Big Brother (24 page)
After a couple of months of Upchuck I’d bravely installed a full-length mirror in my bedroom, and ever since getting down to 130 again I’d stopped glancing in the opposite direction when I passed it by. Once I could bear to confront the image, I had faced down that mirror naked with embarrassing frequency. Thus an evening before bed after I’d been back to food a day or two, I closed my bedroom door to appraise the organism.
It was a relief to no longer feel ashamed, and that was probably the most intense emotion my new body stirred: a not-emotion. But I was in my early forties and looked it, fat or trim. Now that I’d taken the diet too far, I enjoyed the “leeway” that I’d envied in Breadbasket photographs—but “leeway” translated into tiny breasts that sagged and striated with wrinkles around the nipples. When I took a deep breath, ribs extruded in parallel tracks above my bosom, but as achievements go this one didn’t do much for me. Aesthetically, I could see the merits of hip bones that looked as if a scoop of ice cream had been curled from each one, but the extra skin that withered on the underside of my upper arms and the inside of my thighs was hardly fetching. While I was a reasonably symmetrical creature, I was never going to be a knockout, for I hadn’t been a knockout even during those few center-cut years when women turn heads. The single aspect of my reduced circumference that I did find pleasing was simply the sense that, physically, I was myself. A few months before, a proportion of my body had seemed to belong to someone else. Yet even this satisfaction was mild. A slender figure therefore joined career success in its so-whatness. Did anything at all in life deliver a proper payoff?
On the heels of this revelation, I feared for Edison. The anticlimax of losing fifty-four pounds was disconcerting; the anticlimax of losing 223 pounds could prove soul-destroying. For once I’d overshot my own target, what hit me over the head was the host of other problems that being a little slimmer didn’t dent. Over the phone, Fletcher and I had sometimes grown so distant that we weren’t even antagonistic. It was odd to miss his hostility, but without it we were losing that crucial tension for lack of which I had stopped going out with Oliver. Only months from graduation, Tanner had become a chronic truant, and if he failed his courses he’d have to go to summer school or repeat the semester next year. I was growing actively bored with my company, but if I folded or sold it I had no idea what I’d do next. And Edison . . . Well, my brother never made any reference to his life on the other side of this weight-loss project. How cataclysmically would all the balls he’d left in the air in New York come crashing down once he’d met his goal and discovered that being 163 didn’t really solve anything?
M
istrustful, and thus insistent on overseeing my rehabilitation one-on-one, Oliver stopped by Monotonous at the end of every workday that following week. Edison found this curious enough that he pressed me on whether Oliver and I had become an item. I was taken aback by the acid that laced my brother’s accusation. If he’d been protective of Fletcher, fair enough, but I knew better. Fletcher had been merciless when my brother was our houseguest, and in the months since Edison had gotten in many a vengeful crack about “Feltch” (sans the
t
, slang for a sexual practice I’d rather not describe; rhyming with
belch
,
squelch
, and
welch
, the new nickname exuded meanness and vulgarity). In theory, my cuckolding his brother-in-law should have made Edison’s day.
I lied that I was consulting Oliver about how we might redesign the mechanism to use flash drives, thus allowing customers to replace recordings grown tiresome with new sets of phrases (not a bad idea at that). Yet it was comical, what I was hiding: not a steamy, illicit romance, but a steamy, illicit supper.
Oliver and I went back to the same diner every evening. I’d had some explosive diarrhea, but otherwise returned to solid food without mishap. I carried a toothbrush, and ducked in the restroom to clean my teeth before heading what had started to feel, confusingly, like home. There I shared a protein shake with Edison, which served as cover and provided additional nutrition I could use.
Only days before, I’d looked forward to those concoctions so! Yet now I turned my head when downing mine lest Edison see me gag. Formerly passionate about flavors of herbal teas, I stashed the infusions arrayed on the counter in a cabinet, just so I didn’t have to lay eyes on the ghastly boxes. Of course, sudden revulsion for these tokens of self-torture was rational: pursued much further, that punishing drill might have killed me. But real food also upset me, and quite apart from the fact that I was hiding it from my brother. After subsisting on four stingy envelopes daily, I no longer profoundly believed, as Oliver noted, that I required solid sustenance to live. Even if I gamely bought into the premise, food had become arbitrary, and scary. My first reaction on sitting down to a meal was panic.
I wasn’t alone in this hysteria. You could see the same frenzy all over the Internet: diatribes about sugar, clever tips about using tiny plates or drinking lots of water, profiles on celebrities who claim to have “eighty meals a day,” the charts listing the glycemic index of parsnips and potatoes. You could see it in the accelerating demand for extra-wide caskets, roller coasters reinforced with I-beams, and elevators redesigned to carry twice the load. You could see it in burgeoning retail sales for “bountiful” apparel, in the return of the corset. You could see it in the market for airline seatbelt extenders, “Big John” toilet seats, 800-pound-rated shower chairs, and “LuvSeats” for
couples of size
to have sex. You could see it in popular websites like BigPeopleDating.com, but you could also see it in the prestige designation of size-zero jeans and in the host of Cody’s classmates who’d been hospitalized for starving or throwing up. You couldn’t help but wonder what earthly good was a microprocessor, a space telescope, or a particle accelerator, when we had mislaid the most animal of masteries. Why bother to discover the Higgs boson or solve the economics of hydrogen-powered cars? We no longer knew how to eat.
T
he Sunday that began the second week of my furtive feasts, I was feeling remorseful about leaving my brother by himself. At supper with Oliver, I rushed through a spicy chicken cacciatore with all the neglect I’d sworn over salmon in December to eschew, and hastened to the restroom. I couldn’t find my toothbrush and had no time to run to a drugstore; I’d promised Edison that I’d be back in time for
Mad Men
, to which, if only to spite Travis, we’d grown addicted. So I picked the green pepper from my teeth, rinsed my mouth, and hoped for the best.
At Prague Porches, I stirred our dinner shakes, averting my face to avoid the smell. Edison watched me from the piano bench with an unnerving stillness that drove me to flights of hyperactivity—turning on the TV though the program wouldn’t air for ten minutes, plumping throw pillows, rehearsing the plot of the last episode, which we both remembered well. With five minutes to go, I was retrieving our Upchucks when Edison walked straight for me with the accuracy of an intercept missile. Leaning in to sniff, he announced, “Chorizo.”
“In your dreams!”
He strode to our trash can and lifted the lid.
“What are you looking for?”
“A pizza box. Or something like it.”
I hadn’t been that careless. “Tea bags and Senokot foils. As usual.”
“That’s what tipped me off, man.” Edison jabbed my chest. “You got the trots.”
“I do not!”
“This isn’t that big an apartment, babe. I can
hear
you. Ain’t
nobody
gets the shits on this diet.” Looming over me, he chided with that piercing parental disappointment, “Panda Bear, how could you.”
“How could I what?”
“After all our sacrifice!” He gesticulated as he paced. “Tell me, was it worth it? For a crappy piece of sausage?”
The game was up. I hung my head and sobbed. “I’m sorry!”
“You’re an ungrateful, selfish BABY,” Edison bellowed, “and a total CREEP!”
“It wasn’t my idea! Oliver made me!”
But Edison couldn’t keep it up, and started to laugh—a huge, rich belly laugh that I hadn’t heard in ages. “Sure bit that hook, line, and sinker! I’m just razzing you, kid. You don’t gotta explain. Look, you look hot as the blazes. Real skinny and real cute. Of course you can’t keep living on five-eighty a day. You’d fucking die, man! But why you been sneaking around? Jesus, it’s been so obvious, I only been waiting for you to come clean.”
“I’ve deserted you.” I couldn’t stop crying.
He was getting stronger; when Edison embraced me, at long last he lifted me off the floor. He rested me down gently, and ruffled my hair. “Look, I’ve dug the companionship. But it’s time you got off the boat. Just don’t eat in secret, right? Christ, it could be better than the Food Channel. I should at least get to watch.”
I wiped my eyes. “That sounds pretty dirty.”
“I’m not through. Got a hundred nineteen more big ones to drop. So here’s what I propose: I’ll cook for you. I’ll make your breakfast, and pack your lunches, and every night make you a dinner that’s absolutely killing.”
“You could stand that?”
“I would
love
that, man. I could buy food, and cut it, and stir it, and smell it, and pinky-swear I wouldn’t snitch. You were starting to look a little pale there, pal. Now hop to.” He tossed me the remote. “Already missed five minutes, and I know you got a hard-on for Don Draper.”
So thereafter Edison cooked. He cooked up a storm. We’d have Cody over, and Oliver over, and one night we finally coaxed Tanner over, during which Edison regaled him with tales of fleeing to the East Coast at seventeen—at which point I sensed my brother’s long war to win his de facto nephew’s favor was starting to succeed, since for the first time in years my stepson was palpably impressed: “No
shit
!” he’d interject, or, “You left with only
twenty bucks
?” The meals were light and nutritious, and I never once caught the cook slipping a morsel in his mouth when he thought no one was looking. Why, like my successful suitor of yore, to keep from dripping on the floor he now instinctively shook his wet hands
splat-splat
at the sink before reaching for a dishtowel. Edison found enormous pleasure in his new role as house chef, and not from caloric voyeurism alone. In depriving himself these many months, Edison was exploding with the need to satisfy
somebody
. Was it the aerobic exercise? He’d grown smaller of girth, but greater of heart.
T
his time, I had not been invited to Java Joint. I had been summoned.
We arrived at the same time. Discarding my jacket, I paused the smallest moment before sliding into the booth, my version of a show-off twirl. In the six weeks since Fletcher and I had last seen each other I’d dropped another twelve pounds before leveling off; this was Fletcher’s first viewing of the finished product. What’s more, my tastes in dress had grown racier, at least for me: tight black jeans, a low-cut aqua blouse. My new contours in the mirror having proved such a private letdown made this single serious payoff—my husband’s admiration—only more important.
As he furtively checked me out, I caught a look in my husband’s eye that I hadn’t seen in a long time. Yet my figure both aroused and annoyed him. “New clothes, I see.”
“The old ones don’t fit.”
“You’re looking . . .”
I waited. I had earned this. It was my reward.
“You’re looking a little fragile.”
“
Thanks.
” I couldn’t believe he could be so ungenerous. Obviously he wanted to be the thin one. The fit one. The perfect person, who required a fallible slob at his side for contrast.
Fletcher backed off any more criticism, but the compliments I had anticipated were not forthcoming. “Never mind for now. We have to talk about Tanner.”
“All right. Shoot.” I hated sounding so clipped, but he’d hurt my feelings.
“He’s quit school.”
“That’s ridiculous. He’s two months from graduating.”
“It’s deliberate. He thinks he’s
exceptional
. As far as Tanner’s concerned, he’s getting out in the nick of time, just before he becomes a plain old high school graduate like everyone else.”
“This country is awash in dropouts.”
“I’ve said that. But he also wants to spite me, and in that sense the ploy is working to plan.”
“What can I get you folks?”
Fletcher had learned not to order a muffin. “Green tea, decaffeinated, no sugar,” said Fletcher, and I chimed in, “Make that two.” A draw.
“There’s more,” said Fletcher. “Two days ago, while I was in the basement working on a rush commission, Tanner packed up and left. No note. His computer’s gone, all his favorite T-shirts. He even left his cell behind so I couldn’t contact or track him. None of his friends have heard from him. I’ve been so desperate, I even contacted
Cleo
. No intel, except I did find out she’s become a born-again, believe it or not.”
“Predictable,” I said. “Another addiction. So where do you think he went?”
“Where else?
California
. Just like your fat-headed dad. Tanner flunked American History—along with everything else. So the only history he has absorbed is
your family’s
. Before he left he even started calling himself ‘Tanner Appaloosa.’
Feuerbach
, I’ve been informed, ‘isn’t commercial.’ ”
“Does he have any money?”
“He’ll have cleaned out his meager savings account. And my wallet.”
“I’m so sorry.” But I wasn’t close enough to this story. I was “so sorry,” as if I were comforting a neighbor or employee.
“There’s more than his diploma at stake here. I want a son who works. Who doesn’t loll around waiting for an inheritance or some other manna from the sky. Who understands that life isn’t just something you’re given but something you make. But kids, they’re told in school now that they’re God’s little angels, that they’re wonderful just because they exist, and they buy it. So they walk out into the world and expect everyone to bow down. It’s dangerous, Pandora. The ‘I’m Mr. Wonderful’ thing, it makes them stupid and it makes them prey.” Fletcher was starting to choke up, but there was fury in there, too, and it was directed at me.
“We see completely eye-to-eye on our son, so I don’t understand why you keep acting as if we’re having an argument.”
“He didn’t just get this stuff from Facebook or
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
or his teachers. It’s you, and your brother. You two make fun of Travis, but only as an opportunity to remind everybody: Our dad was a TV star. That’s the inheritance that Tanner’s waiting for, and it’s worse than waiting for money. Though after those magazine covers about your company, he figures you’ll throw him a wad sooner or later.”
“I’ve never dangled any pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. I’ve never glorified growing up as an ‘Appaloosa,’ either. Don’t I go by Halfdanarson? In fact, I’ve bent over backwards with those kids, explaining that any celebrity I either cadged or earned was no big deal, or even a downer.”
“They don’t believe you.”
I saw his point. You could never convince powerless, obscure people—like children—that they were better off powerless and obscure. It sounded suspicious, like the ruling class shoring up its advantage. For years Travis had tried to convince us kids that we wouldn’t like “slimy” avocados, because he wanted all the ripe ones for himself.
I said, “I’m not getting how you expect me to help here.”
“I want my kids to turn out
solid
.” Atypically, Fletcher wasn’t interested in practicalities. “I don’t want them thinking there’s some cheap shortcut. I want the kind of kids nobody has anymore. Who bear down, who do their part, who don’t expect a leg up or a handout. And now your brother has poured all this crap in their ears. About honoring your ‘talent’ and how he’s whizzed around the world unburdened by anything so clay-footed as a high school diploma, much less a college one. Where do you think Tanner got the idea of dropping out? Your fat fuck of a brother quit school at seventeen, too.”
“Edison makes a better role model for our kids right now than either one of us. He’s not taking any ‘shortcuts.’ He didn’t opt for stomach banding or liposuction. He’s skipping one meal after another, for months, and that’s exactly the kind of hard work and humility you’re touting.”
“That’s a stretch. Do something unbelievably stupid like put on hundreds of pounds and then undo it. That’s hardly a model of constructive behavior. Like carrying a load of bricks to one side of the yard and then carrying them back again.”
“Cody, whether you like it or not, is bowled over.”
“Cody has the flu, and doesn’t have a mother to take care of her. Which I thought I’d gotten for her seven years ago, but apparently not. Instead, all I seem to have installed in our house—for a little while—was some deadbeat’s
sister
.”
I drained my tea. This was pointless. We’d gone around this loop continually: You’ve betrayed us, your real loyalty should be to your family, why is your brother so important, I’m only doing this for a short while and I’ll be back but Edison needs me. Why further groove a broken record?
So I promised I’d let him know if Tanner got in touch, and noted that without a word from the boy himself there was nothing we could do. This meeting failed to accomplish anything tangible, but Fletcher hadn’t come to me for a clue to our wayward son’s whereabouts. He’d dragged me to that coffee shop to have someone to blame. And on some level, I wasn’t sure he was wrong.
W
hen you’re seventeen, it’s not called ‘running away,’ ” said Edison while washing lettuce. “It’s called ‘leaving home.’ That’s what the cops would tell you, too. Tan’s not a missing person. He’s a left person. With a dad like that, it’s a wonder he didn’t cut out years ago.”
“He’s a young seventeen, and Fletcher’s right,” I said. “As soon as he runs out of money, that kid is ripe for any passing deviant.”
“He’ll clue-up pronto. My money says in no time some slightly older fox takes him under her wing and pays for everything.”
“But he has no understanding of how hard—”
“
It’s not your job
”
—
Edison poked a wet finger at my chest—“to be
pre-disappointed
for him, dig? You and Feltch go on and on about how big and terrible ‘the world’ is. Well, maybe so. But in that case, it’s the world’s job to be big and terrible, not yours. You guys keep drilling into the kid he’s not going to make it, he doesn’t have a prayer. He has to be ‘realistic.’ You think you’re protecting him. But you’re insulting him. Take my word for it, that’s the way Tan sees it: you’re keeping a foot on his neck.”
“It is protecting him, to at least ensure he graduates from high school.”
“What for? In Tanner’s terms? Besides, you may be all maternal on the guy’s ass, and maybe you do think you have his interests at heart, but Feltch, man—Feltch just wants those kids to do what he says. He’s an unforgiving authoritarian hard-ass, and it beats me what you ever saw in the guy.”
I was less alarmed by Edison’s characterization than by his final choice of verb tense. “Fletcher Feuerbach is honest, loyal, diligent, and, whether you personally can see it, kind.”
“Kind! About time you noticed Tanner and Cody aren’t the only ones that cat wants to control.”
“He hasn’t controlled me. He didn’t want me to move in with you, and I did.”
“Has he made it easy? Has he been
supportive
? Of a project you warned me yourself would be the hardest gig of our lives?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“All right, then.” Edison brought a cleaver down on a chicken leg. “Case closed.”
E
hhh-di-SUN!” Cody gave my brother a high five. She’d dropped the “Uncle” for months, preferring the chantlike emphasis with which impatient crowds demand the appearance of rock stars. She propped her once-neglected bike against our own in the hall, since it had become evident, once Edison and I started cycling too, that her father hadn’t personally annexed this efficient form of transport. She was looking a little peaked, and I recognized the mopy, lethargic symptoms as an ailment I’d come down with at the same age.
“If anyone asks”—she clumped her backpack on the kitchen pass-through—“I wasn’t here. I told Dad I was working on a paper with Hazel and eating with her folks.”
“You shouldn’t lie,” I said.
“Mom, it’s not worth it. Dad gets so bent out of shape when he knows I’m coming here. He calls it ‘the clubhouse.’ He goes all quiet and moves around all jerky and stiff . . .” She did a demonstration, a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Frankenstein’s monster, and we laughed.
“You could always invite your dad to come, too,” I said.
“The only way Dad’s coming to Prague Porches is with a gallon of gas and a match. Like, head for the exits, man.” His daughter’s recent penchant for
man
and
jive
and
crib
must have driven Fletcher insane. “And now with Tanner gone it’s worse. Dad makes me feel like a traitor. And I hate leaving him by himself. With that gucky brown rice and broccoli so undercooked it’s like chewing on a tree. It’s totally depressing.”
“Yo, it ain’t your fault the cat can’t cook,” said Edison, tailing ten green beans at a stroke. We were having cod fillets with an olive, caper, and eggplant tapenade, one of my brother’s specialties. I’d no idea how he did it without tasting anything.
Cody bombed into a recliner. “I can’t tell you the relief of plopping in a chair that isn’t some sort of
artwork
. Dad’s stuff isn’t, like, totally uncomfortable or anything, but soon as you sit in one of those things he starts staring all beady-eyed and shit, making sure you don’t put a wet glass on the arm or scuff your shoes on the wood. So just sitting there I get an anxiety attack. Half the time I can’t stand it and just sit on the floor, dig?”
“Tell me about it,” said Edison, pulling a charred whole eggplant from the oven.
“He finally fixed the Boomerang, you know,” said Cody.
“Let’s hear it for superglue,” said Edison.
“Not exactly,” said Cody. “But I don’t know why he bothered. I guess the chair darkened over the years, so the new wood isn’t the same color. He keeps running his hand over the rail and scowling, or picking at some little joint where the pieces don’t meet absolutely, one hundred percent, exactamundo flush.”
“You know your dad’s a perfectionist,” I said, setting the table. What I’d missed most during my Upchuck days wasn’t food but the event of food, all the surrounding activities like putting groceries in cupboards and folding napkins. I now adored setting the table.
“Supposedly that’s a compliment,” said Cody. “But what’s so great about being a perfectionist? You’re never happy. You do all this work, and then the stuff you’ve made just pisses you off.” Since her regular lessons with Edison, Cody had grown more blasé, tougher-seeming, but she hadn’t changed that much, and caught herself. “Anyway, the main thing is the Boomerang’s okay, right, Edison? It’s back. You didn’t, like, mess it up. Or, you know, whoever messed it up—didn’t.”
This was a perfect opportunity for Edison to admit responsibility once and for all, but Cody wasn’t the only one who hadn’t changed that much.
“The times you have told your dad you’re coming here,” I said, “what have you told him when you came back? About what it was like?”
She looked away. “I don’t know. I guess I say it’s depressing.”
“Which is exactly the way you described what it’s like at home.”
“Well, I don’t think it
is
depressing. Here, I mean. You know I have a pretty cool time. My improvisation’s getting better, and we play Fictionary when Oliver’s over—”
“Do you tell your dad when Oliver’s come over?”
“Um,” she said glumly. “Generally, no, I guess I don’t.”
“And do you tell your dad that we play Boggle, and Monopoly, and go for walks? About dividing up the parts and reading aloud Tennessee Williams plays, and practicing our hicky Southern accents? Or how we built that snowman out back in February—the really massive one that we made to look like Edison before he went on his diet, using some of his old clothes that no longer fit? That was hilarious.”
Edison shouted from the kitchen, “Even in Iowa, thought we was gonna run out of snow!”
“Of course I don’t!” said Cody impatiently. “I tell him we just sit around and watch TV. That’s what he wants to hear, so that’s what he’s going to hear, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, I know what you’re
sayin’
,” I said. “But you shouldn’t have to cover up having a good time here, and you shouldn’t think you have to tell us that your dad is miserable, either. It’s not fair to you.”