Big Brother - Lionel Shriver

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with the proceeds of my offbeat business two years before might have meant that I had the “right” to install my brother in its guest room without permission. But pulling fiscal rank struck me as vulgar and undemocratic. There were three Feuerbachs in that house, and only one Halfdanarson.

      What called me to run roughshod over Fletcher’s opposition was something else. I was not, as a rule, held hostage to family. At some point I would make the disagreeable discovery of how deep a tie I retained to my father, but not until he died; meantime, I was free to find him unbearable. My sister Solstice was sufficiently my junior that I could almost be her aunt, and it was only at her insistence that she visited me in Iowa every other summer. (She grew up in the fractured remains of a nutty, failed family, on which she’d long tried to impose a more appealing cliché. So she was the only one who bought presents, sent cards, and paid visits whose perfect regularity suggested a discipline.) My lovely mother Magnolia had died when I was thirteen. Both sets of grandparents had passed. A loner until Fletcher, I’d borne none of my own children.

      Edison was my family, the sole blood relative whom I clearly and cleanly loved. This one attachment distilled all the loyalty that most people dilute across a larger clan into a devotion with the intensity of tamarind. It was Edison from whom I first learned loyalty; it was therefore Edison from whom all other loyalties flowed, and the beneficiaries of this very capacity to cling fiercely were Fletcher and our kids. I may have been ambivalent about the past we shared, but only Edison and I shared it. In truth, I hadn’t hesitated for a heartbeat when Slack Muncie called that morning. Fletcher was right: it was a trump. Edison was my brother, and we could really have ended the discussion then and there.

       chapter two

      I’m picking your uncle up at the airport at five.” The pecans on my pie smelled nicely toasted, and I pulled it from the oven. “Be sure and join us for dinner.”

      “Step-uncle,” Tanner corrected, standing at the counter getting toast crumbs on the floor. “Right next door to total stranger in my book. Sorry. Got plans.”

      “Change them,” I said. “I wasn’t asking. You and Cody will be at dinner, period. Seven o’clock, if the plane’s on time.” I’d always felt shaky about exerting authority over my stepchildren, even shakier now that Tanner was seventeen, and when you don’t feel confident of authority you do not have it. If he did as I said, he would obey out of pity. “When you have a houseguest,” I added, laying on the parental shtick even thicker, “you may not have to be around for all the other meals, but you do on the first night.”

      “Is that so?”

      I wasn’t sure what I’d said was true. “I mean, I’d really appreciate your being here.”

      “So you are asking.”

      “Pleading.”

      “That’s different.” He wiped butter from his mouth with his sleeve. “The guy was here once before, right?”

      “A little over four years ago. Do you remember him?”

      “Got a dim recollection of some blowhard. Kept yakking about bands nobody’s ever heard of. Couldn’t remember my fucking name.”

      The characterization stung. “Edison has a son somewhere, but his ex got full custody when the boy was a baby. So your uncle doesn’t have much experience talking to kids—”

      “Got the impression the problem was the way he talked to adults. He was boring the shit out of everybody.”

      “He’s a very talented man who’s led a very interesting life—much more interesting than mine. This is a rare opportunity to get to know him.” I was speaking to a brick wall.

      I hadn’t quite cracked my stepson. Tanner had a blithe sense of entitlement, a certainty that he was destined for an undefined brand of greatness. Though already a month into his senior year of high school, he had yet to evince the slightest interest in the college education for which I was expressly saving the proceeds from my business. He wanted to write, but he didn’t like to read. That summer the boy had announced that he’d decided to become a screenwriter as if doing Ridley Scott a personal favor. I’d wanted to shake the kid; had he any idea the poor odds of breaking into Hollywood even as a runner? Uncertain whether my impulse was kind or cruel, I’d held my tongue. I had pointed out that his grammar, punctuation, and spelling were atrocious, but Tanner imagined that word processing took care of all that silly prose-style folderol. Anyway, he’d said, for screenwriting you had to know how people really talked, for which a grasp of proper grammar was only an impediment. Okay, I’d thought begrudgingly, one point for Tanner. Throughout his adolescence, Fletcher and I had praised the boy’s every poem, extolled the creativity of his half-page short stories. Parents are supposed to. But, to my horror, Tanner had believed us.

      Tall, pale, and unmuscled, the boy had that undernourished look that girls so often fall for. His dark hair was painstakingly disheveled. The clashing layers of his clothing showed like peeled-back layers of old wallpaper: a checked sweatshirt over dangling striped shirttails, parted to reveal the elastic of plaid boxers rising above his slumped, unbelted jeans. Most of his friends stopped by in the same state of harlequin half-undress. Tanner carried himself with his hips canted forward, and he’d recently developed a disconcerting habit of touching himself while he talked—smoothing palms down his hips, or up his rib cage to his flat chest. He may have been chronically unimpressed, but that skepticism did not extend to himself, and I was amazed how readily his peers and teachers alike took his superficial assurance at face value.

      I had to watch myself with Tanner. When I noted that “girls” would fall for his looks, I should have clarified: at his age, I’d have been one of those girls. It’s not that I was tempted to be flirtatious with him; after all, I could still discern traces of the wary, closed-down ten-year-old I first inherited, who had to be coaxed into the open like a cat from under a bed. Nevertheless, I recognized my teenage stepson as just the sort of poised, hip, self-convinced young man with whom I was besotted in high school, where I’d huddled the halls praying above all to be left alone. (My classmates at Verdugo Hills were more than happy to oblige. Unlike Edison, I continued to go by “Halfdanarson,” the surname with which I was born; I never let on that I was Travis Appaloosa’s kid.) What I had to watch with Tanner, then, was resistance. It was tempting to parade before myself how as a grown woman I no longer fell for such a huckster, and I didn’t want to indulge a too-ferocious, slightly vicious determination to see through him.

      Viewed from the impunity of marriage, the penchant for unrequited passion that persisted through my early thirties had paid off. The likes of Tanner might not have known I was alive, but if you never spoke to the young man he would never reveal his disillusioning enthusiasm for the Bee Gees. Having nursed my loves in private, I had kept them inviolate, and was now spared looking back at a string of deranged entrancements with mortified incredulity. Marathon devotion had developed my emotional endurance, in contrast to Tanner’s sprints with three or four girlfriends a year. I feared that my stepson wasn’t learning to love women but to harbor contempt for the women who loved him.

      “Glop that much jam on your toast,” Fletcher grunted en route to a glass of water, “might as well be eating cake.”

      “Whole wheat!” said Tanner. “And he still won’t give it a rest.”

      I’m sorry, but I don’t eat daaaaaaaaairy! Our thirteen-year-old, Cody, had abandoned her piano practice to tug the pull-string doll propped on the dining area’s middle shelf in case her father needed razzing. The doll was a first effort from four years before, and then a mere whimsy of a Christmas present. I’d sewn it from scratch on the heels of Fletcher’s sudden health kick. The crafts project had doubled as therapy, embodying my struggle to keep a sense of humor about the fact that he would no longer come near my celebrated manicotti.

      The stuffed ragamuffin wore a miniature version of Fletcher’s standard black fleece, to which I’d glued his signature dandruff of sawdust.

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