The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047. Lionel Shriver
down bowls, Florence debated asking Kurt to join them for ice cream. She was always of two minds about how much to enfold their basement tenant, a part-time florist, into the family’s social life. He was sweet about bringing back aging bouquets that would have been thrown away, cheering their home with freesias. And she liked him well enough, which she wished he would simply register and then relax. After all, he was polite, solicitous, intelligent, well spoken, and eager. (Overeager? And eager for what? To be liked, obviously, and even being liked well enough would have sufficed.) Yet his outsize gratitude for every common kindness was exhausting. The fact that he never complained made their lives easier, but he’d every right to complain. Tall for the low ceiling downstairs, he perpetually hit his head on the crossbeams, which she should have cushioned with foam appliqué. An amateur musician, he would only practice the sax with no one else home, while upstairs, even Willing’s light, stealthy tread translated into elephantine pounding from below. Did Kurt Inglewood even plead with the family to keep the TV low? No, no, no. So what tilted the balance this evening toward three bowls not four made Florence feel sheepish.
Roughly her age, trim and nicely proportioned, with a long, sharply planed face, Kurt should have qualified as handsome. A guy with a middle-class upbringing who’d struggled from one unsatisfying, low-paid job to another just as Florence had, Kurt would have come across as a charming and competent striver waiting for one decent break when he was younger. But one of the corners he’d cut for years was dental care. Decay had blackened an engaging smile into a vampiric leer. Absent fifty grand’s worth of implants, fillings, and bridges, he’d be single for life. Now in his forties with those teeth, he’d tipped tragically, unfairly, and perhaps permanently into the class of loser—an ugly, dehumanizing label that she had narrowly escaped herself. She encountered no end of poor dental hygiene at the shelter, and maybe that was the problem tonight. She wouldn’t have minded sharing ice cream with Kurt-as-Kurt. But it had been a long day at Adelphi, and she simply couldn’t face that smile.
Florence dished up three scoops. Feeling that edgy gaiety of something major having happened even if she couldn’t tell yet if it was good or bad, she impulsively put a chunk of peppermint chip in Milo’s dog dish. They convened in the living room with spoons, and Esteban turned off the TV.
“So what’s your take on the address?” she asked Esteban as they lounged with dessert on the sofa.
“Está maravilloso,” he declared. “Those decrepit Republicans—they’re always carping about how Alvarado is weak and spineless. This’ll show them. Talk about standing up for this country! That’s the nerviest set of policy decisions I’ve heard from any president in my life. They can’t call him a pussy now.”
Florence guffawed. “They might call him some other things. Like a grifter.”
“Only people get hurt deserve it,” Esteban said confidently. “Bunch of Asian assholes. Who gives a shit.”
Densely silent since their conversation in the laundry room, Willing emerged from his stewing with a prize-winning non sequitur: “We could always move to France.”
“Oka-ay …,” Florence said, stroking her son’s neck with a forefinger as he sat rigidly on the floor. His ice cream was melting. “And why would we do that?”
“Nollie lives in Paris,” Willing said. “It might be safer. The president said they won’t let dollars out of the country. He didn’t say they won’t let people out. Yet.”
Florence glanced at Esteban and shook her head like, Don’t ask. “I suppose you might visit your great-aunt someday. You two seemed to get on well during her last trip to New York.”
“Nollie does what she wants. Everyone else does what they’re supposed to,” Willing said. “Jayne and Carter say she’s selfish. That might be a good thing. It’s the selfish people, a certain kind of selfish, who you want on your side.”
Florence assured her son that there were no “sides,” observed that he was overtired, urged him to bed, and finished his ice cream, now turned to soup. After he’d brushed his teeth, she murmured in the boy’s doorway that no one was moving anywhere, and that lots of events that seem strange and scary up close end up looking like the plain ups and downs of regular life later on. The Stone Age seemed like the end of the world, didn’t it? And it wasn’t.
Yet later her own sleep was troubled. The disquiet was subterranean. Bedrock was shifting—what had to stay the same in order for other things safely to change. In 2024, Florence came to appreciate the vast difference between something bad happening and the very systems through which anything happens going bad. Even if the president’s somber decrees had no concrete impact on the day-to-day in East Flatbush, the edicts seemed to challenge her life at ground level—not so much the trifling to-and-fro of what she earned and what she spent, what she did and where she went, but who she was.
Walking to the bus stop the next morning, Florence crossed to drop the Con Ed bill in the mailbox—a payment method that felt as primitive as lighting a fire with flint. So history could reverse. Now that any transaction involving vital infrastructure or finance had to be conducted offline by law, trashy, space-eating paper bank statements and utility bills once again littered domestic tabletops. The checkbook, too, had been salvaged from the dustbin of the past, hairballs and used dental floss clinging between its leaves. But at least the necessity of scrawling on a rectangle “Two hundred forty-three and 29/100s” alone justified mastery of the formation of letters by hand. Close to losing the skill altogether, she’d been forced to void the first Con Ed check at breakfast because it was illegible. So she’d tutored Willing on printing the alphabet, since they didn’t teach handwriting in school anymore. Most of his classmates couldn’t write their own names. This was progress? But that was an old-fashioned concern that kids considered drear.
As the envelope fluttered into the blue maw, she frowned. If “internet vulnerabilities” had been fixed, why did we still have to pay electric bills by check?
The “gentry” encroaching ever farther east into Brooklyn took private transport. As usual the only white passenger on the standing-room-only bus, Florence strained to pick up any reference to Alvarado’s address. The Afri-mericans spoke their own dialect, only partially discernible to honks, infiltrated by scraps of mangled Spanish. Among the Lats, the only rapid urban Spanish she could confidently translate concerned the latest music rage, beastRap, comprising birdcalls, wolf howls, lion roars, cat purrs, and barking. (Not her thing, but when artfully mixed, some of the songs were stirring.) A screeching seagull tune with an overlaid rhythm track of pecking seemed to generate more excitement on the B41 than the wholesale voiding of American bonds. Yet once the news filtered down to the street, gold nationalization wouldn’t go down well with this crowd, many of whose toughs were looped with gleaming yellow chains. It was hard to picture these muscular brothers and muchachos lining up patriotically around the block to deliver their adornments to the Treasury. With the likes of that hulking weight-room habitué looming by the door—were the feds planning to wrestle him to the pavement and yank out the gold teeth with pliers?
A generation ago, this stretch of Flatbush Avenue north of Prospect Park was trashy with the loud rinky-dink of carpet warehouses, discount drug stores, nail salons, and delis with doughnuts slathered in pink icing. But after the stadium was built at the bottom of the hill, the neighborhood spiffed up. The “affordable housing” that developers promised as part of the stadium deal with the city was nearly as costly as the luxury apartments. Flatbush’s rambunctious street feel had muted to a sepulchral hush. Pedestrians were few. The bee-beep of the private vans that used to usher the working class up and down the hill for a dollar had been replaced by the soft rush of electric taxis. The avenue was oh, so civilized, and oh, so dead.
Florence rather relished the fact that the commercial transformation of the once vibrant, garish area must have put the well-heeled new residents to no end of inconvenience. Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city’s elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn’t buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning,