Big Brother by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online Page A

doubled ludicrously as Travis Appaloosa, who played another father named Emory Fields, a fake dad who was a far more successful paterfamilias than the self-absorbed monomaniac I saw only occasionally at home. I wasn’t simply Pandora Halfdanarson, but could choose to be Pandora Appaloosa if I wished, and on Wednesday nights for eight years I recognized an idealized version of myself in Maple Fields, a sweeter and more altruistic little girl than I who was always trying to get her parents back together. In turn, Maple Fields was played by one of those rare child actors who wasn’t unendurable, either on-screen or off-, even if Floy Newport was probably not her real name either. I idolized her and sometimes thought they should have kept filming the show and canceled our real family. So you can see how my fashioning mocking duplicates for a living might have seemed almost inevitable. After all, my favorite episode of Night Gallery was “The Doll.”
    This time driving back to New Holland our traditional sharing of notes—first and foremost, on whatever crackpot strategy Travis had recently devised to restore himself as the apple of the public eye—felt diversionary and dishonest. As we continued to discuss the latest on Joy Markle and Tiffany Kite, I could get with the program only so long as I trained my gaze on I-80. Side glances at the unaccountable mass in the passenger seat broke the spell, and it would suddenly seem a bit rich for Edison in this condition to be deriding anyone else for having failed to live up to youthful promise. For that dizzying sorrow on glimpsing the large gentleman in an airport wheelchair had only intensified, and I’d no idea how I would make it through the whole evening to come without falling apart.

chapter four
    C alling, “We’re ho-ome!” in the hallway, I tinged the announcement by descending into a minor key, a note of warning that my family would fail to pick up on. Here I’d hoped to present Tanner with a member of his extended family whom he could plausibly “look up to,” but with my brother’s spine compacted two inches Tanner was already too tall. Nothing about being obese diminished Edison’s accomplishments, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the way Tanner would see things.
    When Edison trailed me to the kitchen, Fletcher’s face mirrored what my own must have looked like when I turned to my brother’s voice at the airport: that flat smack against plate glass, the shock of having your expectations so thoroughly thwarted. My husband is not an impolite person, but when he looked up from the stove he said absolutely nothing and forgot to close his mouth. Time stretched. He was dying to look at me, but cutting away would have seemed unwelcoming. “Hey,” he said feebly.
    “Hey, bro, good to see you, man!” Edison clapped Fletcher’s shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who’d last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people’s transparent hypocrisy. They couldn’t say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile.
    “Tanner?” I led Edison over to where my stepson slouched at the table, taking in the scene while dawdling at his laptop. I could already read in the twist of his mouth the ruthless description of our new houseguest that he’d post on Facebook. “You remember your uncle Edison?”
    “Not really,” said Tanner warily.
    “Hell, kid, you’ve really shot up,” said Edison, extending his hand. “Can’t say I’d recognize you on the street, Tan.” Nobody called Tanner “Tan.”
    Tanner continued to slouch, so when he extended