But I wasn’t giving my employees enough credit. You have to provide Iowans good reason to be unkind, and if anything a conspicuous weakness for pork rinds made my nightclubbing East Coast brother seem more down-home.
“Don’t you believe that guff this lady spouts about Monotonous going down the tubes any minute,” said Brad, the weedy guy who inserted the recording mechanisms. “This biz is going like gangbusters. Gonna be one distant day when people in this country run out of folks they wanna make fun of.”
I explained that Edison was a jazz pianist in New York City.
“You mean, like—
doo-doo-doo-REEE-do-REE-do-do-do-dum-dum-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-dum-do-dum . . .
?” Brad’s screeching recital was comically cacophonous.
Edison laughed. “More like,
dit. Du-dit. Du-dooo-doodly-do . . .”
He completed an impromptu ska line with a catchy swing beat, and everyone clapped.
“Lord, that stuff’s right over my head!” cried Angela, tugging the arms of a miniature denim jacket right-side out. “Afraid you’re more in the land of Barry Manilow, honey. Now, it’s a shame you’ve missed the corn. But while you’re out here, make your sister lay in some good country-style ribs. And head over to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum—it’s a real treat.”
“Right after we visit the monument to Enron.” Since Angela didn’t pick up, Edison swallowed any more cracks about this state memorializing an Iowa native still a byword in the rest of the nation for catastrophe and incompetence. When he bantered genially about what kind of a whip his kid sister cracked, I demonstrated: time to get back to work.
“We contract out for the electronics,” I explained once we’d retired to my office. “But we do the audio. At first I had customers send their own recordings of the subjects—who around here we call ‘vics,’ like in cop shows—so the dolls could speak in the vic’s actual voice. But we got complaints that, even if the vic said, ‘Big diff, baby, big diff!’ fifty times a day, it was the dickens to get it on tape. Also, skulking around after spouses with secret digital recorders in their pockets made people feel creepy. So we hire actors, and I think the satire is more successful hyped up in a different voice—and it softens the ribbing somehow. Matching the right actor to the script is part of the art. Among other things, I’m a casting director.”
“You gotta admit, as manufacturing goes,” said Edison, lowering into my office armchair, “this operation’s pretty out.”
“I know it’s nuts,” I said easily. “Still, people make stupider products.”
“Like what?”
“Whole factories in China do nothing but produce ghastly, hideous, pointless toys for American kids, who break them after playing with them once. I make attractive toys for adults out of natural materials that become treasured members of the family. And these dolls aren’t only a way for people to tell each other what drives them crazy. They’re also a way to show they love each other.”
“How you figure that? Seems to me what you’d buy when you were fucking dark on somebody, man.”
“It’s surprisingly difficult to nail people verbally. Some customers take months studying the subject and taking notes. That intensity of attention is a compliment. And for us at Monotonous, it’s been a mini psych course. You should see some of these phrase lists.” I rifled the papers on my desk. “They’re tiny character studies. Like this one. Louisa’s working up his costume, and calls him ‘Dr. Doom.’ ” I handed Edison the printed-out photo of a gangly guy with wild red hair, his hands despairing midair, along with its accompanying script:
We’re not going to make it.
All I do all day is
RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN
!
Don’t ask
me
.
This is impossible.
I don’t have any time.
It’s a
disaster
!
I have too much to do.
It’s not going to happen.
Fugetaboutit.
We’d never find a parking place.
That won’t work.
I bet it’s sold out already.
Can’t do it!
What are we
doin’
?
I give up!
“Real life of the party,” said Edison.
“Chronic paralysis and defeatism. Revealing, no? Or this one’s fun.” In the photo, a short, plump young woman in a spangled spandex skirt was raising a glass to the camera; one of my staff was bound to have fun with all that jewelry. The phrases in the commissioning email read:
I don’t have
that
many credit cards.
Over the next year, that’s only fifty cents a day!
No problem, we can take out another home equity loan.
This house is worth a fortune!
I’m not
telling
you how much it cost.
But that bag was half price!
All you care about is
money
.
We only have a
cash flow crisis.
I owe it to myself to have a
few nice things
.
[Meekly] I guess I went over my texting limit.
I’m not having this conversation unless you use a civil tone of voice!
“We’ve had more than one of those. This one’s more subtle.” I handed over a photo of an elderly woman in a severe brown dress who looked both self-righteous and aggrieved. Probably an in-law or grandparent, prone to deferring:
Oh, I’ll have whatever flavor of ice cream no one else wants.
Don’t turn down the air-conditioning on
my
account; I can always wear my coat.
Don’t mind me, it’s what the
children
would like to do that matters.
No, no, if Betsy wants to watch
American Idol
, I can always read.
Let Doug take the folding chair. I can sit in the dirt.
You’ll do no such thing! Why, they say there’s nothing better for your back than a rock-hard mattress.
If everyone else wants the window open, who am I to say closed? It’s a democratic country.
I’m perfectly happy with plain tap water.
Oh, you all go on without me! I’d just be in the way.
You
have the last waffle, dear. I can always have gruel.
“This bitch is a bummer, man,” said Edison, surprised to find my enterprise more engaging than the average toy factory.
“We call her the ‘L’il Ole Me’ doll. Now, theoretically the ‘bummer’ doesn’t realize she’s passive-aggressive. Still, if that lady has a shred of self-awareness, next time she’ll ask for strawberry ice cream, period. Because that’s what she
wants
and she can have what she
wants
if she asks for it directly.
“Oh, and this one came in this morning. It’s my latest favorite.” The photo showed a fit, overbearing wiseass wearing a “Biff’s Bail Bondsman” bowling shirt and hefting an axe. It was easy to imagine him lambasting:
Get a grip.
Suck it up.
Stop your whining.
Hop to!
That excuse would never wash in the
army.
[Sung, to Cat Stevens tune]
Oh, baby, baby, it’s a hard world!
Nobody
cares
, capiche?
Hang tough, bud.
On yer bike!
Give it a rest.
Don’t be such a
pussy.
Shut your pie hole.
Keep a lid on it.
Yeah, tell me another one.
I do a hundred push-ups every morning, kid—you could do
five.
I grinned. “How’d you like that asshole for your dad?”
“Yeah, well, we got our own asshole.”
“We should really make a Monotonous of Travis.”
“Get the impression I couldn’t afford it.”
“Gratis. You have connections. ‘
Back in the seventies
’ ”
—
I assumed our father’s gruff, overaggressive masculinity—“ ‘
television actors got no respect!
’ ”
“But this is an upmarket product. Toys for the rich.”
“Not exclusively. Besides, when you play at Irradiated—”
“Iridium.”
“That place had a thirty-dollar cover for one set. Two-drink minimum. You serve a wealthy clientele yourself.”
Somewhere in that billboard of a face, I detected a wince. Edison reflexively rooted a chocolate bar from a jacket I wished didn’t have such voluminous pockets.
“Why do you think that’s going to make you feel any better?”
Edison raised his eyebrows warily. “Chocolate makes most people feel better. And what makes you think I need to ‘feel better’ anyhow, sister?”
The air went prickly whenever anyone went near Edison’s food. “I was only thinking we’ll be eating dinner soon. Maybe you should save your appetite.”
“Got appetite to spare,” he said as if raising a gun.
I backed off. Ever since obesity had become a social issue on top of a personal one, big people must have encountered the conviction that what they ate was everyone else’s business. In truth that chocolate bar did feel intensely like my business, but only because he was my brother. Whenever he ate rich or sweet things around me I got agitated, no less so than if he’d carved himself with a razor blade in plain view.
As we ambled to the car, Edison still had caramel in his mouth, and when he said something I didn’t understand him. He swallowed. “Pretty
impressive
,” he repeated with irritation, stopping to look me in the eye. “I mean—this company of yours. It wasn’t real to me. Like, I understood the catering bag. I thought that was cool because it was a fucking lot of work, if nothing else. But this Monotonous thing. It’s a bigger deal. Don’t take this wrong, but I’d never have thought you had it in you. Like, organizationally even. This factory is whack, man
.
But it’s a big achievement, and I’m”—his voice quavered as he put a chocolate-stained hand on my shoulder—“I’m real proud of you.”
That had been difficult for him to get out, and I admired him for saying it anyway, so when I rejoined, “I’m proud of you, too,” that’s what I meant.
C
ody adored her uncle. She continued to express the easy physical affection that had come so naturally when she instantly intuited how often he must have been subjected to ridicule and avoidance. Though never a kid person, Edison was a sucker for my stepdaughter. Only her regular entreaties finally moved him to come near the piano, about which if I didn’t know better I’d have said he was phobic.
Cody was still working on “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” having discovered the LP in my ragged collection and ordered a Simon and Garfunkel songbook online. Thanks to Edison’s coaching, she was learning to play against the song’s overwrought sentimentality.
“Don’t milk it,” my brother would advise over her shoulder. “Be cool.”
“Why don’t
you
show me, then?” she insisted one evening.
I dithered setting the table to keep a curious eye on their exchange. I couldn’t understand why my brother hadn’t been playing. In my late twenties when a neighbor was giving it away for the price of removal, I’d secured that secondhand Yamaha upright for Edison in the first place, since he refused to visit me in Iowa unless he could practice. Hence one of the points of friction between Fletcher and Edison on that seminal visit had been piano morning, noon, and night. Fletcher got sick of it. So I’d never have expected the opposite problem: that Edison wouldn’t touch the keys.
“
Please
,” Cody implored. “You stayed with us when I was little, and you played all the time. You were great!”
“Huh,” said Edison. “You remember that, babe?”
“It’s one of the main reasons I decided to take piano. You inspired me.” (I wasn’t sure this was true.) She threw her arms around her uncle’s ratty black cardigan the size of an afghan. “
Please, please!
”
He rested his hands on her shoulders before removing them quickly, as if afraid he might be arrested. “Okay, then.”
They traded places, and the bench creaked. The eerie disproportion between player and piano put me in mind of Schroeder, banging out Beethoven on a toy.
He played the first verse straight. There was a funny hesitation in his playing—a delay while he found the chords. But by the time he hit the refrain he was striking the keys with more surety. I’d seldom heard him play a familiar tune without—well, I know this makes me sound ignorant, but to my ear?—without messing it up. In wonderment, I stopped folding the napkin before the battered maroon armchair. I’d always found that song a bit much; the recorded version was hyped with yearning strings. But Edison’s rendition was calm and wistful. It was beautiful. I felt a pang. Only when he played a regular song in a regular way did I realize how very fine a pianist he was.
Maybe it was his beginning the tune without embellishment or departure that enabled him to bring me along, but this time, when he started another verse and the chords began to bend, I didn’t fight the changes in my head, but heard the logic of the progression, in which the tune was recognizable, yet—better. He kept taking the chords into a more dissonant range until the song lost all semblance of the bathos that contaminated the cloying track I grew up with. Just when I started to resist, when the song was in danger of getting clamorous, the original melody lost, he brought it back, and played a final refrain straight again—sweet, mournful, no violins. I guess that was the first time I thought maybe the song, at its core, was pretty good, too.
Cody burst into applause, and I joined her.
“Now, why don’t you do that more often?” I asked softly.
Edison shot me a dense look. “You got all night?” Then the legs of the bench shrieked on the wooden floor, and no amount of Cody’s cajoling would get him to return.
With that one recollection I wouldn’t want to imply that matters in our household were harmonious. Dinners were a battlefield. Ever since being blinded by the light in the aisles of Hy-Vee, Fletcher had prepared most of our evening meals (an invasion of my territory that really shouldn’t have rankled so, given the trouble he saved me). Following Edison’s arrival, my husband’s fare had grown only more viciously nutritious. We were drowning in bulgur and quinoa. But he couldn’t stop Edison from adding butter to the grains, or burying his tempeh in pepper jack; my brother was a guest, and a grown-up.
Then there were the other evenings, when Edison cooked. He made chili by the vat, and boasted his lasagna—three pans of it—used five kinds of cheese. Even with Edison’s industrial forklifting of these quantities at dinner, the leftovers were overwhelming, and the freezer began to bulge with plastic containers and foil-wrapped squares. On nights Edison concocted Fletcher’s version of traif, my husband would prepare his own separate meal, baking an unadorned fillet of defrosted pollock in the toaster oven and squeezing his pot of short-grain brown rice onto the one burner Edison hadn’t co-opted. Fletcher’s refusal even to taste what Edison had spent all day preparing infuriated my brother. Also, Fletcher perching at the end of the table with his special little fish and his special little rice made him seem prissy and aloof.
I acted grateful for Edison’s massive meals, which made my brother feel less of a parasite. Yet cooking made his life all the more about food. Skillets of simmering ground beef allowed for plenty of snitching, and the volume of his dishes slyly dwarfed the chef’s ample portions at table. It was our kitchen, and he was only able to install the ingredients thanks to the cash I slipped him and the loan of Fletcher’s pickup. In providing the venue and materials, I was complicit. Though avoiding our bathroom scale as consistently as Edison avoided the piano, I’d surely put on two or three more pounds myself.
My brother’s generosity extended to making the kitchen look like Chechnya, but not to cleaning it up. Thus I spent the end of those evenings scrubbing pots and wiping counters, while Edison picked crusts from a moussaka whose fried eggplant had absorbed an entire quart of extra-virgin olive oil. With Fletcher retired to bed, we’d open a bottle of wine and stay up late, recalling especially egregious examples of Travis’s desperate bids to wrest “has-been” into the present tense.
“Ever consider reverting to Halfdanarson?” I asked one night, propping a foot on the dining table and tipping my chair back. “The associations with Appaloosa are getting embarrassing.”
“ ‘
Edison Halfdanarson
’ would never fit on a poster. ’Sides, kiddo, I made my rep with Appaloosa. Stuck with it.”
“Mother thought it was hilarious when you took Travis’s hokey surname. She thought you’d grow out of it.”
“I grew into it. Appaloosa attracts attention. Halfdanarson—no offense, sis—sounds like a clod. A nobody.”
“Not anymore,” I said sharply. With any allusion to Baby Monotonous the air curdled, so I returned to our stock fodder. “Remember the episode when Mimi was trying to manipulate the kids into taking her maiden name? Saying stuff like, ‘Maple
Barnes
—has a ring to it’ and talking up her ‘estimable’ lineage. One of the better shows. Funny—think they picked those surnames to mean something?
Barns
are civilized, manmade structures, and
fields
are part of nature, like Emory’s environmental thing, but
barns
and
fields
still go together, as if Emory and Mimi were meant for each other after all . . .”
Edison snorted. “You give those guys
way
too much credit. Ever notice how you’re always sticking up for that series?”
I laughed. “Maybe I don’t want to believe it was totally appalling.”
“But you watch a few lately? In real life?”
“Unfortunately, yes. It hasn’t aged well. Still—we never missed one, did we? Every Wednesday night—we’d go through that game of pretending to forget or having something else to do, but we always ended up in front of the set at nine. I kind of liked it when I was younger, and Travis watched it with us, too.”
“That was the tip-off, man. When he stopped. That’s when he started up with Joy Markle.”
“Maybe it’s hard to blame him. Mother always had a headache. I don’t think she saw more than a handful of episodes. He must have felt, you know, snubbed.”
“Hell, she hated it. She hated the show and what being a TV star did to Travis. She hated L.A. She hated all the phonies Travis swelled around with. Her life, what she wanted, you know, the singing thing, just got—run over.”
“Her death may have been a metaphor at that,” I said wistfully. “Still, you ever wonder whether we rag on Travis mostly because he’s alive? I mean, Mother died before we could look at her critically, from an adult perspective. That protects her.”
Edison grunted. “Guess it’s possible that if she were around today she’d drive us nuts. And that one record she made,
Magnolia Blossoms
, the vanity job? I swiped the last copy from Travis. Doubt she coulda made it as a pro. Voice was too fragile.”
“
She
was too fragile. But she did sing with an unusual purity. I used to love it when she didn’t think anyone was home and she’d light into ‘I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger’ beside the pool. It was even better when you accompanied her—all those Cole Porter tunes you two worked up, like ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’? That’s how I always picture her, standing behind you at the keyboard and singing ‘
I di-ie a little
.’ She’d have been thrilled you made it as a pianist. If she could see you now . . .” I looked away.
He wasn’t offended. “Hey, you still remember the words? To the theme song?”
“Gosh, I haven’t tested myself for years.”
“
Now, Emory Fields is a right-on dad
,” Edison began, his voice deep and robust. I should have warned him to keep it down, since it was two a.m., but when I joined in I was too curious about whether I could still summon the lyrics.
Maybe people with a more Christian upbringing never forget the words to “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful.” Others are able to light into “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving” decades after memorizing the Gerard Manley Hopkins to get an A in English. I’m not sure if they mean anything—these permanent scorings into our skulls, like engravings on a tombstone. In any event, it turned out that one such carving in my head would be the last memory to erode in a nursing home. Indeed, if I ever fail to recall the theme song to
Joint Custody
in full, you can turn out the lights:
Now, Emory Fields is a right-on dad,
But his cool hippie shtick’s gettin’ older.
That flower power doesn’t heat his pad,
And his homemade shack’s gettin’ colder.
The pit latrine doesn’t seem so rad;
With no indoor john, his lady smolders.
Refrain:
Joi-oi-nt Custody!
Fra-a-ctured family!
Mom hates Dad and Dad hates Mom—
That ain’t what they cooed when you were little.
They keep on sayin’ it’s not your fault
But here’s the mystery riddle:
You never did think it was your fault.
But still you’re caught squeezed in the middle.
So Mimi packed, took her maiden name,
Passed the bar, and moved back into the city.
Uptight, upright, she’s a grown-up dame,
But one side of this split is quite a pity.
The only thing Emory wouldn’t let her claim:
One plain nice girl, two gifted kiddies.
[Refrain]
Though Teensy Fields’s a mathematical whiz,
One-plus-one don’t make two in this equation.
Getting Mom and Dad together is sister Maple’s biz,
But they won’t respond to her persuasion.
Hipper than a hippie, Caleb’s keen to play jazz,
Leave the parents to their petty confrontations.
[Refrain]
Whose side are you on?
Whose side are you on?
Whose side are you on?
MINE!
The tune was a little drippy, if still the sort of melody that, once wormed into your head, tyrannizes the rest of your day. But the refrain had a hard-rock bash-bash that didn’t lend itself to the under-breath delivery appropriate for the hour. On the show, too, that last add-on finale had been shouted over a wild drum track, “
MINE!
” consonant with a shimmering cymbal crash, which I’d duplicated by reaching with a wooden spoon to clang a stainless-steel mixing bowl in the dish drainer.
“I swear,” I wheezed, doubled over laughing, “that ‘
one plain nice girl, two gifted kiddies
’ line traumatized me for years—”
I clapped my mouth shut, took my foot off the dining table, and brought the handcrafted front chair legs to the floor. Edison straightened in the recliner and rearranged his cardigan as my husband marched to the sink for a glass of water. For a minute nobody said anything, though Fletcher shot a pointed look at the empty wine bottle. “Are you,” he said measuredly to me, “ever coming to bed?”
“Of course,” I said. “I didn’t realize how late it was. Sorry.”
What would appear my transgression was that we had been loud and woken my husband, which was inconsiderate. He’d be up in three hours, though he didn’t have to be up in three hours, so that wasn’t what I felt bad about. When Fletcher loomed in the doorway in his robe, I was inevitably reminded of the way Travis’s entrance into our Tujunga Hills kitchen had pooped the party when we were kids, and we’d fiddle with homework or mutely load the dishwasher, waiting for our father to go away. So my real treachery was replicating that old social geometry. Fletcher and I were the ones who were supposed to
hang.
My husband and I should have stopped talking when my brother walked in.
T
o the extent that I was looking forward to Edison’s departure for his tour of Portugal and Spain at the end of November, it was overwhelmingly because of this
Joint Custody
–esque “caught squeezed in the middle” business. When I came home from Monotonous, did I loiter in the kitchen with Edison, or head to the basement to say hello to Fletcher? If I did the latter, my husband would keep feeding a piece of timber into his deafening table saw while wearing plastic goggles sufficiently hazed with sawdust that I couldn’t have any idea what was going on behind them. I’d wait for the operation to be completed before I waved, but rarely earned more than a nod before he started cutting another piece. What was the use? I’d go back upstairs. If Fletcher did emerge later to make dinner that night, Edison would be yammering on the sidelines from his maroon throne, usually telling jazz stories. (“Jarrett is such a prima donna,” Edison might opine, “that he’ll stop the performance if anyone in the audience so much as
coughs
. I ain’t kidding—during winter concerts they actually hand out free
cough drops
to the whole crowd before the precious maestro deigns to touch the keys. Or he’ll lead the audience in a ‘group cough’ to get it out of their system. Give me a break!” It wasn’t subtle: Edison was fiercely jealous of Keith Jarrett, one of my brother’s few contemporaries of whom the rest of us had actually heard.) I could have tolerated Edison’s garrulousness if it weren’t for the fact that he never said anything. I mean anything with honest emotional content. He loved to spout information, and he wasn’t a bad raconteur. But Edison could talk all day, at the end of which no one knew him any better than before.