Big Brother (18 page)

I told my brother he could order whatever he wanted. The only rule for the evening was that our consumption be slow and reflective—conscious. “You bolt your food as if you’re afraid someone is about to take it away,” I explained. “Someone like yourself, actually. It’s as if you’re eating behind your own back. But tonight you have permission. Personally, I think you eat so much because you
don’t
enjoy your food, not because it’s so satisfying you can’t stop. Since you’re obviously turning to food to provide something it can’t, the amount you eat is potentially infinite. It’s like you’re twisting the tap of the sink to fill the bathtub. So you can keep turning the sink taps on fuller and fuller, but you’re never going to fill the tub.”

“After the other day with that freaking toilet, you can keep your bathroom metaphors to yourself, babe,” he said distractedly, studying the menu with the intensity that yeshiva students devote to the Talmud. “What do you think, the wild mushroom and goat cheese tart or the deep-fried ‘onion flower’?”

Those batter-dredged whole-onion things ran to a thousand calories apiece. “
I
think you should order the cold turkey.”

“Where’s that . . . ?” He finally looked up. “Oh.”

Through the first course and breadbasket I tried to teach him what I’d learned with my salmon fillet a few days earlier. I held up a tiny piece of walnut bread and then
fletcherized
it. “Really think about it,” I commended. “About what it is. About what it isn’t. About what you get out of it. And try to store up the memory for later. So you can reference the flavor. So much of eating is anticipation. Rehearsal and then memory. Theoretically you should be able to eat almost entirely in your head.”

“Too deep for me, little sister.” All the same, he did as I asked. Though he’d ordered a second appetizer, by the time he was through with that tart, flake by contemplated flake, he canceled the whole fried onion.

“Yo,” he said as we waited for our main course—I’d asked the kitchen to drag this meal out for as long as possible. “You still ain’t told me how we’re gonna do this.”

I drummed my fingers. “Would you agree that you have a tendency to be
extreme
?”

“Like how?”

“Well, look at you, Edison. If you’re going to overeat, you don’t just get a little potbelly; you turn into a human rotunda. I thought we could use that tendency to our advantage. If you have an ‘on’ switch, then you also have an ‘off.’ ”

“I don’t know why, kid, but you’re making me nervous.”

“All these menu plans on the Web, with their exacting rules and portions. They’re a torture. I think it’s easier, rather than making dozens of tiny, self-depriving decisions a day, to make one big decision. After which there’s nothing to decide.”

I laid out the parameters. Surmounting a dumb shock, Edison promised to trust me.

The Last Supper lasted nearly four hours, and we extracted every available drop of savor from that meal like wringing a dishrag dry. I shared one of my peri-peri tiger prawns, and together we dissected the crustaceans, working our knives into the little triangles of shell at the tails to prize out the last orts of shrimp inside. We exchanged portions of our entrées, slicing Edison’s black-and-blue filet mignon so thin that the beef was translucent, slicking each piece with a glaze of béarnaise sauce accented with a single pink peppercorn. We cut each of my sea scallops into six wedges like tiny pies, constructing bites with a strip of chorizo, a leaf of arugula, and a languid shred of celeriac like edible haiku. During dessert, I crushed individual seeds of the raspberry clafoutis between my front teeth; the chocolate in Edison’s fudge cake seemed dark in every sense—plummeting, infinite, and wicked, though we took so long tining single black crumbs that the ice cream melted. By the end, we had polished off the bread sticks, the caponata dip, the butter packets, and the mints, and while I let Edison have most of the bottle because I didn’t want to get dozy on this of all evenings, we drained the inky, subtly granular Mourvèdre-Cabernet to the last drip. Eating might not have been all it was cracked up to be but it wasn’t negligible either, and I kicked myself for having blindly, blithely shoveled from my plate for most of my life as if stoking a coal furnace. I would be sucking on this memory candy for months, rolling it around in the back of my mind until it was eroded to a shard.

I
am less nostalgic about the next morning.

Edison must have been hungover—he’d had a cognac with the cake—and dragged into the kitchen, where I was filling the stovetop espresso pot I’d brought from Solomon Drive. (By then having forsworn caffeine, Fletcher wouldn’t miss it.) I was ratty myself, dreading black coffee on an empty stomach, but my brother was a surly ball of resentment and free-floating ill will. “There’s nowhere to sit, man!”

“We’ll take care of that. But meantime, without the soothing of half-and-half, we should have breakfast before coffee.”

“I’d be down with that if you meant a tall stack of chocolate-chip pancakes.”

“The secret to which you told me”—I held up a BPSP envelope—“was vanilla?”

“Ha-ha,” Edison grumbled, slumping onto the counter. “Man, that dinner last night was
killing
. I bet they do a mean steak-and-eggs brunch.”

I’d swiped two water glasses from the motel. Into these I poured one BPSP envelope each: protein, vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes. I dissolved the powder with tap water and stirred. “Mmm, yummy!”

“Can the chirpy shit, Panda Bear.” He took his first slug. “Fuck!”

I took a sip. I had to admit it was pretty thin. “Let’s hope the strawberry is better.”

We milled aimlessly with our beverages, gawking dispiritedly out the picture window at the oak saplings below, their fragile branches metaphors for the flimsiness of our resolve. My newfound sense of savor failed to extend to vanilla protein powder, and I downed the rest in one go. Predictably, even the two fingers of coffee with which I chased our feast-in-a-glass set off an acidic reaction. I had often skipped breakfast altogether, but this morning was different, and I felt piercingly underprivileged without any compensatory sense of accomplishment. I had not even completely skipped breakfast, and I was just as overweight as the night before. Apparently I had no lunch to look forward to, much less any dinner. My entire sense of order had been upended; my life had no protocol, no structure, and on top of that I had to deal with my grumpy, babyish, sniveling older brother.

“This feels fucking stupid, man,” he mewled repeatedly, chain-smoking at a cracked-open window. “I’m fucking starving.”

“You promised last night you’d trust me. You promised you would not cheat, and you understood that if you ever do cheat I will quit this project faster than you can say ‘Quarter Pounder with Cheese.’ You remember the rules: you may have diet soda, water—fizzy or still—and herbal tea, but only with lemon and artificial sweetener. I might lay in some sugarless mints. But other than that, four glasses of that sludge a day, period. Now, let’s get out of here, I can’t stand it.”

I was so relieved to have rented unfurnished accommodations that I could have kissed my own hand. Something to do! And I was already reconsidering an earlier resolution, made in the heady delirium of a full stomach. Any asceticism had initially seemed apropos, and with our family history I can see how I might have wanted to renounce the source of so much neglect throughout our childhoods. Yet after only half an hour of beige carpet and vanilla protein powder I had vowed that, in addition to a couch, two armchairs, and a “dining” set in name only, we were first and foremost buying a TV.

chapter three

T
here’s no point in glossing over it. Those first few days were awful. We felt silly. The withdrawal of food felt arbitrary and, absent any immediate results, pointless. The scale of our ambition was so daunting as to seem demented, and I feared that Fletcher was right: we’d never make it through the week. Though the meager protein shakes must have taken the edge off, I was still gnawingly, unrelentingly hungry, which put a drag on the passage of time and infused every passing moment with a gray sensation. I found myself thinking that I didn’t really care about having put on “a bit of” weight; as Fletcher said, I was a woman in my forties and a little padding was only to be expected. I didn’t need to attract a mate because I was already married, and here I was imperiling that very security for this unfeasible exercise.

All the same, I am a stubborn person and, as my stepchildren discerned, more prideful than I pretended; the prospect of crawling back to Solomon Drive with a bagel and cream cheese clutched in each messy fist was anathema. So I relied on hubris on the one hand, affection on the other—often reciting the long list of lethal ailments that my brother’s bulk invited. Though their abstraction was problematic, the last thing that Dr. Corcoran had imparted at the door of his office had hit home. “Mr. Appaloosa,” he’d said gravely. “I don’t have any old, fat patients.”

If the main thing that got me through day by day was Edison, only in retrospect can I infer the corollary: the main thing that got Edison through day by day was me.

Why, by the evening of the very first day my brother was in tears, which meant I’d seen him cry twice within ten days; the Gibraltar of a sibling I’d grown up with had crumbled to landfill. The furniture we’d bought that afternoon had yet to be delivered, so he puddled against the wall on the living room floor like a human beanbag chair. He’d already strained my patience, since the shopping expedition hadn’t proven the welcome distraction I’d planned. He’d alternated between an unhelpful finickiness and an equally unhelpful indifference, wandering out of the store every five minutes for another cigarette. He’d perked up a little when I proposed heading to Hy-Vee, but the improved attitude was short-lived: all we needed was paper goods, cheap china, tea bags, diet soda, artificial sweetener, and sugarless mints. He never exhibited any appreciation for the fact that I was starving, too. We’d been roommates for less than twenty-four hours, and he was getting on my nerves.

For me, what made the discomfort so debilitating was the very fact that it was so low grade. Going hungry when overweight is a distinctly bourgeois form of suffering, and when no one else would feel sorry for you, it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself. Edison, however, didn’t share my difficulty with self-pity.

“Why can’t I just have a sandwich?” he whined. “What difference does it make?”

I plunked next to him on the carpet. “One sandwich is the gateway to two. I know you’re not used to being hungry. But it’s not that bad. Your body is designed to use fat for fuel. It’s doing what it’s supposed to.”

“I don’t care! Look at me. I’m still a fat fuck. Now I’m a miserable fat fuck. I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Panda. A whole year of this, I can’t do it.”

“Shush . . .” I fluffed the dark blond curls from his face. “This is the hardest part. The very first day.”

Giving him strength made me feel stronger, and after I’d brought him a wad of toilet paper to blow his nose I prepared us lemon-ginger tea, trying to look brisk and vigorous as I squeezed every sorry drop of flavor from those sad-ass bags. The more I focused on my brother, the less I suffered myself, and I wondered if in time the solution for Edison, too, might be to worry a little more about me.

“So now what?” Edison scowled at the proffered mug. “It’s only eight o’clock, man!” The television hadn’t arrived yet, either.

“Well . . .” I settled back beside him, cradling the tea as Edison had cupped his cognac the night before—which already seemed weeks ago. “We’ve been around each other for over two months, and you still haven’t talked to me.”

“Balls. I’m a fucking motormouth and you know it.”

“You haven’t explained what happened. For you to end up like this. There’s more to it than corned beef on rye.”

“What, you expect some bare-all confession?”

“Out of sheer desperation to fill time? Yes. I want to know what’s made you so depressed.”

“Let’s see. I had a shit-hot wife who walked out. I got a son I ain’t seen since he was four. I ain’t got laid in years. I got no money and no work, and at the age of forty-four I’m dependent on my nationally famous sister for my allowance. Sounds pretty depressing to me.”

“That
Reader’s Digest
version only got us to eight-thirteen. I don’t get it. I got the impression that pretty soon after you left Tujunga Hills you took Manhattan by storm.”

“That may be putting it kinda strong. But I played three years with Stan Getz! I did some serious venues, man. The Vanguard, the Blue Note. I played—”

“With some heavy cats,” I deadpanned. “So why aren’t you still playing with heavy cats?”

“Look, it’s not like I sucked. Cats change their sound. And, around when I started having trouble with Sigrid, I may have got . . . a little difficult. You know, I was a fucking star, man—”

“Like Travis,” I said heavily. “That’s a pretty dangerous role model you’ve got for yourself. Travis Professional Asshole.”

“Maybe I got it from Travis at that. It didn’t go down too good. I, like, walked out a few times. In the middle of gigs. When the audience wouldn’t shut up, or the bass was amped too loud.”

“That’s what you ragged on Keith Jarrett for doing.”

“Takes one to know one. But Jarrett can get away with it—”

“Which is why he makes you mad.”

“I got with the program in due course, dig? Came round to the view that pulling that everything-just-so-or-I-refuse-to-play shit was unprofessional. But I’d already got a reputation. Cats got leery of playing with me, so the primo gigs stopped coming my way. And I never played with Miles! Every dude even carried the guy’s horn been sitting pretty ever since. Those cats can act up much as they like, insist on silk dressing gowns and berate the audience about their cell phones—”

“But you’ve recorded all those CDs.” I’d heard the
if I’d only played with Miles
riff before. “I know you haven’t made them up, because you’ve sent me copies.”

“Anybody can make CDs, man. Snagging a distributor, getting reviewed by Ben Ratliff—that’s another bag altogether.”

“Still, you kept playing.”

“Yeah, but lower down the pecking order. Cornelia Street. Small’s. Fat Cat. People noticed. I was going in the wrong direction. In fact, I never told you this, but . . .”

“What?” I sensed there was so much he’d never told me that, rather than killing an hour or two, we could be up all night.

Edison took a hard slug on his tepid tea in the spirit of downing a double whiskey, and I wondered if the primary point of boozing was that prop—not what was in it, but the glass. “There was this period, in the mid-nineties.
Joint Custody
had only been off the air, what, twelve, thirteen years? Plenty club hoppers grew up watching it. So for a while I tried marketing myself as ‘the Real Caleb Fields.’ I was actually listed in the
Voice
as Caleb Fields.”

At least he sounded sheepish. “Did it work?”

He shrugged. “Brought in a few curiosity seekers. Hey, you use what you got, right? And we’re, you know . . . not chopped liver. He may drive us nuts, but Travis was a network TV star. We’re special, kid.”

I almost didn’t say it, but keeping just this sort of remark to myself was why after all these years, and two months in the same house, my brother and I still didn’t know each other well. “You mean
you’re
special.”

When Edison looked over, the fire in his eyes wasn’t from crying. “Look. I’ve worked motherfucking
hard
. Maybe I’m rusty right now, but you’ve seen it—most of my life I’ve practiced six or seven hours a day. I’ve hustled—since nobody out there walks up to you on the street and just offers you a gig because you look like a nice guy. I’ve listened and studied the gamut, from Jelly Roll Morton, to Monk, to Chick, to Bley. In the days before you could get every obscure recording under the sun on iTunes, I tracked down all their music, everything those cats recorded—”

“Ever catered a dinner party for seventy-five?” I deliberately refrained from playing the Baby Monotonous card. “Missing three nights of sleep in a row chopping onions and rolling out tart crusts—?”

“Don’t talk about food, man. Please.”

“I’ve worked hard, too. If that’s the standard, lots of people are ‘special.’ And there’s a big difference between feeling special and feeling privileged. Entitled.”

“Maybe I am
entitled
. I got something, I’m—”

“You have
talent
, and I don’t.”

“Hey, kid. This isn’t going anywhere.”

“It’s going somewhere all right, just not where you want to go.”

We sat for a minute in silence.

“My life is shit. You’re flying high, and I’m in three hundred eighty-six pounds of shit. Beats me why you want to make me feel even worse.”

“I’m not.” I softened. “We grew up thinking wrong, Edison. I’ve tried to get it through to Tanner and Cody, without much success, either. This whole obsession with . . . It’s just, you care too much what other people think of you!”

I didn’t imagine it possible for Edison to slump any lower against that baseboard, but he did. “Other people don’t think about me at all, babe, not these days. You know, when I tried going by ‘Caleb Fields’? Some of the audience always walked out in a huff. They thought they were coming to see Sinclair Vanpelt. Can you believe it? The little fuck who thought an arpeggio was an Italian pastry.”

I laughed. “Yeah, that’s pretty rich.” I patted Edison’s knee and got up. We’d kept “dinner” in reserve; though that morning I’d had no idea how one might look forward to protein powder, I advanced on the kitchen with gusto. “How are you feeling?” I called as I stirred.

“Light-headed. Pissy. Fat.”

“At your size, by tomorrow morning you’ll have already lost a pound and a half.”

“And you’ll be able to tell the difference?”

“A journey of a thousand miles . . .”

“Eat your homilies, sister.”

“Homilies, then”—a word that sounded like something made out of cornmeal—“for dessert.”

T
he next morning Edison was astonished to have lasted twenty-four hours on a quartet of envelopes dissolved in water, and an entrenched petulance was contaminated with self-congratulation. Overcome with relief that we were no longer on the very first day, I had lined up tasks for our second. Yet running errands was constantly impeded by one of us having to pee. We were supposed to be drinking a minimum of four pints of liquid per day in addition to the shakes, and without food water goes right through you. Twice we had to U-turn back to our Prague Porches bathroom before we finally made it to Walmart—by which time Edison refused to budge, and stayed behind in the car.

“You never heard the expression ‘Ignorance is bliss’?” joked the hefty guy behind me at checkout, nodding at my boxed, heavy-duty scale, big enough to require a platform caddy.

“Yeah, honey,” the woman ahead chimed in amiably. “I’d rather not know.”

“Well, there’s ignorance,” I allowed, “and there’s self-deceit.”

“Self-deceit makes life bearable,” said the philosopher behind me, loading his case of Bud onto the belt. “Make ’em see too clear in the mirror, whole human race’d jump off a bridge.”

I laughed. “My brother and I just started this horrific all-liquid diet. And if we don’t start charting a little progress”—I patted the box—“we’re definitely jumping off that bridge.”

Shouldering his beer, the guy followed me outside and offered to help load the scale in the car. A farmer, I guessed, brawny enough that, if agriculture hadn’t grown so mechanized, he’d have been quite a hunk. “Keep the faith, ma’am,” he said, closing the trunk; he must have glimpsed Edison’s mounded outline in the passenger seat. “But don’t you forget—the right to lie to yourself is what makes this a free country!”

“Doesn’t anyone in this place ever
shut up
?” Edison groused when he was gone. “Everywhere we go, in five seconds a new yokel is your best friend. Jesus, at least in New York total strangers don’t yak your head off.”

At some point I might defend Iowans’ conviviality as making the most mundane transactions rich, personal, and satisfying, but now was not the time.

I
called home later that afternoon and got Cody. “I don’t care what Dad and Tanner say,” she said quietly. “I think what you’re doing is wonderful.”

I put Edison on, and for once Cody did most of the talking. When he got off, he was abashed and at a loss for words. I asked what she’d said. “Teenage girls should never be given access to the fucking Internet,” he grumbled. “She’s been doing searches. On obesity. So it was all this ‘I love you, Uncle Edison’ stuff and ‘Mom is giving you this big chance and if you don’t take it you’re gonna die.’ I’d heard about all the badgering kids do when their parents smoke. Same thing. It’s unbearable. It’s fucking blackmail.”

At six p.m. we went to see a film, and I don’t remember what we saw. All I can remember is the thick fug of artificially buttered popcorn. When following the BPSP program (which we had started calling “Blip-Sup”), smell is so intense that I worried whether we could ingest some fraction of the 1,500 calories in a large bucket through our noses. Torn on whether inhaling the theater’s salty infusion was a joy or a torture, I would soon conclude that, if you ever had a choice between the two, you picked joy.

That night the TV—a little 24-inch LED, though Edison had rooted for a monster 65-inch plasma—still hadn’t been delivered. At least the twin recliners had arrived, so we didn’t have to pick up my brother’s story where we’d left off while sprawled on the floor.

During that second day, when I wasn’t concocting recipes in my head—adding cranberries to cornbread, or doctoring ground lamb patties with fennel and paprika—I’d been reflecting on what little Edison had told me so far. Professionally, he’d struggled more than he’d ever let on. I’d been self-indulgent. I wanted to revere my brother, and in the service of that reverence had for years taken his braggadocio at face value.