Big Brother (4 page)
This time driving back to New Holland our traditional sharing of notes—first and foremost, on whatever crackpot strategy Travis had recently devised to restore himself as the apple of the public eye—felt diversionary and dishonest. As we continued to discuss the latest on Joy Markle and Tiffany Kite, I could get with the program only so long as I trained my gaze on I-80. Side glances at the unaccountable mass in the passenger seat broke the spell, and it would suddenly seem a bit rich for Edison in this condition to be deriding anyone else for having failed to live up to youthful promise. For that dizzying sorrow on glimpsing the
large gentleman
in an airport wheelchair had only intensified, and I’d no idea how I would make it through the whole evening to come without falling apart.
C
alling, “We’re ho-ome!” in the hallway, I tinged the announcement by descending into a minor key, a note of warning that my family would fail to pick up on. Here I’d hoped to present Tanner with a member of his extended family whom he could plausibly “look up to,” but with my brother’s spine compacted two inches Tanner was already too tall. Nothing about being obese diminished Edison’s accomplishments, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the way Tanner would see things.
When Edison trailed me to the kitchen, Fletcher’s face mirrored what my own must have looked like when I turned to my brother’s voice at the airport: that flat smack against plate glass, the shock of having your expectations so thoroughly thwarted. My husband is not an impolite person, but when he looked up from the stove he said absolutely nothing and forgot to close his mouth. Time stretched. He was dying to look at me, but cutting away would have seemed unwelcoming. “Hey,” he said feebly.
“Hey, bro, good to see you, man!” Edison clapped Fletcher’s shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who’d last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people’s transparent hypocrisy. They couldn’t say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile.
“Tanner?” I led Edison over to where my stepson slouched at the table, taking in the scene while dawdling at his laptop. I could already read in the twist of his mouth the ruthless description of our new houseguest that he’d post on Facebook. “You remember your uncle Edison?”
“Not really,” said Tanner warily.
“Hell, kid, you’ve really shot up,” said Edison, extending his hand. “Can’t say I’d recognize you on the street, Tan.” Nobody called Tanner “Tan.”
Tanner continued to slouch, so when he extended his arm to limply shake Edison’s hand it was from as far away as possible. “Can’t say I’d recognize you, either, Ed.” Nobody called Edison “Ed.”
“So you’re seventeen? Figure my son Carson’s about your age,” Edison supposed.
Tanner exclaimed, “You don’t even
know
?”
That’s when Cody filtered into the doorway. With fair flyaway hair and a diffident manner, she was a shy girl, as I had been. Responding to her natural modesty and diligence, I’d tried for years not to show her any partiality over her more arrogant brother. Although no prodigy at the piano, the girl had a precocious sensitivity that would either be the making of her or would doom her for life as an easy mark. This was one of those moments in which she distinguished herself, for her instincts were pitch perfect. Cody took a mere instant to assess the situation, after which she ran to my brother crying, “Hi, Uncle Edison!” and gave him an unreserved hug.
He hugged her back, hard. I wondered how many times recently anyone had held him like that—with joy, with affection, with no trace of distaste. I wished I’d hugged him that way myself.
“So what’s cookin’?” asked Edison, hovering by the stove.
“Ratatouille and shrimp with polenta,” said Fletcher.
“I’m afraid the shrimp are only the frozen supermarket kind,” I said. “It’s the landlocked Midwest, and Fletcher decides the only animal protein he’ll eat is seafood.”
“No prob—smells great!” Edison helped himself to a large nearby jar of peanuts and asked for a beer. I poured him a lager and followed him anxiously to the table. Fletcher had made the dining set, and the chairs all had finely curved arms—between which my brother was not going to fit.
“I’m sure you’re worn out after your trip,” I said hastily, “but you may not be—comfortable in these chairs.” I did a rapid inventory: the living room was furnished with Fletcher’s rigid normal-size-person creations. But one broken-down recliner in the master bedroom was leftover from the days I lived alone; I’d refused to part with an ugly chair so sumptuous for curling up to read. My husband’s confabulations of oak, cedar, and ash were more sensuous for the eye than the ass.
I tried to be offhand about it. Turning off the ratatouille, Fletcher was stoic, Cody eager to help. Once upstairs, my husband and I finally met each other’s eyes. Desperate to talk to him for hours, I could only shake my head in dismay.
“Mom,” Cody whispered as we knelt on one side of the recliner and Fletcher took the other. “What happened to Uncle Edison?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
“Is he sick?”
“According to the latest thinking on the subject”—we heaved to a stand—“yes.” Though I was personally unsure how labeling obesity an “illness” got anyone anywhere.
“Does he eat too much?”
“I think so.”
“Why doesn’t he stop?”
“That’s a good question.” We paused at the top of the stairs.
“He makes me sad,” said my stepdaughter.
“Me, too.” I kept my voice steady for her sake. “Very, very sad.”
I was determined not to make a big deal out of this project, but the recliner was heavy, and in order to get it around the turn at the landing we had to tilt the chair on its side. A certain amount of huffing and Fletcher’s barked directions must have leaked to the kitchen. When we lugged in the recliner, Edison was holding forth to Tanner while leaning on the prep island. I felt bad about making him stand so long, which he must have found tiring. The peanuts were finished.
“I’m not dissing Wynton Marsalis,” Edison was opining. “He’s brought in some bread, if nothing else. But the trouble with Wynton is he feeds this whole nostalgia thing, like jazz is over, you hear what I’m sayin’? Like it’s in a museum, under glass. Nothing wrong with keeping the standards alive, so long as you don’t turn the whole field into one big snoring PBS doc. ’Cause it’s still evolving, dig? I mean, you got a certain amount of lost free crap, which the public hates, and drives what few folks do listen to jazz even further into the ass of the past. Cats who blow all freaky don’t appreciate that even Ornette riffed on an underlying
structure.
But other Post-Bop cats out there are
killing
. Even some of Miles’s contemporaries are still playing, still innovating: Sonny, Wayne . . .”
“Talk about ‘ass of the past,’ ” said Tanner, focused on his keyboard. “What’s with all the ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘dig’? That shit must have been pretty moldy by the time you were a kid.”
“Yo, every profession got its
patois
,” said Edison.
“It’s true, they really do talk like that,” I said, after we’d set the recliner down in the kitchen to rest. “I’ve visited your uncle several times in New York, and all the other jazz musicians talk the same way. Time warp. It’s hilarious.”
When Edison withdrew his cigarettes, I urged him to the patio. We didn’t allow smoking in the house.
“Jesus, it’s like he’s trying to sound like a jazz musician,” Tanner grumbled once Edison had shambled outside. “Like some stereotype of a jazz musician that wouldn’t wash in a biopic because it’s trite. You’re not going to tell me, Pando, that he grew up
speaking
jive
.”
“Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn’t mean it’s fake,” I snapped. “You could be a little more gracious. Like, give us a hand, because I think we’re going to have to move the table.”
Lodging the chair at the head of the table was an operation, since the recliner wouldn’t fit in front of the step up to the living room without our moving the table a foot toward the patio door—which meant Tanner had to push his own chair right up against the glass. Reseated but cramped, he looked put out, doubly so when he had to get up again to let Edison inside. As my brother sank with obvious relief into the crazed leather cushion, I caught Fletcher appraising the room critically. He was house-proud. Now the room was off-center, and the dirty maroon eyesore hardly set off his dining table.
“Hey, Pando, I almost forgot,” said Tanner, typing with the very urgency I had dreaded. “Some photographer called while you were gone, about a re-sked of the
Bloomberg Businessweek
shoot. Wish you’d pick up your damn iPhone. Taking a handwritten message on a pad is like carving on the wall of a cave.”
“Oh, God, not another photo shoot,” I said before I realized how that sounded. “I hate them,” I continued,
them
making it worse, since the very plurality was the problem. “I can’t stand having to decide what to wear, and it doesn’t even matter since I always look hideous,”
always
continuing to dig my grave. Since it was true enough, in my haste to say something more self-deprecating still to cover for the embarrassing fact of the shoot itself, I almost added, but pulled up short just in time, that lately all I could think when I saw pictures of myself in the media was that I looked fat.
“They don’t always come out so bad,” said Tanner. “The
New York
magazine cover, where they added a pull-string on your back? That one was a kick.”
“Little cheesy, though,” Edison proclaimed from his new throne, and drained the last of his beer. “That rag’s gone to shit. One step from
Entertainment Weekly
.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to realize that Edison might have regarded that cover as an invasion of sorts. New York was his patch.
“
You
ever been in
New York
magazine?” Tanner charged my brother.
“Nah. I’m more the
Downbeat
type.”
As I retrieved napkins at his side, Tanner muttered, “Look more like the
beat down
type to me.” I hoped Edison hadn’t heard him.
I should have been glad that Tanner stuck up for me, but I didn’t want the responsibility of being the one he looked up to. Baby Monotonous had come to me flukishly. I hadn’t planned the venture or even wanted it, much less worked hard for it until it landed in my lap. I believed I set a bad example.
“Well, we should all enjoy this making of hay while the sun shines,” I said, laying plates. “Baby Monotonous dolls are a fad. Fads don’t last. Like pet rocks—a perfectly ridiculous gift item that you kids are too young to remember. They lasted about five minutes. In that five minutes, someone made a bundle. But if he wasn’t smart, he’d have been left with whole warehouses full of stones in stupid little boxes. I’ve been very lucky, and you should all be prepared for that luck to run out. Orders are already starting to level off, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see those dolls start cropping up on eBay by the hundred.” Orders hadn’t leveled off.
“We’re never putting Dad’s doll on eBay!” said Cody.
“Pando, what’s with trashing your own company all the time?” said Tanner. “Someone finally gets a business off the ground in this family, and all you can do is apologize.”
“Thanks a lot, Tanner,” said Fletcher at the stove.
“Basement full of furniture says this house got only one
going concern
,” said Tanner.
“Nobody buys quality anymore.”
“Thanks a lot, Fletcher,” I said.
It was a pale facsimile of family banter—the fast-paced, rollicking back-and-forth to which our foursome had indeed risen on occasion, but which I generally located only on television. I’d grown up in such proximity to scripted family follies that you’d think I could have done a better job of faking it. But ever since I’d walked in with Edison in tow our interchanges had been forced.
For once when I told the kids to wash their hands before dinner, there were no groans; with a thick glance between them that I recognized from my own childhood, they scooted off, both spurning the nearest bathroom for the one upstairs. After a lag, I followed. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to admonish them—probably with something bland and pointless about trying to be nice. When I arrived outside the door, they weren’t even bothering with the pretense of running water.
“Then, like, he drops some peanuts,” Tanner was saying in a harsh whisper, “and stoops to pick them up, right? Except he loses his balance, ’cause that whale gut throws him forward, and he ends up on his hands and knees! I’m not kiddin’, Code, the son of a bitch couldn’t get off the floor! So I had to help drag his ass upright, and I thought we was both goin’ down! Even his hand is huge. And sweaty.”
“He is kinda gross,” said Cody. “Like when he bends down, and his shirt’s too small so it hikes up and you can see his crack with little black hairs in it, and these huge butt-blobs bulge over his belt.”
“Guy could do his own retro TV show, just like Grampa’s:
My Three Chins
,” said Tanner. “And he’s got a bigger rack than Pando.”
“If I looked like that, I’d just wanna die. His ankles are bigger around than your
thighs
. Hey, you think Mom knew he’d turned into such a load?”
“I kinda doubt it. But notice how she keeps pretending how everything’s all normal? Like, nobody’s supposed to mention that ‘Uncle Edison’ barely fits through the fucking door.”
I’d heard enough. Clearing my throat, I walked in. “Get it out of your system
now
. Just because someone’s overweight doesn’t mean he has no feelings.” Yet when I closed the door behind us, the atmosphere remained conspiratorial.
“But how long’s this guy gonna hang around?” said Tanner. “In twenty-four hours he could bust the whole place up. What if he sits on the john and it cracks to pieces?”
“I don’t know how long he’ll stay,” I said quietly. “But while he’s here, I want you to imagine what it might be like if you two grow up, and then you, Tanner, visit your sister and her family, and maybe you’ve had a hard time, and maybe you’ve been hitting the Häagen-Dazs. Wouldn’t you want your sister to still treat you like the same person? Wouldn’t you feel hurt if her family made fun of you?”
“Tanner will never get fat!” said Cody. “He’s got to watch his
figure
so he can keep pawing all over his
girl
friends.”
I shot back, “That’s what I thought about
my
brother.”