A Perfectly Good Family (20 page)

I mumbled to Mordecai as we left the building, ‘I guess you’re not still coming for Christmas Eve dinner, right?’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world!’ He slammed me on the shoulder to lumber off with his sleazoid lawyer, leaving me slack-jawed.
I shouldn’t have been incredulous. While I was an avid voyeur—having acquired a taste for watching spit fly by eavesdropping on argy bargy from our landing—I preferred an eye on the storm to the eye of it. Like it or not, I resembled my mother in more than countenance; unless pushed to the wall she, too, would smooth over family cracks with pastry. Outside discrete bouts of hysteria, my mother did not believe in conflict, that there was such a thing. All enmity was misunderstanding; improve communication and everyone eats pie. I did believe in conflict enough to avoid it. Mordecai, by contrast, adored nothing better than a pretext to hurl crockery. I’ve wondered if our difference wasn’t so much appetite for battle, one of us peace-loving, the other a warrior, for I became paralytically bored when stuck among softies who all ploddingly got along. Perhaps what differentiated our eagerness to enter the ring was the degree to which we were convinced we could win. If Mordecai stirred things up because he was sure to do more damage than have damage done, I envied him.
So, doomed to Momism, Christmas Eve I found myself in the kitchen peeling spuds for potato salad, all of us about to kill each other while I debated mayonnaise versus sour cream.
Truman was slicing Smithfield ham into the translucent slices tradition demanded. His brow was boiling, his lips were compressed. His wide forearm was flecked with the same once-blonde curls of my own hair, glinting with bygone gold. Often I barely recognized this meaty grown man as the fragile four-year-old who had stacked wood-blocks in our carriage house only for me to knock them down. Other times I recognized him more profoundly than any other child in the family. Despite the long string of failed Christmas Eves in this house, he would sliver yet another mound of exactingly thin Virginia ham in the naïve expectation that this time would be different, just as he had erected yet another playroom folly convinced, like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, that for once I would leave it standing.
With blocks or Lego, Truman hadn’t constructed phallic towers, but wombish houses, like a girl. There was, if I looked closely, a touch of the feminine about him still, maybe what all that weightlifting in his eyrie was meant to disguise. Truman’s improbable guilelessness, at thirty-one, tempted me to knock it down. Fleetingly, I relished telling him that the future of HeckAndrews had a Plan B.
Averil was stuffing holly-cornered napkins into rings carved with Santa’s elves. She was wearing red and green. The kitchen was a disaster, and for what? I wondered how we’d bought into this myth of occasion, my mother’s ‘special times’. All this hustle-bustle, only to wrap the leftovers in cling-film, waiting to spoil so we could put them in the freezer.
‘I thought you hated potato salad,’ I mentioned at the sink.
‘Yep.’
‘Then why are we having it?’
‘Search me.’
‘…Do you like Smithfield ham?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Then why are we bothering?’
‘Search me.’ He’d decimated a third of the ham. He seemed to enjoy cutting too much.
‘Don’t you think that’s enough?’
‘Fine.’ He glared with a tight grisly smile, the knife raised point up.
‘I guess we should have arranged some financing before showing up at that hearing.’ My eyes met only those of the potatoes; my peeling was meticulous.
‘I
guess
we should have.’
‘You’re the one who didn’t want to hire a lawyer. I assume that’s the first thing he’d have advised us, OK?’
‘Too late now,’ Truman clipped. ‘Hindsight’s about as useful as looking up your ass.’
I eased the cork from a cabernet.
Truman looked askance. ‘At six o’clock?’
‘It’s Christmas Eve!’
‘There’s always some excuse.’
‘For a drink? In this house? You bet.’
‘You’re drinking more than you used to, Corlis.’
‘We both are, we didn’t used to drink.’ Which staggered me. I’d no idea how I managed my whole childhood without a bracer. ‘What’s biting your bum?’
‘Besides the fact that my brother just made me look like a complete twit in public? Maybe I’m reminiscing.’ I was relieved, though we’d more than enough sliced, when he applied the knife back to the ham. ‘About last year.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Yeah. You said that at the time. You were
sorry
.’
By and large, I was prone to the indolent emotions. I’d drop by if I was in the neighbourhood; I’d buy friends a little something, but only if there was a shop on the way. I was comfortably regretful when it was too late to remedy an oversight. I did whatever I wanted on the assumption that I could patch things up after. I was cavalier; I was sorry.
‘Troom, how was I to know Mother would have a heart attack? She wasn’t very old. Right, people can always die on you but you can’t twiddle your whole life in the sitting room waiting for some member of the family to expire.’ Well, of course you could; one of us had.
‘Uh-huh. But you’re home for Christmas this year. Now that she’s dead.’
He hadn’t let go of the knife. I whittled too many potatoes, reflecting that my little brother had all the makings of a serial killer.
‘Maybe better late than…’
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Maybe not better late.’
‘I couldn’t afford—’
‘Mother said that she offered to pay for your ticket. And you said no.’
‘I finance my own—’
‘You’re not too proud to take it now, though. Inheritance may be “evil”, but you’ll accept her money when it doesn’t mean you have to put up with her company for a day or two.’
‘I visited when I could.’
‘You’d be out every night of a five-day stay. You’d apologize, of course. Think she didn’t
twig
, Corlis?’
‘All right.’ I tossed a potato in the sink. ‘Did you enjoy earnest evenings with Mother? Be honest.’
‘Of course not, and that’s the point!’ He threw down the knife at last. ‘Do you realize what it was like here last year? Mother had volunteered to pay your fare, and you said you’d rather spend the holiday with your
flatmates
. Did Mordecai stop by? When he lived ten blocks away? Not one phone call! So Averil and I went out and spent three hundred dollars on a bunch of presents she didn’t need because
no one else bought her anything
. You didn’t, did you, not even a little package of shortbread or a souvenir from Buckingham Palace. She’d have been touched by trash, Corlis, some stupid trinket. You didn’t even send a decent letter, did you? A postcard! Which arrived, as I recall, in the middle of January.’
‘The end of January,’ Averil contributed.
‘So we spent last Christmas Eve looking at slides of their travels with Mother’s voice quavering, getting so puddly she couldn’t focus and the ten million shots of ANC worthies kept wobbling into blurs. We heard, again, about how they met in the Young Democrats and how respected Father was and how Jesse Jackson came to his funeral. We made her dinner and cleaned up and wouldn’t let her help, though that was mostly to get away for at least a few minutes, which didn’t work because while I was sudsing glasses she’d droop over my shoulders and thank me for being the one kid who seemed to care and she’d cry. I may have wanted to hit her, but I didn’t hit her, did I? You hit her.’ Truman was hyperventilating.
‘I had friends and a career and I lived in another country! That’s what parents bargain for. They do not expect you to stay home until you’re fifty-five, making repairs to the stoop.’
‘Then what are you doing now? Except I don’t notice you making repairs to the stoop.’
‘I’m taking a little time to work out what to do next. Considering you wasted ten years driving a bloody hardware truck in circles for your in-laws while you decided what to do with your life, I think I’ve earned a few weeks of slack. That is, if you
have
decided. If studying philosophy isn’t more navel-gazing procrastination. Fucking hell, you’re one to talk.’
That did him. I was regretful—I was sorry. He looked at his big hands with his shoulders slumped. I was glad I could still make him cry. ‘I thought—’ His chest lurched. ‘Christmas was hard, Corlis. I was tired, she was driving me crazy. I thought you might
come home for me. You didn’t bother. All you cared about was your boyfriends.’
Despite the plural dig, I said, ‘I
am
sorry, Truman,’ and this time the apology felt different; I meant it. ‘Now—’ I poured him a medicinal glass of wine, ‘—Mordecai will arrive any minute. Get this down you, and then some. You’ll need it.’

Truman had not swilled nearly enough antidote when the kitchen table trembled as a military motor gunned outside. Mordecai managed to drive a vehicle that actually sounded like a bulldozer.

When he clumped in the back door with three of his workmen in tow, I noticed that his manner had altered. Ordinarily he had acted detached here, the avuncular visitor, but now he waltzed in with a feudal swag just like my father after a long day, who would slide his briefcase on the table and make for the freezer, to shovel ice cream straight from the carton before dinner. Mordecai now walked in this house as if, well, as if he owned it.

‘Yo, you guys got something to drink?’

I scanned all four of them, and felt a little economic sinking that not one of them had arrived with a bottle of anything. Mordecai beelined for the cabernet on the counter, grabbed a gas-war tumbler, and upended the bottle. His roll-up bobbed and shed ash as he talked. Meanwhile his minions ambled through the first floor, poking into closets and picking up knickknacks, as if considering whether to tuck them in an inside pocket. ‘Hey, Mort, some crib,’ the one with the dingy blonde ponytail murmured. ‘Not bad.’ I felt the impulse to count our silver, like some hapless Civil War widow when a Northern general occupied her vanquished house for bivouac. I expect Sherman didn’t arrive with any wine either.

‘Where’s Dix?’ I asked as Mordecai helped himself to ham. ‘Spending the holidays with her snit,’ he said with his mouth full.

‘They were getting on so good, it seemed a shame to part them.’ ‘What’s she upset about?’
Mordecai flicked his head in Truman’s direction. ‘Later.’ God forbid with the three of us together that anyone would confide

anything to anyone. It may have been a luxury of a sort to be the centre of information, for each brother told me his side of things so long as the other was out of range, but as a consequence
they left me full of secrets and turned me into a liar with both. Maybe that was the idea.

Mordecai having left home so early, I’d had little experience with the two of them in the same room. Since I assumed a radically different persona with each brother, they cancelled me out. Not only did I not know what to say, but how to say it. With Truman, my speech was distinctly British—I said ‘con
tro
versy’ and used a ‘spanner’; with Mordecai, I fell in with his yahoo singsong, and said ‘fuck’ a lot. In Truman’s company, I was careful not to drink to excess, never admitted I sometimes smoked a cigarette, wouldn’t be caught dead nibbling biscuits between meals, and curtailed stories of sexual antics in the interest of portraying myself as a passionate woman with high standards just looking for love. Slumming with Mordecai, I tried manfully to keep up my end of a bottle, name-dropped multiple boyfriends, and snickered knowingly at any reference to pharmaceuticals, never letting on that I’d only taken acid once. Therefore when Mordecai thumped his muddy boots on the table, rolled a joint and passed it to me I froze. With Truman, I claimed I didn’t smoke dope; with Mordecai, I had never refused a few hits. I compromised with a single drag and handed it back. Truman raised his eyebrows. I fled for ham.

Mordecai and his three grungy employees reached across one another for slabs of Smithfield, ignoring the holly napkins to wipe mustard on their sleeves. Bandying brands of audio manufacturers, they glugged great tumblers of Rosemont cabernet until in short order they’d decimated a third of our case.

We were never formally introduced, but I sorted out the names of our gate-crashers. MK was the smarmy blonde, whose ponytail hung stiff with a lacquerous sheen. His weight was cadaverously low, his face dappled with the purple undertone of volcanic acne in his youth. MK’s drawl overplayed the dumb hick:
gosh-dang ain’t that sump’m
. I figured him for one of those lowlifes who was always trading on a southerner’s reputed buffoonery—sweet corn to divert attention from the switch-blade taped to his ankle.

When he followed me once to the sink—to get a glass of water he failed to drink—he may have been locating our case of wine. He said, ‘Is it true, Corrie Lou, that Mort took a test at NC State that proved he was a
genius
?’

‘So I’ve been told,’ I said coldly. I noted MK had mail-ordered my brother’s exact same style of leather boots, as he also rolled his own cigarettes and extolled that sickening caraway schnapps. Imitation made me edgy; it was a kind of theft.

“Cause that guy sure do run rings around me,’ MK twanged. ‘Half the time, I can’t tell what he’s gassin’ about from the man in the moon.’ Somehow I didn’t believe that MK felt all that stupid.

Wilcox was the tall lantern-jawed fellow who didn’t say much, though that left his mouth the freer to suck down drink. His head swivelled, following the others’ chatter as they segued from speaker components to the US Marines’ recent invasion of Somalia, but his pupils were inert and opaque. Wilcox looked like one of those kids in the back of the class who maintained an attentive expression, but if you called on him he’d sputter about the Revolutionary War when the class had long ago moved on to algebra.

Big Dave was the cut-up of the bunch, an amiable porker with a shameless guffaw. Maybe it was the granny glasses, but he seemed quicker than the other two and, more appealing still, I thought Big Dave liked my brother. When he chortled he seemed to have got the joke, where the other two laughed late, waiting for their cue. Big Dave was physically familiar, gripping Mordecai’s forearm, but even this boisterous prole knew his limits and when Mordecai looked down at the hand Big Dave lifted it with a simpering grin. The whole trio demurred to excess and their good-timeyness felt forced, making me wonder whether Mordecai could be forbidding outside his family as well as in. I overheard Wilcox mumble to MK to ‘keep an eye on Mort’ because ‘you know that fucker’s a mean drunk’.