Big Brother. Lionel Shriver
still halfway happening in the early 1970s, Edison may have gotten a distorted impression of jazz as a logical route to seeing your name in lights. Maybe that explained the bitterness of his diatribes about how marginalized the form had grown, and about what a farcical shard of market share he and his colleagues commanded—“most of which is Norah Jones.”
Fourteen in the first season, Caleb is the rebel of the three, who carries on a whole parallel life as a hep cat in dark clubs in Old Town and the Pearl District, where he has to keep his status as a minor on the QT. The oldest has no patience with either parent, and adolescent viewers identified with his driving ambition to leave them both in the dust. He wears a porkpie hat and black turtleneck, and it’s a running issue in the show that he’s started to smoke. As for Sinclair himself, he had a lanky build that resembled Edison’s own—at least back in the day—and the two of them were good-looking in a similar vein. Sinclair’s hair was brown, Edison’s dirty blond, but both mops tended to tendril, and one similarity my brother would be hard-pressed to deny: he’d styled his longish hair, which went electric in humid weather, just like Caleb Fields’s for his entire life.
Otherwise Sinclair was a supercilious snob who chummed smarmily with our father whenever Edison and I were around during rehearsals, marginalizing us into mere extras. I have one clear memory of Sinclair’s registering the fact that Travis-slash-Emory had an actual son near his age. Edison and I were loitering in the studio wings because our family was supposed to attend an NBC picnic in Griffith Park after the taping. Between takes, Edison took it upon himself to demonstrate to Sinclair how to play properly with crossed hands—at which point my brother confirmed, yes, he did know what he was talking about: lo, real-life son was now studying real-life jazz piano. “God,” Sinclair exclaimed, “that is—too droll!” The actor’s doubled-over laughter would secure Edison’s enmity forever after. But neither Sinclair’s arch condescension nor his affected world-weariness would help him much once the show was canceled and he failed to be cast again in any other major role. (He scored one guest appearance on Family, but being conspicuously gay didn’t convert to an advantage until the mid-1990s, by which time he was dissolute-looking and half bald.)
Teensy, the youngest, is only four in the first season, and she’s a math whiz. I guess it’s pretty impressive that an actor so young could rattle off all those numbers idiot-savant style, since the scriptwriters were persnickety about her human-calculator answers to multidigit equations being correct. But it would be surprising if Tiffany Kite herself had finally mastered the multiplication table by the time the show wrapped up eight years later. She had black ringlets and the soulful brown eyes of a refugee. To my personal consternation, as Tiffany grew older she only got prettier and so, of course, became more of a princess. In the show, Teensy is a perky genius but still a little girl, and they got a whole episode out of her phobic avoidance of her father’s outhouse: in Emory’s custody, Teensy refuses to go to the bathroom, and on her daughter’s return Mimi has to dose the poor kid with laxatives every time.
Then there’s Maple, the only three-dimensional character on the program—the kid always conveying messages between her warring parents and editing the content along the way (“Did your father really say that?” “Did your mother really say that?”). Since the middle child alone is not bequeathed magical powers, she’s actually likable. Sandwiched between two attention-grabbers with a high wow factor, Maple has no heaven-sent gift as a shorthand personality and no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. Accordingly, I’ve sometimes heard contemporaries thumbnail a conscientious, decent, but undistinguished woman who is roundly ignored and sometimes taken advantage of as: “You know, she’s a Maple Fields.” Both on and off camera, Floy Newport was unassumingly attractive in that way that L.A. always overlooks. Maple Fields was the one character in Joint Custody whom Edison almost never mentioned.
I still felt conflicted about our father’s program. Naturally Edison and I had made a lifelong sport of ridiculing the show, but external ridicule was another matter. Pressured by Tanner and Cody, I’d broken down a couple of years earlier and ordered all eight seasons on DVD. Accustomed to the slicker fare of HBO, you forget how crude, obvious, and hammy television used to be, as well as technically rinky-dink; I naturally remembered the sets as sets, but they looked like sets to Tanner and Cody as well, who couldn’t believe the show was so “lame.” I was discomfited. I tried to laugh with them, but I couldn’t, and before we’d finished the first season I put the DVDs away.
At least for me it had been a revelation to see Travis, since it’s always a revelation to see images of your parents younger than you are now. Suddenly all the surety and authority you’ve accorded them falls away, and these glimpses of outsize icons as ordinary lost people with no road map, no special access to the truth or to justice or to anything, really—well, such epiphanies are tender and sweet and frightening all at the same time. I even softened briefly, thinking maybe Edison and I had been too hard on Travis. It was hardly an outrage that he kidded himself about how handsome he still was or exaggerated his own importance like most people. Another revelation: while our father prided himself on his sophistication, it was clearly his wholesome farm-stock presence to which the casting director had taken a shine; Travis Appaloosa played it, but Hugh Halfdanarson had gotten the part. In fact, Travis had originally auditioned for Apple’s Way, in which a father quits the L.A. rat race for his hometown in Iowa, only to find the transition from slick to hick traumatic. But Travis didn’t have the fish-out-of-water quality they were looking for. In Iowa, as far as the producers were concerned, Travis fit right in.
The one aspect of our father’s show that I still admired was its representation of the way siblings live in a separate world from their parents, who for kids function as mere walk-ons. Joint Custody captures the intense, hothouse collusion between siblings, while Mimi and Emory are played for fools. Often ashamed of tugging the children’s loyalties in opposite directions, the parents fail to grasp their kids’ salvation: the children’s uppermost loyalty is to each other.
To the degree he intuited the ferocity of mutual clinging that got Edison and me through our childhoods intact, my husband resented it. I didn’t think he should have resented it on our marriage’s account; when Edison first arrived on Solomon Drive, I was still of the view that being a devoted sister made no implicit incursions into my devotions as a wife. But as an only child, Fletcher should have envied this intimacy on his own account. If you don’t have a sibling to keep the sides drawn, you’re stuck lumped in with your minders, an alliance that makes you a traitor, your own tattletale, with the schizoid psyche of a double agent. Edison and I did rat each other out from time to time, but these were isolated strategic sorties in the complex politics of the playroom about which our parents knew nothing. We used our mom and dad as weapons in the far more central relationship to one another. Certainly with Tanner and Cody I tried never to forget: children know your secrets. You do not know theirs.
Ironically, given the show’s ostensible edginess, when I was thirteen our own family took a turn toward the network cliché of times past. I came home from school to find, of all people, Joy Markle waiting to receive me. In retrospect, Travis’s selection of his costar to break the news—with the physical implication that now the fake mother had replaced the real one—was in poor taste.
When she wasn’t playing Mimi, Joy’s metallic blond hair was no longer bunned in a metaphor for strictness that must have made her scalp hurt. I suppose she was pretty, though not beautiful, a lack she tried to make up for when playing herself—and like so many of the people I grew up around, Joy Markle did play herself—with an undercurrent of sluttiness, exposing the lace of her bras well before the practice was fashionable. That afternoon she wore a low-cut dress, an unfortunate scarlet—which signifies and rhymes with harlot—and when she stooped to talk to me I knew there was something wrong. I wasn’t that much shorter than she was, and this impulse to kneel in order to you-poor-dear could only have been in the service of melodrama.
Travis was at the hospital, playing his own part to the hilt, though he wasn’t unaffected. To the contrary, and it must be an unnerving experience to gesture toward emotion professionally for years on end only to be mugged by the raggedy, artless ineloquence of the real thing.
Edison and I harbored conflicting versions,