A Perfectly Good Family (28 page)

  He was courageous. I played with my spoon. 'I told you, I thought we should talk about it.'

  'Fine,' he said. 'Talk.'

  My mind went blank, save for one simple question. 'If I say yes,' I said softly, 'could I have the dovecot?'

I did not get home early. Mordecai kept us on through three more rounds. Though my older brother has the chemical resilience of a walking medical experiment, there is no constitution on earth that could metabolize that much alcohol and not show it.

  'I'll never forget,' he croaked, bolo tie askew and beef juices down his white shirt. 'In eighth grade, we got back a chemistry test. The whole class flunked. The whole class, except me. I got a D. I came home to Mother, really pleased with myself, you know? Told her out of thirtyfive kids I was the only one to pass. She scowled.' Mordecai did a plausible imitation, crinkling his lips into a butthole. 'She shook her finger. You mustn't compare yourself with the bottom,' she said. Jesus H. Christ!' With a sweep of his arm, he shattered his coffee cup, water glass and empty schnapps tumbler on to the floor. 'You mustn't compare yourself to the bottom. They were never fucking satisfied…' His chin dropped to his clavicle.

  'Mordecai, I really think we should go.'

  The waiters were putting chairs on top of tables; we'd been the only remaining customers for over an hour.

  'One for the road!' my brother roared.

  I shook my head at our waiter, and scribbled the air for our bill.

  'Come on,' Mordecai wheedled. 'One more. You've hardly drunk anything.'

  'On the contrary, I'm plastered,' I said. 'That's enough.'

  'You're just like Mother,' he groused.

  'I don't recall Mother ever telling you to lay off after a full litre of hundred proof,' I said crisply.

  It took him minutes to dig out his credit card; watching him page through every receipt and video membership in his wallet was excruciating. When the imprint arrived Mordecai's pen hovered

over the gratuity, looping confused squiggles in the air. I reached for the bill and filled in the 15 per cent myself, pausing to scan the itemized printout. Each double aquavit was ten bucks, inflating the total to $280. I felt less guilty about the tableware we'd broken; fob off that much booze on a single customer, and a few smashed glasses were figured into costs. After Mordecai trailed the pen aimlessly across the carbon, the waiter had to bring it back because he'd signed on the wrong line.

  On the way out the door, Mordecai slumped on to my shoulder; I staggered, glaring at the maitre d'—this was my brother, taken care of. Mordecai lunged at the mints by the register, upsetting the bowl and clattering pink buttons across the counter.

  We had a tussle over the keys in the car park, where I discovered Mordecai was stronger than he looked. When I finally prised them from him I threw the chain into the azalea bushes, and threatened if he didn't let me drive I would walk. By the time I recovered the ring from the mulch, Mordecai had begun to snore in the passenger seat, leaving me to figure out how to operate an army troop transporter all by myself. I supposed if I lived with my older brother I'd get pretty good at it.

I woke the next morning thrashing from pillow to pillow as I racked my brains to remember what I had promised Mordecai about the house. As far as I could piece together, my older brother had spent $300 on another glorified maybe, and the only thing that had changed as of this hangover was that I no longer had eighteen days to make up my mind, but one less.

  I tugged the duvet to my eyes, then pushed it back to my chin because my breath stank. I squinted at the seedy wash of winter light. In July the sun threw a vivid harlequin patchwork on my quilt, but in January the pale rays filtering through the panes of stained glass cast weak, uncommitted colours on my bed, like the blah pastels of Averil's blouses. Core-less! I chided myself. You cannot sign for two different mortgages on the same house. You cannot divide your future into parallel universes where you live with Truman in one, walking the straight and narrow of chicken thighs and brisk cemetery constitutionals, and with Mordecai in the other, dragging him to bed at cock-crow and hauling off his boots.

  All month I'd been tormented with dreams of raising my left

hand in the Jaycee Center, then outbidding myself with my right, eventually raising the price of the house into the several millions. Once I roused, 5 February would keep a drowsy fog about it, as if the date would never arrive after all. Maybe I was too accustomed to doubledealing and getting away with it.

  I collapsed over on my side, cool air spraying from the pillowcase on to my cheek. There was more to it than that. While still backed by middle-class parents, all my decisions had exuded a probationary aura—as if my hand hadn't left my checker, and I could always slide to my last square. In this respect Heck-Andrews diminished me as much as it did Truman. Though my parents were dead, their house propped me up with paternal solace, its moist motherly air nursed me with therethere-dear. I still felt taken care of. Perhaps this was one reason we were all three holed up here: our trio had regrouped to its lone bunker, sandbagged against an army of alien surnames. We were cleaving to the last vestige of a generation that had buffered us from the rest of the world, where we were nobody in particular and were expected to fend for ourselves or take the consequences. It may indeed have been 'only a building', but Heck-Andrews was the only refuge we had left.

  Consider your options, girl. I flapped the duvet off my shoulder to slap the skin with a shock of cold draft. Yet no usefully contrasting fantasies came to me: the snug groove I might wear with Truman versus the wild, unhinged carouse of life with Mordecai. Instead I weighed competing dreads, estimating which sibling might be visited with more devastation by my betrayal. My solicitous, timid younger brother? Or the older, whom I had already betrayed once, if all those afternoons of abandoning him to his basement didn't count as thousands of individual treacheries? Could I bear to add one more?

  Then, most decisions consumed no more than a nano-second, and this ritual agonizing was cheap theatre. Trying to make up my mind might be transparent flight from the fact that I had made it up to begin with. My stomach yowled. Maybe I knew all along which brother I would choose.

  So in preference to dwelling on my dilemma, I lacerated myself for being duplicitous: you waffler, you snake, you slag. Self-disgust was an indulgence.

  I got up, since I had another mortgage appointment today! Nuts.

  Dressed, I groped down the banisters, giving the gargoyle at the bottom a pat—this morning it looked like a self-portrait. As my hand felt the kitchen doorknob tremble with Truman's murmur to Averil on the other side, I paused. A memory descended to me unbidden, like the Good Witch Glinda when all seemed lost. Disheartening at the time, now the flashback was a burst of light: I was not the only member of this family whose loyalties were provisional.

About three years before I had been visiting from London. I often slept in, and they can't have expected me to be up. I'd trundled downstairs and around into the hall between the foyer and the kitchen; this door was not quite shut. Voices emerged.

  '—I just think she should get realistic!' When Truman was strident, he said just a lot. 'She's thirty-two, and what's she going to do, drive a moped around London delivering other people's memos all her life?'

  'Well.' I knew that well: throaty, seemingly apologetic—it meant, Idon't-like-to-criticize-you-kids-to-each-other-but-just-this-teencyweency-once-I'll-make-an-exception; I'd heard plenty of wells, plenty of exceptions. 'I've tried to be encouraging about Corrie Lou's artwork, but I am beginning to worry that she's a bit of a dreamer. Of course, the pictures I've seen of her sculptures are very attractive—' Mother emphasized the moderation of the word.

  'Oh, they're OK, I guess, but how many other people can make passable figurines, Mother? She's living in a fantasy world! Do you realize how competitive art galleries are? I don't keep up with that stuff, and even I know that field is a crapshoot. I just think she should consider another career, maybe one in which she could be useful, help other people—'

  Like nursing, I thought sourly.

  '—Like working with handicapped children.'

  Even better.

  'I'm more worried about whether she'll ever be taking care of her own children,' said my mother.

  'Don't hold your breath,' said Truman. 'Corrie Lou just seems to go from man to man—'

  'I am simply in despair about that girl!' Mother cried, italicizing with lots of air. 'I cannot understand how, after witnessing her

parents' deeply loving marriage, she could cheapen herself like that—!'

  'It is, it's cheapening,' Truman chimed in. 'She sells herself short. I guess when you've been with enough guys it doesn't mean much. And the riff-raff! I have no idea where she digs these people up.'

  'I think it's been hard for her to find any man who measures up to her father. But that's no excuse for jumping into bed with the first fellow who comes along. I've been so relieved that you and Averil have a committed, faithful relationship. You two had the restraint and respect to wait and explore the delights of each other's bodies until your wedding night.'

  'I think it made a big difference, actually,' said Truman. 'Holding out, and being first for each other.'

  That lying sack of shit! In whatever cursory a fashion, Truman was no virgin when he met Averil; he'd cut the teeth of his zipper on one of my best friends. As for having 'waited' for his wedding, what about tucking Averil naked up to the tower deck?

  'But your sister!' Mother gasped. 'Why, she must have given herself to at least three or four—'

  Truman guffawed. 'Three or four! Mother, you're joking.'

  'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'Well.' My brother's well. 'She told me that this last month—' I could see him through the crack, leaning forward with an elbow on each knee, chin thrust, eyebrows arched, as he lowered his voice and disciplined himself not to smile. 'Last month, she was with three different guys. That was just one month, Mother.'

  I'd had enough. That morning, I went back to bed. In the end I may have been less offended that he grassed about my sleeping around than that behind my back he called me 'Corrie Lou'.

I realize that eavesdroppers are supposed to 'get what they deserve', but I find the snooped-on will leap at the violation of their privacy to divert you from what you overheard. It was not from shame at having pressed my ear to the kitchen door that I never discussed this cosy dialogue with Truman.

  I guess I never brought it up from a depressing shrewdness; if he was a quisling, so were we all. Given half a chance, I had sold him downriver as well, though always to my father—Can you

imagine why Truman doesn't have more friends? How do you think he came to be so unadventurous with parents who love to travel? Hasn't he had a desperate time finding his professional niche…! Alone with either parent, all three of us disguised our reflections on our siblings as concern when in truth we were ripping each other to shreds. The subtext was obvious: how much more wonderful we were than their other worthless children. I didn't know what else to do but find it funny. With one another we would collude in beastly imitations of our mother's 'telephone voice', but throw a parent into the ring and it was a free-for-all fight-to-thefinish for the trophy of parental adoration. Maybe the sibling relationship was intrinsically penultimate; maybe all our alliances with each other were brief marriages of convenience, and we tread a thin crust over a boiling magma of rivalry, which could readily spit to the surface as outright hatred. Maybe the real marvel was that we ever got along at all.

  'Looks like you had one swell time last night,' Truman snarled at my rat's nest hair and baggy eyes when I bumbled into the kitchen.

  I rang Frames and informed them that I was still unwell which, considering the state of my head, was accurate enough. I brewed my coffee extra strong, and choked down a rare breakfast. Today, I'd need it.

I showed up in the kitchen that afternoon in jeans, the novelty of bankers having already worn off, but Truman squawked and said, yesterday you took off work to give Mordecai a hand and wore a skirt to go to Ferguson's Hardware, you could at least—I said OK, OK, so changed into the outfit I'd worn on Monday; it was still on my chair. Truman was trussed in suit and tie; there was no danger that in any encounter with authorities Troom would show up in a hard-hat.

  I know it was only a second time, but for me the drive threatened to become one of those hellish Nietzschean re-enactments—this woman who had zero interest in finance of any description would be spending the rest of eternity going from one mortgage appointment to another. The sensation of being trapped in an infinite loop intensified when Truman replicated the route Mordecai had described in the army truck the day before, though it was only when Troom turned into the little Wachovia Tudor branch

on Hillsborough that I realized we were applying for a loan at the very same fucking bank.

  Which may seem a Dickensian coincidence, but wasn't. Both my brothers have a provincial side. They had started their first accounts at this branch when they turned ten, and neither had ever moved their accounts elsewhere.

  'Ms McCrea?'

  The fog surrounding 5 February was apparently only possible if my double-bind were kept shrouded in the clouded privacy of my head; when I shook hands once more with Claude Richards, it was like reaching out and touching my predicament, hot, solid and clenching. The expression on Claude's face was of rapacious narrative hunger.

  'How nice to see you,' I said, lying.

  'This way,' he said familiarly, and tucked me in front of him to lead off to his office. I glanced behind me, imploring; I prayed that the confidentiality accorded clients of lawyers and doctors applied to bank patrons as well.

  I assumed my usual chair in the corner, as the onlooker of my own life. Truman took the hot seat in front of the desk. He clasped one set of fingers around the other as if holding a hat in his lap, cleared his throat, and straightened his back. His bearing of formal appeal reminded me of nineteenth-century suitors asking for a daughter's hand—the steadfast, stolid petitioner who plans to stay and work the farm and meanwhile the dashing ne'er-do-well officer has eloped with the girl.