A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver Page A

totally predictable.’ I said. ‘It’s surprising
those first amendment flunkies didn’t walk off with the lot.’ ‘Mordecai embarrassed me. Comes into money from parents he
never gave howdya-do and then complains it’s not enough.’ ‘Mordecai feels chronically shafted.’
    I had promised to lay in provisions for Mordecai’s ‘secret recipe’ spaghetti sauce. Soothed by the shimmy of our cart in Harris Teeter, my little brother cheered up. While many find shopping tedious, Truman looks forward to Harris Teeter all week.
‘I know this sounds crazy,’ he confided by the paper towels, ‘but I love running out of supplies so that I can replace them.’
    I’d seen it: the shine in his cheeks when he lathered a soap splinter, from satisfaction it was his last bar; the flourish of his hand when he vanquished the tarragon so he could buy a new jar. When he collapsed a box of Total into the bin he spanked his palms, as if he’d accomplished something. Truman liked to have needs. At least the illogic wasn’t lost on him, but I wondered if this delight in dispatching products in order to re-acquire them wasn’t a functional definition of the middle class.
    Consequently, as our cart mounded my brother’s chest expanded and his step sprang—shopping, he was concentrated, efficient, authoritative about brands of tinned tomatoes. In a grocery store, Truman was pig in shite.
    We returned having agreed it was time to move operations to the main kitchen. Truman took obvious relish in unpacking. Although I was sometimes frustrated by the close perimeters of his life, within those boundaries he thrived. Maybe to him who celebrates a fresh jar of mayonnaise belongs the kingdom of heaven. Truman shoved the Winn-Dixie ketchup aside for proper Heinz, swept away the broccoli rubber bands, and set about alphabetizing the spice rack. This would be the first time he’d cook here since my mother died, a festive and solemn occasion both. Truman had ambitions to enlarge his world by exactly two floors.
    As he burrowed in the pantry, Truman’s high spirits precipitously dropped when the back door slammed. He turned to confront, among his nutritionally correct carrots and ten-pound bag of Carolina long grain, a litre bottle of aquavit.
    Hee-hee-hee …
    Truman’s face folded down like a garage door. Truman claimed to dislike his brother; I thought his dislike was occluded by terror.
I suggested we all have a drink before preparing dinner. Brothers beelined for opposite corners of the parlour, Averil taking the love seat behind her husband’s chair so that her view of her brother-in-law was physically blocked. She picked up a copy of The Christian Century and looked rapt.
When I solicited Truman with a glass of wine, I found him hunched over a piece of stationery. I recognized the sheet with its black border as the bill for our mother’s funeral expenses.
(Exorbitant—I suspect that out of sheer frugality she’d have preferred we bury her in the backyard, like a beloved dog.) He scribbled additions and divisions, tortoiseshell reading glasses down his nose.
I brought Mordecai a shot of aquavit, whose single ice cube he fished out and threw in the fireplace. He raised the glass to the lamplight and squinted through his yellow-tinted lenses at the mere finger remaining, knocked it back, and returned the empty glass. I soldiered to the kitchen where the bottle was lodged in the bulging stand-up freezer. I wondered if he really liked caraway schnapps, which smelled like liquor fermented from a ham sandwich, or whether what he liked was the fact it was repulsive.
On a whim I took down my mother’s last grocery list, scrawled on old ‘Bob Scott for Governor’ notepad paper and still magneted to the refrigerator door, and pulled a nubby pencil from a drawer. I had an itch to make my own calculations. The chart I constructed on the back of the list so amazed me that I wondered at having never drawn it up before:
Mordecai Truman Corlis