A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘You smashed it, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  I might have left before she started breaking his records and he threw bottles, albeit not the ones with beer—he wouldn’t waste it. Instead I withdrew just out of range, a vantage point from which to ascertain that like most battles this one had rules. Dix’s eye flicked to the title before she grabbed an album to crack over his head, and once she chose another. The kitchen was open season, but they ate out. Not once was the slightest feint made in the direction of the workshop, the tools, with which Mordecai’s crew continued to grind and hammer, shouting directions a bit more loudly as if Dix and their employer going at it were a car alarm

  101

  that wasn’t theirs. If she really wanted to whack him, she’d have abandoned Daffy Duck—an early casualty—in favour of a solid chisel blow to his Rockwell table saw. This fracas, therefore, was performed within strict theatrical boundaries, so when I interrupted that I needed to be off they dropped their weapons as if the director had called a tea break.

  ‘You won’t say anything to Truman, will you?’ I pleaded. ‘About what you proposed?’

  ‘Since when,’ said Mordecai, ‘did I ever say anything to your brother, period?’

  Fair enough. ‘And I wanted to know,’ I said, ‘if you’d come for Christmas.’

  Mordecai shrugged. ‘Sure. I’ll come for Christmas.’

  Wrapped up with a bow.

  102

  8

  Chewing peppermint to obscure the incriminating caraway on my breath, I found Truman and Averil in the kitchen with rolled-up sleeves.

  We were not nearly through with sorting and reclaiming this house for ourselves, and the kitchen remained the most dauntingly inhabited di-orama of my mother’s Gestalt. Though overflowing with comestibles, this had always been one of those mysterious sculleries whose pantry dropped cans, whose fridge bulged baggies, and whose freezer required a chair against the door to keep it from popping open, where you couldn’t find a thing to eat.

  We’d attacked the refrigerator the day before, and once we cleared out the fungus-furred yellow squash, liquefied lettuce, separated mayonnaise and crystallized strawberry jam there was nothing salvageable remaining besides a single jar of dubious peanut butter. After we scoured the ice-box with cleanser and propped it open to air I had gazed into that expanse of pristine plastic, for the first time guiltlessly glad on some account that my mother was dead. My whole life that refrigerator had been crammed full of stale margarine crumbed with burnt toast, cling-filmed half-cups of overcooked rice, and imploding green peppers sagging into the lower drawers’ ad hoc vegetable soup. I had never been at liberty to thunk anything into the bin without suffering,

  ‘Why, that’s my good meatloaf!’ to send her scraping diffidently at a glaucous brown scab. There was always one half-inch chunk of a Macintosh that was ‘perfectly good’, leaving me to question my mother’s compromised version of perfection, and if I ever drew her attention to the fact that though apples by the bushel had indeed been cheaper than by the bag but these were nine months old, we would suffer reproof by pie.

  In fact, my mother had not been a bad cook, but she was so 103

  consumed with employing ingredients that ‘needed using’ that she’d contaminate five dollars’ worth of lasagne with a handful of ammoniated mushrooms that cost ten cents. When she cut fresh pineapple, it so grieved her to slice off any of the fruit with the rind that she left the spines in, and dessert was like chewing your way out of a prison camp.

  This curious inclination to sacrifice the whole for the part—to leave mould on one side of the cheddar, to gouge out only half the tomato rot, or bake an otherwise gorgeous gingerbread with fermented molasses—must have had larger implications for her life. Had she been a Civil War surgeon, she couldn’t have brought herself to chop off any of the ‘perfectly good’ leg and what’s wrong with leaving just a little infection and all her patients would have died from gangrene.

  Having so recently exterminated the refrigerator, I’d given her culinary edicts some thought: those imperatives both to save and to not-waste—subtly different laws with subtly different pitfalls. Saving became hoarding for its own sake; misers died with mattressfuls of cash, or, in my mother’s case, a full row of spiced peach halves, which she adored, in the back of the pantry. But the upside of saving is a sense of preciousness. It gave my mother more pleasure to retain those jars than to dispatch them. She savoured potential, just as Truman treasured a stocked larder. I liked that, the keeping; it was a belief in the future, if misguided, since the peach halves had survived her.

  Not-wasting was all the more rooted in preciousness. How could I fault that? Only for being a trap. Not-wasting was a bondage. Say the zucchini is sufficiently geriatric that when you pick it up with one hand it falls in half. Yet if you chuck it you become a person who throws

  ‘perfectly good’ food away and that is not the way you want to think of yourself, so into the stir-fry it goes, even if you have to ladle in the zucchini with a spoon. My mother served dinner, literally. Food was a responsibility, a ward she was determined to do right by, and as long as her charges were helpless she was a good mother. I can’t count the times at a restaurant that she’d been given an absurdly large portion, when she was already too heavy and would feel bloated later, and still she could not, could not bring herself to leave so much as a morsel on her plate. She’d force herself through to the last forkful even to the point of nausea, because she did not understand that it was there for her and not the other way round.

  104

  My father felt superior to the inanimate and my mother was its love-slave.

  However, my mother’s sense of the precious beat the buy-another-one world in which a fresh sponge meant nothing. I enjoyed swabbing coffee grounds with bright yellow virgin foam. I wouldn’t want to start a new sponge every day.

  My parents never resigned themselves to the fact that anything wore out or spoiled. All was forever: from stereo speakers whose shot woofers my father refused to hear buzz to ‘30% More’ saltines that Mother would ‘crisp up’ (burn) once the crackers were soggy. The night before, Truman and I had finally put to pasture the pepper grinder we’d wrestled since I was five, which had strained the tendons in even his arms for a weary baptism of imperceptible ash. It would never have occurred to them in a million years to buy a new grinder. They had bought one, with the finality of marriage.

  Possibly this belief in the immortality of the inanimate was a standin for belief in their own, the refusal to recognize degeneration of foodstuffs commensurate with my mother’s conviction that she had been born beautiful and could not, therefore, be fat. Stubbornly, she would deny loss on even the smallest scale since if ‘perfectly good’

  brinjal pickle could acquire a suspicious fizz behind your back you entered an untrustworthy universe where romances could sour and sons could go bad. She refused to live on so unreliable a planet, and I couldn’t resist a sort of dumb admiration for someone able to fly so magnificently in the face of fact. The pickle was from their trip to India eight years earlier and it was ‘special’ and it was therefore fine. Reality had nothing to do with it.

  Consequently, my mother was a compulsive economies-of-scale shopper, for because she did not acknowledge the concept of the perishable there was nothing that wouldn’t keep. It always amazed me that when her gallon can of olive oil went rancid she couldn’t taste it.

  She would stash the same can in the pantry for five years, rust crawling across the catty-cornered punctures, until her dressings made me gag.

  If she could taste rancid oil, some override function intervened: it was more important to my mother to maintain her belief in the permanence of all things than to toss edible salad. Hers was a religious problem, or strength—my mother’s obliviousness to corruption, her stoic Protestant palate, was a tribute to her faith in life everlasting; our every meal 105

  was a sacrament. Jesus in our family did not, alas, turn water into win
e, but resurrected our vegetable drawer.

  It was before the cathedral of eternal life that Truman and Averil now stood, stepped fearfully back with its great door agape: the awesome stand-up freezer. Truman had unplugged it, like the villain in Star Trek who turns off life support for space travellers in suspended animation.

  The baggies were just beginning to glisten, frost yielding to that treacherous world of decay that my mother spent her life defying. On the floor yawned two heavy-duty garbage bags, which I expected to prove insufficiently capacious for the ransacking we had planned.

  ‘What took you so long?’ Truman fretted when I walked in. ‘I don’t see how you can bear that rat’s nest. And I thought you always say he’s so boring.’

  ‘Mordecai is endlessly entertaining, if often at his own expense,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway, you’re just in time for a walk down memory lane.’

  ‘Memory lane—’ I poked at a fibrillated rump steak on the counter that had freeze-dried to umber with a distinctive greenish cast ‘—in winter. Bloody hell, do we have to do this now?’

  ‘That’s what you’ve said all week.’ Truman prised a tupperware container from the upper shelf with the crowbar he’d marshalled for the job. “‘Feta walnut pâté”,’ he read out. ‘Corlis—when did you make that?’

  ‘Ten years ago.’

  I was not hyperbolizing; I meant ten years ago. When he prised off the lid, the frost had grown high and interlaced, reminiscent of that remarkable green fungus which had thrived on the yellow squash. He plonked it in the bag.

  ‘But that’s my good feta and walnut dip!’ I exclaimed, once more the imitation too true for comfort. ‘You’re not going to throw it away!’

  ‘Gross,’ said Averil, exploring another corpse in cling-film. ‘Is this fish, or fibreglass?’

  ‘Three important heels of bread from 1977,’ Truman announced, ker-chunk.

  ‘That would make perfectly good french toast!’ I cried.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Truman groaned, fingers grown ruddy. ‘Rice and cheese balls!’

  106

  I had helped my mother with a party, when? I must have been at UNC at Chapel Hill, and we’d rashly multiplied a recipe so fecund that the rice balls seemed to reproduce of their own accord, as if by cell division. Poor Truman ate those gluey fried dumplings for weeks—but not, it seemed, all of them. The second shelf was devoted entirely to neat packages of icy brown orbs, nesting nefariously like an invasion of aliens waiting to hatch. Just then I had a brief nightmarish vision of what might happen to our house if we allowed the undead to enter the room-temperature dimension. I cautioned Truman he should cart these bags to the kerb before their contents began crawling up the stairs to our beds, tongues of unnaturally preserved lasagne noodles trailing crenulated worms along the carpet.

  ‘A quarter cup of chilli con carne, 1974…’ Truman rooted. ‘One half hot cross bun—’

  ‘The Easter rising,’ I said. ‘1916.’

  ‘One ball pie dough scraps, one dollop leftover carrot cake icing, and—what’s this— salmon surprise.’

  ‘You know what she did, don’t you,’ I explained to Averil. ‘When some yummy titbit in the fridge was turning to science fair project?

  Normal people throw it out, Mother put it in the freezer.’

  ‘She believed in cryogenics,’ Truman posited. ‘Maybe she was hoping that over the years they’d come up with a cure for cancerous casseroles.’

  ‘In the later years it became obsessive,’ I went on, taking over while Truman breathed on his stiff red hands. ‘They lived to freeze. A prune cake would barely cool before Mother was wrapping it happily into little squares and nudging them maniacally by the egg whites. Egg whites…Egg whites…Egg whites…’ I threw four successive plastic containers into the first bag, now full.

  ‘I’m going to toss this,’ said Truman, tying it up. ‘I swear this bag was starting to move.’

  When he returned we were down to the serious archaeological back layers, which had melded into a solid wall of petrified leftovers, the kind of Arctic dig in which you discover missing evolutionary links.

  Troom hoisted the crowbar again. ‘Corlis,’ he enquired offhandedly, using a hammer on the crowbar to chink the gooseberry crumble my mother only made once—when I was in tenth grade. ‘What happened, at Mortadello’s?’

  107

  ‘Oh, a lot of bitching about the ACLU, of course. Funny, too—most Yippie sons would be carping that their fathers didn’t leave bequests to bastions of social justice. You can’t win.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And that’s what you told him?’

  I shrugged and picked shrivelled peas from the floor. ‘More or less.’

  ‘What about the house?’ asked Averil squarely. ‘Will he let us buy him out, or not?’

  ‘Ah—’ I was getting very thorough about the peas. ‘Not exactly.’

  Truman hit the crowbar again with the hammer, hard, and a glacier of clam chowder gave way. ‘What do you mean, “not exactly”?’

  ‘I guess I mean—’ I scooped some frost from the floorboards. ‘No.

  He won’t. He’s going ahead with that partition suit.’

  ‘What the heck!’ A chunk of cooked frozen oatmeal skidded across the floor.

  ‘Would you watch what you’re doing with that crowbar? I think you need an acetylene torch.’

  ‘But why?’

  I muttered, ‘Mordecai’s more complicated than you think.’

  I took over from Truman so he could thaw again. Spanish noodles, pork barbecue, lamb curry—all my old favourite dishes had paled to the same morbid mauve. This was Mother’s idea of preservation?

  ‘All he’s ever cared about is money. What’s complicated?’

  I noted with some surprise myself, ‘He’s sentimental.’

  ‘Mother and Father didn’t like him, I don’t like him, and you don’t like him, do you? Do you?’

  In the crook of the freezer door, I was physically in a corner. ‘Not much.’ I qualified tentatively, ‘I guess.’

  ‘So what’s to be sentimental about?’

  ‘I did what I could, OK? The fact is, if the house goes on the market there’s a chance the price will go higher than the appraiser’s valuation and Mordecai knows that. Yes, he wants his money, but he wants as much of it as possible. That’s why he’ll force us to advertise, and it’s not my fault!’ I had made all this up on the spot.

  ‘OK, OK—then why are you so mad?’

  I had started hacking at the ice mural of dinners we didn’t finish and hadn’t enjoyed much the first time, wondering if the 108

  impulse wasn’t to save most what you never really had in the first place.

  The montage of my motley childhood was in this layer so welded and blurred and twisted with interweaving plastic wrap failing to protect tuna bakes from the ravages of salvation that none of the dishes was recognizable any longer, or distinguishable from one another—just one big gunky smorgasbord of keeping elbows off the table and wanting to go play. Oh, she’d saved all right, but saved what? A life of freezing.

  That was what my mother did. She froze.

  If I was angry at being jammed once more between two brothers, at that very moment I was furious with the woman who lodged me there.

  Like the sponge, this freezer was a point of view. Beyond rice-and-cheese balls, my parents had stored their courtship by the ice cubes, wedged their lives together and their first kiss between the chopped spinach and desiccated chuck steak, so that at the end of this project I half expected to find the two of them embraced over stiff slices of pumpkin pie. For my parents had not been brave enough to live in a world of spoilage and catastrophe, decline and obsolescence. Their marriage was in the freezer. Their versions of their children—The Bulldozer, The Scatterbrain, The Tender Flower—were in the freezer.

  The world itself—where grown children now have sex and drink ‘the hard stuff’, but not in their house—was in the freezer. The fixed tenets of Heck-An
drews—that we Loved Each Other, that we had a Happy Family—were in the freezer. So I was angry over ten-year-old feta walnut pâté because I’d have preferred warm-blooded parents who had rows and fell out instead of a couple rigidly holding hands like the top of a wedding cake preserved for eternity by the family-pack pork.

  ‘You know,’ said Averil, retrieving a casualty and sniffing, ‘this might still be all right—’

  I grabbed the pinkish chunk and hurled it back in the sack. ‘Don’t even think about it.’ Averil didn’t have the constitution for this work.

  Eugenia Hadley Hamill met Sturges Harcourt McCrea when she was twenty-one at a Young Democrats conference in Richmond, Virginia.

  He was President and she was Secretary—too perfect, for 1952. Loosely speaking, she remained his secretary for the duration, dutifully remembering appointments while the Great

  109

  Man championed racial justice. (How appropriate that my father never appeared for a plaintiff in a sex discrimination case.) That there was never any question of equality between my parents probably made the relationship possible.

  Initially, her looks would have nearly evened the balance with her husband—my mother was stunning. My father received flattering lambastes in conservative papers, but my mother got salesmen falling all over themselves to be helpful when she bought a hat. She sported generous hips, but a tiny waist and neat, close breasts. Over the years her knees got a little bulgy, but otherwise her legs were solid, and she had trim, diminutive feet. Her skin was a warm olive that didn’t sun-burn, which I inherited, while Truman was stuck with my father’s freckling hairless white-bread complexion that seared and peeled with a vengeance. Only Mordecai, however, got her hair—a thick and lustrous mahogany like the pricey woods he favoured, with a natural curl and tendency to form ringlets around the temples after a light sweat. Mordecai bound that hair tightly away, but Eugenia Hamill had made the most of being a brunette, sweeping shocks back from her forehead where they would tendril free from hairpins down her neck.

  Most riveting of all, of course, was her face. Even in crinkled old photographs she radiated with a smile like an open window, and chocolate eyes that simmered in the light, twin pots of dark fudge glistening on a stove. Mordecai got those, too—her first-born was treated to the whole package, so that when the second and third came along it was as if there was less left for us genetically. But in my older brother those eyes had a muddier, more conniving stir, less like fudge sauce than brownie batter. They were flatter and more suspicious, and when they went pellucid it was never with desire but always with self-pity.