Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  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 posttraumatic 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

  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 b
efore 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 cliché not mentioning the elephant in the room was taking on a literal cast.

  chapter six

  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.”