The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Oiled with alcohol, dinner was raucous, Nollie presiding. Florence tried to savor the enlivening of her aunt’s strident views, which could soon begin to wear. She was starting to feel the strain of real generosity, as opposed to the more formal charity for which, after all, she was paid. Real generosity entails no recompense. It means giving up something you fiercely value and cannot replace. In this case, the sacrifice was of privacy, intimacy, and quiet. The addition of the garrulous old woman and obsequious ex-tenant to life upstairs completely transformed what it felt like to walk around her own house, even in the unlikely instance that those two kept their mouths shut. Newly self-conscious, she felt observed and judged; when making an ordinary request that Willing fetch Nollie a towel, a whiff of performance parenting polluted the instruction: Look how I have raised my son to lend a hand. Despite the evening’s casual plates-on-laps dining style, she didn’t dare plunge hungrily into the platter of meats and cheeses on the coffee table, but hung back to ensure her guests got enough prosciutto first. That was the biggest change: Florence checked everything she did and said now for whether it was polite—surely the very antithesis of what it was supposed to feel like to be home.

  “The national debt was bound to come to a head eventually,” Nollie held forth on her third glass of wine. “It was just hard to predict when. And prophets too ahead of their time are always ridiculed. Take population. In my teens, the species was allegedly reproducing itself into extinction. Last time I checked, the human race was still here. Now we’re closing on nine billion—a tripling in seventy years. But what if the ‘overpopulation’ hysterics were right, just too soon? Same with debt. Twenty years ago, doom-and-gloomers were foaming at the mouth about excessive borrowing. Nothing happened then, either—until a year ago, when everything happened. Familiar with complexity theory? It helps to explain why everything can be fine for a long time and then go to hell all at once.”

  “I’m betting if we all had PhDs in ‘complexity theory,’” Esteban said, “you’d tell us about it anyway.” Nollie was the sort of know-it-all whom Esteban couldn’t abide. After Over the Hill, he cut no one slack merely for being old.

  “Complexity theory isn’t itself all that complex,” Nollie said pleasantly, not rising to the bait. “As systems become more complex, they grow exponentially more unstable. They can keep puttering along, getting messier and messier, until one tiny disturbance sends the whole shebang into meltdown. Like those towers of playing cards, where you add a single queen of hearts and suddenly it’s fifty-two pickup. Or jugglers who can keep ten balls in the air, but not eleven. Feeding, watering, and employing nine billion people and rising is the ultimate complex system. You never know when adding that one last baby boy sends all the balls in the air to the floor.”

  “That’s absurd,” Esteban said.

  “Is it?” Nollie said mildly. “The straw that broke the camel’s back is complexity theory in a nutshell. Economics—same idea. Massively complex, massively unstable. It doesn’t take much. See, that’s the other rule: complex systems collapse catastrophically. Look out the window.”

  “This is nothing,” Willing said.

  The company turned to the boy.

  “Care to elaborate?” Nollie asked.

  “No.”

  Her son’s obscure pronouncement was freaky, and Florence was relieved when her fleX tringed. “Dad! I guess you want to say hello to Nollie. She’s right here.”

  “I guess, but I mostly wanted to ask if you’ve talked to Grand Mimi.” Her father looked harried. But then, didn’t he always.

  “Not for a while, why?”

  “I can’t raise her. Fair enough, though I’ve imposed a fleX on her, she never turns it on. But my mother is one of the last holdouts with a landline. Which for weeks she hasn’t picked up. Maybe she’s been out, and the voicemail being full could be simple inattention. But now the line is dead.”

  “But the landline is dead in general. Telecoms don’t maintain the network. I wouldn’t worry too much. She has live-in help.”

  “When she first moved in, Margarita seemed energetic and capable, but that was fifteen years ago. She’s pretty damned old herself.”

  “If you’re that concerned, maybe you should stop by, then.”

  “I can’t, that’s the point,” her father said irritably. “You have no idea what we’re dealing with here. I say we loosely speaking. Your mother barricades herself in her Quiet Room all day, and I have to beg her to babysit just to run out for milk.”

  “Can’t Grand Man take care of his own wife?”

  “He’s not strong enough. She can get violent. And he’s become so passive. Without any investments to manage, Pop’s lost all sense of purpose. He fleXts, noses around the net, but rarely leaves his chair. We tried leaving them on their own for an afternoon, and when we got back the house looked as if there’d been a tornado. You keep asking us over for dinner. Why do you think we haven’t accepted?”

  Florence sifted discreetly into the kitchen. “I’m responsible for a full-time job, a kid, an unemployed husband, and a tapped-out tenant, not to mention your sister—who as far as I can tell takes up a lot of room. Like, the whole house. It’s not going to be easy for me to find time to go on another care mission. Couldn’t Nollie stop by?”

  “Good luck with that!” her father jeered. “Those two haven’t spoken for thirty-five years.”

  Florence promised that someone would check on Grand Mimi. The call ended before she realized that her father hadn’t tried to talk to his sister. Ever since taking his father and stepmother in, he’d churned in a sustained state of wrath, and some of that anger seemed aimed at Nollie. The put-upon posture was a pity. Having sidelined his own life to care for elderly parents, he came across as unkind.

  When she returned to the feast, Willing was addressing his great-aunt with unnerving focus. “That can’t be the real reason. You wouldn’t leave France only because people don’t like you. After all. You must be used to it.”

  “Ha!” Nollie said. “You’re right there. I guess there was more to it. I have a penchant for being where the action is. I’m a writer. I like story.”

  “Mom says you don’t write anything anymore.”

  She smiled. “You don’t go out of your way to ingratiate yourself either, do you? As for writing, no, I don’t see the point. But you don’t lose a certain mindset.”

  “The United States is a bad place to be,” Willing said sorrowfully. “You should have stayed as far away as possible.”

  “I’ve been an expat a long time,” Nollie reflected. “I always thought I haven’t bothered to get French citizenship because jumping the bureaucratic hoops was too much trouble. When the dollar crashed, I realized that my reluctance to swear fealty to France went deeper than laziness. It’s weird, because I don’t believe in nationalism. I’ve always dismissed patriotism as blind, mindless cheerleading. I don’t have many friends left in the States, and I haven’t been that close to our family. But I felt pulled back. I can’t help—caring. It’s been unbearable, watching this last year from afar.”

  “You’re an American,” Willing translated.

  “I’ll always be American to Europeans, and maybe I’m tired of fighting it.”

  Willing didn’t appear to find the explanation satisfying. “I think you’re crazy.” He cut himself another slab of Camembert. “This cheese won’t last, and then what?”

  The following afternoon, Florence returned from work to find a large van double-parked in front of the house. A burly Central American was unloading cartons onto the sidewalk. Willing was schlepping the delivery inside. On inspection in the light of the streetlamp, the boxes were all addressed to Enola Mandible, c/o Florence Darkly. Scrawled on the side of the uppermost box: BLT, PB—UK.

  “What’s this,” Florence asked Nollie, who was overseeing the operation, “first the cheese, now bacon, lettuce, and tomato and peanut butter?”

  Her aunt chuckled. “Better Late Than. British paperback.”
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br />   Florence hadn’t read it. In her early teens, everyone seemed to be reading Enola Mandible’s bestseller except for her own family. At a glance, BLT seemed to dominate the shipment: BLT, HB—PORTUGUESE; BLT, TRD—SERBIAN; BLT, BK CLB—FLEMISH.

  “You know,” Florence said carefully, “this house is already pretty cluttered.”

  “Oh, I left all the chairs and whatnots behind, even most of the clothes. But I wasn’t about to leave the books.”

  “This is all books?” Florence was staggered that anyone would pay to transport anything so superfluous. Her father had regaled her with the story of Grand Man having packed up his library in the ludicrous expectation that Dad would store all those formal anachronisms in his house. But as she decoded the labels in black marker—VF = Virtual Family, AO = Ad-Out, C2G = Cradle to Grave, TIM = Time Is Money—she registered with astonishment that these were multiple copies of the same books, mostly in languages that no one in the household spoke, including Nollie herself, and which presumably the addressee had already read because she wrote them. The vanity of the consignment beggared belief.

  “They’ll have to fit in the attic.” Florence felt awkward issuing an edict to an elder. “That’s all the space we can spare you, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll manage. Uh-uh! I’ll take that one.” Nollie intercepted a box marked Foul Matter, and struggled it possessively up the stoop stairs herself. Foul Matter being the only good title of the lot, Florence was moved to inquire.

  “It’s a term of art for original manuscripts and their permutations en route to publication,” Nollie said. “Invaluable material for literary critics, biographers, and doctoral students. Sold to a university library, those papers could be worth a great deal.”

  Willing and his great-aunt did miraculously cram the dozens of cartons in long, snug lines below the eves, though Florence was crestfallen that after her homey redecoration the space now looked trashy and cramped. But even more was she distressed by her aunt’s glaring failure to have digested what had been happening in the United States. Maybe the woman really did need a good dose of the country up close—where “literary critics” comprised a few online cranks who deplored any screed downloaded by more than ten people, and self-published authors who talked up their own work under assumed names; where people were too resentful about having to relinquish their own dreams to read biographies about lucky predecessors who’d been allowed to realize theirs; where no student who could manage to remain in school would squander tuition on anything as trifling as literature, while universities were furiously selling off the very real estate that might improbably have accommodated the weak first drafts of an aging one-hit-wonder who’d exiled herself to France.

  Florence had kept abreast of her sister’s travails in DC, but it had been difficult to take them seriously. Avery’s life had always seemed charmed. The younger sister was the mercenary, the materialist, the conformist, the conservative, whose politics had grown only more rightwing. She’d never seemed to work that hard, yet milk and honey flowed effortlessly in her direction: the townhouse, the luxury cars, the sumptuous dinner parties, the three perky children who were nicely spaced and brimming with arty talents. Her barmy therapeutic practice had been backstopped by a husband with a solid academic post in an institution at the very heart of establishment Washington. Avery had chosen the safe route, the wide, well-paved road.

  In short, her sister was rich—in Florence’s circle, a permanent designation, one that stripped the so anointed of any right to pathos. Florence eked by from month to month, but people like Lowell kept money in jars all over the house. He may have lost his job, but people like Lowell got another one. If Florence had to repress a trace of satisfaction that at last her sister had troubles, too, she had to try harder still to appreciate that the troubles were real, that they were large, that they were insoluble.

  “We’re selling the house,” Avery declared, without even saying hello. Nollie’s preposterous shipment just installed in the attic, Florence was disappointed by her sister’s cut to the chase on fleXface. She was dying to tell Avery about the delusional chutzpah with which their aunt expected her papers to be purchased by a prestigious university library.

  “Well, it’s not a bad idea to downsize, is it?” Florence supposed. “With Savannah soon off to college—”

  “Savannah’s not going to college.”

  “I thought you said she accepted delayed admission.”

  “The delayed admission is a fiction. And we’re not downsizing.” In contrast to her musing ruminations of yore, Avery’s discourse had grown jagged and declarative.

  “What’s the point of moving if you’re not—”

  “If-we-do-not-sell-the-house,” Avery spelled out staccato, “we-will-face-foreclosure. That is the ‘point’ of moving out.”

  Her sister’s frustration made Florence worry that a certain humoring quality on her part may have infected their conversations hitherto—conversations into which she’d never have expected a word like foreclosure to make an appearance. Nonplussed, she said neutrally, “So what’s the plan?”

  “Fortunately, real estate has appreciated. But we’ve built no equity, other than the increase in value, a whack of which will be seized to cover defaulted interest payments.”

  “But you can use the profit as a down payment on something cheaper, right?”

  “Florence, you idiot! You don’t put a down payment when you can’t get a mortgage!”

  Had they been in the same room, Florence would have taken a step back. Whatever she said seemed to enrage her sister, and the next question would prove no different: “Why can’t you get a mortgage?”

  “I have no job! My husband has no job! We have no income, other than Lowell’s pissy unemployment checks! What bank is going to give us a loan of, like, a million dollars?”

  “You don’t get unemployment, too …?”

  “Not if you were self-employed! Florence, you’ve really got to start paying attention here! I have three children. We’re living on meatloaf. Goog keeps getting beaten up at school. He’s a target because he doesn’t speak Spanish.”

  “It might have been a good idea if you’d encouraged him to study—”

  “In the olden days it wasn’t illegal to learn German instead, the language of Goethe and Günter Grass and Bertolt Brecht, which he actually likes. And which, by the by, they don’t teach at Roosevelt, either. They don’t teach anything at Roosevelt, as far as I can tell, besides the lyrics to ‘Guantanamera’ and how to punch out a kid with just enough restraint so that he can come back the next day and you can do it again.”

  Florence decided this wasn’t the time to take on her sister’s racial insensitivities. “So could you rent for a while, then?”

  “Landlords aren’t going to leap at a couple without jobs, either. Maybe if we flashed the cash from the house. But it wouldn’t last long, since new leases are astronomical. It would be better if we could cool our heels for a while until the economy recovers.” Avery had disciplined herself into using a more reasonable tone, even a pleading one.

  “Like where?” Florence asked warily.

  “Somewhere urban, ideally. Where Lowell could jump on any university openings.”

  “What are Lowell’s job prospects?”

  “Right now?” Despite the suggestion of a snarl, Avery kept trying to control herself. “Abysmal. The irony has come home to me late in the day that economists are of very limited economic utility. And he’s useless in every other regard, too. I have to do everything. I was the one who found a buyer for the house.”

  “Who can stretch to property like that, unless they pulled some fiddle before the crash? I heard tycoons with connections in Congress made out like bandits.”

  “Sorry not to play to your leftwing conspiracy theories. Who can swing a nice American house, really? Some guy from Shanghai. Asians are buying up everything. Not only residential real estate, but companies. Landmarks. Any day now it’s going to be the Mao Mo
nument in the middle of the Mall.”

  Florence sighed. “Talk about conspiracy theories! Dad says we went through the same thing in the 1980s with the Japanese—Oh, those slant-eyes are taking over, they’re buying up Rockefeller Center—and now look at them.”

  “Florence.” In the proceeding silence, there was a girding. “Would you mind. For just a little while. Would it be all right—if we stayed with you?”

  In Florence’s silence, a horror.

  “We’d bring the cash,” Avery continued. “We wouldn’t be a burden. We could help with expenses. Help with other things, too. And everything’s getting so weird. Maybe we should band together. Rally around, as a family. Florence. I already asked Dad, about our staying in Carroll Gardens, and he said”—she was choking up now—“he said no. He just kept railing about Luella.”

  Florence’s mind was racing. The money would have been more tempting had Nollie not unobtrusively delivered an envelope of bills to defray expenses that very morning. “But this is only a two-bedroom, and full to the gills. With a tenant in name only. Nollie … You don’t have to be in the city, do you? What about Jarred?”

  “I asked Jarred, too,” Avery said glumly. “He said maybe if I’d asked earlier in the summer, but then he hired some ‘temporary’ farm workers, and now they won’t leave. With their families, and everything. It sounded creepy. Like, it wasn’t exactly his idea. Halfway between having serfs and being held hostage. He said he actually pointed a rifle at them, and they laughed. They could tell he wouldn’t use it. I couldn’t take the kids up there even if he said the more the merrier. It doesn’t sound safe.”

  “Why not turn to Lowell’s family? Why is this purely a Mandible problem?”

  “My in-laws also live in a two-bedroom, in Fort Lauderdale. Where my brother-in-law, his wife, and their two kids just moved in. They were all wiped out in the Renunciation—thanks to my husband’s peerless investment advice.”