Read Online A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver - Free Book Online

his foul language as puerile defiance best undermined by refusing to take issue. (My mother was one of the last late twentieth-century Americans for whom the f-word still had punch. It truly shocked her, like a physical slap, and left a brilliant red imprint on both cheeks. Since her heart attack, I had reached for an expletive and could not find a word sufficiently crude for my purposes. In the absence of offended audience, there is no obscenity; with my mother dead, it was impossible to be horrid.) But no—she had to dote on Mordecai, and so he could destroy her. She’d coronated the ingrate, which was like crowning the son most likely to chop off your head.
    I turned the chart back over, and re-magneted the grocery list to the fridge, savouring that an entire family calculus rested underneath our continuing need for toilet paper.
    Having delivered the aquavit, I stood in the parlour doorway, surveying the results of nearly forty years’ worth of primary school arithmetic.
‘See, no measurement can be perfect,’ Mordecai was expostulating. ‘But traditional science has always operated on the assumption that niggling influences, small mis-estimations, can be overlooked. Chaos theory trashed that. That one rounding off, the one pesky speck you failed to take into account, can overturn your results completely.’
‘Like The Fly ,’ I said, but Truman wasn’t listening. Averil wasn’t listening. I felt like my mother, who kept up the naïve conviction to the last that all you need do for a ‘special time’ is put enough blood relations in the same room. And for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if we had nothing to talk about. Far from wanting for subject matter, we were sitting in it.
‘Man,’ said Mordecai, as he propped his thick black lace-up boots on my mother’s fragile coffee table; its fluted edge began to creak. ‘How do you like that pompous horseshit about the ACLU? That was all Father cared about, causes. Never mind his kids.’ On an open Britannica, he arranged a pack of Bambus and tin of Three Castles; shreds of tobacco dribbled across thin pages of cramped paint. ‘They felt guilty for living. Mother never splurged on a box of chocolates that she didn’t feel bad about.’
‘She felt bad,’ I added, ‘because they made her fat.’
‘Hell, by the time you guys came along, they’d got downright profligate,’ Mordecai went on. ‘Dirt, that was all I had to play with.’
‘Dirt,’ said Truman, not looking up from his equations, ‘and us.’
Mordecai liked to portray his childhood as threadbare, but often omitted that my father hadn’t been picking through Belmont’s garbage, but going to Harvard Law School. Boasting about your underprivileged background must be one more mark of the middle class. I had a feeling Real Poor People didn’t brag about it.
‘I’m just floored,’ said Mordecai, ‘that they didn’t salt away more than 300,000 lousy smackers. They saved enough dough on me. Moving out in ninth grade? No college tuition? And then I borrow 14,000 crummy dollars and it gets subtracted. All that we-love-you-we-wantto-help-you and they kept track.’
I knew that when people were hurting they often seemed recriminating and spiteful from the outside, as Andrew had let me know how much he cared for me by smashing years’ worth of my best work. Truman, however, would go to no efforts to rationalize his brother’s insensitivity, since to whatever degree he enjoyed Mordecai’s company at all it was when his brother hanged himself. There was a grim look of satisfaction on Truman’s averted face, as if he were already relishing the conversation with me later when he could once again cast his eldest sibling as a grabby, selfish boor.
‘Don’t worry, Mordecai will make out OK,’ Truman muttered, circling a figure in his lap. ‘He’ll walk away with $156,000, if Hugh’s numbers are right.’
‘That’s if we sell the house,’ said Mordecai, who seemed to have already arrived at this