So Much for That. Lionel Shriver

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      “So you want to pick a fight? Great, that’s a surefire, hundred-percent-guaranteed route to upsetting your daughter. But go ahead, make her tense,” Carol murmured temperately, with that calmness she had that bordered on insanity. “You’re not the one who has to shove the diazepam up her anus because she can’t keep down the oral kind.”

      At the mention of pharmaceuticals, on cue Heather flounced into the kitchen and demanded, “Isn’t it time for my cortomalaphrine?” Jackson had no idea; he could never remember if they were pretending she had to take it before or after meals.

      “Heather, I’ve got to get this dinner ready because we’re having a guest, who could be here any minute, so why don’t you take them when Flicka grinds her meds after we eat.”

      “But I’m starting to feel funny,” Heather objected, introducing a slight weave to her stance. “Dizzy and prickly and sweaty and stuff. I can’t concentrate or anything.”

      “Oh, all right then; pour yourself a glass of milk.” Carol unlocked the high cabinet; keeping sugar pills under lock and key was obviously gratuitous, but part of the theater. So was “cortomalaphrine,” a name they’d effortlessly made up after years of the Catapres, clonazepam, diazepam, Florinef, Ritalin, ProAmatine, Depakote, Lamictal, and Nexium that filled out Flicka’s pill chart like nonsense rhymes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Cortomalaphrine” and its recommended dosage were printed on formal Rx labels. Jackson had been dumbfounded to learn that pharmacists keep sugar-paste placebos as part of their standard stock, so presumably it wasn’t only Heather who was scarfing down little brown vials of Good & Plentys at ten bucks a pop.

      As Carol shook out three capsules, Jackson looked away. He didn’t believe in this crap. Oh, he took Carol’s point that Heather always had to assume a backseat to her sister’s ceaseless medical crises. But if Heather needed more attention, a fake prescription wasn’t the answer. She should be taught to treasure her good health, to be grateful for it. Sure, back when Carol was pregnant with Flicka the labs didn’t have a test for familial dysautonomia, and once they were told that the baby was fine they’d relaxed. (Ha ha, big surprise in the offing. When their pediatrician finally stopped hiding behind his lame nineteenth-century diagnosis of “failure to thrive” and identified why their newborn couldn’t suckle, was losing weight, and puked all day, that false reassurance from the first trimester made the news much harder to take.) But Jesus, by Carol’s second pregnancy a test had just been developed, and they already knew the chances of another FD kid were one-in-four; getting the results of the amnio, they’d been nervous to the point of stroke. When the obstetrician beamed a big smile and gave them the all-clear, Heather’s mother-to-be was so relieved she cried. Did Heather have any idea that if her fetus, too, had carried the two copies of the FD gene she seemed so foolishly to envy she wouldn’t be here? Well, no, you didn’t tell children that they had ever been an inch away from an abortion.

      And you didn’t let your older kid know that, either, since the obvious implication was that if they’d known they’d have marked Flicka “Return to Sender,” too. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that they would have, or should have, but he’d wondered about it. During some of the worst of it – once the corrective surgery for scoliosis had barely healed, they then had to break it to her that it was time for a “Nissen fundoplication” to cure her chronic acid reflux – he’d suspected that Flicka was angry not just in that why-me way, but angry at her parents in particular, who made her be here. Just be here at all.

      However much it cost her, he’d assured Flicka many times – and thanks to her very refusal to embrace that hackneyed angel-of-innocence shtick, which would have bored her father senseless – that she really did brighten their lives. It was his fault that she was a brat – a caustic brat, an entertaining brat, but still a brat. Yet how could you not spoil the girl, at least a little? As hard as he tried not to see it, FD was a degenerative condition, and Flicka was duly deteriorating. She used to be so cute. If she was still cute to her father, he sometimes recognized that her chin had started to round upward and jut forward like Popeye’s, lending her face a permanent pugnacity. Her smashed-looking nose was growing in the opposite direction, its tip rounding downward and curving inward, as if the nose and chin were trying to touch each other. Her mouth had grown disproportionately wide, her eyes had migrated too far apart, and as the chin grew up and out she had started resting her front teeth on the outside of her lower lip. He wasn’t concerned about her having grown less fetching; he was concerned that these were outward manifestations of something much more dire happening that you couldn’t see, something he still didn’t quite understand, although it wouldn’t matter if he did.

      He’d started out thinking about Heather and then ended up thinking about Flicka again, so maybe Carol was right about Heather’s feeling neglected. A few sugar pills were probably harmless enough, and she got to name-drop to her friends about taking “cortomalaphrine.” Most of the kids at Heather’s primary school were drugged to the eyeballs, and apparently a diagnosis was her generation’s must-have, the equivalent of fringed suede jackets in the sixties. But what really floored him about this placebo business was that as soon as she started popping those pills Heather, already on the stocky side, had started to put on weight. It wasn’t the pills themselves, which couldn’t have been more than five calories apiece; it was pure suggestion. All her classmates on antipsychotics and antidepressants and every other anti-be-difficult prescription were porkwads.

      Jackson was disheartened to detect that already at eleven Heather showed signs of being a joiner. He’d never understood this impulse to be just like everybody else when everybody else was a fucking moron. Even as a boy, Jackson had always wanted to stand out; his daughters’ peers seemed driven to blend in. The sole exceptions, the only truly ambitious kids determined to draw attention to themselves as a cut above, clinked to school with an arsenal under their trench coats.

      On the other hand, maybe he was more of a conformist than he liked to admit. Take Heather’s name. They’d picked it because they thought it was unusual. Now there were three other Heathers in her class. What was it with this name thing? You think you’ve never heard it before, but it’s in the air or something, like a smell or a gas, and meanwhile every other pregnant couple on the block is deciding to name their kid Heather because it’s unusual. At least by some miracle their firstborn’s high school wasn’t chockfull of Flickas. Thank fuck for Carol’s hang-up on stupid horse books as a kid. Look at you, he kicked himself. Flicka again. You can’t keep thinking about your second daughter for ten seconds. Still, there was sure to come a time, no telling how soon, when he would have to think about Heather because Heather was the only daughter he had.

      “Jackson, should I go ahead and feed the kids? It’s getting late.”

      “Yeah, probably. Shep and Glynis likely got into a thing. If I know Glynis, she won’t let him go without a fight. No telling when he’ll get here, really.”

      “Sweetheart,” Carol said gently. “You should prepare yourself for the possibility that he gets cold feet. Or sobers up and realizes that he has a son and a wife and a life, and this Pemba thing is ridiculous. Cloves. I mean, really.” It was a particularly female form of condescension: men and their juvenile notions, their vain, impractical little projects.

      Jackson glared. It was one more of those moments when looking at his wife was an outright torture. She was unbelievably beautiful. It sounded mean-spirited, but he’d been a little exasperated that as she’d grown older she’d remained as sexy as ever, tall – taller than he was – with long amber hair and perfect round breasts the size of halved grapefruits. She never gained an ounce. Not from dieting or jogging either, but from hauling eighty-five pounds of writhing, gagging human flesh to an upstairs bed or emergency room. He was no longer sure whether Carol’s face had always been set in that serene, impassive expression, as if carved in marble, or if she had developed that stillness and infuriating СКАЧАТЬ