Big Brother - Lionel Shriver

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blamed Fletcher for those twenty pounds. I may have been a quiet sort who hugged the sidelines, but that didn’t mean I was a pushover. I was the kind of person at whom you could finger-wag and tut-tut-tut, who wouldn’t talk back, who would submit to all manner of browbeating while seeming to take it all in like a good little camper, and you’d walk away and think, There, that’s put her straight, and then I’d sift off and blithely do whatever you’d just told me not to.

      That defiant streak had backfired when I started noshing pointedly between meals on whatever entire food group Fletcher had recently disavowed. (The repudiation of cheese was deadly. The day after that announcement, I returned from the supermarket with half a wheel of Brie.) His spurning of the very dishes that had entranced him during our courtship and early marriage—banana cream pie, homemade deep-dish pizza—hurt my feelings. I shouldn’t have conflated love and food, but that’s a mistake women have made for centuries, so why should I be any different? I missed cooking, too, which I found therapeutic. Hence I still baked an occasional coconut layer cake, which Fletcher would boycott, and even the kids would avoid as their father glowered nearby. Well, someone had to eat that cake. Fatally, I felt sorry for it.

      We had at least evolved a ritual compromise. From each contraband confection, I cut a one-bite amuse-bouche, arranging it with a dab of whipped cream, a garnish of mint, and a couple of pristine fresh raspberries on a large china dessert plate with a sparkling silver fork. This I would leave in the middle of our prep island, the way kids put out cookies for Santa, then make myself scarce. Fletcher would never take the bait while I was watching; still, it meant more to me than I can say that these illicit samplers of what he now deemed “toxic” vanished within the hour.

      Strictly speaking, as a nutritional Nazi my husband had grown more attractive, but I’d been attracted to him before. Besides, a pointiness was now more pronounced. He had a high forehead and long oval face; shorn to a prickly furze to minimize the balding, his head was bullet-shaped. His long, strong nose in profile looked like a checkmark, and the wire-rimmed glasses added a professorial sharpness. Some strict, censorious quality had entered the triangular geometry of his wide shoulders and newly narrow waist, so that simply being in his physical presence made me feel chided.

      As I collected our dishes, it bothered me that Fletcher hadn’t stayed to tidy the kitchen, which wasn’t like him. Commonly we dispatched cleanup with the interlocking fluidity of synchronized swimmers. We were at our best working side by side—neither of us understood or relished “leisure” time—and my fondest memories were of just this sort of cleanup on a grand scale. When we first started dating, on nights I’d catered a big buffet Fletcher would install Tanner and Cody in sleeping bags on my living room floor, so he could help with the kitchen. (When I first saw him shake his hands at the sink—thrusting fingers downward splat-splat, a small, instinctive motion that ensures you don’t dribble water all over the floor on the way to drying your hands on the dishtowel—I knew this was the man I would marry.) Swabbing counters, sealing leftovers, and rinsing massive mixing bowls, he never complained; he never had to be told what to do. He only took breaks to sidle behind me as I removed another set of warm tumblers from the dishwasher and kiss my neck. Believe it or not, those cleanups in spattered aprons were romantic, better than champagne and candlelight.

      Such memories in mind, I could hardly begrudge sudsing the broccoli steamer after lunch for two. I reviewed our conversation. It could have gone worse. Fletcher might himself have announced “over my dead body”; I’d slyly said it for him. I’d never asked outright, “Is it okay if my brother stays in our house for a while?” He’d never said yes or no.

      Our house. Of course, it was our house.

      Having rented most of my life, I still hadn’t shaken the impression that this address on Solomon Drive belonged to someone else; I kept the place fanatically neat as if the real owners might walk in any time unannounced. The house was larger than we required; the kitchen’s plenitude of cabinets invited the purchase of pasta- and bread-making machines that we’d use once. Deserving of the contemptuous tag McMansion, our new home had been an overreaction to the cramp of Fletcher’s tract rental, one of those “temporary” resorts men seek post-divorce, from which unless a new woman puts her foot down they never move. I’d been flushed with awe that I could suddenly afford to buy a house, in cash no less, and in some ways I bought it simply because I could.

      Also, I’d wanted to find Fletcher a workspace. Furniture was his passion, so I bought his passion for him. Naïve in the ways of money, I couldn’t have known beforehand how much he would resent me for it.

      Earlier in our marriage, Fletcher had worked for an agricultural company that made genetically modified seed. I’d been keen to enable him to quit because he wasn’t a natural salesman—not from environmentalist aversion to fiddling with nature, or political outrage that corporate America wanted to patent what was once literally for the picking. I didn’t hold many opinions. I didn’t see the point of them. If I opposed the production of nongerminating disease-resistant corn, it would still be sold. I considered most convictions entertainment, their cultivation a vanity, which is why I rarely read the newspaper. My knowing about an assassination in Lebanon wouldn’t bring the victim to life, and given that news primarily aggravated one’s sense of helplessness I was surprised it was so widely heeded. Refusal to forge views for social consumption made me dull, but I loved being dull. Being of no earthly interest to anyone had been a lifelong goal.

      In kind, this brick neocolonial had no character. It was newly built, its maple floors unscarred. I adored its unstoried blankness. The sockets were solidly wired, and everything worked. I’d never courted character on my own account, save in the sense of being disinclined to shoplift or cheat on my husband; Edison was the one who sought the designation “a real character,” and he could have it. I gloried in anonymity and by then violently resented that the glare of an uninvited public spotlight had turned me into someone in particular for other people. (For pity’s sake, you’d think after purposefully burying myself in the very middle of the country the least I could expect was to be inconspicuous.) I had enough history, and with the lone exception of Edison himself my instinct regarding the past was to draw the shade.

      The big, lobotomized house formed the perfect neutral backdrop against which Fletcher’s furniture could stand out. At this point my husband’s handiwork had replaced most of the department-store appurtenances of our original combined households. (This joining of domestic forces was the first time in my life that someone had helped me move. With ferocious efficiency, Fletcher could carton a room in an afternoon, which has to be even more romantic than prizing the fiddly scraps from the food processor.) So lithe were his creations that whenever I walked into the living room the furniture seemed to have been grazing on throw rugs moments before. Its back corners curled like stag horns, bowed legs prancing on pared feet, the couch was weighted down with pillows, without which the skittish creature might have cantered out the door.

      Though Fletcher liked to think he was improving, my favorite piece was one of his first. We called it the Boomerang. Its red leather cushion was oval. The rail forming the contiguous arms and back slooped high on the right, then arced down on the left, until the far end of the left-hand arm almost touched the floor. The chair looked as if it had been hurled. The slats supporting the great rising back line were also curved—laminated Macassar ebony, rosewood, and maple that he’d soaked for a week to bow. The Boomerang was a talisman of sorts. Most people who’ve refined a skill may cling to such a touchstone: early proof they’ve got the goods. The object to which they can always refer when a current effort is foundering: See? If you can do that, you can do anything. I’d no equivalent myself, because I didn’t care about product. I liked process. Be it a marmalade cake or the absurd merchandise I sold then, output was chaff to me the instant of completion. I found finishing projects perfectly awful.

      After scrubbing the beige film from the rice pan, I peered out the front window. It had started to rain, but that never drove my intrepid husband home. Safe in my solitude, I crept upstairs to my home office and booked a plane ticket between LaGuardia and Cedar Rapids, choosing an arbitrary return date that we could always change. I wrote a check for five hundred dollars with “incidentals” scrawled in the lower-left-hand corner. Enclosing the check and e-ticket printout, I addressed

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