A Perfectly Good Family. Lionel Shriver
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 parlor.
Meanwhile I tried to jolly him, saying don’t worry about Heck-Andrews 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 favor?”
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.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Any normal son with a heart.”
“Truman, I wouldn’t even come home for Christmas.”
“I didn’t blame you!” He started to pace. “You know, I trained her—even before we got married—not to come to the dovecot.”
“As I recall, the big accomplishment was to get her to knock.”
“Right. Twenty-one years old, and she’d waltz straight into my room as if I were still in my cot.”
At another time—as I had for so many years that it ceased to make Truman angry and simply bored him—I’d have suggested that if he didn’t want his mother walking in unannounced the answer wasn’t to “train her” but to move out.
“So we had that confrontation. After which—theatrically—she’d knock. This turned out to be important, since there were some mornings I had to stuff Averil up the spiral staircase to hide on the tower deck.” He was worked up, but couldn’t help smiling.
“In