The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  Luella was convinced that she’d been kidnapped—as in a way she had been—and that Great Grand Mimi had plotted the abduction. They must have tired of putting her right—“No, honey, this is Douglas, remember? And this is his son Carter, who’s my husband, and you’re staying in our house …” So instead they played along. It bordered on sadistic. Jayne might say, “We’ve delivered our demands, but your husband is broke. You’re on your own.” Great Grand Man would toss in playfully, “No, no, ransom’s on its way, my dear. Four fat Social Security checks, thousands apiece! Each of which will buy a sandwich.”

  Willing still liked talking to Great Grand Man (or “GGM,” which the paterfamilias had taken a shine to; it wasn’t easy to score a hip sobriquet at ninety-nine). But he preferred their discourse by fleXt, in which assertions tremulous in person came across as robust. That spring, their ongoing dialogue had addressed the pervasive view that the “American experiment” had failed. So on a visit in June—which no one called “unseasonably cold” anymore; one advantage to checking up on his elders was getting warm, because with those “four fat Social Security checks” they ran the central heating—Willing resumed the discussion. He felt it was therapeutic to force his three marginally with-it relatives to engage in focused interchanges, the way a clinician might ask them to count backwards from a hundred by sevens.

  “But you can’t close a country like a business,” Willing submitted. They were sitting around the kitchen table, covered in sticky stains and littered with dirty dishes. Imposing implements from the Mandible silver service were tarnished and smeared with butter. His glass of water having a slice of lemon in it meant Jayne had gone out of her way to be hospitable. “You can’t throw up your hands and say, too bad, guess ‘the experiment’ didn’t work. People my age have a long time left to live.”

  “It’s up to your generation to rise from the ashes,” GGM croaked.

  “I’m fifteen. I can’t invent a new country from scratch.”

  “Country’s not going anywhere. It’s only the economy you have to Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

  “Oh, no problem, then.” Carter had grown flippant.

  “Alvarado’s trouble is, he still thinks he’s president of the United States,” GGM said, pronouncing the title sonorously. “The fellow who strides in with a retinue, and everybody trembles. Hispanics have a big investment in flag-waving, land-of-the-free exceptionalism. Otherwise, they’ve merely emigrated from one Spanish-speaking third-world dump to another Spanish-speaking third-world dump, and what’s the point of that?”

  Jayne said, “Lots of Lats are going back. Mark my words, we’ll miss them.”

  “Everyone says we’re in a ‘depression,’” Willing said. “But it’s emotional depression, too. Like you guys. Why is the ‘American experiment’ over because this isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore? Maybe it never was the greatest country in the world. Lots of other places used to be empires. Now they’re not. The people who live there are careless with that. It seems like everyone’s being babyish.”

  “They’re going kill me,” Luella stage-whispered in Willing’s ear. “Tell Mimi that Douglas was unhappy in his marriage before we met! It’s not my fault!”

  “It’s never anyone’s fault when you fall in love,” Willing told her solemnly.

  Perhaps hungry for the coherent conversation that Willing had imposed, Jayne looked annoyed that he was engaging Luella at all. “Americans aren’t depressed,” she said. “They’re in denial. Everyone thinks the crisis is temporary, and any day now we’ll all be sipping lattes at cafés again. Every other economic crisis has come to an end. So at the worst you worry about a ‘lost decade.’ The notion of a lost everything, a permanent, irreversible decline—it’s alien to this country’s psyche.”

  “I don’t know why,” Carter said. “The place has been falling apart since I can remember. Crumbling highways, collapsing bridges, decrepit train tracks. Airports like bus stations. I’ll be damned why foreigners have kept piling in here, or why it’s taken them so long to think twice and turn around.”

  “You people have a bad attitude,” Willing said sadly. “Maybe you deserve this.”

  “Whole school of thought agrees with you,” GGM said. “Brought this on ourselves. Tried to butter both sides of our bread. Raised our children soft. Took supremacy for granted, with nothing to back it up. Evangelicals in the Midwest claim this is the day of reckoning. Except nobody’s being selected for the right-hand-of. We’re all chaff.”

  “You know I’m chaff! I’m chaff! You know it!” Luella sang, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Bad.”

  Willing surveyed the tableau. In a dingy striped nightgown, strapped to a straight-back with her wrists duct-taped to its arms, Luella recalled a victim of the early electric chair. Her wide eyes showed excess white, as if the current had been switched on. Her teeth were long and yellow, with the retracted gums of peritonitis. Draped in the floor-length black gown of a fairy-tale witch, his gaunt grandmother was once again tearing at her cuticles until they bled, then dabbing at the red beads with a napkin. In times past, his grandfather had always struck Willing as fairly fit, and boringly normal: considerate, unassuming—everything his sister Nollie was not. But now what seemed to give Carter a workout was sheer animus. He sat there glaring, arms bunched, hands clenched around his biceps. His metacarpal tendons stood out like the strings of a tennis racket. Meeting his eyes was like looking down the twin barrels of a shotgun.

  Still exuding a tattered nobility, GGM was at least back in one of his cream suits, but the garb was crushed. His uncombed white hair shocking willy-nilly in arbitrary directions betrayed a fatalism beyond coiffure. It was discouraging how reduced the patriarch became once you stripped away the cravat, the manicure, the props—the crystal decanters, the platinum Mont Blanc fountain pens clipped nattily to an outer pocket. Even his steamer was now filled with a cheaper e-bacco, which smelled like disinfectant. Yet coming up on two years of the Great Renunciation, one thing hadn’t changed: Great Grand Man was enjoying it—albeit in that confounding way that adults got a taste for espresso. Willing had a sip of real coffee once. The stuff was vile. But it was clearly the murky liquid’s most awful qualities for which the drink was prized.

  You could see it, in this kitchen. There were too many old people. They all had a bad attitude. They all relished this ongoing calamity—the implosion, the sucking vortex, the vertigo. They thought they were going to be able to take everything with them, like pharaohs buried with their treasure. Willing stood up. “I’m not chaff.”

  “Will, don’t get the wrong idea,” Carter said, though Willing was certain he had the right idea, and he’d never cared for Will. “This just isn’t the way I pictured my seventies.”

  “Baby, be honest,” Jayne said. “You never pictured your seventies, period.”

  “Being able to eat, that’s important,” Willing said. “And having a place to live. But what else is so important that now you can’t buy? You guys just seem so bitter—”

  “Bitter is better than butter,” Luella babbled. “Bitter batter. Badder bitter butter.”

  “At least you’ve got each other,” Willing finished.

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Jayne quipped, ripping another cuticle.

  “Being robbed,” GGM said, “is an emotional experience. One much more intense than suddenly not being able to buy a boat. And we haven’t been robbed by marauding outsiders, but by our own government. The Renunciation has severed the bond between Washington and the American people—which was tentative at best to begin with.”

  Willing shrugged. “All governments rob their people. It’s what they do. Kings and stuff. They did it, too. The president did it all at once this time. Maybe that’s better than little by little. At least you know where you stand.”

  “In the gutter,” GGM said.

  “The badder bitter gutter,” Luella said.

  “But you explained to me before,” Willing told GGM. “Th
e national debt got too big to pay back a long time ago. You said if it weren’t for foreign creditors demanding to be repaid in bancors, they’d have had to inflate the debt away. Which is the same thing, you said. It’s still welshing on the debt. It’s still a form of default. It’s still cheating. It makes you just as ‘feckless’ and just as dishonest. The Renunciation was what was going to happen anyway, over sneaky years and years, except the scam was fast-forwarded overnight. Big deal. You predicted this. So I don’t see why you’re upset about it.”

  “Simply because you see a train coming doesn’t mean it can’t broadside your car,” GGM said.

  Mischievously, Willing had also described the conventional erosion of sovereign debt with inflation as “dishonest” to Lowell, and had enjoyed watching his uncle turn purple. Money, Lowell explained scathingly, has no moral qualities but is simply a “fuel,” and all that matters about an economy is that its engine turns over. An economy is a set of “mechanisms” that work well or badly, and to get hung up on irrelevant concepts of “justice” or “honesty” or “fairness” is to condemn those mechanisms to working badly. The only “good” that pertains, Lowell said, is the greater good of an efficient machine, from which all cogs benefit. It was one of Lowell’s finer moments, and once Willing decoded the tirade to mean that both government and capitalism were fundamentally unscrupulous, his uncle’s point seemed well taken.

  “I should have clarified,” GGM went on. “Alvarado has only stolen from the Americans who saved something, and that excludes over half the country. So, yes, I am bitter. I’m being punished for not spending the entire family fortune when I had the chance. For not slugging down a three-grand Lafite Rothschild at every meal. For trying to ensure that the likes of you, my boy, eventually profited from my prudence.”

  “Pop, an estate in Oyster Bay hardly qualifies you as having led a life of ceaseless self-denial,” Carter grumbled.

  “A bunch of money for doing nothing might not have done me any good,” Willing said.

  “It could have sent you to college,” GGM countered.

  “College might not do me any good. Studying engineering. I think it’s more important right now to know how to garden.”

  “I could’ve sent you to gardening school, then.” GGM sounded frustrated. “The best definition of wealth I ever came across is ‘money is stored energy.’ In other words, since ’29 this whole country has been running the air con with the windows open.”

  “But the Mandible fortune,” Willing said. “It only accumulated because one of your forebears was good at designing diesel engines. None of you earned it. You guys were lucky. Then in ’29 you were unlucky. But lucky and unlucky have nothing to do with right and wrong. Besides, you’re still lucky. You have Social Security. It’s pegged to inflation. And you have Medicare. Younger people don’t have that. Anyone over sixty-eight is protected. Aside from Nollie, no one at our house is protected.”

  “Nollie’s not protected against a sock in the jaw,” Carter grumbled, “if I ever get my hands on her. The prodigal used to have France as an excuse. Now she won’t travel five miles to spell us for a night or two.”

  “Nollie does help out at our place,” Willing said. “It’s kind of a zoo there, too.”

  “Enola is a free spirit,” GGM said. “And she might find stopping by more enticing, Carter, if you acted as if you wanted to see her, rather than merely wanting free nursing care. I have hopes that coming back to the States will inspire her to start writing again. There’s a great book in this upheaval, and she’d be the ideal chronicler of the times. She’s always had the eye. For most people, what lies outside our front door is tragedy. For Enola, it’s material.”

  “Right,” Carter said. “The perfect author for today’s Great American Novel is a fallow lightweight famous for a thinly disguised romantic tell-all who hasn’t lived in the country for decades.”

  “But what you were saying, Willing,” Jayne interrupted, yanking her first proper conversation in weeks back on course. “I do think Douglas is right about the moral hazard. The Americans who’ve suffered the deepest losses are the ones who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future. Who saved for the future. Who believed in the future. Who kept reserves on hand, in the expectation that they’d take responsibility for themselves and whatever befell them in the future. The pessimism that’s bothering you, Willing, is a result of that sense of betrayal. The people who believed in the future now feel like dupes. Like victims of an enormous practical joke.”

  His grandparents had been fighting to formulate a way of looking at the incineration of Carter’s inheritance that didn’t make them seem like ordinary greedy people who were enraged that now they wouldn’t get their money. After all, for liberal Democrats to have come into a mountain of unearned cash would have been an injustice in the terms of their own politics. Now they could be aggrieved on behalf of “people who believed in the future.” It was clever. He admired the intellectual gymnastics. Performed by ordinary greedy people who were enraged that now they wouldn’t get their money.

  “One of the primary responsibilities of government is to provide a functional currency,” GGM was declaring. Jayne and Carter’s averted gazes indicated they’d heard this more than once. “Functionality entails meeting three criteria. It’s a means of account—for keeping track of who owes whom what. Cross that one off, since with today’s rates of inflation, people in hock up to their eyeballs can effectively pay off loans of a thousand dollars with ten cents. Second, a currency is a medium of exchange, which the dollar remains barely—although only if you earn the money in the morning and spend it by the afternoon. Because the third purpose of a currency is to act as a store of value. The dollar has not been a sound store of value in my lifetime.” As he’d aged, GGM had become more emphatic, and almost impossible to interrupt.

  Willing raised his palms in dismay. He shouldn’t have to play missionary, but someone had to say it. “I don’t know how, but you’ve all got to get over this. Having been ‘robbed’ is eating you up. It’s like letting the government win twice.”

  GGM chortled. “Put it that way, and the boy’s got a point.”

  “You’re a very smart young man, Willing,” Jayne said, in a way that made his skin crawl.

  “It’s not smart to say something that’s obvious,” Willing muttered.

  Right then, Luella got a squeezed look, followed by a beatific smile. “You know I’m chaff! I’m chaff! You know it!”

  The smell that always infused the house grew more intense. The other three locked eyes and sighed.

  “It’s my turn,” Jayne said, slumping. “But, Carter, you have to be on hand. Last time she got into the kidnapping thing again and kicked me in the shin.”

  “Before you go, son?” GGM had pulled Willing aside confidentially and lowered his voice, as if to bestow a final wisdom that might resonate for his great-grandson in the years to come—since at his age any parting could easily be the last. “We can’t seem to locate any laxatives. If you come across a box or two …”

  It was literally a world of shit. Willing promised miserably, “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  On his return home, Willing walked into a face-off in the living room. “I’m nineteen, and it’s my business,” Savannah was telling her mother.

  “Its having become your business is just what I’m afraid of,” Avery said hotly.

  Savannah glanced at her cousin, and seemed to make a decision to be shameless. “You’d be careless with it, Mom, so long as I was giving it away for free? That wouldn’t be very smart, under the circumstances.”

  “Under the circumstances we’re managing, and you do not have to debase yourself!”

  “We’re not managing,” Savannah said. “Have you told them yet?”

  His aunt blushed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I heard you and Dad talking. Your basement boudoir doesn’t have any walls. It’s gone, isn’t it?”

  Her mother glanced at t
he floor, arms bunched.

  Turning to Willing, Savannah spelled it out. “The cash, from the sale of the house. It’s finished. Kaput. Pasado. Good-bye domestic contributions, hello abject dependency. Of course, we’ve got a lot of hinges and Q-tips to show for it. Oh, and quite a little stash of wine, though you’d better make it last, Mom. Florence won’t be springing for Viognier when she can barely cover the vinegar for our assholes.”

  “You father is searching high and low for another university position,” Avery said. “Meantime I—I’ve thought about running something from the house. If not PhysHead sessions, cooking, even taking in laundry!”

  “Mom, please! Nobody’s having dinner parties at all, much less catered ones, and most people wear the same clothes for a month!”

  “The only thing I’m too proud to do is what you’re doing.”

  “You’re too old for my vocation. And somebody’s got to bring some scratch into this house besides Florence. You want to see inflation work to our advantage for once? Because my prices are going up.” Savannah grabbed her coat and marched out the door.

  “Did you know about this?” Avery asked him.

  “I wondered.”

  “Leaving aside the indignity—it’s dangerous, and there are diseases. Which antibiotics can’t always treat.”

  “She doesn’t have a large skill set,” he hazarded. “And she’s right: my mom can’t support ten people. Except there’s one main problem with Savannah’s chosen career path. From what I’ve seen on the street.”

  “That is?”

  “Too much competition.”