Big Brother (7 page)

Ironically, given the show’s ostensible edginess, when I was thirteen our own family took a turn toward the network cliché of times past. I came home from school to find, of all people, Joy Markle waiting to receive me. In retrospect, Travis’s selection of his costar to break the news—with the physical implication that now the fake mother had replaced the real one—was in poor taste.

When she wasn’t playing Mimi, Joy’s metallic blond hair was no longer bunned in a metaphor for strictness that must have made her scalp hurt. I suppose she was pretty, though not beautiful, a lack she tried to make up for when playing herself—and like so many of the people I grew up around, Joy Markle did
play
herself—with an undercurrent of sluttiness, exposing the lace of her bras well before the practice was fashionable. That afternoon she wore a low-cut dress, an unfortunate scarlet—which signifies and rhymes with
harlot
—and when she stooped to talk to me I knew there was something wrong. I wasn’t that much shorter than she was, and this impulse to kneel in order to you-poor-dear could only have been in the service of melodrama.

Travis was at the hospital, playing his own part to the hilt, though he wasn’t unaffected. To the contrary, and it must be an unnerving experience to gesture toward emotion professionally for years on end only to be mugged by the raggedy, artless ineloquence of the real thing.

Edison and I harbored conflicting versions, because my brother thought of himself as savvy, while I thought of myself as gullible. So Edison maintained that he’d known for years that Travis and Joy were having an affair, while I maintained that neither of us realized until Travis started seeing her openly after our mother’s death. (They didn’t last. Many an affair topples without anyone to cheat on, like a three-legged stool whose supports are reduced to two. They needed my sweet, credulous mother from Ohio for their otherwise too-predictable showbiz shenanigans to be any fun. Yet Travis and Joy’s subsequent falling-out added a bona fide acrimony to their portrayals of Emory and Mimi, making the last two seasons the best of the series.) There was only one reason I cared whether Edison had known all along about our father’s philandering: if so, I couldn’t bear the idea that he hadn’t told
me
.

Raised in Oberlin, our delicately comely mother hailed from a solid, formerly industrial family of some standing; her father edited the local paper for decades. When she met Hugh at a regional horse show in Dubuque, I doubt she took seriously his aspirations to act, assuming he’d soon put the pipedream aside to tend his parents’ farm. After all, a life of pies cooling in windows and relief about long-awaited rainfall would have suited her well. My mother has long been a touchstone of authenticity for me, and my migration to the Midwest was an homage to her of sorts.

Yet at parties in L.A., she was at a loss how to dress, and confided to me once that she waited out many a drunken gathering in a locked bathroom, while other revelers tiddled on the door and finally went away. Detesting her husband’s pompous, self-promoting new friends, Magnolia Halfdanarson privately wept every time
Joint Custody
was renewed for another season. (She only went by “Appaloosa” in public, to humor our father; her checkbooks were printed with the name of the man she thought she had married.) So she may have been depressed, and in that case the condition had worsened after Solstice was born three years earlier. But I’d only had the one; how was I to know whether a mother sleeping whole afternoons was normal? Likewise I couldn’t be expected to differentiate between depressed as in has-a-serotonin-deficit and depressed as in for-good-reason. If the question was whether she knew Travis was cheating on her, the answer was probably yes, if only because the answer to that question is almost always yes.

Edison had come to glory in having a mother who killed herself, which told well in New York jazz clubs. Remember—he’s the one who went by look-at-me Appaloosa, which even for those never brainwashed to accord it legitimacy every Wednesday at nine was still bound to raise eyebrows as no convincing family surname but a breed of horse. Not looking to differentiate myself with a sleeve-tug bio, I never thought her death was suicide. Though obviously devastated to have lost her so young, I didn’t regard having a mother die of natural causes as a narrative letdown, much less as a personal insult.

She was standing at the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Woodland Avenue, and she stepped off the curb. That is the whole story, though as it happened a UPS delivery truck barreled past a fraction of a second later.

Edison would have it that our mother sighted the truck and gave herself up to its bumper on purpose, a lateral variation on hurling oneself off a bridge. Magnolia despaired of her husband’s betrayal, ergo the loss of our bashful, winsome mother in our teens was Travis’s fault. This simple, durable construction had long bulwarked my brother’s preconceived opinion: that Travis was an asshole.

If I held few opinions, I did cling to a handful—like the view that facts are not the same as beliefs, and that most people get them confused. When your mother dies, you want the loss to mean something, reprieving grief from its purest, most intolerable form, in which there is only loss, with no compensation, no takeaway. Driven by this craving if not for a moral then at least for an accusation as a kind of mortality kewpie doll, even commonly honest people will reconfigure the mangle of the truth into a form that has pizzazz. By contrast, here is what
I
reconstructed:

Hundreds if not thousands of times per day we make small rudimentary decisions while thinking about something else. When I ascended our front porch steps, I was never thinking, “Raise your right leg; establish firm footing, lift left heel and push off.” No, I was probably wrestling with whether I could sneak a little sour cream into our evening’s casserole without Fletcher noticing. I’m no neurologist, but there must be a watchful part of the brain that carries out routine tasks and frees the rest of your head to ponder the telltale pastel effects of dairy products.

If so, the watchful part is not perfect. I’ve experienced it enough times myself: those instants when the overseer blinks out like a flawed digital recording. When the bit that allows the rest of your mind to be distracted itself gets distracted.

My mother stepped off a curb. She was a good mother in a traditional sense, and had inculcated in her children the importance of looking both ways. This time she didn’t.

You could say that left me with pure and therefore intolerable loss. But I did derive something from Magnolia’s fate. One afternoon in my mid-twenties, I was cycling along a deserted two-lane street in New Holland, and I ran smack into a parked car. Picking myself up and examining the crumpled bike frame, I thought of my mother. What I took from her moment of inattention was incredulous gratitude: that I did not plow my bike into parked cars all the time. That for decades I had been devising recipes for salsa, guiltily dreading Solstice’s impending visits, or contriving phrases for my husband’s pull-string doll, all the while making incalculably numerous, crucial negotiations of this perilous world, and I still hadn’t died.

That was enough for me. But so minor a matter as thankfulness for the competent multitasking of the human brain 99.9 percent of the time would never be enough for Edison, for whom plot had always to be writ large. Perhaps this seems a stretch, but for me it was all of a piece: his appetite for Cinnabons and suicide alike, his insistence on building his life along such drastic lines that thinking big had manifested itself in his proportions. If my brother’s weight was symptomatic of something wrong, then it also emblemized a vanity. He wasn’t the type to submit to slings and arrows with a bit of a paunch. In the same style in which he’d schemed to succeed, so also would he fail: on a grand scale.

chapter seven

O
ver the next ten days I offered to show Edison Baby Monotonous several times, but he always begged off to check out some jazz interview online. In the end I rather insisted. If
Vanity Fair
and
Forbes
were interested in my business, my own brother might express some small curiosity about what I did for a living.

Edison had been sleeping late, so I arranged to drop back by the house mid-afternoon and ferry him to the premises. Aside from the preparation of meals—a large enough issue to defer for the moment—I wasn’t sure what my brother got up to while I was at work. I think he spent a fair bit of time on the Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity—although Fletcher said that down in the basement he could hear the yammer of the TV, too, for hours on end. What Fletcher did
not
hear, unless Cody was practicing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” was the piano.

Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy and might have learned to relax more, but I did find it disturbing how, especially with the assistance of media gizmos, it was possible for time and time and more time to pass in the process of doing absolutely nothing. I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for whole afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I
was
capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house, waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

When I returned to Solomon Drive to escort Edison to my headquarters around four p.m., I found him faced off with Fletcher in the kitchen, surrounded by groceries on every counter. Edison’s face was red. He was huffing, hands held out from his jeans, quick-draw. Fletcher stood rigidly opposite, his expression steely. If this was a duel, my husband was the sheriff, my brother the outlaw.

“Edison,” I said. “You ready to go?”

“Better believe it,” he said gruffly, eyes narrowed.

I surveyed the counters, mounded with corn chips, pork rinds, canned beef chili, croissants, soda, double-cream sandwich cookies, pizza rolls, frozen french fries, and coffee cakes. I was sure to hear about it in the car, though from picking out the items that needed refrigerating—three packs of butter, smoked mozzarella, and two
quarts
of half-and-half—I could infer the gist.

“Mind if we take your pickup?” I asked Fletcher, keen to scram. I didn’t want to take sides. “I think Edison’s more comfortable in it.”

“Go ahead. He’s already used it to truck half the poison in Hy-Vee into our house.”

Edison snatched the pork rinds, grabbed his jacket, and hunched out the door. After he’d clambered into the passenger seat, he spooled out the seatbelt to its maximum extension, while I took two feet of slack out of the driver’s belt. He bunched his arms and tripled his chin into his clavicle. Scowling, he squeezed his eyes to slits. His inmost self was balled into a dense pellet in the middle of a wide berth of shielding flab; I sensed he could not make himself small enough, nor could his defensive perimeter ever be sufficiently ample to make him feel at a safe length from hostile forces. As if to demonstrate that for pure protection he could not get fatter fast enough, by the time I’d backed from the drive he’d opened the pork rinds and was stuffing them through the taut portal of his pursed lips, chewing snacks the texture of spray insulation foam in a spirit of reprisal. I wondered if he was aware that the object of his retaliation was himself.

We didn’t say anything until he finished the bag.

“Don’t take this personally,” he grunted, crushing the cellophane. “But your husband is a prick.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not gonna repeat it.”

I pictured my husband picking his words with care. That was what made his rare invectives so stinging: he didn’t lose his temper. I knew how long the perfectly chosen slight could last—like being called a
mousy dishrag
at Verdugo Hills High, when my muttering back, “That’s a mixed metaphor,” had branded me only more conclusively as a twit.

“You had an altercation, I presume,” I said. “Over the groceries.”

“I was being
helpful
. Trying to pull my weight.”

I waited for his embarrassment over his choice of expression to dissipate. “You know he has strong feelings about food.”

“Who doesn’t? Nobody’s making the guy eat my groceries.”

“I suspect,” I said delicately, “the issue was the kids?”

“They’re teenagers. Stock nothing but chickpea kibble, and they’ll hang at Mickie D’s. Christ, Fletch wasn’t a food fascist last time I was here. What happened?”

“Well . . . our kitchen used to be crammed with leftovers from Breadbasket—poppy-seed tray cakes or big Ziplocs of potato salad, which we’d either have to eat or throw away. Something of a trap, when you’re from the waste-not-want-not school.”

“And your cooking is the shit,” said Edison.

“Thanks. Though that’s a trap, too.”

“Lotta pitfalls for potato salad.”

“Yes, you have to ask yourself if there was ever a time people just ate something and got on with it. Every time I open the refrigerator I feel like I’m staring into a library of self-help books with air-conditioning. Anyway—when Fletcher realized the leftovers were having the predictable effect, he sort of freaked. You have to understand: his first wife got heavily into crystal meth. That’s why he got custody of Tanner and Cody. She first started snorting crystal to lose weight. But soon she was leaving the kids unattended, disappearing for days. Lost several teeth . . . Got all these sores she’d pick at, and they’d get infected . . . Then when she came down off a tear, all she’d do was sleep. The whole spiral—it was pretty traumatic. Left Fletcher with a control thing.”

“You don’t get that way in an afternoon. That guy,” Edison grumbled, “has always had a ‘control thing.’ ”

“His nature errs in that direction,” I conceded. “In any case, when he resolved to drop a few pounds, this obsession with fitness and nutrition snowballed. Meanwhile, Tanner never lets his friends forget that his
real
mother is a drug addict. Just like you always bragging about how Mother killed herself. It makes him seem darker and more complicated.”

“Man, this isn’t the Iowa where we visited the Grumps.”

“No, it’s grown a pretty vile underbelly,” I said—though you’d never know that from the innocent vista out the window. In plowed-under cornfields, tufts of dried husk fluffed the clods. Feedlots snuffled with wholesome cows. Photogenic silos poked the flat horizon. “Iowa’s developed a massive crystal meth problem.”

“Mexicans,” Edison supposed.

“Only at first. You can get all the ingredients at Walmart, except some sort of ammonia that’s used on farms as fertilizer. So now it’s homegrown, along with tomatoes and green peppers. Which is worse. The local stuff is purer. The ice from Mexico—”

Edison chuckled. “
Ice!
Don’t think of my kid sister in the Midwest as hip to user lingo.”

“In this state, grannies on Medicare are
hip to
user lingo
. Farmers take meth to stay awake, like when they have to pull all-nighters bringing in crops. So do truckers. They call it ‘high-speed chicken feed.’ And because it burns up all this energy, around here meth is a housewife problem. A diet drug.”

“
Maybe
I can see why having an ex who became a meth head would make you more conservative,” said Edison, folding his arms again. “But that cat’s got no reason to be abusive toward
me
.”

However brutally, Fletcher must at last have referred directly to the subject I’d avoided since Edison’s arrival. I was tired of feeling like a coward. I’d thought my tact was kind, but maybe I’d simply been trying to make life easier for myself.

“Listen . . .” I trained my gaze on the road. “We haven’t talked about it. But I couldn’t help but notice . . . since the last time I saw you . . . you’re a little heavier.”

Edison slapped his knee and hooted. “ ‘Oh, Mr. Quasimodo, I
couldn’t help but notice
you’re
a little
stooped over.’ ‘Excuse me, Mr. Werewolf, I
couldn’t help but notice
you’re
a little
hairy.’ I guess you’ve finally ‘noticed’ the Empire State Building is
a
little
tall, the sun is
slightly
bright, and the Earth is a
smidgeon
on the round side.”

I laughed, too, if only in relief. “Okay, okay! I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

“How about, ‘Whoa, bro, you sure are fat!’ Think I don’t know I’m fat? They make mirrors in New York, you know.”

“All right.” I braced back from the steering wheel. “When I first laid eyes on you at the airport, I was floored. I’m still floored. I don’t understand how you could have put on so much weight in just a few years.”

“Try it sometime. It’s not that hard.”

He was right. Add four Cinnabons per day to a calorie-neutral diet, and you could gain 365 pounds in a single year. “But . . .” I asked feebly, “why?”

“Duh! I like to eat!”

“Well, everybody does.”

“So it’s no big mystery, is it? Everybody includes me, and I like to eat a lot.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to get his back up. “Would you
like
to lose weight?”

“Sure, if I could push a button.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I would
like
ten million dollars. I would
like
a beautiful wife—again, I might add. I would
like
world peace.”

“How much you weigh is within your control.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Yes. That is what I think.”

“You gained a few pounds yourself. You
like
to drop those, too?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“So why don’t you? Or why haven’t you?”

I frowned. “I’m not sure. Ever since Fletcher became such a goody-goody, it’s seemed almost like my job to be the one who’s bad. My coming home from the supermarket with a box of cookies has provided a release valve. If we only stocked edamame, you’re right: we’d lose the kids to Burger King for good.”

“Pretty complicated for learning to skip lunch, babe.”

“Well, maybe it is complicated.”

“So for me it’s even more complicated, dig?” He was getting hostile. “You can’t even lose thirty pounds, and I’m supposed to lose—I don’t know how many.”

“I don’t need to lose
thirty
pounds, thank you. More like twenty, at the most.”

“Don’t worry, if this is a contest, you get the gold star.”

“It’s not a contest. But we could both agree not to make things worse. That’s a start, isn’t it? The way you’re eating lately, you’re only getting heavier.”

“There’s the one little problem of my not giving a shit.”

That was, of course, not one problem, but the problem.

A
s I parked in front of Monotonous, Edison said, “Huh. This all yours? Pretty big.”

It wasn’t much better than a warehouse, with offices on one end—but it was my warehouse. My idea, my employees: my project.

“I couldn’t have anticipated it at first,” I explained as Edison heaved from the cab, “but one of the keys to this product taking off has been the way it excites competition. Not between companies, but between my customers. Who’s got the wittiest doll. Or the crudest. We’ve had more than one order for a male Monotonous that does nothing but burp, snort, sneeze, hawk, and spit. That has hiccups and a hacking cough. One customer wanted it to stink when it farted, but that was technically beyond us.”

The short walk to reception, with Edison, was not short. “Then there are the pornographic ones,” I said. “I had to decide whether to accept the orders at first, but there were so many . . . If a wife wants to give her husband a doll that barks, ‘Suck my dick, bitch!’ why should I care?”

I introduced Edison to Carlotta, our receptionist, whom I’d alerted about my brother coming by for a tour. I had not warned her about anything else, and was glad she took the lack of obvious family resemblance in stride. “It’s a real pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she said, pumping his hand warmly. “Your sister here’s the best boss a body could hope for. And I’m not just saying that to wheedle for a raise.”

I brought him into the big open area, which hummed with two dozen sewing machines. The walls were stacked with hundreds of fabrics, while one corner mounded with clear plastic bags of cotton stuffing. “All the dolls are custom jobs, but we have standardized a little,” I said, raising my voice over the machines and leading him to the piles of unclothed dolls with no hair or facial features. “Over here, you can see we’ve got three basic body types in both sexes: thin, average, and portly. Three fabric colors seems to cover the racial bases. These we mass-produce. Angela also churns out denim and leather jackets, though we often add a distinguishing detail—embroidery, a political button. It’s the personalized touches that people like.”

“So—what, they send you a photograph.”

“Sometimes we work from one jpeg; other customers send five or six. And a list of expressions. We recommend a minimum of ten. We’ll do up to twenty, but the poetry—honestly, it is a form of poetry—seems to work better with fewer.”

Edison frowned. “This is shit the cat in the photo says all the time. In real life.”

Clearly, my brother had neither read my interviews nor looked at my website. I wondered if I felt hurt. I marveled that I didn’t seem to. Instead I felt an increment sorrier for Edison. If I felt any sorrier for Edison, I would faint.

“That’s right,” I said. “We all repeat ourselves, but certain signature phrases become a form of branding. Most people aren’t aware of what they say all the time unless it’s called to their attention. The repetitions are telling. Our dolls are expensive. But as a substitute for therapy, they’re dirt cheap.”

I introduced Edison to my staff. I was proud of my workforce. A business with an inbuilt sense of humor gave rise to a natural joviality, and as long as orders weren’t piling up we had a good time. They were nice people, so my impulse to protect my brother from my employees was disconcerting; my first introductions were tainted with a challenging demeanor, like,
So? What are you looking at?
that made my workers glance to the floor. Some of them may have read correctly in my hard stare,
You’re not so skinny yourself, you know
. I was dismayed that my brother’s size seemed to be all that people saw. I wanted to object,
But his mind is not fat, his soul is not fat, his past is not fat, and his piano playing isn’t fat, either
.