A Perfectly Good Family (33 page)

  I had a passing presentiment of what Truman was about to say and I didn't know how to make him stop. Outside rare blow-outs, our family was congenitally civil. That doesn't sound like such a curse until you consider that as a consequence we didn't know how to fight; that is, fight within limits. Families accustomed to airing grievances understand that even when things heat up the rules may change, that does not mean there are no rules; another set slides in, with wider margins but margins all the same. But we were conflict amateurs—we couldn't even tell my mother to her face that her rice was mushy—so that when we finally said what we were thinking all hell broke loose. It was a big Protestant problem and I'd seen it in other homes as well: once we allowed ourselves to say something, we allowed ourselves to say anything.

  '—You know you were unwanted, don't you? That when Mother found out she was pregnant with you she was furious?'

  'So she took pains to inform me,' said Mordecai dryly.

  'Well, it's one thing to regret a kid before he's born,' said Truman. 'An embryo, a blank slate. It's another to regret him when you know what he's like.'

  'What are you driving at?' Mordecai's impatience was nervous.

  'Father.'

  'Truman,' I interceded, 'I really don't think—'

  'Four years ago. Right here at this table—'

  'Troom, that's enough.'

  'I'm the one who's had enough. You remember, don't you, Corlis? As I recall, you were on one of your charitable visits home.'

  I nodded unwillingly. 'Unconditional love.'

  My father had been objecting there was no such thing.

Philosophically, I'd seen his point: that between any two people lurks the unforgivable. I could fling Truman's textbooks from his tower deck and though he'd be angry we'd be reconciled. If instead I threw Averil off the tower deck and she miscarried his first child, no handshake would smooth the way to nightcaps and chicken thighs. Some are more fragile than others, but all relationships are breakable if you kick them hard enough. Yet reasonable as it sounded, I remember resisting the proposition from my father, getting uneasy.

  'Know what he said?' Truman leaned forward. 'Direct quotes. If I'd known at the time what he'd put me and your mother through, I'd never have had my first-born son.'

  Mordecai snorted. 'Big deal. Parents toss that shit off all the time.'

  'You think so?'

  I didn't think so. The most harried parents I knew didn't rue their children as persons, but lamented the generic state of being unable to go to the cinema. The night my father issued his belated call-back of Mordecai was the only time in my life I have ever heard a parent—let's not beat around the bush here—wish his own child dead.

  'So he was pissed off,' Mordecai dismissed.

  'No,' Truman levelled. 'He wasn't.'

  Mordecai looked to me with an expression I could only describe as pleading.

  I turned away. 'Truman's right,' I said huskily. 'Father was pretty matter-of-fact.'

  Composure had made his assertion so grim. He wasn't raving; no one was upset. My father made that unsolicited, unequivocal statement, having obviously given it some thought. The funny thing was, though aimed at Mordecai, the remark had tightened my own stomach. If perfectly durable devotion is a fiction, it is a myth any child of sound mind would preserve. For under my father's wishful retraction loomed the warning: be a good girl, or we'll regret you, too. With the divine power of parenthood to bring you into the world in the first place, it is hard to resist the fanciful notion that they could send you back.

  And it was all very well to observe that if we turned into homicidal maniacs we could expect rebuff. But what had Mordecai done? He wasn't a thief or a junkie; he didn't even lie. He drank

and philandered; he used bad language, but so does the London Independent. Mordecai was not malevolent but merely difficult, and that was enough. If this was conditional love, the conditions were stringent indeed.

  'So the guy was an asshole,' said Mordecai, hardening. 'I can't say that comes as a surprise.'

  I was impressed; I'd have cried.

  'Then this won't come as any surprise, either. We're buying this house tomorrow morning, and you're out on your ear. No more free lunch; no more free maid service; no more free flophouse. We're kicking you out.'

  'We, is it? Who's we?'

  'Me and Corrie Lou,' said Truman proudly.

  Mordecai turned to me and asked, 'Is that so?'

  I panicked. I wasn't ready. I hadn't 'decided'. My gaze shuttled frantically from brother to brother.

  If a stranger had walked into our kitchen right then he would have found: a pushing-forty Sixties throw-back with a violent hangover, streaked in vomit, moist in wrinkled slept-in clothes—a small-time businessman sunk in debt and not even bothering to battle the bottle. Not very tall, gently overweight, with a third broken marriage; a junior high school drop-out with a taste for cartoons.

  Facing? A beamy-shouldered stalwart, handsome and showered, well-nourished and rested. Married, issue on the way, ensconced in a lordly manor he considered his own. If unadventurous, safely bulwarked in a small world whose perimeters he had no intention of pressing; if kind, fully capable of deploying unconscionable weapons at his disposal; if younger, grown.

  But what did I see? In Mordecai, an edifice—the girds in our Hi-flier, my shelter on the first day of school. The foreshortening, pleasantly patronizing paragon actually allowed behind the grill at the Red Barn, who lured two hour-glass older women to the same Hillsborough mattress. King of the Basement, Godfather of the underworld below the post office. And the only man I had ever met who could stand up to my father.

  Opposite? A delicate and ingenuous Tender Flower, with too-wide eyes and a kick-me smile, bedevilled by a wayward gold cowlick, and so shaken by nursery school that for hours after he would only speak in signs.

'Mordecai.' I looked at the floor. 'You don't need me.'

In my defence, I believed that.

'Yeah, right.'

  Mordecai drew himself up with obvious reluctance, the Big Brother, the Genius. Though we serfs would have traded places in a minute, the imperial mantle of the first-born must have weighed heavy at times, and as Mordecai squared himself in the back doorway he didn't manage to right the slump of having been woken in what was to him the middle of the night.

  'You,' he told Truman, 'are the one who's had a free ride, but if our parents never jump-started you into adulthood I will. You've always borne me a grudge, because I got out from under. You think being good wins the day, don't you? Oh, you've been perfect, all right. The perfect baby. Mother might reward that, but I won't.

  'I've got the financing to outbid the both of you tomorrow, and I'll put in an offer you two couldn't touch with a barge pole.'

  Before about-facing to the porch, Mordecai shot me one look and I met his eyes because I thought I deserved at least a glare. I was prepared for scathing, if not exposure. With some wonderment I found my older brother's brown eyes behind the yellow lenses for once unhooded, softened. I was braced for a parting shot to Truman and would submit to the consequences: You realize that for two months your beloved big sister has seriously considered buying this house with me, don't you? We had a mortgage lined up. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. That's what Mordecai might have said, or ought to have said, at which point Truman would never trust me again.

  But Mordecai's lips remained closed and for once they didn't purse but smiled slightly; cleansed of sarcasm, the smile was relaxed, symmetrical, gentle. I still don't understand what you see in that kid, his shrug as much as said. But if he's that goddamned important to you, keep at least one brother if only to remind you of me. Then Mordecai's face resumed its military implacability, and he marched out the door to his truck.

  A soldierly performance, but his flash of superior finance had been less than blinding; his swagger of seniority echoed hollow from the damaged boards of the back porch. I had long envied Mordecai's reputation for intellect, though his reputed brilliance served my parents' vanity as much as his. I realized that we exalted

one another to exalt ourselves, and bestowed qualities to personalize the incomprehensible, but in the end we did each other a disservice. When your brother is the Genius, he is also the enemy. If the upside of families was that we meant something to one another, the downside was that we meant too much. We were never allowed to be regular people, just as Heck-Andrews was not allowed to be a plain old house. We turned each other into abstractions. So there was little mystery in why I had, at eight as at thirty-five, chosen Truman over Mordecai. The Tender Flower had laid exclusive claim to fragility, as The Bulldozer had title to brutality; that Truman could be cruel or that Mordecai could be injured was lost on their sister. I had been hoodwinked by my mother's nicknames, and seeking purpose more than power I would leap to the side of the helpless, who required my protection. In this preference I betrayed that I was, profoundly, a girl.

After Mordecai left, our capacious kitchen closed in, the long counters fencing us, a smell cloying the air like kippers, as if the altercation had left a residue. Though this room had commonly appealed to me for feeling untampered, that morning it felt excessively so—tired, worn, over. I scanned the crannies by the stove that my parents had cluttered with broccoli rubber bands, washed Ziploc bags, lidless jars and coffeeringed coupons. Though we’d swept away the detritus in December, I saw these orphaned objects had gradually been replaced with our own: folded tin foil we’d ridiculed my parents for obsessively recycling but re-used three times ourselves, dried-up ballpoints, grocery lists we never remembered to take with us to Harris Teeter, and the same ‘perfectly good’ rubber bands. That we’d proved genetically incapable of tidy counter tops oppressed me.

Truman and I said nothing. Our imbroglio ended, for a few minutes it appeared that with the rules of normal discourse restored we had lost the knack of communicating within its strict and rather dull conventions.

At last he scowled at me as if I were the single lemon in a row of slot machine cherries. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘I was fired.’
Truman grunted and didn’t pretend he cared why.
‘I’ve gotta do something,’ he muttered, and lunged from his chair.
I could hear him trudge up the first flight of stairs, then creak overhead towards the front—to Mordecai’s room, or MK’s. I didn’t dwell on what he was up to, I had plenty else to dwell on, but Truman must have been gone for twenty minutes. When he came back, he didn’t explain. He paced, jerkily, in various directions, and kept smoothing his palms down his jeans as if to rub something off.
‘I don’t have any classes. But much as I like this house, I’d really like to get out of here today,’ said Truman, jittery. ‘How about it? A walk, a museum, I don’t care. You game?’
The claustrophobia wasn’t like him, but I shared it. ‘By all means,’ I assented. ‘I feel like all three storeys are resting on my shoulders.’

At first we walked our regular circuit, which seemed longer than usual; like the kitchen behind us, Wilmington, the Mall and Peace College felt overly known, washed out and washed up. For once I didn’t stride with my head bent towards Truman’s in conference, but maintained a wary space between us that would fit a whole person, as if a whole person were missing. I stepped toe-first on the pavement the way children balance along a wall, and superstitiously avoided cracks, though my mother was dead. After a while I said, ‘I’ve never seen you like that.’

‘Maybe I’ve never been like that. You’re the one who said I should stand up to him.’
‘I never said any such thing, that was Averil. And if I had, I’d have said
stand up to him
and not
stomp on his face
.’
Truman flapped his hands. ‘Classic! My brother craps all over me for weeks—not to mention years—swiping my tools, defacing my house, eating and drinking everything in sight he didn’t pay for and inviting half the town to do likewise, and
finally
I say something,
finally
I dish out what he has coming, and
who
gets the dressing down? Mordecai’s the maverick, which I suppose elevates him above common decency whereas the obligations of politeness still apply to me.’
‘I know Mordecai’s been inconsiderate, but he hasn’t tried to hurt your feelings.’
‘What do you mean, he called me a “perfect baby”!’
I said, true.
At Krispey Kreme, neither of us had an appetite for bavarian creams, and we settled for tepid coffee. I couldn’t be bothered to sharpen my English accent for the waitress, who commented when we ordered that I had ‘started sounding like a local in no time’.
What all did we do that afternoon? We took a guided tour of the Legislature, which I hadn’t done since a sixth-grade field trip. We roamed around the art museum; we canvassed the capitol and
read Civil War inscriptions. We ended up in front of Green Street about six, too early for a beer really, but Truman seemed keen to make another exception to the Eight O’Clock Rule. I was weary of exceptions, and craved one day when, according to our old form, we sipped only two glasses of wine, after eight. It was odd, me wanting order and Truman acting devil-may-care.
I was tired of meandering, especially considering how little Truman and I seemed to have to say to each other. I’d have liked to catch MacNeilLehrer. ‘Come on,’ I urged. ‘Let’s skip Green Street, go home, and put our feet up.’
After glancing at his watch, Truman was adamant. He’d not go back to Blount Street; I supposed he dreaded running into Mordecai. So we pushed in the double-doors of the micro-brewery, all done up in snooker-green and brass like a British pub.
I collapsed in a booth, leaning into the corner. Truman fiddled with the hot mustard, stirring the pot with the tiny spoon and gazing dolefully at the Colman’s. I realized I was waiting. All afternoon Troom had blown off blasts of hot air about his brother, but in the last hour he’d run out of steam. I knew Truman. He may have unearthed a buried penchant for sporadic biliousness, but it wasn’t in him to keep it up. Once we had ordered bangers and mash to pick at, he mumbled, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, about Father.’
‘Mmm-hmm,’ I hummed. ‘Maybe not.’
‘I never thought I could say anything to Mordecai that would affect him in the slightest.’
I knew that. A man who regards himself as impotent is surprisingly lethal. He doesn’t take care. No one tries to control power he doesn’t recognize he has. And with a chronic victim, the idea that he might himself victimize other people never enters his head.
‘You had an effect, all right.’
‘You think I should apologize.’
‘Yes.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And I may owe an apology to you.’
‘What for?’
Mordecai had made me a gift of Truman’s trust when he left that morning, but I didn’t want it. So I told Truman everything. Mordecai’s proposal, my openness to the coalition, even why Wachovia really coldshouldered Truman’s application. He didn’t go ballistic, but kept his hands in his lap and took it all in like a good student.
When I was finished, I qualified. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not apologizing for considering a different arrangement. I’m only sorry I wasn’t dead straight. I still think Mordecai may have been right. That staying in that house isn’t good for you, Truman.’
Though he might have chosen to lose his rag, or slump stiffly away from his scurrilous, two-timing sister, Truman instead looked four years old again, open, hopeful, obedient. I think it hit him, just like that first afternoon after school when I played Tinker-Toy with Troom instead of scampering down to watch Mordecai preserve mice in formaldehyde, that once more, astonishingly, the weaker had won. He seemed less interested in my duplicity than in nailing down the future.
‘Do you really think Mordecai will make a bid for the house tomorrow?’ Truman leaned over our sausages. ‘And will he be able to go higher than $490,000?’
The house, the house, the house! I was bloody sick of it. I hated the
word
‘house’. So I peeked under our booth and once more discovered Dorothy’s shoes. There was little use being in a position of influence if you weren’t willing to exploit it.
‘Now, listen, Truman,’ I began. ‘Yes, I’m uncomfortable with inheritance in general, something for nothing. But this situation has degenerated into a horlicks Mother and Father never intended and would have deplored. In leaving us with a piece of property and a nest egg, they were trying to do us a favour, not set us at each others’ throats! OK, so I said I’d go in with you, but how does that make Mordecai feel? How does that make me feel? Like one of those medieval torture victims ripped limb from limb by Clydesdales. Well, I bow out. No, I won’t buy the house with Mordecai, but I won’t buy it with you either. I suggest tomorrow morning we all sleep late.’
‘You don’t mean that.’ His voice was faint.
‘Try me. Now can we please go home? Or do you want to check your watch again?’
He did. He checked his watch.