A Perfectly Good Family (13 page)

Instead, at nineteen Mordecai built a shrine under the Franklin Street post office to a whole aspect of reality my father abhorred: the physical world. While Mordecai stockpiled every drill and sander he could lay hands on, my father despised and abused mechanisms of any kind. Technology expressed its animosity in return: chainsaws sputtered in his hands; two laptops in a row exploded. On winter mornings when the Volvo wouldn’t start, Truman took to commanding my father to get out of the car and to step back three feet, at which point, for Truman, the station wagon turned over like a charm.

My father felt superior to objects and refused to stoop to their level. As a result, he was always putting the wrong oil in the lawnmower or savaging the gearbox in the Volvo with a ruthless, careless arrogance he sometimes transferred to his children. He would botch plastering drywall because he regarded himself as above drywall, though the plaster always got the last laugh. My father was an ambitious, wilful man used to getting his own way, and this showed in his strong-arming of the inanimate. People, in fact, were easier to push around; the objects fought back. I’m sure that’s why he didn’t like them.

What’s more, he was mistrustful of anything that wasn’t instilled with qualities of good and evil. He delighted in proclaiming a machine ‘poorly designed’ (i.e. he just broke it), because that meant it was bad. But most things just are. They may be predestined for obsolescence, but not heaven or hell. It was no accident that my father became a judge, for when denied the power to praise or upbraid he felt helplessly irrelevant. Finding a whole three-dimensional universe outside his jurisdiction must have been horrifying.

My mother, by contrast, had an uncanny mechanical knack, and in the absence of my brothers would cajole my father away from his jammed typewriter, to fiddle with frequent success. She understandably identified with the inert, manipulated by its master, whose only capacity to resist resided in its passive inability to comprehend what was required of it.

Though dubbed The Bulldozer by my parents at an early age, Mordecai more than any of us had an instinctive grasp of lawnmowers that must have come from thinking from the inside, where my father would simply attack from without in blind, bigoted ignorance. Had Mordecai brought to his three marriages the same gentleness and intuition with which I had seen him tinker lovingly with his table saw, no woman no matter how crazy would have ever walked out. If relations to objects are at all evocative of relations to people, then Mordecai was naturally compassionate where my father was a brute.

I skipped Krispey Kreme and turned down Franklin Street, where the bumpers of Mordecai’s army truck delineated the stumpy contour I associated with my brother. Everything he owned was thick and blunt; his suitcases were heavy-gauge aluminium with rounded corners, his three-mil leather boots had
dull reinforced toes, so that bluntness is a physical shape I associate with stubbornness, resistance and relentless, ploughing aggression. One of his inventions was ‘wooden pillows’, two of which he’d given my parents for watching TV: great slabs of laminated oak with routered edges. Only Mordecai the Obdurate would think to make pillows out of wood.

As I skirted the truck down the drive, my pulse girlishly quickened, and I reminded myself I need no longer be so bowled over by my older brother’s job as a small businessman. The shine might have gone off his colourful rebellions against my parents as well—mutiny against tee-totallers had been too easy and had gone too far. In his rejection of formal education, he was left defending a Swiss-cheese version of the world with the same preachiness of the father he overthrew. And while twenty years ago they’d seemed worldly with their Spartan mumbles,
Yeah, Mort, sure, Mort, cool Mort
, the truth was a lot of his friends were morons.

None of this prophylactic deflation went anywhere. I was visiting my big brother. My brother, the genius.
The door was open; I wandered in. My eyes took a moment to adjust. The sun was glaring outside, but no ray no matter how determined ever infiltrated this space. There were only two windows near the ceiling, their black curtains sealed with duct tape.
The Basement’s sleeping quarters were relegated to a cramped corner of the floorplan. I ducked under its maroon drape to check if he was still in bed. It was, after all, only five in the afternoon.
‘Mordecai?’
Quietly, I switched on the lava lamp, churning the matted shag with lurid red eddies. There were no windows in here at all, so the same air had recycled for two decades, thick with what seemed to be the pungency of dirty sheets. I knew better—Mordecai didn’t own sheets. This outer room housed his office; the lamp illuminated rows of audio catalogues. Decibelle’s crimson logo gleamed on his invoices: a sketch of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon captioned, ‘Nothing’s impossible, just expensive.’ An Iron Butterfly poster drooped off its Blutack, but as for ornament that was it; Mordecai’s idea of decor was embodied in the ocean of off-white plastic beneath Inna-Godda-DaVida that constituted his exorbitant Compaq computer drafting package. The beaded curtain to his bedroom had abandoned all
pretence of privacy, missing more strings than it retained, but Mordecai was not a prudish man. More than once I had heard grunting, glimpsed swatches of dark hair, as I suspect I was intended to.
‘MK! Slide me over some one-by-fours, will ya?’
From behind the drape I heard metal echo, a saw shriek—he was up.
As a teenager, I used to tempt my brother’s hirelings sidling in in tight cut-offs. They all had ponytails and low-riding jeans slung on lean hips, a scraggle of belly hair exposed through missing buttons. They wore wire-rims and amulets and puzzle rings; they ate carob bars and yoghurt raisins, or tahini-tofu pitta pockets with sprouts. Perspiration infused the thongs at their necks until the leather was slick and dense with a funk that still permeated my brother’s Basement. The astringency of those men—a few years older than I, men who fasted, threw the IChing, and popped mescaline as casually as I might chew the bit of paper that wouldn’t peel off my Tootsie Roll—the boggy pong of their brackish Birkinstocks and sharp weedy breath had steeped this whole warren. Their residue mingled with the mildew from Mordecai’s bare mattress and mould spores rising from discarded coffee cups, with the singe of grinding metal, the char of drill-bits blackening good wood, the sting of hot oil.
I loved this cavern in summer, with the sealed cool air of a wine cellar, cement cold on my bare feet as Mordecai ritually rebuked me that the floor was rife with nails. Now in December the heat exhaled from an open duct overhead, breathing down my neck as I crossed the workspace. Sawdust caught in my nose hairs, and I couldn’t quite sneeze.
‘Core!’
Three seedy employees looked up. The heavy one winked. I may not have quite the figure I once did, but my brother is still proud when I stop by. Around Mordecai I am impressionable, acquiescent, soft. Around Truman I am caustic, canny, imperious. They have completely different sisters.
‘Mort, you want this threaded?’
‘Yeah, but for 1.2 cm and no more. If you can’t get it exact, call me over; that rod’s $3.80 a foot. Dix! Get my sister a drink, will ya?—For Chrissake, Wilcox, never operate that saw without the guard down!’ I enjoyed being ignored. I savoured my brother’s self-importance. ‘How ya’ doin’, girl?’ Dix slapped me on the shoulder.
Of Mordecai’s wives, Dix Ridelle was my favourite. I hoped he kept her. She was a carpenter by trade; her overalls swung with ball-peens and screwdrivers. A chipped front tooth gave her a pawky, tomboy grin, and her sandy hair was cropped as if she hacked it off herself with a razor blade. When they first married, she was tall and lanky, with sinewy arms and shoulders hard as oranges. I supposed she was still tall. But after putting in four years of overtime with my brother, even overalls couldn’t hide the extra weight. Dix was turning yellow.
‘Hanging in there,’ I said, and collapsed in what passed for their kitchen. No wiener-cooker or bagel-slicer here. The blender hadn’t a top, and if you didn’t remember to put a plate over the strawberry daiquiris the nook took a blood bath. Often they hadn’t, on the third batch, and the wall was mapped in these oversights, Rorschached with splurts of coffee-ground tomato sauce left on high, and Jasper-Johnsed from mustard jars that just missed Mordecai’s head. Uncrimped aluminium containers littered the counter from month-old Indian take-aways. Few of the dishes matched; all of them were filthy. I needn’t open the fridge to confirm it contained three six-packs and half a bottle of hot lime pickle.
Truman hated The Basement. He’d only been here twice, while living a mile away. For one thing, Troom had a passion for stocked pantries—lone bottles of Cremora nestled in dead silverfish made him feel desolate. For another, he was fastidious, and Mordecai’s table was sooty with roll-up ash; the Toast-R-Oven doubled as a roach motel. Both visits, Truman had washed his hands within five minutes. And Mordecai’s environs dripped with the neglect that Truman detested. Mordecai lost the cap to his Worcestershire sauce, and never shut the top of his doughnut box. His cups seeped coffee from hairline cracks; his amplifier adjusted with vice-grips. Broken-down flophouse furniture lay strewn about the place at queasy angles in misadventurous groupings like the slaughtered anti-heroes of
Reservoir Dogs
.
But Mordecai’s negligence was selective. Over in the workshop, motors were oiled, drill-bits of ascending size coddled in felt, hammers returned to their Magic-Markered shadows on the pegboard. The message was explicit: a genius did not lower himself to buy broccoli. Even I had objected that his bog, with a door that didn’t shut, its stacks of
Mechanics Weekly
by the head and hardened Hilton towels in the shower, never had loo roll. Money down, however, that Mordecai never ran out of electrician’s tape or five-amp resistors. According to Truman, his brother’s domestic disregard was a vanity.
For me it was a liberation. Granted this was not a household that arranged sliced tomatoes with fresh basil on handsome ceramic, whose host would throw a fit on discovering they were out of balsamic vinegar. No basil, no tomatoes, no platter, Dix howabout Karen’s, you game? I loved it. Personally, I’m a natural homemaker—I’d have the bloody vinegar.
‘How’s it going at the haunted house?’
‘Horror show. Low budget. Had much truck with
Averil
?’ I had a way of pronouncing her name.
‘Sweet. But mousy.’
‘Ever lived with a mouse?’
Dix laughed. ‘Scrabbling in the rafters.’
‘And how. Oh, she never complains to me outright. Only through Truman. I get the diplomatic version.’
‘What’s the beef?’
‘You name it. I add too much detergent to the laundry, too much salt to the pasta, and too much cayenne to the salad dressing—that is, any. After a shower, I walk around in a towel: I have no shame.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘She’s right. I don’t.’
‘Mean she’s lucky for the towel?’
‘It’s no accident she’s a school teacher.’
‘Bet they figured once your mother cashed in her chips they’d have the place to themselves.’
‘They should have figured they’d be out on their ear.’ The heat in my voice surprised me. ‘There’s no reason Truman should assume he stays in a house willed to all three of us just because he never had the wherewithal to leave home.—Hi.’ I looked up shyly. ‘What’s up?’
‘Just won the contract with Meredith College to overhaul their theatre. New sound system, lights, the lot. A plumb. Dix, you’re remiss. Any clean glasses?’
‘You mean of all the ones you washed?’
Mordecai slid me an aquavit in a Burger King tumbler glazed with Daffy Duck—it looked so harmless. If spirits this early in the day were against my policy, I maintained most policies to make exceptions to them. Truman replaced my parents’ regulations with stricter of his own: no pie. Mordecai chucked them wholesale. Me, I teetered. My whole life I had never decided whether to be a good or a bad girl.
‘So how’s tricks at the ranch, Core?’ Mordecai dumped his boots on the table; dope seeds rolled to the floor.
I sighed. ‘We’ve reclaimed the place, little by little. But it’s slow, and pretty depressing.’
‘That house is full of the most godawful crap.’
‘It’s funny, we can’t bring ourselves to throw anything away. Everything’s in boxes.’
‘It’s not all yours to chuck, is it?’
‘You want the yellow squash casserole?’ I offered.
He skinned up a Three Castles. ‘You don’t know what I want.’
‘Listen,’ I raised cautiously. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had anything to do with this, except the Britannicas disappeared at the same time.’
I darted my eyes towards the entrance, where the twenty black encyclopedias had been dumped not a foot past the door. An uppermost volume was squarely under a leaky pipe; a drop splatted as I looked over. The book’s black surface had already bubbled and blanched, its cover warped.
‘You didn’t, uh, borrow any tools, did you?’
He licked the Bambu. ‘A few. One of my hand drills was on the fritz. We had a deadline. What’s the problem? You guys get a half million dollar house, and I grab a bag of two-penny wood screws.’
I rolled a dope seed between thumb and forefinger. ‘See, the drill and…little circular saw,’ which wasn’t little and was frigging expensive and about which I had already heard altogether too much, ‘they’re Truman’s. So you might, um, drop them by. And maybe next time…make sure first?’
‘I gotta ask Mommy?’
‘You can help yourself to all the yellow squash you like. But if you run off with anything of Troom’s I get the aggro. From now on it’s between you and Truman.’
There was nothing between my brothers but me. If the matter were left to direct communication, Truman wouldn’t see his saw for fifty years. Ask my parents what happened when Mordecai ‘borrowed’ things.
I looked up suddenly. ‘You have a key!’
‘Sure. I left with one at fourteen.’
‘In case you came back?’
‘Maybe I still will.’
Dix got up for a beer, and slammed the fridge. ‘Mort!’
‘Dix, roll a joint, will ya? Anyway, Core, I did come back. When no one was home. When I couldn’t stomach another heat-lamp casualty burger from the Red Barn dumpster. I’d fix a cheese sandwich.’
‘With lots of chilli sauce.’
‘And sometimes pocket a twenty from Father’s dresser.’
I slammed Daffy Duck. ‘That was you! I got scuppered for that! Twice I was grounded for a week, no dessert! They still think I did it!’
Mordecai hee-hee-ed. ‘Naturally they wouldn’t suspect little True, would they?’
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘He was always Mister Perfect.’
‘I rehabbed your rep, then. Added a dash of the unpredictable.’
But what came back to me were even earlier scenes, when Mordecai still lived at home. A crime would have been committed, petty—Father’s scissors swiped from his desk drawer. ‘I din do it,’ I’d say, wringing my skirt—even telling the truth I looked guilty as sin. Truman swooned up at them with those big hazel eyes, mute with terror. Mordecai folded his arms and scowled. My father would arraign us at the kitchen table for mock juvenile court. We were not allowed to leave until someone came clean.
The culprit was always the same. But we would sit for
hours
at that table, Mordecai implacable, staring at the ceiling. Once I’d shaken my head to satisfy Truman that he needn’t take the rap on my account, the toddler would rifle cereal boxes for snap-together prizes and draw pictures in poured salt. But I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to go play. I eyed Mordecai with defeated admiration. He’d have sat at that table into the night with no dinner rather than cave in to my father. Every time, I took the blame.
While I was spanked, Truman would throw his arms around my father’s ankles, imploring, ‘Hit me instead!’ I’d figure I deserved the beating, as punishment for weak resolve. And I have
since found taking the fall enlightening, of the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four: it is less humiliating to confess to something you didn’t do.
‘What bamboozles me,’ Dix was saying, ‘is how you could only take twenty bucks.’ She turned to me. ‘Kid out on the street, fourteen, fifteen, and they didn’t give him jack? And his daddy a hotshot lawyer?’
‘As I recall,’ I said cautiously, ‘he didn’t want their money.’
‘Besides, Dix, it would just have been subtracted from my inheritance.’
‘Your parents were remembering sons of bitches.’
‘I’m surprised I didn’t get deductions for the diapers.’
‘Speaking of which,’ I mentioned. ‘The ACLU wants their dosh. Of course they asked nicely. This chap thought Father was Gandhi or something.’
‘I could tell him a thing or three,’ Mordecai grumbled.
‘So we had the house appraised, and it’s worth more than Hugh thought: $410,000. That means you’d be due about $100,000 clear…There’s no reason to take this to court, is there? Between the cash and a mortgage, Troom and I could buy out the ACLU and you as well…’ The proposition had seemed so straightforward, yet I couldn’t look Mordecai in the eye.
‘Yeah, right.’ He knocked back another aquavit.
‘Why don’t ya’ll put that albatross up for sale?’ Dix exclaimed. ‘You know how many rich faggots would leap at that pile of kindling in Oakwood now? Are ya’ll out of your tree?’
I hugged my elbows; Mordecai flipped a catalogue.
‘HeckAndrews is irreplaceable,’ I said feebly.
‘Who would
want
to replace it?’ She was furious; I wasn’t sure why. Though she reminded me of my mother in her resort to slamming dishes, instead of rattling silverware she threw it away.
‘What’s with that brother of yours, anyway?’ asked Mordecai. ‘What’s his game?’
‘I’m not sure Truman has a game.’
‘Well, that’s pathetic.’ Mordecai eyed his wife puffing away on her reefer and not offering him any, and reached for the baggie to roll his own. ‘What are you up to?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why would you keep your share in the house? You said yourself your sister-in-law is driving you bats. Why not take the money and run? Buy a
flat
in England or something? Or are you planning to stay?’
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. I had a bit of a mishap in London. All my work was—ruined.’
‘That sounds careless.’
‘I was living with two chaps and, ah, fucking them both at the same time. They found out.’
Mordecai guffawed and said, ‘Nice going!’ I know how to impress my older brother.