A Perfectly Good Family (14 page)

‘—So I’m back in Raleigh for now. Thought I’d stay in HeckAndrews for a while, pick up some work after the new year. Besides, without my help Troom would have to get out. They barely have an income.’
Mordecai snorted. ‘That’s just what he needs, Corrie Lou. If you really cared about the guy, you’d pitch him in the drink. Sink or swim.’
‘Uh-huh. What if it’s sink?’
‘And you know he’d have taken care of Mother until she was a hundred and five.’
‘That’s so bad?’
‘Criminal.’
I took a breath and launched. ‘He lives in a small world. OK, he goes to school, but to classes, full stop. He does his homework. He hasn’t any friends. He has his—wife,’ I said with effort, ‘like some—little sister,’ I said with more effort, ‘who I’m sure tells him everything since there’s nothing to tell. He volunteers for Preservation/NC twice a week, but that’s all about the house. He wants most of all to get HeckAndrews listed on the National Registry so no one can tear it down. That’s his world, see: Truman lives in a house. You want responsibility for taking that away?’
‘I’d leap at the chance.’
I laughed, and poured another aquavit.
‘What’s that kid gonna do with a degree in philosophy?’
‘Prove to Father he’s got moral gravity. Now Father’s dead. Leaves Troom in a bit of a corner.’
‘The guy’s head is in a fucking bucket. And the wife—!’
‘Don’t get me started.’
‘What a dishrag! How do you explain it?’
‘Good lay?’
‘Even your hand moves.’
‘Any lay?’
‘Now you’re talking.’
‘So you think that out of affection,’ I proposed whimsically, ‘you and I should buy Troom out instead.’
Mordecai looked around to find Dix out of earshot, and then leaned forward. ‘That’s right.’
I stopped laughing. ‘Come on.’
‘He’d be testy at first.’ Mordecai leaned back coolly. ‘Later, he’d never stop thanking you.’
I choked.
‘What’s funny?’
‘I’m trying to imagine Truman, shaking my hand. “I just wanted to express my infinite gratitude for your robbing me of the most important thing in my life.”’
‘It’s not his house.’
‘He thinks it is. With a vengeance.’
‘Let me ask you this. What effect do you think living in that museum has on your little brother? Honestly.’
‘It stunts him,’ I conceded. ‘He talks about Mother all the time. He feels guilty there. He’s always scrubbing and hoovering, like a murderer washing his hands.’
‘Don’t you think that some people have to be pushed from the nest because otherwise they’ll peep away their whole lives too scared to jump?’
‘That’s Mommy Bird’s job,’ I said warily.
‘Mother’s dead.’
I drummed my fingers. ‘Mordecai, what are you getting at?’
‘I told you: why don’t you and me buy out your brother?’
‘You’re serious!’
‘Damn tootin’.’
In truth, I had never been so flattered. I stalled for time. ‘Truman wouldn’t agree to sell to us for all the tea in China.’
‘He wouldn’t have to. You said it yourself: without your share, he can’t swing it, can he? Together, we own half the house already; we’ve got the cash coming in from the will, and
you and I
could take out a mortgage. Sink that equity into Decibelle, it’ll multiply; sitting there on Blount Street, it rots.’
‘Truman would die,’ I mumbled.
‘He wouldn’t die. He could take the money and pick up a condo where Mother didn’t boo! around every corner and maybe, perish the thought, get a job. He’d squeal, you betcha. But getting booted out of there would be the best damned thing ever happened to the guy.’
‘I don’t understand. What would you want with HeckAndrews?’
‘That place is massive and right now it’s wasted on flower vases and empty beds. My office is cramped, and we just broke our last coffee cup. Plenty of work space—why not? And you and I get on all right—don’t we?’
I wanted to say I wasn’t so sure; that he paralysed me with a deference as if I were always making up for something, though I had never located for exactly what. But that very deference guaranteed I would answer, ‘Sure.’
I could hear his wife in the background, shouting instructions to his workmen. Though she once hired out at union wages, she now worked for Mordecai as his Vice President. Mordecai didn’t pay nearly so well.
‘But how does Dix feel about this?’ I whispered.
‘I thought she made it pretty obvious how she feels. Decibelle’s in the red—though only for now, we’ve got this new contract—and a quick hundred thou with no strings would come in handy. But she’ll come round. I have a feeling once the pigeons were cleared from the rafters she might like it there. So whatta you say?’
I opened my mouth and this is what I expected to come out: however hobbled he might seem to you, Truman is my beloved younger brother who might recover from moving house but would never recover from a sister’s perfidy. Thanks, but no thanks. If you force the house on the market, Truman and I will make our bid, because that’s the way it’s always been—Truman and I are a team.
‘Maybe,’ I heard instead, to my own stupefaction. ‘It’s an idea. Can I think about it?’
‘Not for long. That’s why I’m going ahead with the partition suit, Core. The court will give you a deadline, and you need one. You don’t like to make choices, Corrie Lou, but you’re making them all the time whether you admit it to yourself or not. It’s down to the wire: your neurotic, retarded kid brother, or me.’
Dix returned to the kitchen for a refill of aquavit, and looked from her husband to me. ‘You asked her.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mordecai, spewing smoke.
‘And what’d she say?’
‘Think we may have a deal here.’
That’s not what I said, but Mordecai was not The Bulldozer for nothing.
One of their last plates hit the concrete floor. ‘Ya’ll are out to lunch! What’s that dump gonna do for you two but suck $100 bills like a leaf machine? I don’t know diddly about real estate, and even I can see the place is falling to bits! Maybe you save a snapshot to remind you of your Mom and Dad, but you don’t save a $400,000 hole in your pocket!’
‘That house may not be my kid brother’s, but it ain’t yours either so stuff the attitude and butt out.’ Mordecai’s boots hit the floor.
‘When my Daddy died, all I wanted was my Daddy’s desk, which you gave me shit over—’
‘OK, driving the truck all the way to Chattanooga for one lousy desk was a pain in the ass—’
‘I didn’t ask you to cart back the whole fucking house, did I? To remind me of my goddamned wonderful childhood?’
Mordecai stood up and advanced with a clump. Dix took a step back. ‘I don’t seem to recall you had such a goddamned wonderful childhood.’
‘That’s what I mean, you bastard, have you forgotten? All you were to them was a drunken chain-smoking cunt-fingering degenerate, and you’re getting maudlin? When we’re up to our eyes in debt—’
‘It’s my inheritance, which I’ll take in the form I please, and you can keep your fucking desk—’
‘You smashed it, in case you’ve forgotten.’
I might have left before she started breaking his records and he threw bottles, albeit not the ones with beer—he wouldn’t waste it. Instead I withdrew just out of range, a vantage point from which to ascertain that like most battles this one had rules. Dix’s eye flicked to the title before she grabbed an album to crack over his head, and once she chose another. The kitchen was open season, but they ate out. Not once was the slightest feint made in the direction of the workshop,
the tools
, with which Mordecai’s crew continued to grind and hammer, shouting directions a bit more loudly as if Dix and their employer going at it were a car alarm
that wasn’t theirs. If she really wanted to whack him, she’d have abandoned Daffy Duck—an early casualty—in favour of a solid chisel blow to his Rockwell table saw. This fracas, therefore, was performed within strict theatrical boundaries, so when I interrupted that I needed to be off they dropped their weapons as if the director had called a tea break.
‘You won’t say anything to Truman, will you?’ I pleaded. ‘About what you proposed?’
‘Since when,’ said Mordecai, ‘did I ever say anything to your brother, period?’
Fair enough. ‘And I wanted to know,’ I said, ‘if you’d come for Christmas.’
Mordecai shrugged. ‘Sure. I’ll come for Christmas.’
Wrapped up with a bow.

Chewing peppermint to obscure the incriminating caraway on my breath, I found Truman and Averil in the kitchen with rolled-up sleeves. We were not nearly through with sorting and reclaiming this house for ourselves, and the kitchen remained the most dauntingly inhabited diorama of my mother’s Gestalt. Though overflowing with comestibles, this had always been one of those mysterious sculleries whose pantry dropped cans, whose fridge bulged baggies, and whose freezer required a chair against the door to keep it from popping open, where you couldn’t find a thing to eat.

We’d attacked the refrigerator the day before, and once we cleared out the fungus-furred yellow squash, liquefied lettuce, separated mayonnaise and crystallized strawberry jam there was nothing salvageable remaining besides a single jar of dubious peanut butter. After we scoured the ice-box with cleanser and propped it open to air I had gazed into that expanse of pristine plastic, for the first time guiltlessly glad on some account that my mother was dead. My whole life that refrigerator had been crammed full of stale margarine crumbed with burnt toast, cling-filmed half-cups of overcooked rice, and imploding green peppers sagging into the lower drawers’ ad hoc vegetable soup. I had never been at liberty to thunk anything into the bin without suffering, ‘Why, that’s my
good meatloaf
!’ to send her scraping diffidently at a glaucous brown scab. There was always one half-inch chunk of a Macintosh that was ‘perfectly good’, leaving me to question my mother’s compromised version of perfection, and if I ever drew her attention to the fact that though apples by the bushel had indeed been cheaper than by the bag but these were nine months old, we would suffer reproof by pie.

In fact, my mother had not been a bad cook, but she was so consumed with employing ingredients that ‘needed using’ that she’d contaminate five dollars’ worth of lasagne with a handful of ammoniated mushrooms that cost ten cents. When she cut fresh pineapple, it so grieved her to slice off any of the fruit with the rind that she left the spines in, and dessert was like chewing your way out of a prison camp. This curious inclination to sacrifice the whole for the part—to leave mould on one side of the cheddar, to gouge out only half the tomato rot, or bake an otherwise gorgeous gingerbread with fermented molasses—must have had larger implications for her life. Had she been a Civil War surgeon, she couldn’t have brought herself to chop off any of the ‘perfectly good’ leg and what’s wrong with leaving just a little infection and all her patients would have died from gangrene.

Having so recently exterminated the refrigerator, I’d given her culinary edicts some thought: those imperatives both to
save
and to
notwaste
—subtly different laws with subtly different pitfalls. Saving became hoarding for its own sake; misers died with mattressfuls of cash, or, in my mother’s case, a full row of spiced peach halves, which she adored, in the back of the pantry. But the upside of saving is a sense of preciousness. It gave my mother more pleasure to retain those jars than to dispatch them. She savoured potential, just as Truman treasured a stocked larder. I liked that, the keeping; it was a belief in the future, if misguided, since the peach halves had survived her.

Notwasting
was all the more rooted in preciousness. How could I fault that? Only for being a trap. Notwasting was a bondage. Say the zucchini is sufficiently geriatric that when you pick it up with one hand it falls in half. Yet if you chuck it you become a person who throws ‘perfectly good’ food away and that is not the way you want to think of yourself, so into the stir-fry it goes, even if you have to ladle in the zucchini with a spoon. My mother served dinner, literally. Food was a responsibility, a ward she was determined to do right by, and as long as her charges were helpless she was a good mother. I can’t count the times at a restaurant that she’d been given an absurdly large portion, when she was already too heavy and would feel bloated later, and still she could not, could not bring herself to leave so much as a morsel on her plate. She’d force herself through to the last forkful even to the point of nausea, because she did not understand that it was there for her and not the other way round.
My father felt superior to the inanimate and my mother was its loveslave.

However, my mother’s sense of the precious beat the buy-anotherone world in which a fresh sponge meant nothing. I enjoyed swabbing coffee grounds with bright yellow virgin foam. I wouldn’t want to start a new sponge every day.

My parents never resigned themselves to the fact that anything wore out or spoiled. All was forever: from stereo speakers whose shot woofers my father refused to hear buzz to ‘30% More’ saltines that Mother would ‘crisp up’ (burn) once the crackers were soggy. The night before, Truman and I had finally put to pasture the pepper grinder we’d wrestled since I was five, which had strained the tendons in even his arms for a weary baptism of imperceptible ash. It would never have occurred to them in a million years to buy a new grinder. They had bought one, with the finality of marriage.

Possibly this belief in the immortality of the inanimate was a standin for belief in their own, the refusal to recognize degeneration of foodstuffs commensurate with my mother’s conviction that she had been born beautiful and could not, therefore, be fat. Stubbornly, she would deny loss on even the smallest scale since if ‘perfectly good’ brinjal pickle could acquire a suspicious fizz behind your back you entered an untrustworthy universe where romances could sour and sons could go bad. She refused to live on so unreliable a planet, and I couldn’t resist a sort of dumb admiration for someone able to fly so magnificently in the face of fact. The pickle was from their trip to India eight years earlier and it was ‘special’ and it was therefore fine. Reality had nothing to do with it.

Consequently, my mother was a compulsive economies-of-scale shopper, for because she did not acknowledge the concept of the perishable there was nothing that wouldn’t keep. It always amazed me that when her gallon can of olive oil went rancid she couldn’t taste it. She would stash the same can in the pantry for five years, rust crawling across the catty-cornered punctures, until her dressings made me gag. If she could taste rancid oil, some override function intervened: it was more important to my mother to maintain her belief in the permanence of all things than to toss edible salad. Hers was a religious problem, or strength—my mother’s obliviousness to corruption, her stoic Protestant palate, was a tribute to her faith in life everlasting; our every meal was a sacrament. Jesus in our family did not, alas, turn water into wine, but resurrected our vegetable drawer.