A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. You’ve got to hold on to something. In a way it doesn’t matter what you stick by, only that you stick by it. If you let certain things go, you let everything go. Heck-Andrews is mine.

  It’s me.’

  ‘It’s only you,’ I said huskily, ‘if you let it be. And that’s a mistake.’

  When we arrived at Player’s Retreat, a dark divey place off Hillsborough with fish tanks and mint machines for the blind, we hunkered into a booth and Truman, too, seemed to find his wife’s 219

  absence liberating. On his second beer he confided that she had done nothing lately but complain. If he went out of his way to buy her Doritos, he’d inevitably bring home Ranch Style when she was craving Nacho Cheese.

  ‘You know,’ I sidled, ‘the last few weeks, she has put on a few pounds.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he grumbled. ‘You may think this sounds petty, but that’s the one thing I don’t think I could take. That could break up my marriage, if she got fat.’ He had a way of saying that word, the a bloated, the t rebukingly sharp.

  ‘And she’s so afraid of Mordecai,’ he continued, ‘that she only carps to me, so it’s as if I’m playing screamy music, wolfing down all the groceries, and drinking us out of house and home. She claims I never stand up to him.’

  ‘You don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Not you, too!’

  ‘Hey.’ I patted Truman’s hand. ‘I don’t stand up to him, either.’

  Truman toyed with his glass, and edged the beer away. ‘Isn’t it time we face the fact that Mordecai is an alcoholic?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I pshawed. ‘Believe what you read these days, you and I are alcoholics.’

  ‘Maybe we are.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Except next to Mordecai, we pale. I’m not talking about nouveaux-dipsos, who rush off to AA after a single spritzer because it’s become fashionable to diagnose your “addictive personality”, and have a problem to recover from. I mean the old kind. I mean alcoholic.’

  ‘Mordecai would never go to AA. He’s not a joiner.’

  ‘He’s a drunk!’

  I’d have been more open to Truman’s suggestion if I thought it pained him more. ‘I wouldn’t use that word.’

  ‘What word would you use? Corlis, he gets up and goes straight to the freezer!’

  ‘At seven p.m.’

  ‘It’s breakfast to him. You remember that Wild Turkey I bought, for our thimble-sized nightcaps before bed? A fifth used to last a month. I hid the bottle, under my sandbags. That stash worked with Mother, inveterate snoop. Then, she wasn’t nosing around to whet her own whistle. My first day of classes? He found

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  it. Sniffed it out like a dog. Admit it—when you went to Karen’s, how much booze did he swill?’

  I shrugged. ‘A few shots.’

  ‘Like fun,’ Truman scoffed. ‘Or last Sunday—when for once we hadn’t been to the liquor store for a day or two? The house was dry, the ABCs were closed. You know I came down the next morning and the cooking sherry was upended in the trash can? There are whole hospital wards for people like that. Why can’t you call him what he is? Why’s it any skin off your nose?’

  ‘So he has a dependency.’ Defiantly, I drained my beer.

  ‘ Why are you always defending him?’

  ‘Somebody has to. You sure won’t.’

  ‘The man’s entire character is a write-off!’

  I would not, would not bandwagon to please him. ‘Mordecai drinks because he’s troubled.’

  ‘What has he got to feel so all-fired sorry for himself about?’

  I gripped the edge of the pine table, carved with ‘Go Wolfpack!’, as if to keep myself physically from backing down. ‘You know he was an unwanted baby, don’t you? That when Mother found out she was pregnant with Mordecai she was livid?’

  Truman shrugged. ‘I was unwanted, too. They never made any bones about that.’

  True enough, that I issued from their only planned pregnancy was one of the family’s Known Facts; presumably I was to take this as flattering without the other two receiving a slight. In her lilting Winnie the Pooh voice Mother had informed us all that when the doctor told her she was carrying her first child she flew into a ‘conniption fit’.

  ‘You were different, just timing,’ I reminded Truman. ‘They’d wanted three children, already had two. Mordecai invited himself on their honeymoon.’

  ‘How do you think that happened?’ Truman reflected. ‘They had birth control back then, didn’t they? Just bad luck?’

  ‘I’ve worked it out. Mother was using a diaphragm—’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She told me plenty of details about their sex life—to rub salt in the wound that she slept with Father and I didn’t.’

  ‘Is the diaphragm that unreliable?’

  ‘When you don’t put it in.’

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  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘No, but I know Fifties double-think. She was a virgin at the wedding—you heard that a thousand times—and proud of it. Positive urine tests were in her mind reserved as punishment for sluts. She was married. That meant sex with impunity. And diaphragms are embarrassing at first—you have to excuse yourself to the loo, suspend operations.

  They were inexperienced, Father was jumpy; she wouldn’t have wanted to risk losing his hard-on while she struggled with her little rubber hat.

  Never mind that they had no desire to have a kid right away. She thought if you were married you were covered morally and that’s all that mattered. I’d lay money on it: Mother got pregnant out of sheer self-righteousness.’

  ‘All the same, Mother said she gave Mordecai more attention than the two of us combined.’

  ‘Over-compensation. I bet a kid can tell. He can certainly tell when he’s apprised point blank that his arrival was one of the worst things that ever happened to his mother.’

  ‘Why do you think she told him that?’

  ‘Maybe she figured if she was no-nonsense about it he wouldn’t take it personally.’

  Truman jeered. ‘With Mordecai? Mr Self-Pity, Mr Leap at an Excuse to Cry in Beer? Fat chance.’

  ‘Or maybe—’ I tapped my forefinger. ‘She wanted him to feel literally guilty for living. If so, it worked.’

  ‘Mordecai is a horror show all because he was an “unwanted child”?

  That’s pretty trite, Corlis.’

  ‘I never said Mordecai was a “horror show”. And I’m not saying it explains everything, but Father never stopped resenting his first kid.

  After waiting for a year to get his hands on this 100-pound hot number, the first month she starts to balloon. So, all told, Mordecai’s led a stressful life, Truman. With no formal education—’

  ‘Which is his fault, since he thinks he knows everything already—’

  ‘You’ve got it the wrong way round. He acts as if he knows everything because he’s afraid he doesn’t. You’re in college now—’

  ‘Which only gets held against me, as if going to Duke is a weakness, a confession of ignorance. Just like my making good grades: by some twisted logic, a 3.8 GPA makes me pathetic. I’m one of those little rote people. Well, you went to U.N.C, didn’t you—?’

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  ‘Yes I did, shut up, that’s the point. We’ve both walked those supposedly hallowed halls. Don’t you remember, before you enrolled, how you privately worried that there were all these secrets in a university education, that it was an initiation you’d been left out of—’

  ‘Which is a load of hooey. It’s not that different from high school.

  Books and lectures and bullshit.’

  ‘Precisely. University’s not a masonic society whose handshakes you can’t research in any library. I know that, you know that. Mordecai doesn’t know that, he’s never been. I’ve met other auto-didacts, Troom, and they’re all the same: brassy, seemingly conceited, always spouting off what they’ve read. Because they don’t
buy their own schtick. We know the emperor has no clothes. Mordecai doesn’t.’

  ‘So he’s insecure. That doesn’t explain how you can sit on the back porch hour after hour submitting to that stultifying gibberish about the Mandelbrot Set—’

  ‘It’s not all boring, Troom. Have you ever listened? I didn’t have any idea why drains clear in opposite directions north and south of the equator.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Why is that?’

  I cracked a splinter from the table. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘See? You don’t listen, either.’

  I took a breath and regrouped. ‘Can’t you cut him a little slack? He started his own business at nineteen, with no capital—’

  ‘Since when was gross profit something you were taught to admire?’

  ‘It wasn’t what we were taught to admire. Just as we weren’t raised with an appreciation for architecture, right?’

  But Truman was in no mood to suffer the same compliment I had paid his brother. ‘All your anti-US guff, and you’re as American as they come. What do your respect? Making money.’

  ‘What I respect, which you should as well, is how hard it was to rebel against someone like Sturges McCrea—’

  ‘Rebel! Give me a break. Pigtails and yin-yang rings? Mordecai’s a throw-back, a cultural Cro-Magnon. For all his talk of revolution, Mordecai’s never managed to overthrow himself.’ Rather pleased with this formulation, Truman tossed back the last of his beer, licking off the moustache with a smack.

  ‘You don’t think it took guts to go it alone at fourteen?’

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  ‘Plenty of kids run away, Corlis. They don’t get medals. So he flipped hamburgers instead of peddling his ass on the street, but it amounts to the same prostitution in the end.’

  ‘But he left home before—’

  ‘Unlike sappy little Truman,’ he ploughed on ferociously, ‘strangled in his mother’s apron strings, just gullible enough to care about his own parents and how they felt—’

  ‘I was going to say,’ I overrode, ‘that Mordecai is “troubled” because he left home before he knew he was loved.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t.’

  ‘That’s a hideous thing to say about your own brother.’

  ‘So? He cut out when I was seven years old. He’d come home a couple of times a year and ask what grade I was in. I got more probing enquiry about my life from Father’s partners. Just because he’s family doesn’t mean I care for him, does it? Doesn’t mean I love him? It’s not enough, being born a brother. You have to act like one, too.’

  I leaned back appreciatively. If what Truman felt about Mordecai could not be called love, from the quaver in his voice along with its sheer volume—causing men in Cat hats at the pool table to look over—I was satisfied that Mordecai stirred passion of some kind. That was a start, and if anything what blood relations were good for. However we might enrage one another, we would never, as Averil to me, not pertain.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Truman continued, ‘he was held up to me as this freakish cross of paragon and anti-Christ, the genius of whom I was meant to be in awe but whom I must never, never emulate. What am I, a retard? Nobody ever called me “too intelligent for my own good”.’

  ‘That reputation boomeranged. It isn’t an advantage in adulthood to have been a precocious kid. When you grow up, suddenly speaking in complete sentences isn’t amazing. Everyone else knows those big words, too. You pontificate and no one falls off his chair. Mordecai’s still trying to impress the way he did at twelve, and it doesn’t work any more.’

  ‘I’m not impressed, that’s for sure. The best thing about this last month has been to get a good look at Mr Larger-Than-Life up close, who cast his fat black-sheep shadow over my whole childhood. He reads comic books! He watches TV for hours, and any old game show will do. He’s stoned half the day. As for glorious 224

  Decibelle Inc., with which he bootstrapped himself into the fast-lane world of commerce, I’ve seen what he does—he’s a construction foreman!’

  I was wincing. ‘He may not be as towering as you were led to believe, but that doesn’t make him a dwarf.’

  ‘No, according to you Mordecai is this remarkable renegade self-made man, whose drinking you excuse as drowning his abandonment at fourteen. But first, he abandoned us, not the other way around, and second, that was ages ago, Corlis—!’

  ‘Not to him.’

  ‘Are you ashamed of me, then? Because I haven’t left three wives and taken drugs and grown my hair to my waist? What do I have to do?’

  I was afraid he was going to cry. Even as an adult, Truman wept often and freely. For men of our generation that was meant to be an achievement, yet I found I was from the old school—the shine in his eyes, before the voyeurs at the pool table, embarrassed me.

  ‘Why,’ I said, keeping my voice low, ‘do you insist on regarding any credit I give Mordecai as criticism of you?’

  The question was rhetorical. Though sympathetic with my own frustration, I was hitting my head against the brick wall of the way things were. However irrational the perception, sibling assets would always appear zero-sum; among brothers and sisters, any comment on one implicitly passed comment on the others. If Mordecai was bright, we were dumb; if I was imaginative, my brothers were prosaic; if Truman was loyal, Mordecai and I were traitorous.

  ‘I’m not ashamed of you,’ I mumbled as Truman paid our tab. ‘You’re considerate, responsible, industrious.’ These adjectives had a kewpie-doll quality, second-prize. I added as forcefully as I could, ‘I always hoped you’d to come to London so I could show you off.’

  Hiking back towards the capitol, Truman hunched. ‘I realize you know him better than I do. On the face of it, though, I can’t point to what’s so overwhelming about the guy. Even if he’s not a villain, it turns out he’s pretty ordinary. Which only makes me more miserable.

  He’s ordinary and still makes me feel like a zero. What does that make me?’

  ‘Different. You wouldn’t want to be like Mordecai, and this family couldn’t take two.’

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  ‘Maybe I’m too hard on him. I’m sorry if I was mean.’

  I took a deep breath, and felt I’d achieved something.

  ‘At the least,’ he added, ‘admit that he always pushed us around.’

  ‘He had two little kids at his mercy; we must have been tempting. I suppose we’ve all got it in us to be fascists, given the chance.’

  ‘Me, too?’ Truman sounded hopeful.

  I nodded towards Oakwood. ‘Remember those twins we pestered, on Bloodworth?’

  Of course he did. We hadn’t been cruel children, relatively speaking.

  We went on sprees of stomping the crickets that periodically infested our carriage house, but never picked their legs off one by one. Neither Truman nor I were prestigious enough in school to torture the lower echelon; we were the lower echelon. Meanwhile, we were subject to the despotism of Mordecai’s dread babysitting: gagged by deliberately lumpy powdered milk, pounced on until we couldn’t breathe, red from his ‘Indian rubs’, sore from his prodding for ‘pressure points’, if relieved we weren’t paralysed from the neck down.

  So we two perpetual victims discovered a pair of twins who lived a few blocks from our house. They were perhaps three years younger than Troom, and played in their front yard wearing twee lacy dresses, daintily snagging at bits of grass but never mucking into puddles for fear of getting their pink skirts dirty. I’m not sure what got into us, but one day we sauntered past them and began to call them names. ‘Barf-brains!’ They whimpered. ‘Spaz butts!’ They balled their fists in their eyes. This inspired us. We rushed at them. When they wrung their skirts in anguish, we sniggered that we could see their underpants and we’d tell their mother.

  ‘We’ll tell!’ they sobbed.

  We guffawed, with a hard yucky laugh that was itself a discovery.

  We threw rocks. Little rocks; pebbles, really—we were new at this game.

  In the end
they wailed so loudly for their mommy that we thought it judicious to skedaddle.

  Troom and I went back several times. Taunting the twins became our private filthy pastime, and I will never forget that sensation which, incredibly, I have never quite experienced since: our small, pure sadism.

  I don’t think we ever hurt them,

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  physically, but it was obvious when we appeared that the twins lived in mortal fear of our arrival and had discussed our terrorism between times. This enthralled me. Our new-found taste for their mewling also made me nervous, the way every squeal baited us to cruder threats, dirtier epithets, larger rocks. Relish mingling with revulsion left behind a flavour like the ambivalent corrupted sweetness of high cheeses. After a handful of sessions Truman and I never went back, in tacit agreement that the experiment was over. We were both ashamed, and gratified, that we, too, could be bullies.

  ‘I felt like a creep for that,’ said Truman. ‘But I’m glad I know what it’s like, being a Big Kid: fun. And bad.’

  ‘And fun,’ I reiterated. ‘So can you blame him?’

  ‘Of course I can. We stopped teasing those girls, after a while. In the end, we didn’t really enjoy abuse of power. Mordecai did. He still does.’

  Back home, I turned in early, and lay on my back in bed, staring at my ceiling as if I could drill a hole to Truman’s dovecot. So he was sleeping on the couch. I was happy as Larry.

  Still, I had at least stuck up for each brother to the other, if my testi-monials seemed to fall on deaf ears. At best when you’re telling someone something they don’t want to hear you’ll get through on delay, and I liked to think that later they’d each remembered what I said. Probably the entire exercise in fealty was for my own sake; it made me feel a tad less of a rank shite.

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  17

  That night I dreamt about the auction. Not the house but I was on the block, up on a dais with my hands tied behind my back. The auctioneer observed that I had good teeth, and demanded I grin for the buyers and then he said, look, she has her mother’s smile! He used his pointer to lift up my skirt and leered at the audience. Someone shouted, ‘Two bits!’ and cackled. The auctioneer said there, there, we can do better than that for this fine filly!