Big Brother Page 15

  “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.

  “You can have one of our suitcases. We won’t miss it.” I made no move to retrieve another bag. “But Edison—where are you going to go?”

  “Aw, Slack’ll take me in, for a while. I drive him a little bats, but we go way back. I got plenty of friends. My whole life’s not fantasy. So don’t you worry, I’ll get by. I always do, one way or another.”

  We were awkward with one another. There was a chair at the desk, but I continued to stand. “What about work?”

  “Oh, something’s bound to turn up eventually.” It was the kind of hazy assurance that most relatives took at face value, so they could get off the phone and go back to sorting the laundry. It felt artificial for us to regress to that airy “keeping in touch” whereby basically you’re on your own.

  “I don’t understand why we couldn’t get you to play the piano more often,” I said. “You used to visit me and play all day. I could hardly get you to leave the house.”

  “Complicated.” Edison pushed a few more toiletries into a zipper case. “More’n we got time for. I’ll get back to playing in due course. Just for now—bad associations.”

  “With the piano?” But he was right; we didn’t have time. We had had time, of course. So I dropped it. “Hey, I bet you’re a bit short. What say we stop by the bank tomorrow, and I give you a little something to see you through.”

  “It’s embarrassing, if you wanna know the truth. But Slack’s more likely to open the door with a smile if I show up with some bread.”

  Merely bending down to pick up a stray pack of Camels put him out of breath. I used to love the way the blond tendrils corkscrewing from his head whipped when he ranged a keyboard; on a lean, younger man, the collar-length hair had looked sexy. But now that halo of curlicues rendered his head rounder and imparted a Little Lord Fauntleroy aspect; his arms and legs short in relation to his trunk, his proportions were those of a toddler. I’d never been attracted to my brother in some untoward sense that I was aware of, but I had always relished his being attractive to others. In my girlhood, association with a sinewy, good-looking guy whose jeans rode low on narrow hips had provided me a social ace in the hole every bit as powerful as a father who was on TV.

  “Listen,” he said,
fitting the Camels into an open carton. “I don’t know how to say this. You been pretty cool. Even with this company you got going—I mean, you’re the one who’s happening, with all the—interviews, and photo shoots and shit, everybody wanting a piece of you . . . I know what that’s like, believe it or not.” For a moment he returned to his old bluster; ever since the overflowing toilet, Edison had dropped his boastfulness cold. But I wanted him to be boastful. “Or I knew what it was like in my twenties. I used to be a pretty heavy cat.”

  “I know. You’re still a heavy cat.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I meant in both senses, dig?”

  “You making fun of me?”

  “I should hope so.”

  “Look, I was only saying—you’re busy, I get it. And I know I kind of overstayed my welcome. But it’s been great to have—a place to chill. And that kid Cody, she’s been—she’s pretty hip, man. Gonna be a heartbreaker someday. I just want to say . . .”

  “You just want to say thank you. And then I say you’re welcome.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” By and large Edison didn’t do gratitude, and his coming this close touched me.

  “I wish I could ask you to stay a little longer. But Fletcher . . .” I wasn’t sure about telling him this, but I wanted him to understand what a bind I was in. “He said if you stayed here ‘five seconds’ past your flight departure tomorrow he wants a divorce.”

  “Whoa! That cat must really hate me, man. Though what I ever did to the guy is beyond me. Don’t see how anybody could get that bent out of shape over a fucking chair.”

  “It’s not just the chair. Fletcher’s an only child, and for him the brother-sister thing is suspicious. And he and I met on the late side. He missed out on a lot of my life, and all the Joint Custody stuff makes him feel more excluded. Maybe he thinks I have to actively choose him. Over you. To prove something. I haul you off to the airport, and then he’s the only man in my life again. Or almost—he doesn’t like my hanging with Oliver, either. It’s the same thing. One man, one woman, that’s all Fletcher understands.”

  Watching Edison stack jazz magazines for recycling, I flashed on my seventeen-year-old brother packing just like this, but with more vigor, dashing around, loading a backpack with cassettes that were wrapped in stacks with masking tape to travel without cracking. Dropping out before his senior year, he’d been in the process of deserting me for New York to try his hand as a jazz musician. Given his age, I’d been braced for his departure after high school. But our mother had died the year before, and I wasn’t ready to lose my lone remaining ally. At least college would have entailed term breaks when he might have come back home, whereas his hitchhiking blindly across the continent threatened an indefinite exile. I remembered lingering dolefully in his room at fourteen, unsure when was the right time to give him his farewell present to remember me by—a bracelet of woven brass and copper wire that I’d soldered at summer camp—unsure whether to give it to him at all, in case it was square.

  Joint Custody had been renewed for another season, and would end up running two more years, during which I’d be left defenseless before our family’s script-enhanced alternative children without the aid of my older brother’s shared contempt. That was the period of the show during which Mimi was suing for full custody of the younger two kids, using every confidence they’d ever shared about their father against him in court. Maple was especially caught in the middle. Having been for years assiduously “controlling information,” she had to decide whether to stick to declarations of ignorance under oath. As Edison hulked about the guest room bunching socks, while down the hall my husband would be raging on his back wide awake, I recognized the pinched feeling that Floy Newport had evoked so well: wrenched between competing loyalties, destined to betray both parties, bound to please no one, including herself—although I worried if it was tawdry to understand your emotions through the aegis of a television character. See, I couldn’t help but recall how bereft Maple had been in the previous season, when her older brother Caleb also decamped upon coming of age to try his hand at becoming a jazz pianist. Since Sinclair Vanpelt was still under contract, the fictional Caleb only moved to Seattle, and continued to make appearances on the show to give his racked sister Maple advice on her deposition. At seventeen, Edison Real Person had shown Sinclair-slash-Caleb how it was really done if you were serious about jazz, man: you moved to fucking New York.

  Barely old enough to shave, Edison had left for a dangerous city where he had no place to live, an odyssey he was now repeating a second time. When Edison picked up stakes for Manhattan as a teenager, I’d envied him; I’d felt abandoned. Yet I hadn’t feared for him. I’d had perfect faith that my seventeen-year-old brother would land in New York on his feet. Releasing Edison to the big bad world at forty-four was terrifying.

  “Remember leaving for New York the first time?” I asked. “You seemed so manly to me then that I didn’t think twice about whether you’d manage. But now I appreciate you were only Tanner’s age, and I see how brave you were. You didn’t know anybody there. You just swung that pack on your back and stuck out your thumb.”

  “Yeah, Travis thought it was a big ha-ha. Expected me to come back tail between legs within the week. That was motivating, dig? I had a lot on the line.”

  “I wasn’t worried then. But I am now.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I took a breath. “At seventeen, you weren’t morbidly obese.”

  “Jesus, getting clinical on my ass.”

  “So far I don’t think I’ve been clinical enough.” I pulled Edison to sit beside me on the bed. “I don’t have to tell you this. You’re putting yourself in the way of diabetes. Stroke. High blood pressure. Heart disease. You already have sleep apnea, which is also related to your weight.”

  Edison looked bored.

  “And that’s on top of making yourself miserable, and scotching the chance that any self-respecting woman will put a hand on your knee. All my girlfriends used to have such crushes on you! This is a waste, and an atrocity, and it has to stop.”

  “Look, don’t take this wrong, but like I said—that’s my business.”

  “Fletcher’s right, killing yourself is lots of people’s business. For me to keep pretending it has nothing to do with me—it’s wrong, morally wrong, if you can bear my sounding so unhip.”

  I had no idea what I was going to say next until I said it. Inventing the whole thing as I went along, I was filled with a sense of sacrifice, but also of power. Much like Fletcher’s ultimatum the previous hour, this was a move that I could not take back:

  “I want to make you a proposition. That you stay in New Holland. I will find you—I will find us an apartment. I will move in with you. I will take care of you, and support you financially. But only if you lose weight.”

  Edison squinted. “How much weight?”

  “All of it. Until you look like the photographs on your website.”

  “Come on, man, got any idea how long that would take?”

  “I’m not sure until I do the math. Many, many months. But it would have to be radical. Not a matter of skipping a second piece of cake.”

  “You even know how?”

  “I’ll find out. I’ll be your coach. I need to lose weight too. Besides, we both know ‘how’ really. It’s not rocket science. You don’t eat so goddamn much.”

  “But what about Fletch? Your kids?”

  “The kids, I can keep in touch with. But Fletcher—won’t like this,” I said, making the understatement of the decade. “I’d be taking a risk.”

  Edison stared in silence. “You would do that for me?”

  Both exhilarated and frightened by what I had just offered, I was tempted to say, Actually, you’d better let me sleep on this, though I realized I had been sleeping on exactly this for quite some time. “Yes.”

  “Oh, man.” He
shook his head, bewildered.

  I stood and gripped his shoulders, looking him in the eye. “But the other question is: Would you do this for me?”

  That was not quite the right formulation. In the fullness of time I’d regret it.

  “Wow.” Edison’s mouth dropped, and I was glad of the wave of momentousness that crossed his face. I didn’t want him to undertake this lightly. I’d rather he not undertake it at all. “You cleared this with your man?”

  “He’ll be a little surprised.”

  “He’ll be motherfucking livid. You and me, in our own pad? Cat’s gonna hunt me down and kill me, man.”

  “Luckily we don’t keep guns.”

  “Only one thing would piss that fucker off more than my being fat.” His eyes went steely. “My not being fat.”

  “There will be no cheating,” I said. “It will make your leaving for New York City at seventeen without a dime or a phone number seem like a trip to the post office. Because, Edison—it will be, bar none, the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

  II: Down

  chapter one

  I didn’t sleep much,” Edison croaked from his swirl of covers when I poked my head in his door. It was already ten a.m., and we had a great deal to organize—or I did.

  “Good. If you’re unsettled, you’re taking this seriously. Now, get up.” I wasn’t accustomed to ordering my older brother around. After letting him gorge himself into ever more parlously poor health for two solid months, the while keeping my eyes timidly averted like a “mousy dishrag,” the bossiness was refreshing.

  Fletcher had absconded to his basement and the kids were in school, so once Edison shambled downstairs we had the kitchen to ourselves—in the middle of which he stood, lost, befuddled, turning one way and then another, at last appealing, “What do I do?”

  “That’s the right attitude.” I had worked out the protocol while lying next to Fletcher’s ramrod body, making out the dim gray outlines of the drapes as my mind raced. “For now, we are moving immediately into a motel. From there we will find an apartment. The end of food as you know it will not begin until we find permanent lodging. In the meantime you will see my doctor. This interim will also give you time to either marshal your resolve, or conclude you’re not up to it.”