Big Brother Read online

  My brother contended with his ongoing terror of comestibles by becoming obsessively scientific. After consulting the poster of calorie values now magneted to the fridge, he weighed every tomato to the exact ounce on a digital scale. He worked out the total energy in his ingredients on a calculator, and I never caught him rounding down. Indeed, the kitchen was littered with pads, their pages striated with columns of figures. I was tempted to urge him to relax a bit—an extra half carrot would hardly be the end of the world—but he didn’t trust himself one hair off the straight and narrow, and if all this lunatic weighing and sawing away little lumps of veal helped him feel self-possessed, fine.

  Albeit on a slower schedule, the solid-food stage of this project continued to produce steady progress. In Month Seven, Edison lost twelve pounds, only two fewer than the previous one, when he’d still been on protein shakes. It’s true that the final weigh-in of Month Eight was a particular low point, for which he blamed me, railing that he should never have commenced that 1,200-calorie daily intake. I said that most people would be pleased as punch to have lost eight pounds in a month, and at 209 he was looking better than ever. (I know this numerical stuff seems dry, but you can’t imagine how emotional these confrontations with the scale were; for Edison, the drop from twelve to eight pounds in a month was devastating.) At least subsequent totals demonstrated that I’d been right: he had to eat more to burn more, and his metabolism was ramping up.

  Though our refrigerator was full of produce from roadside farm stands, I was doleful about missing out on our garden on Solomon Drive, and found myself calculating from afar how big the zucchini were growing, when the green peppers would come on, whether the sweet-pea vines had peaked. I continued to fruitlessly scan my inbox for [email protected], and to retrieve the last of my cell-phone messages with a heavy heart. Running errands in New Holland, I was tortured by familiar glimpses, only to discover that the cyclist was Korean. On one occasion I really did spot Fletcher; stricken, I about-faced. The dizzying effect of the adrenaline whited out any useful intelligence: what he was up to, whether he looked cheerful or glum.

  Alas, the dispositional disjunction between Edison and me was a revelation: apparently no matter how satisfied a loved one, how proximate his pleasure, how drastic the contrast between his present joy and the dejection of his recent past, or how abstractly gratified you may feel by having played a substantial role in his restoration, no one else’s happiness can quite stand in for your own. Battling a pernicious dolor, I often felt as if I were observing my brother from a great distance when he was only in the next room.

  Yet better to watch a boisterous, diligent, considerate brother from a remove than a despondent, suicidally fat one from close up. After we were mugged by yet another unsolicited care package from Solstice—containing a wind-up donkey, a tiny framed picture of the Dalai Lama, and a fancy enameled ballpoint that didn’t write—he conducted a couple of long calls with his younger sister whose slight tedium was worth it; embraced by her legendary sibling, she stopped regarding the two of us as being holed up against her. Since I’d put him on salary at Baby Monotonous, he no longer hit me up for spending money, and lived within his means. Initially reluctant to work for his sister and so resentful of my company’s success that he’d had the gall to blame that cover story in New York for triggering his compulsive eating, my brother was now campaigning to become the general manager at our plant, freeing me up for more creative exploration of new products. While during our original furnishing of Prague Porches Edison had hung back sullenly and smoked, he’d started browsing online for a grander dining table now that we propped something more amusing on the laminated one than herbal tea—though I was interested that he never suggested we move to a better apartment or proper house; maybe he was afraid that moving together would open the door to the possibility that we could also move apart.

  Somehow, miraculously, and I am not sure how this happened, Edison Appaloosa had adjusted to the idea of a normal life. That may sound a modest achievement, but for anyone in our family it was monumental. In the limitless temporal pasture one wanders on an all-liquid diet, perhaps he had reviewed his own career highlights—like accompanying Harry Connick in an impromptu jam session—only to conclude, as I had regarding mine, that these were not the highlights of his larger life. However he did it, the glad embrace of a quietly productive, low-profile existence requires far more spiritual maturity than the insatiable pursuit of headlines, and in this sense my big brother was finally growing up.

  Yet a conversation with Oliver in August stands out in my memory. We’d had a difficult time finding a date to get together one-on-one without my excluding Edison so emphatically that it might have been hurtful; my brother was forever filling our free time with jaunts to the IMAX, the Science Museum, and pick-your-own raspberry farms. At last when Cody asked to spend a long day at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines alone with her uncle—Edison was so touched that his eyes welled—I invited my old friend to dinner.

  Oliver hadn’t been by for a few weeks, and surveyed our apartment with uneasy appreciation. “Wow, this is beginning to look—settled.”

  Although to begin with the place had had that impersonal cookie-cutter quality of a model apartment, now framed black-and-whites of Edison’s icons lined the walls—Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Herbie Nichols, and Earl Hines. The barn-plank dining table had arrived by then, with funky, rough-hewn chairs. The rooms were warmed with touches—a kooky umbrella stand, an antique milk crate bulging with back copies of Jazz Times, begonias on the kitchen pass-through. The round face of our big red scale was topped with a yard-sale Stetson, lending our sentinel a cowboy strut, while the Pandora doll leered drunkenly atop the piano. A photo montage improved on the lone birthday shot of my brother at 386: Edison and me at Monotonous; Edison and me sandbagging; our most recent addition, Edison entering his weight on the calendar the first morning he dropped below “two large.” Seeing our lair with Oliver’s eyes, I realized it wasn’t a rehab clinic anymore. It was a home.

  “I’ve been surprised to discover Edison’s domestic side,” I said. “I always thought of him as the sort who never has milk in the fridge. But after losing everything to that storage company, maybe he’s ready to anchor himself with stuff again.”

  “He’s ready to anchor himself with something,” said Oliver warily. He ambled over to my double and pulled the string: Oh, no, not ANOTHER photo shoot!

  “There’s nothing like having your nose rubbed in your fake humility to keep you humble for real.” I poured us cautious glasses of white wine. “It’s good for Edison, being settled. I’d never have believed it, but he may stay in Iowa for keeps.”

  “I don’t find that surprising. You live in Iowa.”

  “So? My living here didn’t influence his residence for twenty years.”

  “No . . .” Oliver took a seat at the table. “Is he seeing anybody?”

  “Not that I know of, and I’m sure he’d tell me. He hasn’t brought anyone over since that one-night stand during the flood. It’s as if he was making sure the equipment was still in order, like getting your car inspected once a year. Maybe he’s not ready.”

  “Why should he ever be ready? What could he find in some strange woman that he doesn’t have now?”

  “Sex, obviously. Our relationship isn’t that kinky.”

  “It’s pretty kinky.”

  I busied myself in the kitchen. I’d been looking forward to our tête-à-tête, but this conversation was setting me on edge.

  “After all, a little sister makes the perfect wife, in a way,” Oliver continued. “Undemanding. A known quantity—intimate, but not in any way that’s scary. Adoring. Permanently second fiddle, since don’t imagine a little bossing around about his diet trumps hardwired birth order. You’ve provided him a de facto family with Cody, and isn’t he still funneling advice to your stepson over the phone?”

  I trimmed the fat of
f our pork loins. Now that Fletcher had used the D-word, I’d half expected Oliver to make a move on me again. A respectful period of time had passed, too, but he hadn’t—as if I were still married, but not to Fletcher.

  “Yes, he is,” I said lightly. “I hate to admit it, but Edison is the only one who takes Tanner’s screenwriting ambitions seriously. He’s a big proponent of preposterous dreams, since he pursued one himself.”

  “My point is, your brother’s got everything he needs. Maybe not sex, but I bet when you’ve been that heavy for years you’re used to living without. A girlfriend would blow all that. He’d have to take his chances with someone he hasn’t known since she was zero years old, who isn’t structurally subservient, and who feels free to break it off.”

  “Remember, officially this arrangement of ours is only for one year.”

  “It’ll have been a year in three months. When was the last time you told Edison that in early December he’s got to find another apartment?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So this living together thing—it is permanent.”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “No. You haven’t said much.”

  I brought our salad to the table and sat squarely across from Oliver. “Do you like Edison?” Strangely, I’d never before asked him this point-blank.

  Oliver considered. “I’m sympathetic with Edison,” he determined. He was scrupulous about emotions, careful to be as precisely truthful about his feelings as he would be about external facts. It was one of the things I loved about him: he never chose the first bland word at his disposal out of laziness, in this case “yes.”

  “I can see ‘sympathy’ as of a year ago,” I said, “but not now.”

  “Especially now.”

  “Why? I’ve never seen him happier in his life.”

  “Exactly.”

  This conversation was upsetting me; I wasn’t sure why.

  “He still hasn’t learned to eat like a normal person, has he?” Oliver continued. “He’s still measuring every morsel to the tenth of an ounce.”

  “That’s right. He’s closing in, but he hasn’t reached his target. This isn’t changing the subject?”

  “It isn’t changing the subject. And he still won’t go out to eat?”

  “He doesn’t trust restaurants, even when they post calorie counts.”

  “And you said he was addicted to heroin for a while, too.”

  “Another non non sequitur? He claims he wasn’t addicted. He only tried it.”

  “This whole project. With you. It’s everything he lives for. It’s the latest heroin. But you can’t be on a crash diet forever. The only thing left for him to do when your project is through is to gain the weight right back.”

  “You sound just like Fletcher! Edison could instead move on to doing something more interesting than either eating or not-eating, and I don’t know why everyone is so goddamn cynical!”

  “Calm down. I said I was sympathetic. But all the measuring, and notating, and weighing in. This setup, this pretend-open-ended playing house with you. He’s delicate. He is not in control of himself. He’s only in control of the control. Once the controls are lifted, he’s in control of nothing.”

  “Right over my head.”

  Oliver tried again. “Exercising control is not the same thing as being in control. It’s the opposite. When you’re really in hand, there’s only doing what you want. There aren’t two of you.”

  Still opaque to me, and mercifully we moved on.

  Cleaning up after Oliver went home, I reflected that, if a little sister made an ideal wife, I was less convinced that an older brother made an ideal husband. I despaired of the very companionability that Edison treasured, an absence of friction that I associated with bad sex. Yet one of Oliver’s points was well taken: my brother did indeed give every indication that he expected our arrangement to continue indefinitely. He wondered aloud if “we” should consider buying a new car, weighed in on whether I should accept interview requests from local publications like the Des Moines Register as if he aspired to be my personal manager as well as my production plant’s, and had recently proposed a cross-country bike trip through the Midwest once he was well established on a full-calorie maintenance diet the following summer. He took it as a given that we would shop together, ride to work together, dine together, and hit jazz clubs in Iowa City together. These hand-in-hand presumptions were sweet, but an anxiety had started to build in me that, contrary to Fletcher’s prediction that Edison was destined to “break my heart,” I was more apt to break my brother’s.

  chapter ten

  Those last three months I observed Edison’s tunnel vision with conflicted admiration and disquiet. In his determination to fulfill his purpose by our one-year anniversary, my brother had eerily duplicated my husband, as if I were karmically fated to live with Mr. Perfect. Biking to work, he was the one who urged me to hurry up. He’d started jogging as well, keen to retrieve some semblance of his track-star adolescence. He was so focused on the end point at which he would clock in at exactly 163 that he never alluded to any occasion that might proceed it, not even Christmas.

  What did he think was going to happen—he’d turn into a butterfly? Ascend to sit at the right hand of God the Father? Where would he channel all that obsessive energy when we’d achieved our goal? I hadn’t wanted to give ground at the time, but Fletcher had been right at our disastrous picnic: weight loss made for a pretty shabby religion, if only because for faithful adherents it had a sell-by date; you could only continue to worship at the altar of comestible restraint if you chronically failed your vows. I kept remembering what it had been like to overshoot my own destination. Downsizing hadn’t made me happy. Rather, I’d felt lost, and bored, and robbed, as well as frightened and flummoxed by something as mundane as regular meals. Looking back, too, what had been most soul destroying was getting a grip: taking a step back in the privacy of my room, facing the mirror squarely, and confronting the fact that being a little thinner was trivial. On a host of levels, from health to self-respect, I supposed it was important that Edison would no longer draw cruel remarks at baggage claim from people who’d resented having been seated next to him. But it didn’t matter a jot if he weighed 163 or 164, and I worried that this discovery could plunge him into darkness. I wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with a forlorn Well, so—what’s next?

  “You do realize that the really hard part is after you’ve attained your objective,” I warned in mid-November while Edison was toweling down after a run.

  He guffawed. “You’re such a trip. What, a year ago, losing this weight was gonna be ‘the hardest thing I’d ever done.’ Got that right. But then solid food was ‘the really hard part,’ and now being a normal-size person is ‘the really hard part.’ Man, talk about a moving target. No matter what I do, the ‘really hard part’ is still glooming down the road. You gotta lighten up, babe. As a coach, you might figure out a better motivating strategy than unrelenting dread.”

  “All right. Let’s plan something to look forward to, then. We should have a party. To celebrate. A Coming of Size party.”

  “Now you’re talkin’.”

  We consulted the calendar. In Month Eleven, he’d dropped 10.2 pounds. If he upped his burn to twelve pounds with additional exercise, Edison should be sliding into home plate on our one-year anniversary to the day. “Don’t you want to give yourself a little leeway?” I proposed.

  “Panda Bear, before I arrived in your lap, I’d allowed myself a whole lifetime’s worth of leeway. December sixth is the ticket. We got three weeks and change, just about the right lead time to send out invites. Speaking of which—you figure your ex-in-waiting is an honorable cat?”

  “I don’t know how honorable it is to jettison your wife just because she’s loyal to her own brother.�
� I’d grown a little bitter. “But until last June I’d have said yes, supremely honorable. That’s why his big-baby flouncing off was such a shock.”

  “Then you gotta invite Feltch. He owes me, man: one whole chocolate cake, downed in a sitting.”

  “You remember that.”

  “I remember that jive, condescending wager every day.”

  “ . . . I can’t promise he’ll come through. Circumstances have changed.”

  “What ain’t changed is he insulted me, man. All that shit when the fucking chair broke, about not being able to find my dick. About how I’m some homeless loser leeching off my sister, just ‘pretending’ to be a respected jazz musician. Then when we left, how I’d never be able to do it, how my will was ‘flabby.’ Fuck him. I want to see him eat crow. I want to see him eat humble cake.”

  So benign had Edison’s demeanor grown of late that his acidity took me aback. Somewhere in there was still the wounded pride that had gotten him into this mess, and had also gotten him out. But however I feared the prospect of Fletcher refusing or accepting the invitation in equal measure, I owed it to Edison to extend one. It was his achievement, his party, his guest list.

  The single enduring satisfaction of my own diet had been self-recognition: the image in my mirror bore some relation to me, replacing a swollen imposter who had doubled as both caricature and rebuke. For me, Edison’s transformation over our year together had been marked by a sequence of recognitions, most dramatically that afternoon in March, when the sun’s shaft through the window unearthed his cheekbones at last.