A Perfectly Good Family. Lionel Shriver
“Why the hands?” pressed Averil.
“Because my hands,” I said, “had lied. But they hadn’t really. I liked each of those men. I liked each of them, in a different way, a great deal.”
Whenever my father was asked if he wanted pie or ice cream he would smirk and say he wanted pie with ice cream, so I was raised with the idea I could have both.
In my bedroom, I could make out snippets of conversation overhead.
“How long is she—” Averil pierced.
Truman’s voice was more muffled. “Until … she’s depressed.”
“Corlis takes over!” My lullaby, and I slept.
I woke early, on UK time, and stumbled down for coffee. Our long, woody kitchen was added to the house around 1900, built on top of what was once a deep back porch. We’d eaten most of our meals at the rectangular table in the middle, the formal dining room reserved for interminable pot-roast dinners after church. I loved this kitchen. It had never been done over with linoleum and Formica, but retained its tacked-tin countertop by the pockmarked porcelain sink; cabinets were thick ash with crazed china knobs. My mother had read that a dishwasher used more hot water, so had washed up by hand; hence, aside from the Cuisinart, the room was free of garish modern appointments. With a few home-jarred pickles and strings of garlic bulbs garlanding the curtains this kitchen might have been the hospitable Southern hearth my English friends would picture, wafting with the rise of baking cornbread.
Instead the smell was stale, sharp with rancid oil and the faintly medicinal residue from “perfectly good” heels of bread with the mold pinched off, as if no one would know the difference. Counters were littered with fat green broccoli rubber bands my mother couldn’t bear to throw away, or the yellow crimps of sweet roll ties, amid an array of rinsed-out jars with the wrong lids and painstakingly smoothed aluminum foil, dull from reuse. A peek in the pantry proved it predictably lined with watery store-brand ketchup and reduced-price dented tins, recalling “surprise” suppers when we would open real bargains without labels; at my feet the floor was knee-deep in plastic bags. On the refrigerator, sheaves of coupons were magneted to the door. Beside them, a last grocery list exorted with shy urgency, “t.p.!” She had never bought double-ply in her life.
I rooted around for a spoon among the ancient airline peanuts packets (Piedmont had long before gone to the wall); from between the gas-war glasses, I retrieved a send-away-for-your-free Nestlé’s Quik coffee mug. The prospect of a grown woman who is comfortably well off cutting out three logos from successive purchases, stuffing and stamping an envelope and remembering to tuck it in the postbox and raise the flag, all for one mug covered in advertising for chocolate powder, frankly made my jaw drop.
Waiting for coffee to drip (through a cone that had never quite fitted the jug and tipped precariously when filled), I slumped to the table. My mother’s kill-joy obsession with minuscule frugalities was so unnecessary. Her husband had been a successful civil rights lawyer, later a state Supreme Court judge, and despite the checks to the United Negro College Fund and his assumption of countless down-and-out discrimination cases pro bono, they’d never hurt for cash. I’d had a drink with their estate lawyer when my father died to confirm she was provided for, and he’d been reassuring. So why were we raised on A&P powdered milk?
It’s true that thrift was a game to my mother, and she must have enjoyed it. And habits like clawing all the cartilage off the chicken carcass and throwing it into the soup would have been installed in childhood: through the depression, her father was a hard-up typewriter repairman; they’d stinted on sugar through the war. She married in the fifties, when whole magazine spreads were devoted to limp-potato-crisp casseroles. She had never held a job, and her only contribution to the family coffers was to not-spend; so day-old baked goods empowered her. But I resisted seeing Eugenia McCrea as a creature of era; I preferred her as uncommonly cheap. Plenty of her cohorts had gone on to reach for new Ziploc bags rather than washing the old ones relentlessly and sealing a lone half of uneaten spud—perish the thought she should throw it away—into greasy plastic. In the scrimping of this larder you could see it: she must have felt so undeserving.
A sensation to which I had only contributed. She had cooled my forehead with damp cloths when I was feverish, whereas my father, when I was carsick, blew his stack. Yet, like my mother herself, to others I promoted my champion-of-the-underprivileged Dad. When I returned home in adulthood, I debated affirmative action with my father in the sitting room while my mother scoured this yellowed sink. Hadn’t he told us himself that he’d been “waiting for his children to grow up” so that we could at last “engage in adult conversation”? In the meantime we bored him. So he left the raising of his offspring to his wife, and then had the temerity to rage when his eldest didn’t turn out as he’d have liked. When I was young he was so rarely in evidence, forever in “meetings,” that my favorite birthday present was to spend an hour with my father alone, and to do so again I would have to wait another year. Gruff, inaccessible, buried in briefs with glasses down his nose, Sturges McCrea had been more icon than parent to me, and in truth I owed him little.
You’d think that the one reward for doing all the puke-wiping and nappy-dunking would be a little credit; instead we dismissed our mother for being so apparently unimportant. So she redeemed herself by mailing off for coffee mugs, and settled for victories of remarkably intact quick-sale vegetables while my father brought home honorary degrees.
“I thought you might want some milk.”
Truman delivered a carton, and sat down with his panda mug.
“You’re not spending much time downstairs?”
“It doesn’t feel like mine yet.”
Yet. I didn’t take issue, for Truman charmed me in the morning. He took hours to wake up, and rubbed his eyes, bear-like, with the backs of his hands. For years he’d collected panda posters from Peking, T-shirts from the National Zoo, and mugs like the one he was slurping from, on which Ling-Ling nibbled bamboo. In fact, he looked like a panda: with dark rings around his eyes and a myopic bumbling amble, especially on rising, like a massive, muscular mammal I knew to be vegetarian and could tease if I liked.
“Ready for the big pow-wow?” Though a question, the sentence fell.
“As I’ll ever be. I noticed nobody’s cleaned out the fridge.”
“That’s right, nobody has.”
“There’s some furry yellow squash casserole in there that could cure all Tanzania of TB.”
Truman wandered to the sink; he compulsively tidied. “Nuts.” He stopped. “The sponge.”
I turned to glimpse, fossilized by the faucet, the horror of Truman’s childhood. It had been his job to wipe the kitchen table, and my mother could not have started a fresh sponge more than once a year. The same fastidious boy he’d been then, Truman wet it by knocking it into the sink and running the tap; he squeezed it with a fork. Touching the sponge with only his fingertips, he nudged the fetid greenish square through my sloshed coffee. He scrubbed his hands, sniffed his fingers, and washed them again.
“How much can a new sponge cost?” he despaired. “Thirty cents?”
As his first act of revolution, Truman pinched the reeking tatter by its very corner and dropped it in the bin.
Not expecting any surprises, I wasn’t dreading our conference with the estate lawyer. If anything, I looked forward to seeing Hugh Garrison, who had handled the particulars of my father’s death two years before. For a lawyer, he was unprepossessing, big on corduroys and always tugging at his tie; when he resorted to legal jargon, his eyebrows shrugged apologetic inverted commas on either side. He and my father had been colleagues, though I suspect that during our one after-hours beer at Brother’s Pizza two years back I got to know him better