Big Brother (13 page)

So when I said I’d miss him, I meant I would miss what we had not experienced, and I don’t know what that’s called: nostalgia for what didn’t happen. I knew that when he left I would feel dreadful, and in that sense during his final few days in our house I did savor his company, which at least reprieved me, however briefly, from my own remorse.

I
t was the Saturday before Edison’s Tuesday flight, and we’d just finished one of my brother’s overkill brunches: french toast. Making an effort to be sociable on Edison’s last weekend, Fletcher (
I want DRY toast! I want DRY toast!
) had joined us with his unbuttered whole wheat. Tanner and Cody left to meet friends at the mall. Somewhere between noon and one p.m., the phone rang.

Travis.

My brother talked to our father about once a year and had thus filled me in as to what Travis really thought of Baby Monotonous—rather, “your sister’s toy company.” For his no-account, plain, below-the-parapet second-born to have made a name for herself with “doll babies” was apparently a leading source of his trademark consternation. My father’s affront was one of the few bankable benefits I reaped from my peculiar product’s popularity. In a word, revenge. While ours was one of those many families in which it was hard to pinpoint what exactly we kids might crave revenge
for
, this sense of deserving compensation for a big, ineffable, nameless atrocity persisted nonetheless. Yet I knew I was being small-minded. Travis was pathetic. Triumphing over the guy in his seventies was therefore itself pathetic, and way, way too late.

As a rule I talked to Travis more like once a month, since these dutiful daughterly calls made me feel less like a heel for otherwise dumping a delusional monomaniac on Solstice merely because she lived nearby. (But, hey. Her choice.) My father asked rarely about my affairs, and even then in a cursory manner (“How’s tricks, Pandarama?”). Then we could get on with the important business of Travis’s non-life now that even companies who produced the most mortifying products had dropped his endorsement (Ab-Sure, which made medical trusses, was the last to go).

Thus far Edison and I had twice placed joint calls to our father, during which I had barely gotten a word in edgewise. These three-way conversations had been quite a contest, since it was a hard call whether Edison or Travis was more of a windbag. First Travis would fume that nowadays TV stars raked in nearly as much moolah as the Hollywood kind, when he’d earned “chump change”—our father’s backhanded fashion of informing us that he had already spent most of aforesaid chump change, so no, we would not be inheriting any money to speak of. With no pretense of a segue, Edison would then reminisce about his Rio tour in 1992, listing every unknown-from-Adam band member and describing a wild impromptu jam session in a tough, dangerous favela.

Thus on hearing our father’s voice when I picked up the phone that Saturday my heart sank: there goes an hour down the drain. But I did wonder at the fact that, contrary to custom, Travis had called us.

“Pandorissimo!” cried my father gaily. His benevolent embellishments of my name were meant to bestow the family nonentity with Personality for a Day. With a woebegone look, I mouthed
Travis
to Fletcher. Noticeably more genial as Edison’s exodus loomed, he was sponging up the french-toast custard that had dribbled all over the kitchen floor.

“Now, listen,” Travis barreled on in my ear. “Have you seen this new series
Mad Men
? Pretty noteworthy that AMC is commissioning original drama now, and I’m thinking I might be able to capitalize on some opportunities there. But everyone I run into out here can’t shut up about this show. I’ve checked it out, and for the life of me I don’t see it. Set in the early sixties, fine, hardly real ‘historical’ drama, in my book. All this buzz about the sets and the clothes, when I could have tricked out the whole season with a trip to Goodwill. Lotta that show’s mileage is from Christina Hendricks’s bazookas. Cheap shot. And this whole man-with-a-past, not what he pretends to be. Hackneyed beyond belief. Give me
The Fugitive
any day.”

“I can’t say. I haven’t seen this new show,” I lied. “We don’t watch much TV.”

“That’s what everybody says. Listen to folks in this town, you’d think they all lived in caves without electricity. Then in the same breath they start slobbering about
Mad Men
. It don’t compute, kiddo. Now—Pandorable. That was right nice of that hunky carpenter of yours to email a pic of your birthday. Sorry about not giving you a shout on the day, but I had such a stack of fan mail to get through that I didn’t manage to fit it in.”

“So this is my
birthday call
?” I wasn’t thinking sharply. I merely noted that, had Fletcher not sent our group snapshot, Travis would have forgotten my birthday altogether. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

“Down payment on next year’s, anyway. Meanwhile, your jazz
artiste
brother still camped at your place? Cooling his heels before the next
whirlwind tour
?” I said yes, he’s right here. “Why not put the little man on, then?”

I handed Edison the phone and went back to the griddle.

“Yo, Trav, you just caught me,” said Edison from his recliner, after licking his fingers. (So close to his departure I’d resigned myself to my role as an “enabler,” and the night before I’d made a lemon-almond tart for dessert—trying to make up for my eagerness to be rid of him in the most unfortunate manner possible. Edison was dispatching the leftovers.) “Heading for the Apple on Tuesday, then on the road in Europe—”

It was not Edison’s style to telescope his musical plans into a half sentence, but something down the line pulled him up short. His face flushed. I hurried around the prep island until I could hear the sound escaping from the receiver: our father hooting.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Edison said quietly, and pressed the disconnect.

“What happened?” I said. “What did he say?”

He stared straight ahead and breathed. He didn’t touch the pie. Finally he looked over, but not at me. “You bastard,” he said to Fletcher.

“What’d I do?” It was a replay of the feigned innocence with which Edison had denied breaking the Boomerang.

“You just
had
to email that photograph.”

Fletcher wiped down the sink with, I thought, undue diligence. “Why not? Your sister’s birthday. Include Travis, insofar as he cares.”

“
Include Travis
in the fact that his son is now, quote, ‘a human parade float.’ ”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, Edison, I’m so sorry.”

Fletcher raised his hands in theatrical dismay. “Wouldn’t he already know you’ve had a bad case of the munchies?”

“I haven’t seen the guy for years. Meaning he hasn’t seen me, either.”

“Yeah, but.” Fletcher fluttered his fingers. “The Internet . . . ?”

“That guy has never typed anything into a search field but ‘Travis Appaloosa’ in his life. So why would he be up to date on my
appetite
?”

Fletcher finally stopped messing with the sink. “You can’t protect people from what you look like. When you’re umpteen hundred pounds, it’s not a secret. And it’s not
my
fault that to snap a family photo I have to take three steps back to fit you in the frame.”

Impatient with letting the prep island afford my husband a bulwark, Edison pulled himself up and stalked into the kitchen. My husband had riled a very large animal, and instinctively retreated. “There’s the inevitable, and then there’s
deliberately
shoving up in my father’s face what he doesn’t have to know. You realize I police my Wikipedia page
every day
? Making sure the picture they’re using is still from five years ago. Ever check out my webpage? There must be a hundred shots in the gallery, and they’re good ones, too. From all over the world. Same goes for my Facebook page. In not
one
of them do I weigh more than one-sixty-five.”

“You can try and rewrite history if you want. But your problem is reality, and an old picture on your Wikipedia page doesn’t change that.”

“This is payback, isn’t it? For your fucking chair.”

“Sending a simple birthday photo to my father-in-law isn’t ‘payback’—”

“Your fucking
chair
, man! A piece of
furniture
, in exchange for my
dignity
, man—”

“You’re so concerned with your dignity, then try stopping at one plate of spaghetti!”

“You have any idea what I just had to listen to?”

“Travis is a jerk. Why should you even care what he thinks?”

“He’s my
father
, man! I can’t help if my dad’s a jerk, he’s still my
father
, man! You just
humiliated
me—”

“You’ve humiliated yourself!”

“Stop it!” I ordered Fletcher. “Leave him alone!”

Fletcher shot me a piercing look: look whose side little sister is on.

“Fuck it.” Edison waved his hand. “What’s done is done, right? You accomplished what you set out to do. Made my father’s day, you’ll be happy to know. Bet he’ll have that photo blown up into a life-size cardboard cutout. Have it plastered all over the family Christmas letter.”

“He doesn’t send Christmas letters,” I said.

“He will now.” Edison turned, and I put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“Don’t go,” I said. “This is no way to leave things. With you flying back in three days—let’s try to talk this out.”

“Look, if you have to know? Even parade floats sometimes have to take a dump.”

The stairs creaked; it was apparently worth the extra effort to use the upstairs bathroom, putting a full story between him and Fletcher.

“Did you?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Did you send that picture to Travis on purpose, to make sure he knew Edison’s gotten so big?”

“Come on, Travis was bound to find out sooner or later.”

“He didn’t have to find out from you. Just like he wasn’t going to find out from me. Talking to Travis, and
even to Solstice
, I’ve never made the faintest allusion to Edison’s having changed. I’ve also kept it to myself that he has money problems. I’ve said he’s between apartments, so we took advantage of the gap to catch up. Period. Don’t you know anything about families?”

“Plenty,” he said coldly. “You’re forgetting I have one.”

“
We
have a family, thank you. I meant siblings. You don’t
tell
. Not on your brother, and not on your brother-in-law, either.”

For a few minutes we furiously cleaned the kitchen, and I was annoyed when we finished, leaving nothing to vent myself upon. In desperation, I attacked the smears around the cabinet handles, while Fletcher loitered helplessly, at a disadvantage with nothing to do.

“The problem is what the guy looks like,” said Fletcher, “not that Travis knows. Why do you always stick up for your brother and never for me? ‘Forsaking all others,’ remember?”

“I have forsaken all other romantic attachments, but as for the rest of the world, it’s not that simple.”

“It’s simple, all right. You’ve gone back to the old team. The same childhood buddies who clung to each other to defeat the big bad fake children on TV. But you’re a sidekick, you know.
Little sister
. A tag-along. He’s helping himself to your house, your family, your apparently
infinite
patience, and your money. What do you get out of it?”

The question stopped me cold, and I don’t know what I’d have said if we hadn’t been interrupted by a great bellow from upstairs—a cry of despondency so deep that it sounded like less a response to a single calamity than a lament over a whole life.

I told Fletcher to stay put. Once I’d hurried upstairs, Edison’s howl had subsided to a more sustainable wailing, reminiscent of the uninhibited bereavement in news reports from the Middle East. The bathroom door was shut. Water was leaking from underneath. An enlarging pool on the hallway floorboards was streaming toward the stairs. I failed to avoid stepping in it as I rapped on the door. “Edison, are you okay? What’s happened? What’s all this water?”

More wailing. He didn’t sound able to talk.

I tried the doorknob. “I don’t want to invade your privacy, but you’ve got to unlock the door. Whatever’s wrong, let me help you. We’re developing a lake out here.”

After a pause, the bolt retracted. When I opened the door, I was treated to one of those revelations people lately call “too much information”: it seems my brother had not evacuated his bowels in quite some time.

The toilet was brimming. Floating on a skim of waste water, turds were scattered all over the floor—under the sink, beside the shower stall, against the wall of the tub, and dammed at the door, so two balls escaped before I closed it behind me. Having pulled up his pants just enough to save us from more embarrassment, Edison was slumped on the edge of the tub, sobbing in his hands. The scene might have been funny. It wasn’t.

Brisk efficiency was the ticket—the bright, blithe, unbothered spirit in which our mother had changed our sheets when we wet the bed. It is a female knack, this contending with effluents quickly and in good cheer, thus minimizing disgrace down to the routine untidiness of a dropped napkin.

So I plunged the toilet—something of a job; a fair bit of both shit and paper had plugged it up. After snapping on rubber gloves, I whisked up wandering turds and popped them in the bowl, flushing at intervals. It’s surprising how when you
act
unfazed, you
feel
unfazed; you’d think that, as habitually as I picked up socks, I went about collecting lumps of excrement on a daily basis. I got a couple of old towels to soak up the water on the floor, retrieved the two brown escapees, and dried the hall. By the time the horror had subsided like the end of
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
, Edison’s wailing had diminished to an erratic sob.

I turned my back and suggested he fasten his fly. Peeling off the rubber gloves, I joined him on the rim of the tub and put an arm around his shoulders. “When I was a kid, that was my deepest fear. It must be every kid’s deepest fear. Whenever I flushed after a ‘number two,’ I’d look at the bowl in terror. The water would rise at first. I was always convinced it would keep rising.”