A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver Page B

ACLU Mother: 1 2 3 4
    Father: 4 3 2 1 Total: 5 5 5 5
    By way of explication: every child has sooner or later to face down the farcical liberal fiction that his parents love each child equally well, a myth Sturges and Eugenia enshrined in their will, as if to convince themselves. Bullshit. Parents have favourites. Mine did their best to camouflage these preferences, my father by being indiscriminately aloof, my mother by being indiscriminately clingy. But as Sturges McCrea had himself opined, prejudice will out.
    Hence my chart. If we counted the ACLU as the fourth child and allowed each parent to rank the McCrea kids on a preference scale from 1 to 4, we all four earned exactly five points. I had to admire the symmetry, contrived by two people neither mathematically minded and only egalitarian in an official sense. My father fought for justice his whole life, so naturally my parents would mete out love along with the real estate in equal portions.
    Though Mordecai’s glass was beginning to sweat, I paused to study my handiwork. Unquestionably, the ACLU came first in my father’s affections; it did not wet the bed or require a ride to the school play when he planned to take the car. There was equally no question—and I say this in my mother’s defence—that however faithfully she parroted his views and encouraged his cheques out the door, for my mother the ACLU straggled in a far fourth. She was incapable of getting exercised over progeny she couldn’t treat to a Popsicle, a ward who would never arrive at the back door trying to hide his report card or waving the winning essay on the school cafeteria. She was a real mother.
    As for Truman, that of the warm-blooded kids he was the runner-up with both parents explained a doggedness in him, a we-try-harder, like Avis. If he could merely succeed in besting one sibling with each parent he could walk away with first prize. To this effect he had repaired their hot water heater, retacked their stair carpet, and rolled their wheelybin to the bottom of the drive every Tuesday morning.
    Yet my father’s choice of Truman over Mordecai betrayed his weaker side. Sturges McCrea vilified his eldest son for being an arrogant, obstinate, pushy, demanding chancer—ergo, for being just like his father. How much easier to manage, that docile, introverted boy who would never dare the f-word in front of his mother; a ‘late bloomer’ with a queer fancy for architecture that my father found cute; a man (though I doubt my father ever thought of Truman as a man) too practical, or too cowardly, to move out of his parents’ house, and married to a wallflower who was inarticulate about politics and therefore failed to impress. Truman didn’t give my father competition.
    My mother, too, eschewed competition, which is why in her books I came in third. With the wicked timing of the heedless teenager, I began to mature, or ‘grow curves’, as she would say, right around the time my mother started to sneak a second piece of pie. I always hated that expression, grow curves , which implied putting on weight. Instead I was whippet-thin in my teens, and my mother never forgave me.
    It would be absurd for me to take her low rating personally; and I still kept an edge on the ACLU. Yet that among his burpy-poopyscreechy children I was my father’s favourite was also impersonal. My father adored me and my mother wished I would put a bag over my head from the same neutral ontology: I was the girl.
    Perhaps the single surprise on my chart, then, was Mordecai, who would himself have been taken aback that he’d remained, after so many shouting matches, his mother’s pet. Maybe all women prefer their firstborn sons. She always stuck up for him, though her advocacy often took the form of despair. I was glad for Mordecai that he’d retained a stalwart ally—he needed one.
    Still, her partiality had its exasperating aspect. Had Mother’s devotion to number-one son been less fierce, she might have dismissed