Big Brother. Lionel Shriver

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      “Edison,” I said. “You ready to go?”

      “Better believe it,” he said gruffly, eyes narrowed.

      I surveyed the counters, mounded with corn chips, pork rinds, canned beef chili, croissants, soda, double-cream sandwich cookies, pizza rolls, frozen french fries, and coffee cakes. I was sure to hear about it in the car, though from picking out the items that needed refrigerating—three packs of butter, smoked mozzarella, and two quarts of half-and-half—I could infer the gist.

      “Mind if we take your pickup?” I asked Fletcher, keen to scram. I didn’t want to take sides. “I think Edison’s more comfortable in it.”

      “Go ahead. He’s already used it to truck half the poison in Hy-Vee into our house.”

      Edison snatched the pork rinds, grabbed his jacket, and hunched out the door. After he’d clambered into the passenger seat, he spooled out the seatbelt to its maximum extension, while I took two feet of slack out of the driver’s belt. He bunched his arms and tripled his chin into his clavicle. Scowling, he squeezed his eyes to slits. His inmost self was balled into a dense pellet in the middle of a wide berth of shielding flab; I sensed he could not make himself small enough, nor could his defensive perimeter ever be sufficiently ample to make him feel at a safe length from hostile forces. As if to demonstrate that for pure protection he could not get fatter fast enough, by the time I’d backed from the drive he’d opened the pork rinds and was stuffing them through the taut portal of his pursed lips, chewing snacks the texture of spray insulation foam in a spirit of reprisal. I wondered if he was aware that the object of his retaliation was himself.

      We didn’t say anything until he finished the bag.

      “Don’t take this personally,” he grunted, crushing the cellophane. “But your husband is a prick.”

      “What did he say?”

      “I’m not gonna repeat it.”

      I pictured my husband picking his words with care. That was what made his rare invectives so stinging: he didn’t lose his temper. I knew how long the perfectly chosen slight could last—like being called a mousy dishrag at Verdugo Hills High, when my muttering back, “That’s a mixed metaphor,” had branded me only more conclusively as a twit.

      “You had an altercation, I presume,” I said. “Over the groceries.”

      “I was being helpful. Trying to pull my weight.”

      I waited for his embarrassment over his choice of expression to dissipate. “You know he has strong feelings about food.”

      “Who doesn’t? Nobody’s making the guy eat my groceries.”

      “I suspect,” I said delicately, “the issue was the kids?”

      “They’re teenagers. Stock nothing but chickpea kibble, and they’ll hang at Mickie D’s. Christ, Fletch wasn’t a food fascist last time I was here. What happened?”

      “Well … our kitchen used to be crammed with leftovers from Breadbasket—poppy-seed tray cakes or big Ziplocs of potato salad, which we’d either have to eat or throw away. Something of a trap, when you’re from the waste-not-want-not school.”

      “And your cooking is the shit,” said Edison.

      “Thanks. Though that’s a trap, too.”

      “Lotta pitfalls for potato salad.”

      “Yes, you have to ask yourself if there was ever a time people just ate something and got on with it. Every time I open the refrigerator I feel like I’m staring into a library of self-help books with air-conditioning. Anyway—when Fletcher realized the leftovers were having the predictable effect, he sort of freaked. You have to understand: his first wife got heavily into crystal meth. That’s why he got custody of Tanner and Cody. She first started snorting crystal to lose weight. But soon she was leaving the kids unattended, disappearing for days. Lost several teeth … Got all these sores she’d pick at, and they’d get infected … Then when she came down off a tear, all she’d do was sleep. The whole spiral—it was pretty traumatic. Left Fletcher with a control thing.”

      “You don’t get that way in an afternoon. That guy,” Edison grumbled, “has always had a ‘control thing.’”

      “His nature errs in that direction,” I conceded. “In any case, when he resolved to drop a few pounds, this obsession with fitness and nutrition snowballed. Meanwhile, Tanner never lets his friends forget that his real mother is a drug addict. Just like you always bragging about how Mother killed herself. It makes him seem darker and more complicated.”

      “Man, this isn’t the Iowa where we visited the Grumps.”

      “No, it’s grown a pretty vile underbelly,” I said—though you’d never know that from the innocent vista out the window. In plowed-under cornfields, tufts of dried husk fluffed the clods. Feedlots snuffled with wholesome cows. Photogenic silos poked the flat horizon. “Iowa’s developed a massive crystal meth problem.”

      “Mexicans,” Edison supposed.

      “Only at first. You can get all the ingredients at Walmart, except some sort of ammonia that’s used on farms as fertilizer. So now it’s homegrown, along with tomatoes and green peppers. Which is worse. The local stuff is purer. The ice from Mexico—”

      Edison chuckled. “Ice! Don’t think of my kid sister in the Midwest as hip to user lingo.”

      “In this state, grannies on Medicare are hip to user lingo. Farmers take meth to stay awake, like when they have to pull all-nighters bringing in crops. So do truckers. They call it ‘high-speed chicken feed.’ And because it burns up all this energy, around here meth is a housewife problem. A diet drug.”

      “Maybe I can see why having an ex who became a meth head would make you more conservative,” said Edison, folding his arms again. “But that cat’s got no reason to be abusive toward me.”

      However brutally, Fletcher must at last have referred directly to the subject I’d avoided since Edison’s arrival. I was tired of feeling like a coward. I’d thought my tact was kind, but maybe I’d simply been trying to make life easier for myself.

      “Listen …” I trained my gaze on the road. “We haven’t talked about it. But I couldn’t help but notice … since the last time I saw you … you’re a little heavier.”

      Edison slapped his knee and hooted. “‘Oh, Mr. Quasimodo, I couldn’t help but notice you’re a little stooped over.’ ‘Excuse me, Mr. Werewolf, I couldn’t help but notice you’re a little hairy.’ I guess you’ve finally ‘noticed’ the Empire State Building is a little tall, the sun is slightly bright, and the Earth is a smidgeon on the round side.”

      I laughed, too, if only in relief. “Okay, okay! I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

      “How about, ‘Whoa, bro, you sure are fat!’ Think I don’t know I’m fat? They make mirrors in New York, you know.”

      “All right.” I braced back from the steering wheel. “When I first laid eyes on you at the airport, I was floored. СКАЧАТЬ