Big Brother (20 page)
“Call it whatever cliché you want. I’m your big brother. That means
you
go buy
New York
magazine with
me
on it. That
you
come to
me
for cash, and you can have it, too. That I don’t end up a charity case living on my kid sister’s dime.”
Interestingly, whatever reservations Edison once had about tapping my resources had evaporated. That was obvious when he’d lobbied for the 65-inch plasma flat screen the day before. Like those of most people who’d made a go of an enterprise, my profits were finite—money is always finite—and a large proportion of the gravy had been poured back into the business. But something sinister happens whenever people plop you into the category of the wealthy. It’s as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn’t real, so your generosity isn’t real, either.
“Besides,” said Edison. “I only realized you could have helped me out after I’d already sold the Schimmel and then saw that cover story. That catering bag was barely in the black. From what you’d said on the phone about this ‘Baby Moronic’ biz—”
“Monotonous.”
“It sounded whack. I thought you were out of your freakin’ tree. So when a tenor player mentioned he’d bought one for his wife’s birthday, I didn’t make the connection.”
“That’s because whenever I tell you what’s up with me, your mind wanders. I’ve always been able to hear it. Your grunts and uh-huhs are in all the wrong places.”
“Don’t take this wrong, but that catering trip . . . You moved to
Iowa
. . . Then you married some closemouthed seed salesman turned carpenter I got nothing in common with . . . The only reason I got to find that riveting is you’re my sister.”
“That’s not enough?”
“Sure it is. Sort of. But we live in totally different worlds, man. I’m up jamming till the wee-smalls in Manhattan, and you’re rustling around in all this—corn.”
If I’d long aspired to be dull, I had apparently achieved my goal. So what was my problem? Well, I had a headache. I felt weak. I couldn’t keep a grip on the reason I was subjecting myself to this deprivation. I missed my husband, and Edison wasn’t the only one who could be bored by a sibling. I couldn’t stay focused on what I was doing in this bland, underfurnished apartment, and I suspected this mutual vagueness of mind was why Edison and I seemed incapable of getting his story to flow in a comprehensible fashion. I bore down.
“Back to the main agenda,” I said. “The Schimmel must have been worth thousands. That would have bought you some time.”
“It bought me something,” Edison muttered.
“Meaning?”
He covered his face with his hands. “I ate it, man. I ate my piano.”
“Oh,
Edison.
” I sounded like our mother.
“I’m on the town, I’m not warming up a two-sixty-nine can of soup, am I? That’s when things started to get heavy. Or I did. And restaurant food is pricey.”
“I just . . .” I threw up my hands. “I’m dumbfounded! You were a high school track star!”
“You could understand if you made an effort. Yeah, I used to look pretty good. Then I didn’t. That’s the point. Once I got sort of fat, one more baby-back didn’t matter. See, when you look sharp, you got something to protect—an investment to preserve, a power to keep. But when you’re already big, there’s nothing to lose from being bigger. Now, going wide didn’t help me professionally, I admit. Especially for the younger cats, this middle-aged fat guy fucked up their image. So suddenly I’d notice in the
Voice
that bands I been playing with for five years are listing with a different piano player. Which made me eat more. ’Cause it passed the time. ’Cause I was hungry. ’Cause I was pissed off.
“So I’d do a wedding, and . . . There was one in particular, on Long Island. It turns out the band wasn’t supposed to eat the buffet. We were meant to get a plate, in the kitchen, like, you know, the Negroes. Nobody said so,
per se
. So I took a chance, and between sets I hit the spread. It was good grub, too, shrimp and lobster and roast beef, so maybe I piled it on kind of high. A
little
high. Then we all got an earful when we were packing up, and the
happy couple
took two hundred bucks out of our pay, a shortfall the band passed on to me. Two hundred bucks! And it was a quintet, so five ways that was only three hundred per
before
my bad-boy deduction, leaving me with a lousy C-note. No way I ate two hundred bucks’ worth of their damned food. But one look at me, and everyone assumed I ate the whole roast pig. Like the head-shaking tut-tuts I get in restaurants—when I’m sitting there eating a regular turkey club like everyone else? I can hear the other guys at the lunch counter thinking:
These porkers always complaining about glandular problems, but whenever you see them in public they’re up to their nuts in onion rings . . .
“Anyway, after that wedding fiasco, my rep took another hit, and cats started warning me before asking me on a gig: ‘Don’t know if you’re interested, ’cause we don’t get dinner on this one,’ or ‘You’re not allowed to touch the food.’ Fucking insulting. Wasn’t like I couldn’t go five minutes without a cheeseburger.
“You getting the picture, Panda Bear? Money got super tight. Cats who should’ve been thanking their lucky stars to be associated with someone with my résumé are starting to avoid me. I’m getting fat—yeah, of course I
noticed
—and that was a drag, too. That’s the thing: getting fat makes you fatter. The weight itself is such a bummer that it drives you right into the arms of a lamb shawarma. Too many shawarmas translate into fewer gigs, more chowing down to forget my troubles, even fewer gigs. It’s, whaddya call it, a
feedback loop
, know what I’m saying? Meanwhile, the Schimmel may have paid off the arrears, but after I ate through the rest of that dough I was back where I started. Couldn’t keep the apartment, even in Williamsburg. Which is getting pretty full of itself, actually, but never mind.
“So I put everything in storage. Slack helped, rented a van. Thousands of CDs. Cartons of sheet music. Whole library of jazz biographies. Had a box set of twelve Miles LPs,
Chronicle
—all the recordings he did with Prestige. Limited edition, numbered, only ten thousand pressed. Gorgeous, all brown and soft, with heavy sleeves. Bio, photos, liner notes on each set. Shoulda sold it when I had the chance, but I couldn’t bring myself, man. I just couldn’t part with it.”
He sounded so morose, I had to ask. “But your stuff is still in storage, right?”
Edison stared out the window to the lights of the Burger King glimmering through the trees. “Fell behind on those payments, too. Went back to Box My Pad last spring, thought I’d try to strike a deal for back rent. They’d already auctioned my unit. Unless the lucky bidder was a jazz fiend, he’d have hauled most of my shit to the dump. Dozens of framed posters from gigs, some in German, French, Japanese. My sound system. My vinyl—including Mother’s
Magnolia Blossoms
, I’m afraid. All my photographs, aside from the few I’d uploaded to my website. Clothes, not that I could wear most of them anymore.”
“So that’s what happened to your leather trench coat,” I said softly.
“Keep seeing that Miles box set on some mildewed mattress. Rained on. LPs cracked in half. And all those CDs. Mine’s a pretty old laptop, small memory by current standards. I’d only transferred a fraction of that music to the computer.”
“You lost
everything
?”
Edison spread his hands. “What you see is what I got.”
I don’t think of myself as a hopeless materialist, but this revelation hit me hard. It’s sometimes so difficult to be sure of what and who we are, our sense of ourselves is so precarious, so tentative—and these physical totems are guide wires. Edison’s posters had been emblems he could touch, sure verification that every European tour had not been in his head. Having accompanied him to many a music emporium in New York, I knew how rigorously he’d worked to compile that rarefied CD library now either cluttering some disappointed scavenger’s rank basement or scattered to seagulls. That was our family’s last copy of
Magnolia Blossoms
. And I mourned that coat.
“So that’s when you started sleeping on your friends’ couches?”
“No. Gotta understand, yeah, some of the cats made themselves scarce. But a hard core of my friends would do anything for me, man. Word went out I was having trouble keeping a crib, and they found me a place. That club in Red Hook—”
“Three Bars in Four-Four.” (At 44 Visitation Place—a haunting address I remembered.) “The one you managed.”
“Well, not exactly. I never, like, managed it, though I can see how, over the phone, you might have, you know—got that impression.”
“Yes. I got that impression.”
“There was a room over the club. See, Three Bars is a real seat-of-the-pants operation, can’t afford a cleaning service, and the whole idea of the hang was they’d stay open ultra late—by which time the staff was dying to go home. So the deal was, I’d clean the place after closing, and in exchange I could stay in that room on the second floor for free. Of course, it wasn’t up to code, not much better than a closet with an electrical socket. Only one window, covered in spiderwebs. But I didn’t need much, and I could use the club john to wash up. During the day when Three Bars was shut I could practice on the house piano, and being right upstairs meant I also became, like, the house keyboard player. Slack and the other cats would come by after their own gigs, since by then just about everybody’d moved to Brooklyn. It was a cool place, really smoking. Still is, far as I know. Honest, for a while there things weren’t so bad.”
“So why don’t you still live there? Hardly sounds opulent, but you could play.”
“Yeah, well. Three Bars sells food, right? Not just burgers, but fish, a chicken salad with mango and cashews and shit. Good home fries . . .”
I didn’t like where this was headed. Edison wouldn’t look at me.
“So they noticed stuff disappearing,” he continued reluctantly. “From the kitchen.”
“Oh, Edison,” I said, again with that maternal color. “It sounds as if your friends really went out on a limb for you. Just a little self-control . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard that from several parties, thank you. But it’s not easy for me to get around lately, and sweeping wore me out. Bringing in all those glasses to the dishwasher, I was already in the kitchen. No fridge upstairs, and I’d been warned against storing even dry goods, because of rats. So by six in the morning I was famished, and nothing in Red Hook was open yet. I always put everything back, plastic covers sealed up. And that chicken salad was killing.”
“It sure killed something.”
“Yeah. My last chance.”
I clinked my cappuccino shake glass against his. “Your next-to-last chance,” I said, and we downed the dregs.
H
aving let it hulk oppressively in its box by the door, we finally unpacked the scale on Day Four. Eschewing the measly drama of a digital readout, I’d chosen the old-fashioned kind with a wide white face and red needle. We dragged our sentinel beside the picture window, where it stood at attention against the wall, its big round head keeping stern watch as I patted out every last grain from the day’s third set of envelopes. We’d already formed fierce opinions about the flavors. Edison liked the butterscotch; I was rounding on the view that only the vanilla could go the distance.
It was time for our first weigh-in. I decided not to down my shake beforehand; why add eight more ounces to what could be a grim reckoning? In the future, we’d always need to measure our progress at the same time of day, since one’s weight can vary a good five pounds over twenty-four hours, and I didn’t want us to get disheartened after living all day on Blip-Sup—a shorthand that had already metamorphosed to “Upchuck”—only to weigh in even fatter. By now, Edison badly needed some demonstrable achievement to hold on to. Given his size, we couldn’t really see any difference after four days of starvation, so I could begin to understand how nefariously that process worked in reverse. You eat a whole cheesecake and look in the mirror and big deal: nothing’s changed.
For my part, I’d started this experiment with no baseline. In the frenzy and chronic nausea of the Breadbasket years, I’d scrawnied down to 117: a lifetime accolade. For most of my life I’d circled around 130, which at 5’7” put my BMI at an irreproachable 20.4, and that’s how I thought of myself:
I weighed 130
. Yet ever since I’d grown determined to show Fletcher that he couldn’t push me around with a head of broccoli, I had given the scale in our bathroom wide berth.
An especially contemporary form of cowardice. My compatriots may have connived to amplify what constituted normal proportions, our dress sizes deflating as wildly as university grades were bloating in the other direction. (I’d just seen on CNN that Levi’s planned to bring in the buttock sizes
slight
,
demi
, and
bold
, while considering yet a fourth,
supreme curve.
How easily I could picture the hilarity at that sales meeting.) But had we therefore ushered in an era of absolution in relation to the waistline? Hardly: the weigh-in was now subject to the most ruthless of interpretations. I believed—and could not understand why I believed this, since I didn’t believe it—that the number on that dial was a verdict on my very character. It appraised whether I was strong, whether I was self-possessed, whether I was someone anyone else would conceivably wish to be. Because I’d been dodging my confessor in the master bath at home, the scale in Prague Porches would also put an exact numerical value on my tendency to what my farmer friend at Walmart claimed “makes life bearable”: self-deceit.
So Edison and I faced our arbiter with the foreboding of having been sent to the principal’s office. Manfully, I volunteered to go first. I slipped off my shoes. I pulled off my sweater. I removed the change from my pockets, and even took out the comb. Presenting myself like a human sacrifice, I stepped onto the platform. The red needle swept gracefully, inexorably up: 168.
My cheeks flamed. I stepped back off the scale as if it were physically hot. My head told me that there was no earthly reason to take that number to heart. If temporarily in absentia, I was a decent mother. At least with Edison, I was a devoted sister; if Fletcher would only let me, I was still a devoted wife. I’d now run two businesses, the second a resounding success. These were the aspects of my life that mattered. Furthermore, I was already doing something about this situation, and the higher my weight to start with the longer I’d be able to accompany Edison on his grueling mission. Yet none of this reasonable, rational reassurance moderated by an iota my burning sense of shame.
“Wow,” I said, flustered. “That was a shock.”
“Maybe now you got some appreciation for what it’s like to clock in at three-eighty-six.”
“It’s just a number.” A number that meant I’d gained twice as much weight in the last few years as I’d thought. “Now, hit the deck.”
Edison removed his shoes and stepped up to the plate with his eyes closed. “You read it, babe. If those sorry-ass shakes are all for squat, break it to me gentle.”
“Three-seventy-seven! Edison, in only four days you’ve lost nine pounds!”
“Not too shabby, right?”
“Shabby? This is fantastic! Those stupid Upchucks work!” After Edison had ambled off the stage of his star turn, I clasped his hands and jumped up and down. “We should celebrate! . . . And I don’t know how.” Indeed, our abstinence eliminated all the traditional means of marking an occasion. We couldn’t pop champagne or book a table. Wanly, I restirred our shakes, and we toasted with the grainy, watery elixir of our salvation.
We did manage some sense of festivity that night, plugging Edison’s computer into our new sound system and dancing around the living room with his iTunes set on “party shuffle”—a term I welcomed, since we needed every hint of revelry we could scrounge. To say that my brother “boogied” might have been pushing it, but I did, while he jigged around the room inscribing sardonic Middle Eastern hand movements like a belly dancer. With one denied, other senses as well as smell were growing more acute; besides, my ear for jazz had grown unwittingly better educated during my brother’s crash course on Solomon Drive. Rather than clash in a jangle of discordant riffs—which I’d pictured as rusted garden furniture and incomplete board games crammed in a jumbled garage—the music sounded more tuneful and orderly. When we played the who’s-this game I could at last identify Charlie Parker.
Yet what I most remember is suddenly coming up short. “Edison. Stop a second. I don’t know about you. But
I don’t feel hungry
.”
Edison contemplated his midsection. “Huh. You’re right, babe. I don’t, either.”
“Do you have a funny taste in your mouth?”
“Now that you mention it—like an animal crawled in there and died.”
“It’s ketosis! I’ve read about it, but I didn’t really believe it!”
Thereupon, that night officially became our Ketosis Party: the magic moment when our bodies gave up on ever seeing takeout again and resigned themselves to eating in.
B
ut our project was going so well! Edison became far less begrudging, and admitted to having more energy than when he was pigging out, even if he refused to grant that the giddy highs of ketosis could quite compare to heroin. It was Edison and Pandora against the world, just like when we were kids. On walkabouts—exercise that also killed time—we shared a mounting superiority to our brethren still groveling in the gutter of earthly delights, lifting our heads at an imperial tilt down gauntlets of fast food. We sampled salty lung-fulls of french fries with the discerning noses of perfumers, able to tease out palm oil versus beef tallow, to detect the tang of ketchup or mellow of mayonnaise. Yet gliding past KFC was like window shopping without our wallets, and we were never tempted. We were invincible, like superheroes; we had special powers. Though I’d imagined myself little concerned with status, living on four slender envelopes of protein powder per day while everyone around me wallowed in buckets of extra-crispy was my most consuming experience of aristocracy. This
rising above
sensation grew especially intense over Christmas, when in Hy-Vee we would waltz obliviously past pre-basted turkeys and mincemeat pies to haughtily assemble our prissy purchases of paper towels and pink packets of aspartame.
We both had black days, of course—days I prefer not to recall. I’m not sure what triggered them, but certain mornings I’d wake with
oh, no, not this again
, groping for my clothes in a miasma of misanthropy. Everything I laid eyes on was infuriating: the cold wet teabags on the counter; the knocked-over recycling bag, its spilled bottles of diet soda drooling on the linoleum; the toothpaste Edison had let crust around the bathroom sink and the skid marks he never brushed from the toilet; my fat, indolent brother most of all, especially if he made the smallest remark that sounded
cheerful
. Since I couldn’t abandon my business during the whole Christmas rush, I’d gone back to work, and employees for whom I’d thought I harbored great affection inspired nothing but hatred. When they came to me for advice on a commission, I’d snap that this was only a glorified toy company and nothing we did mattered so they could at least make a few trifling decisions on their own. I would look up at the clock in disbelieving
outrage
that only ten minutes had passed.
At Prague Porches those evenings, everything on TV seemed moronic, and I’d fix tea I didn’t want and slosh most of it down the sink. Usually inclined to find the repetitive rhythms of daily life becalming as a lullaby, I have never been so bored. And I mean aggressively bored, maliciously bored, as if my boredom weren’t merely an affliction but a weapon, and when I turned it on Edison with a glowering, sooty-eyed glare I could have been aiming a bazooka. I was bored with his droning on about musicians nobody in their right minds ever listened to anymore. I was bored with his whining about his terrible life when most of what had gone wrong in it was his own damn fault. And the tunes from his computer would sound demented—manic, screeching, fingernail-on-a-blackboard. He learned not to take the dyspepsia personally, since Edison had his own version: lumping in his recliner, utterly inert for hours, falling in and out of a rancorous half sleep. Those black days, they lasted for lifetimes, and once the storm passed the restoration of a gliding serenity and smug supremacy over all the little people and their little food problems felt all the more victorious.
That’s why what happened the first week of January seemed so inexplicable. We had hit our stride. I’d already left him alone for whole workdays, from which I’d return to find Edison parked placidly in front of
30 Minute Meals
, sipping a Diet Coke. I did remark once, “Do you think that’s the best program to be watching?” and he said blithely, “Food porn. Least you didn’t walk in on me jerking off.” I thought it was harmless.
As well as enjoying several buoyant visits from Cody, I had stayed in regular phone contact with my family, and Fletcher’s conversation had been so cryptic and chilly that when he proposed a little face time I leapt at the chance. I told Edison I was meeting Fletcher at our favorite coffee shop downtown after work, and my brother’s reaction was odd: “What are you seeing
him
for?”
“He’s my husband, dummy. A better question is what am I living with
you
for.”
Perhaps a bit pointedly—this is the new me who walks everywhere—I arrived at Java Joint on foot, though with New Holland’s paucity of sidewalks that meant teetering around icy puddles on verges and recoiling from rattling semis. Just as pointedly, Fletcher arrived by bike, wrapped in Lycra, for which it was too cold. I waited as he locked up and unclipped his lights. We hugged, awkwardly, and hustled inside. “You know, when the weather improves, I might like my bike back,” I said.
“Well, sure,” he said, thrown off guard.
We nestled opposite in a booth, while Fletcher warmed his hands around his neck. He ordered a glass of soy milk and a lactose-free whole-wheat banana muffin, which in the old days would have contrasted sanctimoniously with my usual pastry here—a crumb Danish with cheese—but which took on a more indulgent hue beside my lone cup of black tea. “You want some?” he offered.
“No, thank you.” Declining food was effortless. It had nothing to do with me.
“This thing’s enormous.” Hunched over the muffin, he shoveled a clump with embarrassment. I was familiar with this phenomenon. When I joined my employees at lunch just to be sociable, nursing a soda water and slice of lime, they ate with a funny furtiveness, keeping their plates close and sheltering their meals with their hands.
“You know, you do look—better,” Fletcher allowed, abandoning his muffin.
“I’ve lost fifteen pounds. It’s only been a month. But Edison’s lost
thirty-nine
. When you’re that big, it drops off like nobody’s business at the beginning.”
“Gotta say, I never thought the guy had it in him.”
“He’s into it now. Or I should say,
we
are.”
“In the olden days, when you said ‘we’ it referred to you and me.”
“It still can,” I said. “This is a time-limited, goal-oriented project, not a new normal.”
“Is he clear on that?”
“Of course!”
“Christmas,” said Fletcher. “It was depressing. I couldn’t pull it off.”
“Look, we talked about this. Holidays are centered around meals. Even if you’d lifted my exile, Edison and I would have rained on the family parade. People feel weird eating around us. Besides, the holiday’s relentless. I loved getting the kids presents, but otherwise it was a relief to skip it a year.”
“It reminded me too much of right after splitting with Cleo. That bloodless, going-through-the-motions feeling.” He added with effort, “I miss you.”
I put a hand on his. “I miss you, too. I know I’m asking a lot, but this thing with Edison is working, and it’s making me happy. I feel like I’m making a difference, a big difference, to at least one person—”
“But I’m one person, too. You make a difference to me.”
“You don’t need me in the same way. It’s not forever. Just don’t let your where’s-my-woman macho side get the best of you.”
“Here’s the thing: I wanted to ask you—to
beg
you. Please come home. It sounds like your brother’s on a roll, if you’re telling me the truth. So why can’t you be his ‘personal trainer’ from our house? Visit, phone, give him pep talks—whatever you’re doing. This separation, it’s no good. I don’t want to get used to your being gone. You can play Mother Teresa if you have to, but from a couple of miles away.”
From Fletcher, a proposal that involved Edison in our lives at all was a major compromise. And I was tempted. My bed at Prague Porches was big and cold. Our sibling duo provided the kind of emotional nutrition that lacked a vital mineral whose absence was cumulative; much longer and my hair would fall out or something. On the other hand, I was stricken by the picture of Edison sitting forlornly through meal-free evenings in that barren apartment all by himself.
