Property

by Lionel Shriver

  Burt interrupted her anxious internal reverie about the many daily activities that a woman avowed to “take nothing, and expect nothing” would now have trouble doing for herself. “You’ll need help. Got kids?”

  “No,” Jeannette said. “Wyndham and I did not self-seed.” The shorts were soiled, silly and too exposing, and she was grateful for the sheet he’d brought her, even in the heat.

  “I feel part responsible,” he said, nipping at his drink. “Should have stopped you when I first spotted you climbing that wall. With a handsaw, for fuck’s sake. Figured I’d let you learn your lesson. Thought it was funny.”

  “I suppose it was funny.”

  “So what was the plan? You’d never have lopped more than a branch or two.”

  “Over time, I was hoping to cut off enough to kill it.”

  “But what’s so bloody important about a few little plants? You’re bigger than them.”

  “Few?” She turned away, groping, unsure of the why of it herself. “I told you, I hate them. So mindlessly cheerful and impossible to discourage. Just starting out in life. Willing to give it a go, even in bark chips. Then the mess of them. They’re rioting, insane. Running roughshod over all my husband’s tending and discipline. Invading, uninvited, out of control. And I feel an obligation, to honor Wyndham’s creation, in memoriam, to not let the garden go to hell in a handbasket on my watch. I only found out recently how much effort a garden is, how much work he must have done, which I was blithely unaware of, or even scoffed at. Besides. Also. There’s something horrible. The replication. The burgeoning is grotesque. I can kill them in the thousands, but still I can’t win over them as a mass. I know they’re so much smaller than I, but together, as a profusion, they’re bigger, and they make me feel helpless and defeated all over again.” It was the fatigue, and shock, and the blurring of the painkillers, but the plethora of personification must have verified the verdict: without question, a kook.

  “And you?” she added. “What’s so important about that tree? I haven’t sensed any love lost.”

  “Had my fill of female willfulness, I reckon,” he said. “Willfulness begets willfulness. Spirals, and never ends well.”

  “Doesn’t it?” she asked with a smile, as he freshened a drink they both knew conflicted with the advisory on her prescription.

  After sharing his takeaway, he insisted she settle for the night on his sofa. She slept hard and long, stirring only from a loud, high-pitched buzz outside. The council, ironically, must have been finally pruning the London plane trees along the pavement.

  Rising midday with chagrin, Jeannette hobbled with her NHS crutch under her good arm out the back double doors. She knew her way around. The houses on this stretch were identical.

  Right at the back, Burt was splitting the last of the big logs, using the stump of the self-seeding sycamore as a chopping block. In wonderment, she could see through the slats: Rising on her side of the party wall, the log store was nearly full, its contents neatly stacked. An offering—or was it a proposal? As she approached, he remembered to put on his chain saw’s safety catch. Off to the right, fat, fluffy twigs of felled pod clusters piled bonfire high.

  After landing a decisive blow on the wedge with his sledgehammer, Burt announced gruffly, “Sycamore seasons fast, and burns hot.”

  “If Wyndham is to be believed,” she returned, “so do I.”

  When he was not away treating cholera patients, they would recline in the glow of incinerating sycamore in her wood burner, watching the concluding Christmas special of Downton Abby, and later the repeats—though Burt drew the line at Poldark, which he ridiculed as a sappy bodice ripper, and she accused him of being jealous of the lead. They would stay in separate houses; the arrangement maintained a courtliness, an asking, that they came to cherish. Every spring, the seedlings returned. According to the Royal Horticultural Society website, the sycamore lays a seedbed that will recrudesce for years. But it had laid her own bed also. Nature abhors a vacuum.

  Domestic Terrorism

  “By about seventeen,” Harriet despaired, “I couldn’t wait to fly the coop. Emory appealed if only because it was about the farthest school from Bellingham that I could find. My parents lobbied for the University of Washington, so I could commute from home. They were clingy. While I was dying to get up to no good, and do everything for myself. I was frantic for my adult life to begin. Which Liam’s hasn’t.”

  “Liam’s never seemed to find adult life especially compelling,” Court granted.

  As ever, the couple was holed up in the master bedroom of their split-level in Atlanta, voices held to stage whispers. Liam had a room and bath below, which should have afforded them the run of upstairs, and a modicum of privacy. But no, their son preferred to prowl the upper floor, closer to the refrigerator. The switcheroo had not gone unremarked upon: the parents had become the teenagers, bulwarked in their antisocial lair.

  Harriet plumped her pillow and raised the volume of the eleven o’clock news for better cover. The stream of unaccompanied children pouring over the Mexican border from Honduras was unabated. “He has no motivation to leave. How’s a community college dropout going to afford a whole house in leafy, middle-class Morningside, a twenty-minute bus ride from downtown? With a juicer and espresso machine? At least in our day, parents were dark on sex and drugs, with rules against cursing and drinking. They marched into your room and turned the music way down without asking, and then ordered you to take out the trash. We let him do what he wants.”

  “We could join some obscure cult,” Court proposed, “and turn into hard-ass killjoys overnight. No Godless whore music by Beyoncé, only revivalist hymns, like ‘Shall We Gather at the River.’ Jocanda’s sauntering downstairs would be against our religion—or sauntering, period. We’d have to defend our pure minds from the rays of the devil, so we could ban the internet! I’d buy you a bonnet. We could disavow motorized transportation and modern medical care. Get a horse and buggy and sell the car.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t always address this situation with whimsy.” On another evening, she might have spun the fantasy forward, conjuring the draconian laying down of God’s law on Wildwood Place, the pouring of liquor down the drain. But they’d spent too many nights fabricating fanciful solutions, and they just weren’t that funny anymore.

  She couldn’t fathom her own impotence. It was their house. But unlike many of their friends’ children, who’d returned home in their twenties, Liam had never left, which eliminated the juncture at which he might at least have had to ask for his old room back.

  Harriet might have blamed indulgent parenting, in which case being saddled with a lifelong adolescent was just deserts for failing to raise a functional human being. But Liam’s younger sister, Alicia, had evolved into a competent striver, living with two other young women in Peoplestown while working as the sous chef at Tap. Despite being the firstborn, typically the more intrepid, Liam had never exhibited an appetite for independence as a child. Whereas Alicia grew furious if, in a hurry, you tied her shoes for her—“I want to do it my-sehwf!” became her ringing prime directive by age three—Liam wouldn’t even fold over his sneakers’ Velcro. He threw screaming fits at four when Harriet insisted he learn to wield utensils; he preferred spoon-feeding. Once when he got separated from Harriet at Six Flags, she’d raced the grounds for half an hour before spotting a lone, immobile figure beside the Great American Scream Machine. It hadn’t occurred to the nine-year-old to take some initiative—to locate the Meeting Place, to approach a security guard, or even to attract adult attention by bursting into tears. To the contrary: head swiveling languidly as if taking in the sights, he didn’t race to embrace Mommy in relief, but acknowledged her approach with a nonchalant wave. He’d always possessed an unshakable faith that, come what may, someone else would take care of him.

  Obviously, a boy who felt safe and secure was all to the good. Yet the complacency grew less than heartening. Throughout his school years, he let his bicycle rust
, content to be ferried to Kmart for supplies. When he was a teenager, she actually wished that he seemed at least a little embarrassed to be seen with his parents. They’d had to veritably foist a first cell phone on the boy in high school, and he never learned how to text or retrieve voicemail; he didn’t keep it charged or do the updates, so that it rapidly transformed into fallen space junk. When his other classmates enrolled in driver’s ed, Liam preferred a nondescript elective called Civic Responsibility, a selection his mother found bleakly comic in retrospect. He still didn’t have a license. Indeed, so little command of an automobile did he enjoy that in the midst of some theoretical metropolitan emergency, of which, say, his poor parents were early victims, while long lines of cars on I-85 fled a viral plague or hordes of flesh-eating zombies, she pictured him sitting inertly in the passenger’s seat in their driveway and poking at the radio.

  He couldn’t cook. He couldn’t sew on a button or work the washing machine. Not that she hadn’t taught him these things, or tried. Is a lesson taught if it doesn’t take? No matter how many times she demonstrated which point on the dial corresponded with a load of whites—for heaven’s sake, it said whites—and which button started the cycle, he would amble upstairs the next time and ask to be instructed again. Or he’d select the wrong setting for colors and ruin the load. Ineptitude of this magnitude required a genius. But calling incompetence a gambit didn’t change the fact that it worked.

  “I feel a little had, frankly,” she confessed to Court, finishing her mint tea. Meanwhile, on the news idealistic young lawyers were streaking to detention centers on the Texas border, eager to provide unaccompanied Central American minors help with negotiating the immigration system or locating distant relatives in Wichita. “When he was a kid-kid, I was more than glad to bake peach crumbles, buy his spiral notebooks, and get him vaccinated. But just because we’re technically still his parents—well, I feel taken advantage of. He never lends a hand. He never vacuums or unloads the dishwasher or shops.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  Harriet guffawed.

  “I know you find his still living at home a little trying. But have you wondered why you want him out of here? He’s an extra expense, but he doesn’t cost us that much.”

  “We’re on the cusp of entering a whole new chapter of our lives. Once we retire, it might be nice to, I don’t know, travel.”

  “Nothing stops us from traveling. He’s thirty-one. Leave him alone, and we’re not going to be arrested by social services for neglect.”

  “Given his vast incapacities, we probably should be.” She didn’t want to travel.

  “Do you not …” Court hazarded in a discomfited whisper, “like him?”

  “No, it’s not dislike … All that idleness is oppressive. It lowers the barometric pressure of the whole house. And there’s not that much to like or dislike either way, is there?” She worried this formulation of awful neutrality definitely tilted toward dislike. She’d never wanted to be one of those tiresome embodiments of “maternal ambivalence.”

  “So what do you really want to change?” Court was a musing, mischievous man, and the sobriety was refreshing.

  “I want to feel able to get him out of here,” she determined. “I’d like a choice in the matter. Then, who knows? I might even be okay with his staying.”

  The soft, rasping paw on the door was a triumph of patient coaching—Liam’s lifelong impulse was to barge into his parents’ bedroom unannounced—but he didn’t wait to be invited before popping his head in. His face was broad and bland, like a parking lot. “That raspberry crumb coffee cake is gone. And we’re out of paper towels. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “But there were two extra-large rolls—” Harriet began.

  “I spilled a soda.”

  “I’ve asked you, please don’t use yards and yards of that pricey reinforced double-ply on the floor. There’s that big sponge under the sink.” Liam wasn’t an idiot. Imagining that her son would comply with this request if she issued it twenty-five times after he’d ignored it for twenty-four made Harriet the idiot.

  In his usual summer uniform of T-shirt and boxers, his flat feet bare and spreading like melting ice cream on the wooden parquet, Liam continued to stand in the doorway, being. It was his habit. One of the many responsibilities he shirked was keeping up his end of conversation. He seemed to regard the sheer fact of himself as both comment and reply. While never having been talkative, he was possessed of a weighty presence, and this sense of mass was literal only in part. Sure, he got no exercise and was on the heavy side, but becoming outright obese would have required ambition on a scale beyond him. He forever exuded the baffled, slightly dazed, not unpleasantly surprised quality of having just been transported to another universe, and of still being unsure of how things in the seventh dimension were done. Try this, Harriet thought: In the seventh dimension, we use a sponge.

  “Well,” Harriet said, after an amount of time in which normal people could have done twenty sit-ups or made a cup of instant coffee. “Good night.”

  Liam was socially awkward in a way that he didn’t appear to experience as awkwardness. Liam felt fine. He made other people feel awkward. “Right,” he said at last, floating back down the hall, and failing to close the door behind him.

  Harriet heaved from the bed and closed the door. “We’ve got to talk to him.”

  Court reminded his wife, “We have talked to him.”

  There had indeed been much earnest discussion about Liam’s occupational future. Environmental campaigning? Maybe Liam could get experience by volunteering for a lobbying organization at the state legislature. Or the hospitality trade, did that appeal? Because Atlanta’s tourism industry did nothing but expand, and entry-level hotel jobs required minimal qualifications, maybe … But his parents did most of the talking, and they might as well have been speculating about the fate of a television character in a series slated to be canceled. “He’s just not an aspiring kind of guy,” his father had recently reasoned out of their firstborn’s earshot. “You can’t change his nature.”

  “He could become the kind of young man who aspires to something, if he wanted to,” Harriet insisted.

  “I think that’s called assuming the conclusion,” Court said. “The whole problem is not wanting to want to.”

  Liam had been diagnosed in the days before everyone routinely put an H between the AD and D, but Ritalin, then Adderall, had only ensured that he did the bare minimum in class a little faster. Because over half of his schoolmates were on the same prescriptions, in a relativistic sense the medications simply maintained what often seemed a carefully calibrated position in the academic pack: not at the very back, but behind the middle—a location that, naturally, attracted the least attention. For if Liam was guilty of nursing a single objective, it was to be left alone. When as a young mother Harriet had dutifully grubbed onto the floor to play with her son, her participation proved an intrusion. He preferred solitary pursuits, of a maximally purposeless variety—filling a cup with pebbles, emptying it out, and filling it up again. She sometimes wondered, when this proclivity for a veritably Buddhist circularity persisted into adolescence, whether he lived on an elevated metaphysical plane, having an inborn sense that this earthly life is chaff, that seeking is only for its own sake, that all grasping after satisfaction is fated to end only in more fruitless, gnawing desire. His affect into adulthood grew only airier. His smooth, pleasant face could entertain such a lofty, pityingly scornful smile that she worried it might someday earn him a sock in the jaw.

  Yet when he did venture from the house, he somehow provoked something else entirely. Harriet couldn’t imagine his being perceived as a catch—his body was soft from inactivity, his features engendering the same behind-the-middle position in the comeliness stakes that his schoolwork had achieved in the educational one—so it must have been that very aura of knowingness, of finding everything faintly amusing though in what way he wasn’t about to say, of having mastered a
mystery whose solution had been withheld from the multitudes, that explained why Liam had more than once pulled in a stunning girlfriend who would appear to be out of his league. He had something they wanted, or he seemed to have something they wanted, which being indistinguishable from genuine enlightenment was equally enticing—for what they wanted, what all young women most wanted whether or not they knew so consciously, was not to want. To be spared the ceaseless tyranny of yearning, to escape their own desire to please. To stop giving blow jobs because they didn’t like the taste and to be able to say so. To be replete. For that was what Liam Friel-Garson gave off in spades: repleteness.

  Other words for replete were less complimentary: smug, self-satisfied, and static.

  In her own youth, Harriet wasn’t precisely driven. A better word was directed. Neither she nor Court could quite claim to be a child of the sixties, which in her teenage years had made her feel cheated, but which she understood by college to have been a narrow miss in her favor. Beyond the few issues of consequence like civil rights and the war, the whole LaughIn la-di-da had been a commercial contrivance to sell beads and flares. She’d also been spared so much retroactive mortification, like the photos of her older sister Eileen in body paint shooting peace signs. Young people in that era thought they were so original and special, and it never occurred to Eileen and her friends that in that case why did they all look identical? The cohort that came of age in the late 1970s was more practical, spurning the overobvious attractions of the creative professions for achievable career choices that were solid second bests. So Harriet had majored in arts administration. The trouble with this strategy was that aiming for second best often meant attaining third best—at best. Harriet’s having finally worked her way up to booking talent for the Woodruff Arts Center was a miracle.