A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver

Author:Lionel Shriver [Shriver, Lionel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Romance, Fiction, Brothers and sisters, Sibling rivalry, Family Life, North Carolina, Inheritance and succession, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780007271115
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

I fell asleep in that chair, and dreamt about my sculptures, tumbling down a muddy red hillside just out of my reach and cracking off their hands. These dreams were recurrent, and always the sculptures were wards in my keeping that I had forsaken or neglected and which suffered unduly on my account. Visions of clay figurines spliced with snapshots of my mother. To say I missed my art more than my parents would go too far, though my mourning for the objects was simpler. More accurately, the loss of what I had made and what I was made from had indistinguishably fused.

I woke to find Mordecai passed out on the floor, a wine stain spread at his elbow, a cold roach between his fingers having burned a black dot in the carpet. The flunkeys weren’t in evidence and hadn’t taken any care to cart my brother to bed and I hoped they’d gone. Groggy, I roused to switch off the stereo, still auto-reversing Smashing Pumpkins. I collected a few glasses and went to the kitchen; Truman had turned in, and I felt bereft. I wanted to explain to him that I had some new angles on our childhood and now I couldn’t wake him up the way I used to and whisper secrets at his bedside because he was married.

I bundled to my own bed and didn’t get up again until noon on Christmas Day. I found Truman downstairs, bent over the stove. It seems that Mordecai and his friends had made a late night raid on the fridge, decimating a whole pan of unbaked stuffing, one of my pumpkin pies, and most of the cranberry sauce. Truman had already stuffed the turkey, and was basting over the breast as if to soothe himself.

‘I guess after I went to bed you guys had a high old time,’ Truman clipped.

‘Hardly. I conked out in the parlour and had nightmares.’ ‘Are those waste products gone?’ Among their other unsavoury attributes, Mordecai’s employees were strangers.

‘I don’t know. Want some help?’

Averil came in the back door having binned the rubbish, and the three of us put a shoulder to dinner, lopping radishes, splitting celery, peeling potatoes. Mordecai must have hauled himself to bed in the weesmalls, so we salted the rug, though the burn mark was there to stay.

By three Mordecai shambled into the kitchen yellower than ever, the weave of his three pigtails afray. He made straight for one of Truman’s cold beers, and within the hour it became apparent we had three charity cases for Christmas. They’d sacked out in the second-floor bedrooms, and by four-thirty had polished off two six-packs. I was reminded of a future whereby our father had let out spare rooms to the homeless after all.

When the seven of us milled around our Christmas tree it was nearing dark, though its carnival glow was unable to bathe our gathering in a persuasively festive light. I had fresh appreciation for how difficult it must have been for my parents to pull off this holiday with adolescent or grown children.

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