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

primary concern that there should not be too much.
    Where Averil is painstaking, Truman is brisk. They share an exactitude—Truman’s diced onions are all the same size square. Yet while Averil might take an hour trimming and snapping green beans one by one, my little brother lines them up ten at a time and dispatches two pounds in ten minutes. And where Averil is timid, Truman is judicious. The heat under Truman’s sautéing onions is medium. The amount of salt in his pasta water is some.
    The confidence with which Truman wielded a cleaver had always meant to me that, beneath his closeted, suspicious-of-strangers, whygo-out-let’s-stay-home day-to-day, teemed a brusque, masculine certainty that never got out of the house. About his assembly-line methodicalness I was less enthusiastic. He was capable of experimentation, but if he ever dolloped the beans with pesto and it was tasty, then he would always dollop
them with pesto in future. Truman seized on answers and kept them. I think if you presented a meal to Truman and said, This meal is good; it isn’t remarkable or memorable, but it is healthy and competently prepared and it will never make you grow ‘love handles’; if you push this button you may have this same dinner for the rest of your life , he would push the button. On Truman repetition never wore thin. I hadn’t ascertained whether he was congenitally incapable of boredom, or whether he was so fantastically bored, all the time, that he was unacquainted with any other state.
    Myself? In the kitchen, I am whimsical and I flit. I measure nothing, adding dashes of this and fistfuls of that until I have made either a brilliant dish that can’t be repeated or an atrocious one that shouldn’t be. This evening I sneak more olive oil into the vinaigrette than Truman would allow. However, I can’t choose between adding capers or green peppercorns to the salad and so opt for both, which is foolish. I do this all the time: torn between accents, I’ll sacrifice neither, and the flavours conflict. The last thing I am is methodical; I grind a little pepper until my tendons tire, peel one carrot when I will need to peel five, slice a tomato and have a sip of wine. Washing the lettuce I get impatient since I grew up with a younger brother who would do all the drudgery and I am a little spoiled; the salad will later be gritty. Meanwhile, I hover over the others and I pick. I crunch raw green beans, sample the simmering onions, slip off with a surreptitious spoonful of pesto, swipe a heel from Averil’s garlic bread. She squeals. By dinnertime I will have ruined my appetite, but I enjoy food I snitch more than whole permitted portions at table. Most of my pleasures are devious.
    The real study, however, was Mordecai, extended at the table smoking rollups and slurping aquavit. He ran his own audio-engineering company and was used, like me, to drones dispensing with the shit-work. He only roused himself for the foreman’s role of spicing the tomato sauce. Mordecai cooked rarely—he and his wife Dix went out nearly every night—but inexperience never stopped my older brother from being an expert at anything.
    If Mordecai has a motto in cooking, it reads: quantitus, extremitus, perversitus . Compulsively industrial, he promptly opens three times more tinned tomatoes than necessary. He presses two whole bulbs of garlic into the onions (while Averil’s eyes pop) and proceeds to dilute the paste with the entire bottle of
ten-dollar pinot noir I have opened to breathe for dinner. He shakes the big jar of basil with visible frustration, prises off the perforated top, and dumps in another quarter of a cup. He tastes the sauce, looks dissatisfied, throws in more basil, looks dissatisfied—in point of fact, Mordecai never looks satisfied—throws in some more, and advances to thyme. I peek in the pot to find that the sauce is turning black. But even after he has killed most of the oregano as well he casts about the kitchen as if