A Perfectly Good Family. Lionel Shriver
“It’ll ruin your appetite for dinner!”
I looked back at him dully. So this is how it happened: you yearn for years to be old enough to eat doughnuts when you please, at last you grow up, to find yourself reciting platitudes about din-dins. The liberation of adulthood as we’d conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed, we became our own tyrants. “When was the last time you ate a Krispey Kreme?”
“Five years ago. When you made me.” He glared.
“Come on!” I hooked his arm and dragged him through the double doors. Truman could not have looked more glum if he’d been taken hostage in Lebanon.
Krispey Kreme was an institution in Raleigh, and one corner of this town that hadn’t updated its decor since I was a kid. Lit with cold neon twenty-four hours a day, the shop had chrome-rimmed stools, counters the color of surgical gowns, and waitresses in starched nurse-white. With a few crudely drawn posters about breast exams, it would have doubled as a family planning clinic.
“How’re ya’ll today?” The waitress patted down our napkins, and without asking poured us two cups of coffee the color of rusty tap water.
“Cheers,” I said. “We’ll have two chocolate bavarian cremes, won’t we?”
“We will not,” said Truman hotly.
The waitress looked inquiring, and I shot her the imperious glance of the elder whose baby brother didn’t know what was good for him. She recognized authority when she saw it, and retrieved two revolting doughnuts hygienically gripped in wax paper.
“Lovely,” I said.
“You don’t sound like you’re from around here, missy,” she drawled.
Oh, joy, I thought. “No, I’m from London.” I straightened my shoulders and set my tiny serviette in my lap, as our waitress started nattering about the Royals, and was it true that Princess Di made herself upchuck.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered when she retreated. “I thought she’d never stop whittering.”
“Since when,” Truman charged loudly enough for the waitress to hear, “were you not born in Raleigh, North Carolina?”
I hunched over my pastry and muttered, “From. I came from London, I didn’t say I was born there. Now eat your doughnut.”
He wouldn’t. He arched back from it stolidly, as I had from cold pot-roast on Sunday afternoons.
My own snack was unexpectedly melancholic. Sure, it was shite—the custard filling hadn’t been within miles of an egg, all cornstarch and yellow coloring, but the dough itself was motherly, and the chocolate icing formed a nice crinkly skin over the top. I made a right mess of it, and was enjoying myself until I looked at Truman, arms folded in disgust, doughnut untouched.
“Something wrong with this here creme-fill?”
“Aside from having about six hundred empty calories—”
“There is only something wrong,” I interrupted, “with my kill-joy brother. Can we have that take-away, please?
“You needn’t have been rude,” I whispered out the door.
“And you needn’t have lied,” said Truman. “If you’ve really come back to Raleigh for good, you’re going to have to can that Cheerio! la-di-da.”
“Just cause Ah come home don’t mean Ah have to sayound lahk a moh-ron.”
“Keep practicing,” he said as we loped down Bloodworth. He grabbed my waxed paper bag and dropped the bavarian creme summarily in a passing bin. My brother was getting uppity.
“So have you?” asked Truman. “Come back for good?”
“For a while, I guess. For years I was driven to get away—from this town, from our family. Why do you think I wanted to hit Krispey Kreme? At least it hasn’t changed. Because lately, the past is getting away from me.”
I had long regarded my history as a ball and chain, so had spent every spare minute trying to file it off. Raleigh itself had seemed a purgatory of the obscure whose most malevolent power was to suck me back. In two short years I realized that the past was instead terrifyingly evanescent. Increasingly, the town where I grew up did not exist.
“I mean, now Mordecai’s going to force our house on the market,” I went on. “Maybe that’s the limit. No house, no parents—I’m not sure I want to be that free.”
We were on the outer edges of Oakwood, where the Colonial Revivals were smaller and closer together, painted in original Reconstruction colors that approached garish—magentas, lavenders, and corals glared on window sashes, which must have suited the onslaught of posh homosexuals that had recently moved in en masse. We turned on Polk Street to enter Oakwood Cemetery, where the setting sun lemoned gravestones on hillocks.
We hiked up to the Confederate burial ground, a grid of modest identical slabs a foot high, engraved with nameless dates. After the Civil War, Union troops still occupied Raleigh. They refused to allow Confederate dead to remain in the federal cemetery on Tarboro Road, insisting that the corpses—gray in every sense now—be exhumed to make room for Union graves: one more Southern grudge to bear, and this town thrived on them. In 1867 the Wake County Memorial Association dug up some five hundred bodies and lugged them over here. Later, the same association hauled corpses down from the heathen North, and now there were 3000 Confederate graves on this hill. We used to play here as children, upsetting the caretakers with our shrill irreverence, and swiping plastic stars and bars from headstones to bring home and deliberately appall my father.
The official halfway point in Truman’s walk was a small memorial house erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with cold cement benches and flagstone floor. The damp, still air was sweet with unraked leaves. From one of many bronze plaques to fallen rebels inset in granite, Truman read out:
Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently it is holy—
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not—unfold it never,
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people’s hopes are dead.
“The American South,” I observed, pretentiously like my father, “it’s the only place I know that revels in defeat. Most countries, after suffering ignominy, try to put it behind them.”
“Did you ever notice,” said Truman, “that Father’s attitude toward the Civil War was a little weird?”
“Weird? It made him mad.”
“But he wouldn’t work himself into an abolitionist lather. He was mad at Sherman. Like everyone else.”
True, and I treasured the inconsistency.
We tripped out the south cemetery gate and threaded through the margins of Oakwood, where big black mamas still darned socks on splintered porches. The central part of the neighborhood had gentrified, and now contained the highest concentration of Ph.Ds in the city limits. It was thanks to the Eighties boom that Heck-Andrews had multiplied into a staggeringly far-sighted investment, for this had not always been an upscale locale.
Oh, it started that way, though these tattier homes we strolled past now had been built for the Negro cooks and housekeepers who toiled in the Big Houses, like ours. Yet little by little the help didn’t remember their place and encroached on Oakwood proper, and in their wake many white owners fled.
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