A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  You couldn’t argue with the legality of the situation, though more to the point you couldn’t argue with Mordecai full stop. Neither Truman nor I could keep Mordecai from shifting wholesale into Heck-Andrews because he was our older brother, The Bulldozer. That was a kind of law, more binding than statute.

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  Poor Truman was drafted into the work crew, and his hangdog expression as he shouldered the computer down the truck’s ramp was of a prisoner building his own gallows. It took three of them and a hand truck to move the hulking Rockwell tablesaw into Truman’s workshop.

  Once the workshop was chock-full, Mordecai instructed that the lathe and standing drill be carted to my new studio. MK dragged the machine tools across the floor, scraping Truman’s fresh paint job. As for the aluminium suitcases of dirty black jeans, Mordecai gave Wilcox directions, not to his adolescent hovel, but to the master bedroom. It had never occurred to Truman or I to sleep there. It had never occurred to Mordecai to sleep anywhere else.

  Concerned that Truman might regard me as complicitous, I didn’t lend a hand myself. I watched in the parlour as Big Dave shoved the encyclopedias back in their shelves. The spines had frayed, the pages splayed, the covers mottled. After two weeks in Mordecai’s possession the Britannicas had aged fifty years. He had a similar effect on wives.

  Mordecai managed to distribute at least one carton in nearly every room of the first two floors. That he steered clear of the dovecot was wise, but I suspect he was less canny than disinclined to tromp up an extra set of stairs.

  Between trips to the inexhaustible troop transporter, Truman returned to the kitchen to baste. The turkey long done, he’d turned the oven down low and tented the bird with tin foil. Truman had coped through his whole childhood this way, by coddling creatures even more powerless than himself—fallen baby bluejays, fireflies in jars. As he knelt at the oven and swabbed, I wanted to advise him that what you were meant to do was find something weaker than you were and beat the shit out of it.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he grunted to Averil.

  ‘You can’t let him get away with this!’ she whispered.

  ‘What am I supposed to do? Huh? Just what?’ He was shouting.

  Mordecai sauntered in for his champagne. ‘Krug,’ he purred, untwist-ing the wire. ‘Seventy-five bucks.’

  Mordecai popped the cork deliberately at the ceiling and promptly put out the kitchen overhead light. He laughed, and left us in the dark.

  Truman groped to his overrun workshop and fetched a torch; I 161

  held the light on the fixture as Truman climbed on the table and incre-mentally unscrewed the smashed bulb with needlenose pliers. ‘Isn’t that typical?’ Truman mumbled, dodging falling glass. ‘We buy all the groceries, get presents, put up a tree; he and his freeloading buddies drink up all the wine and beer in the house and what do we get? One bottle of overpriced champagne. I guess we’re supposed to fall all over ourselves.’

  It was eleven o’clock, so Christmas was almost over, which couldn’t be soon enough for me. Truman hauled out the turkey, withered and cowering, slopped out the reheated mashed potatoes, and ripped the cling-film off the relish tray. The peas had pocked, but according to Averil they were obligatory, and I have to express some incredulity that while our house was being occupied by foreign troops she could still panic that we were short on cranberry sauce.

  Mordecai hove into the dining room and hacked off a drumstick whole, dousing it with Open Pit barbecue sauce and setting to with both hands—if Truman would have made a credible antebellum gentleman, Mordecai belonged in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, his henchmen didn’t avail themselves of plates, but wrestled scraps off wings and fingered the stuffing, picking out all the chestnuts.

  Alcohol was in tight supply—the beer was finished, and to my amazement our entire case of cabernet had evaporated the night before.

  I got one dribble of champagne, but otherwise had to rely on Mordecai’s aquavit, which he doled out in parsimonious trickles while he himself slugged straight from the bottle, never releasing hold of its neck. The ABC stores were shut, and a dry dinner with dry turkey made everyone petulant.

  Yet despite my irksome sobriety, I remember that night physically teetering. Once more I swayed between spheres of influence, helping Truman and Averil slice pie in the kitchen while Truman muttered that it ‘didn’t make any sense’, if Mordecai was trying to sell this house out from under us, for the son of a bitch to move in; then gravitating to the dining room, where I tried to tease out titbits about Mordecai’s altercation with his wife, and enquired tentatively—wasn’t it a terrible lot of trouble moving everything over here if they got back together and he moved back?

  ‘Of course not,’ Mordecai scoffed. ‘When you and I buy this place, I’ll have to shift my crap here anyway. What’s the diff?’

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  All right, I can be slow, but I got it. Mordecai and Dix may very well have had a fight, but I was not convinced it need have resulted in Mordecai’s every hand-drill and paperclip shipping into this house. I may not have known Mordecai so well, but he had a fair measure of me. Anyone who didn’t like to make choices often made them by default. If I was already living with Truman, I could choose my prince by doing nothing. If I was living with both brothers, I would have in any case to do something, force one of them out. In a stroke, Mordecai had evened the score. Moreover, if Mordecai acted as if we had reached an accord when we had done no such thing, I would have to ram that absence of consensus forcibly down his throat, and Truman was not the only sibling in this house afraid of an older brother.

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  12

  Walking in the back door two days later, I recalled the flamboyant baking projects Truman and I undertook as kids. Flour fogged in the air, chairs lay overturned, silverware spilled from the drainer. A copper bowl rocked on the floor with a new indentation the shape of Mordecai’s crown. Himself was at the sink, running water over a chicken breast, then testing if it was thawed enough to slab over his eye. His hair, full of flour, had gone prematurely grey.

  ‘You missed the show,’ said Truman, emerging from the pantry with a broom.

  ‘Who starred?’ At first I assumed that with me out of the house for only an hour the two of them had gone at it tooth and nail.

  ‘Dix Ridelle, who else?’ said Truman, with the smugness of I-was-here-and-you-weren’t. ‘The harridan.’ He began sweeping up the shards of his panda mug from the National Zoo.

  ‘Mordecai, are you all right?’

  Mordecai flinched from my hand, shielding his face with an elbow.

  A cut above one eyebrow was bleeding.

  ‘Why don’t you let me—’

  ‘Leave it!’ he said sharply, wadding paper towel over the eye. He shook water off the chicken breast, still stiff, and stalked out.

  I said, ‘ What on earth?’ before I could stop myself. That was my mother’s expression, which had been insinuating itself into my moments of alarm with ominous frequency.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Truman. ‘A straight-back in smithereens on the landing. That woman’s got some arms.’

  ‘What were the ructions over?’

  ‘Money. Mordecai didn’t leave her any.’

  ‘I thought she was Decibelle’s vice president—?’

  ‘VPs are a dime a dozen,’ said Truman with authority, and I 164

  wondered, with incredulity and even a trace of vexation, if he had talked with his own brother. ‘ MK is a vice president. Dix can’t sign cheques.’

  I began sponging cabinets, which were glopped with crusting raw egg. ‘I must say, had Mother and Father fought like this from time to time it would have done them a world of good.’

  ‘You’re not honestly saying you wish Father heaved ten pounds of flour around the kitchen on a routine basis.’

  ‘Once in a while, yes.’

  He stopped, standing the broom on its handle end. ‘You admire this mess?’

  ‘In a way,’ I conceded. ‘Our paren
ts acted as if they agreed on everything. But how is that possible? Father kept her under his thumb for nearly forty years, and she never tried to wriggle out from under.

  She’d take it out on me, when I got big for my britches and didn’t expect to become some man’s secretary—’

  ‘Except Mordecai’s—’

  ‘I wish Mother had thrown something—once.’

  ‘Averil and I don’t fling dishes. Is there something wrong with our marriage, then?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘In a good relationship you have brawls and smash furniture, according to you? That’s real communication? That’s love?’

  ‘There must be nights that Averil complains one more time about raisins in the chutney, and you’d like to punch her in the gob.’

  ‘First you’re commending gross physical destruction, now wife beating. Mordecai’s only been here two days, the house is already a trash heap, and he’s clearly had a glorious effect on your version of the good life.’

  ‘Never mind.’ Convincing Truman that disarray had any merits whatsoever was a lost cause.

  ‘If and when our parents did have a difference of opinion,’ he said, sweeping again, ‘they kept it civil and between themselves. If you imagine that makes us anything but lucky, you’re pig-ignorant.’

  I kept my clean-up cursory, and marched from the kitchen. I would not have my sheltered, shut-in little brother lecturing me on the harsh realities of the big bad world.

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  Within a week the discipline that gripped our household when Truman ruled Heck-Andrews fell to ruin. Sometimes I missed it: the cereal-sandwich-chicken-thighs battery, two measures of wine, a rigorous walk around the same cemetery circuit; a niggardly finger of Wild Turkey, after which we would brush our teeth and go to bed with the regimentation of children with school in the morning. Other times I recognized that life for what it was: compulsion fuelled by terror, as if with a single step off his treadmill Truman would freefall hedonistically off the deep end. He was afraid of fat, indolence, drugs, drunkenness and constipation. The strictness of his habits gave him away. He legis-lated against sloth and intoxication because he was so powerfully drawn to them. More than biscuits or a second bourbon, Truman was afraid of himself.

  Mordecai and I discussed it more than once—how Truman was squandering his life as a milquetoast, how more than any of us three he was haunted by the stern apparition of his moralistic parents, how staying in this house dwarfed him while for Mordecai rolling joints on his mother’s bureau was a victorious coming of age. Mordecai’s adolescent rebellion may have seemed tawdry once we were grown—he’d stood his ground on his right to fuck, his right to get hammered—but surely the battle was the point, its pretext spurious. Maybe every generation was revolutionary or should be; maybe you were obliged by the very process of replacing it to overthrow the existing order, or surrender and so prove unworthy of its mantle. By that definition, Mordecai was my parents’ only progeny who did his job, who most deserved the house and its intangible accoutrements; Mordecai was the good son, where Truman, in his very acquiescence to his elders, had remained too much of a son and therefore a rather bad one.

  Mordecai took his castle by force as he’d once wrested power from our parents. He appropriated Truman’s workshop, where their tools miscegenated on the same pegboard. The Hewlett-Packard laser printer and Design Jet plotter, IBM photocopier and Compaq Prolinea 4/66

  high-capacity computer were installed in our sitting room, where the television whittered all night, competing with Urge Overkill pounding from the parlour. The C. S. Lewis Narnia series that Mother had read to us as children was thrown in the corner, their shelf space devoted to electronics catalogues.

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  Upstairs in my father’s office, Mordecai squared his Toshiba laptop and Bubblejet on the big black desk and tossed the Law Weeklies on the floor. A length of casebooks gave way to Doonesbury anthologies and old National Lampoons. He unhooked the framed diplomas from Davidson and Harvard, masking the resultant white patches with his poster of Iron Butterfly. Burying flyspecked Supreme Court stationery, Decibelle invoice blanks gloated: ‘Nothing’s impossible, just expensive.’

  In a matter of days, the master bedroom stiffened with crusty denim and unmatched socks; the dresser was scattered with alligator clips and grew hairy with threads of Three Castles. The room reeked of aquavit like mouldy rye. Mordecai kept the drapes pulled all day, just as he had at thirteen in the room across the hall, until leaching from under the door came the unmistakable whiff of Basement.

  This sounds more unpleasant than it was, or at least to me. I liked that smell. It may have been stagnant and a little stale, but the odour was full and human and inhabited the whole second floor. The house needed inhabiting. Mordecai may have spread himself in Heck-Andrews the way he sprawled on court benches, but this was a cavernous barn of a place; Truman, Averil, and I had not been able to make enough sound here. Our steps were too timorous and made a hollow tiddle down the hall, where Mordecai’s boots boomed to resonate all three storeys. The yammer of WRAL, the pulse of Nirvana, the scream of his circular saw filled a void. Mordecai wasn’t shy, whereas Truman and I had lived here with post-funereal deference, as if asking permission.

  Mordecai had never asked permission for anything in his life, and he took Heck-Andrews like a rake who knows you never get anywhere with women by asking for a kiss.

  Moreover, his three confederates never quite left. Oh, they didn’t spend every night here, but no one in Mordecai’s crew spent a ‘night’

  precisely; they slept during the day. Big Dave assumed the bedroom next to mine, and I’d hear the mattress wheeze and springs squeal about the time I was getting up. Wilcox drifted sullenly in and out of Truman’s old room, and kept the door shut possessively even when he was out.

  Since that room faced the entrance to the dovecot, I would sometimes see Truman and Wilcox emerge at the same time, to confront each other with the flat anonymity of hotel guests. MK made for 167

  Mordecai’s former nest, ploughing down the hall with a familiar side-to-side lunge. Not quite ballsy enough to plait his hair in three pigtails, he had opted for five instead. MK’s aping of my brother unsettled me, for I was convinced that he didn’t want to emulate Mordecai so much as to replace him.

  However, if I relished the sweet funk infusing the second floor, it made Truman gag. He did have a legitimate gripe that the rooms were not self-cleaning. Wet towels left splotches on oak floorboards. Throw rugs grew lumpy with smudged Y-fronts toed out of view; the furniture fluttered with stray Bambus and cast-off foils of paracetamol, their quick-fix hangover cure of choice. Gradually we’d find ourselves short on cups and glasses, and retrieved them from the guest bedrooms, curded with soured milk and grey coffee, or sticky with J. D.

  As for how the habits of our latest ‘tenant in common’ clashed with Truman’s it is hard to know where to begin. Certainly their schedules collided, for after New Year’s—an evening of merrymaking that so resembled all the others that I have no distinct recollection of it—Averil went back to substitute teaching and had to get up at seven, right about the time Decibelle called it a day. And Decibelle was aptly named. With Mordecai shouting brand-name electronics, the table saw shrieking at four in the morning, all-night gospel shows chorusing from the sitting room, and Bash and Pop interminably auto-reversing in the parlour, few sugarplums danced in anyone’s head. After a week of sleep deprivation, Averil acquired a vagueness whose consequent suggestion of apathy could be misconstrued. The panda rings around Truman’s eyes deepened and darkened, and provided him the look of a Boris Karloff zombie who might prove murderous later in the movie.

  Yet the mounting issue of groceries—not to mention drink—was at least as volatile as that of sleep. The amount of time and money we were spending to keep our new housemates fed and soused was building into a sizeable grudge, apparent by the rarity with which this resentment was voiced. Then, that is the nature of resentment, as di
stinct from anger—it is an emotion you can only feel if you are not doing anything about it. While Truman and I appeared pagan in comparison with our devout Protestant parents, a constraining propriety and embarrassment about money betrayed that our souls were Presbyterian.

  Before Mordecai moved in, I had calculated my share of the 168

  bills to two decimal points; my payments were prompt but bashful, since heaven forbid anyone should ask for my cheque. I knew that Truman had an exacting sense of justice, if not arithmetic. Well, Mordecai’s sense of justice was rough at best, if not opportunistic. He did splurge—on another bottle of Krug, a side of the best smoked salmon, Haagen-Daaz liqueur that I’m afraid Truman detests, or a tiny jar of Beluga caviar whose price tag of $79.00 Mordecai left ostentatiously stuck on the box. Nevertheless, it would have meant more to us had Mordecai humbled himself to rattle a cart down the aisles of Harris Teeter and remember we were out of ketchup.

  I’ll grant there are oblivious people. They do not question full pantries, and if the cupboard is bare they don’t question that either and somehow they don’t starve. Mordecai’s head was not in the clouds, however. In his work he was consumed with the cost of materials, and could quote the per-foot price of oak two-by-fours to the penny. He was not the kind of Einstein unable to deduce from the sticker that a can of tomatoes cost 89¢. He would have been aware then, perhaps with no small amount of satisfaction, that someone else had bought the loo roll every time he wiped his bum. The hint of literal brown-nosing would have pleased him.

  Truman would not go back to school until 21 January, so when he was not out shopping, now a daily preoccupation, he was home during the day, studying, or pretending to study, for his upcoming courses.

  Naturally, he ate the same lunch every day—a ham sandwich with a third slice of Branola for extra carbs, lots of mustard and pickled banana peppers. Like all his exercises of Zen-like repetition, the sandwich both entranced and saddened me. However, keeping all these ingredients on hand in the downstairs kitchen, subject to regular 3 a.m. plundering, was nearly impossible within any 24-hour period. Truman would launch downstairs at one to find his Branola gaping open, its heels stale, the mayonnaise hours out of the fridge and toxic, and pepper juice spatter-ing the floor.