Big Brother (26 page)
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Doritos,”
said Edison,
“I shall fear no weight gain—”
“For my Upchuck art with me. My laxatives and my artificially sweetened herbal tea, they comfort me.”
Edison frowned. “Some shit about a table . . . ?”
“Thou preparest a table before me,”
I supplied.
“Which is my enemy!”
“Thou annointest my fingers with olive oil, though I shan’t lick them,”
I said.
“My cup runneth over with cherry-chocolate-flavored protein powder and essential enzymes.”
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,”
we recited together.
“And I shall dwell in the house of . . .”
“Starvation?”
“Privation?”
It was a cute solution, but in retrospect I wish I’d come up with another idea: I cried victoriously, “Prague Porches!”
“And I shall dwell in the house of Prague Porches,”
we resumed in unison,
“forever!”
We rolled on the bedspread laughing. Giddy over having a good time rather than merely pretending to, I took too long to notice that, not only was Fletcher not laughing with us, he’d turned white.
At first I figured that he was irked by our having appropriated his making fun of us, in effect hijacking his joke. But it was worse than that, more grammatically profound. It wasn’t the joke; it was the
us
. And it was the wrong
us
.
“You want to stay at your little clubhouse
forever
?” Fletcher swung a leg across his bike and clipped hard into a pedal. “Be my guest.”
Now when I sprang up from the bedspread, there was nothing artificial about it. “Come on, we didn’t mean anything!” I reached for Fletcher’s shoulder. “The
Lord
, Prague
Porches
—it just sounded good!”
“Yeah, it obviously sounds good to you. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, sweetie, we were just horsing around! We do that all the time!” But no matter what I thought to say, it was
we
this and
we
that, and there was no inclusion of my husband in that pronoun.
“I warned you from the beginning about this cockamamie scheme.” Hands braced on his handlebars, Fletcher employed that hypercontrolled, level delivery that chilled my blood. “You walk out on a man and his family for six months—a
year
is what you prepared me for, once you’d done your sums. Well, that has consequences. I told you: feelings change. Not because of what someone decides to feel. Because of cause and effect. Like a hammer on a board. You remember?”
“Yes, I remember.” I was panicking. This was moving too fast. It was just a bike ride, a picnic, and later I could apologize that maybe bringing Edison along hadn’t been a brilliant idea. We could talk it all out, and I could explain how, given the role of peacemaker that I’d not only been born into but that had been double-imprinted by Maple Fields, I compulsively kept cajoling my husband and my only brother to strike a truce . . .
“You feel close to me?” Fletcher asked point-blank.
If he’d asked whether I loved him, I’d have said of course right away, which is probably why that’s not what he asked.
“Because you sure don’t act like it.” My hesitation had been answer enough.
“Obviously, when we haven’t spent much time together—”
“You chose not to spend time with me. You chose to spend a year—a whole year—with your brother instead of me. You know, once you’re in your forties, and we’re talking good years, still in good health, still energetic?
There
aren’t that many years.
”
“It’s not that much longer, and you can see, look at Edison, how much better he looks, it’s working—”
“If I disappeared on you for a solid year, I’d be out on my ear for keeps.”
“That would depend on what you left for.”
“Crap. Leaving is leaving. You’ve demonstrated in no uncertain terms who’s most important to you. Generally”—he glanced at Edison—“I don’t like to air dirty laundry with an audience. It’s private, it’s our business. But I don’t think you have any comprehension of ‘our business’ anymore. So I might as well say this stuff in front of you both, if only so you don’t scurry back and report everything I said almost word for word but slightly wrong so that I seem a little more ridiculous and a little more the villain. You think I don’t know how
siblings
work? I’m not that dumb.”
“Honey, hardly, we should really talk this out when we’re alone—”
“
I want a divorce.
” Even when issuing that ultimatum about Edison’s having to be out of the house by the day of his plane reservation, Fletcher had never used that word.
“This isn’t fair,” I whispered. “I’ve only been trying—”
“Trying to have it both ways. You can’t. Sometimes you have to choose. You chose. Live with it. Oh, and for the record: they’re my kids, and they stay with me.”
“Tell that to Tanner,” Edison cried from the bedspread, and I wished he’d please stay out of this. I wished, too, he’d not lit another cigarette, as if the better to enjoy the show.
Fletcher swiveled. “While we’re at it, Travis tells me a certain formerly fat fuck is talking on the phone all the time to my son. Lay off the
fatherly
advice. You’ve poured enough bullshit into that boy’s head already.”
“He talks to us,” said Edison, “because he refuses to talk to
you
, man. So maybe you should consider, like, why that might be.”
“Sweetheart, this is crazy,” I said. “Really calling it quits, it’s too important to decide so impulsively—”
“I wouldn’t call it impulsive. Today just confirmed what I already knew. Like I said, I’m not that dumb.”
Fletcher pushed off, accelerating further down the bike path—for a
real
ride, unencumbered by slowpokes. I collected our picnic containers in silence, for suddenly all the chummy sibling camaraderie had fallen away, and when I told Edison to turn off the damn music I felt a trace of real acrimony, dislike for
all that jazz
and my brother, too. As with fiscal assets, there had to be such a thing as emotional net worth, and Edison’s account had just plunged into the red.
T
he homeward slog did feel like forty miles, since it once more started to pour. After a long, hot shower, I left my soaked, mud-spattered clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. I unpacked the remains of our picnic and threw out the leftovers with rancorous abandon, whether or not the seaweed would have kept.
That night, and for days thereafter, I was taciturn and morose; Edison left me to my sulk. He was waiting for me to get over it, as if a nearly eight-year marriage and the adoption of two children were on a par with the junior high crushes he’d watched implode in a torrent of tears as a world-weary high school track star. Meanwhile, I left Fletcher pleading phone messages. I sent beseeching emails and texts, eliciting not a single reply. It was murder to stop myself from using Cody as a go-between.
Edison lobbed a few unpersuasive assurances that Fletcher and I would patch things up after my husband got over his snit, but I knew Fletcher—a man of few strong moves, who when he packed up his kids and walked out on Cleo had never looked back. Besides, my brother failed to suppress a burbling cheerfulness about this turn of the wheel, and he didn’t
want
to be persuasive.
Yet for me, all that had once been thick had gone runny, the way a reheated cornstarch custard can break its emulsion and water. Edison as an addition to my family was one thing, as the whole of my family quite another. I grant there’s a comforting steadiness to the sibling tie; except for the odd blowup like the one over the pizza box in January, Edison and I had thrummed along with the mild ebb and surge of crickets. But I missed the more orchestral crescendos and glissandos of marriage, and had never imagined myself getting old with my brother. I knew there were such couples, at whose loyalty others marveled, but mostly people felt sorry for grown live-in siblings, who had settled for something lesser and slightly wrong. Without any inbuilt conclusion to our dodgy cohabitation, this weight-loss project dribbled to the horizon, no longer finite and climactic, but ceaseless and a chore. The fact that it never stopped raining made me feel trapped in a giant pathetic fallacy—as if I were starring in a heavy-handed film noir.
Having been working myself up to a showdown over solid food, following that fatal bike ride I wasn’t in the mood. On the six-month anniversary of Edison’s having taken the BPSP pledge—and I now refused to reference their envelopes as “Upchuck,” our in-house lingo too pally—I skipped all the prefatory jollying I’d been contriving for weeks and cut callously to the chase.
“No more liquid diet,” I announced on our return from Monotonous—my business now aptly named, since the tedium of manufacturing
doll babies
was suddenly rubbing me the wrong way as radically as my overnight roommate-for-life. We’d taken the car; I wasn’t biking in this weather. “Time to eat.”
“I’m nowhere near one-sixty-three,” said Edison, as I’d known he would.
“You already skipped the week of real food in the middle. The literature is unequivocal. Six months max.” My tone was retributive, as if I planned to force gray, lumpy gruel down his throat with a plunger.
“Just a couple more months, then,” Edison parlayed.
“Not one more day. You will start with soup, including soft, digestible starch like overcooked potato, along with fruit juices and vegetable purees.”
He bunched in his recliner and folded his arms. “Sounds fuckin’ awful.”
“I don’t care.” I’d originally contemplated making him the cool, bright vichyssoise that I’d pictured for my own fast breaking, but now I couldn’t be bothered and strode to the kitchen to open a can of commercial cream of chicken. I wasn’t a bit concerned with whether he liked it.
I slopped orange juice into a glass and banged the soup bowl on the table. I felt sadistic. It was a new feeling, one I could come to like. “You will now consume eight hundred and ten calories per day for the next month.”
“This is nuts,” he objected. “We can’t just—”
“I know.
But there’s no ceremony.
Well, I’ve got news for you: after all this build-up, food is a big drag. It doesn’t take much time. It’s not interesting. It never was interesting. So eat your stupid soup, drink your stupid juice, and then we’ve still got to find a stupid movie we can stand to watch on TV.”
“I don’t want any.”
“Too bad. Just because you’ve ruined my marriage doesn’t mean I’m stuck in this apartment regardless. Deal’s the same as ever: do what I say, or I’m outta here.”
His voice went small. “I’m scared.”
“So? If you had any sense, you were scared the first time you played the piano in front of a live audience. You can at least face down cream of chicken.”
Edison eased warily from the recliner, eyeing his sister from a distance as if assessing a pet exposed to rabies.
“Hurry up, it’s getting cold.”
Edison settled at the table, his chair pushed back from the bowl. “I told you, man: I don’t want it. And I don’t
wanna
want it.”
“
I do not give a shit.
” I swear, it was all I could do to keep from hitting him, or hurling the soup in his face. “You think the last six months were the hard part? Well, think again. Eating nothing is easy. Eating something but not very much is an everloving bitch. You’re right, you’re not finished, not at your target weight. But guess what. You’re never going to be finished. You think this is about getting to one-sixty-three, and then you can relax. Big surprise,
bro
. You can never relax. You have to learn to eat all over again. And the bad news? Once you’ve messed up as badly as you did, and made food into this personal pitfall, and then this giant source of anxiety, going through all the obsessive hullabaloo with little envelopes, well . . . Eating is never going to be the same again. It’s always going to make you nervous, and it’s never going to be much fun. You’ve ruined that. Got it? So the
next
six months, they’re going to be
even harder
.”
Pitching his soup as challenge rather than indulgence was canny. Edison edged his chair closer to the table and leaned over to sniff. He glowered. “Smells terrible.”
“
Eat it.
” I had a future as a prison guard.
He loaded a spoonful. It pooled there, congealing. How impatient Oliver must have felt with me, the first time at our diner. Under my hard glare, Edison took a sip.
“There,” I said viciously. “Thanks to a few shreds of chicken and specks of melted potato, you’ve lost your virginity. Back to Go. You’re mortal again. Just a regular guy, gotta drop sixty-five pounds—nothing special, dull as dishwater.”
Edison finished the spoonful and looked wretched.
“How’s it taste?” The question was malicious.
“Like . . .” He scuppered the spoon and wafted his hands. “Like who-cares.”
“Told you,” I said victoriously. “Now, since your sister will pour the rest of it through a funnel into your nose if she has to, you might as well finish the bowl.” I marched to the kitchen to prepare my own stupid little chicken breast, stupid little pile of stupid little rice, and stupid little salad.
“This is depressing, man,” came from the dining table.
“Tough.”
A little later: “That wasn’t fair, man. What you said before. About ruining everything.”
“It’s true,” I said. “You have ruined food, probably forever. That’s what happens when you put on hundreds of pounds of self-pity for no reason.”
“No. That crack about your marriage. I don’t see why Feltch’s issuing you a pink slip is all my fault.”
I couldn’t control myself. “Fact: if you hadn’t popped up as a basket case on my doorstep, I would at this very minute be sitting down to dinner with my husband and stepdaughter, exchanging the stories of our day. No big fat Edison, no divorce.”
“I never intended to break you guys up, did I? And I tried to be cool with the cat. Feltch was the one kept picking fights with
me
.”
“You’ve gotten what you wanted. Little sister, on call, slipper-fetching, unencumbered by any of the inconvenient relationships that
grown-ups
have. Now we can be brother and sister, living together happily ever after, the sort people whisper about and wonder if there isn’t something strange going on. Just exactly how I wanted my life to turn out. But what does my life matter, if big brother has finally lost some weight.”
A wisp of a memory visited of how horrible I had been to Solstice, convincing her at four after a few strands came out in the comb that every bit of her hair was going to fall out and she’d better get used to wearing hats, when in truth I was angry my mother was dead, and taking it out on a weaker party wasn’t going to change that.
“Look, I’m sorry, man.” Edison had started to blubber. Perhaps he was fragile after the crushing disappointment of that soup and his humiliating demotion to humdrum dieter in a spoonful. Besides, never underestimate the effects of starvation on the brain. He’d cried a few days earlier because he couldn’t claw the packing tape off an Amazon shipment. “I shouldn’t have let you do this, man. Not when Feltch wasn’t cool with it. I shoulda gone off somewhere, on my own like a monk or something, and only showed my face again when I wasn’t a fucking embarrassment.”
Okay, I couldn’t keep up the brutality, though as it slipped away I knew I would miss it. I shuffled out, slid my plate on the table, and squeezed my brother’s hand.
“It’s not really your fault,” I said glumly. “This whole thing was my idea. Fletcher warned me up front. I didn’t take him seriously enough. I’m only blaming you because you’re here. Brothers and sisters get to treat each other like shit. It must be, like, in the Constitution. A
human right.
And in the end we’re still brother and sister because
you
can’t tell me you want a divorce. We’re stuck with each other. That’s what’s bad about us, but that’s what’s good, too. Maybe it helps me to have someone to yell at.”
“Yell your fuckin’ heart out, then.” I hadn’t bothered to provide him a napkin, so Edison blew his nose in his shirttail. “If it makes you feel better.”
“Even the other day. The bike ride. I knew we were being too chummy. Leaving Fletcher out. I knew that would make him mad. But I still hung with you. Because it was easier. We have a thing now. Fletcher’s harder for me to reach. I shouldn’t have asked you along in the first place. But I was anxious about spending the day with him. I thought I asked you to come because you could use the day out. But I obviously asked you for my own sake. To feel safe.”
“I make you feel safe?”
“Yeah.” I took a flavorless bite and chewed. “And Fletcher could tell. That I was sort of clinging to you. That was the last straw, I figure.” I pushed my plate away.
“I ain’t the only one gotta eat, babe.” He pushed it back. He closed my hand around my fork.
Sourly, I stabbed a lettuce leaf. “Sorry about the soup. Could have done better, for your first meal.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference. It’s just, you can’t help but fantasize . . .”
“I tried to describe the big letdown in April, but I could tell you didn’t believe me.”
“So what’s the moral of the story? Everything sucks?”
“Not everything. Food sucks. But, you know. Us, here. Sometimes. It hasn’t all totally completely sucked.”
“Put that on my gravestone,” said Edison. “
It hasn’t all totally completely sucked.
”
“That’s more than most people could claim.”
“You regret it, though?” asked Edison. “Do it all over again, you put me on that plane?”
I thought about it. I didn’t want to give him a cheap answer. “Nah,” I concluded. “I’d do it again, I guess. Something might have gone off the rails with Fletcher, even without Prague Porches. Maybe there’s something deeper wrong. At least . . .” I choked up a little. “At least I’m not all by myself.”
Being directly emotional with my brother always felt awkward. I think siblings are supposed to take each other for granted. Which has a bad reputation, but the world out there is precarious, as I’d recently discovered, and it’s a joy and a relief to take someone, anyone, for granted.
M
any of my neighbors would find this inexplicable, but I may not be the only one who looks back on the rest of that month with a backhanded nostalgia. Personally, I was desperate for distraction, and grateful to be pulled out of myself—to do good works on a larger canvas than my brother’s belly. They don’t call these things “disasters” for nothing, of course, and the reconstruction is still not completed to this day. But I was moved by how utterly Edison threw himself into the community effort. The brother who arrived nine months earlier would have put his feet up and watched the spectacle gleefully on TV.
New Holland is on raised ground, though multiple basements filled with water. I was sorry that my status as persona non grata meant I couldn’t give Cody and Fletcher a hand with moving his backlog of furniture in the basement to the ground floor; the table saw was too heavy for them to manage, and I gather my estranged husband’s most treasured tool of his trade was ruined. At Prague Porches, we were on the second floor, so we didn’t have to worry about Edison’s upright—which freed us to volunteer our services in Cedar Rapids. Once we’d secured our stock on upper shelves, I closed Monotonous until further notice, so that my employees could pull on rubber boots and lend a hand. It was the worst flood in Iowa on record, on a scale the state shouldn’t expect more than once every five hundred years.
For the first time, I discovered one line of work more fatiguing than a catering business: sandbagging. To deplete different sets of muscles, I mixed up the tasks—shoveling, passing bags down the line, and stacking pallets, though the job of keeping the sacks open while someone else shoveled we tried to reserve for kids, since whole families cropped up in droves. (Cody joined us on a couple of afternoons, but of course it was an issue, and most of the time she lent a hand nearer to New Holland with her father. Her primary job was to ascertain where we were working so that Fletcher could work somewhere else.) For five solid days, round the clock, thousands of volunteers from the area—and a handful of Katrina survivors who drove up from Louisiana with vats of Cajun chicken and a slightly knowing been-there-done-that attitude that got on a few people’s nerves—piled line upon line of sandbags along the Cedar River and at the entrances of businesses downtown. We relayed stacks around the Cedar Rapids Public Library while another set of volunteers packed books into cartons to shift them to the second story, and fortified the ground floor of Mercy Medical Center to protect the generators in the hospital’s basement.
