A Perfectly Good Family (7 page)

I had learned from my mother to employ food as a proxy in domestic relations, just as Truman had detoured his complex affections for his family into a simpler alliance with our architecture. At least as we four bustled over cutting boards, the chop of cleavers and scrape of spoons filled what would have been, for fifteen minutes, numbed silence.

It may be sissy of me, but I’ve always been fascinated by how people cook. Take Averil, for instance: I gave her the job of making garlic bread. Easy, right? And quick. But no. First off, she adds a timorous amount of garlic to the butter, and has to be bullied into pressing several more cloves. She mashes the butter for ten minutes, mortified by the prospect of an unbroken clump startling an innocent diner with a burst of zing. When she advances to the baguettes, she saws the bread slowly as wood, and dithers the blade back and forth after every slice before committing to another, intent on identical twins. When in mid-loaf she severs it in half instead of cutting just to the bottom crust, she lets the knife droop dejectedly as if she has just failed a geometry test. Buttering, she dabs and peers and dabs, until I find it too excruciating to watch further. In the time it takes her to make garlic bread, the whole rest of the meal will have been prepared and the table set.

Averil was daunted by food, along with a great deal else. That she was a substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system suggested that I had either over-estimated the significance of garlic bread or underestimated the unruliness of North Carolinian teenagers. In the kitchen, she was always looking over her shoulder to make sure she’d done nothing wrong. She wanted to please the food itself, to earn its approval; perhaps someone in her childhood had delivered draconian punishments for piddling mistakes. Of flavour in general she was leary, her primary concern that there should not be too much.

Where Averil is painstaking, Truman is brisk. They share an exactitude—Truman’s diced onions are all the same size square. Yet while Averil might take an hour trimming and snapping green beans one by one, my little brother lines them up ten at a time and dispatches two pounds in ten minutes. And where Averil is timid, Truman is judicious. The heat under Truman’s sautéing onions is medium. The amount of salt in his pasta water is some.

The confidence with which Truman wielded a cleaver had always meant to me that, beneath his closeted, suspicious-of-strangers, whygo-out-let’s-stay-home day-to-day, teemed a brusque, masculine certainty that never got out of the house. About his assembly-line methodicalness I was less enthusiastic. He was capable of experimentation, but if he ever dolloped the beans with pesto and it was tasty, then he would always dollop
them with pesto in future. Truman seized on answers and kept them. I think if you presented a meal to Truman and said,
This meal is good; it isn’t remarkable or memorable, but it is healthy and competently prepared and it will never make you grow ‘love handles’; if you push this button you may have this same dinner for the rest of your life
, he would push the button. On Truman repetition never wore thin. I hadn’t ascertained whether he was congenitally incapable of boredom, or whether he was so fantastically bored, all the time, that he was unacquainted with any other state.

Myself? In the kitchen, I am whimsical and I flit. I measure nothing, adding dashes of this and fistfuls of that until I have made either a brilliant dish that can’t be repeated or an atrocious one that shouldn’t be. This evening I sneak more olive oil into the vinaigrette than Truman would allow. However, I can’t choose between adding capers or green peppercorns to the salad and so opt for both, which is foolish. I do this all the time: torn between accents, I’ll sacrifice neither, and the flavours conflict. The last thing I am is methodical; I grind a little pepper until my tendons tire, peel one carrot when I will need to peel five, slice a tomato and have a sip of wine. Washing the lettuce I get impatient since I grew up with a younger brother who would do all the drudgery and I am a little spoiled; the salad will later be gritty. Meanwhile, I hover over the others and I pick. I crunch raw green beans, sample the simmering onions, slip off with a surreptitious spoonful of pesto, swipe a heel from Averil’s garlic bread. She squeals. By dinnertime I will have ruined my appetite, but I enjoy food I snitch more than whole permitted portions at table. Most of my pleasures are devious.

The real study, however, was Mordecai, extended at the table smoking rollups and slurping aquavit. He ran his own audio-engineering company and was used, like me, to drones dispensing with the shit-work. He only roused himself for the foreman’s role of spicing the tomato sauce. Mordecai cooked rarely—he and his wife Dix went out nearly every night—but inexperience never stopped my older brother from being an expert at anything.

If Mordecai has a motto in cooking, it reads:
quantitus, extremitus, perversitus
. Compulsively industrial, he promptly opens three times more tinned tomatoes than necessary. He presses two whole bulbs of garlic into the onions (while Averil’s eyes pop) and proceeds to dilute the paste with the entire bottle of
ten-dollar pinot noir I have opened to breathe for dinner. He shakes the big jar of basil with visible frustration, prises off the perforated top, and dumps in another quarter of a cup. He tastes the sauce, looks dissatisfied, throws in more basil, looks dissatisfied—in point of fact, Mordecai never looks satisfied—throws in some more, and advances to thyme. I peek in the pot to find that the sauce is turning black. But even after he has killed most of the oregano as well he casts about the kitchen as if the insipid slop still tastes like baby pap. He lights on the cone from my coffee that morning, and spoons in about half a cup of grounds. Only with this addition does Mordecai look pleased. His last stroke, a torrent of hot pepper flakes, leaves me praying we are out of cayenne.

When at last we sat down, Truman and Averil each took as small a spoonful of the sauce on their pasta as etiquette allowed. Even with Mordecai, Truman was polite. He did mutter, ‘If this recipe is a secret, I think we should keep it,’ but under his breath. The spices were chewy, and coffee grounds wedged in my teeth, though all I could taste was red pepper. I commended Averil on her garlic bread, which did a decent job of damping the fire in my mouth.

Mordecai himself made a show of gusto, his serving mountainous, an extra snow of chilli flakes over the top. He kept the schnapps at his elbow by some triple-strength black coffee and alternated slugs of each. At thirty-eight, he still wouldn’t eat his vegetables.

‘So kid,’ said Mordecai, spaghetti worming down his chin, ‘how’s the
philosophy
degree?’
I intervened, ‘He’s got a 3.8 grade point average. Don’t you?’
Truman looked at me darkly, as if what I had blurted was shameful, which in Mordecai’s terms I suppose it was.
Truman’s affairs addressed, we moved to mine. ‘How about your sculpture, Core?’
Now, Mordecai himself was one of those entrepreneurs whose big break was always around the corner. I couldn’t count the times that he had arrived at HeckAndrews, to stretch back and toss six digits around in the poignantly misguided assumption that money would impress my father. Yet the big round figures floated in on a puff of his chest, and floated out with a shrug of his
shoulders; the New York recording studio contract would simply never come up again, and no one would ask. Only because the next time my brother would be back for a ‘loan’ to see him through a ‘cash-flow crisis’ would we understand tacitly that one more big break had not come through. In this regard I was truly sorry for my brother: that he was unable to share with his family a single grievous disappointment, of which he must have suffered so many.
However, those who don’t share their tragedies don’t invite yours. ‘I got a gallery interested,’ I said, and didn’t attempt even an abbreviated version of my disaster.
The rest of our meal was consumed with yet another contract that Mordecai was sure he’d win for Decibelle, Inc. whose syllables he caressed with more sensuousness than he ever used naming his wife. I could only find it ironic that Mordecai was a self-taught audio engineer when the last thing he ever did was listen. We were treated to all the costly components he planned to install in a local nightclub; his rhythmic recitation of brand names and model numbers—the Stanley-PowersEbberstein-and-Whosits
M2XY 50001-BH
—gave his monologue a liturgical lilt, and my head began to list from Sunday morning narcolepsy. I felt an irrational urge to play Hangman on a church bulletin. As with any sermon, you didn’t interrupt, you didn’t participate, and you didn’t take
any
of it on board bar the fact that it was over.
Averil began to clear up, and stared down woefully at the pot where two gallons of Mordecai’s ‘secret sauce’ remained.
‘Freeze it,’ I advised, and Truman laughed. Mordecai didn’t get it.
‘Man…’ He extended while the table cleared itself, and lit another roll-up. ‘This may sound uncool, but Mother dropping out of the game is something of a relief.’
‘A relief?’ The tendons in Truman’s forearms rippled as he carried off a tower of plates.
‘Yeah.’ When Mordecai tipped the chair back on two legs and slapped his stomach for emphasis, I puzzled how he’d managed to pick up so many of his father’s mannerisms, having left home in ninth grade. ‘She wasn’t ever happy after Father died, right?’
‘Sometimes,’ Truman objected tightly, scraping his wife’s spaghetti into the rubbish. ‘Besides, if she didn’t have anyone else to live for, whose fault was that?’
‘Hers,’ insisted Mordecai. They lived in a smug self-congratulatory unit of two. Don’t kid yourself that we ever meant much to them—or that we could have made the slightest difference when Father was gone.’
Truman ran water in the sink, and kept his back to his brother. ‘You didn’t make much difference, that’s for sure.’
‘Didn’t you ever imagine what it might be like if she lived to a hundred? Getting heavier and weak in the head, talking about Father all the time? Wetting her bed, no longer able to drive? Hell, yes, I’m relieved. She’s better off, and so are we.’
‘The important thing, of course,’ said Truman, ‘is how
we
are.’
As Truman plopped glasses into the soapy water, Mordecai wrapped his hand around his tumbler, and Averil, I noted, did not have the nerve to clear
Mordecai’s
glass.
‘I find it a little hard to picture,’ Truman went on, his voice almost affable in a way that unnerved me. ‘You driving to buy her groceries; you listening to the day they met in the Young Democrats for the eighty millionth time; you rolling up her smelly sheets and tucking in fresh ones. So what all are you relieved of?’
‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t have changed her sheets. You would have, kid. I’m not that much of a sucker.’
Truman gripped the counter on either side of the sink, his head bowed. The veins in his hands were raised, shocks of hair on his crown standing on end like a cat’s in a corner.
‘She dunked our stinky diapers and mopped up our vomit when we were sick. She cooked supper every night and if it wasn’t always gourmet we didn’t starve. It seems fair enough to expect something in return.’ At last Truman turned his head. ‘If I’d have done it and you wouldn’t that doesn’t make me a sucker but you a cad. If it weren’t for Mother, you wouldn’t even be here.’
I had the feeling he was blaming her.
‘Shit,’ said Mordecai, rocking his chair on its back legs with his boot on the table. ‘I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She wanted to have kids, she had kids. Diapers went with the territory. I’ll tell you this, I didn’t want their favours. I wiped my own ass as soon as I was able, and at the age I could so much as turn a hamburger I walked. You’re the one who chose to stick around home until, what? Twentyeight?’ (Truman was thirty-one.) ‘You’d have cooked her strained peas, because she got you—you owed. I
didn’t. So maybe I’m relieved for you, bro. There aren’t a lot of good sides to people kicking it, but she saved you a twenty-year nightmare and I’m just suggesting you admit it.’ The front legs of his chair hit the floor.
Truman sudsed glasses furiously, though with his usual system, all the wine glasses at once, lining them on the left; he would rinse them in matching sets.
‘What she saved you,’ said Truman, ‘was money. If she’d lived longer, she’d have used up what you already seem to regard as inadequate compensation for putting up with her company an entire fourteen years of your life.’
‘All right,’ Mordecai proposed blithely. ‘You think I’m so moneygrubbing? Let me pose you a hypothetical question. Say, Mother’s dead. A fairy appears, and offers you one more evening with your mother. A whole night. There’s one catch: you have to
pay
for it, out of your inheritance. Now, how much would that night be worth to you, bro? Would you pay $20,000? $15,000?’
‘That’s a false dilemma,’ Truman croaked. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not real. That’s like asking who do you love more, your mother or your father, when you can love both of them.’
‘But you do love your mother or your father more, don’t you?’ pressed Mordecai. ‘Besides, my little fairy isn’t absurd. You said yourself, the longer she lived the less we got, so every night did cost money, didn’t it? You haven’t answered me. How much would the hand-squeezing and hot cocoa be worth to you? $1,000? $500?
Ten bucks
?’
‘I’d pay anything!’ Truman cried.
‘Are you so sure? I’ve looked at Garrison’s figures. You and my sister here want to buy me out of my birthright, ain’t that so? Bribe me with a bowl of soup?’ (Even Mordecai had been forced to go to Sunday school.) ‘The way I see it, you two already don’t quite have the cash to send both me and the ACLU packing. So what if this one golden evening with Mommy—her arms around your neck, asking how your day went, patting your head and slipping you a big dish of ice cream—cost you just enough money that you had to sell the house? What if keeping your mother around a tiny bit longer meant you lost your beloved fucking house? Would you take the trade?
Really
?’
Truman took one of the unrinsed wine glasses and threw it on the floor. ‘Get out!’ he shouted.
Yet it was obvious to all present that stressing a point by breaking crockery was derivative. Earlier in the evening, Mordecai had smashed an object of far greater value that made a much more splendid crash.
Mordecai stood and poured himself one more measure of aquavit; its caraway effluvium made me woozy.
‘Something of an accomplishment growing up in this lofty loony bin,’ he announced, ‘I live in a world of balance sheets. I understand that everything costs, and I mean costs money. Even sentimentality you’ve gotta pay for. So if you’re going to go all wobbly over this house here, you’re going to have to fork out, OK? And you haven’t got all day. No way am I going to wait around for eons while you figure out how to save this dump. I’m going to Garrison next week to file for partition. The clock’s ticking, kid. This firetrap is going on the market whether you like it or not. Maybe it’ll go for three-eighty, maybe more. Maybe you and Corrie Lou can bid high enough for it, maybe not. Only one way to find out.’
He knocked back the last of his liquor, and capped the bottle to go. ‘I’ve got to get to work. I’ll just leave you with the thought, kid: Would you swap your house for your mother? And
be honest
.’
The back door slammed on an ugly question, since in a sense, as Mordecai well knew, Truman had replaced his mother with a house. While she was alive, he had lavished more abundant attention on this structure than he had on her, so that when Truman tenderly retouched baseboards and caulked the bath I suspect she was jealous.
Truman finished the dishes in silence, while I wiped the table with the new sponge we’d bought that afternoon. He swept up the broken wine glass, searching out the least splinter, and left to collect shards of celadon in the parlour.
Meanwhile I tried to jolly him, saying don’t worry about HeckAndrews going up for auction, we’ll swing the price tag, whatever, and maybe Mordecai’s right, we should get this property settled, but I got no reaction. Truman looked desperate when there was nothing left to wash, and finally sat with Averil and me for a last glass of wine.
‘Are you relieved,’ Truman asked me, ‘that she didn’t live a long time?’
‘Of course not.’
He slumped. ‘I am.’
‘Oh?’
‘What Mordecai said,’ he proceeded morbidly, rubbing his eye with the back of his hand. ‘I’d thought about it. I was afraid she’d live forever. You’d be in England…Mordecai’s no use…I’d have been stuck. And now I got out of it, didn’t I?’
‘You’re whipping yourself,’ I said. ‘Give it a rest.’
‘You don’t know what it was like,’ said Averil. ‘The last two years. She never left us alone. She was always baking us pies.’
‘How terrible,’ I said.
‘Well, we don’t eat pies!’ said Averil. ‘She was fat. She wanted us to be fat, too. If I even left the crust, she’d slam cupboards.’
Averil was right. When Mother handed my father half her slice, you could see her calculating that if her husband ate three times as much dessert as she did then she had to be dieting. Without him, she’d have plumped someone else to be eating less than. Mother had her truly generous moments, but would not have cannoned lemon meringues at Truman’s dovecot—and at his petite young wife—only to be kind. Fudge, pecan, peach crumble—you name it, my mother’s pastry shells were impeccably tooled and would have been aimed in a fusillade at her daughter-in-law’s gut.
‘We told her to stop once,’ said Averil quietly.
My wine glass froze at my lips. ‘You didn’t.’
Truman groaned. ‘That was horrible.’
‘She left another one,’ said Averil, ‘apple and walnut, lattice crust, by our door. Truman took it back downstairs. He was hoping to leave a note and sneak away, but she was home.’
‘Except for working at the hospice,’ Truman lamented, ‘she was always home.’
‘He said no, thank you,’ Averil went on. ‘We’d discussed it. We weren’t going to accept another pie. We always ate it, and then felt ill. We considered throwing them away, but knowing your mother, she’d find out.’
‘What happened? Did she cry?’
Truman raked his fingers though his tight, curly hair. ‘It went on for hours! How I didn’t like her cooking—’
I got up and banged cabinets, rattled silverware, picked up drying coffee cups and slammed them on the counter with my lips pressed white. ‘
I thought you liked my pie
!’ I gasped. (My mother’s speech pattern was emphatic, as if were every word not anchored to its sentence with underlines it would wash out to sea.) ‘
All
these
years
I suppose you’ve been
doing
me a
favour
?’
Averil laughed. I stopped, abruptly. The imitation was too perfect.
‘Then she got into how I didn’t seem to want her around,’ said Truman. ‘And I didn’t, did I? How baking was one way she could be loving and stay out of my hair. So I said I didn’t want her affection in pie, damn it—’
‘You said damn?’
‘I said damn. She turned purple and said there was no need to curse. I said I didn’t like to eat a lot of sugar, but then she started on about Father, so…’
‘You ate the pie.’
‘Of course I ate the pie! I hugged her and she mopped her nose with those Kleenex used a hundred times and I dragged Averil down and we all sat around the table pretending everything was fine and the pieces she cut were enormous.’
‘Don’t tell me. With ice cream. And you finished the crust.’ I could see the scene clearly. My mother would bustle with napkins and pour root beer they didn’t want either and sit down to a ‘sliver’ herself with her eyes still puffy and bright red. She’d talk about her Aids patients at the hospice with a humble, apologetic lisping that failed to disguise her sense of victory.
‘It had raisins,’ said Averil blackly.
‘After that—did you keep getting pies?’
‘Yes.’ Truman sighed. ‘Only ever since, she acted nervous, maybe we didn’t want it and she’d offer to take it back or make an injured little joke, so we had to act exaggeratedly thankful. I think we got slightly fewer pies on average, but from then on we couldn’t scoff them upstairs but had to make a show, sharing dessert with Mother in the kitchen and agreeing about how cinnamon with blueberry was a nice touch. We may have had them less often, but the slices were gigantic and the scene was always tense. So tense you really had to wonder why she kept rolling them out.’
‘Now, however,’ I said, ‘no more coconut custard. You can eat cereal and chicken and rice and grapefruit and your diet is impeccable.’
Truman stared at his hands as if they had just wrapped around someone’s neck. His chest shuddered, and lay still. ‘I raked the yard. I vacuumed. I cleared pine needles from the gutters and installed new pipes in the upstairs bath. I’d do anything but sit down with her for a cup of coffee, and that was all she wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Truman—’
He looked up. ‘She cried, Corlis. All the time. She’d wrap her arms around me and her fingers clawed into me like—talons. She’d soak my shoulder so that I’d have to change my shirt. Those weird—shotgun—sobs…And I didn’t feel any sympathy, Corlis. I wanted to hit her.’