Yet in her youth the simplest making do had been exhilarating. Back then, chance acquisitions worked accidental magic, coming together in a way that never would have fallen into place by design. Odds and ends of crockery had complemented one another with slant juxtaposition, like the parts of a Schoenberg quartet. A fake-Victorian blue-and-white dinner plate would strike chords with a parti-colored polka-dotted soup bowl and hit serendipitous harmonics.
After Harriet graduated from Emory and was outfitting her first apartment in Little Five Points (“Little Five” if you were with it), her parents had driven out from Bellingham to help, making a vacation of the project and stopping to see Eileen in Kansas City en route. Harriet had felt both comforted and crowded. True, the gifts of small furniture and used housewares were a welcome economy, and her father had used a tape measure to hang the Cars and Steely Dan posters at the same height. She’d scrounged through her mother’s boxes of family castoffs for the red-fringed tablecloth she’d grown up with, printed with tiny dustpans, brooms, and 1950s fridges. Yet she’d been desperate to be left to her own devices, and didn’t really want to be taken out to eat in the Old Spaghetti Factory in Underground Atlanta, but ached to prepare her own meals in her own kitchen, whatever and whenever she liked. When her parents finally cleared off, she cranked up Can’t Buy a Thrill to dance in celebration at two a.m., until the resident of the apartment below furiously pounded his ceiling.
For all that glorious self-sufficiency there would be a price to pay, of course, one steeper than the ire of a neighbor who felt excluded from all the fun: nights when the bottom fell out for no reason, and freedom converted to ordinary loneliness, hollow and dragging; on certain Gethsemanes, the loneliness descended to desolation. But you only realized later that it was supposed to be that way—that the very precariousness of young adulthood was what made it so heady—that balancing on the edge of a sheer drop conveyed heroism to mere standing up. To this day, the pop tunes of that era, like “Baker Street,” filled her with a soaring sense of possibility that none of the highbrow symphonies at Woodruff could stir.
Thus in Liam’s place, she’d have been twirling with delight that the teal sofa from Goodwill fit perfectly beneath the bay window—the while chafing for her parents to go. Liam, however, stood in the middle of the main room, equidistant from every object as if to express a perfect lack of attachment to each foreign appointment. As he had when lost at Six Flags at nine, their son didn’t look frightened or unsettled, but he did seem to be waiting, less for his parents to leave, which they were preparing to momentarily, than for his parents to come back.
“But what will I do for dinner?” he asked.
“There’s the makings for ham sandwiches, or a burger,” Harriet said. “I left you some chicken, sweet peppers. You could try a stir-fry …” She could as well have told him that he could also order Chinese from a takeout place on the moon.
In the end, they stayed and christened his new apartment with a meal she whipped up herself, a useful exercise. He also needed a serving spoon, a vegetable peeler, and a mixing bowl.
On the pretext of getting help choosing job openings on Craigslist, Liam returned the next day for lunch. Once back from Ansley Mall, Court helped him go at it until after seven, at which point it was easy enough to put out a third plate for the bolognese. By the following week, Harriet was stricken with Provender Pity. The sliced ham in Liam’s fridge would be acquiring a fetid slick, the chicken would be toxic, the ground beef oxidized. Oh, their son returned to his apartment to sleep, but Court often broke down and gave him a ride. They were paying $1,250/month to outsource a mattress. Thus far having eliminated the perk but not the problem, she missed Jocanda.
The job search was more pebbles and cups, and Harriet grew alarmed when Liam started to enjoy it. Given his appetite for numbing circularity, that meant the process never threatened to end anywhere other than where it began. It seemed the interviewer at the Four Seasons had commented that his applicant “didn’t really seem to want the job” of receptionist at the plush downtown hotel, and their son had then credited the man with being “keenly observant.” What was she supposed to do, come with him?
The third month, they piled Liam’s furniture at the back of the carport, after which the VW wagon would no longer quite fit under its roof. Once the war of independence was battled in reverse, the fact that Liam had lent a hand in packing up the floral stoneware, the worn sheets, the charming print tablecloth from Harriet’s childhood, and his brand-new mixing bowl was purely discouraging. It was at least gracious of the landlord to let them break the lease without penalty. He was sympathetic, he said. His brother in Saint Louis had four grown kids, and in short order after college every single one of them had come back home.
It was winter now, and their firstborn had turned thirty-two.
By spring, Harriet was crazed. Fundamentally, the predicament was zoological. Like the time a badger had gotten into the toolshed and simply skulked farther back by the rakes the more they shouted at it. A large animal had invaded her territory, and it would not scare out. But you couldn’t put an apple in a cage in the backyard and wait for your son to trip the latch.
Alicia stopped by in May. It pained Harriet that her daughter seemed to pay these biannual visits—too evenly spaced, the way one schedules dental checkups—in the same spirit of fatalistic obligation in which Harriet had visited her own parents. So she knew the drill. Having shown up on the early side, Alicia would pick at her dinner, though she’d always been a night owl with a creditable appetite; her real evening would commence once she fled. Yet they’d tried to be companionable parents—broad-minded, unrestrictive, and nonjudgmental to such a degree that, in relation to Liam anyway, admonition had built up in Harriet’s system like mercury poisoning. Did nothing ever change? Didn’t anyone like their parents and look forward to seeing them? Or did all grown children shoot surreptitious glances at their father’s watch, gauging whether they’d served enough of their sentence that they might get time off for good behavior?
At twenty-six, Alicia possessed a knowing sourness that Harriet recognized. It was a weak disguise of knowing absolutely nothing and having unrealistically high expectations of everything and everybody. Harriet had imagined herself a cynic at that age as well, until she chanced across snapshots of her own postgraduate years in the 1980s: big-eyed, soft-lipped, the facial expressions perfectly undefended—a beautiful idiot. In oversize black jeans and a boxy, mannish sports jacket, Alicia did her damnedest to disguise how pretty she was. Harriet had lost track of whether her daughter was currently “gender queer” or “gender nonconforming”; having looked up both terms online, she still couldn’t have told you the difference with a gun to her head. When Harriet was growing up, women were trying to immolate gender stereotypes. These days, you preserved the stereotype, the better not to correspond to it. She wasn’t sure what the difference was there, either, but with Alicia she wasn’t looking for a fight.
Mother and daughter had a brief window on their own, since Court had been making an effort to share Liam’s fascination with manhole covers, and the two men had launched into Druid Hills to track down a retro design.
“Any progress on finding Little Liam another tree house?” Alicia asked, sipping rosé on the back patio.
“Your brother doesn’t seem very interested in making his own way in the world,” Harriet said.
“Why should he be? He’s got everything he needs here. I’ve half a mind to move back home myself. Jack, you remember her—she’s back with the folks, saving to buy her own place. She’ll have enough for a down payment, too, by the time she’s fifty-five.”
“I realize that property prices for your generation—”
“Oh, screw it. I don’t want a house. But these parasaito shinguru who waitress at Tap—”
Harriet frowned.
Alicia translated, “‘Parasite singles.’ Common parlance around here now, but the Japanese coined it, so they’ve obviously got the same
thing-that-wouldn’t-leave problem in Tokyo. The waitstaff who live with their parents—you have to be super nice to them, because if you so much as say boo they’ll quit in the middle of their shift. No rent to pay—nothing to lose. Their tips and wages are just especially generous forms of an allowance. So they go out all the time, and wear shit-hot gear, and always have the latest iPhone. I still have a five.”
“You have what money can’t buy: self-respect. And that’s why you don’t really want your old room back.”
Alicia chuckled. “I made you nervous. Admit it.”
“It’s our home gym now, as you know very well. I’d have nowhere else to put the StairMaster.”
“You could put it in the utility room.”
“I can’t stand that thing without TV!”
“See? You are. You’re nervous.”
“What am I supposed to do about your brother?” Harriet lamented.
Alicia shrugged. “Kick him out. Get all Darwinian on his ass.”
“We can’t throw our own son on the street. You know, home is where they’ll always take you in and all.”
“I never knew you were such a sucker for poetry.”
“He’s not able to take care of himself, and you know it, sweetie.”
“He was useless in school because he could get away with being useless, and he’s useless here for the same reason. He’s not mentally challenged, he’s fucking smart, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Meanwhile, you’ve disabled his survival instinct. It’s like, unplugged. Or at least rerouted. He can survive here; he’s got that sorted. But force him to survive somewhere else, and my money says he won’t end up in the morgue.”
“Alicia!”
“All I know is it’s not fair. You cover all his expenses, and I cover all of mine. You’re paying off his student loans, and I’m paying off my own loans. He gets meat and two veg every night, and I’m living on pot noodles. Useless pays. He makes me feel like a sucker.”
“But honey, standing on your own two feet—it’s so much more admirable!”
“I don’t need your admiration. I need more money.”
“What I don’t understand is—what does Liam expect to happen, in due course? We’re getting older. Life doesn’t stand still.”
“You and Dad will get feeble and dotty and move into an assisted-living facility and eventually a nursing home. Beforehand, because Liam knows you’re planners, way in advance of Medicaid’s ‘look-back period’ you’ll have steadily transferred any remaining assets, and finally this house, into Liam’s name. Once you’re down to two grand in cash, at least on paper, you’ll qualify for Medicaid—though he tells me that you can still keep one car. This way the government will pick up the tab for your long-term care, so some larcenous geriatric outfit won’t eat up your savings. Voilà. Liam stays in his room. If, over time, the assets dwindle, he can sell the house and downsize.”
Harriet was stunned. “I can’t imagine our Liam figuring all that out.”
“Then you don’t know him very well.”
“I think that’s the sort of thing that as a loyal sister you’re not supposed to be telling me.” Alicia had been a terrible tattletale as a girl.
“Loyal sister was invited in on the deal. He said I could move in, too, once you’re addled. Though I think he just likes the idea of keeping someone on hand who can drive.”
Court and Liam returned, rubbing proudly in tow. While Harriet rustled up tacos, the other three lounged at the kitchen table, with CNN yammering behind them. This summer the Central Americans had been eclipsed by the European refugee crisis. To the left of Alicia’s head, discarded orange life jackets littered a Greek beach. Many of the life jackets, Anderson Cooper explained, were defective.
“If you actually look at who’s in those boats,” Liam said, pointing at another rescue at sea, “tons of them aren’t from Syria. They’re from Africa. Like, it’s kind of obvious, if you get my drift. You don’t exactly have to check their passports.”
“So?” Alicia said.
“So they’re not running away from a war. They just want the good life.” For Liam, this was unusual engagement with the news. Ever since Harriet’s mumble about perhaps replacing him with a waif from Honduras, he’d felt competitive with the wretched refuse of anyone’s teeming shore.
“You of all people,” Alicia said, “are incensed by economic opportunism?”
Even his sister had trouble ruffling her brother’s feathers. “All of Africa and the Middle East can’t move to Germany,” he said mildly. “It’ll get crowded, and the Germans will get sick of them. They should stay home.”
“You’d know about that,” Alicia clipped.
Chopping green peppers, Harriet wondered whether recipients of charity were naturally suspicious of other recipients of charity; for Liam, that had been an impassioned speech. Clearly, he resented the genuinely desperate and dispossessed for making him seem capable and prosperous in comparison.
Weakness was a weapon, and a fiendishly effective one. Harriet increasingly experienced their son’s poor education, domestic ineptitude, off-kilter social skills, and broad unemployability as a form of blackmail. Yet this brand of extortion—I have thrown myself on your mercy; if you don’t take care of me, I will make you look like a monster—depended on physical presence. The moment those poor migrants set one foot on Greek sand they ceased to be an African or Syrian problem and transformed into a European one. The temptation to pole those populous dinghies from the shore must have been stupendous, although with the cameras rolling no one on Lesbos wanted to look that callous—or, to give the good Greek people more credit still, they didn’t want to be that callous. Yet surely you were a bit of a patsy to allow your own finest qualities to be used against you: your sympathy with the vulnerable, as anyone who drew a short stick of any description was now labeled incessantly; your self-consciousness about your own privilege; your sense of responsibility for the defenseless; your decency, your kindness, your generosity. Okay, but if weakness conferred power, Harriet realized joyously, so did being an asshole.
It had taken days of cajoling to get Liam to join an expedition in sewer spelunking sponsored by his buddies on ManHole.com, the better for their son to be out of the house a whole Saturday. Harriet sneak-thiefed downstairs, come to ransack her own home. In big plastic containers allegedly purchased as protection for sweaters, she folded her son’s shirts in neat stacks, filling empty crevices with rolled boxers and bunches of socks. The exercise might have recalled packing Liam’s bags for summer camp, except that Liam had never cared to go to camp. The books were few; he wasn’t a big reader.
Helping lug the containers up to the foyer, Court plunked the first on the floor in befuddlement. “But what are we going to do with this stuff?”
“Once it’s on the other side of that front door,” she said, dragging the box labeled jeans/slacks over the threshold, “the only question is what Liam’s going to do with it.”
Court was queasy about the scheme, which his wife had sold as “a sociological experiment.” The locksmith arrived at noon.
By the time a fellow hole spotter dropped Liam back home at six p.m., the front yard was stacked with their son’s belongings, the containers secured with a tarp in case of thunderstorms. Huddled at the kitchen table clutching glasses of the wine they’d largely forgone for years—if they kept it in the house, Liam drank it all—Harriet and Court heard the key crunch into the side-door lock and then snick-snick when it wouldn’t turn. “Mom?” Typically, the call was indolent, untroubled. Then the same soft mauling that often afflicted their bedroom door, a soughing sound that brought to mind “The Monkey’s Paw.” “Something’s wrong with the lock.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the lock.” Harriet’s voice had gone squeaky. “This motel has no vacancies. No room at the inn. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
He might have inferred the futility of the circuit, but Liam still went through the theater of shuffling to the front door, to
the patio sliding door, and to the separate back entrance to his own former warren downstairs, the better to underscore how much bother his own parents had gone to in order to batten down the hatches against their only son. Listening to the old house keys jam each time made Harriet feel trapped, as if she hadn’t locked her boy out but herself inside. In a horror movie, they’d be goners.
“This is awful,” Court mumbled. “I’m not going to be able to hold out.”
“You will hold out, and so will I. This is the hard part. We just have to keep our nerve, and not go soft and gooey.”
“You know what a customer at the Bookie called stay-at-home adults? Failed fledglings. But what happens when you push a little bird from the nest, and it still can’t fly? It’s not a pretty picture.”
“Liam’s not a little bird. We’ve come this far. And I’m scientifically curious what he’s going to do.”
For the time being, what Liam did was return to the side door and stand there. He didn’t keep pawing, and he didn’t beg. But the silhouette of his blunt, impassive form lurked behind the thin curtains, like a paper target at a shooting range. The reproachful shadow would be able to discern them more clearly in the light of the overhead, merrily preparing a meal that their son wasn’t invited to join, toasting the abandonment of their firstborn with a feisty Pinot Gris. At length, Harriet grew so uncomfortable that she corked the bottle and took their plates down the hall, barricading themselves in the bedroom on the queen-size mattress just as they’d hidden out when Liam was still home.
Jocanda had apologized that her mother didn’t exactly welcome a white boyfriend, which was why she and Liam always spent the night together over here. So Harriet had rather assumed that her ousted son would end up bunking with Alicia. It was more unfairness, dumping the girl’s brother in her lap, but Harriet was sure that Alicia’s hardworking roommates would refuse to carry a slacker for more than a few days. Then Darwin would work his magic.
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