Big Brother (15 page)
“You can have one of our suitcases. We won’t miss it.” I made no move to retrieve another bag. “But Edison—where are you going to go?”
“Aw, Slack’ll take me in, for a while. I drive him a little bats, but we go way back. I got plenty of friends. My
whole
life’s not fantasy. So don’t you worry, I’ll get by. I always do, one way or another.”
We were awkward with one another. There was a chair at the desk, but I continued to stand. “What about work?”
“Oh, something’s bound to turn up eventually.” It was the kind of hazy assurance that most relatives took at face value, so they could get off the phone and go back to sorting the laundry. It felt artificial for us to regress to that airy “keeping in touch” whereby basically you’re on your own.
“I don’t understand why we couldn’t get you to play the piano more often,” I said. “You used to visit me and play all day. I could hardly get you to leave the house.”
“Complicated.” Edison pushed a few more toiletries into a zipper case. “More’n we got time for. I’ll get back to playing in due course. Just for now—bad associations.”
“With the piano?” But he was right; we didn’t have time. We had had time, of course. So I dropped it. “Hey, I bet you’re a bit short. What say we stop by the bank tomorrow, and I give you a little something to see you through.”
“It’s embarrassing, if you wanna know the truth. But Slack’s more likely to open the door with a smile if I show up with some bread.”
Merely bending down to pick up a stray pack of Camels put him out of breath. I used to love the way the blond tendrils corkscrewing from his head whipped when he ranged a keyboard; on a lean, younger man, the collar-length hair had looked sexy. But now that halo of curlicues rendered his head rounder and imparted a Little Lord Fauntleroy aspect; his arms and legs short in relation to his trunk, his proportions were those of a toddler. I’d never been attracted to my brother in some untoward sense that I was aware of, but I had always relished his being attractive to others. In my girlhood, association with a sinewy, good-looking guy whose jeans rode low on narrow hips had provided me a social ace in the hole every bit as powerful as a father who was on TV.
“Listen,” he said, fitting the Camels into an open carton. “I don’t know how to say this. You been pretty cool. Even with this company you got going—I mean, you’re the one who’s happening, with all the—interviews, and photo shoots and shit, everybody wanting a piece of you . . . I know what that’s like, believe it or not.” For a moment he returned to his old bluster; ever since the overflowing toilet, Edison had dropped his boastfulness cold. But I
wanted
him to be boastful. “Or I knew what it was like in my twenties. I used to be a pretty heavy cat.”
“I know. You’re still a heavy cat.”
“Very funny.”
“I meant in both senses,
dig
?”
“You making fun of me?”
“I should hope so.”
“Look, I was only saying—you’re busy, I get it. And I know I kind of overstayed my welcome. But it’s been great to have—a place to chill. And that kid Cody, she’s been—she’s pretty hip, man. Gonna be a heartbreaker someday. I just want to say . . .”
“You just want to say thank you. And then I say you’re welcome.”
“Yeah, whatever.” By and large Edison didn’t do gratitude, and his coming this close touched me.
“I wish I could ask you to stay a little longer. But Fletcher . . .” I wasn’t sure about telling him this, but I wanted him to understand what a bind I was in. “He said if you stayed here ‘five seconds’ past your flight departure tomorrow he wants a divorce.”
“Whoa! That cat must really hate me, man. Though what I ever did to the guy is beyond me. Don’t see how anybody could get that bent out of shape over a fucking chair.”
“It’s not just the chair. Fletcher’s an only child, and for him the brother-sister thing is suspicious. And he and I met on the late side. He missed out on a lot of my life, and all the
Joint Custody
stuff makes him feel more excluded. Maybe he thinks I have to actively choose him. Over you. To prove something. I haul you off to the airport, and then he’s the only man in my life again. Or almost—he doesn’t like my hanging with Oliver, either. It’s the same thing. One man, one woman, that’s all Fletcher understands.”
Watching Edison stack jazz magazines for recycling, I flashed on my seventeen-year-old brother packing just like this, but with more vigor, dashing around, loading a backpack with cassettes that were wrapped in stacks with masking tape to travel without cracking. Dropping out before his senior year, he’d been in the process of deserting me for New York to try his hand as a jazz musician. Given his age, I’d been braced for his departure after high school. But our mother had died the year before, and I wasn’t ready to lose my lone remaining ally. At least college would have entailed term breaks when he might have come back home, whereas his hitchhiking blindly across the continent threatened an indefinite exile. I remembered lingering dolefully in his room at fourteen, unsure when was the right time to give him his farewell present to remember me by—a bracelet of woven brass and copper wire that I’d soldered at summer camp—unsure whether to give it to him at all, in case it was square.
Joint Custody
had been renewed for another season, and would end up running two more years, during which I’d be left defenseless before our family’s script-enhanced alternative children without the aid of my older brother’s shared contempt. That was the period of the show during which Mimi was suing for full custody of the younger two kids, using every confidence they’d ever shared about their father against him in court. Maple was especially caught in the middle. Having been for years assiduously “controlling information,” she had to decide whether to stick to declarations of ignorance under oath. As Edison hulked about the guest room bunching socks, while down the hall my husband would be raging on his back wide awake, I recognized the pinched feeling that Floy Newport had evoked so well: wrenched between competing loyalties, destined to betray both parties, bound to please no one, including herself—although I worried if it was tawdry to understand your emotions through the aegis of a television character. See, I couldn’t help but recall how bereft Maple had been in the previous season, when her older brother Caleb also decamped upon coming of age to try his hand at becoming a jazz pianist. Since Sinclair Vanpelt was still under contract, the fictional Caleb only moved to Seattle, and continued to make appearances on the show to give his racked sister Maple advice on her deposition. At seventeen, Edison Real Person had shown Sinclair-slash-Caleb how it was really done if you were serious about jazz,
man
: you moved to fucking New York.
Barely old enough to shave, Edison had left for a dangerous city where he had no place to live, an odyssey he was now repeating a second time. When Edison picked up stakes for Manhattan as a teenager, I’d envied him; I’d felt abandoned. Yet I hadn’t feared for him. I’d had perfect faith that my seventeen-year-old brother would land in New York on his feet. Releasing Edison to the big bad world at forty-four was terrifying.
“Remember leaving for New York the first time?” I asked. “You seemed so manly to me then that I didn’t think twice about whether you’d manage. But now I appreciate you were only Tanner’s age, and I see how brave you were. You didn’t know anybody there. You just swung that pack on your back and stuck out your thumb.”
“Yeah, Travis thought it was a big ha-ha. Expected me to come back tail between legs within the week. That was motivating, dig? I had a lot on the line.”
“I wasn’t worried then. But I am now.”
“What’s the difference?”
I took a breath. “At seventeen, you weren’t morbidly obese.”
“Jesus, getting clinical on my ass.”
“So far I don’t think I’ve been clinical enough.” I pulled Edison to sit beside me on the bed. “I don’t have to tell you this. You’re putting yourself in the way of diabetes. Stroke. High blood pressure. Heart disease. You already have sleep apnea, which is also related to your weight.”
Edison looked bored.
“And that’s on top of making yourself miserable, and scotching the chance that any self-respecting woman will put a hand on your knee. All my girlfriends used to have such crushes on you! This is a waste, and an atrocity, and it has to stop.”
“Look, don’t take this wrong, but like I said—that’s my business.”
“Fletcher’s right, killing yourself is lots of people’s business. For me to keep pretending it has nothing to do with me—it’s wrong, morally wrong, if you can bear my sounding so unhip.”
I had no idea what I was going to say next until I said it. Inventing the whole thing as I went along, I was filled with a sense of sacrifice, but also of power. Much like Fletcher’s ultimatum the previous hour, this was a move that I could not take back:
“I want to make you a proposition. That you stay in New Holland. I will find you—I will find
us
an apartment. I will move in with you. I will take care of you, and support you financially.
But only if you lose weight
.”
Edison squinted. “How much weight?”
“
All of it.
Until you look like the photographs on your website.”
“Come on, man, got any idea how long that would take?”
“I’m not sure until I do the math. Many, many months. But it would have to be radical. Not a matter of skipping a second piece of cake.”
“You even know how?”
“I’ll find out. I’ll be your coach. I need to lose weight too. Besides, we both know ‘how’ really. It’s not rocket science. You don’t eat so goddamn much.”
“But what about Fletch? Your kids?”
“The kids, I can keep in touch with. But Fletcher—won’t like this,” I said, making the understatement of the decade. “I’d be taking a risk.”
Edison stared in silence. “
You
would do
that
for
me
?”
Both exhilarated and frightened by what I had just offered, I was tempted to say,
Actually, you’d better let me sleep on this
, though I realized I had been sleeping on exactly this for quite some time. “Yes.”
“Oh, man.” He shook his head, bewildered.
I stood and gripped his shoulders, looking him in the eye. “But the other question is: Would
you
do
this
for
me
?”
That was not quite the right formulation. In the fullness of time I’d regret it.
“Wow.” Edison’s mouth dropped, and I was glad of the wave of momentousness that crossed his face. I didn’t want him to undertake this lightly. I’d rather he not undertake it at all. “You cleared this with your man?”
“He’ll be a little surprised.”
“He’ll be motherfucking livid. You and me, in our own pad? Cat’s gonna hunt me down and kill me, man.”
“Luckily we don’t keep guns.”
“Only one thing would piss that fucker off more than my being fat.” His eyes went steely. “My
not
being fat.”
“There will be no cheating,” I said. “It will make your leaving for New York City at seventeen without a dime or a phone number seem like a trip to the post office. Because, Edison—it will be, bar none, the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”
I
didn’t sleep much,” Edison croaked from his swirl of covers when I poked my head in his door. It was already ten a.m., and we had a great deal to organize—or I did.
“Good. If you’re unsettled, you’re taking this seriously. Now, get up.” I wasn’t accustomed to ordering my older brother around. After letting him gorge himself into ever more parlously poor health for two solid months, the while keeping my eyes timidly averted like a “mousy dishrag,” the bossiness was refreshing.
Fletcher had absconded to his basement and the kids were in school, so once Edison shambled downstairs we had the kitchen to ourselves—in the middle of which he stood, lost, befuddled, turning one way and then another, at last appealing, “What do I do?”
“That’s the right attitude.” I had worked out the protocol while lying next to Fletcher’s ramrod body, making out the dim gray outlines of the drapes as my mind raced. “For now, we are moving immediately into a motel. From there we will find an apartment. The end of food as you know it will not begin until we find permanent lodging. In the meantime you will see my doctor. This interim will also give you time to either marshal your resolve, or conclude you’re not up to it.”
“What if I’m not?”
I was glad he realized the commitment was so forbidding that he might not be able to make it. “Then no apartment, and it’s straight to the airport.”
“You’d hate me,” he said morosely.
“I wouldn’t hate you. I’d be disappointed in you is all.”
“That’s what Mother used to say. Cut me to the quick.”
There was more than a whiff of the maternal about this whole project, and I would have to live with having acquired not two children but three.
“But, breakfast . . .” Edison wafted his fingers. “What’s the drill?”
“I’m hoping we can find our private ground zero within the week. During which you may eat. But I want you to use this time to think about why you eat, and to reflect on the fact that every morsel you put in your mouth you’ll effectively have to spit back out. That is, everything you eat from now on you will have to
uneat
. This morning, I suggest coffee and toast. You can devour the loaf and slather it with a pound of butter if you have to, so long as you contemplate the extra starvation that every bite will cost you. Which may induce . . . the dawning of restraint.”
Even Edison’s two slices made him self-conscious. “I wish you wouldn’t watch me like that.”
“Get used to it.”
I fixed him with the same steady stare as he raised the half-and-half over his mug. His usual ratio was one part coffee to two parts whitener, leaving a thick, tepid milkshake that over the morning he would down at least four times. Under my hard eye, he dribbled only a couple of tablespoons and scowled at the results. “It’s not the same.”
“Better not be,” I said. “Ever look at the calorie count of that stuff? Twenty per tablespoon. I haven’t said anything, which I’m ashamed of, but you’ve been going through a
gallon
of half-and-half every five days.” I scrawled on the kitchen phone pad. “At five thousand six hundred and seventy calories, that’s nearly two pounds’ worth of fat per week. So enjoy white coffee while you can. You’ll have to learn to drink it black.”
That meant
I’d
have to learn to drink it black. It wasn’t only Edison who needed a few days to “marshal resolve.” Black coffee on an empty stomach made me ill.
I scurried up to my study to book rooms at Blue Cottages, a motel with separate white clapboard huts and cobalt shutters only two blocks down the road; to begin with, I’d be virtually next door to the kids while they got used to the new state of play. My starting at noises from downstairs recalled the covert, traitorous sensation of buying Edison’s plane ticket in the first place. I still hadn’t talked to Fletcher.
I fetched bags from the attic, a large one for me and another for Edison’s spillover. I packed in the master bedroom on tiptoe, and simply removing my toothbrush from our communal glass felt disloyal. To the naïve eye, this furtive stuffing of underwear would have looked like a wife breaking her wedding vows—vows that I had taken in great earnest. I desperately didn’t want Fletcher to catch me in this sneak-thief mode, his heart stabbing with fear that I was leaving him.
Which I was. I was lying to myself. I wasn’t sure if I was leaving for a few days or for many months, but in any case this departure was a violation of contract.
I was helping Edison with his luggage—that is, taking it down for him—when the basement door slammed. Fletcher rounded from the hall and bounded up the stairs to take the suitcase from me, the spring in his step restored. However chimerical Edison’s European travels, his bags were packed, and that was all that mattered. “Hey,” said Fletcher, hefting the bulging brown bag effortlessly downstairs. “Thought I’d come up and say goodbye before you guys leave for the airport.”
Despite my coffee’s furtive dash of half-and-half, I still felt sick. “There’s been a change of plans.” I trailed him to the foyer, where he plunked Edison’s bag. “We’re not going to the airport.”
Fletcher wheeled. “You do remember what I told you?”
“That if Edison stayed
here
five seconds after that plane takes off you and I were”—I couldn’t say it—“going to have problems. So he won’t be
here
. As for the plane, you didn’t say he had to be on it.”
“Pretty legalistic.”
“If you’re going to make ultimatums, you’ve got to expect I’m going to adhere to them to the letter. Anyway, I’ve booked us into Blue Cottages for now.”
Fletcher had a good ear for pronouns. “Us.”
Edison was bringing up the rear with his lighter second bag, with which he was still struggling. I let him struggle. I thought: That’s another twenty calories down.
“I’m going with him. Then I’ll find us an apartment. I’m going to help him lose weight.”
Fletcher’s eyes could have burned pinholes in paper. He stood supremely still. With exceptions, like the Boomerang debacle, his wiring was reversed. What triggered rage in most men drove Fletcher Feuerbach to extremities of composure.
“Losing weight is generally an activity one can do by oneself,” he said, his enunciation precise. “In New York as well as Iowa, from what I’ve read.”
“You’re an athlete. So you should appreciate the concept of a personal trainer.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t need one. Edison does. Maybe I do too, for that matter. I’d be a lot easier to live around if I dropped a few pounds myself.”
“Let me get this straight.” Fletcher looked between me and Edison, who had huffed to the foyer. “You’re
moving in
with your brother, so you can read each other the nutritional label on the cottage cheese. How long is this hand-holding supposed to last?”
“If I catch him with a single Ho-Ho”—I shot my brother a look—“it will last as long as it takes me to drive right back home. At eighty miles an hour, running lights. But if he shows determination, and follows my instructions—my
orders
—and it seems to be working . . . Well, I can’t say how long until he gets on a scale. He can’t use ours; the numbers don’t go that high.” I no longer beat about the obesity bush.
Fletcher looked straight at Edison and employed an aggressive third person. “He can’t do it.”
“We’ll see about that, bro,” said Edison. “You don’t know me well as you think.”
“I know your type. Before I rescued my kids from a lying, thieving, abusive meth-head, I heard more high-flown resolutions than you’ve had hot suppers. It’s just more self-deceiving bullshit. Put you alone in a room with a plate of french fries, and the spuds win every time. The will is a muscle. Yours is flabby as the rest of you,
bro
.”
“You got no idea what I been through. My version of being tested ain’t going on some jive-ass bike ride. So you want to put some money on it, man?”
“What, so you could pay off the bet with my wife’s money? Think I’ll pass. Wouldn’t want to double up your embarrassment.”
“We’ll see who’s embarrassed, motherfucker.”
This was the first instance in which Edison had gone public with what must have still been a pretty wobbly pledge. It was a cold perspective on my own husband: Fletcher could prove a useful tool. Edison would dislike failing in front of me; he would
revile
failing in front of Fletcher. But if my husband’s antagonism was beneficial for my brother, the moment was fast approaching when I should also be keeping an eye on what was good for me. Lest I sound improbably selfless, in truth I was already safeguarding my
project
. I had always been single-minded in this way, and the blinkered focus was really a form of egotism:
my
project.
“Could you give us some privacy, please?” Fletcher asked my brother with rare civility.
“Well, the one thing not up for grabs is I’m outta here. I’ll be in the car.” Edison marched out wheeling the lighter bag, his carriage as stiff and upright as his mass permitted. Being left alone with my husband made me strangely fearful.
“Are you also walking out on my children?” Pronouns again. With which Fletcher sometimes took his children back.
“Any apartment I even consider will be within walking distance of this house. They can visit us as much as they like.” Since I didn’t also mention being able to visit them, I must have known what was coming next.
Fletcher didn’t get mad; he got sad. Which was worse. He was both tender and matter-of-fact. It meant something to me that the words came heavily, and there was no malevolence in his voice. “I can’t promise I’ll welcome you back.”
However gently put, it was a right hook. “This isn’t against you.”
“You’re leaving your husband and kids in the lurch for your fat-fuck brother. How’s that not against us?”
“I’m taking some time out from one family to attend to another,” I said staunchly. “Why would you punish me for that?”
“I’m not threatening to ‘punish’ what you’d obviously like me to see as an admirable largeness of heart. I’m not being spiteful. Really. But you do something like this, and it has consequences. For how I feel. Not any different from the physical world. Bring a hammer down on a piece of molding, it cracks in half. And not because the molding
wants
to crack in half. It’s simple cause and effect. Your being willing to throw us all over for this fool’s errand—it makes me feel expendable. Expendable for jack.”
I liked the way my husband talked. What other people often missed in his commonly taciturn manner is that he is very thoughtful—usually in both senses of the word, if presently in only one. “It’s not a fool’s errand,” I said weakly.
“That slob’s not going to drop any weight. You’ve got him all worked up about some grandiose scheme, which mostly appeals to him because it means not having to
face the music
back in New York. You’ll keep paying his tab, and he doesn’t have to sort out his life. But the minute he can’t have a cracker, it’s over.
Why
is he so important to you?”
“He has to be important to somebody.”
“ . . . What if I forbid you?”
“Don’t try that. I seem to recall skipping the ‘honor and obey’ part.”
“I forbid you,” he said limply. There was a hint of the sardonic, but he wanted to make it official.
“All right, I forbid you to forbid me. Checkmate.”
“He’s a sponger you’re related to by accident. I’m your husband by choice. If you ‘love’ that loudmouth it’s a kneejerk genetic thing; I’m supposed to be the real love of your life. Frankly, I’m
insulted
.”
“You’re choosing to be insulted, which is perverse. Why can’t you understand that I need to accomplish something more meaningful than making
doll babies
”
—
I used Travis’s flattering term—“that torture people with what’s wrong with them? That shove up in their faces how repetitious and tiresome they are, that make people seem cartoonish and ridiculous?” It came out in a rush. “Because I strongly believe that if someone doesn’t do something—and I’m the only one who can—my brother is going to die.”
He sighed. “Well, well, another trump card.”
“I don’t play it lightly. Can you imagine how I’d feel if he, you know, collapsed from a heart attack, and I’d never lifted a finger to help?”
“So this is a big preventive guilt trip. An insurance policy. To be able to tell yourself, when he collapses anyway, that you tried.”
It didn’t sound so great put that way, but I conceded, “That’s about the sum of it.”
“Then you’re really going to do this.” I was surprised it took him so long to circle around to the perfect fruitlessness of his appeal. He knew me.
“Yes. I don’t know if he can do it. If he can’t, I’ll come home.”
“If I want you home.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll risk that I won’t.”
“If the alternative is walking outside and telling Edison we’re going to the airport after all—leaving him all alone, without a hope in hell of losing an ounce without someone to cheer him on—abandoning him to mockery and ostracism, and letting him drop dead in five years if he keeps overeating at this rate—yes.”
Fletcher sagged against the banister. “That puts me in my place. On your list of priorities, my kids and I come somewhere between the toilet paper and the aluminum foil.”
“Being anywhere near the toilet paper makes you pretty important.” The levity fell flat.
“I already had one wife who didn’t rate her obligations to her family.”
“I cannot put methamphetamine addiction on a par with a crash diet.”
Impasse: my willfulness versus Fletcher’s incredulity. At least in his next laying down of the law I detected the glimmer of recognition that this was actually happening.
“I don’t want you dropping by all the time because you forgot your hairbrush. If you’re ready to come back for keeps, we can discuss that. But if you need something, ask the kids for it”—the go-between image this conjured was piquantly reminiscent of
Joint Custody
—“because I don’t want a wife half in, half out. I don’t want to suffer a lot of little goodbyes. I’d rather go through one big one. Come here.”