A Perfectly Good Family. Lionel Shriver
come in and start to make the bed …”
I had heard these favorite stories before.
“Right, well, sanctified by marriage,” said Truman, “we got a little privacy, okay? Dinner upstairs except on Sundays, and we had our own life. After Father died that went to hell. She’d knock, three timid taps, but never waited to be invited, and crept up the stairs calling my name in that kiddie voice, Twooo-maaannn! Some days we hid. Some days we both chattered on the tower deck.
“Well, last spring she came up again and it was time for grapefruit and I wanted to slip the bourbon from under my sandbag and have our nightcap and finish talking about—”
“Mother,” I provided.
“Of course. We stood around the kitchen and gave her yes and no answers to every question and folded our arms and looked at the ceiling and wouldn’t even ask her to sit down in the living room—didn’t offer her coffee, didn’t ask her about the hospice—but does she get the message? NO! So after half an hour, right, after all those hugs and pats on the arm I couldn’t control myself. Gosh, Mother! I exploded. You can’t be mean enough!”
Truman sat down with a thud. “Well, you know how her voice was always fake? Cheery and falsetto? I’ll never forget hearing it change. It sank a full octave lower. It wasn’t nasal anymore. All the muscles in her face dropped. No, you’ve done a pretty good job, she said, and her posture became totally straight with her shoulders squared and she walked calmly down the stairs. That was her real voice. I’d never heard my own mother’s real voice before. Amazing. It was almost worth it,” Truman added. “But not quite.”
“So sometimes,” I noted, “you did hit her.”
I thought about Mordecai’s false dilemma,” Truman admitted as we squealed on the porch swing late the next afternoon. “I might pay $10,000 for a night with Mother and Father, as long as it were different.”
“Maybe that was his point,” I said, toeing the swing in a figure eight. “That it couldn’t have been different. Therefore, inexorably, if Mother appeared in your dovecot from beyond the grave, in five minutes you’d be fretting for her to leave you alone. That’s the way it was, so that’s the way it was.” A tautology, but I was groping.
“What do you think was wrong?”
“Mother was miserable.”
“Yes, for the last two years—”
“Long before that.”
“And Father never noticed?”
“Come on. Mother was the one who never noticed.”
I reported a remark she’d made to me when I was twelve, making my mother only forty. Rather out of nowhere, she informed me in the same buoyant, bouncy tone she’d used for reading aloud The Man with the Yellow Hat, “The best of my life is over, of course. I’d be glad to die now, except that would be selfish. I have to think of the family.”
“What she was saying,” I told Truman, “was she wished she were dead. And this from the happiest woman in the world, according to herself. She thought it a common enough sentiment and went on to propose we have Spanish noodles for dinner.”
“Don’t that beat all,” said Truman.
Like my brothers, I, too, had tried all my life to get away from my parents, the underpinning assumption that of course I couldn’t get away or I’d not have gone to such extravagant lengths as putting the entire Atlantic Ocean between us. The two deaths, one on the other, had therefore arrived with a dumb surprise. Behold, it was more than possible to flee their company; in the end they fled mine.
Truman and I had talked plenty about my parents and we weren’t through. A brother is a gift this way, since no one else would tolerate our interminable dissection for five minutes. Claustrophobically as I might yearn to chat about something else, should we stray to other matters conversation sagged and I was inevitably lured back. Talk of my parents was like candy we couldn’t resist but which made us sick.
It was as if we were trying to solve a puzzle, like the Independent crossword. Yet Andrew and I had never done anything with our filled-in crosswords but throw them away. Therefore my question was less whether my mother, feeling excluded, tried regularly to divide me from my brothers than to what conceivable use I might put this information.
I suggested we go for a walk (for Truman, that always meant the same walk); he objected that he walked after dinner and I kicked him. He grumbled and said all right he’d fetch Averil and I pleaded please don’t. “She’ll feel left out!” he objected.
“Sometimes people are left out,” I said, picturing my mother’s eyes hood and smolder while Truman and I conducted whole conversations in a language we had invented. “So there’s nothing wrong with their feeling that way.”
I grabbed a muffler and jittered on the front porch as Truman applied for permission upstairs. At last he emerged, alone but harried. One walk had cost him.
“What’s the big deal?” I asked as we tripped down the stoop. “For Christ’s sake, I’m your sister.”
“You’re not married,” he said. “Filling out course registrations can be a big deal. If Averil can get jealous of a pencil, she can certainly manage it with a whole sister.”
I swished through the curling leaves of the black walnut tree.
He side-eyed me. “You’re looking pretty good.”
“Thanks. The last two weeks, I lost some weight.”
“Suits.”
I biffed him lightly on the upper arm, solid as a firm mattress. “You, too. Not bad.” It was a service we did one another, mutual confirmation that neither of us was falling apart.
As we cornered Blount Street to North, I glanced back at Heck-Andrews; gold light retouched the manila clapboard so it no longer seemed to need painting. Massive for a residence, it was dwarfed by the Bath Building rising behind it, a great white slab for the NC State Laboratory of Public Health. The steady roar of its circulation system Truman claimed to detest, but I’m sure he was used to the noise. It was the hulk of concrete itself he reviled. Erected in 1987, the Bath Building destroyed the view from our back porch, once of an open field used for landing the governor’s helicopter. The field was now circumscribed by a mall of polished granite office buildings, and children could no longer play Army there—a game my father had discouraged, and which had therefore been our favorite.
As we strode down Wilmington Street, my eyes swiveled from the Mall on our left to Oakwood on our right. It had taken me years of absence to notice that our neighborhood was bizarre. Smack in the middle of downtown Raleigh, our Reconstruction enclave might easily be mistaken for a state theme park; add a gruesome dental surgery, a pretty girl pretending to churn butter, and an over-priced beeswax candle factory and I think we’d have got away with charging tourists admission. The houses were all Colonial Revivals and Second Empires, with storm cellars, boarded-up outhouses, and a proliferation of chimneys; happy darkies hauling water from a hand pump would not have looked remotely out of place. The grand, leisurely scale of these dwellings had been made possible by the Civil War, which had ravaged and leveled so many homes around the capitol. Carpetbagging architects had poured down from the north, for land was cheap, pine plentiful, and labor, with freed slaves and veterans equally unemployed, eager to pound clapboard for a meal a day. The yards were grand, their hardwoods grown as lush and steady as their planters intended.
What Oakwood’s architects would not have anticipated was the New South on our left: a faceless array of stoic government granite indistinguishable from dozens of other downtowns north and south. This was the land of Internet and sun-dried tomatoes, no longer butt of barefoot bumpkin jokes,