A Perfectly Good Family - Lionel Shriver

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on his tobacco threads and tossed it on the floor, where its spine bent at an uncomfortable angle like an accident victim you aren’t supposed to move. He leaned forward and tapped ash on the carpet. “Here’s a check, buddy, now run along and we’ll pretend we never met.”

      “Maybe we haven’t,” said Truman tersely.

      “Buy me out is exactly what Mother and Father did, for years, and got off cheap at that. And now look—even dead, they want it back.”

      Finally Truman looked up from the invoice. “Nobody kicked you out, you left. You never wanted to be a part of our family, and you weren’t a part of it, so take your thirty pieces of silver and leave us alone.”

      Truman’s muscles were straining the shoulders of his green workshirt, whereas Mordecai’s shirt only strained at the buttons above his belt. Of the two, Truman was technically much stronger. Yet in the face of the older’s impervious relaxation and bemused little smile, Truman may as well have been lofting rubber darts at a tank.

      Mordecai reached for the woven celadon vase on the coffee table, turning from his brother as if neglecting an annoying bee that is not worth the trouble of pursuing and swatting at all over the room. “What’s this from?” he asked me, bouncing the ceramic from hand to hand like a basketball.

      “Oh, some Korean gratuity …” I stuttered, nervous for it, and feeling apologetic for my parents’ trinkets.

      “So this is part of my inheritance?” he inquired, still hefting the pot back and forth.

      “Lucky you,” I said.

      Without further ado, he palmed the vase as if for a free throw, and launched it past Truman’s nose to the far corner. It smashed into a hundred pieces with a sound as if an entire china cabinet had pitched on its face. Then Mordecai stood to arch his eyebrows at me, holding his empty tumbler upside-down by way of complaint.

      “Maybe,” I said unsteadily, “it’s time to make dinner.”

      I had learned from my mother to employ food as a proxy in domestic relations, just as Truman had detoured his complex affections for his family into a simpler alliance with our architecture. At least as we four bustled over cutting boards, the chop of cleavers and scrape of spoons filled what would have been, for fifteen minutes, numbed silence.

      It may be sissy of me, but I’ve always been fascinated by how people cook. Take Averil, for instance: I gave her the job of making garlic bread. Easy, right? And quick. But no. First off, she adds a timorous amount of garlic to the butter, and has to be bullied into pressing several more cloves. She mashes the butter for ten minutes, mortified by the prospect of an unbroken clump startling an innocent diner with a burst of zing. When she advances to the baguettes, she saws the bread slowly as wood, and dithers the blade back and forth after every slice before committing to another, intent on identical twins. When in mid-loaf she severs it in half instead of cutting just to the bottom crust, she lets the knife droop dejectedly as if she has just failed a geometry test. Buttering, she dabs and peers and dabs, until I find it too excruciating to watch further. In the time it takes her to make garlic bread, the whole rest of the meal will have been prepared and the table set.

      Averil was daunted by food, along with a great deal else. That she was a substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system suggested that I had either over-estimated the significance of garlic bread or under-estimated the unruliness of North Carolinian teenagers. In the kitchen, she was always looking over her shoulder to make sure she’d done nothing wrong. She wanted to please the food itself, to earn its approval; perhaps someone in her childhood had delivered draconian punishments for piddling mistakes. Of flavor in general she was leery, her primary concern that there should not be too much.

      Where Averil is painstaking, Truman is brisk. They share an exactitude—Truman’s diced onions are all the same size square. Yet while Averil might take an hour trimming and snapping green beans one by one, my little brother lines them up ten at a time and dispatches two pounds in ten minutes. And where Averil is timid, Truman is judicious. The heat under Truman’s sautéing onions is medium. The amount of salt in his pasta water is some.

      The confidence with which Truman wielded a cleaver had always meant to me that, beneath his closeted, suspicious-of-strangers, why-go-out-let’s-stay-home day-to-day, teemed a brusque, masculine certainty that never got out of the house. About his assembly-line methodicalness I was less enthusiastic. He was capable of experimentation, but if he ever dolloped the beans with pesto and it was tasty, then he would always dollop them with pesto in future. Truman seized on answers and kept them. I think if you presented a meal to Truman and said, This meal is good; it isn’t remarkable or memorable, but it is healthy and competently prepared and it will never make you grow “love handles”; if you push this button you may have this same dinner for the rest of your life, he would push the button. On Truman repetition never wore thin. I hadn’t ascertained whether he was congenitally incapable of boredom, or whether he was so fantastically bored, all the time, that he was unacquainted with any other state.

      Myself? In the kitchen, I am whimsical and I flit. I measure nothing, adding dashes of this and fistfuls of that until I have made either a brilliant dish that can’t be repeated or an atrocious one that shouldn’t be. This evening I sneak more olive oil into the vinaigrette than Truman would allow. However, I can’t choose between adding capers or green peppercorns to the salad and so opt for both, which is foolish. I do this all the time: torn between accents, I’ll sacrifice neither, and the flavors conflict. The last thing I am is methodical; I grind a little pepper until my tendons tire, peel one carrot when I will need to peel five, slice a tomato and have a sip of wine. Washing the lettuce I get impatient since I grew up with a younger brother who would do all the drudgery and I am a little spoiled; the salad will later be gritty. Meanwhile, I hover over the others and I pick. I crunch raw green beans, sample the simmering onions, slip off with a surreptitious spoonful of pesto, swipe a heel from Averil’s garlic bread. She squeals. By dinnertime I will have ruined my appetite, but I enjoy food I snitch more than whole permitted portions at table. Most of my pleasures are devious.

      The real study, however, was Mordecai, extended at the table smoking roll-ups and slurping aquavit. He ran his own audio-engineering company and was used, like me, to drones dispensing with the shit-work. He only roused himself for the foreman’s role of spicing the tomato sauce. Mordecai cooked rarely—he and his wife Dix went out nearly every night—but inexperience never stopped my older brother from being an expert at anything.

      If Mordecai has a motto in cooking, it reads: quantitus, extremitus, perversitus. Compulsively industrial, he promptly opens three times more tinned tomatoes than necessary. He presses two whole bulbs of garlic into the onions (while Averil’s eyes pop) and proceeds to dilute the paste with the entire bottle of ten-dollar pinot noir I have opened to breathe for dinner. He shakes the big jar of basil with visible frustration, pries off the perforated top, and dumps in another quarter of a cup. He tastes the sauce, looks dissatisfied, throws in more basil, looks dissatisfied—in point of fact, Mordecai never looks satisfied—throws in some more, and advances to thyme. I peek in the pot to find that the sauce is turning black. But even after he has killed most of the oregano as well he casts about the kitchen as if the insipid slop still tastes like baby pap. He lights on the cone from my coffee that morning, and spoons in about half a cup of grounds. Only with this addition does Mordecai look pleased. His last stroke, a torrent of hot pepper flakes, leaves me praying we are out of cayenne.

      When at last we sat down, Truman and Averil each took as small a spoonful of the sauce on their pasta as etiquette allowed. Even with Mordecai, Truman was polite. He did mutter, “If this recipe is a secret, I think we should keep it,” but under his breath. The spices were chewy, and coffee grounds wedged in my teeth, though all I could taste was red pepper. I commended Averil on her garlic bread, which did a decent job of damping the fire in my mouth.

      Mordecai himself made a show of gusto, his serving mountainous, an extra snow of chili flakes over the top. He kept the schnapps at his elbow by some triple-strength black coffee and alternated slugs of each. At thirty-eight, he still wouldn’t eat his vegetables.

      “So

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