Big Brother (17 page)
“Forget it,” said Edison.
“I’m sorry to quote Fletcher, but he’s right: the will is a muscle. We have to touch our mental toes.” I was assiduous about using the first-person plural. “And—we know you like to eat, and so do I. So the real question is: What else do you enjoy?”
Edison slumped. “Hard to admit, babe. But at this point I’m not sure there is anything else.”
“Ah,” I said delicately. “Then that is the heart of the matter.”
I wondered if that wasn’t the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn’t that eating was so great—it wasn’t—but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay. In which case I was surrounded by millions of people incapable of deriving pleasure from anything whatsoever besides a jelly doughnut.
D
r. Corcoran had a flat, unadorned frankness that I had always liked. He delivered reliable information with a practiced neutrality. He’d treated a second-degree burn from boiling pasta water and kept it from getting infected. He’d stitched a stab wound from my careless removal of an avocado stone so neatly that I regretted the invisibility of the scar; from catering, my hands were crisscrossed in prized tribal tattoos. With that diffident blankness Corcoran cultivated, I hoped he’d be good for Edison, who didn’t need to feel any more harshly judged.
However, during our joint appointment I noticed that lightning-bolt chevrons now etched the doctor’s brow, suggesting that in his leisure time he forwent that blankness for a great deal of scowling. By the end of this consultation, I would be interpreting his neutrality in a different light. It was fatalism. For his practice to have bought such a sturdy, high-poundage scale, he must have seen enough wide-load patients for the investment to earn out.
“You’re pre-diabetic,” Corcoran delivered in a bored, of-course spirit, once Edison had dressed in the examination room and we had assumed chairs before the doctor’s desk. His monotone was almost flip. “Your blood pressure is elevated. At a BMI of over fifty-five, your chances of getting most cancers are significantly raised. You have edema in your extremities—that’s fluid retention, from poor circulation. Your lung capacity is reduced, and if you keep smoking emphysema is almost inevitable—”
“One problem at a time,” I interrupted. “Is Edison in good enough health to go on a severely restrictive diet without keeling over?”
“Probably.” Corcoran sounded casual. “We can bring down the blood pressure with medication. His heart’s in better shape than it has any business being, though he’s still a prime candidate for cardiovascular disease. What did you have in mind?”
“From what I’ve read, we’d eventually have to step it up to eight hundred, then twelve hundred. But to start with, between five and six hundred calories a day.”
Since Edison didn’t gasp, he mustn’t have had any notion how little sustenance that amounted to: two-thirds of one Cinnabon. As for Corcoran, I swear I remember him laughing. Maybe not a belly laugh, but a distinct guffaw. “That’s ambitious.”
“With Edison’s size, there’s no point in doing this if we’re not ambitious,” I said. “Could you tell me what he weighs?”
The doctor glanced at the patient for permission.
“It’s not a state secret, man,” said Edison.
“Three-eighty-six.”
My brother added, “But that’s including boxers.”
It could have been worse. I borrowed a pad and pencil to do the following calculations: 386 – 163 = 223 pounds to lose; 223 × 3,500 calories per pound = 780,500 total calories to burn off. I ballparked that Edison would burn an average of 3,000 calories a day—more at the beginning, less at the end. So 3,000 minus, say, an average of 800 calories of consumption = a 2,200-calorie shortfall per day. And 780,500 ÷ 2,200 = 354.77.
That was days. I dreaded telling Fletcher. Even if Edison stayed improbably on the straight and narrow, we could be roommates for a year.
I
opted to look for an unfurnished apartment, figuring that we’d be grateful for the task of making the place habitable. Even before the marathon began, I had grasped the special challenge of this project for me in particular. Hitherto, anything I’d taken on, from bedroom curtains to Baby Monotonous, had entailed, well, doing something. This project was about not doing something, which defied my nature. The project itself took up no time, but rather opened up grotesquely more of it—for I was sobered to consider what a big chunk of the day shopping for, preparing, consuming, and cleaning up after meals routinely colonized. The task of buying mattresses would be a mercy.
Three landlords in a row had sounded positive on the phone, only to lay eyes on Edison and inform us regretfully that the apartment had been taken. Oh, they fell all over themselves to apologize—“Gosh, I’m so, so sorry you guys made the trip! It’s such a coincidence, ’cause this place has been on the market for weeks!”—which around here was the tip-off; their cadence slow and deliberate, Iowans were prone to a nasality that grew pronounced when they were plaintive. I think the owners were afraid he would break things. I wondered if there was a civil rights issue we might have pressed. Those real estate people would have been far more nervous about slamming the door in his face if Edison were black. But when I did some checking, I discovered that the Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t cover the obese. Landlords refusing to rent to lard-asses was perfectly legal.
New Holland has a small population, about 16,000, but still sprawls on its edges, and keeping our search to within a half hour’s walk from Solomon Drive was restrictive; I worried we’d run out of options. Driving around with Edison, I was glad for familiar landmarks that might ground my brother and make him feel at home: the decorative wooden windmill in the center of town; De Vries Bakery, which still sold S-shaped, almond-paste Dutch Letters; Norman Borlaug Park, with its entrance hoop of ungainly cutout tulips; the towering white silo on the edge of town that had always signaled the interminable four-day drive from L.A. was finally over. Yet while I’d accustomed myself to its dimensions in adulthood, Edison still found the windmill jarringly small. The bakery would soon become a torture. Even so inclined, we could no longer climb gleefully on the retired fire engine in the park, because contemporary parents had killjoyed this “death trap” of a jungle gym to the dump. Himmel’s Meatpacking Plant having modernized, its roof no longer sported the signature pink plaster pig.
Nearly buried in the flotsam of chain stories that littered the whole region like the detritus of a flood, these teasing, dreamlike glimpses of childhood visits to our grandparents seemed only to unnerve my brother. Edison was fundamentally at a loss to explain to himself what he was doing here, with a look on his face every time we crossed the whole town like,
This is IT?
The wide skies and open spaces seemed to make him claustrophobic, as if he might drown in all that nothingness. Admittedly, too, early December didn’t show off the area to its advantage. The fields were dirt. The skies were gray.
At last we were met at a development called Prague Porches by an affable man himself seriously overweight. Dennis Novacek had a clubby quality, and noticeably brightened on encountering a would-be renter even bigger than he was. At least fifty, he’d probably been a big man a while; his gut had shifted downward to center around his groin, and sloshed independently of his gait, lurching left when he stepped right. He recognized Edison as a confederate, so I let my brother do the schmoozing. The two of them took the same protracted time laboring up the stairs, while Novacek remarked how a single flight got your blood running but didn’t tucker you out. He called our attention to the proximity of Dunkin’ Donuts and an all-you-can-eat buffet a five-minute drive away. Edison didn’t disabuse the owner of his assumptions, instead bonding with the landlord over their mutual enthusiasm for the “garlic-butter stuffed crust” at Pizza Hut. Again I was glad; if my brother was leery of making proclamations to strangers, he was coming to appreciate the sinister immediacy of the commitment—for the very first morning after we accepted a set of keys the party was over. Funny, the only thing that bugged me a little was his neglecting to correct Novacek’s misapprehension that Edison and I were married.
The two-bedroom was more attractive inside than its generic exterior would suggest, with a big picture window overlooking some spindly oak trees that had lost most of their leaves. It sobered me that if this diet went according to plan I would see those trees bare and snow-covered, in bud and in full leaf. With everything white and clean, the apartment had an appropriate spareness, the same this-is-life-and-there’s-not-much-to-it starkness of the motel. It was a wiped slate. The simple functional kitchen concealed no bottles of maple syrup in its cupboards, no boxes of confectioner’s sugar. Since the premises were newly renovated, the white walls and beige carpet bore none of the stains of other people’s failings. Its faintly medicinal, punitive aura recalled a rehabilitation clinic, and that’s exactly what we’d turn this place into. I wrote the check.
While we waited for it to clear and for Dennis to track down my credit score, I left Edison at the motel and drove to an address on the edge of town not far from Baby Monotonous. It was an Iowan outfit called Big Presents in Small Packages, or BPSP; though they were imitating a popular national brand, I liked the idea of supporting another local business. Their website included before and after photos that should have been hard to fake. I’d checked with Dr. Corcoran, who’d supervised patients on their program and didn’t dismiss them as shysters. I needed to lay in supplies immediately, although subsequent purchases I could make online. Entering the innocuous storefront with trepidation, I remembered the children’s books I used to read to Cody, in which deceivingly unassuming rabbit holes or wardrobes proved portals to another world.
“Hi there, what can I do for ya?” No more than thirty but already settled into a floral-bloused middle age, the generously proportioned receptionist was not a great advertisement for her employer’s products—although having railed so recently against fat discrimination I couldn’t have it both ways. She led me to the array in a glassed-in case. “Now, everybody raves about the cappuccino. And there’s some that swear by the banana, though, me, I think it’s kinda artificial-tasting. You partial to citrus? ’Cause we got a clear line, too.”
“It’s not only for me, and my brother is . . . a major project,” I said. “I guess it makes sense to lay in a variety, so we don’t get tired of one flavor?”
The woman’s involuntary laugh reminded me of Corcoran’s. “Think you’ll find after a real short while ‘variety’ don’t make much difference.”
“With your other customers—does it work?”
“Sure, it works—if you follow the program,” she said cheerfully.
“And—do they?”
“Most folks get religion at the start. But it takes a special type to stick with it. And then there’s the backsliders.” She looked me in the eye with a wan half-smile. “We get plenty of repeat customers.” I inferred this was not a business whose employees were paid partially in stock.
“Me, I tried everything for a while,” she carried on, stacking my order. “Just made myself unhappy. My husband likes me the way I am, and these days I reckon there’s no point fighting nature. Life’s too short.”
“My brother’s life being too short,” I said, “is the problem.”
“Keep us posted!” she cried, raising her Big Gulp in a toast. “We can always use more testimonials for our website.”
The trunk loaded, I called Fletcher from the parking lot.
“A year,” he repeated.
“Probably.” I wouldn’t do myself any favors by playing down the figures.
“A week is a long time in politics, they say. A year is a long time in anything.”
“It certainly is.”
“I’d be angry, except it won’t be a year. It won’t even be a week.”
“It doesn’t help for you to pray we go belly up.”
“He’s going to break your heart, Pandora.”
I asked after the kids, and his accounting was lifeless. Tanner had been caught skipping school. Yes, he was being punished; Fletcher didn’t say how. All his answers were short. He might have been responding to a marketing survey.
Edison and I moved into Prague Porches two days later. When Dennis Novacek met us at the property with the keys, he kept offering to lease us appliances—washer, dryer, dishwasher, full entertainment center, anything he could think of, probably stuff left behind by previous tenants—addressing himself not to Edison but to me in a newly obsequious spirit. Right: he’d Googled the name on the check. Doubtless he was kicking himself that he could have demanded a higher rent. I had long since stopped taking mere recognition as a compliment. I coveted anonymity for this undertaking, and having transitioned from person to personage with our new landlord was a pain in the neck.
Our three bags made little impact on all that space. We busied ourselves with unpacking, but there was nothing to unpack into, so in each of our rooms we made piles on the carpet. The beds I’d ordered had arrived that morning, and constructing the frames consumed a couple of hours; Edison’s heft was helpful for nudging them into place. Otherwise, we didn’t even have a table—though there would be no meals, so no matter. The scene was reminiscent of two strapped newlyweds in a ramshackle prefab, where the couple would picnic shyly on the floor with bread, cheese, and wine—a spartan tableau on which they’d later look back fondly: look how happy we were when we had nothing. I wasn’t sure it would work that way for Edison and me: look how happy we were when we ate nothing.
“There’s something about this pad, man,” said my brother, surveying the bleak expanse.
“What?” Though I felt it, too: a burbling terror.
“Makes it real. I guess we’re not heading out to fill the fridge with brewskies.”
“The refrigerator won’t be strained. But think of it this way: we’ll never need to clean it.” One more thing
not
to do made me feel robbed.
For that evening we’d planned “The Last Supper,” and—indulging the very kind of thinking we’d soon have to jettison—we spent hours debating restaurants. Finally, after I’d wiped down counters that were already clean, it was dark enough to go out. We set off in a funereal spirit for one more meal that on the far end of this project Edison would have to “uneat.” I say Edison, since we’d neglected to address one uncomfortable issue: long before I, too, lost 223 pounds, the Incredible Shrinking Sister would be fencing spiders with a straight pin. But we’d have all too much time to resolve this disparity in the months to come, and for now I wanted to set off on this venture as a team.
Once we’d settled on a little bistro that at least wasn’t a chain, I’d called ahead to warn that my companion would be a “large man,” so could they please arrange for a widely proportioned chair. To ensure a decent table, I’d made the reservation in my company’s name. Tanner was right. Having submitted to all those humiliating photo shoots should be good for something. When we arrived the staff was duly gracious, and Edison’s plush wide-bodied armchair had probably been dragged from the manager’s office.