you drag it from place to place. The shit makes you be the kinda person who has that shit. Suddenly you can be somebody who has totally different shit. Or no shit. Suddenly you can be anybody. It lets you go.”

This was a situation that brought out the best of the Midwest, and while a few codgers made self-deprecatory jokes about bad backs, I never heard anyone really complain—even at the start, when it was still raining. Never mind the steady pummel from the sky, the real problem was getting soaked from sweat. Yet even once the sun came out, the Cedar River continued to rise.

The first couple of days, Edison had weighed out smoked turkey for his stinting packed lunch, but by the third day we’d run out of sandwich meat, and at the end of our shift a thankful local business drove in pizza pies. My brother was horrified. I said, “I am your coach, and you’ve just expended fifteen hundred calories in sand. Eat the pizza. And that’s an order.” It was thin-crust, while he generally preferred the chewier New York style, but Edison said later that—unlike the verboten one in January—it was truly the best pizza he’d ever had.

The flood protection effort was a social enterprise, so perhaps it was to be expected that over that pizza Edison asked his bag-filling partner—a younger woman I’d be tempted to call a “girl”—back to our apartment for “a cup of coffee.” It was a long drive for coffee, so I should have known the real agenda, but ever since Edison’s weight gain I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t thought of him as remotely sexual. So I made something of a fool out of myself, hanging about the living room with the two of them well after the coffee no one wanted had cooled. Exhausted from the day’s labors, I was waiting impatiently for her to ask for a ride home, until I realized that they were waiting with considerably more impatience for
me
to go. Embarrassed, I went to bed.

I woke stiff and in the first really bad mood since the welcome distraction of civic-mindedness began. The girl—Angie or something—was still here, and the fact that she’d come in our car so of course she was still here didn’t quell my irritation. She emerged from Edison’s bedroom with that languorous sense of territorial entitlement that intimate congress grants total strangers, however temporarily. Slender with lustrous enough chestnut hair, she still didn’t seem that attractive to me, and I’d an intuition “Angie” had volunteered in Cedar Rapids to begin with merely for bragging rights. That morning, she kept draping herself around Edison’s shoulders while he played the piano and I made coffee at a time of day people actually wanted to drink it. After gushing over my brother’s playing, she ran down a series of women’s-glossy dieting tips, when Edison’s intake was my department, thank you, and I found it a tad inappropriate that, having known this woman for less than a day, he had already spilled his guts about his history as a walking Lifetime documentary. He could have been a little more private.

That evening, I felt sheepish that I hadn’t been friendlier, though this mild remorse was facilitated by the fact that Edison had refrained from bringing her back a second night. He evidenced some of the old swagger of his randy adolescence, and I was pleased to see it. “Shit, man,” he said, stretching beside the scale whose high tolerance he no longer required, “haven’t let anyone see me in the buff in ages. Can you believe it? She thought I was hot stuff.”

“You are,” I said bashfully. “Barring a certain few years, you always were.”

Looking back, considering how much the encounter boosted his confidence, I should have encouraged him to keep seeing the girl, and I don’t quite understand why I was so relieved at the time that he didn’t follow up.

On June 13th, the Red Cross and National Guard decided we’d done what we could and it was time to clear out. Our dismissal was crushing. We didn’t want to give up, and if we were honest with ourselves we were having a wonderful time. Edison and I watched the river crest on local news back home, luxuriating in having electricity—unlike most of the residents we’d been forced to abandon. On news-helicopter footage, rooftops looked like lily pads. Later they estimated that the flood covered thirteen hundred city blocks. The mid-river island on which the Cedar Rapids City Hall sat was completely submerged, and the roof of the library we’d worked so hard to save barely rose from the gray, murky sea. Street signs poked an inch above the water, as if identifying roadways in Atlantis.

Nobody involved in that mobilization likes to admit it, but most of our sandbagging didn’t do any good.

I
have a bittersweet memory of that summer. As the weeks went by, with nothing but stone silence emanating from Solomon Drive, it came home to me in a series of agonizing increments that Fletcher was serious—the most painful our anniversary in July, which my husband wouldn’t even acknowledge with a text. I wasn’t taking a break from my home life to coach my brother’s weight loss; I was separated, and lived in daily dread of a bailiff at my door serving formal divorce papers. At least Cody continued to treat me like her mother, making dogged visits and accompanying us to the movies. Though I discouraged her from playing up her father’s pining in my absence—“I’ve seen this series, sweetheart,” I abjured, “even the reruns”—she played the go-between anyway. She thought she was sly, but there’s only so subtle a fourteen-year-old gets.

Commonly, in summertime Iowa comes into its own—the air musty with overturned earth, the corn rising by the day to tower by the roadsides, sweeping with alternating patches of bluer soy fields to the horizon. I associated this time of year with the happiest periods of my childhood, when Edison and I were ritually packed off to visit our paternal grandparents for a solid month. (So indelibly had Iowa in July been imprinted on my mind that my first experience of an Iowan winter was a shock. Before I moved here, I envisioned the Midwest as eternally hot, thick, and green.) My brother’s memories of those stays weren’t as bucolic as mine; he’d resented being put to work during his vacation, and when he got older he stayed behind in L.A. to haunt jazz clubs and practice his piano. But I loved giving the Grumps a hand on the farm. Having relished physical labor from an early age, I gladly fed their few hogs, mucked out the barn, and harvested flat beans in the beating sun.

Yet that summer defied the season’s halcyon stereotype, and a desolate countryside mirrored the muddy sensation that daily sludged the pit of my stomach. Dismal tracts of our devastated local corn crop were taunting reminders that my life, too, was now a washout: lo, I was no longer a woman who, after a long, lonely young adulthood, had at last found herself a reliable, quietly passionate man with two animated, ready-made children—a woman who finally had a life—but a divorcée in waiting, entering middle age with my older brother for a helpmate. The rows of dead sticks that stubbled slick black fields painted a landscape of stunted promise, blighted hopes. Everywhere I looked I saw pointless destruction and ravaged domestic comity, the curbsides stacked with mottled couches and water-logged freezers, the region’s sanitation workers overburdened by all-too-tangible emblems of loss, resignation, and grief. Roadside vistas that June and July—the tarmac itself often cracked and caked, the gutters strewn with mashed litter and the mangled detritus of lawn furniture, windshield wipers, and jungle gyms, all uniformly muted by a putrid, diarrheal silt—reflected back at me the brown, sodden interior of my own head.

In the very season of my discontent, the spoilage of my own Iowan idyll, Edison was cleaving to the land of our father’s with a new ferocity. The retreating floodwaters left a mournfulness in their wake that he inhaled like the aroma of fertile soil—for if mournfulness has a smell, it’s loamy, with that hint of corruption, like cow manure. The sorrow in the air supplied my brother a density, a seatedness, a gravity and depth that contentment alone cannot provide.

Why, he’d dropped altogether all those cracks about our nowheresville state and the crackers who dangled silver “bull’s balls” under the license plates of their jacked-up dually pickups, with G
O
H
AWKEYES
plastered on the bumpers. My brother wasn’t so far gone that he’d caught the local mania for U of I’s football team, but he’d started to delight in the easy pace of life here—the expanse, the serenity, and the space. He seldom mentioned New York, much less referenced any intention to return there. He used to fret at the quiet, but now savored the subtle surge of crickets, a rooster crow, the
eh-eh-eh
of goats. Rather than roll his eyes while checkout clerks at Hy-Vee chatted amiably about the popularity of a special on butter, he’d shoot the breeze with the bagger himself, still amazed that no one in the line behind us ever acted impatient. He no longer plied the grocery boys with a five-spot for loading our bags in the trunk, knowing they’d be insulted; a bit of buoyant banter en route to the car was all the payment they required. He was starting to see the point of people who talked to each other, even when there wasn’t always much to say, and he commiserated with displaced or financially devastated neighbors in a spirit that conveyed the flood hadn’t happened to
them
but to
us
. I no longer detected in him any hint of contempt or restlessness in this big, blank place, and I heard him more than once on the phone to Tanner
defending
my stepson’s home state, whose charms were rarely apparent to the young people who were born here. Honestly, I began to suspect that, as far as Iowa was concerned, Edison was a convert.

With more energy on proper food—come July, I upped his daily intake to 1,200 calories—he grew more adventurous, checking out the Iowa City Jazz Festival and driving into the university town on weekends to sit in on jam sessions at The Mill. I often went with him, and was struck by how absolutely he declined to name-drop. When I’d tagged along to his gigs in New York, he’d schmoozed with the audience between sets, always managing to insinuate the fact that he was Travis Appaloosa’s son. These days, when he introduced himself he routinely stuck his hand out announcing his first name alone. He never mentioned the “heavy cats” he’d played with, either. He arrived like any old guy who happened to play the piano in his spare time, and as a consequence he knocked their socks off.

My brother contended with his ongoing terror of comestibles by becoming obsessively scientific. After consulting the poster of calorie values now magneted to the fridge, he weighed every tomato to the exact ounce on a digital scale. He worked out the total energy in his ingredients on a calculator, and I never caught him rounding down. Indeed, the kitchen was littered with pads, their pages striated with columns of figures. I was tempted to urge him to relax a bit—an extra half carrot would hardly be the end of the world—but he didn’t trust himself one hair off the straight and narrow, and if all this lunatic weighing and sawing away little lumps of veal helped him feel self-possessed, fine.

Albeit on a slower schedule, the solid-food stage of this project continued to produce steady progress. In Month Seven, Edison lost twelve pounds, only two fewer than the previous one, when he’d still been on protein shakes. It’s true that the final weigh-in of Month Eight was a particular low point, for which he blamed me, railing that he should never have commenced that 1,200-calorie daily intake.
I
said that most people would be pleased as punch to have lost eight pounds in a month, and at 209 he was looking better than ever. (I know this numerical stuff seems dry, but you can’t imagine how emotional these confrontations with the scale were; for Edison, the drop from twelve to eight pounds in a month was devastating.) At least subsequent totals demonstrated that I’d been right: he had to eat more to burn more, and his metabolism was ramping up.

Though our refrigerator was full of produce from roadside farm stands, I was doleful about missing out on our garden on Solomon Drive, and found myself calculating from afar how big the zucchini were growing, when the green peppers would come on, whether the sweet-pea vines had peaked. I continued to fruitlessly scan my inbox for [email protected], and to retrieve the last of my cell-phone messages with a heavy heart. Running errands in New Holland, I was tortured by familiar glimpses, only to discover that the cyclist was Korean. On one occasion I really did spot Fletcher; stricken, I about-faced. The dizzying effect of the adrenaline whited out any useful intelligence: what he was up to, whether he looked cheerful or glum.