The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047. Lionel Shriver
found her son freshly washed with his dark, wet hair tousled. Though having grown a couple of inches this year, the boy was slight and still a bit short considering he’d be fourteen in three months. He’d been so rambunctious when he was small. Yet ever since that fateful March five years ago, he’d been, not fearful exactly—he wasn’t babyish—but watchful. He was too serious for his age, and too quiet. She sometimes felt uncomfortably observed, as if living under the unblinking eye of a security camera. Florence wasn’t sure what she’d want to hide from her own son. Yet what best protected privacy wasn’t concealment but apathy—the fact that other people simply weren’t interested.
Also somber for a cocker spaniel—though the forehead’s perpetual rumple of apprehension may have indicated a drop of bloodhound—Milo was flopped beside his master, chin glumly on the floor. His chocolate coat was glossy enough, but the brown eyes looked worried. What a team.
Typically for this time of evening, Willing wasn’t propped before video-game aliens and warlords, but the TV news. Funny, for years they’d predicted the demise of the television. Channels were streamed, but the format had survived—providing the open fire, the communal hearth, that a personal device could never quite replace. With newspapers almost universally defunct, print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose. Television news was about the only source of information she faintly trusted. The dollar now having dropped below 40 percent of the world’s … a newscaster was yammering.
“I’ve no idea what a reserve currency is,” she admitted. “I don’t follow all that economics drear. When I graduated from college, it was all people talked about: derivatives, interest rates, something called LIBOR. I got sick of it, and I wasn’t interested to begin with.”
“Isn’t it important?”
“My being interested isn’t important. I swear, I read newspapers front to back for years. My knowing any of that stuff, most of which I’ve forgotten, hasn’t made the slightest difference. I wish I had the time back, frankly. I thought I’d miss newspapers, and I don’t.”
“Don’t tell Carter that,” Willing said. “You’d hurt his feelings.”
Florence still winced at that “Carter.” Her parents had urged all their grandchildren to address them by first names. “Only” fifty and fifty-two when Avery had her first child, they’d resisted “Grandma and Granddad” as connoting a geriatric status with which they couldn’t identify. They obviously imagined that being “Jayne and Carter” to the next generation would induce a cozy, egalitarian palliness, as if they weren’t elders but buddies. Supposedly, too, the rejection of convention made them bold and cutting-edge. But to Florence, it was awkward: her son referenced her parents with more familiarity than she did. Their refusal to accept the nomenclatural signature of what they actually were—Willing’s grandparents, like it or not—suggested self-deceit, and so was purely a gesture of weakness, one that embarrassed her for them if they didn’t have the wit to be embarrassed on their own accounts. The forced chumminess encouraged not intimacy but disrespect. Rather than remotely nonconformist, the “Jayne and Carter” routine was tiresomely typical for baby boomers. Nevertheless, she shouldn’t take her exasperation out on Willing, who was only doing what he was told.
“Don’t worry, I’d never bad-mouth newspapers to your grandfather,” Florence said. “But even during the Stone Age—everyone thought it was so awful, and some aspects of it were awful. But, gosh, for me liberation from all that noise was dead cool”—she raised her hands—“sorry! It was careless. Everything seemed light and serene and open. I’d never realized that a day was so long.”
“You read books again.” Mention of the Stone Age made Willing pensive.
“Well, the books didn’t last! But you’re right, I did go back to books. The old kind, with pages. Aunt Avery said it was ‘quaint.’” She patted his shoulder and left him to the Most Boring Newscast Ever. Christ, she must have the only thirteen-year-old in Brooklyn riveted by the business report.
Checking the rice, she tried to remember what her weirdo son had claimed about the recrudescence of malnutrition in Africa and on the subcontinent, after both regions had made such strides. It was an outrage that the poor simply couldn’t afford to eat, she’d bemoaned to the boy, when the planet had plenty of food. He’d responded obtusely, “No, it doesn’t.” He proceeded to recapitulate his great-grandfather’s tortured explanation—something like, “It only seems like there’s plenty of food. If you gave the poor more money, then the price would rise even higher, and then they still couldn’t afford it.” Which didn’t make the slightest sense. Around Willing, she should monitor her grandfather’s propaganda more closely. The old man was liberal by creed, but she’d never met anyone with money who didn’t have conservative instincts. One such instinct was to make the morally obvious (if fiscally inconvenient) seem terribly complicated. Like, rice is too costly, then give people the money to buy it. Duh.
Willing seemed so subdued and unassuming at school, but behind closed doors that kid could get a bit full of himself.
“By the way, I’ve arranged to talk to my sister after dinner,” she told Esteban as he reached for a cold beer. “So I hope you don’t mind doing the dishes.”
“Let me use real water, I’ll do the dishes every night.”
“The gray is real enough, just not especially clear.” She didn’t want to have this battle every evening, and was relieved that he changed the subject as the pork sizzled.
“Met this afternoon with the new group we’re taking up Mount Washington,” Esteban said. “Already identified the trouble-maker. It’s never the weak, pathetic clients who give us grief, but these geriatric superheroes. Usually guys, though sometimes it’s some tough, I-still-think-I’m-thirty-five old bag held together with Scotch tape and several hundred grand in plastic surgery.”
He knew she didn’t like him to talk about his charges with such contempt, but presumably he had to get the frustration out of his system beyond their earshot. “So who’s the headache? Jesus, this meat’s so full of water, these patties will be boiled.”
“Must be the other side of eighty. Has that look, with these stringy biceps—spends hours in the gym and hasn’t noticed that he’s now doing curls with barbells made of balsa wood. Wouldn’t listen to my safety drill. His only question was how we dealt with the fact that people ‘keep to different paces,’ and some climbers prefer to ‘push themselves.’ He’s a type. They’re runners, or used to be, though that was before their double hip replacements and five keyhole heart surgeries. You can bet they have money, and back before the dawn of time they did something with stroke. So nobody’s dared to tell them they’re fucking old. Usually their doctor or their spouse has laid down the law that they can’t troop into the woods anymore without someone to scoop them up when they stumble down a gully and break their legs. But they never like the whole idea of trekking with a group, and they always look around at the other arthritic losers and think, What am I doing with these boomerpoops?—when actually they fit right in. They don’t follow directions and they don’t wait up. They’re the ones who have accidents and give Over the Hill a bad rep. On a canoe trip, they’re the ones who splash off solo and take the wrong tributary, and then we have to abandon the whole expedition to find them. Because they don’t like following a guide. Especially a Lat guide. They’re enraged that Lats are running the show now, since somebody has to—”
“Enough.” Florence threw the cabbage into what was starting to look like pork soup. “You forget. I’m on your side.”
“I know you get sick of it, but you’ve no idea the waves of resentment I get from these crusties every day. They want their domination back, even if they think of themselves as progressives. They still want credit for being tolerant, without taking the rap for the fact that you only ‘tolerate’ what you can’t stand. Besides, we gotta tolerate honks same as they gotta put up with us. It’s our country every bit as much as these has-been gringos’. It’d be even more our country if