Big Brother (14 page)

“Fletch is right,” Edison blubbered; I doubt I’d seen my brother cry since he was twelve. “All I do is humiliate myself.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “By the time you’re on the road in Portugal, this will have foreshortened into a hilarious little story that we’ll laugh about on the phone.”

“There is no Portugal.”

“Well, that’ll be news to the folks who live in Lisbon.” I’d been assuming a lightness of tone that was hard to drop.

“There is no tour.”

“Ah.” I let this sink in. I must have known, deep down, that there was no tour. “So if you fly back to New York on Tuesday—do you have anywhere to live?”

“No.”

“Then where have you been planning to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about all those gigs—in the spring?”

A flick of his head said it all.

“But why did you feel you had to invent all this stuff?”

“I could hardly show up in Cedar Rapids and say, ‘Hi, it’s your big brother, I’ve come to stay for the rest of my life,’ now could I?”

“Whatever’s gone wrong . . . The eating to compensate, or forget, or hide, or whatever you’re doing . . . You can’t go on like this.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

I’d have liked him to have meant that he didn’t want to keep eating himself to death. But the alternative interpretation was more likely: that his steady overconsumption was purposive—a slow-motion suicide-by-pie.

chapter eleven

I
allowed Fletcher to believe that the cries of anguish upstairs on Saturday afternoon were solely the result of his having emailed that jpeg to Travis—which protected my brother’s pride and further chastened my husband. By then I was accustomed to controlling the flow of information, a nice way of saying that I had grown chronically dishonest with everyone.

Fortunately, our master bedroom had an en suite bath, so Fletcher didn’t use the kids’ bathroom down the hall, the one that Edison shared. The next day Tanner sniffed out a turd I had missed—puddled in that dark, hard-to-mop area behind the toilet. Fortunately, too, when he cried, “Oh,
gross
!” that Sunday afternoon, Fletcher was off on a manic cycle ride. No longer faking myself into a strong stomach for Edison’s benefit, I confess that sweeping the partially melted excrement into a dustpan was revolting, and I immediately exiled both brush and pan to our outdoor trash can.

When Tanner pushed me to explain how a lump of shit could possibly have gotten on the floor, I said I didn’t know. Edison probably got the blame by default. Perhaps that shouldn’t have mattered, now that he’d be gone in two days, but I was no longer sure I could bear to shove him onto that plane—with no home to return to, friends whose goodwill might still be strained, and no European tour to make him feel important. I feared his return flight would effectively touch down on Houston Street, where Edison and I had once tucked into sandwiches at Katz’s Delicatessen that bulged with twelve ounces of pastrami apiece. Yet I had not told anyone else that Edison’s packed itinerary was bogus, not even Fletcher. Well—especially not Fletcher. Not that he would care. But he would care that I cared.

That same afternoon I had also to field a call from Solstice, to whom Travis had forwarded the incriminating jpeg. (For that matter, he’d probably sent it gleefully to his entire contact book.) Atypically, my sister didn’t solicit any newsy updates about our kids and cut to the chase. “He’s been there for two months. How could you not have told me?”

“Told you what?” I said flatly.

“That’s what I mean. That’s what gets me. That pretend innocence. You can seem so open and confiding, and then it turns out you don’t tell me anything.”

“There’s not much to tell,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Edison’s turned into a beach ball and he’s obviously developed some kind of huge problem, but you don’t even
mention
it, though we’ve talked at least a couple of times since he moved in with you. It’s just so classic! Anything going on, and it’s a little secret between you two. You were always like that, a tight, closed, hostile
unit
, and you never included me in anything—”

“How could we? Edison left home when you were
four years old
.”

“After he left, you two were always having whispery phone calls with your bedroom door locked. Think I couldn’t hear you? And then you started meeting up, in New York. Hitting the town, living the high life. Nobody ever invited
me
to New York!”

“That first trip was the summer before I went to college. You were still a little kid.”

“I practically grew up an only child! And then he visits you in Iowa for months. Know how many times I’ve scribbled an invitation on my Christmas card to come stay with us in L.A.? He never even emails, ‘No, thanks.’ The last one was returned to sender. Not knowing my own brother’s address—”

“Half the time
I
don’t have Edison’s address—”

“You have it now,” Solstice jeered. “It’s your address. And who knows, if you’d have shared with me about Edison’s troubles, maybe I’d have been able to help—”

“How? By shipping him a StairMaster? I’m sorry if I didn’t regale you with descriptions, but he deserves his privacy, and I didn’t think it was considerate to broadcast the fact that he’s got a weight problem—”

“A ‘weight problem’ is an understatement! He obviously needs people to reach out. I’m his sister too, Pandora. But I don’t know how I’m ever going to be a real sister to Edison if you keep running interference and coming between us.”

One more time I swallowed:
Edison may have loomed mythically large in your childhood, if only as an absence. But he’s oblivious to you, my dear. For decades I’ve been protecting you from your brother’s indifference.
Instead I said curtly, “Your relationship to Edison is not my responsibility. If you want to ‘reach out,’ nobody’s stopping you.” I hung up with the certainty that she would initiate no contact with our brother of any kind. She was afraid of him.

My sister’s having being born so much prettier than I had always seemed ample compensation for a little loneliness growing up. Though Solstice was the sole beneficiary of Travis’s late-life discovery of real children, her well-adjusted façade was a poor cover for grievance, which would burst the banks of her contrived niceness at the slightest pretext. Constantly feeling cheated, she could only have mustered this searing sense of deprivation if she had no idea what she’d been left out of, for there was little to envy about the
Joint Custody
era. I didn’t feel close to her, and she made me feel hunted. For years she’d sent ensnaring care packages of weird and conspicuously useless presents in acknowledgment of no occasion whatsoever: a knitted rooster too loosely woven to use as an oven mitt, a set of porcelain chopstick cradles, a fragile handheld fan so lacy that it wouldn’t have generated a breeze even if any of us had been dainty enough to use one. Superstitious about throwing the knickknacks away, I was forever rifling a kitchen drawer and coming across, say, a velvet change purse with a hole in it. This cascade of uninvited benevolence did, however, accomplish its purpose. I was too busy to send trinkets in return, so the totems planted all over our house created a cumulative sensation of beholdenness and ingratitude.

Now, how bitterly comical: two months’ worth of spattered pancake batter, coffee rings on rosewood, and cigarette butts all over the patio were straining my marriage to the breaking point, and Solstice was
jealous
. From all sides, I was castigated for being too chummy with a brother whom, I had lately ascertained, I hardly knew.

O
n Monday night, we took Edison out for his farewell dinner at Benson’s, the closest New Holland has to chic. We ate on the early side, since my brother had to pack after dinner. The evening got off to an unpleasant start, since we were seated in a cove near the kitchen. “Excuse me,” Cody said loudly, “but we’d rather sit over there.” When the waiter mumbled about the middle table being reserved, she wouldn’t let it go. “The one next to it would also do just fine. There’s hardly anybody here. We don’t want to sit off in the corner.” She leveled the guy with an unrelenting stare, and he was helpless to resist a thirteen-year-old girl. Once we were reseated, with a great to-do about finding a larger chair for Edison that chagrinned Tanner, Cody was still furious. “You know why he put us there, don’t you?”

“That was dead sweet of you, kid,” said Edison. “But I’m used to it.”

“I’m not ashamed of you, Uncle Edison.”

“Cool,” said my brother, adding wanly, “but that’s not the same as being proud of me, is it?”

Cody looked flustered. “I didn’t mean—!”

“I knew what you meant, babe. And I’m touched, really. But I shouldn’t be putting you in this position, dig? You’re a kid. Hard enough to stick up for yourself.”

“You should have pulled rank, Pando,” said Tanner. “Local celeb, you could demand to sit anywhere you want. Jesus, you never use it for anything!”

“That’s ’cause my sister’s got class, man.”

Edison’s demeanor was subdued. He didn’t go on any riffs about Charlie Parker, and since his arrival I’d never seen him eat so little at a meal—sawing small, unenthusiastic bites from his prime rib, most of which we’d doggie-bag, and he barely touched his wine. It was as if he’d been putting a number over on us for all these weeks, and the energy required to keep it up had run out a single day too soon. Keen to spare him a reprise of his fanciful plans, I consumed much of the dinner with diversionary tales of new orders at Baby Monotonous, but the spirit of the evening was so forlorn that I didn’t make anybody laugh and my imitations of a germ freak’s dialogue went over flat. Maybe the dismal dinner was a tribute at that. Edison was leaving, and we—or most of us—were sad.

When we got back home it was only nine. Edison excused himself to pack. As my husband got ready for bed, I lay on the spread, my chest heavy.

“I know you’ve
grown accustomed to his face
,” said Fletcher between
pocks
of dental floss. “But you have to admit it’ll be a relief.”

“Yes,” I said. “But the relief makes me feel guilty.”

“It shouldn’t. You—we—have gone way beyond the call of duty.”

“I haven’t heeded the call of duty in the slightest. You’re the one who’s always reminding me that I haven’t helped. That he’s bigger than ever. ”

“And you’re the one always telling
me
that it’s not in your power to save him.”

“Maybe it has been in my power to save him. Maybe I’ve been a coward. Maybe it’s easier to pretend to help him by lazily putting him up and running out the calendar, instead of really helping him, which would be hard.”

Fletcher threw his floss in the trash. “I’m sorry your brother is fat. I’m sorry he’s still fat—or ‘big,’ as you’ve started to say, as if that’s any different. I’m sorry he’s probably unhappy. But that’s not your problem. You should be facing forward. We’ve got some repair work to do. This whole thing has been a big ask, and though we’ve had some fights we’ve gotten through, and I haven’t, incredibly, murdered him. Let it go.”

The weight on my chest felt figurative: I needed to get something off it. “On Saturday. He confessed. There is no tour of Spain and Portugal. No gigs in the spring. He has no work, and nowhere to go.”

In the bathroom doorway, the hand holding the toothpaste froze. “That doesn’t change anything.”

“Maybe to you it doesn’t.”

Fletcher strode to the bed and stared me down. “You are not seriously considering asking him to stay any longer.”

“I can’t stand sending him back to nothing.”

“Yes, you can. Or if you can’t stand it, you’ll have to stand something else.”

“That sounds threatening.”

“It was supposed to.”

I sighed. I didn’t want this to be happening. I fell back on platitudes. “When you get married, you don’t only take on the one person, but everyone who comes with them. Their colleagues, their friends you don’t like, and their families. Like I took on Tanner and Cody. Joyfully, I might add.”

“I did not marry Edison Appaloosa. That said, I challenge you to find any other man who’d put up with a brother-in-law who’s that much of a royal pain in the butt for two solid months. So, big picture, I’ve been pretty tolerant. But I’m at my absolute limit. You can’t keep that guy in our house for
five seconds
past the witching hour of four o’clock tomorrow afternoon and still be married to me.”

We were not a couple that wielded divorce as a commonplace weapon. We had never in our seven years together made the slightest reference to the possibility of our splitting up—though the omission may have been a sign of fragility at that. I doubted he’d planned to put his ultimatum quite so drastically, insofar as he’d planned anything. Yet Fletcher was not a man to level such a statement and take it back.

I stalled. “What do you expect me to do?”

“What I told you to at the start. Give him some money. Enough to get a hotel and then an apartment. Enough to find a job, any job. He could work at Burger King if he had to.”

“What a lovely picture. Besides. If I send Edison back to New York with a wad of cash, he won’t find himself an apartment with it. He’ll eat it.”

“You don’t have to turn your back on the guy. Phone, email, be
supportive
. That’s what normal families do. You’re constantly telling me I don’t understand about siblings, but I do know that you’re not obliged to adopt them.”

“Phone calls. Email. Certainly Edison
disembodied
is a great deal easier to take. How nice for me.”

“You did understand what I said?”

“I did.” I closed my eyes.

“And you’re actually
torn
?”

“Torn up.”

“Do you still love me?”

I hoped he didn’t regard my pause as an insult. I was taking the time to think that I rather admired the uncompromising nature of his edict: it’s him or me. There may have been a fearful center to all this nonsense about soy milk and cycling, but my husband was a strong man, a handsome man, a man-man. And he made exquisite furniture.

“Yes, I do,” I said with conviction, opening my eyes again to reach for his hand. “And I love our lives together, and the children I’ve tried to treat as my own. But after Monotonous took off, everything went all larkish and happy-clappy. I wonder if I need difficulty. And real difficulty isn’t something you go out and find, but something, or someone, that finds you. You don’t get to choose it. That’s part of what makes it hard.”

“Lost me there, friend. What am I supposed to make of that?”

I sat up. “That you should go ahead and brush your teeth. That I’m feeling awful, that I’m dreading driving Edison to the airport tomorrow. That I’m having a nagging sensation right now, with him packing down the hall by himself, and I think I should go in and keep him company, especially if this is his last night.”

“
If
it’s his last night?”

“The upshot is, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I really don’t.”

For a moment, lumbering off the bed, I had a vivid presentiment of what it felt like, physically, to be Edison, dragging along hundreds of pounds every time he walked across a room. It must have been exhausting.

I
rapped on the guest room door; admitted, I closed it behind me. The room was piled with folded clothes. My brother’s battered leather case open on the floor looked already full. “How are you coming?”

“You bought me too much shit,” said Edison amiably.