A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘Man,’ said Mordecai, as he propped his thick black lace-up boots on my mother’s fragile coffee table; its fluted edge began to creak. ‘How do you like that pompous horseshit about the

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  ACLU? That was all Father cared about, causes. Never mind his kids.’

  On an open Britannica, he arranged a pack of Bambus and tin of Three Castles; shreds of tobacco dribbled across thin pages of cramped paint.

  ‘They felt guilty for living. Mother never splurged on a box of chocolates that she didn’t feel bad about.’

  ‘She felt bad,’ I added, ‘because they made her fat.’

  ‘Hell, by the time you guys came along, they’d got downright profligate,’ Mordecai went on. ‘Dirt, that was all I had to play with.’

  ‘Dirt,’ said Truman, not looking up from his equations, ‘and us.’

  Mordecai liked to portray his childhood as threadbare, but often omitted that my father hadn’t been picking through Belmont’s garbage, but going to Harvard Law School. Boasting about your underprivileged background must be one more mark of the middle class. I had a feeling Real Poor People didn’t brag about it.

  ‘I’m just floored,’ said Mordecai, ‘that they didn’t salt away more than 300,000 lousy smackers. They saved enough dough on me. Moving out in ninth grade? No college tuition? And then I borrow 14,000

  crummy dollars and it gets subtracted. All that we-love-you-we-want-to-help-you and they kept track.’

  I knew that when people were hurting they often seemed recriminating and spiteful from the outside, as Andrew had let me know how much he cared for me by smashing years’ worth of my best work. Truman, however, would go to no efforts to rationalize his brother’s insensitivity, since to whatever degree he enjoyed Mordecai’s company at all it was when his brother hanged himself. There was a grim look of satisfaction on Truman’s averted face, as if he were already relishing the conversation with me later when he could once again cast his eldest sibling as a grabby, selfish boor.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mordecai will make out OK,’ Truman muttered, circling a figure in his lap. ‘He’ll walk away with $156,000, if Hugh’s numbers are right.’

  ‘That’s if we sell the house,’ said Mordecai, who seemed to have already arrived at this figure in his head.

  ‘Or,’ said Truman slowly, ‘if Corlis and I buy you out.’

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Mordecai shut the Britannica on his tobacco threads and tossed it on the floor, where its spine bent at an uncomfortable angle like an accident victim you aren’t 43

  supposed to move. He leaned forward and tapped ash on the carpet.

  ‘Here’s a cheque, buddy, now run along and we’ll pretend we never met.’

  ‘Maybe we haven’t,’ said Truman tersely.

  ‘Buy me out is exactly what Mother and Father did, for years, and got off cheap at that. And now look—even dead, they want it back.’

  Finally Truman looked up from the invoice. ‘Nobody kicked you out, you left. You never wanted to be a part of our family, and you weren’t a part of it, so take your thirty pieces of silver and leave us alone.’

  Truman’s muscles were straining the shoulders of his green workshirt, whereas Mordecai’s shirt only strained at the buttons above his belt.

  Of the two, Truman was technically much stronger. Yet in the face of the older’s impervious relaxation and bemused little smile, Truman may as well have been lofting rubber darts at a tank.

  Mordecai reached for the woven celadon vase on the coffee table, turning from his brother as if neglecting an annoying bee that is not worth the trouble of pursuing and swatting at all over the room. ‘What’s this from?’ he asked me, bouncing the ceramic from hand to hand like a basketball.

  ‘Oh, some Korean gratuity…’ I stuttered, nervous for it, and feeling apologetic for my parents’ trinkets.

  ‘So this is part of my inheritance?’ he enquired, still hefting the pot back and forth.

  ‘Lucky you,’ I said.

  Without further ado, he palmed the vase as if for a free throw, and launched it past Truman’s nose to the far corner. It smashed into a hundred pieces with a sound as if an entire china cabinet had pitched on its face. Then Mordecai stood to arch his eyebrows at me, holding his empty tumbler upside-down by way of complaint.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said unsteadily, ‘it’s time to make dinner.’

  I had learned from my mother to employ food as a proxy in domestic relations, just as Truman had detoured his complex affections for his family into a simpler alliance with our architecture. At least as we four bustled over cutting boards, the chop of cleavers and scrape of spoons filled what would have been, for fifteen minutes, numbed silence.

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  It may be sissy of me, but I’ve always been fascinated by how people cook. Take Averil, for instance: I gave her the job of making garlic bread.

  Easy, right? And quick. But no. First off, she adds a timorous amount of garlic to the butter, and has to be bullied into pressing several more cloves. She mashes the butter for ten minutes, mortified by the prospect of an unbroken clump startling an innocent diner with a burst of zing.

  When she advances to the baguettes, she saws the bread slowly as wood, and dithers the blade back and forth after every slice before committing to another, intent on identical twins. When in mid-loaf she severs it in half instead of cutting just to the bottom crust, she lets the knife droop dejectedly as if she has just failed a geometry test. Buttering, she dabs and peers and dabs, until I find it too excruciating to watch further. In the time it takes her to make garlic bread, the whole rest of the meal will have been prepared and the table set.

  Averil was daunted by food, along with a great deal else. That she was a substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system suggested that I had either over-estimated the significance of garlic bread or under-estimated the unruliness of North Carolinian teenagers. In the kitchen, she was always looking over her shoulder to make sure she’d done nothing wrong. She wanted to please the food itself, to earn its approval; perhaps someone in her childhood had delivered draconian punish-ments for piddling mistakes. Of flavour in general she was leary, her primary concern that there should not be too much.

  Where Averil is painstaking, Truman is brisk. They share an ex-actitude—Truman’s diced onions are all the same size square. Yet while Averil might take an hour trimming and snapping green beans one by one, my little brother lines them up ten at a time and dispatches two pounds in ten minutes. And where Averil is timid, Truman is judicious.

  The heat under Truman’s sautéing onions is medium. The amount of salt in his pasta water is some.

  The confidence with which Truman wielded a cleaver had always meant to me that, beneath his closeted, suspicious-of-strangers, why-go-out-let’s-stay-home day-to-day, teemed a brusque, masculine certainty that never got out of the house. About his assembly-line methodicalness I was less enthusiastic. He was capable of experimentation, but if he ever dolloped the beans with pesto and it was tasty, then he would always dollop

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  them with pesto in future. Truman seized on answers and kept them.

  I think if you presented a meal to Truman and said, This meal is good; it isn’t remarkable or memorable, but it is healthy and competently prepared and it will never make you grow ‘love handles’; if you push this button you may have this same dinner for the rest of your life, he would push the button.

  On Truman repetition never wore thin. I hadn’t ascertained whether he was congenitally incapable of boredom, or whether he was so fant-astically bored, all the time, that he was unacquainted with any other state.

  Myself? In the kitchen, I am whimsical and I flit. I measure nothing, adding dashes of this and fistfuls of that until I have made either a brilliant dish that can’t be repeated or an atrocious one that shouldn’t be. This evening I sneak more olive oil into the vinaigrette than Truman would allow. However, I can’t choose between adding capers or green peppercorns to th
e salad and so opt for both, which is foolish. I do this all the time: torn between accents, I’ll sacrifice neither, and the flavours conflict. The last thing I am is methodical; I grind a little pepper until my tendons tire, peel one carrot when I will need to peel five, slice a tomato and have a sip of wine. Washing the lettuce I get impatient since I grew up with a younger brother who would do all the drudgery and I am a little spoiled; the salad will later be gritty. Meanwhile, I hover over the others and I pick. I crunch raw green beans, sample the simmering onions, slip off with a surreptitious spoonful of pesto, swipe a heel from Averil’s garlic bread. She squeals. By dinnertime I will have ruined my appetite, but I enjoy food I snitch more than whole permitted portions at table. Most of my pleasures are devious.

  The real study, however, was Mordecai, extended at the table smoking roll-ups and slurping aquavit. He ran his own audio-engineering company and was used, like me, to drones dispensing with the shit-work.

  He only roused himself for the foreman’s role of spicing the tomato sauce. Mordecai cooked rarely—he and his wife Dix went out nearly every night—but inexperience never stopped my older brother from being an expert at anything.

  If Mordecai has a motto in cooking, it reads: quantitus, extremitus, perversitus. Compulsively industrial, he promptly opens three times more tinned tomatoes than necessary. He presses two whole bulbs of garlic into the onions (while Averil’s eyes pop) and proceeds to dilute the paste with the entire bottle of

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  ten-dollar pinot noir I have opened to breathe for dinner. He shakes the big jar of basil with visible frustration, prises off the perforated top, and dumps in another quarter of a cup. He tastes the sauce, looks dissatisfied, throws in more basil, looks dissatisfied—in point of fact, Mordecai never looks satisfied—throws in some more, and advances to thyme. I peek in the pot to find that the sauce is turning black. But even after he has killed most of the oregano as well he casts about the kitchen as if the insipid slop still tastes like baby pap. He lights on the cone from my coffee that morning, and spoons in about half a cup of grounds. Only with this addition does Mordecai look pleased. His last stroke, a torrent of hot pepper flakes, leaves me praying we are out of cayenne.

  When at last we sat down, Truman and Averil each took as small a spoonful of the sauce on their pasta as etiquette allowed. Even with Mordecai, Truman was polite. He did mutter, ‘If this recipe is a secret, I think we should keep it,’ but under his breath. The spices were chewy, and coffee grounds wedged in my teeth, though all I could taste was red pepper. I commended Averil on her garlic bread, which did a decent job of damping the fire in my mouth.

  Mordecai himself made a show of gusto, his serving mountainous, an extra snow of chilli flakes over the top. He kept the schnapps at his elbow by some triple-strength black coffee and alternated slugs of each.

  At thirty-eight, he still wouldn’t eat his vegetables.

  ‘So kid,’ said Mordecai, spaghetti worming down his chin, ‘how’s the philosophy degree?’

  I intervened, ‘He’s got a 3.8 grade point average. Don’t you?’

  Truman looked at me darkly, as if what I had blurted was shameful, which in Mordecai’s terms I suppose it was.

  Truman’s affairs addressed, we moved to mine. ‘How about your sculpture, Core?’

  Now, Mordecai himself was one of those entrepreneurs whose big break was always around the corner. I couldn’t count the times that he had arrived at Heck-Andrews, to stretch back and toss six digits around in the poignantly misguided assumption that money would impress my father. Yet the big round figures floated in on a puff of his chest, and floated out with a shrug of his

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  shoulders; the New York recording studio contract would simply never come up again, and no one would ask. Only because the next time my brother would be back for a ‘loan’ to see him through a ‘cash-flow crisis’

  would we understand tacitly that one more big break had not come through. In this regard I was truly sorry for my brother: that he was unable to share with his family a single grievous disappointment, of which he must have suffered so many.

  However, those who don’t share their tragedies don’t invite yours.

  ‘I got a gallery interested,’ I said, and didn’t attempt even an abbreviated version of my disaster.

  The rest of our meal was consumed with yet another contract that Mordecai was sure he’d win for Decibelle, Inc. whose syllables he caressed with more sensuousness than he ever used naming his wife.

  I could only find it ironic that Mordecai was a self-taught audio engineer when the last thing he ever did was listen. We were treated to all the costly components he planned to install in a local nightclub; his rhythmic recitation of brand names and model numbers—the Stanley-Powers-Ebberstein-and-Whosits M2XY 50001-BH—gave his monologue a liturgical lilt, and my head began to list from Sunday morning narcolepsy. I felt an irrational urge to play Hangman on a church bulletin. As with any sermon, you didn’t interrupt, you didn’t participate, and you didn’t take any of it on board bar the fact that it was over.

  Averil began to clear up, and stared down woefully at the pot where two gallons of Mordecai’s ‘secret sauce’ remained.

  ‘Freeze it,’ I advised, and Truman laughed. Mordecai didn’t get it.

  ‘Man…’ He extended while the table cleared itself, and lit another roll-up. ‘This may sound uncool, but Mother dropping out of the game is something of a relief.’

  ‘A relief?’ The tendons in Truman’s forearms rippled as he carried off a tower of plates.

  ‘Yeah.’ When Mordecai tipped the chair back on two legs and slapped his stomach for emphasis, I puzzled how he’d managed to pick up so many of his father’s mannerisms, having left home in ninth grade. ‘She wasn’t ever happy after Father died, right?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Truman objected tightly, scraping his wife’s spaghetti into the rubbish. ‘Besides, if she didn’t have anyone else to live for, whose fault was that?’

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  ‘Hers,’ insisted Mordecai. They lived in a smug self-congratulatory unit of two. Don’t kid yourself that we ever meant much to them—or that we could have made the slightest difference when Father was gone.’

  Truman ran water in the sink, and kept his back to his brother. ‘You didn’t make much difference, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever imagine what it might be like if she lived to a hundred? Getting heavier and weak in the head, talking about Father all the time? Wetting her bed, no longer able to drive? Hell, yes, I’m relieved. She’s better off, and so are we.’

  ‘The important thing, of course,’ said Truman, ‘is how we are.’

  As Truman plopped glasses into the soapy water, Mordecai wrapped his hand around his tumbler, and Averil, I noted, did not have the nerve to clear Mordecai’s glass.

  ‘I find it a little hard to picture,’ Truman went on, his voice almost affable in a way that unnerved me. ‘You driving to buy her groceries; you listening to the day they met in the Young Democrats for the eighty millionth time; you rolling up her smelly sheets and tucking in fresh ones. So what all are you relieved of?’

  ‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t have changed her sheets. You would have, kid. I’m not that much of a sucker.’

  Truman gripped the counter on either side of the sink, his head bowed. The veins in his hands were raised, shocks of hair on his crown standing on end like a cat’s in a corner.

  ‘She dunked our stinky diapers and mopped up our vomit when we were sick. She cooked supper every night and if it wasn’t always gourmet we didn’t starve. It seems fair enough to expect something in return.’ At last Truman turned his head. ‘If I’d have done it and you wouldn’t that doesn’t make me a sucker but you a cad. If it weren’t for Mother, you wouldn’t even be here.’

  I had the feeling he was blaming her.

  ‘Shit,’ said Mordecai, rocking his chair on its back legs with his boot on the table. ‘I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She wan
ted to have kids, she had kids. Diapers went with the territory. I’ll tell you this, I didn’t want their favours. I wiped my own ass as soon as I was able, and at the age I could so much as turn a hamburger I walked. You’re the one who chose to stick around home until, what? Twenty-eight?’ (Truman was thirty-one.) ‘You’d have cooked her strained peas, because she got you—you owed. I

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  didn’t. So maybe I’m relieved for you, bro. There aren’t a lot of good sides to people kicking it, but she saved you a twenty-year nightmare and I’m just suggesting you admit it.’ The front legs of his chair hit the floor.

  Truman sudsed glasses furiously, though with his usual system, all the wine glasses at once, lining them on the left; he would rinse them in matching sets.

  ‘What she saved you,’ said Truman, ‘was money. If she’d lived longer, she’d have used up what you already seem to regard as inadequate compensation for putting up with her company an entire fourteen years of your life.’

  ‘All right,’ Mordecai proposed blithely. ‘You think I’m so money-grubbing? Let me pose you a hypothetical question. Say, Mother’s dead.

  A fairy appears, and offers you one more evening with your mother.

  A whole night. There’s one catch: you have to pay for it, out of your inheritance. Now, how much would that night be worth to you, bro?

  Would you pay $20,000? $15,000?’

  ‘That’s a false dilemma,’ Truman croaked. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not real.

  That’s like asking who do you love more, your mother or your father, when you can love both of them.’

  ‘But you do love your mother or your father more, don’t you?’ pressed Mordecai. ‘Besides, my little fairy isn’t absurd. You said yourself, the longer she lived the less we got, so every night did cost money, didn’t it? You haven’t answered me. How much would the hand-squeezing and hot cocoa be worth to you? $1,000? $500? Ten bucks?’