Free Big Brother by Lionel Shriver Page A

to tide him over, I’d never been in the parental position of giving my older brother an allowance. Edison had always been the big spender. On my visits to New York he’d never let me pay for anything, putting me on the guest list for his own performances and inveigling me into dives with cover charges for free because he was known, flashing C-notes at waiters and taxi drivers. Now the one with means, I felt a loss that must have been mutual. He’d liked his being the big spender. He’d liked his being my protector. So had I.
    Yet what bothered me while scrubbing burnt drips of batter from the stove wasn’t giving Edison a “loan.” So far, no one, not even my impolitic stepson, had addressed my brother’s dimensions head-on. I myself had not once alluded to Edison’s weight to his face, and as a consequence felt slightly insane. That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so—he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don’t recognize my own brother, and now we’re all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit. Now in order to have a convivial morning together I’d eaten a breakfast five times more filling than usual, and Tanner’s and my gorging had provided cover for Edison’s eating far more. That cliché not mentioning the elephant in the room was taking on a literal cast.

chapter six
    E dison was touchy about any suggestion that he got the idea of playing jazz piano from Caleb Fields. Me, I could never remember whether my brother started studying piano with a storied black old-timer in South Central ( not Melrose—our driver kept Jack Washington’s hairy address a secret from our parents, and so did I) before or after the first season of Joint Custody aired. Travis had always believed that Edison was competing with a television character, and was still riding his firstborn for aping the ambitions of a contrivance—though the imputation was rich, since our father’s fictional children had always seemed more real to Travis himself than his actual kids.
    Travis called the series a “cult show,” but if so the cult comprised exactly one person. In truth, Joint Custody was not one of those iconic programs like Star Trek that go on to distribute generous residuals. That woman at the airport, for example: she wouldn’t have been a “fan” of Joint Custody . She’d simply watched it. I wasn’t sentimental about most of the junk we’d parked in front of, either, although I was abashed to admit that I could still hum the theme song for Love, American Style and that I continued to nurse a nostalgic crush on the late Bob Crane.
    Calling the concept “groundbreaking” gave the show too much credit, but the producers did do their homework. Take a look at its forerunners. The Rifleman : a widowed rancher struggles to bring up a boy with a Tourettesian impulse to cry “Paw!” at every opportunity. Family Affair : a widower raises two insufferable brats with the help of a stuffy, charmless English butler. My Three Sons : a widowed aeronautical engineer with three boys finally remarries after ten seasons—wedding yet another hapless victim of spousal mortality. Flipper : the performances of a widowed father and two sons are all overshadowed by a bottlenose dolphin. The Andy Griffith Show : widowed, single-parent sheriff convinces even most North Carolinians that there really is a town called Mayberry. The Beverly Hillbillies : widowed hick makes a bundle on bubbling crude . . . oil, that is . . . black gold! Bonanza : a patriarch in Nevada ranches with three grown sons born to three different mothers, all of whom are dead. The Brady Bunch : a widower and (it is blithely presumed) widow with three kids apiece know it’s much more than a hunch! that the subsequent family show will live eternally in syndication, to Travis’s particular disgust. The Courtship of Eddie’s