A Perfectly Good Family (21 page)

Under-breath asides as MK and Wilcox left in tandem for the loo confirmed that what they said in and out of my brother’s earshot was chalk and cheese—
hear any more about fucking Somalia I’m gonna…fucking skinny niggers, who gives a
…Mordecai reared back as if his workmen were hanging on his every word, but I thought that their real concentration was on the potato salad.

While they helped themselves to our dinner and uncorked new bottles without asking, not one of them bothered with niceties like making conversation with Truman and Averil. Typically, no one had mentioned the hearing that afternoon, least of all Truman, who pulled his chair two feet outside the circle and said absolutely nothing.

MK asked about the folks their boss ‘got this place from’—these three seemed under the impression that HeckAndrews was Mordecai’s alone. Though my brother described his father as an overbearing knee-jerk liberal, he went on to detail several landmark cases his father had tried, until it hit me like an anvil flattening Elmer Fudd: Mordecai was boasting! About his father! Then, MK couldn’t have cared less, his eyes only following his employer’s spliff as it stabbed the air for emphasis and failed to circulate around the table.

‘You know, if either of you guys needs some extra dough,’ Mordecai finally addressed his siblings, ‘this contract’s got us pressed. You’re pretty handy with a hammer, ain’tcha kid?’

Truman shrugged.

‘I pay fifteen bucks an hour. Think about it. And Core, I could use a hand in the office. Invoices, typing up bids?’
I looked at him in stupefaction. ‘You want me to be your secretary?’
‘Of course not, Core! You’d be my
executive assistant
.’
Having ravaged most of the food, Mordecai screeched his chair out and clomped off to the parlour, bottles in the crook of each arm luring his threesome along with him. Behind him, the table was strewn with potato dribs and half-gnawed carrot sticks, the floor tacky with flattened ham fat. Truman stayed behind to clean up.
That set the rest of the night: each brother in a different room. I kept excusing myself to the kitchen to fetch another cabernet where I would dawdle and dry glasses, drifting back to the parlour where Mordecai had put on Pearl Jam at a volume that would have broken another window in the door if our father were still alive. In neither room was I relaxed. After ten minutes I was acutely conscious of having left one brother for too long and began to fidget. Finally I gave up on trying to please both and no doubt pleasing neither, curling anti-socially in a far corner of the parlour. The music was too loud to talk anyway, so I amused myself by flipping a photo album that lay flat on a shelf in the absence of Britannicas.
I’ve wondered if personal memory hasn’t been fundamentally subverted by photography. These crinkled snapshots objectified a past that would otherwise have remained a revisable blur. For example, when I remembered those years, I didn’t envisage being
a child. I may have recalled the sensation of not being wholly in control of my destiny, but I couldn’t picture myself two feet high. Yet look: I was tiny, smothered in lacy frills that would repel me now, my arms spread with their Vienna sausage fingers groping at the air to embrace a world of which I have grown so much warier since. Photos were a corruption, however. That I did not remember feeling physically small had a truth to it. I’d noticed as well the seductive tendency to replace the quiver of real recollection with the steadied camera. I conjured my mother flat and artificially touched up at her college graduation, an event that I couldn’t remember because I wasn’t born then: photographs.
They did, however, have their uses, and though I was well familiar with this album I turned its leaves this time round as if consulting an oracle. I may have been a little stoned, but my questions were two: why was Truman terrified of his brother, and why did Mordecai revile him?
In the first four leaves, there is no Truman: Mordecai in our Hi-Flier wagon, holding the handle with two-year-old Corrie Lou between his legs. Here he already wears that signature smirk; by five, he has learned the f-word. I, on the other hand, am unrecognizable: decked in flounces, bouncing with blonde ringlets, gawking up at big brother with ga-ga adoration. He is about to go plummeting recklessly down the hill, and I haven’t a care. My eyes are glad and uncomplex, without duplicity. Corlis Louise, dumb but happy.
More of these: Mordecai galloping with his baby sister on his back, bundling her on his sled for the scant two-inch snowfall on Bloodworth Street, the runners bound to scrape tarmac the second time down—snow in Raleigh is exotic, precious. Mordecai my protector escorts me, without my mother, to my first day of school.
The next leaf: my mother with fuller breasts, posing in front of the rental Tudor that preceded HeckAndrews, a formless bundle in her arms. Mordecai is clutching me to his thigh, and averting his head with his eyes closed as if to say: this couldn’t be happening.
In the following two panels Mordecai grips his sister with resolute possessiveness, plying her with stuffed bunnies, crayon portraits, bugs under jars. The third of our number is no more included in the drama of the moment than shirt cardboard. In Pullen
Park, Truman fists his mother’s skirt and ducks in its folds as Mordecai, confident, tall and commanding in comparison, pushes my swing.
I had puzzled over these early shots of Truman before. All small children appear bruisable and undefended, but in Truman these qualities are extreme: his eyes are watery blue, large for his face and too wide open; his lips are parted, his hands held from his sides, wafting as if he doesn’t know what they are for. He looks lost, the other two children colluding behind him, and his innocence is the kind that draws torment as irresistibly as flowers draw bees. These were the days of my first clear memories, when Mordecai and I would follow the toddler about the house ridiculing his first attempts at speech, exaggerating his mistakes; small wonder the little boy went mute for days.
Still there must have been an afternoon that I refused to participate in the game, though I do not remember it. When, instead of mimicking, ‘Doh-nnn! Weave me awone!’ in unison with Mordecai, stooping to leer into Truman’s face as he flapped his arms in the hand-me-down jacket that was still too big for him, I snapped, ‘Quit it, Mordecai,’ put a hand on Truman’s waist-high shoulder, and lent him my model palomino. There must have been an afternoon when, after school, instead of ritually threading down to the basement to peer at Mordecai’s latest stink bomb experiment I searched out the four-year-old back from nursery school, still struck dumb from having spent the entire morning at West Raleigh Presbyterian in a corner with his blanket. An afternoon when instead of hiding the ‘bembet’ one more time in the couch cushions I helped him look for it.
For with a single turn of a page the groupings of our threesome transform—and one construction we never find here is the three of us playing convivially in the sandbox together. No, suddenly I am filling Truman’s pail, edging forward to balance his seesaw, ketchuping his hotdog. These photos already capture the inseparable quality for which among my cousins we were renowned. And this is the first point in the album I recognize my own face. Its lines have sharpened and thinned; my eyes glitter with the quicksilver of a sovereign sibling. I am no longer a gurgly little sister; I am myself a protector, though in the way of most protectors, also the one you need protection from. We do what I say; we do not do what I proscribe, and Truman accepts both punishment and reward with equal submission because he has never stopped being grateful.
Truman was still grateful for my defection. That very evening, when I would pop back to the kitchen he didn’t look censorious but beholden. Likewise, I concluded as I looked up from the album at Mordecai puffing away on his rollie, eyes cutting in my direction to make sure I had not abandoned him for the galley, my elder brother had never stopped being aggrieved.
You could see it in the photos. Often, in the later shots, Mordecai is out of the picture altogether. When he appears at all, he is remote from the rest of the family, sucking on candy cigarettes, looking daggers at his sister and her new-found sidekick. (In a single intimate exception, Mordecai is holding his little brother’s waist as the youngest dangles on a jungle gym, but there’s more than a hint in both Mordecai’s sly grin and Truman’s expression of abject horror that Mordecai is considering letting go.) Far at the edge of the frames, his eyes are slit with calculating resentment, as if he is plotting revenge, biding his time while he contrives the ultimate stratagem to win his sister back. When I glanced over at him in my father’s old chair, boots on my mother’s flimsy coffee table, knocking back our cabernet and casting about the parlour with an air of fresh reclamation, I realized that Mordecai was still scheming; he had not given up.
It had never occurred to me that my desertion might have hurt Mordecai’s feelings. There was humility in my blindness—I never imagined I was that important to him—and admiration as well; he was my big brother, absorbed in pulley systems ingeniously driven by Erector Set motors, or nose down in his dinosaur book. Why would he covet the plaguesome curiosity of a little girl? For in my memory, Mordecai was sufficiently invincible that he didn’t
have
feelings.
The other puzzle I hadn’t fitted together was not only why I was forced to choose one brother over the other, but why I had selected the younger one. Was I naturally maternal? Did Truman’s unguarded blue pupils cry out for my safekeeping? Or had I merely revealed a preference for the role of capricious leader over cowed fan? Did I only opt for Truman so I could boss him around? Or did I perhaps—like him better?
Whatever the answers, the consequences of our childhood alliances and betrayals were still playing themselves out in this
household, so that one more time I would have to decide with which brother to throw in my lot. I slammed the book shut, having at least satisfied this much: Mordecai reviled his brother because the little twerp had swiped his sister, and Truman trembled because anything capable of being stolen can be taken back.

I fell asleep in that chair, and dreamt about my sculptures, tumbling down a muddy red hillside just out of my reach and cracking off their hands. These dreams were recurrent, and always the sculptures were wards in my keeping that I had forsaken or neglected and which suffered unduly on my account. Visions of clay figurines spliced with snapshots of my mother. To say I missed my art more than my parents would go too far, though my mourning for the objects was simpler. More accurately, the loss of what I had made and what I was made from had indistinguishably fused.

I woke to find Mordecai passed out on the floor, a wine stain spread at his elbow, a cold roach between his fingers having burned a black dot in the carpet. The flunkeys weren’t in evidence and hadn’t taken any care to cart my brother to bed and I hoped they’d gone. Groggy, I roused to switch off the stereo, still auto-reversing Smashing Pumpkins. I collected a few glasses and went to the kitchen; Truman had turned in, and I felt bereft. I wanted to explain to him that I had some new angles on our childhood and now I couldn’t wake him up the way I used to and whisper secrets at his bedside because he was married.

I bundled to my own bed and didn’t get up again until noon on Christmas Day. I found Truman downstairs, bent over the stove. It seems that Mordecai and his friends had made a late night raid on the fridge, decimating a whole pan of unbaked stuffing, one of my pumpkin pies, and most of the cranberry sauce. Truman had already stuffed the turkey, and was basting over the breast as if to soothe himself.

‘I guess after I went to bed you guys had a high old time,’ Truman clipped.
‘Hardly. I conked out in the parlour and had nightmares.’ ‘Are those waste products gone?’ Among their other unsavoury attributes, Mordecai’s employees were
strangers
.
‘I don’t know. Want some help?’
Averil came in the back door having binned the rubbish, and the three of us put a shoulder to dinner, lopping radishes, splitting celery, peeling potatoes. Mordecai must have hauled himself to bed in the weesmalls, so we salted the rug, though the burn mark was there to stay.
By three Mordecai shambled into the kitchen yellower than ever, the weave of his three pigtails afray. He made straight for one of Truman’s cold beers, and within the hour it became apparent we had three charity cases for Christmas. They’d sacked out in the second-floor bedrooms, and by four-thirty had polished off two six-packs. I was reminded of a future whereby our father had let out spare rooms to the homeless after all.
When the seven of us milled around our Christmas tree it was nearing dark, though its carnival glow was unable to bathe our gathering in a persuasively festive light. I had fresh appreciation for how difficult it must have been for my parents to pull off this holiday with adolescent or grown children. Once we exceeded twelve or so and no longer wheedled outside their bedroom door to hurry up, pleading to open our presents while they exasperated us with breakfast, Christmas had acquired this same half-hearted, arbitrary quality. We had all become too patient and civilized and could buy ourselves what we liked; if we had postponed opening our presents another day or another year no one would have died. I’d always thought this failure of atmosphere was all my parents’ fault, and now look, we couldn’t do any better. One of the great privations in the demise of a generation over you is having no one to blame.
Averil put on ‘A Music Box Christmas’, but Mordecai said, ‘Fuck this’ not halfway through ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ and replaced it with Nirvana.
I apologized to our interlopers that we’d have wrapped them up a little something if we’d known they were coming, though what I really meant was this is our first Christmas without both our parents, it’s hard enough and it was tactless of you three to butt in.
MK remarked, ‘You’re the one who’s lived in London, ain’tcha, you sher have lost your accent.’
‘I dare say I never had much of a drawl to lose,’ I assured him, draping languidly on the mantle and wishing I had a fag to garnish the pose. ‘Our mother was from Iowa and made such merciless fun of our father’s Virginian accent that I pretty much grew up speaking like her.’ I didn’t mean to imply that as a child I had sounded like Walter Cronkite, but I guess it came out that way.
At which point, with a twinkle in her eye, Averil initiated our exchange of presents by handing me a wrapped packet. Her cornering was impeccable, the bow pert, the paper covered in reindeer, whereas I was given to swaddling presents in newspaper. The enclosed cassette was unmarked.
Averil took the tape from my hands, ejected Nirvana, and explained, ‘We found it in your Dad’s filing cabinet.’ She hit
PLAY
:
—
Happay barthdie tew yew! Happay barthdie dayer fodder! Ha-apay barthdie tew
…(High nasal giggles and spastic laughter.)
Hey thar, fodder! Ah wonted ta ply yew ma reco-erder
—?’
‘Holy Christ,’ said MK. ‘Is that Corrie Lou?’
‘None other,’ said Averil. ‘Sh-sh!’
‘Averil, take that off!’ I implored.
Averil placed herself bodily in front of the deck, treating us to a reedy rendition of ‘Streets of Laredo’, pierced not only with wrong notes and shrill squeaks but with plenty of interruptions from Truman:
—
Shud-up, Core-loo, ya don hayuv ta ply oll fave varses, ya dooface
—!
—
Trew-mayun! Ah ain’t finished! Leggo
—!
Mordecai hee-hee-ed; his merry men snickered. Averil lost her guard over the tape because she was doubled over laughing. I reached to shut it off, my face hot. I was trying to smile, but I’m afraid I only managed the brave, nauseated simper of accident victims carted off on a stretcher when they don’t want you to worry. That was the last time I ever apprised anyone that even as a kid I never had a Southern accent.
For Averil I’d got a blouse. It was pink, with a high neck and tie bow, a panel of lace down the front—much like my dresses when I was three. She was nicer about it than she should have been.
I had purchased Mordecai the obligatory litre of aquavit, tin of Three Castles, and cyberpunk novels, though there was something too generic about the gifts, like always getting my father aftershave. I had my theories from afar, but I didn’t know Mordecai very well in an ordinary way. After ten minutes of chatting with
him like anyone else, I’d have discovered what movies he liked to and whether he still read science fiction. When other people talked to members of my family, I’d often been amazed by how much they found out that I didn’t know.
In exchange, Mordecai delivered me a small unwrapped vial, with speaker wire for a ribbon.
‘The texture—’ he leered ‘—is just like spit.’
It was sexual lubricant. Truman examined my present with a scowl; later he would remark that it was typical of Mordecai to give me something ‘literally slimy.’
‘This is a Gift of the Magi, Mordecai,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’
‘We’ll see what we can do about that,’ said Mordecai. I scanned the trio on offer and wondered if they were part of my Christmas present.
I was looking forward to Truman unwrapping his hefty pile, all taped up in the
News and Observer
. I’d considered getting him some books on architecture, but that idea seemed staid. Things had been so ponderous around our house that I thought we needed to lighten up. By the time he opened the first package I realized the gifts would not be received in the spirit I’d intended.
‘Well, well,’ he said, his voice grey. ‘Pick-up Stix.’
I had gone to Toys-R-Us and discovered that, amid the computer games and battery-operated doohickeys that did all your playing for you, many of the classic amusements we’d grown up with were still for sale. I got so caught up in my own reminiscence that I went a little over the top: Matchbox cars, Lego, Tiddly-Winks. I’d had a wonderful time and frankly spent a fortune. Yet as Truman dutifully shredded off the newspaper, revealed a box of coloured plasticine, and went, ‘Huh,’ I wished he’d hurry up and get this over with.
All right, so he took the presents as an insult, as if I still thought of him as a little boy, an impression the more distressing with Mordecai looking on. But the toys may have rung off-key on a deeper level. Having meant to trigger his nostalgia, I may have roused his memory instead, which is not the same thing by a yard.
For inevitably the Risk set would have recalled that it was a game Truman never won; the imperialists of his family had amassed great armies on his borders, which were inevitably overrun. Clue would have revived his rage at my record-keeping
‘system’—after I’d guessed Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick, Truman would ball my scorecard of hieroglyphic triangles into the fire. Monopoly would merely remind him of my helpful advice that every property he landed on was too dear for the rent, leaving me owning the entire board and Truman with Go money. Perhaps he imagined the Lego blocks would be the usual motley mismatch of the corner pieces left over from my own threestorey hulk that had consumed all the windows. That Matchbox sedan would be his first, at thirty-one, in good nick—for when we’d built elaborate cities in the backyard I would get the convertible whose top went up and down, and Truman would drive the convertible only when the top had jammed or the door had been pulled off. As for that adorable stuffed gorilla, I wonder if Truman still expected me to mash its mouth and bulge out its eyes until the creature looked so deranged that he’d be afraid to take it to bed.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Truman, his voice in a dying fall. ‘The same fire truck.’
‘It came to the rescue when we played Volcano, remember?’
Truman’s head bobbled, like a plastic dog’s in a car’s rear window.
‘We’d build a mountain in the sandbox,’ I explained to Averil, speaking quickly and smiling too much, ‘with houses and trolls and trucks. But the mound was constructed around the garden hose, and when the city was completed we turned on the water. It took a little while, but eventually whole sides cracked off and there went the neighbourhood. We got much more fun out of tearing things apart than putting them together.’
Truman sounded fatigued. ‘All children are like that, Corlis.’
Mordecai, who I’d have expected to find my presents either dopey or equally evocative of an unsavoury past (we’d never played board games with him, since if he didn’t win he’d fling the Chance cards all over the room and we’d be weeks finding them), crawled on to the floor and built a double helix with Tinker Toys. I wondered if he’d have preferred the tiddly-winks to cyberpunk, as he and Big Dave then scrambled on all fours popping bright plastic discs exuberantly among the needle droppings. To watch his mesmerized ching-chinging of the Slinky, you’d think Mordecai had never played with toys before.
In a way, he hadn’t. His only resort when I deserted his wagon had been to withdraw to his famous precocity. He disdained our muddy fire engine rescues for his crackling Jacob’s ladder in the basement—Mordecai had been in one basement or another for most of his life. Maybe he thought that this Christmas, as he and MK fashioned lewd plasticine figurines with outsized phalluses, we were at last including him in the games he once pooh-poohed but must also have envied.
Truman thanked me with a peck on the cheek, and tramped off to baste the turkey. Like the racoons he trapped, the roast was a helpless little animal and he felt sorry for it.
When Truman returned Mordecai said he’d brought a bottle of champagne for Christmas, and Truman said, ‘A whole bottle?’ deadpan. Absorbed in his rapid progress with the Rubik’s cube, Mordecai gave Truman instructions where to find the champagne in the back of his army truck so we could start it chilling.
Before he trudged out the door Truman asked, ‘You want to
time
me?’
Mordecai didn’t seem to get the reference, but I did. When Troom was small we were always making him go fetch—crackers, Coke, especially anything to which we weren’t supposed to help ourselves so if caught the youngest would get in trouble. ‘I’m not your swave!’ he might protest, at which point Mordecai would offer craftily, ‘We’ll
time
you.’ Truman would race off for ginger snaps and tear back again; Mordecai would declare, ‘Forty-three seconds!’ Later, if we wanted a sandwich: ‘We’ll
time
you.’ It worked without fail.
When Truman bustled back into the house his face had paled a shade, and he whispered to his wife furiously; something was up.
Truman composed himself and announced in that woeful tone of his that my own present was out back and I would have to put on a blindfold—no peeking. I taped a holly napkin around my eyes. He took my hand and guided me through the back door and across the porch, until I recognized the hollower resonance of the carriage house platform. I stumbled up its rear stairs to the door on its second floor, which Truman had stolidly refused to unlock for three weeks. Then I heard a click, and ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas!’ boomed in his own hearty baritone from speakers in front of me.
‘You can take it off now.’
The light was bright, since someone had finally replaced the shorted overhead socket. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed the big room was cleared of broken rockers and withered forsythia, and repainted white including the floor. The tacked-tin sink was no longer clogged with leaves and dead crickets. Along two sides were newly installed counters sealed in thick enamel. At one of these stood a high stool, before an armature board.
‘Truman,’ I gasped. ‘What is this?’
‘Your new studio,’ said Truman. ‘You said you wanted to move to bronze casting, so your sculptures couldn’t get smashed by jealous boyfriends any more. So I bought you some wax. Did a little reading up on what you might need.’
He’d done his homework. There were three blocks of microcrystalline by a two-burner hotplate, along with a battered pot, a bag of resin chunks, some pallet knives and a coil of aluminium wire.
I walked around the studio, tracing the neatly rounded counter edges with my fingertips. I was abashed. It suddenly occurred to me how I might have felt if, instead of getting up early to paint and pound nails, Truman had bought me dollies that wet and an oven that baked addwater cakes with a light bulb. As if he knew what I was thinking, Truman quipped behind me, ‘I figure you can work on sculpture while I play Volcano with my fire truck.’
I tried to say thanks, but the words stuck. What jammed in my throat was not only this studio, but the brownie batches he’d cooked for my girl scout troop when I was behind in my homework, the cage he’d laboured over when I decided to raise gerbils, the bookshelves he’d built for my Chapel Hill flat. I could go on. All my life Truman had patched my punctures and carried my suitcases, and though I may have become jaded I couldn’t resist the notion that some of these gestures were not because he was ‘grateful’ or obsequious or frightened, but because he loved me.
‘You don’t like it,’ he said morosely.
‘No—’ I coughed. ‘I do. It’s—swell.’ Lame, but since awkwardness and inadequacy are the flag of sincerity in our family, he must have known I was impressed.
‘Listen—’ Truman hustled me to the stairway landing. ‘Is there something you need to tell me?’
‘Thank you,’ I remembered.
‘No, is there something I don’t know?’
‘Sorry—?’
His whisper was harsh as we huddled down to the back porch.
‘When I went for that champagne. Mordecai’s truck—it’s all loaded up, Corlis.’
‘So? Maybe he’s got a job—’
‘No, there are bags of dirty clothes, filing cabinets, a photocopier, that computer drafting rig—to the gills, Corlis, like, everything he owns is in there!’
‘Troom, I haven’t a clue—’
When we reached the parlour again, Mordecai was reclining in my father’s chair, hands clasped over his middle, with a feline smile of having just eaten the canary. For the first time all day, he spoke directly to his brother.
‘Bet you thought I forgot you, bro,’ said Mordecai. ‘That I didn’t get you anything.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ said Truman warily.